Australian Book Review, October 2019, issue no. 415

Polluters and their panderers

Nunan’s ‘Rubble Boy’ was placed third worth a total of $7,500, of which the ($2,000).

Welcome to our annual Environment winner will receive $5,000 and the The judges commented: ‘At once issue. As we noted here in 2018, ‘Each runner-up $2,500. Once again, Calitender and sinister“The Point-Blank year the threats seem more nightmarbre is open to anyone writing in EngMurder” is a story of parental vigiish, the political inaction more reprelish around the world. We welcome all hensible.’ In his Review of the Month, lance, with all of its new terrors. On kinds of essays – from the literary and an isolated rural property, a couple Tim Flannery writes: ‘I am not alone the political to the experimental and learn how to comfort and care for in becoming furious at the polluthighly personal. This year’s judges are their newborn. The rhythms of parers and those who pander to them, award-winning authors J.M. Coetzee enthood are new and strange to them for they are threatening my children and Chloe Hooper and ABR Editor, – almost otherworldly. One of the pair Peter Rose. and their future as repulsively as any paedophile might.’

Guidelines and the Guest editor entry form are availBilly Griffiths and our able on our website. many contributors ofEntries close on 15 fer a range of reviews, January 2020. The two essays, poetry, and surwinning essays will vey pieces, all intended appear in successive isto enhance our sense sues of the magazine in of present dangers, the first half of 2020. historical factors, and We thank Colin cultural resonances. Dr Golvan AM QC Griffiths, whose recent (Chair of ABR) and travels have taken him the ABR Patrons for to the boab belt in the enabling us to present Northern Territory Calibre in this lucra(see page 14), also has tive form. an editorial on page 2.

Shortlisted and commended authors with ABR Editors and judge Maxine Beneba Special thanks to FAN Poll Clarke at the Jolley Prize ceremony (L-R): Morgan Nunan, Brendan Sargeant, Eucalypt Australia, Ten years after the Peter Rose, Sonja Dechian, Raaza Jamshed, Maxine Beneba Clarke, which has supported first ABR FAN Poll, Elleke Boehmer, and Amy Baillieu (photograph by Daniel O’Brien) this special issue for a the second one was fifth time. limited to Australian is listening to a true crime podcast to novels published since 2000 (though give the days shape. Why does its disJolley Prize we received votes for recent classics A large audience gathered at Readings tant violence feel so claustrophobically such as 1984, Voss, and Monkey Grip). resonant? This assured story is drumHawthorn on September 11 for the When voting closed in mid-September, 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Sto- skin taut – it trusts that its readers will Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winfind their way into its dark corners, ry Prize ceremony. All six shortlisted ning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep and then emerge, bleary-eyed, back and commended authors were able to North emerged as a clear winner. Ironiinto the merciless sunlight. join us. After readings from our three cally, Tim Winton’s Breath came fourth All three shortlisted stories appear shortlisted authors, celebrated writer for the second time, ten years after it in the September issue.

Maxine Beneba Clarke (representing did so in the original FAN Poll for the her fellow judges, John Kinsella and best Australian novel of all time. (Alexis Calibre Essay Prize Beejay Silcox) named Sonja Dechian’s Wright’s Carpentaria and The Slap by For the fourteenth time, we seek enstory ‘The Point-Blank Murder’ as the Christos Tsiolkas were the only other tries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the overall winner. She receives $5,000. crossover entries between the two lists.) country’s premier prize for an unpubRaaza Jamshed’s ‘Miracle Windows’ For more information and a full list of lished non-fiction essay. The Prize is was placed second ($3,000); Morgan the top twenty titles, turn to page 48.

A D VA N C E S

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A complete listing of (eligible) FAN Poll nominations appears on our website (along with links to ABR reviews), offering plenty of inspiration for summer reading and gift buying.

Thanks to our friends at Classics Direct and Readings, we were able to offer lucky voters some brilliant prizes, alongside two free digital subscriptions to ABR. Winners will be notified by email soon.

Comes the dark

Newspaper and magazine house styles, beloved of editors and other

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his year, the Australian bushfire season began in winter.

A long, dry summer – the warmest on record – lingered into and then beyond autumn. By spring, more than one hundred uncontrolled fires were raging across the eastern seaboard, reaching into ecological regions unfamiliar with flame. It is alarming how routine such record-breaking extremes have become, and how readily, in political statements and news reports, cause is decoupled from effect.

In the early hours of September 8, a fire front savaged the Lamington National Park in south-east Queensland. The usually wet rainforest was dry. Vast tracts of the World Heritage region were razed, along with the historic mountain cabins at Binna Burra Lodge, built in 1933 by conservationists Arthur Groom and Romeo Lahey to encourage a greater appreciation of nature. The forest is now rapidly changing. ‘When we reconstruct this place,’ Steve Noakes, Binna Burra’s chairman, told reporters as the fires burned, ‘we have to take into account the impacts of climate change on Australia’s forests.’

In this issue, Tim Flannery explores the tactics and philosophies of activists who are searching for solutions that match the scale of the climate crisis we face. He, like so many others, finds hope in the 2 OCTOBER 2019

pedants, reflect common usage and present realities. It’s clear to us that the term ‘climate change’ – first employed in the 1970s to describe global warming and concomitant threats to the natural world – no longer does justice to the immense challenges facing society, notwithstanding the euphemisms of government and the mendacity of certain commentators, with their vested interests and blinkered vision. ‘At one stride comes the dark,’ as Coleridge reminds us in his epic poem.

Henceforth, ABR – which shares

Editorial

global school climate strikes inspired by the words and actions of sixteenyear-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg (who appears on our front cover). Flannery also charts the rise of the global protest group Extinction Rebellion, which turns one this month. For Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, the environment is not an isolated issue but an inseparable part of a whole, and action to reverse the climate crisis demands transformative, structural reform.

Julia Kindt’s essay on ‘Nature’s ancient history’ reminds us that the natural world has always been an agent in human affairs, and vice versa. Xerxes, the ruthless Persian king whose army drank rivers dry, was also susceptible to the powerful beauty of nature. In protecting and decorating a plane tree, he became perhaps the first conservationist on the documentary record.

Kim Mahood’s essay in this issue reminds us that conservation efforts invariably tell us more about people than they do about the places or animals being protected. She reflects that the Night Parrot, once thought extinct, survived just fine without human intervention, and now bemused Paruku Rangers are using its re-emergence to support their own millennia-long conservation efforts. It is galling that the remarkably successful Indigenous Ranger programs need ‘a fat budgie’

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Tim Flannery’s incomprehension at the miserabilism of denialists – will adopt the term ‘climate crisis’.

New website

Many thanks for your comments on our new website, which we launched on September 18 – our first major renovation in some years. We hope you enjoy the fresh new look and functionality.

Hearty thanks to our web developers at Snaffle – especially Nathan Morrow, our valued colleague of nigh on ten years, and his designer, Alice Good.

to ensure their ongoing funding. As Kim Scott laments in his review of The Australian Dream, ‘mainstream Australia’ too often appears to care about heritage but not its custodians.

Threaded throughout the issue are enduring questions about political power, regulation, and obfuscation, whether these relate to water governance, windfarms, nuclear radiation, mining effluent, or small-mammal extinctions. Writing about Australia’s fatal affair with asbestos, Graeme Davison reflects on the many bitter legacies we face – from Indigenous dispossession to environmental neglect – and how they coalesce around the same questions: ‘When did they know? Why did they ignore the truth-tellers? Was the blindness innocent or wilful?’

Once again, Greta Thunberg’s words ring clear: ‘To all of you who choose to look the other way every day … Your silence is almost worst of all.’

It has been a privilege to work on this issue, which has been generously supported by ABR’s long-term partner Eucalypt Australia. g Billy Griffiths, who co-edited this special issue, is a historian and lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. His latest book is the award-winning Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018).

October 2019

Tim Flannery Sheila Fitzpatrick Billy Griffiths Kim Mahood Kim Scott James Ley Alice Nelson Philip Dwyer

Editorial

Billy Griffiths

10 12 14 24 36 42 46 53

Interviews

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44 Open Page: Trent Dalton 66 Poet of the Month: Lisa Gorton

17 18

47 John Kinsella: Hollow Earth Chris Flynn 50 Amanda Niehaus: The Breeding Season Fiona Wright 51 Heather Rose: Bruny Nicole Abadee 52 Lenny Bartulin: Fortune Francesca Sasnaitis

Environment

Lenore Layman and Gail Philips (eds): Asbestos in Australia Graeme Davison Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies: Sludge Alexandra Roginski Andrea Ballestero: A Future History of Water Jerome Whitington: Anthropogenic Rivers Timothy Neale Tom Gilling: Project RAINFALL Alison Broinowski Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichton: Wind Turbine Syndrome James Dunk Tim Bonyhady: The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat Libby Robin ‘An Evergreen Canopy’ Bianca Le Environment Survey Lynette Russell et al.

‘Nature’s ancient history’ Julia Kindt

Young people’s outrage at the climate crisis Radioactive skeletons in the closet Searching for Retribution Camp It’s a whitefella thing Adam Goodes and The Australian Dream James Ley completes J.M. Coetzee’s cycle Anna Krien’s first novel The biography of a nobody

Fiction

21 23

History

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54 Tim Bouverie: Appeasing Hitler Glyn Davis 56 Marie-Janine Calic: The Great Cauldron Iva Glisic

28 30 31 33

Politics

Jane R. Goodall: The Politics of the Common Good 58 Judith Brett 60 Tom Frame: Gun Control Kieran Pender Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma: 61 Addressing Modern Slavery Sayomi Ariyawansa

Poems

Mary Jo Bang 26 John Kinsella 59

Society

Biography & Memoir

Lisa Taddeo: Three Women Astrid Edwards 38

62 Angela Woollacott: Don Dunstan Christina Slade

Middle East

Poetry

Mike Thomson: Syria’s Secret Library Beejay Silcox 39

65 Lisa Gorton: Empirical David McCooey

Memoir

From the Archive

Benjamin Gilmour: The Gap Nicholas Bugeja 39 Tim Costello: A Lot with A Little Jacqueline Kent 63

Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang 72 Morag Fraser

ABR Arts

Susan Lever Felicity Chaplin Sarah Walker Jack Callil

68 69 70 71

Titus Andronicus Halston Australian Realness Dogman CONTENTS

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THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Local Government, Sport, and Creative Industries; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University, and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Eucalypt Australia, the City of Melbourne, and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

B Y WIL L IAM SHAKESPE ARE

DIREC T OR JAMES E VANS

BEL L SHAKESPE ARE.C OM.AU

11–19 OC T OBER C ANBERR A THE ATRE CENTRE 22 OC T OBER – 24 NO V EMBER S YDNE Y OPER A HOUSE

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Australian Book Review | October 2019, no. 415

Cover Design Judith Green Cover Image In August 2018, outside the Swedish parliament building, Greta Thunberg started a school strike for the climate. (photograph by Anders Hellberg) Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available. www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Advertising Media Kit available from our website Contact Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and website comments. All letters and online comments are edited before publication in the magazine. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment.

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Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Sarah Holland-Batt, Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Elissa Newall (Observership Program) ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) Editorial Advisers Frank Bongiorno, Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, James McNamara, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson Communications Consultant Jane Finemore – jane@finemorecommunications.com or 0408 463 873 Volunteers Eloise Cox (Monash University Intern), John Scully Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Environment issue

Protesters at the Global Climate Strike in Melbourne on 24 May 2019 (photograph by Julian Meehan via Wikimedia Commons)

Tim Flannery on the radicalisation of young people Review

Comment

Review

Chernobyl

The Night Parrot

Asbestos

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Kim Mahood

Graeme Davison

ABR’s Environment issue is generously supported by Eucalypt Australia.

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Looking the other way every day The radicalisation of young people because of the climate threat

Tim Flannery

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any climate activists and scientists are becoming desperate. They have devoted decades to warning the world of the danger of climate change and to forging solutions. But nothing has worked. No climate report or warning, no political agreement, no technological innovation has altered the ever-upwards trajectory of the greenhouse pollution that is ravaging our world. I am not alone in becoming furious at the polluters and those who pander to them, for they are threatening my children and their future as repulsively as any paedophile might.

How astonishing is it to read enthusiastic articles in the financial pages on new fossil fuel ‘plays’, and of the calls of politicians to subsidise new coal-fired power plants. What do their children think? We gain some idea from the latest generation of books by young climate warriors. The most striking thing about them is that they are all remarkably short – as if the new generation have run out of words. What will happen as efforts at persuasion fail?

Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference (Penguin Press, $5.99 pb, 80 pp, 97880141991740) is the slenderest of books. Its sixty-eight printed pages are filled with breaks and ample spaces, and it takes just minutes to read. But her words are beautiful, ringing with power: To all the political parties that pretend to take the climate question seriously.

To all the politicians that ridicule us on social media …

To all of you who choose to look the other way every day …

Your silence is almost worst of all.

The future of all the coming generations rests on your shoulders.

Thunberg is a sixteen-year-old Swedish schoolgirl famous for single-handedly instigating the now global 10 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

school climate-action strikes. She has Asperger’s syndrome and tells us that she sees almost everything in black or white. In the climate debate, that certainty on what is black and what is white is sorely needed, especially among older generations.

For everyone who reads Thunberg’s words, there are thousands who have been moved by her actions.

I marched in Sydney, in the school strike of 2019, and saw firsthand the passion of the students. The school strikes are an immensely powerful global movement, for they force principals and teachers to choose: should they forbid their students marching to save their future, or keep them in the classroom learning skills needed for life in a fast-vanishing world?

At around the same time Thunberg was forging her solitary act of defiance, a small group of people in England were creating Extinction Rebellion. This Is Not a Drill (Penguin Press, $19.99 pb, 208 pp, 9780141991443) is their credo. It lists no author on its cover and consists of a compendium of contributions, none more than a few pages long that document what is at stake with climate change, how social change is brought about, and what it is like to be at the front lines of an environmental rebellion.

The book opens with Extinction Rebellion’s ‘Declaration’. A mere two pages long, it echoes earlier declarations, charters, and manifestos that have altered the course of human history. It begins, ‘This is our darkest hour. Humanity finds itself embroiled in an event unprecedented in its history, one which, unless immediately addressed, will catapult us further into the destruction of all we hold dear.’ And the rebellion knows who is to blame: ‘The wilful complicity displayed by our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gain and private profit …We hereby declare the bonds of the social contract to be null and void.’

The manifesto lists only three demands: ‘to be heard,

The transformation of our society that Extinction to apply informed solutions to these ecological crises Rebellion and other new environmental movements and to create a national assembly by which to initiate … work to usher in is profound. They want to end the fossil solutions’. The call for a national assembly, presumably fuel era before it’s too late to stop climate change, to by sortition, is eloquent when highlighting how low the root out the corruption and privilege that bedevil our credibility of our current so-called democratic system governments, and to reverse the destruction of nature. has fallen among younger people.

In short, the old order is under threat from Extinction The book’s introduction, by Sam Knights, documents Rebellion. As governments come to terms with the Extinction Rebellion’s history. It began in a small British rebels, we shall soon learn whether the old order is a town on 31 October 2018 and today has proliferated paper tiger, or one willing to cannibalise her offspring. astonishingly, with ‘hundreds of extinction rebellions Angus Forbes’s Global Planet Authority: How … established in countries across the globe’. The Rewe’re about to save the biosphere (LID Publishing, bellion’s most impactful moment came in April 2019, £8.99 pb, 184 pp, 9781912555307) is almost quaintly when thousands of protesters shut down, for ten days, old-fashioned in comparison with the works of Oxford Circus, Marble Arch, Waterloo Bridge, Piccadilly Thunberg and Extinction Circus and Parliament I am not alone in becoming furious Rebellion. It argues that Square in London. They what is needed to save the also blocked access to the at the polluters and those who world is a transnational Treasury and glued thempander to them global planet authority that selves to the London Stock will mediate our relationExchange. More than 1,000 ship with nature. Despite the failure of the protesters were arrested and the overstretched police United Nations to deal with the climate crisis, Forbes force could not cope. Shortly after, senior politicians feels that there is hope. He cites the Montreal Protocol of all parties agreed to meet the Rebellion leaders, and on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the treaty the following day the United Kingdom became the first banning Persistent Organic Pollutants, and the Paris country to declare a climate emergency.

Climate Accord as evidence that global change through Chapter 14, ‘The Resistance Model’ by Roger Halsupranational action can occur. lam, details how Extinction Rebellion came into being The biggest problem with Forbes’s thesis is the fact as a result of years of research and planning by academics that, in every country, there are politicians who prosand activists who wanted to understand why previous per from the burning of fossil fuels, the destruction of efforts to stop climate change had failed, and how that forests, or the raping of our fisheries. As recognised by could be changed. They decided that peaceful disruption Extinction Rebellion, unless we destroy their power, – what they call the ‘civil resistance model’ – offered the no Global Planet Authority can make progress on the best hope of success. They calculated that they needed climate issue. around 50,000 people, deployed in a capital city, to break Reading these books, I was sobered by the degree the law but remain non-violent. The rebellion must last to which young people have become radicalised by our for days, they felt, and it had to be fun. complacency and failure in the face of the overwhelming The nature writer Jay Griffiths provides a fabulous climate threat. Some will be the doctors, nurses, and othaccount of what it’s like to be on the front lines of the er carers to whom we will entrust our ever more fragile Extinction Rebellion. She locked herself on at Oxford bodies. In a world suffering from out-of-control climate Circus, her hand fastened with a chain inside a metal change, will they wipe the backsides of incontinent, repipe. She relates that, as a writer, watching the angle tired coal executives with the same exactitude they extend grinder work a few centimetres from her right hand to those who acted, or tried to act, to stem the disaster? g was disconcerting. She admits to having been ‘mightily scared of arrest’, but also records astonishing support from the police, one of whom said to her,‘You’re standing up for something that needed to be stood up for. We all needed someone to do that. You are doing it. I totally support you.’ When she was released from prison after overnight detention, one of the police in attendance said, ‘God bless, and good luck.’

Cathy Eastburn, a fifty-one-year-old mother of two teenage daughters, had a more fraught experience. After supergluing herself to the top of a DLR train at Canary Wharf, she was denied bail and put on remand. The loss Tim Flannery is one of the world’s most prominent of her liberty was an unbearable physical pain, but over environmentalists. His latest book is Sunlight and Seathe weeks of her incarceration she came to feel that even weed: An argument for how to feed, power, and clean up prison can be meaningful – ‘a life-changing experience’. the world (Text Publishing, 2017).

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

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Mixed berries

Radioactive skeletons in the closet

Sheila Fitzpatrick MANUAL FOR SURVIVAL: A CHERNOBYL GUIDE TO THE FUTURE

by Kate Brown Allen Lane, $45 hb, 420 pp, 9780241353069

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his is a very disturbing book. It’s not just the Chernobyl story, but also Kate Brown’s broader story about the worldwide but inadequately studied impact on public health of lifetime exposure to ‘chronic doses of man-made radiation from medical procedures, nuclear reactors and their accidents, and atomic bombs and their fall-out’. But let’s take Chernobyl first.

Cover-up is a big part of the Chernobyl story. That is by now familiar, as far as the Soviet Union is concerned, from HBO’s Chernobyl television series (2019) and other sources. But Brown’s cover-up story is much more complicated. Certainly, Soviet authorities reflexively, though not entirely consistently, tried to cover up the scandal in their own backyard. The surprising thing is how apparently disinterested international and foreign experts connived or even sometimes took the lead in covering up. United Nations agencies take a beating in this book, though

Brown is scrupulous in presenting their side of the story. The dismissive attitude of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to reports of Chernobyl damage might be understood, if not excused, in terms of its role as the UN’s nuclear lobby, with its ‘own institutional interest for the promotion of peaceful uses of nuclear energy’ and consequent incentive to play down Chernobyl effects. But the World Health Organization, with its ‘whistle-stop’ tour and disdain for local scientists and medical personnel ‘not well versed in radiation’, was no better. Consciously or unconsciously, a parade of foreign experts ‘suppressed and refuted evidence about the epidemic surrounding the smoking Chernobyl reactor’ because they didn’t trust the competence of local Soviet doctors and scientists who raised the alarm; because of a Western scientific consensus on the harmlessness of low-dose radiation (which, in contrast to the immediate impact of the accident, caused most of

An uncannily timely work. Rockel breaks down the artificial divisions between science, art, creative production and history to forge an original perspective and a model of connection between the creative processes of nature, knowledge and writing.

ELIZABETH McMAHON

Rogue Intensities - Angela Rockel Out now.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the long-term damage); and, Brown suggests, because the United States and other countries ‘had much larger radioactive skeletons in the closet from nuclear bomb tests’.

For readers of a sceptical turn of mind, stories of multiple cover-ups provoke a certain wariness about conspiracy theorists or well-meaning alarmists.

Brown, a respected American Soviet historian of original and independent mind who knows the region well from her prize-winning book on the Soviet Union’s Western borderlands, A Biography of No Place (2005), is neither of those things. A gifted environmental historian, she knows (literally) how to walk through bogs. But she also knows about archives, and this book shows what you can find out not only from the archives of governments and international agencies but also from Belorussian and Ukrainian public health departments, a completely untapped source from which she draws fascinating statistical material and reports.

Winner of the 2019 orothy Hewett ward for an n blished Man scri t

of a truck ‘with a “radiating mass” in While the archives disclosed cover- regulated as radioactive waste.’

What about the larger story? Brown its trailer’ inspected at the US–Canada ups, they also disclosed whistle-blowers – local doctors and scientists who tried sees Chernobyl not so much as a unique border, raising concern that someone to get stories of health damage out into event but rather as an acceleration on a was trying to smuggle in a dirty bomb. the public arena, and who were often time-line of exposures in the ‘raddled’ When they found out that it was only punished or sidelined as a result. Brown environment of the Pripyat Marshes, berries from the Ukraine, they waved tracked many of them down and inter- one in a series of nuclear and other it through.

‘American, Canadians, Europeans viewed them, respecting their expertise environmental disasters inflicted on the on local conditions and finding in ret- region in the second half of the twen- may wake to a breakfast of Chernobyl blueberries,’ rospect that their data and Brown writes. conclusions stand up a lot In Australia, we better than those of the import bluebervisiting firemen sent in by ries from the Soviet and international United S tates agencies. The local people but not, as far as who, at cost to themselves, I know, from the persisted in gathering Ukraine. But that data are the real heroes of wouldn’t make the story. u s s a f e f ro m Fifty-four is the ofhealth damage ten-quoted UN-endorsed from multiple exfigure for direct fataliposures to lowties from the Chernobyl disaster, which belevel radiation, gan on 26 April 1986. since this is not Brown is less interested just a Chernobyl in immediate fatalities problem but a than she is in long-term worldwide one: damage to public health Chernobyl emisfrom a contaminated sions of radioacA helicopter sprays a decontamination liquid nearby the Chernobyl reactor in 1986 (Photograph by USFCRFC / IAEA Imagebank via Wikimedia Commons) environment much larger tive iodine were than most people wanted only a third of to acknowledge; nevertheless, her nar- tieth century – two world wars fought those from decades of US nuclear bomb rative is dotted with individual cases of on its territory, plus a bombing range tests in Nevada detonation during the Chernobyl-related deaths that, for one during the Cold War – ‘that makes Cold War. Rates of thyroid cancer reason or another, were not included the greater Chernobyl zones, where in the United States tripled between in the official figure. She points out people continue to live, good places to 1974 and 2013. Over the same period, that the Ukraine is currently paying investigate the outer limits of human sperm counts among men in North compensation to 35,000 people whose endurance in the age of the Anthropo- America, Europe, Australia, and New spouses died from Chernobyl-related cene, the epoch when humans became Zealand dropped by fifty per cent. health problems – and that doesn’t the force driving planetary change’. ‘Australia, hit by fallout from the British count the people (including children) Chernobyl’s survivors, many of whom and French tests, has the highest inciwithout spouses, or for that matter Brown interviewed, get by as best they dence of childhood cancer worldwide.’ anyone in Russia and Belorussia, which can, despite their own and their chil- As Brown is careful to point out, these received seventy per cent of the fallout. dren’s multiple health problems. One are correlations, not causal links; and So 35,000, not fifty-four, should be con- of their recent sources of income is her Manual for Survival doesn’t offer sidered the absolute minimum figure exporting berries, always a major part of drastic solutions, only further study. for deaths. In addition, there was the the local summer diet (though foreign The message I took away was that, like broader impact on public health. Some researchers ignored this) and also highly the Chernobyl survivors, we just have to years after the accident, ‘the majority liable to contamination. The berries are learn to live with it. But, to repurpose of people and especially children in ‘all radioactive’, as a local monitor ex- Scott Morrison’s favourite idiom, how the contaminated regions were sick. plains, ‘but some are really radioactive’. depressing is that? g Residents had chronic diseases, many Fortunately for the local economy, it’s suffering from several diseases at once possible to meet European Community Sheila Fitzpatrick is currently finishing … Tests showed people had ingested a and American standards by mixing the Russians, White and Red: A story of postwide range of radioactive nuclides and ‘really radioactive’ berries in with oth- war migration to Australia, to be pubthat some bodies had achieved the levels ers. A possibly apocryphal story is told lished by Black Inc. ENVIRONMENT

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COMMENT

Scar tissue

Searching for Retribution Camp

by Billy Griffiths

A

t first I can’t make out the inscription, even though I’m searching for it. Smooth new bark has grown into the cuts, bulging around the incision, preserving the words on the trunk. I run my hand across the surface, tracing the grooves, feeling the letters: R-E-T-R-I-B-U-T-I-O-N. And below, in slightly larger hand, ‘CAMP’.

We are in the boab belt, the ‘western wilds’ of the Victoria River District in the Northern Territory, between Katherine and Kununurra. This is Ngarinyman country: near the northern end of Judbarra/Gregory National Park. It has taken us much of the morning to track down this particular boab, which rises grandly out of long, thick grass. I step back to take it in as a whole.

It is immense.

It is hard not to be captivated by boabs (Adansonia gregorii). They are the charismatic megafauna of the botanical world; their bulbous trunks and knobbled limbs lend themselves to anthropomorphism. Ernestine Hill affectionately described the boab as the ‘friendly ogre of the great North-west’: ‘a grizzled, distorted old goblin with a girth of a giant, the hide of a rhinoceros, twiggy fingers clutching at empty air, and the disposition of a guardian angel’. But boabs are more than guardian angels; in remote arid areas, they are life itself. Their soft, fibrous wood can trap so much moisture that the trunk visibly swells and shrinks with the seasons. Even in drought, ‘sweet water’ can be sucked from the wood or scooped from its hollows. In the nineteenth century, certain boabs along the police track between Derby and Halls Creek had jam tins dangling from their trunks for the convenience of thirsty travellers.

Although the wood is of no value as timber (except to drive away mosquitoes when burnt), the fruit is tasty and full of potassium tartrate, tartaric acid, and vitamin C. 14 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The leaves, roots, and gum are also edible, as is the sprout of a young tree, which can be eaten like asparagus.

Indigenous peoples have lived with boabs for millennia, taking the seed pods from camp to camp, playing a crucial role in their evolution and distribution across the north-west of Australia. People learnt to make rope and nets from the fibrous bark, and glue from the pollen.

They converted trunks into watercrafts, and painted and engraved others for spiritual and ceremonial purposes.

They imbued these remarkable trees with story, transforming them into vessels of memory and lore.

My companion, historian and archaeologist Darrell Lewis, presses himself against the trunk of the boab, arms outstretched. He moves in this way around the tree, using his arm span to estimate its girth: some fifty feet in circumference, we calculate, or sixteen metres. Perhaps thirty metres tall. Darrell has been here many times and has systematically photographed, traced, measured, and mapped every marking on this boab, most of which were carved during the 1890s. ‘It’s the most heavily marked historic boab I have ever encountered,’ he tells me.

He points out the familiar carved names of cattle men, duffers, drovers, and other frontier opportunists. There are also more enigmatic markings: crosses, hearts, and emu tracks; a boxer swinging a punch; a rider on his horse; a hand and forearm decorated in the style of west Arnhem Land rock art; the name ‘Café Francais’. The markings are evocative of life on the early cattle stations, the banter and mobility of the workers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and the increasing familiarity and connections across cultures.

Among all the markings, it is the ominous name before me that stands out. Retribution Camp. Retribution for what? What sinister event is intimated by this name? The tree attends to my questions silently. Nearby,

Retribution Camp boab (photograph by Darrell Lewis)

Retribution Creek runs past Retribution Bore.

Since my arrival in the region a few days earlier, frontier violence has been at the fore of our minds.

Darrell and I have been surveying a part of the range south of Jasper Gorge, searching for the site of a massacre where as many as sixty people are said to have been killed. The event is known through Indigenous oral histories, a few secondary accounts, and an annotated 1890s newspaper clipping. But much of the story remains shrouded in silence. Darrell has identified the probable perpetrators and drawn together the documentation of the attack in his book A Wild History: Life and death on the Victoria River frontier (2012), but he has yet to firmly locate the site. Big Mick Kangkinang, regarded as ‘the man who knew everything’, pointed Darrell towards the rough location, but, as I quickly learn, the process of ‘groundtruthing’ is slow and arduous.

Our unusual mission has elicited many impromptu conversations about the frontier. Over a cup of tea one morning, a couple of cattlemen related a dozen historical accounts of violence against Aboriginal people in the district and elsewhere: beatings, shootings, poisonings, and large-scale massacres. As the late Deborah Bird Rose wrote in her landmark book, Hidden Histories (1991), ‘violence and bloodshed, invariably ruthless and sometimes orgiastic in their excesses, were key features’ of the Victoria River frontier, as was resistance. The

stories are as shocking in their brutality as they are in their frequency. They involve characters such as the second manager at Victoria River Downs, Jack Watson, who once asked the local constable, W.H. Willshire, to procure a particular Indigenous man’s skull for him, so that he could use it for a spittoon. Like many settlers in the VRD, Watson cultivated a reputation for being ‘hard on blacks’. When he was at Lawn Hill, he was known for having on his station ‘40 prs of black’s ears nailed round the walls, collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks’.

Officially, there was no war in the Victoria River District. Nor were there treaties. While the government deemed dispossession to be legitimate, it could not endorse the violent force used to seize the land, so a curious language of denial emerged on the frontier.

Historian Bain Attwood has interrogated this denial in its historic and contemporary forms, noting how settlers often projected ‘their own savagery onto the Aboriginal people’ to ‘blame them for most of the violence that occurred or excuse their own violence in the name of the civilization they claimed for themselves’. At the heart of the denial were acts of othering. Women, men, and children became ‘gins’, ‘myalls’, and ‘piccaninnies’.

Violence, when recorded, was coded as ‘dispersing the blacks’, ‘quieting down the blacks’ – or, simply, ‘retribution’. Deborah Bird Rose described how, in the nineENVIRONMENT

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teenth and early twentieth century, parts of the Victoria and bloody truth. Yet so much of this history remains River District became known as ‘quiet nigger’ country grey.

Whatever events are alluded to at the Retribution and ‘bad nigger’ country: ‘What Europeans called “bad nigger” country was country in which Aboriginal people Camp boab will not find their way onto the massacre map. The carved name rests in the realm of suggestion. were able to resist invasion.’

The war was waged over a generation; the frontier It is a fragment, a clue. There is no known historical lasted a century. Keeping quiet, destroying evidence, account or oral history of a ‘punitive expedition’ in the hiding in euphemisms: these were part of the culture immediate area. This boab appears to stand testimony to an otherwise undocuon the cattle stations. G.W. mented event during the long Broughton observed ‘a freeCrimes turned into whispers that period of warfare between masonry of silence’ during his trip from the Kimberley eventually became too soft to hear the Aboriginal people and early settlers. ‘It’s where the to Darwin in 1908. When punitive expedition must outsiders came to the region, locals ‘kept their mouths shut’. Crimes turned into have camped,’ Darrell reflects, ‘not where they shot people, but where they camped.’ Perhaps this was the whispers that eventually became too soft to hear.

Darrell has been listening to these stories from last place the men spoke of their acts of ‘retribution’. both sides of the frontier since he first came to the Perhaps carving the name was a bonding experience, region in 1971. He weighs them up carefully, testing a compact of complicity. ‘The strategy of silence,’ Rose them for accuracy, parsing the tall tales from the ‘hid- observes, ‘was maintained through, and reinforced, den histories’. He often turns to what he describes as white mateship in the bush.’

I gaze up at the boab, this beautiful old tree signed ‘the outback archive’ to verify or enrich an account: the histories imprinted in the land, such as inscribed water with the suggestion of bloodshed. How many generatanks, engraved cattle skulls, and ‘living documents’ tions has this tree been witness to? How many thousands like marked boabs. Sometimes bullet shells are all that of people have camped beneath it? It’s hard to say. Boabs are needed to confirm a story. ‘If there’s just one shell can live for millennia, but they are unlike most other in remote country,’ he tells me, ‘then perhaps it’s some trees. There are no regular annual rings to count, and size lone fella having a shot at a wallaby for dinner. But if is not always a good indicator of age. They are the world’s there are dozens, even hundreds, far from a stockyard, a largest stem succulent. Some trees grow tall, others stay hut site or an old track, in an area where other sources squat. All fluctuate during their lives according to their suggest a massacre occurred, then I would take that as water content. And they are amazingly resilient. Once pretty firm evidence that it was the site of a massacre.’ So mature, their moisture-rich wood makes them virtually far he hasn’t found this ‘firm evidence’ for the massacre fire resistant. Boabs toppled in storms, with their shallow roots exposed, can resprout and grow, spreadeagled, south of Jasper Gorge.

Darrell has compiled many of these stories into for centuries.

At some point in time, without warning, a boab an epic book, officially launched in Darwin on 5 June 2019. He calls it The Victoria River District Doomsday ceases to be a boab. Its once strong trunk collapses inBook (National Centre for Biography, ANU, 2018). wards and the soft fibrous wood bleaches and erodes into It is a compendium of historical information he has the wind. As Penny Miller records of the South African accumulated over decades – from documentary sources, baobab: ‘When the tree dies the process is Othello-like oral history, rock art, and the ‘outback archive’. It is – a pillar of Herculean strength and nobility, disinteordered according to the cattle stations in the district, grates into a mound of pulp.’ While a red gum remains with details of the lives of the station managers, annual a part of its ecosystem long after its death – perhaps numbers of livestock, as well as notable events, such for as long as it did in life – a boab’s demise is frightas fires, floods, thefts, spearings, and massacres. It is eningly instant. It dies, withers, and collapses within a a vast, sprawling web of memory about the region and year.

A tree that may have lived for some one thousand its characters. And it features the backstories of some years, maybe more, a constant in a time of dramatic of the names carved into the Retribution Camp boab.

Over the past few years, a team of researchers at the change, disintegrates in a few short months, like paper University of Newcastle, led by historian Lyndall Ryan, turning to dust. The living document dies, taking with has been methodically collecting testimony of colonial it the history it once preserved. All that remains is a massacres, corroborating the evidence, and plotting the shallow scar in the earth where the giant once stood. g locations on a map of Australia. Hundreds of entries now dot the continent, like wounds on the landscape. Billy Griffiths is a historian and lecturer in Cultural The project has had remarkable success in drawing Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. national and international attention to this torrid history. His latest book is the award-winning Deep Time DreamIt presents black-and-white evidence of a confronting ing: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018).

16 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

‘Hot little asbestos boxes’ Diseased lungs and bitter memories

Graeme Davison ASBESTOS IN AUSTRALIA: FROM BOOM TO DUST edited by Lenore Layman and Gail Phillips

Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 364 pp, 9781925835618

W

ittenoom is no more. The notorious mine has been abandoned and the township, ten kilometres away across the Pilbara, has been demolished and buried. The name has been erased from road signs along Route 95. Blue asbestos – the mineral that created and then condemned the place – is still virulently present in its soil, air, and water. But while Wittenoom is no more, it is not forgotten. It survives in the diseased lungs and bitter memories of those who lived and worked there.

In 1948, just as the mine was taking off, a young English-born doctor, Eric Saint, visited Wittenoom. Saint was shocked by what he saw. The town – ‘featureless, treeless, waterless streets of hot little asbestos boxes’ – was shocking enough. More shocking still were the working conditions in Australian Blue Asbestos’s mine and mill. As a graduate in industrial medicine from the University of Newcastle, familiar with American and British studies, Saint understood the deadly effects of prolonged exposure to asbestos dust. Workers in ABA’s mill, it was later shown, were exposed to as much as seventeen times the accepted standard. Women washing their clothes were breathing it. Children loved playing with the fluffy fibres that wafted across the plain.

Saint wrote to the Western Austra-

lian Health Department. Wittenoom, he warned, would produce ‘the richest and most lethal crop of cases of asbestosis in the world’s literature’. His warnings were ignored. So were those of Jim McNulty, another British-trained public health expert who visited the town in the late 1950s. ‘I advised [the workers] strongly to get out,’ he recalled. ‘I don’t know of a single person who took my advice.’

It took another decade before the full extent of the disaster became apparent. In the early 1960s, South African doctors observed the appearance among asbestos miners of mesothelioma, an incurable form of lung cancer. Australian cases soon appeared, but because of its long latency period, the incidence of the disease among workers and their families at Wittenoom, and in the factories of the biggest asbestos manufacturer James Hardie, was not evident until the 1970s. The epidemic peaked in 2017, but it is not over yet: people will be dying from mesthelioma for another twenty-five years.

The full cost of Australia’s fatal affair with asbestos may never be known, but Asbestos in Australia: From boom to dust, based on a National Health and Medical Research Council interdisciplinary research project, is the most complete reckoning so far. Historian Lenore Layman has followed the story since the

early 1980s. With doctors, epidemiologists, lawyers, journalists, and unionists, she played a part in the campaign to expose the problem and bring redress to the victims. In three deeply researched and reflective opening chapters, comprising almost a third of the book, she reviews the development of the industry, its impact on the built environment, and the response of public-health experts to the crisis. Later chapters by journalists, medicos, and lawyers survey professional responses. Former residents contribute moving firsthand accounts of living in Wittenoom and at Baryulgil near Grafton, where Aboriginal people were employed in a smaller whiteasbestos mine run by Wunderlich and James Hardie. There is some inevitable untidiness and repetition in a book that attempts to combine so many personal and disciplinary viewpoints. Not all readers will make their way through the denser technical chapters. But as a comprehensive account of the disaster ,it is unlikely to be bettered.

Layman narrates the story as a modern tragedy, a fatal compound of hubris, ignorance, complacency, and greed. In the early postwar years, she reminds us, asbestos was hailed as a ‘magic mineral’: durable, malleable, and impervious to fire and heat. Cheaper than brick or weatherboard, asbestos cement sheeting

APPLY NOW FOR 2020 l FLINDERS.EDU.AU/CREATIVE-ARTS

ENVIRONMENT

17

(‘fibro’) clad thousands of Australian homes, especially in the working-class suburbs of Sydney and Perth. Future prime minister Paul Keating grew up in a fibro cottage in Bankstown. My father, a plumber installing hot-water services and bathrooms in spec-built cottages in postwar Melbourne, regularly sawed, drilled, and nailed the stuff. The magic mineral was the poor man’s friend: a source of well-paid dangerous jobs and cheap housing. As Layman notes, fibro always carried the stigma of social disadvantage. Now those workingmen’s cottages are shunned as death traps.

Gideon Haigh, historian of James Hardie Industries, notes the emblematic significance of the asbestos story for a nation ‘struggling to come to terms with aspects of its past and wondering whether it should have known more at various stages in its history’. As we grapple with other bitter legacies – of Indigenous dispossession, clerical abuse, financial malfeasance, and environmental neglect – we may find ourselves asking similar questions: When did they know? Why did they ignore the truthtellers? Was the blindness innocent or wilful?

In 1948, when Eric Saint sounded the alarm, even he did not comprehend the extent of the danger. McNulty still worries that he did not protest loudly enough. Looking back, the errors of the past seem blindingly obvious – perhaps too obvious. The forensic gaze of the doctor seeking causes or the lawyer seeking redress too easily misses the all-too-human frailties that appear in a more comprehensive study such as this.

Along with greed and culpable carelessness, there were large elements of ignorance, inexperience, inattention, and the most besetting of Australian sins – blind faith that ‘she’ll be right’.

CSR, the sugar company that ran the Wittenoom mine, blundered into a business it only half understood. James Hardie, the old-fashioned company that ran the factory, could not believe that it was actually doing harm it did not intend. Health Department officials in Perth were too far away to care enough about what was happening at the other end of the state. Old hands in the mining business thought they knew better 18 O CTOBER 2019

than a couple of young know-it-all Pommy doctors. Workers, as well as employers and unions, were so intent on making a quid that they simply didn’t want to know about the dangers.

Of such mixed motives are we humans – and such tragedies – made.

The authors point a persuasive lesson: only by strong laws and the mutual

watchfulness of everyone – employers, governments, unions, and workers – will they be avoided in future. g Graeme Davison is an emeritus professor of history at Monash University.

His recent publication is City Dreamers: The urban imagination in Australia (2018).

The twin of lustre Unholy dislodgements of soil

Alexandra Roginski SLUDGE: DISASTER ON VICTORIA’S GOLDFIELDS

by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies La Trobe University Press, $34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760641108

D

rive not too far inland from Melbourne in most directions, past thick bands of ordered suburbia, and you’ll reach bush localities that shiver on breezy days with the sound of gumleaves. At dusk, you might glimpse kangaroos slinking like grey ghosts through blocks of steep, rocky land. Despite this poetry, these bushland escapes represent nature in a third life – a scenic recovery from an industry that left behind a pock-marked, sliced-up, hosed-down moonscape.

Damage is the twin of the lustre of the Victorian gold rush that surged from 1851 and turned this small wedge of south-eastern Australia from a pastoral economy founded on the dispossession of Aboriginal Traditional Owners into a mining stronghold. ‘Two per cent of all the gold ever mined in the world has come from Victoria,’ declare La Trobe University’s Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies. Yet, as they show in Sludge: Disaster on Victoria’s goldfields, such riches cost the newly minted Colony of Victoria a relentless slurry of mining waste that travelled far from its source to distant locations.

Historians have previously noted the environmental toll of the gold rushes, but Lawrence and Davies combine archaeology, archival research,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

digital-mapping technologies and aerial-imaging systems (LiDAR) to build a timely case study that guides us through both mangled bushland and the long political stoush between aggrieved land users and an industry deemed economically indispensable. The battle at times seems starkly contemporary.

The facts need little embellishment: for more than half a century, gold mining generated unholy dislodgements of soil and affected three quarters of Victoria’s waterways. Consider that during the mid-1850s, up to sixty-seven million litres of sludge poured into Bendigo Creek each day. In the 1880s, on our dry continent, even a small mining claim using sluicing technology could daily consume close to a million litres of water.

Lawrence and Davies, industrial archaeologists, lead us through this environment and the industry that altered it, explaining, for example, the enduring dance of a healthy river as it accelerates around bends and then deposits sediment in slowing stretches.

We join them on excursions during which they uncover a ‘remarkably intact’ water flume or the stone foundations of a water wheel. Their photograph of an interrupted cliff face offers a crosssection view of a choking blanket of hard orange soil, a silent reminder of

the malevolent invasions of sludge that terrorised regional residents.

Sludge poured through main streets, mired cattle, clogged waterways, strangled grape vines, engulfed fully grown trees, and drowned more than a few stray humans. It flowed from a range of mining technologies – from cradling and puddling to deep-lead mining, quartz crushing, hydraulic sluicing, and bucket dredging.

Water was essential to washing gold from its gritty or rocky casing, both for individual diggers and corporate players.

From the 1850s, a ‘spaghetti’ of races in gold centres such as Beechworth diverted water along narrow channels, sometimes into entirely different catchment systems. The colonial administration tussled with British precedent about water access at a time of broad discussion regarding land ownership, eventually developing a local model that retained government ownership of water while granting licenses for individual use.

From a morass of innovation, legislation, and litigation emerged the enterprising ‘water boss’, with his (for they were almost all male) army of underlings, including ‘race keepers’. The authors deftly navigate technical content to build a granular picture of how technology shaped the hierarchy of a goldfield, a milieu in which local authorities decided how the ‘creek rights’ of miners could co-exist with the ‘bank rights’ of the richer water bosses. This water wrangling surged to highs of destructive ingenuity during the 1870s with the arrival of ‘giant nozzles’ from California, whose mouths yawned to an immense nine inches in diameter.

Resident groups, supported by parliamentary champions, mobilised in outrage at the power of these sluicing nozzles to blast away riverbanks more than thirty-six metres high, just one in a litany of protests against the menace of mining that finally, after decades of be-sludging, began to prompt stricter regulation.

For the reader versed in the politics of modern-day environmental stalemates, the historical sludge debates seethe with recognisable iterations of denial: questionable attempts at self-regulation;

an industry that eulogised itself with every mention of environmental responsibility; a plea about the ‘small man … the fellow who is making a living with the cradle and tub’; and even a tendentious claim that tailings improved Bendigo’s soil. As Lawrence and Davies show, only changing economic conditions, including agriculture’s growing contribution to the colonial economy, allowed the balance to tip away from mining interests. Pragmatism triumphed.

Sludge ultimately speaks to our own time. Environmental protection laws grow from the activism seeded during past catastrophes. Just as miners brawled over water races in the 1850s, the equity of water allocations along the tendrils of the Murray–Darling Basin fuels interstate animosity. Victorians live with legacy contaminants in the soil thanks to gold mining. In our rivers, ‘sand slugs’ of mid-sized sediment from mining to this day dislodge during heavy flows and lurch downstream, stifling aquatic habitats.

We unstick ourselves from Sludge in a meditation on lasting entanglements between human and environment, both locally and in a state of global interconnection. Lawrence and Davies remind us that each time we purchase a smart phone we bolster a global network of consumption and extraction. It is a wicked problem, and one that generates vital conversations about resources, climate justice, conservation, and the agency of ecosystems that can still somehow flourish again, despite our worst transgressions. g

Australian Book Review congratulates the winner of the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize:

Sonja Dechian

Sonja Dechian is the author of the short story collection An Astronaut’s Life, which won the 2016 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her writing has previously appeared in The Best Australian Stories, New Australian Stories 2, and elsewhere.

Sonja Dechian’s winning story, ‘The Point-Blank Murder’, for which she receives $5,000, is in the September 2019 issue.

Raaza Jamshed was placed second with ‘Miracle Windows’.

Morgan Nunan came third with his story ‘Rubble Boy’.

Alexandra Roginski is a research fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, and an associate of the Centre for Environmental History (ANU).

ABR gratefully acknowledges Ian Dickson’s generous support for the Jolley Prize.

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Calibre Essay Prize Worth $7,500 The 2020 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for a new non-fiction essay, is now open.

The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject or in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental.

The Calibre Prize closes on 15 January 2020.

For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners please visit our website. australianbookreview.com.au 20 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Defeat devices Exploring the idea of water

Timothy Neale A FUTURE HISTORY OF WATER

by Andrea Ballestero

Duke University Press, US$24.95, 248 pp, 9781478003892

ANTHROPOGENIC RIVERS: THE PRODUCTION OF UNCERTAINTY IN LAO HYDROPOWER

by Jerome Whitington

Cornell University Press (Footprint), $62 pb, 288 pp, 9781501730917

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his June I attended a major Aboriginal fire-management workshop in Barmah National Park on Yorta Yorta woka, or Country. Camping on the floodplain of Dhungala – the Murray River – the participants’ discussions of bushfire led repeatedly back to another elemental force: walla, or water.

As several elders explained, the flammability of the surrounding red gum forest is inextricably linked to the industrial regulation of the river’s movements.

Anthropogenic infrastructures such as Lake Dartmouth have turned the forest’s wetting regime ‘upside down’, repurposing a millennia-old ecological pattern to capture spring floods and create summer flows. One perverse outcome, as Yorta Yorta man Corey Walker said, is that holidaymakers experience the river as rich in water. When urbanites encounter news reports of plunder in the wider Murray–Darling Basin, the channelling of its vitality into irrigation, they think back to summer breaks and long Invasion Day weekends enjoying a generous current, likely unaware that those flows were a gift from water authorities sending a strategic pulse through the system.

Such summer flows are a kind of ‘defeat device’ similar to the one made infamous by the automobile manufacturer Volkswagen. In that instance, investigations by the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed that between 2009 and 2015 the manufacturer had equipped its automobiles with software that recognised emissions-testing

conditions, instructing them to ‘defeat’ the test by lowering their emissions to compliant levels. Subsequent investigations unearthed a 2007 email from Bosch engineers politely telling Volkswagen that, while they had designed this software, ‘if you use it in production it will be illegal’.

Rarely is the corruption of such devices, calibrated to enable exploitation, uncovered so conclusively. To return to Dhungala walla, exposés over the past two years regarding the ‘gaming’ and ‘theft’ of water allocations in the Murray–Darling Basin have struggled with the complexity and obscurity of the administrative system and its safeguards. As with native title, the level of technical literacy required to understand the basin’s powerful governance devices (and their defeat) is an obstacle to justice.

A further obstacle is the relative obscurity of the institution established in 2008 to manage the cross-jurisdictional waterway ‘sustainably’: the Murray–Darling Basin Authority. In 2017, a compliance review described the Authority as ‘a closed culture’, which concealed much of its data.

Then, through much of 2018, the South Australian government unsuccessfully attempted to compel Authority staff to give evidence to its Murray–Darling Basin Royal Commission. While federal ministers, such as Anne Ruston, could be found professing to the press that ‘we haven’t got anything to hide’, their government was launching legal

challenges to ensure Authority staff remained cloistered. When the South Australian Royal Commission released its report in January 2019, its findings regarding the ‘gross maladministration’ of the basin were accompanied by numerous (unheeded) recommendations for the inner numerical workings of the Authority to be revealed.

In A Future History of Water, anthropologist Andrea Ballestero provides a compelling case for spending time with water’s bureaucracies and, more to the point, with their employees and consultants. Ballestero has spent years doing exactly this in Costa Rica and Brazil, examining how the human right to water, recognised by the United Nations in July 2010, has been codified into various formulae, indices, lists, and pacts. These ‘devices’, Ballestero argues, are both ‘good things to think with’ and ‘good thoughts to act with’, each one encoded with whole philosophies and norms regarding what counts as human. The author marvels at the ‘wondrous capacities’ of these devices, which ‘translate virtues and values into the dry normality of technocracy’, though their wonder is not necessarily pleasurable. The feeling can be more like vertigo, as we glimpse the immense power that ‘seemingly minor technopolitical decisions’ can have on how the human right of drinking water is delivered to some and not others.

Beyond this, Ballestero also insists we consider how the professionals enrolled in water governance implicitly govern the future, ‘act[ing] to set up structures ENVIRONMENT

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and obligations for the yet-to-come’ through reworked numerical benchmarks and spreadsheets. This is, again, not simply a positive argument. While more interested in those who ‘work to differentiate the world that already is from the world that should be’, Ballestero is also alert to how water’s uncertainties can be manipulated to relieve pressing obligations to justice rather than to create them. In the third chapter, we learn about how the Costa Rican Libertarian party, Movimiento Libertario, weaponised postmodern reasoning to defer decisions regarding which forms of water should be legally protected, conjuring numerous worlds in which human rights to ice cubes and clouds became a burden on the state. Taking a moment, Ballestero reflects on the parallels between this strategy and critical humanities scholarship, where the questioning of categories as connivances of power is also rewarded.

J

erome Whitington’s Anthropogenic Rivers takes a complementary view of the ‘production of uncertainty’ around water governance. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Laos between 2001 and 2010, Whitington’s book analyses a period of unprecedented hydropower development during which the country effectively doubled its major dams. The book is daunting in its complexity, but it essentially conceptualises the administration of water from its practices, showing that such projects do not rely upon the conceit of a shared understanding of reality. There are ‘post-truth’ resonances here, as Whitington details situations in which ‘no one has invested in the knowledge infrastructure and labor necessary for making facts’, demonstrating how a given project ‘bends the social world around its aspirations and requirements’. The implicit point to the reader is that, whether in Laos or the Murray–Darling Basin, uncertainties are not scandalous to those in charge of water governance. Rather, Whitington argues, river systems present a field of ‘open-ended experimentation’ in which engineers and developers seek to capture their potential through new numerical arrangements.

22 O CTOBER 2019

Since we are forbidden much insight into the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, we can at least use Ballestero’s and Whitington’s acute theorisations to adopt a fresh view of its devices and its defeats. A perusal of federal and state government statements about the basin over the last decade reveals an occult numbers game, one curiously detached from dollars. The current federal Minister for Water Resources is intent

Summer flows are a kind of ‘defeat device’ similar to the one made infamous by the automobile manufacturer Volkswagen on ‘delivering the basin plan in full and on time’, pursuing infrastructural options two to three times more expensive than repurchasing water licences to do so. Rather than finances, the political focus has fallen on a set of devices such as the Water Recovery Target, meaning the 2,750 gigalitres of water that, according to the Authority’s plan, need to be acquired back for the basin from its users by 2026. Famously, as the Authority’s former director of environmental water planning recently stated, this number stemmed from state and federal politicians’ decrees that, despite the scientific evidence, the target needed to begin with a two (not a four).

Following Ballestero, such a device places an obligation on the yet-to-be, pressing upon various institutions to make a certain future through present action. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, different administrations have since set about experimenting with other devices to spare irrigators from that obligation.

This began before the plan was even finalised, with the magical thinking of the 2011 parliamentary committee, led by Tony Windsor, which said that the target might be reached ‘without the pain’ through various engineered ‘efficiencies’.

In the next seven years, the government would spend more than $4 billion on infrastructure for basin irrigators, cropping the purported water ‘savings’ as line items against the target. Since then, there has been further interstate

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

horse-trading regarding contributing caps and targets, and an ‘adjustment mechanism’ that ostensibly delivers ‘equivalent’ biodiversity outcomes (but without returning water). As with other ‘savings’, the methods used to imagine this equivalency into existence are not published.

The issue is not that these devices and numbers are abstract fantasies.

Examining efforts to build hydroelectric dams in Laos and to formulate water’s ‘just price’ in Costa Rica reminds us that, to be governed, water must be unmoored from its material form. As a number, water can be aggregated and redistributed to do wondrous things. The issue, as both Ballestero and Whitington show, is that we need to be able to track the paths between the material and the abstract.

We need to know if the devices – curious creatures with names like Sustainable Diversion Limits and Environmentally Sustainable Level of Take – are helping to make the world as it should be. The growing scandals around the basin’s management suggest that the future of this arid continent’s most populous river system has been shaped around the needs of the politically powerful.

Perhaps one day, with greater access to the Authority’s inner machinations, we might sight the defeat devices concealed within. g

Timothy Neale is DECRA Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Geography at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University.

On our land Alison Broinowski PROJECT RAINFALL: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PINE GAP

by Tom Gilling

S

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 317 pp, 9781760528430

ince the 1960s, US military bases have continuously occupied Australian territory, with the permission of successive governments. Of the original sites, the missile-launch tracker Nurrungar is closed and North West Cape no longer communicates with US nuclear submarines, but it has since gained space surveillance and military signals intelligence functions. Pine Gap listens to signals transmissions from satellites in geostationary orbit; it analyses them and transmits the assessed intelligence to allies; it targets drone strikes and supports the US and NATO in military attacks. Familiar claims about contributions made by Pine Gap to ‘global stability’ through arms control, counterproliferation, and monitoring of adherence to treaties are rhetorical, since Australia and its allies are given to abandoning or ignoring rules that no longer suit their purposes.

The pile of books promising to reveal the ‘inside story’ or the ‘secret history’ of US bases in Australia continues to mount. Brian Toohey’s Secret, following his and William Pinwill’s Oyster, coincides with Project Rainfall by novelist and war historian Tom Gilling.

Earlier Australian efforts include David Rosenberg’s Pine Gap, on which a 2018 television series was based, James Curran’s Unholy Fury, Richard Hall’s The Secret State, and the lifetime of work by Des Ball and his Nautilus colleagues.

As well there is New Zealander Nicky Hager’s Secret Power, while revelations from Americans of what their government doesn’t want known include Robert Lindsey’s The Falcon and the Snowman, Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide, Sharon Weinberger’s The Imagineers of War, and many more.

The mountain of bases books is a molehill compared to the intelligence

collected by the Five Eyes Anglo-allies through ECHELON, which monitors virtually all the world’s electronic communications, more than can be digested.

Stored electronically by the US National Security Agency (NSA), ECHELON intercepts would, if printed, make a paper stack 240 kilometres high.

Australia’s Department of Defence has always kept from ministers and other departments the details of what the Americans from CIA and NSA do, particularly at Pine Gap. The pretence that the ‘Joint Defence Space Research Facility’ was purely experimental, and its original name, have since given way to the more truthful ‘Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap’, codenamed RAINFALL. It would be still more accurate to call the vastly expanded station a ‘US military surveillance and targeting base’.

When our elected politicians in the 1960s to 1990s sought to know what happened at Pine Gap, they were given the mushroom treatment: now they meekly accept it. In the 1980s, when officials and parliamentarians investigated the effect of a possible Soviet nuclear attack on three US bases in Australia, they came to much more reassuring conclusions than two civil society medical studies did, Gilling shows. Since the 1990s, the Pine Gap base has been integral to ‘the Pentagon’s war-fighting machinery’. A future Australian government that tries to extricate it could go the way of Allende in 1973, or Whitlam in 1975. It is part of the machinery that is now being used against Iran.

As many protesters and journalists have found, few Australians can get inside the gates of any of the fifteen ‘joint facilities’ to see what they do on our land. An attempt in August by the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network to give a ceremonial, jarrahmounted boot to the US Marines in Darwin was politely rebuffed.

Australia is allowed ‘full oversight’ of Pine Gap’s activities, Christopher Pyne assured parliament: but Ball argued that most of the intelligence it collects is for US strategic interests and irrelevant to Australia. His colleague Richard Tanter has pointed out that Pine Gap is driven, built, paid for, and commanded by the United States.

Hence it does not support Australia’s security: quite the opposite. As Afghanistan winds down, the target of Pine Gap’s ‘cryptologic insight’ and war-fighting spy satellites – including fighting nuclear war – is being transferred to China. No wonder Australia is seen in Beijing as China’s enemy.

Gilling doesn’t evaluate the target Pine Gap now presents for a Chinese nuclear attack, which it could be, if China chose to target a US base in Australia as a warning alternative to a direct attack on the United States.

Malcolm Fraser’s late revelation, that the US bases themselves pose the greatest threat to Australia, presents us with an urgent obligation to debate this existential question, which has prevailed since the 1960s.

Seeking to do this, Toohey’s and Gilling’s books reveal the tangled web of lies about the US bases that began from Menzies’ initiative in 1965 for a submarine communications base in Western Australia, from which he hoped for political advantage over Labor. In 1966 Harold Holt’s government agreed to host ‘joint defence facilities’ with the United States in three sites, Nurrungar, North West Cape, and Pine Gap. Dedicated to Cold War enmity, Defence Department Secretary Arthur Tange took personal responsibility and derived power from keeping the secrets of the operations, particularly at Pine Gap, to himself and the chief scientist. Apparently they accepted that the CIA’s surveillance from Pine Gap was directed at the Soviet Union, and was not used to spy on Australians and their government. Whitlam knew better, telling Parliament in April 1974 that ‘there should not be foreign military bases, stations, installations in Australia’. Apart from honouring existing agreements, Australia did not want extensions or prolongations, he said.

But we still have the bases, and we face the consequences. g Alison Broinowski, formerly an Australian diplomat, is Vice-President of Australians for War Powers Reform.

She is the author of Howard’s War (2003) and Allied and Addicted (2007).

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COMMENT

The Night Parrot It’s a whitefella thing

by Kim Mahood

I

f you google the words ‘Night Parrot’, they come up with a companion set of adjectives, the most common being ‘elusive’, followed by ‘mysterious’, ‘secretive’, ‘enigmatic’, ‘mythical’, and, until recently, ‘thought-to-be-extinct’. Apart from anecdotal claims, there were no confirmed sightings of the Night Parrot from 1912, when one was captured and shot, until a dead parrot was found by a roadside in 1990 and a live bird was photographed by naturalist John Young in Western Queensland in 2013. Controversy, compromised reputations, and accusations of faked evidence followed the re-emergence of the fabled bird, but the parrot prevailed and a conservation reserve was established at Pullen Pullen, the location where Young took the photograph and where a female Night Parrot was subsequently trapped and tagged.

In the winter of 2017, somewhere in the northern part of the Great Sandy Desert, the Paruku Indigenous Rangers and a visiting scientist from the World Wildlife Fund set up a sensor camera at a location where a Night Parrot had reportedly been sighted by a local pastoralist forty years earlier. Returning to the ranger base next morning, the team discovered the camera had captured a flare of yellow-green, which the WWF scientist immediately sent to his brother, a bird expert, who identified it as Pezoporus occidentalis, the Night Parrot.

A second attempt to photograph the parrot recorded wild camels, bulls, cats, and dingoes, their grunts, bellows, and howls keeping the rangers awake for most of the night. A photo taken a few months later, accompanied by audio identification of its call, confirmed that the Night Parrot was successfully sharing its habitat with predators and ferals.

24 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The Paruku Rangers, established in 2004 to help manage the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area, are the custodians of a unique, little-known desert lake ecosystem located at the southernmost reaches of the Kimberley cattle country and the northern end of the Canning Stock Route. Used to being overlooked and under-serviced because of their remoteness, they were suddenly the centre of media attention, funding offers, and expert advice. The Night Parrot had been doing fine, flying under the radar for the four decades since its last sighting, but rare, elusive birds produce a strange fever in certain strata of the human population, and this low-flying, ground-dwelling, spinifex-nesting, seed-eating, dumpy, short-tailed, green bird, described by someone as ‘a fat budgie’, was the gold standard of mythical Australian birds.

The first decision the rangers made was to keep its location secret. This was not as mean-spirited as it sounds. While there are no doubt plenty of competent people in the bird-watching community, the nickname ‘twitcher’ doesn’t inspire confidence when associated with a remote desert region serviced only by an underresourced ranger team.

But it was an opportunity to be grasped. If the whitefellas were interested in the Night Parrot, and prepared to chuck money at it, it was in the interests of the blackfellas to turn it to their advantage. If it took a fat budgie to achieve what youth suicide and intergenerational trauma had failed to do ...

This resulted in the gathering in June 2019 of a cross section of desert-ranger groups, bird scientists, politicians, and interested others at the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area campsite of Handover, so named because

it was the place where native title was handed back to the Walmajarri traditional owners of Paruku in 2001.

The road was graded, the campsite extended, a water bore drilled and cased, and caterers brought in to feed two hundred and fifty visitors for five days. Coordinated by the Indigenous Desert Alliance, the clumsily named Species of the Desert Festival brought together twenty-five Indigenous Ranger groups from across the Kimberley and the Central and Western desert regions, to share their knowledge and experience of desert ecology with Night Parrot experts and a collection of VIPs that included Senator Pat Dodson and the Guardian cartoonist First Dog on the Moon.

It is fortuitous that the desert Indigenous ranger groups occupy the same territory as the most charismatic of our threatened species (bilbies, marsupial moles, Night Parrots) and are best placed to find, monitor, and look after them. Not too long ago, the Indigenous rangers were at risk of becoming a threatened species themselves, when the then-minister for indigenous affairs decided that the ranger program should be relegated to the work-for-the-dole scheme from which it originated.

This triggered an incredulous ‘what the fuck are you joking, this is one of the few initiatives that has produced real outcomes’ reaction from everyone who had spent decades working on Indigenous programs. The minister backed down and the no-longer-threatened Indigenous rangers are discovering that some of the threatened species they monitor may not be as threatened as was previously thought. The marsupial mole is turning up all over its natural habitat, burrowing about under the

sand dunes. The same goes for the bilby. There are lots of bilbies in the desert, possibly because the Aboriginal inhabitants of the deep desert have long enjoyed eating the feral cats that prey on the bilbies.

Cats are the biggest threat to native birds, mammals, and reptiles. The most popular session of the Desert Festival was on managing feral animals, which included the latest development in feral-cat control, a sensor device that recognises the shape and proportions of a cat and releases a poison spray. Being a self-cleaning animal, the cat licks the poison off its fur and dies. There was a suggestion that the Night Parrot’s habit of making its nest deep inside a large clump of old-growth spinifex might be a recent development to escape from cats, but dingoes have been around for five thousand years longer than cats, so it’s more likely that the adaptation evolved to avoid dingoes, and possibly hawks, which are another efficient predator. On the other hand, maybe the hawks’ practice of picking up burning twigs from bushfires and dropping them into clumps of spinifex evolved to flush out Night Parrots.

Apart from the feral cat, the greatest predator of the Night Parrot was Frederick Andrews, employed as a collector by the South Australian Museum in the 1870s.

He captured, killed, and preserved at least twenty-eight specimens for museums before drowning in a waterhole in 1884.

Based on the birds discovered so far, the Night Parrot habitat consists of widely spaced old-growth spinifex, which is not susceptible to wildfire, on run-off or floodout country that produces samphire and quick-response,

When award-winning Australian writer Peter Temple died in 2018, there was an unfinished Jack Irish novel in his desk drawer. The manuscript reveals a writer at the peak of his powers.

This expansive collection of stories, essays and brilliant book reviews pays tribute to the master, and includes an introduction by Temple’s publisher Michael Heyward.

Two-time Booker Prize winner and Nobel laureate, J. M. Coetzee, completes his Jesus trilogy with a new literary masterpiece. David is an inquisitive child and gifted soccer player. He decides to move in with the director of a nearby orphanage, but before long is struck down by a mysterious illness...

‘One of the best novelists alive.’ Sunday Times

Coming in November

A definitive collection of essays, speeches and musings from one of the world’s greatest thinkers. Bringing together nearly thirty years of writing on palaeontology, mammalogy, history, environmental science and climate change, Life: Selected Writings offers insight into the wondrous complexities of our natural world. ‘A master storyteller.’

Australian Book Review Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life.

Now she’s sharing it with her readers. Published in an elegant hardback, Yellow Notebook invites readers into Garner’s private world where she shares her observations, frustrations and joys, spanning about a decade from the late 1970s just after the publication of Monkey Grip.

textpublishing.com.au

ENVIRONMENT

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seed-bearing plants. One of the main agendas of the Species of the Desert Festival was to identify likely habitats and establish the groundwork for a Night Parrot recovery plan, with the initial input coming from Indigenous people, who could choose what information they wanted to share and how they wanted it used. For the first time, Indigenous knowledge would be the template on which to build the process.

Things got a bit heated when a young woman ranger challenged the Threatened Species Commissioner to explain why ranger teams had to look for Night Parrots in order to be funded to manage vast tracts of desert, and why the government couldn’t just give them the money.

It was a fair question, but tough on the commissioner, the only politician apart from Pat Dodson who made the effort to attend.

The desert ecosystem doesn’t revolve around Night Parrots. They are an integral part of it, and if they turn out to be more populous than expected, it will be an indicator that leaving them alone is the best method of looking after them. However, if the whitefella obses-

sion with a spectral avian species generates the money to get out on Country, observe its creatures, control the impact of feral animals and weeds, support traditional management practices, and contribute to the shared endeavour to maintain its environmental and cultural integrity, it’s up to the Indigenous ranger teams to grab the opportunity and make the most of it. Which is what happened, in spite of some ironic observations about a fat nocturnal budgie that supposedly bumps into trees when flying.

No doubt there are negotiations going on between the bird scientists and the traditional owners of the places where Night Parrots are known, or thought, to be. Access to the parrot and its habitat must be a priority for the people who have invested so much in studying it.

But for the time being it’s up to the Indigenous ranger teams to decide where to look and what to reveal. g Kim Mahood is the author of two non-fiction books: Position Doubtful (2016) and the award-winning Craft for a Dry Lake, (2000).

The Experience of Being Outside An insight examines a lifetime while an ocean flows under my feet.

My feet no longer feel

There’s no one to ask what it’s like being dead to the world.

I imagine a switch gets tripped

since my body’s beside itself.

I’m at an altar, calling on the gods of the boggled mind to save me,

as the window gives permission for each multiplex person to merge their many selves into one.

pouring two more mother-may-I’s into the emptiness.

I’m at risk of being pushed

Who will be blamed, I wonder, for living the life that was mine?

A blue bowl catches whatever

through a plate glass window.

The Hellhound looks down on me from a higher plane –

comes its way: birds, clouds, high-wire act reactions.

The hypocrite Hellhound

two evil eyes and three mouths all work in tandem in order to bark out a final decree.

uses a mirror to decide what looks enough like it to let live and who it will smash through the glass.

Mary Jo Bang ❖ Mary Jo Bang is an American poet. Her most recent collection is A Doll for Throwing: Poems (2017).

26 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The creep of climate change Examining wind farms and resistance

James Dunk WIND TURBINE SYNDROME: A COMMUNICATED DISEASE

by Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichton Sydney University Press, $40 pb, 361 pp, 9781743324967

‘C

limate change is coming,’ fourth-generation farmer Charlie Prell told an Independent Planning Commission hearing on a proposed expansion of the windfarm near his Crookwell property on 6 June 2019. He and his family constantly hear the noise of the turbines spinning five hundred metres away, generating electricity. They hear the sounds of traffic from the road, the sheep and cattle on the farm. ‘I hear the birds in the garden around my house,’ he said, ‘and I also hear something else … the nearly silent creep of climate change.’

Several weeks later, inveterate environmentalist Dr Bob Brown raised eyebrows with an opinion piece in the Tasmanian Mercury. ‘The world needs energy efficiency and renewable energy to replace fossil fuels,’ wrote Brown, ‘and fast.’ But the 120-turbine windfarm proposed for Robbins Island, off northwest Tasmania, would be visible for fifty kilometres, generate surplus electricity which would be carried to the mainland, see profits dispensed to foreign shareholders, and kill birds. The island lies in the migratory path of twentyfour endangered species. Its cliffs are home to the wedge-tailed eagle and the white-bellied sea eagle. Wind must be farmed elsewhere.

Brown does not fit the typical mould of the windfarm opponent, and his objections point to the complex ecological, social, and economic dimensions of renewable energy, and to the difficulties society faces in adapting to a changing climate.

One response to this complexity has been to condense the field of vision, from profits, aesthetics, and threats to wildlife to human health risks. This was the sting in Rachel Carson’s prophetic

Silent Spring, published in 1962: birds might be dying, but it was the thought of children struck down by pesticidegenerated disease which troubled readers. Now, with average global temperatures rising, glaciers melting, and ‘natural’ disasters ever more frequent and potent, it is atmospheric carbon which stands centre stage. ‘Protecting the health of future generations,’ writes Samuel Myers, a leader in the new discipline of planetary health, in the Lancet, ‘requires taking better care of Earth’s natural systems.’

Health is proving potent in addressing climate change – but it may also be used for other purposes. ‘You will have heard of the health fears and objections raised by residents,’ wrote businessman and local landholder Maurice Newman in a submission to the Crookwell hearing. ‘Many of these fears are based on empirical research’, he continued, ‘and, not least, the anecdotal evidence’ of those living near windfarms. ‘Often these effects are kept within families for fear of reprisals.’

Wind Turbine Syndrome: A communicated disease, by Simon Chapman and Fiona Crichton, is a response to these claims. Chapman is an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Sydney whose expertise has been solicited by leading scientific bodies; Crichton has a PhD in psychological medicine from the University of Auckland. They gather evidence on the syndrome from all available experimental and clinical studies and scientific reviews and conclude that the best explanation is that the many symptoms (they count 247) reported by those living near turbines are ‘communicated’; that they are elicited not, directly, by noise or infrasound, but by protest groups, online communi-

ties, opinion leaders, and media reports.

It is a meticulous book. The first chapters establish that wind energy was harnessed for centuries, and modern turbines for decades, before health complaints were first registered. The third and fourth chapters interrogate the complaints of wind opponents, before the fifth, the crux of the book, presents experimental research and the careful conclusion of the authors that wind turbine syndrome is a psychogenic condition, apparently arising from psychological processes like the nocebo effect (the negative corollary of the placebo: those expecting to become ill are likely to become ill). Subsequent chapters concentrate on wind opponents and their tactics, before a final chapter suggesting ways forward. The breadth of the literature reviews and the presentation of Crichton’s own doctoral research are compelling – indeed, the arguments of the book are presented with such force and in such detail that it is difficult for a dispassionate reader to disagree with them.

There appear to be few dispassionate participants in the public arena, however. In January 2013, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott instructed the National Health and Medical Research Council to investigate the newlyreported ‘wind turbine syndrome’. After a twelve-month inquiry the NHMRC reported that there was ‘no consistent evidence’ that windfarms adversely affected human health, and called, guardedly, for further research. In June 2013, veteran broadcaster Alan Jones hosted an anti-wind rally outside Parliament House; Angus Taylor (now Energy Minister) addressed the small crowd.

In 2014, Abbott adviser and Crookwell landholder Maurice Newman denounced the ‘scientific delusion’ and ‘climate change madness’ embodied by the IPCC, and the United Nations’ broader ‘environmental catastrophism’ as a ploy to secure a new internationalist world order. Treasurer Joe Hockey spoke evenly of the ‘utterly offensive’ and ‘appalling’ turbines. In 2015, Abbott spoke of the ‘potential health impacts’ of that ‘blight on the landscape’, the windfarm. Both ministers were speaking with Alan Jones. Four years later, ENVIRONMENT

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shortly after the Crookwell hearing, and after losing his seat in a campaign focused on climate change, again being interviewed by Jones, Abbott lauded Taylor’s commitment to coal and said: ‘The last thing we want is what I regard as the dark satanic mills of the modern era spoiling our landscape.’

If wind turbine syndrome is, as the authors argue, a communicated disease, the news may help dispel its symptoms.

The authors describe experimental evidence that providing positive information about health risks can reduce the incidence of symptoms, even after the intake of negative information.

But it may be, as wind opponent Calvin Luther Martin once declared in a bullish book proposal, that ‘real evidence doesn’t work’. He meant the anecdotal evidence of sufferers, but the same might be said of a book like this, which, with its exhaustive detail and sometimes caustic tone, may find little purchase among wind warriors.

Chapman and Crichton’s research shows that, while direct health effects might be unproven, a significant number of those who live near wind turbines may be annoyed by them – especially those who derive no benefit. They are disturbed by the sound and size of wind turbines and by the way their blades cut the light – but perhaps also by the way they are planted in communities which may already feel colonised, as Wendell Berry writes, by cities and global corporations. There are real costs of renewable energies, even if they are outweighed by the mounting costs of fossil fuel industries. The transition to renewable energy and ecological sustainability will require credible scientific evidence, political leadership, ethical communication, and the equitable distribution of costs and benefits. g

James Dunk is a historian and writer..

28 O CTOBER 2019

The Great Irruption

The rat as a key figure in Australian history

Libby Robin THE ENCHANTMENT OF THE LONG-HAIRED RAT: A RODENT HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA

by Tim Bonyhady Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925773934

T

he enchanting of rats has a long history. The Pied Piper, who enchanted first the rats then the children of Hamelin, is familiar to European readers. Here, Tim Bonyhady brings us a new story of rat enchantment by the Diyari and the Yandruwandha people in the eastern Lake Eyre basin. According to explorer Edwin Welch, they sang ‘in low, weird and dirge-like tones’ that drew the rodents from their burrows, then clubbed them on the head with a waddy until they had sufficient to eat.

A Rodent History of Australia is an ambitious task, and a timely one, as the native rodents of Australia have suffered massive losses over the period of European settlement: indeed, Australia leads the world in small-mammal extinctions.

It is a real challenge to inspire the imaginative leap to care about a native animal known as a ‘rat’ – whether it is ‘Longhaired’ (vernacular) or Rattus villosissimus (the ‘most vile’ of rats). Even more difficult when it appears en masse, as a plague or irruption, and eats everything in sight, even the boots of the man recording its presence.

Bonyhady first came across the rat when he was writing his ground-breaking book Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to myth (1991). His own enchantment began with stories of the surging waves of rats that upended the country, destroying all traces of the Burke and Wills party. Nearly three decades later, with a new urgency to understand the climatic patterns of our ancient land, Bonyhady has recast his history of Australia with the rat itself as a key figure.

Writing a history enables detailed descriptions essential to understanding change over time. Bonyhady rightly

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

notes that ‘the strictures of the academic journal article’ tend to exclude description in favour of novel findings and future action. Working beyond journals, Bonyhady unearths life histories of the animals in obscure places, capturing ‘baselines’ on which the animals’ future may depend. He begins with the plague year of 1861 in Burke and Wills country and follows naturalists, literary figures, and other sources (in roughly chronological order) to outbreaks further afield, wherever good descriptions are precise. CSIRO scientists Alan Newsome and Laurie Corbett were lyrical in their observations on their ‘fantastic’ night-time, torch-lit walks near Alice Springs in 1968–69. The rats ‘scurry’ along ‘worn trails’, ‘forage in open grassland’, and ‘squeak and fight in every corner’. Where the focus is merely the monetary value of the pests’ destruction, the records are less useful. The Longreach health inspector who costed the rats’ damage at ‘likely to average £1 per minute’ in 1931 failed to report evidence useful today. Now that the rats themselves are vulnerable, details of their everyday life before their habitats were severely compromised are increasingly important. When ‘now’ becomes the new normal (what ecologists call the ‘shifting baselines’ phenomenon), animals seemingly become extinct without warning.

Bonyhady crafts his history through a forensic analysis of detailed sources.

The helpful map at the start of the book shows the key stations and rivers discussed. In 1874, William Ranken described the capricious climate of Australia as a ‘central oven’ that destroys ‘at uncertain intervals what it has reared in a few milder seasons’. The 1885–88 Long-haired Rat plague, which Bony-

hady dubs ‘The Great Irruption’, was the in remote places. The cat story also takes Aboriginal name – like the koala and biggest and most widespread event for an important twist in 1887, when the the kangaroo? In the boom-and-bust which there are good contemporary re- manager at Thargomindah brings in cats world of inland Australia, where ‘true cords. It is a baseline for the bigger story to attack the rabbits. Less than twenty indigenous rodents vastly predominate of boom-and-bust ecological pulses in years later, Sid Jackson, a leading bird over the marsupial’, the irruptive Longthe interior. collector, wrote of a ‘superabundance of haired Rat is an important historical The Great Irruption is character, a key to life in observed by the brilliant the inland. bush naturalist Kenric The last rodent in the Harold Bennett, whose book, the Melomys rubidetailed reports on the life cola, did not fall victim patterns of the rat were to feral cats. Its home in a labour of love. Bennett, the Torres Strait, Bramlargely undiscovered until ble Cay, collapsed under now, observes the animals tidal swells. In 1998, the as they cope with extreme cay supported about a climatic events. By 1888, hundred animals. Just ‘Year Four’ of the Great four years later, only ten Irruption, the rats had melomys were left. By reached northern Victoria, 2011, the small rodent ‘further south than ever with a mosaic tail was exrecorded before or since’. tinct. Bramble Cay is the The rat is not the only site of the first mammal animal to ‘irrupt’ in this extinction on the planet A night’s catch of Long-haired Rats, Longreach, Queensland, 2011 (photograph by Angus Emmott) land of ephemeral water caused by climate change. and uncertain seasons.

Bonyhady’s creative nonIndeed, learning to take refuge and ownerless cats’. By the 1930s, writer Ion fiction complements the imaginative hold out for better times is the secret L. Idriess was commenting that bird life work of ‘cli-fi’ writers. Rather than of living with long dry spells, extreme was thinning out on the Diamantina apocalyptic futures, it explores the actual temperatures, and sudden floods. One of because of animals ‘much larger than apocalypse of the past and present. His the clever features of this history is pair- an ordinary domestic cat’. The feral cat is a climate history that informs coming the rats’ stories with those of other is now scientifically documented as the ing changes, where life in Australia’s fast-breeding opportunists: the rabbit, arch-enemy of endangered small mam- ‘central oven’ is becoming increasingly the night kite, the taipan, and, most de- mals, including native rodents. difficult. g structive of all, the cat. The intertwined Australia was once, in ecologist Tim histories of the rat and the letter-wing Low’s words, ‘blessed with a bounty of kite, its original predator, appear in the remarkable rodents’. Bonyhady’s history early twentieth century in the pages of explores this most threatened group of The Emu, the journal of the Royal Aus- animals. The elegance of the writing tralasian Ornithologists’ Union, because and the inclusion of delicate quotations the kites’ eggs were eagerly sought by from past observers challenge lingering oologists, and their nests were lined assumptions that all rats are bad, all with rat fur. The rabbit, too, was impor- plagues are bad, and anything that eats tant to rats. Bennett made his living as out the country is bad. Rather, Bonya rabbit inspector. While he grew tired hady seeks to restore dignity to the Ma- Libby Robin’s books include The Flight of the ‘infernal rabbit business’, the job yaroo. How different would history have of the Emu (2001) and Boom and Bust: allowed him to record natural history been if rats had been known by their Bird stories for a dry country (2009).

OBAYSCH A Hippopotamus in Victorian London

by John Simons

‘an accessible, intelligent, charming, sometimes funny, sometimes sad account of Obaysch’—Stephen Romei, The Australian sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

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COMMENT

An evergreen canopy

The alluring and resilient eucalypt

by Bianca Le

T

he Australian outback has long been a muse for artists and storytellers. Australian flora – including the iconic eucalypt in its many forms – has the ability to tell a story about cultural identity and our rich history with the land. This extends to our urban landscape, with native plants common throughout our bustling city streets and parks – they can transform our metropolitan landscapes to become resilient to modern environmental challenges.

The eucalypt encapsulates these artistic, cultural, environmental functions. Eucalyptus trees serve many functions in the Australian experience, from Dreamtime to urban design, and continue to unite generations of Australians over our shared sense of cultural pride.

At a time when many Australians have little connection to country, it is now more important than ever to emphasise the cultural importance of our native plants and animals. Eucalypts have been a prominent physical resource throughout Aboriginal Australian history. Nearly all parts of the eucalypt tree – leaves, roots, bark, and wood – are used in everyday life to create medicines, adhesive resins, tools, weapons, firewood, and musical instruments. The eucalypt trees themselves create their own ecosystem, one that teems with insects and animals, providing a food source for people and animals.

Beyond these practical uses, the eucalypt serves a prominent role in Aboriginal spirituality and philosophy. For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal groups have marked ceremonial sites by scarring and shaping ancient eucalypts with intricate swirls and symbols, or have hollowed the trunks of large eucalypts to create a birthing shelter for multiple generations. These eucalypts become a sacred and spiritual space, to which families have a deep connection.

The spirits of their Dreamtime ancestors remain in these trees, as well as the animals, rocks, rivers, and mountains of today. The Dreaming is perpetual – it links the past to the present and forms a familial relationship between Aboriginal people and the land.

Much like the Dreaming, the eucalypt persists throughout our current urban landscapes, creating a subtle link between Indigenous Australian culture and our day-to30 O CTOBER 2019

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day life in metropolitan cities. Eucalypts continue to serve Australians today, particularly by addressing the modern challenges of urban heat islands and warming associated with the human-induced climate crisis.

These issues are impacting the way people live, work, and travel around urban areas. As the number of new concrete buildings increases in Australia’s major cities, so does the desire to preserve and extend our shared green spaces through ‘urban greening’, especially with native vegetation.

City planners and urban designers around the world are becoming increasingly aware of the many environmental, economic, and social benefits of urban greening. This has led to a rise in initiatives aimed at installing green walls, growing green roofs, and increasing canopy coverage throughout Australian cities.

Eucalypts are one of the most commonly planted trees in urban areas, for reasons beyond the aesthetic of their flowers and their association with Australian identity. There are more than nine hundred species of eucalypts, each with its own special characteristics that make it well-suited to a large variety of Australian soils. Native species of eucalypts are extremely adaptive to a changing urban environment and require little to no fertilisers. Certain eucalypts also act as the city’s natural air conditioners, thanks to their evergreen canopy, minimising the worsening effects of urban heat islands throughout our concrete jungles. This can also help reduce energy usage throughout summer.

Similarly, eucalypts are particularly effective at removing and storing carbon from the air, owing to their fast growth rate, long lifespan, and dense wood. Urban planners can use this knowledge and curate our metropolitan spaces to become adaptable to long-term changes in climate, weather, and human activity.

Like the demographic landscape of Australia, the role of the eucalyptus tree in society is continually evolving. What remains the same, however, is the eucalypt’s power to ignite a strong sense of unity and cultural connection to land. g Bianca Le is an intern at Scientell and a biomedical PhD researcher at Monash. ❖

SURVEY

‘We’ll be going this earth’ To complement the reviews and commentaries in our Environment issue, we invited a number of writers and scholars to nominate a book that will give readers a better appreciation of the environment.

Lynette Russell

Understanding our environment – its vulnerabilities and fragility, its challenges, history, and future (our future) – should be a concern for each and every one of us. In recent years, several important Australian books have pondered these questions, written from a range of disciplines and standpoints. Ruth A. Morgan’s Running Out? Water in Western Australia (2015) offers a deeply historical perspective to the ever-present concern of the availability of water. Joëlle Gergis powerful exploration of climate change, Sunburnt Country: The history and future of climate change in Australia (2019), should be compulsory reading for decision-makers and legislators. Tony Hughesd’Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (2017) illustrates how the role of the environment has been central to creative writing and, by extension, how settler Australians figure their place on the land.

For me, there is still one environmental book that everyone should read: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) – still prescient, contemporary, and utterly terrifying.

(Director, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre)

Ruth A. Morgan

Returning to Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers: The history and future impact of climate change (2005) nearly fifteen years after it was published shows how far we’ve come, but also, how frustratingly far we have to go. When Flannery was writing it, Australia was yet to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and the Millennium Drought was still a reality. What The Weather Makers still offers is an Australian story of planetary change and how our continent is faring in a warming world. We remain ‘the weather makers, and the future of biodiversity and civilisation hangs on our actions’.

(Senior Research Fellow in History, Monash University)

Andrea Gaynor

It has been a convenient fiction for settler Australians that their colonial forebears were at best alienated from the land or even hated it: an ignorant and antagonistic past that can perpetually give way to a more informed and sympathetic present. Moving across and between the twin poles of art and law, Tim Bonyhady’s The Colonial Earth (2000) disrupts this myth. By illuminating the aesthetic and moral, as well as utilitarian, impulses that lay be-

hind colonial environmental-protection efforts, the book evocatively demonstrates that environmental appreciation is as deeply embedded in settler culture as is resistance to effective environmental protection. The upshot is that environmental appreciation is not enough: beyond experiencing and declaring our love of particular places and species, we also need to understand the deep and enduring nature of the threats we pose to them, and to organise alternatives to our destructive economy and culture.

(Associate Professor of History, The University of Western Australia)

Danielle Clode

US-based Australian academic Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The eruption that changed the world (2015) is an impressive piece of detective work. By unravelling the global impacts of a ‘megacolossal’ volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1815, the author documents the unappreciated devastation even this relatively short-term fluctuation caused. Given current predictions, a drop of 1.5 degrees over a decade seems minor, and yet the ultimate death toll and long-term economic damage are sobering.

A few devastatingly cold winters led to opium dependence in Yunnan, westward migration across the United States, the first great depression, famine in Ireland, and typhus and cholera plagues that killed millions. Beautifully written, Tambora draws on scientific and literary evidence to bring together a very personal account of the costs of living through destructive climate change.

It reminds us of just how fragile this ecosystem, and our place in it, really is.

(Inaugural ABR Dahl Trust Fellow in 2014)

Tom Griffiths

Charles Massy’s wonderful book about regenerative agriculture, Call of the Reed Warbler (2017), shows how solutions to the environmental crisis can literally come out of the ground. In the tradition of Elyne Mitchell and Eric Rolls, farmer-scholars who wrote passionately from a knowledge of beloved country, Massy eloquently evokes his farm on the Monaro high plains while investigating the future survival of Earth and humanity. His book begins with a world history across millennia and then takes us into Australian earth with a myriad farming stories – first, Charlie’s own account of how he had to ENVIRONMENT

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unlearn the imported farming habits of his upbringing, and then those of farmers from around the continent who are regenerating agriculture by working with rather than against nature. It is a visionary book that filled me with practical hope for what can be done, and excitement about what we are already doing.

(Historian and author)

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

The Environment: A history of the idea (2018) by Libby Robin, Paul Warde, and Sverker Sörlin is an immensely valuable book. Compact and highly readable, the book brings together three leading lights in the environmental humanities to help us understand how this idea of the environment – one we take for granted and use all the time – actually came into being. While the word was first introduced into English from the French in 1827 (by Thomas Carlyle), its contemporary sense owes much to the emerging planetary sensibility that erupted after the end of World War II. The narrative unfolds like a good detective novel, with the various components of the story of this concept brilliantly rendered. I wish I could have read the book long ago – it answered so many questions. It’s now an indispensable resource for anyone wishing to understand the conceptual foundations of environmental understanding.

(Discipline Chair for English and Cultural Studies, The University of Western Australia)

Ceridwen Dovey

The Sea Around Us (1951), by the American environmentalist Rachel Carson, is not as famous today as Silent Spring (her 1962 manifesto documenting the dangers of widespread chemical pesticide misuse), but it’s essential reading. Carson loved to observe the rock pools around her cottage in Maine, while also joining the dots between the bigger ethical and political questions raised by the ocean’s vastness, and preciousness, as a shared resource.

She had a brilliant grasp of the science, but also thought of herself as a poet of the sea, infusing her writing with wonder. One of Carson’s most famous rallying cries to her readers was to urge them to ask, ‘Who speaks? And why?’ In the midst of any environmental controversy or uncertainty, somebody always has more to gain from one outcome than another. Carson believed that it is our moral responsibility to pay close attention, not just to nature but to the workings of power.

(Writer of fiction, creative non-fiction)

John Kinsella

It is an interesting thing for me to look back and identify a single work that prompted personal sentiments of environmentalism. Activism came from observation, participation, and a desire to rectify my own culpabilities – of witnessing the damage being done. This is why I turn again and again to the poems that spoke to me of the natural world, of the brute reality of colonial intrusion, and of the need for justice – the Collected Poems of Judith Wright.

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Increasingly, Wright didn’t separate cause and effect; she saw the interconnections between different injustices.

Environmentalism per se cannot operate alone: Wright’s conservation was part of a larger picture of obligation and recognition. So while Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a shock to my senses, it reinforced and evidenced what I already knew from direct observation. I have always struggled with Thoreau’s Walden, finding no redress to the contradictions of the privileged space of the Western thinker immersing himself in ‘natural surroundings’ as a route to ‘answers’. Wright’s relationship to colonial pastoral origins, and her efforts to create a dialogic poetry of presence, work hand in hand with her celebration of life.

Since I was a teenager, she has spoken to me of a way of being environmentally activist and receptive to contradictory issues involved in acts of conservation.

(Poet, novelist, critic, essayist and editor whose writing is strongly influenced by landscape)

Billy Griffiths

Australians are still coming to terms with the idea that their environment is as much cultural as it is natural. In 1969, archaeologist Rhys Jones coined the phrase ‘firestick farming’ to describe the intricate means by which Indigenous peoples shaped Country with flame. It was a provocative, revolutionary idea, but the insight wasn’t fully developed until 1975, when Sylvia J. Hallam published her masterful history, Fire and Hearth: A study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in south-western Australia. Hallam explores the regional nature of fire histories, the diversity and antiquity of Indigenous burning regimes, and the social contract between people and fire, expressed through language, art, ritual, and Law. It remains a rich and exciting book, and it has shifted the way I view the Australian environment. As Hallam writes in her opening passage, ‘The land the English settled was not as God made it. It was as the Aborigines made it.’

(Historian and lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University)

Michael Adams

The etymology of book takes us to beech in Germanic languages and connects to codex in Latin, both of which refer to blocks of wood. The etymology of geography gives us: geography, earth-writing. Writing presupposes reading, and the critical book for Australians to read is actually this land, this earth. The story we need is clearly written here already, and its best interpreters are its First Peoples. Two hundred and thirty years of colonial settlement is 0.3% of this land’s human history, an eyeblink in the cognitive, visceral, and sacred understandings of this Country. In the short term, if you want an actual book, I recommend Kakadu Man by Big Bill Neidjie: ‘Dirt, earth, I sleep with this earth. / Grass … just like your Brother. / In my blood in my arm this grass. / This dirt for us because we’ll be dead, / We’ll be going this earth. / This the story now.’

(2017 Calibre Essay Prize winner)

COMMENT

Nature’s ancient history

by Julia Kindt

I

t is easy to overlook that nature itself has a history – or at least our thinking about it does. In the years since Henry Thoreau initiated the modern genre of return-to-nature literature in Walden (1854), his autobiographical account of a two-year stint in the woods, the view that the natural world is a sphere apart – a realm untouched by human intervention – has lost nothing of its enticing allure. It is grounded in the assumption that nature is a dimension of the world not just separate from human civilisation but also one outside of time, and outside of human history and its numerous volatilities, dislocations, and tectonic shifts. And yet there is ample evidence to suggest that the natural world exists as much within the human imagination as outside of it; that it is just as much a real space as an imagined one. As Simon Schama and others have shown, ideas of nature and the natural are deeply entangled in our human ways of sense-making. They have a history of their own.

To those interested in untangling a few strands of this history, the Histories of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus are a good place to start. Herodotus’s fame rests on the fact that he authored the first extensive work of human history in the Western tradition. His main subject is the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century bce and the human customs and cultures of the peoples that came under Persian influence. Yet in addition to history and culture – the main themes of his book – he also comments frequently on nature. Herodotus embeds the past and present in a storyline that includes

the natural world. In the Histories, nature serves as both a setting of human history and as an agent in time, with a logic and order of its own.

By including the natural world in an account of human history and culture, the Histories raise an issue that has gained new urgency in light of a recent environmental concern: man’s relationship to the natural world.

Is human history a tale of man’s gradual separation from and mastery of nature, a tale according to which humanity evolves ever farther away from the natural world? Or is there a different story to be told, according to which nature and culture relate to each other in different ways?

The Histories challenge our assumptions about humanity’s ties to the natural world. They show that some views that strike us as modern might have a long history; at the same time, some perceptions of nature have remained remarkably constant over time. Certain ancient views prevail millennia later – it’s just that these days they come wrapped in decisively modern clothing.

It may, for example, be tempting to see the effects of human exploitation of the environment as symptoms of the malaise of modernity – and they certainly are to the extent and rapidity with which they threaten to destroy our planet. And yet already in the Histories, instances of the fundamental and even catastrophic effects of humans on nature are not hard to find.

At several points, Herodotus claims that the Persian contingents marching towards Greece were so huge that they fully depleted several rivers. The Persians and their ENVIRONMENT

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human and non-human companions – horses, camels, plane tree on his march toward Greece: ‘This was the mules – quite literally drank them dry, or so Herodo- road which Xerxes took, and it was hereabouts that he tus has us believe when he asks rhetorically about the came across a plane-tree of such beauty that he has Persian King Xerxes: ‘Was there a nation in Asia that moved to decorate it with golden ornaments and to he did not take with him against Greece? Save for the appoint a guardian for it in perpetuity.’ Elsewhere in great rivers, was there a stream his army drank from the Histories, Xerxes features as a ruthless and cruel king that was not drunk dry?’ No matter what we make of who does whatever it takes to prevail, but here he has this curious claim, Herodotus chose an example from not only an eye for the physical beauty of a single tree the natural world to illustrate the overwhelming size of but also safeguards its future by creating what is perhaps the Persian army. Already in antiquity the environment the first conservation job in historical record. served as a space to visualise destructive human forces. verall, then, and despite all cases of spectacular Even if the human footprint on the environment, in human intervention, Herodotus does not depict this case, is transitory – presumably the rivers will start a fundamental gap between humanity and the flowing again once the troops have moved on – the image of humans exhausting natural resources sticks: natural world. Rather, he variously points to the symLong before the Industrial Revolution and the corre- biotic relationship between the two. He tells us of the sponding changes in the nexus between humanity and various ways in which people in different parts of the ancient world carve out a livthe natural world, there was an awareness that human inIdeas of nature and the natural ing from the natural resources to them. About the tervention could significantly are deeply entangled in our human available ancient Egyptians, Herodotus alter the environment. ways of sense-making states: ‘Not only is the EgypElsewhere, Herodotus tian climate peculiar to that tells of large-scale engineering feats that leave lasting traces in the physical environ- country, and the Nile different in its behaviour from ment. The Greek city of Cnidus, for example, when other rivers elsewhere, but the Egyptians themselves in faced with the prospect of being overrun by that same their manners and customs seem to have reversed the river-depleting army, decided to turn their peninsula into ordinary practices of mankind.’ Here and elsewhere, an island. The plan was to dig through the narrow land nature and culture map perfectly onto each other. Nature bridge that attached their isthmus to the mainland. In reflects culture and vice versa; together they account for the Histories, such drastic intervention into nature is not local peculiarities.

Occasionally at least, such correspondences go a singular occurrence: the Lydians at one point diverted the Halys River in order to allow their army to advance beyond the merely accidental to imply relationships of more quickly. We could significantly extend the list of cause and effect. The view that nature shapes culture is examples here, but one thing has already become clear: directly articulated by one of Herodotus’s historical charalready in the ancient world humans sought to alter the acters. Facing the suggestion that the Persians, thanks to their military successes, would be able to abandon their course of history by altering the course of nature.

How does Herodotus frame such incidents? As the barren homeland and settle in more fertile neighbourclassical scholar Katherine Clarke has recently pointed ing lands, the Persian king Cyrus disagrees. He points out, the Histories present such examples of spectacular out that ‘soft countries breed soft men’ followed by the human intervention into the natural world with some explanation: ‘It is not the property of any one soil to ambivalence. At times, Herodotus expresses a sense of produce fine fruits and good soldiers too.’ What Cyrus awe at what is humanly possible; at others, he treads is saying here is that one cannot have both an empire more cautiously by describing the negative consequences based on military strength and an easy life of natural of human intervention. The above-mentioned citizens abundance. There is a direct link between the toughness of Cnidus, for example, learn their lesson the hard way: of one’s lands and the toughness of one’s soldiers.

Although this sort of crude environmental determinwhile digging through their isthmus, they are affected by strange eye afflictions serious enough to warrant consult- ism no longer has currency today, its repercussions still ing the oracle of Delphi, which was quick to respond: ‘Do ring true millennia later: place, geography, and location not fence off the isthmus; do not dig. Zeus would have – including the natural world – have once again entered made an island, had he willed it.’ The moral here is clear: the domain of the historian, at least since Fernand Braunot everything that is humanly possible is also prudent del’s landmark study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), in which he and advisable. There are set limits to human action.

And yet to say that Herodotus depicts humans as so expertly showed how nature, geography, and the enviran invariably destructive force would be to oversimplify. onment shape history. We seem to have come full circle.

Where does this leave us with regard to the ways in Instances of human care, if not of nature as such, at least of certain parts of it, are also attested. There is the which we conceptualise man’s relationship to nature and endearing case of King Xerxes delighting in a beautiful conceive of the relationship between nature and culture?

O

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As far as the Histories are concerned, one view, in all explanation that Herodotus offers for how the much particular, has a surprisingly contemporary ring: that smaller Greek contingents triumphed over the vast Perof nature as a balanced system. Herodotus presents the sian army in the Greco-Persian Wars: here, too, Persian natural world as a realm in which different forces coexist excess and overexpansion contributed to their unlikely and keep one another in check: ‘Divine providence, in defeat at the hands of the Greeks. In human history, the wisdom one would expect from it, has made prolific as in the natural world, what goes up must come down. every kind of creature which is timid and preyed upon by In the end, it appears that part of the solution to the others, in order to ensure its continuance, while savage environmental crisis we are currently facing may well lie and noxious species are comparatively unproductive.’ There is an intricate balance in nature which ensures that, over time, no species expands unchecked at a cost to the others. In the Histories, this process is still overseen by the divine, but the dynamic of cause and effect is entirely natural: it plays out in the balance between a species’ rate of reproduction on one hand and the number of its natural enemies on the other.

To illustrate this point, Herodotus draws on the example of timid hares and fierce lions: while the former have numerous offspring and can carry foetuses at different stages of gestation at the same time, the latter breed only once in a lifetime, because, as Herodotus claims, towards the end of the pregnancy, the cub’s sharp claws destroys its mother’s Xerxes decorating a plane tree (Herodotus, Histories, 7.31) Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661) womb. Even if today we may find © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London. the specifics of how this balance is achieved fanciful, it is astonishing to encounter such views as early as the fifth century in the past and in an insight that was obvious already bce – more than 2,500 years ago. to Herodotus: a sustainable state between nature and In the modern era, the idea of a balance in nature culture, between humanity and the environment, can has been linked to the view that human intervention can be reached only if and when we see ourselves as part upset the equilibrium. To conceive of nature and culture/ of the natural world rather than as its masters, and if society as separate and opposing realms makes it possible we respect the processes, cycles, and laws of nature of to think of one as prior to the other. And yet scholars which we are part. g working in the emerging field of environmental humanities have recently advocated for a change in perspective. All translations are from Herodotus’s Histories, transWe are challenged to see nature and culture no longer as lated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised with introduction opposing and separate spheres of life with the capacity and notes by John Marincola (Penguin Classics, 2003) of one to dominate the other; rather, in the face of the unprecedented natural destruction caused by humanity, Julia Kindt is Professor of Ancient History in the we have been called upon to write humans back into the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the history of the natural world.

University of Sydney. Her books include Rethinking Herodotus anticipated this move. In the Histories, Greek Religion (CUP, 2012) and Revisiting Delphi: Rehumans are not outside of nature but an intricate part ligion and storytelling in Ancient Greece (CUP, 2016). In of the larger processes and patterns that balance things her first semester as an undergraduate at the University out. This does not concern just the many small examples of Munich, she picked up a Greek/German copy of in the Histories, in which human excesses of all sorts Herodotus in a second-hand book store. She loved it are followed by retributive backlashes – administered so much that she enrolled in ancient Greek and decided divinely or humanly (or both). This also affects the over- to major in ancient history.

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COMMENT

Australian Dreaming

by Kim Scott

S

tan Grant’s comment on the prolonged booing of the Australian Football League star Adam Goodes – featured in Daniel Gordon’s new documentary, The Australian Dream (produced by Grant himself ) – has attracted much interest, including countless hits on many websites: We heard a sound that was very familiar to us. We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering, and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, ‘You’re not welcome.’

Perhaps it was coincidental, perhaps the crowds simply grew tired of jeering, perhaps it was the speech itself (delivered in October 2015 at the Ethics Centre).

Whatever the reason, public sentiment began to turn after Grant’s speech. People wore Goodes’s guernsey number and waved signs and banners saying ‘We love you Goodesy’. Celebrities filmed messages of support.

Goodes, having become so broken and dispirited that he removed himself from football, returned to play the last few games of the 2015 season. The booing resumed. Unlike a Sydney teammate who was also entering retirement, Goodes chose not to be chaired from the ground.

Grant tells us that because of Goodes a new space has opened up, one that will loosen the chains of history so that we might ‘find belonging, find each other’.

I’m not so sure.

Earlier in the documentary, Goodes says he doesn’t know much about what it means to be Indigenous.

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Oh, but he certainly does. He’s been insulted and rejected.

He’s been ‘encouraged’ to lay low and become invisible in order to fit in. As for his critics, as Gilbert McAdam says, ‘What would they know?’

To be Indigenous is often to experience racism and sometimes something even more. You might call it a structural thing: the insistence on a certain power relationship between Australia and its Aboriginal people that is perhaps the defining characteristic of Australian identity. Some have attributed this insistence to an antipodean Occidentalism, even a settler–colonialist psychosis, the result of a continuing collective insecurity and subsequent need for fragments of the mother colony to be bound together by the threat of the Other.

It’s an ailment as old as the nation itself, and one that apparently makes it so hard for Aboriginal people to be fully accepted in Australia. It might help explain the treatment of Goodes and the rejection of The Uluru Statement, which says, in part: ‘The dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem.

This is the torment of our powerlessness.’

Goodes says he didn’t know much about Aboriginal culture and identity. The legacy of a history of oppression can mean that, for many individuals, Aboriginality is just ‘broken glass and stray dogs’. Both men say that it’s hard to know what to do when the ‘smart asses’ call you the names a racist society makes so easily available: boong and coon and nigger and darky and ape. There is the heft of vicious history behind all those terms.

What to do? Ignore them? But it won’t go away, and your children and family and friends remain targets.

Stand up and call them out? To do that you need sup-

the journey as substantial examples of connection with porters or you end up as isolated as Goodes.

Ironically, Goodes tell us it was the Sydney Swans Indigenous heritage, but they do signal a new direction.

There’s plenty of evidence highlighting the potential ‘Bloods’ culture that gave him a sense of identity and the aspiration to be the leader he became, both within for such reconnection to heal individuals and communities. There’s a growing realisahis team and within Austral‘We heard a sound that was very tion that such heritages are ian Rules football as a whole.

When his academic applicafamiliar to us. We heard a howl’ also important denominations in the currency of identity and tion to Indigenous Studies made him realise the injustice and oppression of his belonging for all Australians. Look at the material used history, he continued to lead. He called out racism and to express Australia’s imagery internationally. Look at then spoke compassionately about the individual in the rise of dual naming, the increase in Welcomes to question, explaining that it was not her choice as such Country and the use of language therein. Look at the but the result of a discourse in which she was immersed, popularity of Indigenous tourism, films, and literature.

True, in many cases this heritage – in its classical one that maims us all. sense – is frail and endangered. And true, in at least some The booing grew louder.

Adam Goodes at Bondi Beach in a still from Australian Dream (Madman Films)

Another response to racism is to fight. Many Aboriginal people’s life experiences teach them that an effective response to racism is violence. Flog the perpetrator.

Nothing else will get it to stop. Goodes couldn’t do that, though his ‘war dance’ was perhaps symbolic of such an approach. In his case – one against thousands – it only exacerbated the problem. The howling mob rose against him, eager for any excuse for self-righteous offence, keen to put him in his place. But that dance also represented an attempt to draw upon his heritage for comfort, for healing, for a solution to the structural dimension of racism.

Goodes’s return to ancestral Country is clearly an attempt to draw upon his pre-colonial heritage for solace, if not a solution. It works, after a fashion. It helps him to return to football. I am not claiming the dance or

cases, ‘mainstream Australia’ appears to desire heritage but not its custodians. It is the reconnection and recovery of such heritages by home communities, and their empowerment through controlled sharing of them, along with a readiness to challenge ossified certainties, that will provide a more nuanced sense of national identity and will close the door on the hysterical manifestation of national psychosis and Indigenous structural powerlessness that this compelling documentary reveals.

Not a howl – a Voice. g Kim Scott’s novels Benang: From the heart and That Deadman Dance won the 2000 and 2011 Miles Literary Awards, respectively. He is Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University.

COMMMENT

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Voyeur with permission Astrid Edwards THREE WOMEN

by Lisa Taddeo

Bloomsbury Circus $32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781526611635

L

ina. Maggie. Sloane. These are the women – real women, albeit with their names changed – in whose intimate lives Lisa Taddeo invested eight years of her own. She spoke to these women daily, uprooting herself to chronicle and share their worlds.

Taddeo’s goal was to reveal the hidden desires and erotic longings of women.

She does so, and the result is revelatory – few works are so absorbing or addictive.

Taddeo’s commitment to her craft is inspiring. She gained the trust and confidence of these women, so much so that she became a voyeur in their lives – a voyeur with permission to articulate and express their inner worlds, including the unflattering parts. For this, Three Women is and will remain an exceptional piece of creative non-fiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert compares the work to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

This comparison works to the extent that both Taddeo and Capote went to extraordinary lengths over long periods of time to immerse themselves in stories other writers ignored. As a result, they were able to retell events from a vantage point that most journalism and traditional non-fiction can’t match, creating the feel and flow of fiction. But in Three Women there is no one-of-a-kind crime.

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Instead, the everyday truths of women are given prominence – an uncommon experience in literature. From this intimate perspective, we witness everything from the death of desire, to the sexual fantasies a submissive wife plays out for her dominant husband, to underage grooming by a teacher.

The work is a subjective and immersive experience, with Taddeo the conduit for the inner monologues of the lives of others. Unlike more traditional non-fiction, we are unabashedly shown only one side to each story – that of Lina, Maggie, and Sloane.

Taddeo articulates the inner truth of these women, but no matter how close Taddeo gets (and through first-person narration she comes very close), these women are not speaking directly for themselves – they are, after all, not writing their own memoirs. Instead, they have entered into a collaboration with Taddeo, chronicling, remembering, and perhaps revising their own experiences.

This work would not have been possible without the willing participation of the three women who agreed to their de-identified stories being published.

But as with any work of non-fiction, what happens after the journalists leave is as important as what happens when they are there. One wonders whether these women have outed themselves in their real lives – the lives that continue beyond publication. Has this truth-telling changed their desires? Have any of their stories had a happy ending? Most intriguingly, do these women now know one another?

The original subject was to be men, or more specifically, the desires that lead heterosexual men to ‘overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee’. Taddeo quickly found these stories repetitive and uninspiring. After all, many a man has had family, reputation, and career ended by affairs of the heart, particularly in the post-#MeToo era. So Taddeo turned to women. Historically speaking, women’s stories have never attracted the airtime men’s stories receive. By daring to focus on the motivations, ambiguities, and desires of women, Taddeo creates something new – a narrative of the complexity of desire in contemporary North America.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Lina, Maggie, and Sloane are different ages, with varied experiences and backgrounds. Lina is conducting an affair with an ex-high school boyfriend. Maggie is holding her high school teacher, who groomed her for underage sex, to account. Sloane is playing out the fantasies of her husband, pursuing group sex and affairs at his bidding. But they are not as different as the reader might expect.

These women are not representative.

They are white heterosexual women (not unlike Taddeo herself ) who find themselves at the mercy of (or desperate to seek out) the male gaze. Where is the story of a woman who desires women?

Or the story of a women who does not need a man? Vivid, intimate, and honest, these stories do not explore the liberation of women’s desire. They are the stories of women who are wrapped up in what men think of them.

Take Lina, for example. Lina leaves a passionless marriage and embarks on an affair with a man with a pot belly and a drinking habit who fucks her in the back of her car and doesn’t notice the new underwear she bought but can’t afford. This can be read as passion, yes.

It can also be read as a desperate need for physical intimacy and a woman defining herself through the attention of an uninterested man.

It is not enough to discuss how Three Women explores the messy beginnings and endings of desire. The book reminds us that trauma is a part of so many women’s stories. All three women were abused when young. The men were never brought to justice and these women carry the trauma for the rest of their lives. And trauma, of course, impacts on desire.

Taddeo is a pioneer of contemporary and immersive creative non-fiction.

Three Women is a literary achievement, but not an unambiguous one. And the stories of Lina, Maggie, and Sloane are not over. One wonders if Taddeo will revisit these women and explore the consequences of this anonymous truthtelling, or if the women themselves will one day choose to tell their own stories in their own voices. g Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing.

Capsule of hope

A poignant rebuke to the Assad regime

Beejay Silcox SYRIA’S SECRET LIBRARY: READING AND REDEMPTION IN A TOWN UNDER SIEGE

by Mike Thomson Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $32.99 pb, 305 pp, 9781474605915

‘War is only the superficial face that you see first. Underneath that, there is so much humanity, so much else taking place. There may be death but there is also normal life here too.’

Anas Habib, co-founder, the Secret Library.

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rebel stronghold on the southern edge of Damascus, the Syrian suburb of Daraya, was violently isolated by the Assad regime for almost four years – a ruthlessly protracted attempt to starve out the city’s pro-democracy insurgency. Power and water supplies were cut, crops were burned, and humanitarian aid was barred. There was no food, no medicine, and no way out.

In August of 2016, after 1,368 days of privation and more than 9,000 shrapnel-filled barrel bombs, a deal was struck between the rebels and regime forces to evacuate the defiant, ruined city, still home to thousands of people.

As the citizens of Daraya readied to leave – ‘uprooted from their homes and heading into the complete unknown’ – they made sure to return their library books. Each of the 14,000 volumes in Daraya’s collection had been hard won, saved from burning apartments and municipal wreckage under threat of sniper fire, and preserved in a hidden basement. In Daraya’s final hours as a living city, the university students who had established the library worked frantically to safeguard its treasures by sealing over the entrance. A capsule of hope.

BBC journalist Mike Thomson first reported the tale of ‘The Secret Library’ in a podcast for Radio 4, which aired mere weeks before Daraya emptied and

the library had to be abandoned. ‘It got a heart-warming reception,’ Thomson recalls of his award-winning feature, but ‘there was so much more to say’. So arrives Syria’s Secret Library, a tender account of this underground literary sanctuary and the dauntless, young bibliophiles who risked their lives to build it. ‘We began by planting vegetables,’ Shakespeare buff and co-founder Abdul Basit explains, ‘but soon realised that we needed to feed our minds too.’

The ferociousness of the military presence in and around Daraya prevented Thomson – a seasoned war correspondent – from seeing the Secret Library for himself. Instead, he forged relationships with its instigators and patrons over scratchy Skype calls with the help of ‘an odd combination of luck, ingenuity, silver foil and a pan lid’ (the mobile phone signal was so weak in Daraya that residents created makeshift boosters by wiring frypans to their roofs).

While Thomson was never able to luxuriate in the Secret Library’s high-ceilinged quiet, he understands how fiercely it was loved and conjures the space with vivid affection, from its handmade shelves to its commodious reading chairs: ‘Books, long rows of them, line almost every wall. Grand volumes with brown leather covers; tattered old tomes with barely readable spines; pocket-sized guides to poetry; classic and contemporary novels; religious works with gaudy gold lettering; a range of reference books; all rub shoulders in well-ordered literary lines.’

The Secret Library’s book collection was necessarily haphazard but resolutely inclusive. It welcomed everything from Agatha Christie to the world-rattling

THE GAP: AN AUSTRALIAN PARAMEDIC’S SUMMER ON THE EDGE

by Benjamin Gilmour

S

Viking $34.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781760890209

irens wail. Families cry together.

Defibrillators shock bodies into convulsion. These are the sounds and images that veteran paramedic, writer, and filmmaker Benjamin Gilmour animates in his latest book, The Gap. His prose is direct, honest, uncompromising; often unembellished. ‘Death is demystified to us; it’s the business we’re in,’ he writes. At times, we feel like we are sitting in the ambulance with him and his band of partners: John, Jerry, Tracy, Matt, and Donna.

The Gap chronicles Gilmour’s experiences in the summer months of 2008 in Eastern Sydney, a fertile time for drownings in Bondi, brawls in Kings Cross, suicide attempts at ‘The Gap’ – an ocean cliff in Watson’s Bay. ‘The Gap is a backdrop for the final act of life,’ Gilmour declares.

The book’s elliptical, theatrical structure does a fine job of reflecting the non-stop chaos of emergency work.

In the introduction to Paramédico (2011), Gilmour laments that the public does not know ‘who we really are’. While that book cannot entirely redress such misunderstandings, The Gap provides a more focused, thematically unified account of the paramedic experience. It explores the joys of saving lives, the resolute bonds between one’s paramedic ‘brothers and sisters’, and the haunting burdens of failure.

The Gap preoccupies itself with how life and paramedic work, for better or worse, interlock. Various passages recalling particular call-outs are interrupted by the surfacing of past traumas in emergency situations, Gilmour’s intermittent longing for his now-wife Kaspia – from whom he was then separated – and concern for his professional partners, especially John, who is enduring an unbearable breakup.

Gilmour describes John’s face as ‘taut, a dam holding back an impossible pressure’.

Due to the sensitive material of The Gap, one can understand why it took Gilmour a decade to finish. He has created a funny, considered, touching work.

Nicholas Bugeja ❖ MIDDLE EAST

39

feminist poets of Arab literature, like Maram al-Masri. ‘Some of the finest wordsmiths from this region have been women and their huge influence continues right up to this day,’ Thomson is delighted to learn. ‘Given the country’s patriarchal society, I incorrectly assumed that their work would have struggled to be recognised. I soon discovered how wrong I was.’ Perhaps the most touching detail Thomson reports is the library’s meticulous cataloguing system, which recorded the name of each volume’s original owner, with the

al-Shami, ‘the Banksy of Daraya’ who paints spirited murals amid the rubble; Ayham al-Sakka, a dental student who becomes the city’s only practitioner by default, working from rescued medical textbooks; and the irrepressible Amjad, the Secret Library’s self-appointed, fourteen-year-old librarian (‘I have my own desk. It’s small, just like me’). Their stories give aching, human shape to the amorphous, geopolitical maelstrom that ‘Syria’ conjures, with its ‘mind-boggling numbers’ of dead and displaced.

‘All were to become my much treasured, long distance friends,’ T h om s on writes. But it is the passionate, eloquent student co-founders of the Secret Library that are dearest to him.

Abdul Basit, the ‘dreamy eyed, gregarious, generous soul’, whose de votion to Hamlet is absolute; and Anas Habib, the steadfast idealist, whose eyes Amjad lovingly cleaning books in the Secret Library (from the book under review) are set firmly hope that they would – one day – return on the future: ‘When people think of to claim it. Hope reverberates across building a town, they normally think every page of Syria’s Secret Library, as only of homes, shops and offices, but insistent, necessary, and precarious as we want to build a nation,’ he tells a heartbeat: ‘Among the books we value Thomson. ‘If we fail to rebuild people’s most are those which describe how peo- minds it will make no difference what ple in other countries have dealt with buildings we put up.’ Battling a sadistic traumas like ours,’ former engineering regime, and Western indifference, what student Anas Habib explains. ‘We hope will happen to their effulgent demothat by reading these we can learn the cratic dreams? best ways of rebuilding our nation when Libraries have graced Syrian soil for the fighting has stopped.’

4,500 years. The oldest library in history ‘Perhaps the most remarkable factor – the palace library of the Kingdom of of all was not the building itself, nor Elba, a collection of cuneiform clay the many thousands of books within tablets – was unearthed in the country’s it. It was the people who created it,’ north. When the library burned in 2250 Thomson surmises. He is right. And so bce, the heat of the blaze acted as a kiln we meet Sara Matar, a schoolteacher and fired the words in. There is a mighty who devotedly excises pictures of food metaphor lurking here. At the height of from textbooks so that her near-starving the siege, twenty to thirty people made students aren’t tormented by reminders the furtive journey to visit Daraya’s of what they can’t have; Abu Malik Secret Library every day, dodging bomb 40 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

blasts, skirmishes, and snipers. Its mission was ‘indivisible from the revolution itself ’, Thomson writes; an anticensorship, pro-education rebuke to the cultural vandalism, merciless opacity, and propaganda of the Assad regime.

As his relationships deepen, Thomson slips from journalist to friend.

While he captures the fractal dynamics of Syrian politics, blinkered by his affection, Thomson misses the chance to interrogate what that ‘revolution’ might entail – its intentions, cohesion, and tactics. What he examines instead is how it feels to encounter the hard edge of empathy: ‘At times it often felt as if I was really there with them, inside the besieged city, exposed to the same awful dangers, hardships and horrors,’ he writes. ‘Yet, of course, I was not.’

Thomson is plagued by the question of whether the story he is telling has become a form of journalistic voyeurism. The besieged people at the heart of Syria’s Secret Library deserve to be heard on their own terms; hearteningly – vitally – Thomson never forgets it.

He is a compassionate and intelligent weaver of testimony, humbly unobtrusive – honouring their brokenness, as well as their resilience. But a version of the question that haunts the author, echoes as a reader: a nagging discomfort with the fact that we seem to need extraordinary stories to remind us of the ordinary truths of human dignity.

It is easy to celebrate this poignant tale of book-loving defiance, but also to romanticise it. Syria’s Secret Library and the growing genre it joins (such as Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu) should demand more from us than warmed hearts and inchoate inspiration. But perhaps that is placing the blame in the wrong place. ‘We are convinced that knowledge rarely comes when you sit doing nothing,’ Anas Habib declares. ‘It usually follows hard work and sometimes taking great risks.’ As libraries around the country wither and close, literary opportunities shrink, and arts funding is razed: What hard work are we willing to do? What risks are we willing to take? g Beejay Silcox was the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow.

Fiction

J.M. Coetzee, 2014 (photograph by Shannon Burns)

James Ley on J.M. Coetzee’s new novel Anna Krien

John Kinsella

Act of Grace

Hollow Earth

Alice Nelson

Chris Flynn

Heather Rose

Bruny Nicole Abadee

41

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

An attenuated life

Stripping a quasi-religious tale back to its essence

James Ley THE DEATH OF JESUS

by J.M. Coetzee

Text Publishing, $29.99 hb, 197 pp, 9781922268280

I

t is commonly accepted that the modern European novel begins with Don Quixote. Lionel Trilling went so far as to claim that the entire history of the modern novel could be interpreted as variations on themes set out in Cervantes’s great originating work. And the quality that is usually taken to mark Don Quixote as ‘modern’ is its irony. It is a fiction about fiction. The new sensibility it inaugurated begins in a spirit of mockery, ridiculing the obsolete genre of chivalric romance, insisting on the disconnection between reality and fantasy. As a character observes in The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the first novel in J.M. Coetzee’s trilogy about a precocious orphan named David and his accidental guardian, Simón, the innovation of Don Quixote is to view the world through two sets of eyes: where Quixote sees giants, his loyal sidekick, Sancho Panza, sees only windmills.

Much of the humour in Don Quixote is derived from the premise that Sancho is correct and Quixote is a ‘deluded old man’. This is the interpretation Simón seeks to impress upon David, who is so enchanted by Quixote’s adventures that he memorises them, but who prefers to sees things the other way round. Near the beginning of The Death of Jesus, Simón, exasperated by David’s refusal to read any other book, dismisses Don Quixote as a ‘made-up story … it is an amusing book, it sucks you into its fantasy, but fantasy is not real. Indeed, the message of the book is precisely to warn readers like yourself against being sucked into an unreal world, a world of fantasy.’

Simón’s reading is questionable at best and subject to its own contextual ironies, not the least of which is that he is himself a character in a made-up story set in an unreal world. As Coetzee has noted elsewhere (echo-

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ing, inadvertently it would seem, another observation by Trilling), the proposition that there is a sharp line to be drawn between reality and fantasy is one of the things Don Quixote calls into question. Its ‘message’ is more or less antithetical to that suggested by Simón. What Quixote’s delusions eventually demonstrate is that the distinction between the real and the ideal is not absolute, that reality is not necessarily fixed and unyielding.

His decision to live according to his ideals does indeed alter the world for the better. The satirical implications of the novel are thus reversed: Quixote’s madness becomes a comment on the wretchedness of reality. This was the interpretation favoured by Dostoevsky, who maintained that Don Quixote was the pre-eminent example of a genuinely virtuous character, but the corruption of the world meant that his essential goodness appeared to be simultaneously absurd. It is his misfortune, Quixote informs Sancho, to have been born into an ‘age of iron’ – which is also to say, an age of irony that regards an allegiance to any kind of higher principle as something deserving of ridicule and scorn, an age that treats idealism as a form of insanity.

Coetzee’s novels have always inhabited other fictions and displayed an element of self-consciousness about their status as fictions. Even Disgrace (1999), the most conventionally ‘realist’ of his novels, carries a weight of concentrated symbolism and allegorical implication that is constantly overwhelming the specificity of its narrative. This characteristic sense of doubleness assumes a striking form in Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy. Viewed as the culmination (if not necessarily the conclusion) of his long literary career, these distinctive late fictions achieve a remarkable synthesis of the influences, styles, and

recognise an element of genuine heroism in Bloom’s thematic preoccupations that have animated his work ordinariness and decency; Coetzee, similarly, wants us to for the better part of half a century. give serious consideration to the idea that David is spe‘Late style,’ wrote Edward Said, ‘is what happens if cial – it is the one thing everyone seems to agree upon. art does not abdicate its rights in favour of reality.’ In In presenting us with such an attenuated life, CoetCoetzee’s case, his enduring allegiance to his art has zee grants David the cover of childhood innocence, thus come to foreground the extent to which he regards its protecting him from the charge of absurdity. He also formal and moral dimensions as inextricable. The Jesus strips his quasi-religious novels can be read as, among tale back to its essence. other things, reflections on The Jesus novels can be read as The Jesus novels propose the ontological status of fica familiar quixotic invertion. They consider what it reflections on the ontological sion: David’s mysticism might mean to live one’s life status of fiction and suspicion of reason are in the service of the imagipresented as challenges to nation. The moral dimension the stolid realism of Simón, who lives ‘in the present like of this question is implied in their provocative conflation an ox’. His peculiarity is used to suggest that when we of Jesus and Quixote. Is it not the case that to believe in seek to quantify and explain we are subjecting ourselves the former’s promise of redemption is to be as deluded to constraining narratives, denying other realities. The as the latter? trilogy offers no solution to this basic dilemma, though The Death of Jesus brings the trilogy to a close, its sympathies with David’s rejection of instrumentalist without going so far as to provide any definitive anreasoning are clear enough. Like all of Coetzee’s fiction, swers to the philosophical questions it raises. It begins it stages a debate in which characters represent different several years after the conclusion of the second novel in views but can also be seen to contradict themselves and the series, The Schooldays of Jesus (2016). David is now echo one another (the passionate Dmitri also likens himten. His philosophical disagreements with Simón are self to an ox in Schooldays, for example). The simplicity becoming increasingly heated; there is a new note of and directness with which the trilogy raises fundamenexistential angst in his questioning. He still loves Don tal questions – and questions don’t come much more Quixote, which he treats ‘not as a made-up story but as fundamental than ‘why are we here?’ – are matched by a veritable history’. He also loves playing soccer. When the intricacy with which they are dramatised. Coetzee’s Señor Fabricante, who runs the local orphanage, invites scrupulous uncertainty, his remarkable ability to write David to come and live at the orphanage and play in an fiction that seems to be at once confessional and selforganised competition, David accepts the offer. Señor effacing, has in the past been criticised for its evasiveness, Arroyo, head of the unconventional Academy where but the Jesus novels leave little doubt that this tendency David attends school, explains to the dismayed Simón is better interpreted as expressive. that David ‘feels a certain duty toward Fabricante’s orThere is a small example of Coetzee’s mastery of a phans, toward orphans in general, the world’s orphans’. certain kind of self-effacing irony late in The Death of Soon after relocating, David is stricken with a Jesus when he has Dmitri, whose name is important, mysterious ‘falling’ illness. There is a period of hospiassert that names are unimportant. This is arguably talisation, during which he begins reciting tales from true in reality (though who’s to say our lives are not Don Quixote to gatherings of enraptured children. The influenced by what we are called), but it is certainly not disreputable Dmitri, convicted of a crime of passion in true in a novel in which every detail must be counted as Schooldays, reappears on the scene, insisting that he is significant and even implied absences can be meaningrehabilitated. He insinuates himself into David’s conful. When I reviewed The Schooldays of Jesus for another fidence and begins claiming that he has been entrusted with the true meaning of the boy’s unique vision. Then publication back in 2016, I noted that the characters David’s condition deteriorates and he dies, after a series Dmitri and Alyosha were clear allusions to Dostoevsky’s of anguished conversations with Simón about death, final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. I also noted the ‘pain and contortion’ of his body ‘giving expression that there was no character named after Ivan, the middle to the dilemma he confronted’. The latter stages of the Karamazov brother, who voices the novel’s most searchnovel are given over the grief and confusion of those ing existential questions. I was wrong, of course. It was who knew him, each of whom seems to have a different when I read Dmitri’s disavowal that the penny dropped. opinion about the meaning of his life. ‘Everyone is There is no character named Ivan, but he is everywhere convinced that David had a message for us,’ observes in Coetzee’s Jesus novels. In a sense, he is their author.

Simón, ‘but no one knows what the message is.’

Ivan is, after all, the Russian equivalent of John. g As this brief outline perhaps suggests, David is Jesus in much the same way that Leopold Bloom is Ulysses.

James Ley, an essayist and literary critic, is the author The parallelism is loose and intrinsically ironic, but it of The Critic in the Modern World: Public criticism from is not intended as a form of mockery. Joyce wants us to Samuel Johnson to James Wood (2014).

FICTION

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OPEN POpen AGE

Page

with

OPEN PAGE

Trent Dalton Where are you happiest?

In the driver’s seat of our Toyota Corolla on the way to Burleigh Heads. The family’s playing a trivia quiz where you have to answer deep-cut questions about a particular family member sitting in the car, and then my youngest daughter says some gag weirdly beyond her years and we all laugh our heads off, and then my wife calls it all for what it is. ‘M.O.P.H.!’ she hollers. Cheesy as hell but that stands for, ‘Moment of Pure Happiness’, and that’s code for, ‘Life ain’t ever gettin’ better than this so recognise it, knuckleheads!’

What’s your idea of hell?

The driver’s seat of our Toyota Corolla driving home from Burleigh Heads.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Contentment. I get my teeth on that carrot and I take a good bite, but then it only grows in my hand and it pulls away again from my grasp. Silly carrot.

What is your favourite film?

Back to the Future. The deepest, most wondrous exploration of courage and inherited trauma disguised as the greatest popcorn movie ever made. There is a Marty McFly residing in all men, and the world becomes a better place when we find him.

And your favourite book?

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I have spent two decades as a journalist writing stories pretty much inspired by that book. I truly believe that the last two pages are the reason why I have kids and get to drive to Burleigh Heads with them. Those pages turned me into the kind of bloke my wife wanted to be around.

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

My place. Chilli mud crab pasta for dinner.

Eddie Vedder’s placing my vinyl copy of Vitalogy on the record player. Jodie Foster sips chianti at 44 O CTOBER 2019

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my kitchen bench and is reminded of a Silence of the Lambs story she’s never told anyone but wants to tell me. And my dear departed dad, Noel, has a XXXX in his hand by the record player, telling Vedder why The Beatles are more musically accomplished than The Rolling Stones but the Stones are better to root to.

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

‘Awesome’ I dislike, and ‘awesome’ I’d like back. That is, used more in relation to things like the view of the Earth from the Moon and Aretha Franklin’s voice, and less in relation to Kylie Jenner’s range of lipsticks.

Who is your favourite author?

If I’m lobbing Cannery Row and Of Mice and Men in with Grapes of Wrath, then I’ve gotta say Steinbeck, purely on an inspiration-per-page ratio. Awesome writer.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Samwise Gamgee. Awesome friend.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Enthusiasm. I’m convinced it’s the single most beneficial quality to possess in any profession. Maybe in life, too.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

E.B White’s Charlotte’s Web showed a wide-eyed young Rugby League lover that the world is one great infinitely expanding glass prism with infinite points of view to look through.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

School pick-up.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

Like all forms of journalism, it’s thrilling and essential and informative when it’s done with heart, honesty, and empathy.

And writers’ festivals?

Love them. I’m the buffoon with the flailing arms thanking every last booklover who dropped some hard-earned money, cleared the diary for an hour, hopped in their car, paid for parking, found the right tent on the map, and came to hear me talk about the thing that makes my legs move.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

Sure. Send them to my mum. Read them out to my wife. Whole bit. Totally and utterly psychologically destructive, but it never felt as though reading reviews of my own work was ever going to be in my destiny so nothing matters but getting to that white screen every day and painting it black. Whatever comes next is gravy.

Are artists valued in our society?

Bankers, lawyers, and Kim Kardashian are still winning that war, but at dawn look to the east, or up to Brisbane, and you’ll see Bri Lee and Ellen van Neerven and Ben Hobson and Joel Rea and Last Dinosaurs. They only just picked up their swords.

What are you working on now?

(Photograph by Lyndon Mechielsen )

Dead set finished writing my second novel only yesterday. Just about to start on another significant writing gig, my wife’s birthday card.

Trent Dalton is a staff writer for the Weekend Australian Magazine and a two-time winner of a Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism.

His début novel, Boy Swallows Universe (HarperCollins, 2018), has won several awards, including the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the 2019 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Boy Swallows Universe will be published across thirty-four English language and translation territories.

FICTION

45

Kaleidoscope Alice Nelson ACT OF GRACE

by Anna Krien

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781863959551

A

young Aboriginal girl wears an abaya because she wants to see how it feels to inhabit someone else’s experience, someone else’s history.

An exiled Iraqi musician plays a piano in a shopping centre in suburban Melbourne. Native Americans protesting the construction of a pipeline on their traditional lands are shot at with water cannons and rubber bullets. Countries are lost, sacred sites invaded by careless tourists, lines on maps exclude and dispossess, sacrifices and compromises are made, and individual lives are disfigured by historical circumstance.

Leaping back and forth in time, spanning continents and cultures, and inhabiting shifting perspectives, Anna Krien’s first novel is a high-wire performance. With its vast historical rigging, epic scope, ethical complexity, and kaleidoscopic view, Act of Grace is enormously ambitious; everything rests on the execution and the stakes are high.

The reader watches, breath held, as the novel unspools, but Krien is a skilled funambulist; her step is sure, and she does not fall.

Act of Grace opens with an embittered Iraqi veteran returned to his uneasy family in Australia, shards of shrapnel from a suicide-bombing attack embedded in his neck. This ‘scattering of lumps that seemed to shape-shift every few days’ is a visible marker of damage, but the internal disfiguring that Toohey Colpitt has experienced is 46 O CTOBER 2019

far more sinister and pervasive. In Iraq, the triumphant idealism of the Australian soldiers, who view themselves as saviours and bask in ‘the glow of aid’ as they dispense candies and footballs emblazoned with the Australian flag, is soon shattered by the mounting resentment of the Iraqis. Children, malnourished due to punitive sanctions, begin to shout insults at the soldiers on their missions of mercy, and eventually throw rocks at the men. Any symbolic freight the stones tossed by tiny Davids at conquering Goliaths might have is subverted when the soldiers respond in kind, holding competitions to see who can inflict the most damage, the Iraqi children ‘targets more real than the shadowy enemy’.

From here we are catapulted into the lives of the O’Farrell family in Melbourne. Danny who describes himself as ‘Half-Aborigine’, has a complicated and uneasy relationship with his heritage.

He rails against the naïve romanticisation of his Aboriginality and hides his secret terror that his children will be taken from him in the way he was from his mother. Danny delights in the fact that his son is fair-skinned and blueeyed, that ‘his kin would get through the system unimpeded’, while he instructs his daughter Robbie, with her dark features, to tell people that she is Italian and views her with ‘a sinking feeling, an unshakeable sadness, a miserly sense of history repeating’.

The novel’s sweep gradually expands to include a vast circle of characters and experiences. Disparate and seemingly disconnected sets of public and private narratives circle around each other, with unexpected moments of crosspollination. At first Act of Grace seems to be a set of discrete stories, albeit with intersecting themes and repeated motifs, but soon the different narratives weave together in sometimes startling ways. The connections never feel contrived or clumsy; they are entirely believable in a novel preoccupied with the coincidences and contingencies of history, with the echoes and repetitions of the past.

The danger of such a complex and multi-peopled canvas is that the experiences of any one individual risk being

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submerged in the flow of time and the calamitous course of global history.

In Krien’s assured hands, the narratives take on a powerful parallactic effect and the accretion of experiences serves to enlarge rather than diminish the story she is trying to tell. Uncannily at home in all of the lives she inhabits, Krien’s exploration of moral complications is exactingly realistic, her narrative command astounding, and her prose precise and lyrical.

In the novel’s final paragraphs, Melbourne comes to a standstill as three Aboriginal flags are raised from the West Gate Bridge. The tattered Australian flags are taken down and the colours of the Aboriginal flags unfurl against the skyline as television crews record the occasion and police flank the highway. For Robbie, this is a triumphant act, a personal and national moment of reckoning, of reclamation. Iraqi exile Nasim, irretrievably unmoored from her own land and history, cannot understand what she sees as an inexplicable preoccupation with ownership: ‘It was beyond her, this obsession of Robbie’s about whose country this was. Smallminded, too, for surely it was a mere cigarette paper of sediment in the history of the earth. “All countries are the inheritance of murderers,” she had said once to Robbie.’

The storehouse of history may be a ruinous depository and victories may be contingent and complicated, but for all the novel’s bleak intelligence, it never plunges the reader into permanent despair. The purpose of art, Auden wrote, in the context of historical cataclysm, ‘is to show an affirming flame’. Krien does not offer any easy redemption and the novel’s register is frequently melancholic, but there are enlivening moments of relief and restitution.

A burial, a homecoming, the birth of a child, lives reassembled and calamities endured: there are acts of grace large and small threaded throughout the sweep of the novel. The affirming flame may leap and flicker, may burn so low as to barely be seen, but it is never extinguished. g Alice Nelson is a West Australian writer.

Her most recent novel is The Children’s House (Penguin Random House, 2018).

The world beneath Chris Flynn HOLLOW EARTH

by John Kinsella

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 268 pp, 9781925760279

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stronomer Edmond Halley (also known as Edmund, debate still rages over which spelling he preferred) may be best known for the comet that passes through our solar system once every seventy-five to seventy-six years (next sighting due in 2061, set a reminder in your iCal), but in 1692 he proposed an intriguing theory: that the Earth was hollow.

Halley suggested that the surface of the planet upon which we teem was 800 kilometres thick, surrounding two inner concentric shells and a molten core. He claimed that a breathable atmosphere separated these shells; that they were luminous and possibly inhabited. As ludicrous as it now seems, the theory was not definitively disproven until 1774.

The concept of worlds within has captured the imagination of writers and folklorists ever since, with prolific Western Australian poet John Kinsella now adding his name to a vaunted list of subterranean-fiction authors including Jules Verne, Thomas Pynchon, Lewis Carroll, and my childhood obsession, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Burroughs penned seven novels set in the fictional inner world of Pellucidar, whose oceans paralleled our continents and vice versa. This was popularised, in a kitsch fashion, by the 1976 British film At the Earth’s Core, which sees Peter Cushing and American beefcake actor Doug McClure drill through a Welsh mountain with a mechanical mole and burst through into a prehistoric land of telepathic Pteranodons and scantily clad women.

Burroughs’s other famed creation, Tarzan, also pays a visit to the underworld in one volume, where, from memory, he fights and bests – no prizes for guessing – one of those pesky pteranodons

Kinsella’s book hews more closely to the hollow-earth notion as portrayed in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) and the more obscure William R. Bradshaw novel The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892). Employing more scientific methods than Burroughs’s characters, the protagonists in Verne’s and Bradshaw’s novels access subterranean worlds via volcanic tubes and Symmes Holes – a flattening of the earth’s curvature at the magnetic poles.

Kinsella’s protagonist, Manfred, finds a tunnel hidden in an Irish copper mine and falls through, fortunately landing in the sea of the unnamed place he christens Hollow Earth. No surprise to an Irish native – tunnels in my home county are rumoured to lead to the land of the Tuatha Dé Danann. You do not want to go down there.

Kinsella’s world is not a place of high adventure. There are no lumbering prehistoric creatures to combat, or princesses to be rescued. Hollow Earth is a simple place, in many ways more advanced than our own society. Its inhabitants are genderless, or rather can adopt masculine or feminine traits according to their whim or need to procreate.

Their existence is a pastoral one, respectful of the environment. They have eschewed conflict and difference, understanding fostered by telepathic communication (surely a Kinsellian wink to Burroughs’s flying reptilian overlords).

Hollow Earthers also happen to be a fetching shade of pale green.

Manfred doesn’t linger in Hollow Earth, as the main thrust of the narrative follows his re-emergence on the surface with Ari and Zest, two Hollow Earthers tasked with assessing the likelihood of our mining and military ventures leading to the conquest and subjugation of the underworld. Their odyssey around the globe grants them scant comfort, although they revel in the excellent quality of our hallucinogens and stimulants.

The behaviour of surface dwellers confounds the Hollow Earthers, particularly in their treatment of the natural world. At one point Zest complains, ‘Yesterday we saw an island full of birds and flowering hedges, and now we look across the harbour, out to the island, and it is burning all over. Now we hear

those fires are out of control. Are we in your “summer” now? You said it wasn’t legal. You make rules you don’t live by?’

Later, Zest is again frustrated.

‘Where is the wild? asked Zest. Everywhere, said the man. Up on the mountain? asked Zest. Yes, said the man, but many think it’s too wild up there and they want to build a restaurant for the paraglider people. A business opportunity. That’s devastating, said Zest. It is, said the man, it’s already festooned with communications towers and aerials.

The devil’s legs, said Manfred quietly.’

Kinsella is an accomplished poet and prose stylist whose work often features a relationship with landscape. As such, Hollow Earth is unusual in its format. It is presented as 184 short chapters, some only a sentence in length. This may at first seem well suited to casual reading, but Kinsella’s tincture requires attention, paralleled in this spot-on analysis of a Hollywood actor’s method: ‘You mean like Nicolas Cage always jerking his neck to one side to command a sense of imminent lunacy mixed with commitment, of anger mixed with high dudgeon, of zeal mixed with unpredictability, of emotion mixed with I don’t give a damn so watch out?’

As Ari, Zest, and Manfred seek a viable opening back to Hollow Earth, they wander from one country and illicit encounter to another, a tragic, almost vaudevillian troupe that finds them supping deep from the well of narcotics and even producing online pornography to raise funds. That the internet accepts without question the sight of green subterranean people fucking in a dingy Australian share-house speaks volumes for the invention, humour, and madness of Kinsella’s left-field prose novel, a copy of which I suggest be posted immediately to Nicolas Cage’s agent. g

Chris Flynn’s forthcoming novel is Mammoth (2020).

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Favourite Australian Novels of the twenty-first century Below we list the twenty favourite Australian novels of the twenty-first century, as voted for by readers in our 2019 Favourite Australian Novel Poll. This is the first FAN Poll since the 2009 one, in which Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet emerged as readers’ favourite Australian novel of all time.

1.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

2.

Boy Swallows Universe

3.

Carpentaria

by Richard Flanagan (2013)

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2014 Man Booker Prize, is a dramatic wartime saga. With a deadly day on the Burma Railway at its heart, the tale begins in August 1943 with Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon despairing in a Japanese POW camp. Evans, struggling to save himself and his fellow men from violence, disease, and death, can’t shake the memories of his love affair with his uncle’s young wife. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a narrative reflecting the depravity of war but also the tentative nature of love.

by Trent Dalton (2018)

Boy Swallows Universe, by Walkley Award-winning journalist and author Trent Dalton, has become a literary sensation. The first book ever to win four prizes at the Australian Book Industry awards, the novel is a funny, sensitive, and gripping coming-of-age tale set in 1980s Australia. Eli Bell and his mute brother, August, live in a housing estate on the fringes of Brisbane, and together they navigate the unpredictable world around them. ‘All of me is in here,’ Trent Dalton writes of his first novel.

‘Everything I’ve ever seen. Everything I’ve ever done.’

by Alexis Wright (2006) Carpentaria, by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright, is a sprawling narrative set in the small town of Desperance in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland. The tale, admired for its hybridised mix of myth, politics, and social commentary via an array of unforgettably unique characters, is a masterly piece of storytelling. It won the Australian Premier’s Literary Prize and the Miles Franklin Award in 2006, and has captured our imaginations ever since.

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4.

Breath

5.

The Book Thief

6.

True History of the Kelly Gang

7.

The Museum of Modern Love

by Tim Winton (2008) Breath by Tim Winton, winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Award, follows paramedic Bruce Pike as he reflects on his youth. This deeply moving book of risk and friendship strikes balance between the everyday and the extraordinary.

by Markus Zusak (2005) The Book Thief, set in Nazi Germany, follows Liesel, a young girl whose act of thievery will alter the course of her life.

A timeless tale about the power of reading and language.

by Peter Carey (2000)

A virtuisic achievement, Peter Carey’s vernacular riff on the Ned Kelly legend won the 2001 Man Booker Prize and is our From the Archive feature on page 72.

by Heather Rose (2016) Heather Rose’s mesmerising novel The Museum of Modern Love reimagines Marina Abramovic’s powerful 2010 performance of The Artist is Present, in which she had silent interactions with members of the public at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

8.

The Natural Way of Things

9.

The Slap

10.

Burial Rites

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

by Charlotte Wood (2015) A dark fable about misogyny and corporate control, Wood’s novel follows what happens after two women wake from a drugged sleep and find themselves imprisoned on a remote desert property.

by Christos Tsiolkas (2008) This popular and provocative novel explores societal and familial tensions through the fallout that follows a man slapping a child not his own at a suburban barbecue.

by Hannah Kent (2013) In her richly imagined début novel, Burial Rites, Hannah Kent explores the life of the last woman to be executed in Iceland, Agnes Magnúsdóttir.

Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (2009) Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser (2012) The Dry by Jane Harper (2016) The Secret River by Kate Grenville (2005) Ransom by David Malouf (2009) Truth by Peter Temple (2008) A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (2008) Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (2011) That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott (2010) The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (2003)

The full list of novels nominated in the 2019 ABR FAN Poll is available on our website along with links to ABR reviews.

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Big ideas Fiona Wright THE BREEDING SEASON

by Amanda Niehaus Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781760529536

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he Breeding Season is a novel that grapples with big ideas: the connections between death; grief, mortality and the bodily experience of them; how the male gaze preconditions how women (and female animals) are portrayed and described in science and art. It is an ambitious book, and the ideas that drive it are one of its main pleasures, even if they sometimes overburden the narrative.

Niehaus’s novel centres on a couple: Elise, a scientist who specialises in reproduction, and Dan, a writer whose work has mined his personal and family history, and who is currently ghostwriting an autobiography for his uncle, a notorious artist. Elise has just delivered a stillborn child. The couple are wracked by grief, unable to connect to each other, let alone come to terms with what has befallen them. Elise is bedridden, Dan wanders listlessly through the house, until both are shocked into action – Dan by a phone call from his uncle’s charming and provocative lover and muse, Hannah Wallace; Elise by the death of a sparrow that flies into her bedroom window.

Sex and death are constantly aligned thus in The Breeding Season. Much of Elise’s work focuses on the antechinus, a native marsupial mouse; antechinuses, Niehaus writes, ‘give so much to breeding that they die’ each generation, the males immediately after mating and 50 O CTOBER 2019

the females after the young are weaned.

Dan’s artist uncle, meanwhile, is best known for a work that depicts Hannah Wallace’s vulva, but also shows other projects featuring ‘skin that seems to crumble away into … dust or ash’ and ‘human-unhuman’ bodies. Accordingly, Elise and Dan are also positioned as both opposite and intertwined. As well as being a scientist and a writer, respectively, and approaching similar subjects with their different mindsets and practices, they are taken at one point to ‘the opposite poles of Australia’ by their work: Elise to Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and Dan to Hobart and the Museum of Old and New Art. This positioning is, of course, useful to the development of the ideas at the heart of the novel, but it also feels heavy-handed at times: the characters have a tendency to act more like metaphors than people.

Niehaus is also interested in what she terms ‘writing through [the] body’, and this accounts for the distinctive style of the book. At moments of great emotion or crisis, or of sudden bodily response to the external world, Niehaus breaks up the prose into short lines, in order to register a particular kind of physical shock or the sense of slowed time that is often experienced in these moments. When Dan first speaks to Hannah on the phone, for example, her laugh is described as: a deep, throaty sound that reverberates through his phone

jaw

tongue

Elsewhere, usually at moments of gentleness or wonder, Niehaus runs words together. When Elise remembers her early fieldwork, for example, she describes the sandpiper hatchlings she worked with as ‘dappledowned and cottonball soft’, their fledging as ‘dash[ing] onetwothreefour out of their nests’.

These are, of course, techniques borrowed from poetry. Used adeptly, they add an element of lyricism to the writing, and the way in which they intensify narrative time is interesting and visceral.

But they aren’t used sparingly enough to be consistently effective, and they begin

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

to grate as the novel progresses. This kind of bodily writing also has a tendency to feel excessive in some of Niehaus’s depictions of sex and sexuality – early on, for example, Dan returns home from a furious, grief-fuelled jog, and imagines a woman (it’s unclear whether this is his wife or Hannah) while he is in the shower: Pulse beats beats beats … He lets a body-not-body enter his mind, settle onto him, lavender-scented, and he pushes against her, warmwet and pressing … She wraps her strong legs around him, clampsuck vagina, and then she is off …

Niehaus is aiming for a directness and immediacy that bypasses language, that is experiential, rather than intellectual. It is especially gratifying to see this kind of risk-taking in a début work, even if it sometimes feels belaboured or pulls the reader away from the text.

This emphasis on writing through the body is also an attempt to circumvent writing about the body as an object, a thing that is looked at and observed rather than lived. This concern with gaze is also a part of both Dan’s and Elise’s work. Dan describes his uncle’s work to a creative writing workshop as ‘art made of bodies and on them, shapes of the body’, and proceeds to be undone by the students – all women – who question both the ethics of this work and the fact that Dan has only brought along, as stimulus material, pictures of women. Elise, for her part, is working on a research project about female agency in reproduction. The exchange between Dan and his students is particularly interesting, because it is nuanced and resists easy answers, and posits the body as a site of empathy and imagination, as much as of power. This is, of course, the same drive that animates the book as a whole – it is bodies, human and animal alike, that take centre stage here, and that govern the narrative decisions.

The Breeding Season isn’t always successful, but it has a verve and scope that are exciting to read nonetheless. g Fiona Wright’s latest book is The World Was Whole (2018).

Explosions and digressions Nicole Abadee BRUNY

by Heather Rose

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 422 pp, 9781760875169

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asmanian writer Heather Rose’s fifth adult novel, Bruny, about a joint venture between the Chinese, Australian, and Tasmanian governments, is well timed, given current concerns about the covert infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party into Australia’s universities and given Federal MP Andrew Hastie’s recent warning that Australia should approach its relations with China with care, lest its sovereignty be diminished. Rose’s last novel, The Museum of Modern Love, which in 2017 won the Stella Prize and the Christina Stead Prize, is set in New York. In Bruny, Rose returns to Tasmania where her earlier novels are set. Part political thriller, part family saga, part love letter to Tasmania, this is her most ambitious novel to date. Bruny covers a multitude of issues, including family loyalty, betrayal, corruption, environmental protection, and the rise of China.

The novel opens with a massive explosion that almost destroys a bridge under construction from Tasmania to Bruny Island, famous for its natural beauty and isolation. The bridge, built with Commonwealth money and Chinese steel, has split the local community between those in favour of progress and those afraid it will destroy their idyllic way of life. The explosion occurs three months from the bridge’s completion date. Nobody knows who is responsible.

The narrator is Astrid Coleman (Ace), whose twin brother, John Coleman ( JC), is the Liberal premier of Tasmania. Their half-sister, Max, is the Labor leader of the opposition. Both JC and Max have supported the building of the bridge, despite strong opposition from the Greens and local protest groups.

JC asks Ace, who works for the United Nations in conflict resolution, to return

from New York to help him manage the crisis. The prime minister and JC are both determined to get the bridge built before the state election in three months, and when Ace arrives, the Australian government has just passed controversial new legislation permitting three hundred Chinese workers to come to Tasmania to help complete it.

JC introduces Ace to all the major players, Chinese and Australian, including three unsavoury politicians: Barney Viper, Frank Pringle, and Aiden Abbott.

She also meets the Bruny locals, including Dan Macmillan, foreman on the bridge, and members of the local protest groups. She learns that, as well as being heavily involved in the building of the bridge, the Chinese have been investing in large parts of Bruny Island and Tasmania. Her quest to find out why drives the narrative.

Rose is concerned with more than just political intrigue. This is a family drama as well. Ace, who left for overseas as soon as she finished school to escape Tasmania and her family, struggles with feelings of guilt about leaving and about not coming back to see her ageing parents often enough. When she does return, she recalls why she left. Her mother, Hyacinth, greets Ace, whom she hasn’t seen in ten years, thus, ‘Ah, Astrid, sweetheart, how you’ve aged.’

In relation to JC, Ace is torn between family loyalty and a deepening suspicion that he is involved in something untoward.

Bruny is also a homage to Tasmania’s natural beauty and a celebration of its way of life. There is, Rose writes, ‘Something to do with the light and the air that is so crisp and unpolluted it almost hurts to take a deep breath.’ Ace realises that ‘to live on an island isn’t just a location. It’s a sense of belonging.

It’s history and sacrifice. It’s a choice to be remote … a kind of metaphor.’

As Dan puts it, ‘When you settle for Tassie, you’ve settled for less in some ways; less of what matters out there, more of what matters here.’ Rose also pays tribute to Tasmania’s proud history of protest – anti-bridge protesters are ‘activists protecting their path, their way of life … they were trying to preserve, not destroy’.

Although there is much to enjoy in Bruny, it is not as strong as Rose’s earlier work. The plot strains credulity at times.

For instance, it is hard to imagine that in any one state all three main political players – premier, leader of the opposition, and chief crisis manager – would be siblings. The romance between Ace and Dan, clearly signalled early on, takes too long to develop, and the banter be-

Bruny is a homage to Tasmania’s natural beauty and a celebration of its way of life tween them can be laboured – ‘“So have you got a hot date?” “You really love to ask the questions, don’t you?”’

The book’s main flaw is that too often Rose interrupts the narrative with a direct address from Ace to the reader about a particular political issue. This is interesting when it relates to issues central to the book – for example: ‘Australian foreign land ownership rules let most anyone buy anything’, or the ‘Belt and Road Initiative was about buying cooperation by way of Chinese investment in ports, rails, bridges’. However, when these addresses are not relevant to the plot, they not only disrupt the flow of the narrative but can also sound didactic. One such digression begins, ‘In the seventies Australia had been the nation of the fair go … but it was bled dry, the national heart.’ It goes on to criticise John Howard and the Murdoch press.

Whatever your view on those topics, digressions such as this are a distraction that detract from the reader’s enjoyment of the book. g

Nicole Abadee is the books writer for The Australian Financial Review Magazine.

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Fate Francesca Sasnaitis FORTUNE

by Lenny Bartulin

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 292 pp, 9781760529307

F

ortune begins with Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin on 27 October 1806. Does it matter whether the popular image of the emperor astride a magnificent white stallion is an embellishment? ‘Time sullies every truth,’ Lenny Bartulin tells us. History is as much a fiction as this tale of derring-do and dire misfortune heaped on innocent and wicked alike.

Coincidence, improbable and highly amusing, propels the narrative in a series of fast-moving, often farcical vignettes that recall Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and Joseph Furphy’s classic Australian yarn Such Is Life (1903).

With a mixture of comic bawdiness and earnest philosophising, Bartulin successfully adapts the satirical novel to suit twenty-first-century expectations.

He shuffles the overlapping lives of characters as if they are cards in a deck of infinite possibility and combination, thus exposing both their selfless acts and darkest secrets. From Europe to the Dutch colony of Suriname and the penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, an otherwise incident-driven narrative is lent pathos

by Bartulin’s inventive and insightful attribution of motive both to characters who are major players in historical events and to their most abject subjects.

He makes the thoughts of Napoleon, his 52 O CTOBER 2019

wives and generals, as banal and elevated as those of ordinary folk affected by the vagaries of their so-called superiors; he forcefully exposes Europeans’ barbarism in the abhorrent treatment of the beautiful slave Josephine and her brother Mr Hendrik.

Fate, recognition, and déjà vu are recurring motifs, or as Krüger, a failed scholar and habitué of Otto Kessler’s Coffee House, puts it, ‘the inevitability of passing through where all and one have already been before and, in fact, must and will be, forever’. At Kessler’s, his philosophy of time is not well received, though his idea of love as recognition does stick in the mind of young Johannes Meyer, the Candide of this swashbuckling romp through the nineteenth century.

Beatrice Reiss serves at Kessler’s, where the handsome, eighteen-yearold Johannes and his friends gather to carouse and spout their favourite poetry.

She is one of the numerous supporting cast who make a brief appearance, then disappear. Johannes and Beatrice are in the crowd on Unter den Linden waiting to greet the famous emperor. So is Marie-Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal. None of them catches a glimpse of Napoleon, but Beatrice sidles up to Johannes and leads him to a couch. This marks the beginning of his long, eventful life.

Beatrice also works for Claus von Rolt, a collector of antiquities and exotica, and a thoroughly nasty type.

As Beyle passes von Rolt’s house, he hears the unmistakable sounds of passion and can’t help but press his face to the window glass. He will not soon forget the thrill of watching Johannes and Beatrice making love. When he hears the approach of another passer-by, Beyle scurries off and out of the story. But his odd behaviour piques the interest of seventeen-year-old Elizabeth von Hoffman. She looks through the glass and locks eyes with Johannes. In that rare moment, ‘it was as though [Elizabeth] could see everything that was inside the boy. And he saw her too (she knew it!) and together they confirmed something they’d always known but only now remembered.’ Thus, their twinned destinies are sealed.

Beatrice leaves and Johannes is

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

caught unawares by the unexpected return of von Rolt with the American trader Wesley Lewis Jr and his companion, Mr Hendrik. Surprised, Johannes drops a seashell from von Rolt’s collection of rarities and flees the scene.

Mr Hendrik allows him to escape, but Johannes is arrested soon after and forced to join the 4e Régiment Étrangers.

‘Book One’ concludes its breakneck trajectory on page thirty-three and the gods take ‘a well-deserved afternoon nap’.

I must not thwart the pleasures of anticipation and revelation with too much detail. Suffice to say, ‘suffering is only a small part of the truth’ as we follow Johannes with the Grande Armée to Posen, Warsaw, and beyond.

Elsewhere, Krüger throws in his lot with the virulent Lewis Jr and Mr Hendrik; Elizabeth escapes her stultifying existence in Berlin; and Napoleon endures the indignities of life on Elba.

Fortunes wax and wane with equal speed in the ten remaining books. From London to the Canary Islands to Rio de Janeiro to Cape Town and Port Jackson, through a string of ports, the various strands of Fortune drift together like tides sweeping drowned sailors to unfriendly shores. The culminating coincidence would be ridiculous in any novel with pretensions to realism, which Fortune emphatically is not. ‘Sometimes believing is enough to make things true,’ says Krüger (the most quotable character), as if he were speaking of the art of reading.

‘Our lives don’t actually go anywhere.

We are always here, wherever we are,’ says Krüger, again unintentionally invoking the vicarious joys of fiction and standing in as the mouthpiece of the author, whose rigorous pace has taken us from 1806 to 1834 by the conclusion of ‘Book Nine’. In a coda of sorts, Books Ten and Eleven catapult us to 1915 Tasmania and World War I. The end of Bartulin’s grand, rollicking adventure, while not exactly dissatisfying, is insistently dour and perhaps a tad too neat.

I would have preferred the ambiguity of unresolved genealogy. g Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.

‘We want to pour hatred, burning hatred’ The biography of a nobody

Philip Dwyer HITLER: A LIFE

by Peter Longerich, translated by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe Oxford University Press, $59.99 pb, 1,339 pp, 9780190056735

I

t’s a disconcerting image. Piercing blue eyes stare out at you from the cover of the book. It renders Adolf Hitler somehow human, which is the intent of the author, Peter Longerich, and which sets this biography apart from the many others that have preceded it. Two other notable biographers, Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest, refused to engage with Hitler’s personality and declared that he was ‘unhuman’ or a ‘nonperson’. This book, on the other hand, does what few have succeeded in doing well – integrating the life of the man with the history of the Nazi regime.

Longerich depicts Hitler up until the end of World War I as a nobody who had an unimpressive childhood, a down-and-outer in the streets of Vienna, an eccentric loner completely on the margins of society, a colourless figure incapable of connecting with people on an intimate or physical level.

(Longerich implies that he was asexual and probably died a virgin.) The women that came later in his life – his niece Geli Raubal, Magda Goebbels, and Eva Braun – were only ever appendages used to make him look ‘normal’.

Nothing in the first three decades of Hitler’s life pointed to what was to follow, which is what makes this story all that more remarkable. What we do find, however, are a number of personality traits that help explain his actions once he does come to power: a complete lack of empathy; infantile fantasies about himself and the world that bordered on the delusional; an intense anxiety about losing control of his life; and an exaggerated fear of humiliation.

Hitler’s life only found purpose with

the outbreak of war in 1914. Despite the fact that he had earlier moved from Vienna to Munich to dodge the Austrian draft – he was born in Braunau am Inn in the Austrian Empire – Hitler volunteered for the Bavarian Army and, for the first time, led an orderly and disciplined life. He spent most of the war as a runner, that is, relatively safe compared to those in the trenches, although he received the Iron Cross, twice, for feats of bravery.

G e r m a n y ’s u l t i m a t e d e f e a t supposedly came as a great shock to him, which is more an indication of his inability to accept reality, and which laid the foundations for ‘the destructive energy necessary to punish those whom he blamed for the deepest humiliation of his life’. Shortly after the war, at the behest of ultra-conservative members of the German Army, for which he still worked, he joined the German Workers’ Party (later the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). There he uncovered his one and only talent: an ability to speak to crowds for hours about his beliefs and dreams.

When accounting for Hitler’s success as a public speaker in these early years, it is his ‘almost pitiable quality, his awkwardness, his obvious lack of training and … his intensity and ecstatic quality’ that made such an impression on his public. His lack of social graces, shoddy clothing, and poor table manners all betrayed his lower-middle-class origins, but even those flaws did not prevent people from being drawn to him. The enigma is that he was so successful at convincing people that his overblown fantasies

and megalomaniacal imaginings were achievable, indeed realistic.

It is because they fed into the dreams, fears, and hatreds of many middle-class Germans. But not only that. Hitler’s rise to power had as much to do with a conservative political and military élite that despised democracy as with Hitler’s powers of persuasion.

The complicity of the German Army, both in the early stages of his political career and especially in the crimes committed during World War II, the general acceptance of anti-Semitism in the broader public, and the desire of conservative political élites to undermine the fledgling Weimar Republic coincided with the economic difficulties being faced by postwar Germany and the stock-market crash of 1929. The Nazis thus went from an extreme-right-wing group that garnered only a few per cent of the vote to being one of the largest parties in the country in less than ten years.

By the time Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, largely due to political machinations behind the scenes, the Weimar Republic had already ceased to function as a democracy, undermined from within.

What followed was an extremeright-wing revolution, as the Nazis took hold of the state apparatus and gradually eliminated all organised opposition. This required a considerable amount of political skill, but it was only possible because Hitler had millions of supporters. That said, it is clear that the majority of Germans did not enthusiastically support Hitler. The regime survived because it was built BIOGRAPHY

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upon the twin pillars of all dictatorships: fear and surveillance. The Party and the Gestapo were ever vigilant and the slightest opposition to the regime could end in a concentration camp and death.

All of this is outlined in detail, including Hitler’s transformation of German society and his desire to start a war. We have just commemorated the eightieth anniversary of the invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II on 1 September 1939, but there is an argument that it began a year earlier, with the Western democracies’ betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938.

Despite some rapid and notable successes in the opening phases of the war, this was a war Germany could never win, for reasons lucidly explained

by Longerich.

This is a Hitler who was no ‘weak dictator’, as some historians have contended, but one who was in control, and whose personality shaped the course of history. Hitler was thus behind the radicalisation of anti-Semitism – even if people like Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann carried it out – not from a preconceived plan, as is sometimes thought, but rather as a function of the war against Russia and as a means of deliberately implicating his allies in the crimes of the Nazi regime in order to hold together the Axis alliance even as defeat loomed.

Hitler conducted the war as a racially motivated one of extermination.

He refused to listen to advice from his generals, and insisted on his armies ‘standing their ground’ and of fanatically holding the line to the last man, even when tactical withdrawals would have saved hundreds of thousands of troops from annihilation (Stalingrad is only one among many examples). This has often been explained as a result of Hitler being out of touch with reality, unable to give up the illusion of a ‘final victory’, but Longerich explains this irrational decision-making in terms of Hitler’s ‘all or nothing’ attitude, born of the defeat of 1918. There could be no capitulation, only victory or defeat that would end in total destruction, or, as Hitler preferred to put it, a ‘heroic downfall’. It was this fantasy that cost the lives of millions of people in the last years of the war.

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This is certainly one of the best biographies of Hitler on the market.

Longerich is one of the most established historians of the Third Reich, with acclaimed biographies of Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. The reader then is in very capable hands.

What is missing, and what I find frustrating as a biographer, is any real sense of getting to ‘know’ Hitler, if that is at all possible. We are told, for example, that Hitler was prone to ‘fits of rage’, without any speculation about the deep source of that rage. Some might argue that this is prudent. It is true that Longerich does a better job than most at trying to get at the personality behind the façade, and of trying to understand Hitler’s motives, but we don’t really get any sense of how, once in power, Hitler so easily developed his murderous disposition.

More than seventy years after the death of one of the bloodiest tyrants in

history, our knowledge of the man and his regime is still evolving. This will not be the last word on the Hitler, and it is not the ‘definitive’ biography that some have already made out. It is, however, an object lesson in what can happen when extremes are given a voice and belief in democracy is undermined. History never repeats itself, but we ignore its lessons at our own peril.

In 1921, Hitler wrote, ‘We want to pour hatred, burning hatred into the souls of millions of our national comrades.’ Consciously or not, any number of populist politicians in the West seem to be doing exactly that. g Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, including a three-volume biography of Napoleon. ❖

What now?

When democracies face an existential threat

Glyn Davis APPEASING HITLER: CHAMBERLAIN, CHURCHILL AND THE ROAD TO WAR

by Tim Bouverie The Bodley Head, $35 pb, 510 pp, 9781847924414

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peechless, Adolf Hitler sat glowering at Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Since 1933 the führer had gambled repeatedly that France and Britain would capitulate to his latest demands. Now he tried again, reassured by Ribbentrop (no aristocrat, a vain man who had purchased his title) that the feckless Allies would not intervene if Germany invaded Poland.

Yet an ultimatum threatening war had just arrived from London.

‘What now?’ demanded Hitler.

After so many triumphs, the führer had finally overreached. It was the end of summer, 1939. Hitler would be dead by his own hand in May 1945, amid

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the ashes of his defeated capital. Tried by the Allies at Nuremberg, Ribbentrop would be the first Nazi leader hanged for his role in a barbarous regime.

In Appeasing Hitler, a skilfully crafted account of a low, dishonest decade, political journalist Tim Bouverie recounts the British miscalculations – some honourable, others foolish, a handful treacherous – expressed as the policy of appeasement. Efforts to accommodate the dictators and thus prevent another war found prominent supporters in Britain throughout the 1930s. Some politicians had turned pacifist after the horrors of World War I. Others, opposing rearmament as fatal to

a fragile peace, trusted in international tortured logic, ‘Assuming that the BBC British people to another war. When he organisations, notably the League of is for the people, and the Government is returned from Munich in September Nations and the 1925 Locarno Treaties. for the people, it follows that the BBC 1938, waving his agreement with HitThere were conservatives who feared must be for the Government.’ ler and promising ‘peace for our time’, communism and found much to admire Even Mussolini expressed quiet thousands lined the streets to cheer him in Hitler and Mussolini, those on the astonishment that British government on the drive home from the airport. left who distrusted British militarism, representatives could be so gullible Downing Street was flooded with letters and a welter of naïve aristocrats who, about the persistently dishonest Hitler. from grateful citizens. ‘With the pospace The Remains of the Day, felt that Yet not everyone was fooled. There sible exception of Our Lord,’ wrote one they could achieve peace with Germany were informed players in Chamberlain’s elderly correspondent, ‘no greater man through private negotiation. own party who understood the clear than Mr Chamberlain has ever trod All these strands are document- and present danger. Hitler’s ruthless this earth.’ ed by Bouverie, who often draws suppression of opponents, his animus And yet Munich was neither an on private letters. His honourable peace nor a central focus, though, wise policy. Britain may remains a portrait of not have been ready Neville Chamberlain, to fight in 1938, but mayor of Birmingham, neither was Germany, appointed a minister in as Hitler well knew.

1922, Chancellor of the Bluff was his favourExchequer during the ite tactic – the 3,000 Depression, and prime German soldiers who minister from May 1937. re-occupied the RhineAppeasing Hitler porland in 1936 were untrays a Chamberlain who der order to retreat is optimistic, vain, and immediately at the overly confident of his first sign of French own judgement. This aggression. It never leader was genuine in came. Hitler watched his wish to avoid war but the Allies complain but sometimes underhand in make no serious efforts his tactics, reinforcing to oppose Mussolini’s German perceptions of invasion of Abyssinia, a foolish British ruling nor Japanese aggresNeville Chamberlain holding the paper containing the resolution to commit to peaceful methods signed by both Hitler and himself on his return from Munich, class. sion in Manchuria 30 September 1938 (photograph by the Ministry of Information, Appeasement did and China. Germany D 2239 Imperial War Museum, via Wikimedia Commons) not start with Chamberflouted international lain, though he became agreements without the public face of seeking an accord toward Jews, revealed the character of consequence. Britain and France igwith Hitler to prevent conflict. From the man. So did Mein Kampf, in which nored blatant fascist involvement in the 1933 a succession of impressionable the future führer helpfully laid out his Spanish Civil War. So Hitler marched British élites visited Nazi Germany, vile views and global ambitions. into Austria, the Sudetenland, and, were awed by the Nuremberg rallies, Yet Chamberlain thought it pos- finally, all of Czechoslovakia after disand left private meetings convinced sible to deal with such a man. In the acid plays of bravado, theatrical posturing, that Hitler was a reasonable man who observation of Conservative politician and unsubtle threats that saw the Allies just wanted to reclaim dignity for his Duff Cooper, ‘Chamberlain had never rush to soothe him with compromise. nation. Media baron Lord Beaverbrook met anyone in Birmingham who in the By 1939, as the tyrant eyed Poland, why returned from Berlin sure that reports least resembled Adolf Hitler.’ The prime would he take seriously concerns from of the persecution of Jews were exag- minister was used to rational, sensible a dour Englishman with an umbrella? gerated. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of people – rather like himself – who In a thoughtful conclusion to The Times, backed Chamberlain despite were honest and could make a deal. For Appeasing Hitler, Bouverie carefully reports from his own reporters on the Cooper, Chamberlain resembled ‘a little weighs arguments for and against apContinent about German intentions. boy who played with a wolf under the peasement. He acknowledges ChamSadly, public broadcasting did not offer impression that it was a sheep’. berlain’s sincere abhorrence of war and a more analytical view. BBC DirectorIn mitigation, Chamberlain under- his awareness of the public’s longing General John Reith was keen not to stood the weakness of British military for peace. Yet it was Chamberlain’s offend Germany. As he argued, with preparation and the clear aversion of the poor judgement that exposed Britain HISTORY

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to danger. The prime minister ignored intelligence reports, often sourced from within the German armed forces, pointing to Hitler’s duplicity. He isolated the handful of Tories, including Churchill, who spoke up against the dictators. He fumbled an alliance with the Soviet Union and spurned proposals from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A program of rearmament began late, long after the march to war was evident.

Determined to ignore unwelcome facts, Chamberlain and his supporters left their nation tragically vulnerable.

Why write such a book now? The topic is familiar and much covered.

Bouverie offers a fine synthesis and some original research, but essentially confirms judgements familiar from other texts. Chamberlain misjudged his times, and eventually found himself in an untenable position. Parliament turned to Winston Churchill to lead the nation in a now unavoidable, long, and bloody war.

Bouverie signed a contract for his book in November 2015, just months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, a nation once more in splendid isolation. Lurking beneath the text is a question that has renewed urgency: why do democracies wilt when faced with an existential crisis? Hitler made his intentions clear, yet egregious newspaper proprietors claimed the threat was elsewhere and politicians followed rather than led. Expert opinion was shunned, apologists preferred to realists. As Bouverie notes, the story might have ended differently had Britain’s leaders ‘spelled out the nature of the German threat and the need to resist it’. In fact, the British public decided that Hitler was a liar long before the political class; when a poll found that eighty-six per cent of those surveyed

56 O CTOBER 2019

did not believe Hitler’s denial of further territorial ambitions, the chairman of the News Chronicle, Sir Walter Layton, sought to suppress the finding. He was worried the news might ‘exacerbate feelings in Germany’.

Perhaps Brexit poses another existential crisis facing Britain, just as authoritarian states again make territorial claims to test Western resolve.

Readers may reflect on how democracies – and their media owners – respond

to the threat of climate change. The failure of the 1930s to register reality and respond was nearly fatal for Britain.

History repeats not as detail but as pattern. Will we too find ourselves at the sharp end of a fatal miscalculation, stare blankly, and ask, ‘What now?’ g Glyn Davis is CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.

Europe’s familiar Other A history of Europe’s contentious quadrant

Iva Glisic THE GREAT CAULDRON: A HISTORY OF SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE

by Marie-Janine Calic, translated by Elizabeth Janik

Harvard University Press (Footprint), $89 hb, 734 pp, 9780674983922

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outh-eastern Europe is a region defined by ambiguity: with few clear geographic boundaries or consensus over its correct appellation, it is a palimpsest bearing the marks of Balkan, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, and central European cultures. As the identities of the region’s inhabitants have shifted across the centuries, their position within the European imagination has never quite settled – south-eastern Europeans remain at once familiar, yet foreign and mystifying. Of course, such a perception leaves a good deal to be unpacked. Taking up this challenge with The Great Cauldron: A history of Southeastern Europe, Marie-

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Janine Calic provides a sweeping overview of the history of this region and its people, from the late antiquity to the present day. Translated from the German by Elizabeth Janik, this 734-page volume adopts the perspective of global history in an effort to provide a new account of this contentious quadrant of Europe.

Drawing upon published sources in seven European languages, The Great Cauldron is a tremendous work of synthesis. Its originality lies primarily in Calic’s curation of existing scholarship on territories that in the twentieth century became part of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and Greece.

The work sets aside familiar explanatory frameworks by which the history of this region is interpreted either as a linear evolution of nation states, or else as an imperial periphery viewed from distant centres of Vienna, Istanbul, or Venice. Calic also eschews the approach of reading this history through the Western categories of progress and modernisation. In arguing that these approaches often fail to consider southeastern Europe on its own terms, Calic traces the history of this region and its inhabitants across a series of global interactions and interrelationships. Her exhaustive mapping of political, cultural, and economic trends is rhythmically punctuated with micro-histories of specific places at critical moments in time, and biographical sketches of those who facilitated transborder encounters.

The study opens with an examination of the region’s earliest recorded history and its emergence as the titular great cauldron of peoples, languages, alphabets, beliefs, and religions. The rise of Christianity in late antiquity is here treated as one of the original global forces that shaped the profile of southeastern Europe. Yet although Christianity had a decisive influence, Calic insists that its impact was by no means uniform – for centuries the region remained not only a battleground between Latin and Byzantine Christian practices, but also a centre of one of the most influential pan-European heretical movements. In illustrating how megatrends such as the rise of Christianity manifested themselves differently across the region’s uneven terrain, Calic sets a strong basis for a historical analysis that treats south-eastern Europe in its own right, rather than as the West’s Other. The region’s integration into the networks of early merchant capitalism – an intricate web of trade, knowledge exchange, migration, and pilgrimage – is given similarly detailed treatment.

While the age of empires saw these lands divided between Ottoman and Habsburg rule, The Great Cauldron again sets aside the habitual framing of south-eastern Europe as a border zone.

Instead, the region and its inhabitants are positioned as nodes within a transcontinental imperial network, which,

in the case of the Ottoman Empire, spanned from Morocco to Iran, and from the gates of Vienna to Mecca.

Calic’s examination of the impact of geographic discovery and transatlantic trade on the Ottoman Empire is especially intriguing, in that it reveals how an inflexible response to shifting patterns of global trade left a permanent imprint on the economic development of the territories under Ottoman rule.

In perhaps the book’s most enthralling use of micro-history, Calic zeros in on the Croatian coastal city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in 1776 – the year of America’s declaration of independence.

As ruling élites grapple to understand how this development might impact the city’s position within global maritime trade, Calic shifts her attention to popular forms of leisure in Ragusa, and the story of a local monk playing soccer in front of his church to the amusement of curious onlookers. These vignettes serve as a subtle reminder that, for the vast majority, there is often something profoundly abstract about even the most significant of global shifts.

Of course, both the American and subsequent French Revolution were major sources of inspiration for those seeking independence from their Ottoman or Habsburg rulers. Yet while the heroic fight for national liberation would provide ample material for Romantic poets and artists across Europe – and famously prompted Lord Byron to join the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans – Calic’s account of the emergence of nation states in south-eastern Europe is anything but romantic. Here the author methodically maps out the vectors of violence that led to the collapse of the great empires and the rise of new sovereign states.

The Great Cauldron does an admirable job of tracing how the extreme violence that accompanied various wars of independence in south-eastern Europe inspired genuine international efforts to define strategies for modern conflict management, while also giving way to the stereotypes of this region as quintessentially backward and anarchic.

This characterisation would, of course, be repeatedly deployed throughout the twentieth century to justify military and

political intervention by global powers seeking to promote or secure their own interests across the region.

Calic’s positioning of south-eastern Europe within the global history of the Cold War period unfolds mainly through an account of socialist Yugoslavia and its role as the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement – an organisation of countries not formally aligned with either of the major power blocs.

This involvement brought the region into direct contact with numerous other countries (particularly those of the ‘Global South’) and thus opened new channels of economic and cultural exchange. Similarly, in examining the fall of communist regimes across southeastern Europe, Calic trains her focus on the Yugoslav experience, as both the fratricidal war that followed its dissolution and the subsequent revolutions in its successor states redefined, for better or worse, international instruments of conflict resolution.

Informed, comprehensive, and methodical, The Great Cauldron provides valuable insight into south-eastern Europe and its turbulent past. While it presumes a level of subject matter familiarity from its readers in some parts and flattens complex issues in others, for the most part Calic provides an artful and engaging narrative. Its conclusion, however, is somewhat lacking. In seeking to deal with the region’s recent (and, in some cases, pending) integration into the European Union, Calic avoids critical engagement with what has largely been a traumatic and uneven process.

Furthermore, her failure to better integrate the stories of women who shaped this history represents a lost opportunity to unsettle not only geographic but also gender assumptions about the region.

Ultimately, The Great Cauldron is a valuable resource for reframing established categories of centre and periphery, and it provides important insight into a part of the world that has always been globally connected. g Iva Glisic is the author of The Futurist Files: Avant-garde, politics, and ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (2018) and a researcher at the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

HISTORY

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Shared rights

The neoliberal assault on the common good

Judith Brett THE POLITICS OF THE COMMON GOOD: DISPOSSESSION IN AUSTRALIA

by Jane R. Goodall NewSouth, $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781742236018

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he commons, the common good, the commonwealth: all words for humans’ shared right to the fruits of the earth to sustain their lives, and all words with deep political histories. In The Politics of the Common Good, Jane R. Goodall excavates some of these deep histories, beginning with the Diggers and Levellers of mid-seventeenthcentury England who, in protest against landlords’ enclosures, laid claim to the people’s traditional rights to common ground. In different circumstances in Australia in the late 1960s, the Gurindji made a similar claim to their traditional lands at Wave Hill.

Although Goodall sees the shared rights to the earth as the basic common good, she is as concerned with social and cultural commons, with what we are as likely to describe nowadays as public goods – civic buildings, like public libraries and halls, and a sense of ownership of shared familiar social spaces that make people feel part of a community.

Over the last half century or so, as neoliberalism has become the dominant policy framework for governments from the national to the local, we have been dispossessed of these commons, hence the book’s subtitle. For example, our cities and country towns are full of beautiful stone and brick civic buildings built by earlier generations. Many have been left to deteriorate or been sold to help pay council bills. Goodall observes: ‘There is no end, it seems, to what we cannot afford as the health of the budget trumps all other concerns and we find ourselves in a situation where human welfare comes second to a budget surplus.’ Just ask anyone on Newstart.

In Goodall’s account, the neoliberal assault on the common good started 58 O CTOBER 2019

with Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 in the shadow of two totalitarian regimes, one collapsing, the other consolidating its power. Hayek championed individual liberty operating through markets against collectivism, which he believed led inevitably to socialist dictatorships. A few years later, he established the Mont Pelerin Society to convince political élites and the wider public of the superiority of markets to governments in the distribution of the resources. Hayek believed that markets, as systems for coordinating the actions of competitive, self-interested individuals, were more efficient and transparent than top-down government actions and institutions.

Hayek’s ideas were marginal until the collapse of faith in Keynesianism in the mid-1970s, when they became an alternative policy framework. Over the next few decades, as the balance between markets and governments shifted in favour of markets, government-owned enterprises like banks, transport, and energy utilities were privatised. The delivery of some government services was contracted out and competitive principles were built into the allocation of resources to others, many in the health and welfare areas.

Regulations that constrained private economic activity were weakened to allow easier pursuit of profit. And governments sought ever more novel ways of reducing their expenditure. Since the mid-1980s the institutional cultures of hospitals, schools, universities, public libraries, art galleries, and museums have changed dramatically. The result has been a people increasingly dispossessed of their commons.

Some neoliberal policies were suc-

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cessful, such as the selling of Qantas, but many are now mired in controversy and dysfunction. The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry revealed an astonishing loss of moral compass in once-trusted organisations, much of it easily explained by internal reward systems based on competitive self-interest. The Royal Commission into Aged Care is currently uncovering shocking stories of neglect and of the suffering of frail elderly people in understaffed nursing homes. We have a crisis of homelessness, and repeated annual efficiency dividends are threatening the core capacities of public cultural institutions. All this in a rich country.

One of the book’s aims is to remind readers of the recent history of neoliberalism, and Goodall does this admirably.

Another is to think about what comes next.

Goodall begins her book with a quote from the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in 1930: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ At this moment when élite faith in neoliberalism is weakening, Goodall wonders if the old order is dying and if we might be on the brink of a radical transformation in our way of life. Certainly much seems to be unravelling, and a progressive way ahead is not clear. This is the impulse for Goodall’s resurrection of ideas and cooperative practices aimed at advancing the common good.

The book discusses an eclectic mix of these, but I did not find them very convincing. They are small scale and

local, like the New South Wales village of Gundaroo, which has a strong sense of its history and has continued to manage its essential infrastructure through Crown Reserve Trusts and locally incorporated bodies. When Goodall writes about people’s need for more meaningful work, her touchstone is William Morris and his celebration of artisan craft. It is always easier to diagnose problems than to solve them, but as the book proceeds the early focus on neoliberalism is lost and corporations, the corporate sector, and corporate interests are more frequently cited as the attackers of common interests. Just what these are

is never clear, nor whether they are the same as business interests, or something different. I suspect they are different, but I would have liked more precision.

Romaldo Giurgola, who won the design competition for Australia’s new parliament house, set it into Capitol Hill rather than situating it on top. The latter, he said, would have symbolised a government imposed on the people.

Instead, the roof of the building was covered with a wide expanse of publicly accessible lawn where people could walk and sit on top of the politicians. Much of this is now enclosed in high security fences, to protect the parliament from

terrorist attacks and, one suspects, from disruptive public protests. It shows, writes Goodall, that government respect for public ownership and public rights is at an all-time low. Hence the timeliness of reviving the idea of the commons, especially in a country that calls itself the Commonwealth of Australia. g Judith Brett’s most recent book is From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got compulsory voting (Text Publishing, 2019). Her biography of Alfred Deakin, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, won the 2018 National Biography Award (Text Publishing, 2017).

Hailstone Villanelle Hailstones in misshapen formation pound on roof corrugations, distorted in scrying before reaching their target, feathers and leaves stripped, birds and trees in transition.

To taste the fracture when air pressure is shaken and unshaken, and lightning brings its personalised thunder close to a house in retreat, hailstones misshapen in formation pound on the roof ’s corrugations.

What can you portend when there are no signs of exposition, when as sudden as sky the ground is remade as ice in white heat?

Feathers and leaves stripped, birds and trees in remission.

Which feather belongs to which absent bird, how did it pattern a flight path laid bare to updraft the wet into frozen conflict?

Hailstones in misshapen formation pound on the roof ’s corrugations.

Jagged as quartz exposed in red earth after the deluge’s erosion, violent as an orbuculum’s sheen of hope broken by its clairvoyant, feathers and leaves stripped as birds and trees are lost in transition.

Milky-centred fist-sized stones resist melting after devastation – each leaf green as when torn away, strips of bark clean as skin, feathers rent; hailstones in misshapen formation pound on the roof ’s corrugations, feathers and leaves, stripped birds and trees in remission.

John Kinsella

John Kinsella’s most recent book is Hollow Earth (2019).

POLITICS

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Gun talk

Kieran Pender

GUN CONTROL: WHAT AUSTRALIA GOT RIGHT (AND WRONG)

by Tom Frame

UNSW Press $34.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781742236346

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his is an unusual book. It is, so the title indicates, about guns and firearm regulations in Australia, with some comparison to the United States. But, as a prefatory note to readers cautions, ‘this book is less about guns and more about the continuing tension between the authority and power of the state and the responsibilities and entitlements of citizens’. It is also a treatise on state–Commonwealth relations in Australia’s federal system, an intriguing case study of collaboration and conflict between the various islands of power embedded in our Constitution.

Tom Frame’s latest book is thus, simultaneously, very much about guns and not really about guns at all. That makes it a stimulating and challenging read.

The publication of Gun Control could not be timelier. The debate over firearm regulation rages in the United States, where mass shootings have become the norm rather than aberrations.

In the month between receipt of this book and finalising the present review, America endured several multiple-fatality incidents. The Australian experience is commonly cited in discourse in the United States, to mixed reaction in a polarised landscape. In March 2019, New Zealand was rocked by the worst mass shooting in its history; an Australian awaits trial. The 2014 Lindt Café siege remains fresh in the memory of Sydneysiders.

Despite extensive consideration domestically and abroad of the most effective way to regulate firearms, the discussion has been unproductive and characterised by polarity. ‘The inability to talk sensibly and constructively about reviewing and reforming firearm legislation is perhaps the most lamentable outcome of the Australian experience,’ Frame writes. To address this lacuna, the author seeks to offer a sophisticated 60 O CTOBER 2019

analysis that navigates a nuanced middle ground. ‘This is a complex debate …

[It] cannot be reduced to simple slogans and sound bites,’ he continues. ‘I have tried to avoid them in what follows.’

Frame largely succeeds, an impressive feat given the high emotions, bitter divisions, and political complexities prevailing in this context.

The shadow of the 1996 Port Arthur massacre looms large throughout this book and in any discussion of gun control in Australia. A direct line can be drawn from Martin Bryant’s mass murder of thirty-five people to the National Firearms Agreement (NFA), ‘a watershed in Australia public life’, which imposed stringent limitations on gun usage via a political compact between the federal, state, and territory governments. Much of Gun Control is a careful history of the political and regulatory reaction to the 1996 shootings.

Then-Prime Minister John Howard and Nationals Leader Tim Fischer feature heavily – two central characters in the creation of the NFA, which the former cites among his major achievements.

More than two decades of perspective enable Frame to analyse the successes and failures of the NFA. He summarises numerous data-rich studies on the link between the regulatory regime and gun-crime trends. That research is ultimately inconclusive. Some contend that the absence of a mass shooting since Port Arthur is proof enough of success, although definitional disagreement about what constitutes a ‘mass’ shooting and the inability to prove causation leave such claims open to challenge.

Gun-related violent crime and suicides have decreased since 1996, although, again, the NFA’s influence is not certain.

Frame does not dismiss the scheme, but his nuanced appraisal is a reminder, in the words of one quoted researcher, of the need to avoid ‘myopic pride in our gun laws’ and to apply ‘intellectual honesty’ in determining the NFA’s efficacy.

Two primary criticisms can be levelled at Gun Control. First, it lacks a strong narrative arc and feels at times disjointed. The author begins with an introduction, note to readers, and glossary before his first substantive chapter covers the political context at the time of Port

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Arthur. The book repeatedly returns to 1996 and its aftermath, while the ensuing chapters consider more recent developments, delve back into history, and venture across the Pacific to the US experience. Although the macro structure is broadly chronological,from Port Arthur to present, the frequent temporal and geographical jumps can be disconcerting.

Secondly, too little of the book is directed towards practical suggestions for regulatory reform. Frame takes a long run-up at the position that ‘the case for amending the NFA is compelling’. He argues that the agreement ‘is neither immutable nor infallible’, pointing to numerous deficiencies in design and implementation. Considering the NFA above revision, he posits, would be ‘a form of legislative idolatry.’ Frame’s case is convincing, but his subsequent guidance is limited – a section entitled ‘How should the NFA be revised?’ runs to just five pages.

In a subsequent chapter, Frame points to road rules as a successful example of cooperative federal–state standardisation, notwithstanding ongoing flux.

Beyond this and a handful of narrow criticisms of distinct aspects of the NFA, there is little persuasive insight as to how exactly Australia should strike the appropriate ‘balance between state authority and individual liberty’ in this arena. A manual for reform may not have been Frame’s intention, but it feels like a missed opportunity nonetheless.

These minor critiques do not detract from what is an impressive, articulate, and much-needed reflection on a topic of upmost public importance. Frame concludes by insisting that ‘the NFA cannot be the “last word” in the way firearms are regulated in Australia’. He calls for ‘the whole community to engage in discussion about firearms’, a debate informed by ‘facts rather than fears’. This plea is laudable. There are, though, few indications that Australia’s fractious, post-truth political landscape can sustain such an informed discussion at present. To the extent it can, Frame’s Gun Control is an excellent primer. One can only hope that it does not take another Port Arthur for his suggestion to be heeded. g Kieran Pender is a writer and lawyer.

Grim messages Sayomi Ariyawansa ADDRESSING MODERN SLAVERY

by Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma UNSW Press $29.99 pb, 254 pp, 9781742236438

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hen the Bill that became the Modern Slavery Act 2018 (Cth) was introduced into the federal parliament, it was accompanied by a grim message: two centuries after the abolition of the slave trade in the United Kingdom, it is estimated that there are twenty-five million victims of modern slavery worldwide. It also came with a bracing if Panglossian promise: that the Modern Slavery Act would ‘transform’ the way large companies in Australia do business, and drive a ‘race to the top’. Published a year after the introduction of this legislation, Addressing Modern Slavery is a timely reflection on the pervasiveness of modern slavery in global supply chains – and on the role of the state, business, and other actors in combating this serious and complex problem.

From the outset, Justine Nolan and Martijn Boersma tackle one of the persistent bugbears of contemporary discourse on modern slavery: the lack of a standard definition of ‘modern slavery’. In so doing, they also confront critiques of the use of this term. As Nolan and Boersma note, the term ‘modern slavery’ is inherently emotive and calls to mind the spectre of evil wrongdoers to be punished and helpless victims to be saved. This, as the authors observe, obscures the systemic and structural causes of this type of exploitation and ‘den[ies] agency to those exploited’. Nonetheless, Nolan and Boersma adopt the language of modern slavery, explicitly acknowledging its currency in public conversation.

They define the term broadly: ‘modern slavery’ encapsulates a ‘continuum of labour exploitation’ – the crux of which is the exercise of ‘abusive control’ by an employer over a worker, including by coercing or manipulating a worker to accept exploitative working conditions.

In this way, Nolan and Boersma suggest that labour exploitation can span from conduct ordinarily regulated by workplace laws (such as underpayment of wages) to conduct that is usually characterised as criminal (such as slavery, servitude, and slavery-like conditions). This is part of a conscious effort, by the authors, to recast the problem of modern slavery and locate it within the social, political, and economic realities of our globalised world.

This is one of the central themes of the text. Throughout, Nolan and Boersma discuss the pervasiveness of modern slavery in our everyday lives. First, consider a simple transaction: paying someone to hand wash your car. The authors reveal that the car-washing industry has been identified as a high-risk area for labour exploitation in the United Kingdom, with some businesses being accused of misconduct including threatening or forcing employees to work, withholding the payment of wages, and failing to provide necessary safety equipment for the chemicals used. Recently, Australian car wash businesses have been taken to task by the Fair Work Ombudsman for the deliberate and calculated underpayment of wages.

Then, consider the more complex cross-border transactions involved when building a car in the first place. Modern slavery is almost certainly present. The mining of the mineral mica – which gives car paint its metallic sheen – has been linked to the deaths of child miners, to give just one example. In this way, both individual consumers (the car owner) and large corporations (the car manufacturer) can be the beneficiaries of modern slavery. These examples also illuminate the transnational aspect of modern slavery. Exploited car wash employees are often migrant workers.

What happens in an illegal mine in India can taint cars that are purchased in Australia, many months later. This transnational element is identified as a key challenge when seeking to address the problem of modern slavery. Existing legal frameworks assume a level of state responsibility for the protection of fundamental human rights, while multinational corporations wield significant power and influence over global supply chains.

This book is commendably ambitious in scope. However, coupled with this – perhaps inevitably – is the application at times of a broad brush.

This results in the relatively cursory treatment of certain matters. For example, the authors analyse the responses of different states to the problem of modern slavery by comparing legislation that requires companies (including multinational corporations) to report on their efforts to identify and address the risk of modern slavery in their supply chain. Other state responses are largely put to one side, including the role of labour inspectorates and other forms of labour supply-chain regulation, such as labour-hire licensing. Additionally, while the authors consider some examples of worker organisation, in general, there remains further scope for the authors to use their considerable expertise to more fully interrogate the role of unions and the labour movement.

Finally, the reader may have benefited from further discussion of relevant empirical studies on the efficacy of business-led private regulation of workplace standards in global supply chains.

A challenging and thought-provoking picture has emerged from these studies about the notion of a ‘corporate social conscience’ and its impact in practice.

Addressing Modern Slavery concludes that collaborative efforts are required to address the scourge of modern slavery. The book is at its most compelling in its detailed account of how modern slavery taints our lives each day. It is a sobering realisation.

Nolan and Boersma’s final call to arms – to take actions, both small and large, to eradicate modern slavery together – could not be more urgent. g

Sayomi Ariyawansa is a Melbourne lawyer and Research Fellow at the Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law, University of Melbourne. ❖ SOCIETY

61

Don the divider

An elegant biography of the maverick politician

Christina Slade DON DUNSTAN: THE VISIONARY POLITICIAN WHO CHANGED AUSTRALIA

by Angela Woollacott Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 344 pp, 9781760631819

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on Dunstan tended to divide those around him, even his parents. His father, Viv, moved from Adelaide to become a company man in Fiji. Peter Kearsley, a contemporary of Don’s who later became chief justice of Fiji, said Viv was ‘a fair dinkum sort of chap’, ‘the sort who would have been an office bearer in a bowling club’. His mother, according to Kearsley, was ‘genteel … deliberately countering stereotypes of what Australians were like. She would not even let Don play rugger.’ She disapproved of his friendship with neighbouring children – the part-Fijian Bill Sorby and the young K.B. Singh. Dunstan himself traced his awareness of racism to his childhood.

Dunstan was sent to St Peter’s College where the young men of the Adelaide Establishment were schooled.

He was one of a group called ‘Us with a capital u’, which another member, Donald Simpson, recalled was ‘very pretentious’. He spent the war at school and university, unable to return to Fiji. At Adelaide University he was involved in drama and student politics. He moved on from the conservativism of his family and schooling. He married Gretel Ellis, the highly intelligent daughter of Jewish refugees. She and her family brought European culture to Dunstan; he adopted elements of their food and attitudes. After a short period in Fiji, when Dunstan controversially defended Indians in his legal practice, the couple returned to Adelaide. He set up as a lawyer in Victoria Square, but business was slow and Gretel was obliged to take in boarders to make ends meet.

The young couple became active in the Labor Party, and Dunstan began his 62 O CTOBER 2019

extraordinary political career.

The Establishment thought of him as a class traitor with, gossip had it, a touch of the tar brush. He supported Aboriginal rights and was responsible for removing the White Australia Policy from Labor policy. With his pebble glasses and stoop, he did not fit Labor stereotypes. He systematically transformed himself. He acquired contact lenses and developed his physique by regular attendance at a gym, long before this became fashionable. He found his voice. He could debate policy and legal details, sway crowds, and connect in the pub. His voice never lost its educated accent or resonance, but his passionate commitment was persuasive.

Dunstan became ‘the visionary politician who changed Australia’, as Angela Woollacott subtitles her biography. With admirable elegance and impeccable historical judgement, she traces the story of his election as the Labor MP for Norwood in suburban Adelaide, his role in federal Labor and his rise to become the stylish reforming premier of South Australia (1967–68 and 1970–79). She wears her scholarship lightly, weaving a gripping personal story with a nuanced account of the social changes of the period.

Never ponderous or didactic, she keeps a tight control over the material. The reader is in safe hands. From his early contributions to national ALP policy, through the complexities of his last year in power, Woollacott lays out the story with clarity. The extended footnotes show just how widely she ranged, from policy documents, archives, school records, personal conversations, and journalism. To take just one example, notes in Chapter Thirteen cite a Mike

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Walsh television interview from 1980, a 2017 email from Mike Rann to Woollacott, and a letter from Shirley Hazzard to Dunstan in 1979.

Woollacott’s achievement is the more remarkable because Dunstan’s friends and acquaintances had such widely different views of him. Dunstan segmented his life. My own perspective was as a family friend, just one of mutually exclusive groups who claimed him as their own. It is difficult for a single narrative to encompass the statesman, the cultural figure, the exotic cook, and the gay icon. Woollacott is never prurient, but nor does she fight shy of the complexity. She connects Dunstan’s sense of justice and his youth in Fiji,traces his life as a passionate cook and sensualist from a tropical childhood, and identifies his vulnerabilities and need for loyalty. Woollacott describes Dunstan’s personal life with considerable tact. She deals dispassionately with the separation from Gretel, by then a lecturer at Adelaide University; the death of Adele Koh, his second wife; his unsavoury friend John Ceruto; and his last partner, Stephen Cheng.

Dunstan’s vision brought together Fabian views with a personal sense of fair play and respect for individuals.

In addition to fighting for Aboriginal rights, he also developed close friendships with the community, as he did with migrant groups. He became a strong advocate for Australia’s links with Asia. He valued the environment and fought to protect Adelaide from developers. He promoted it not as the city of churches but as a vibrant festival city, with a European café culture and tolerant attitudes. He was an early supporter of second-wave feminism, equal pay

for women, and abortion law reform.

His defence of his views was always robust. He was intolerant of those who disagreed with him. He could be scathing, whether about the South Australian gerrymander, inappropriate police action, or others’ slowness to understand.

Woollacott is masterly in her management of material. Chapter headings give the flavour of her approach: ‘Mem-

Dunstan’s vision brought together Fabian views with a personal sense of respect for individuals ber for Norwood’, ‘Labor Supreme at Last’, ‘Adelaide Is Not Canberra’. ‘The Perfect Storm’ describes Dunstan’s last year in office, when he dismissed the state police commissioner, Harold Salisbury, on the grounds that he refused to destroy police files when directed by the government. Woollacott describes Salisbury’s views: ‘In refusing to resign, Salisbury would explain, bizarrely, that he believed he was answerable “to the law … to the Crown and not to any politically elected government”.’

That ‘bizarrely’ is as judgemental as Woollacott gets. Dunstan’s ill health and resignation is searingly sad, in part because it is presented with such restraint. Hubris there may have been, but the story is a tragedy. The final chapters, ‘New Careers’ and ‘Final Acts’, have an elegiac tone, as if the final chapters of the Greek tragedies Dunstan himself loved so well.

A biography of Don Dunstan is well overdue. Woollacott has done an exemplary job of a task that has defeated many. Dunstan had a quick and sharp wit. He was verbally competitive even in social situations, and certainly in political life. He loved to laugh. Even if his inimitable voice can’t always be heard here, those well-rounded tones in elegant phrases, even if something is still missing, this is as informed a portrait as we’re likely to get. g Christina Slade is Emeritus Professor at Bath Spa University, where she was the Vice-Chancellor. ❖

Hons and Revs

The need for community and connection

Jacqueline Kent A LOT WITH A LITTLE

by Tim Costello

Hardie Grant Books, $45 hb, 336 pp, 9781743795521

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his autobiography by Tim Costello – Baptist minister, lawyer, anti-casino activist, CEO of World Vision Australia for thirteen years – is a clear and straightforward account of his life, free of obvious literary artifice. What Costello has tried to do, he says, is to understand and explain how his memories and experiences, especially of childhood and family life, have made him develop as an adult, often in ways that have become apparent only with maturity.

Costello grew up in 1950s suburban Melbourne, the eldest of three children: his brother, Peter, Australia’s longestserving federal treasurer, is two years younger. Theirs was a small, safe world, and the Costello children had fairly standard childhoods: Costello mentions the excitement of television, joining gangs, playing in the bush. They also brought stray kids home from school for meals; Tim and his mother usually looked after them. Their father, Russell, joined the Baptist Church as a young man and spent his entire working life as a teacher at a Baptist grammar school. Anne, their mother, came from a middle-class background and overcame cardiac problems to study arts and social studies; she combined family life with teaching. The Costello parents met at university, and Tim, Peter, and his sister, Janet, were all brought up to believe in the importance of education.

They were all staunch members of the Baptist church. (Anne noted that her children all became ministers: the Honourable Peter and the Revs Tim and Janet.) However, their family life was less harmonious than this statement implies. Russell was austere, reserved, and a strict disciplinarian, not much of a reader except for the Bible. Anne,

on the other hand, was sociable, loved books, and was vitally interested in the world around her. Though Costello does not say so, his mother evidently craved a bigger life, like so many women of her time. And like so many thwarted women, she encouraged her children, especially her two sons, to be competitive and to make their mark on the world. Costello writes: ‘My mother’s message to us was that we were the best, we must succeed, and we must impress the right people. Dad wasn’t the slightest bit interested in success.

For him it was character and faithfulness and staying true to the vision of God’s will.’ Costello says he absorbed both lessons: ‘My bookends in life had been Dad’s faith, which was unswerving and committed at the core, and Mum’s faith, which was open at the edges.’

And though he does not spell this out, it is not difficult to see that the parents’ marriage, and Costello family life generally, had its tensions and conflicts.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is Costello’s tracing of these contrasting views of life and faith in his own life and that of his brother. ( Janet, who became a teacher and Baptist church worker, doesn’t really get much of a mention.) Peter seems to have absorbed his mother’s message about getting ahead more comprehensively than his brother: he was always very disciplined and focused, determined to succeed in his own world of the law and politics – despite his father’s innate suspicion of both. When he entered politics, he was told to play down his religious background for fear of being considered some kind of fanatic.

Tim, on the other hand, has made it his business to explore the relationship between religious faith and ethical BIOGRAPHY

63

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64 O CTOBER 2019

action, and Christianity’s engagement and he gradually learned how to express with moral problems. He notes sardon- his need to challenge power, not simply ically that Peter’s entry into Parliament to accept it and the status quo.

He has some sharp comments about in 1986 made him the favoured son, leaving Tim to his ‘random and obscure politics and evangelism, especially in career in a storefront poverty law prac- the United States. In 2002 the Baptist tice and as a minister’. It’s very clear World Conference refused to pass a that both sons very much wanted their motion congratulating President Jimmy father’s approval, with varying success Carter, a Baptist, on winning the Nobel Prize for Peace unless President at different times.

So how well do Tim and Peter get George W. Bush was congratulated for invading Iraq on? Reasonably in the same well most of the resolution. Retime seems to ligious people, be the answer, Costello found, though, like are not always most siblings, good people, they have had and the Church their moments. had become a The media have prisoner of the been setting Republican vithe two brothsion of a strong ers against each America. This other, he says, view caused for almost their him to break whole public totally with his lives, most nopro-Reaganite tably when, in f a t h e r. A l 2003, Tim bethough he decame CEO of scribes their arWorld Vision, gument lightly, an organisation Peter and Tim Costello with their mother, Anne, saying that they whose aid policy at Tim’s graduation in 1976 quoted biblical directly contratexts to each dicted that of the government in which Peter was other ‘like two gunslingers quick on the treasurer. However, Tim and Peter were draw’, dissension was clearly painful.

In the last part of the book, Costello part of the Indigenous Reconciliation march across Sydney Harbour Bridge in explains how World Vision works – 2000. Tim deals gracefully with Peter’s managing not to sound as if he’s solicitfailure to become Liberal Party leader ing for funds – and manages to describe and his decision to leave Parliament, the good things he has done without saying only that Peter’s disillusionment sounding self-righteous, preening, or obviously overcame his usual party falsely modest. With rueful honesty, he describes the not-always-beneficial loyalty.

Writing about deep religious faith is effect of his advocacy on his family life always tricky, especially in an autobio- and his children.

Costello is writing as the public graphy. It is so easy to sound either hectoring or, worse, smug. Costello avoids man, but he manages to combine the both these traps, largely because he con- personal and the political in a forthcentrates on his own religious evolution, right, engaging way. Without comthe questions he asked himself about the munity and connection, he says, we are basis of his faith, his conflicts with his doomed. It’s difficult to disagree. g father, and his use of his legal skills to try and achieve social justice. He’s telling his Jacqueline Kent’s most recent book is story, not making a series of bland asser- the memoir Beyond Words: A year with tions. Faith means taking risks, he says, Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019).

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Dinggedichte David McCooey EMPIRICAL

by Lisa Gorton

I

Giramondo $24 pb, 87 pp, 9781925818116

n her latest collection of poems, Empirical, Lisa Gorton demonstrates – definitively and elegantly – how large, apparently simple creative decisions (employing catalogues or lists; quoting from the archive; engaging in ekphrasis or description) can produce compelling and complex poetic forms.

Empirical shows continuities with Gorton’s two earlier collections, especially with regard to a repeated concern with places and things. But the use of a ‘transcriptive poetics’ of bricolage – in which Gorton quotes from and adapts literary and archival works to produce original poetry – is a new development.

Gorton is not, of course, the first poet to engage in the transcriptive poetics of found poetry. Conceptual poets such as Kenneth Goldsmith have long produced poetic work through the transcription of non-poetic material. And numerous poets have raided their national and regional historical archives to find, through poetic bricolage, the utter strangeness of what was once simply factual or administrative writing. Such a project is clearly open to post-colonial critique, as the work of Indigenous writers such as Tony Birch and Natalie Harkin shows.

Gorton’s use of the archive is concerned with poetic transformation itself, employing basic poetic strategies such as catalogue, translation, and ekphrasis (or description). Part of the power of Empirical is the way in which it subtly allows critique to form within such poetic forms of transformation.

As the title Empirical suggests, Gorton is deeply concerned with things and the human observation of them.

Thing-poems (Dinggedichte as the Germans call them) have featured in Gorton’s earlier work, but here the thing is the basic unit of poetic transformation. Empirical is concerned with a park (Royal Park in Melbourne, both materially and in the archive), a statue (Aph-

rodite of Melos), two poems by Rimbaud (about virtual cities), Crystal Palace (that Titanic architectural wonder of nineteenth-century cultural imperialism), a Romantic-era poem (‘Kubla Khan’), and magic lantern slides (which are in turn concerned with things).

Stylistically, in her rendering of these objects, Gorton is simultaneously classically austere and brilliantly baroque. It is hard to know whether she is offering plain renderings of the outré or elaborate versions of the quotidian. For instance, ‘Crystal Palace’ heaps detail upon detail in a way that is both highly stylised and documentary-like: ‘Mr Paxton sets the floorboards / a half-inch apart so the women’s skirts will sweep the floor clean – / Overhead clouds, like images in the mind of a reader, / replace themselves – a steam engine dragged in by sixteen horses – / a column of coal from Newcastle, sixteen-tonne weight – / the crane that raised the suspension bridge at Bangor – / the iron ore and the Sheffield blades – the elephant’s tusk / and Indian carvings in ivory – classic marbles of Paros …’ And so the list goes on, producing a sense of the paradoxical project of empire: to plunder the real to produce a virtual representation of itself.

Gorton is profoundly concerned with the specificity of objects in her empire of things; she is part anthologist, part bricoleur, and part historian.

But it is notable that the things found in Empirical all occupy a suggestively liminal space between the real and the ideal, between representation and things-in-themselves. In addition, and despite their historical provenance, they all speak to contemporary concerns regarding empire, the environment, and the virtual condition of ‘reality’.

Unsurprisingly, poetry is one of the key discourses of virtuality under scrutiny in Empirical. As seen in the extraordinary ‘Life Writing’ (concerning Coleridge and his poem), the poetic method is seen to be a disguised version of the empirical method. Observation and the accumulation of data lead to (poetic) speculation and insight. Where poetry, as ‘Life Writing’ shows, diverges from the empirical method is the degree to which it is prepared to confuse the objective and the subjective realms, or

rather show up the foundational confusion between those terms to begin with.

This is nicely seen in Gorton’s rendering of Coleridge’s reminiscences of a younger contemporary: In 1819 he walked with John Keats arm in arm along Millbank Lane – He didn’t believe in ghosts, he said, having seen too many of them – A prodigious walker in the mountains, he crept talkatively along flat city streets – ‘In those two Miles he broached a thousand things’ – Nightingales, poetry – Poetical sensation – Different genera and species of Dreams – Nightmairs – He couldn’t finish Christabel, he said, because it was the most impossible thing in Romantic poetry, witchery by daylight …

This Romantic expression of the dyadic relationship between the real and the virtual is a telling moment in Empirical, given how often the collection transcends apparently disjunct categories: subject and object; complexity and simplicity; real and virtual; human and non-human; original and repetition; poetry and prose. We see this capacity to undo opposing categories, too, in the way the collection is both regional (seen especially in the first section on Melbourne’s Royal Park) and transnational; deeply historical in orientation and intensely of the contemporary moment.

Empirical is perhaps most especially notable in the way it fuses a (postmodern) transcriptive poetics with the (postRomantic) intensity of lyric poetry.

Consistent with this condition is the way in which Empirical illustrates the continuity between the sensual and the cerebral. As the extensive list (another catalogue) of the concluding ‘Notes and Sources’ shows, Gorton undertook an extraordinary amount of labour to produce this beautiful body of work. In this nonviolent use of ‘textual resources’, Empirical shows poetry to be perhaps at its most radical in its capacity to engender compelling transformations without engaging in dissection, plunder, or dispossession.

In that way, and in others, Empirical is an astonishing achievement. g David McCooey’s latest collection of poems is Star Struck (2016).

POETRY

65

with

Lisa Gorton Which poets have most influenced you?

Trying to answer this question has made me realise how often, in my reading, I am tracking lines of influence.

Influence is such a chancy thing – sometimes opening out from a single image, a phrase, an involvement of syntax – and also revelatory. I first read Marianne Moore as an undergraduate. In my mind, the lines lead out from her to Barbara Guest, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, F.T. Prince, H.D., Ezra Pound. Also as an undergraduate, I wrote an honours thesis on Emily Dickinson. Now, looking back, I realise that Dickinson’s use of prepositions – her sudden way of widening a poem out – originated my interest in John Donne. I spent years reading Donne’s poetry and prose, alongside Shakespeare, Burton, Browne, and Marvell. Reading those many-claused works must have had an effect.

So, though there are other poets I like as much – Friedrich Hölderlin, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Philip Hodgins, Martin Johnston, Antigone Kefala, Gig Ryan – Moore and Dickinson are, for me, at the start of things.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Ideally, all the decisions that craft a poem reveal its inspiration.

What prompts a new poem?

It varies; and sometimes the poems forget their beginnings. I started Empirical when the Victorian government signed a contract to build an eight-lane freeway through Royal Park. I walked almost every day in the park, trying to track how memory and landscape fold in and out of each other. At the same time, I started to research the colonial history of the park. Its history was startling; the research took years. But the whole second part of Empirical started from the image of a magic lantern. I must have been in the habit, by then, of advancing digression by digression, reading old books, because that image of a magic lantern turned into a biography of Coleridge and ‘Kubla Khan’.

What have you learned from your book reviews?

It is strangely moving to learn how a reader thinks about something I’ve written. Mostly, I’ve been lucky to have reviewers who crystallise, for me, some pattern in my thinking or inchoate hope for the work. It helps me to start something new. I learn as much, perhaps, from reviews of other people’s work – other approaches, a sense of connection.

66 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

I have fallen into a dependence on Spirax notebooks and black Uni-Ball 0.2mm Fineliners. Also, I like to have a place to walk and a place to sit down – quiet, and not too brightly lit – away from home.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

I work on poems for a long time, collecting bits and pieces.

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why?

John Donne, to ask him about the secrets in his strange poem ‘Metempsychosis: The Progress of the Soul’. But I doubt that he’d tell me.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

No. I think of Australian poetry as a long and ongoing conversation.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Solitude, the idea of some ideal reader, and a coterie of books. The odd friend. But, while it may not be necessary, it is fun to go to readings and hear a poem in the poet’s voice.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

Probably The Riverside Shakespeare.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

‘Unless experience be a jewel / that I have purchased at an infinite rate’, from The Merry Wives of Windsor; or Dickinson’s ‘that precarious gait / Some call experience’.

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

Perhaps as much as it ever was. Its true readership is worked out over years.

Lisa Gorton is a poet and novelist, essayist and

reviewer. She wrote a doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University. Her awards include the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry, the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal, and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her two most recent publications, both from Giramondo, are a novel, The Life of Houses (2015), and the poetry collection Empirical, reviewed on page 65.

(Photograph via Giramondo)

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Tariro Mavondo as Aaron and Jane Montgomery Griffiths as Titus in Titus Andronicus (photograph by Brett Boardman)

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ARTS

67

Titus Andronicus

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Susan Lever

hat can you do with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a play full of murder, mutilation, and rape, culminating in a mother eating a pie filled with her sons’ ground-up body parts? For centuries it was dismissed as the early aberration of a genius, a sop to the bloodthirst of Elizabethan audiences (the play may have been performed as early as 1590). Since Julie Taymor’s film Titus (1999), it has become a testing piece for directors, some of whom consider its violence particularly relevant to our times.

In Adena Jacobs, Bell Shakespeare has found a director with the courage to mould the play to a new vision, one that explores the monstrous nature of the human body and the fearful power of parents over children. In 2018, for the Sydney Chamber Opera, Jacobs directed The Howling Girls, a libretto-free opera based on reports of the uncontrollable screaming of five women after the 9/11 crisis in the United States. Eugyeene Teh designed that opera and works again with Jacobs to create the projections, soundscape, and imagery for a confronting series of tableaux drawn from Shakespeare’s play. Jacobs has also directed productions of Oedipus Rex and The Bacchae and what she called ‘a theatrical poem’ version of Frank Wedekind’s Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls for her company Fraught Outfit. This version of Titus Andronicus might also be called a theatrical poem probing the imagery of the play rather than its savage action.

Each tableau/scene is given a surtitle. The first is ‘The Mother’. Titus Andronicus, played by an androgynous Jane Montgomery Griffiths, stands tall in a long skirt among a group of child effigies, while Melita Jurisic as Tamora, the defeated leader of the Goths, cowers in a corner. Titus is both grieving mother – twenty-one of his twenty-five sons killed in battle – and punitive father. He soon sacrifices one of Tamora’s sons and impulsively strikes down another of his own for daring to contradict him. The second tableau, ‘The Snuff Film: Lavinia’s Rape and Mutilation’ thankfully shifts the most violent acts out of sight in a child’s cubby house where Lavinia, in a red riding hood, is dragged by the masked sons of Tamora. In ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, she appears wrapped in plastic and strapped to a hospital gurney with a cone-shaped mask covering her face, while Titus and his brother Marcus (played by Josh Price) declaim about honour and justice. The victim, Titus’s only daughter, must be silent while projections behind the scene imply the dreadful nature of her wounds. ‘The Baby’ focuses on the birth of Aaron and Tamora’s baby, which is delivered to Aaron by a crone (Catherine Văn-Davies in a grotesque rubber mask), who later performs an anti-erotic striptease revealing her vagina as the source of a wad of indeterminate detritus. By the end of the play, we’ve seen Titus and Saturninus knocking over child effigies with bowling balls, a baby threatened with hanging, and, of course, the enacting of Tamora eating her sons’ bodies.

68 O CTOBER 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Here, gender is arbitrary. The crop-haired Montgomery Griffiths wears prosthetic breasts, which are later peeled away to reveal her real breasts. The silent Lavinia (played

by Jayna Patel), deliberately unsexualised, wears what looks like a hospital uniform. The crone delivers Aaron’s baby from a prosthetic womb that is later strapped on by Aaron, its father, who is played by a woman. Tamora’s sons appear to be children behind their masks, rather than grown men who can rape and murder. The only adherence to the particular indications of the text is the choice of Tariro Mavondo to play Aaron, the manipulative blackamoor. This gives the play’s references to black devils a racist resonance.

The projections at the back show close-up images of the skin of various actors from cameras positioned on the stage, the gaping of bloody mouths, and the explorations of an endoscopy camera. At various points, actors are smeared with shit, blood, and urine. The abject nature of the human body is inescapable.

Shakespeare’s play might well have been lost behind this bombardment of imagery but for the magnificent presence of Montgomery Griffiths, who delivers every line with intelligence and clarity. She has such authority on stage that she commands attention through all the distractions of visual and sound projections, even when her voice must compete with other sounds. It is a joy to watch such a confident performer of Shakespeare’s verse.

What can it all mean? The stylised nature of this production mutes the violence of the play. Its monstrosity lies in the vulnerable human body rather than in the rapid disposal of individual characters. Their moral states are hardly an issue in a play whose main characters seem bereft of humanity, so this production’s refusal to invite sympathy for any character appears totally appropriate. Here we see no explicit rapes or murders, no trunkless heads or disgusting cannibal pies. The grotesquerie is all within the body.

These de-eroticised bodies have a frightening quality, partly because of their clinical distance from individualised human beings. When Chiron and Demetrius, known as Rapine and Murder by the end of the play, are no more than figures in rubbery masks, somehow eating them is no longer horrific. Lavinia – the last surviving victim – is dispatched in a casual gesture at the end. After all, she was only another body to be disposed of.

In her director’s note, Jacobs links the gruesome elements of Titus Andronicus to those of fairy tales, suggesting that these stories teach children that violence and pain are inevitable features of human life. The nightmare quality of what she presents on stage, then, might be seen as an exposure of our deepest fears: for children, the threat of parental cruelty; for adults, the fear of the fragility of our bodies.

See this production of Titus Andronicus if only for Montgomery Griffiths’s performance. But don’t take the children. g Titus Andronicus was performed by Bell Shakespeare at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, from 27 August to 27 September 2019.

Susan Lever is general editor of Cambria Press’s Australian Literature Series.

Halston

Tavi Gevinson), who has been given the job of erasing more than two hundred VHS tapes of Halston fashion shows, parties, and events, and the odd reconstruction shot in kitsch noir style, the film rolls on in a fairly conventional way, relying largely on the star power of Halston and his he fashion documentary is a subgenre of a larger friends (Andy Warhol, Pat Ast, Elizabeth Taylor, etc.) to wave of films about fashion that have proliferated retain our interest. And it is interesting, even if it lacks the in recent years, including biopics such as Coco Before centripetal force of a Raf Simons.

Chanel (Anne Fontaine, 2009) and Saint Laurent (Bertrand Tcheng started out as a camera operator and editor. He Bonello, 2014), documentaries such as Lagerfeld Confi- worked as both on the hit Netflix true crime series Making dential (Rodolphe Marconi, 2007) and The September Issue a Murderer, an experience he puts to some use in Halston, (R.J. Cutler, 2009), and, in a similar vein, the 2018 Netflix both in terms of narrative technique and stripped-back true crime series The Assassination of Gianni Versace. documentary aesthetic. In Dior and I, Tcheng’s expert Among these – but in a class of its own – is Dior and I camera placement comes to the fore; Halston, on the other (2014), Frédéric Tcheng’s first film as solo director (he co- hand, is a triumph of editing. There is a distance here that directed the 2011 documentary Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has is almost the antithesis of the raw immediacy of Dior and to Travel), which follows Dior’s newly appointed creative I: Simons wears his heart on his sleeve, whereas everything director, Raf Simons, as he prepares for his début season. in Halston’s life is affected, designed, staged, and set up.

Tcheng’s second film as director, entitled simply Halston, They are two very different designers, and these are two follows the rise and fall of America’s biggest fashion house very different films. Fans of Dior and I may be disappointed, and the life and death of the man behind it. but this might be more a matter of perspective. Tcheng is Halston (born Roy Halston Frowick) began his career doing something quite different here: true crime is on trend as a milliner in Chicago. His growing reputation saw him and Tcheng has tried to tap into the viewing public’s obvious appointed head milliner at the appetite for this kind of storytellprestigious Bergdorf Goodman ing. Like any good true crime on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan; story, there is more here than however, he came to national atmeets the eye. Who is the victim tention after designing the pillbox and who the villain? Who ‘killed’ hat worn by Jackie Kennedy at Halston? Was it American corJohn F. Kennedy’s inauguration in porate greed? Was it his closest 1961. From there, Halston moved confidants? Or, in the manner to designing clothes and is credited of classical Greek tragedy, was it with changing the shape of womHalston himself ? en’s clothing. His works include the Ultimately, Halston is an now-iconic Ultrasuede shirt dress; American tragedy in the spirit of he also designed uniforms for Avis The Great Gatsby. Like Jay Gatsby, Halston with Liza Minnelli Car Rental and Braniff Airways.

Halston is elusive, likeable, (photograph via Madman Films) All this is background for Tcheng’s driven, self-made. The film owes documentary, which is less intera debt to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ested in how Halston rose to fame than in how certain forces masterpiece not only in terms of its plot but also in terms – including himself – conspired to bring him down. of its study of the decadence of a generation and of one Tcheng’s film is in part a standard documentary: file man’s desire to take up a place in it. It is also a snapshot footage is interspersed with talking heads recounting their of the beginning of the Reagan era and a world forever memories of Halston and of the heady days of Studio 54 different from that which came before, one of profits over when the designer’s fame was at its height. Interviewees people, an attitude embodied by the corporate executives include Halston’s lifelong friend Liza Minnelli, former Hal- who shamelessly mock an ostensibly ruined Halston. stonettes (the entourage of models with whom the designer Unlike Simons in Dior and I, Halston is not there: surrounded himself ), and those who worked closely with what the film constructs is not an image of Halston but, – and against – him. What sees the film depart from this to use Walter Benjamin’s term, an ‘after image’; a faint standard format is a somewhat contrived frame narrative imprint somewhere on the retina of the American cultural that sets up the story as a policier or film noir. The useful- imaginary. Tcheng’s film is a restoration – in both the ness of this framing to the story itself is debatable, and it photographic and the archaeological senses – of an all but is evident that Tcheng is trying to recapture something of erased figure whose legacy is all around us. g the detective work he himself undertook when researching Halston (Madman Films) is directed by Frédéric Tcheng. and making the film, literally piecing together a composite image of the man behind the clothes. Apart from the cross- Felicity Chaplin is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in French backs to the narrator (played by actor and fashion writer Studies at Monash University.

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Felicity Chaplin

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Australian Realness

A

Sarah Walker

ustralians love a bogan in pop culture. Zoey Dawson’s new play, Australian Realness, uses the stereotype to shatter the middle-class drama as both a cultural and theatrical narrative.

It’s 1997. Ansett is still in the air, the stock market is rising, and the future in North Fitzroy looks bright. There are the trappings of a ‘well-made play’: the living-room set, the well-to-do family so familiar they’re not even named, the children home for Christmas, the secrets kept as Dad (Greg Stone), fretting over Mum’s (Linda Cropper) frivolous spending, guards the door to the shed. Son (André de Vanny) is coked to the eyeballs, and Daughter (Emily Goddard), a failing artist, is squabbling with Partner (Chanella Macri), a wharfie and union rep, over whether to ask her parents for a house deposit.

Dawson’s forte is meta-theatrical critique of the act of writing and storytelling. In The Unspoken Word Is Joe, she tore into the pretensions of the play as personal therapy. In Conviction and Calamity, she unpacked traditional feminist narratives and championed female selfauthorship. Tackling the working-class bogan hero was an obvious next step, but from the preset the production feels as though it’s fighting an uphill battle to generate the necessary energy to reach a crescendo.

The production shifts gear with the arrival of the Hogans. Mum and Dad are solving their financial woes by renting the shed to a working-class family, to the horror of their children. Kerry and Gary (also Cropper and Stone), the bogan parents, are crass and flirtatious. Their dole-bludging son arrives onstage to perform a tracksuit striptease. Partner immediately bonds with Gary, who’s just been kicked off the job site next door.

With the Hogans’ arrival, the production shifts from the tropes of theatre to those of television. When Kerry erupts onstage, it’s to a raucous laugh track, which shifts the rules of engagement from an elegant middle-class play to a prime-time sitcom. Several of these destabilising devices aren’t quite resolved. The potential of the canned laughter to heighten the surrealist crescendo of the play is never realised. Similarly, de Vanny and Stone’s father– son relationship conflicts are performed as absurd chase scenes, with daggy accompanying music.

The actors work hard within the constraints of the premise. Cropper is particularly adept at shifting between Mum’s bourgeois snootiness and Kerry’s brash, fannypack-wielding coarseness. But the Hogans are so base, so crass, that they cease to retain humanity. The cultural cringe of characters like Kath and Kim and Dale Kerrigan relies on their familiarity, their recognisable flouting of social codes. The Hogans are caricatures of caricatures; they become mere clowns. We don’t recognise them.

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of the production’s tensions around homophobia, race, and class. Dawson creates in her a sort of intersectional superhero – a lesbian, a woman of colour, a wharfie who sparks a revolution. Partner is the most interesting but the most underutilised character. The embodiment of Dawson’s call for a complicated engagement with the working class, she disappears halfway through the play.

By the time the production shifts to the present day, the structures of the set, the family, and the narrative have collapsed. The stage becomes a gallery space, then a projection space, and finally a black void. Daughter’s pregnancy, the symbol of hope for the future, is lost. Her family doesn’t seem to notice anything wrong. It is a striking metaphor for the ways in which cultural codes and the comfort of things serve to cover a deep lack of certainty.

Throughout the production, the idea of art exploiting the working class is deeply embedded. As static art objects, the poor are fascinating, charming. They are not angry, unruly, or liable to revolt. This exploitation is constantly identified in Australian Realness, but never resolved. The working class exists onstage as photo subjects, sitcom buffoons, installation artworks, and mystical truth tellers, but these people are not protagonists. They are offstage; our eyes remain on Daughter. Her descent into a nihilistic world provides a representation of contemporary existential despair, but its relationship with class feels poorly teased out.

In her writer’s notes, Dawson describes the work as ‘a kind of revenge fantasy that came from seeing the working class locked out of the arts’. The 1997 setting means that the speculative union-led social breakdown loses the bite that a contemporary telling might have enabled. The production offers a form of cultural re-imagining, where the docile bogan cultural figure assumes power in a violent rebellion. In 2019, this form of utopian dreaming is full of the hollowness of hindsight. The year 1998 saw the simmering tensions of Partner’s workplace erupt into the Australian waterfront dispute, which ended not with the violent overthrow of late capitalism but with ongoing industrial issues and a long slide into union powerlessness. Dawson’s alternate history is toothless in its heroics; it hammers home everything that hasn’t changed. Her ‘revenge fantasy’ is imbued with despair.

Australian Realness ultimately struggles to create a nuanced engagement with its own subject matter. The production feels unsure of its agenda, unable to control its own rhythmic shifts. While the production offers some fascinating play with form, it feels as though Zoey Dawson’s text is consistently straining against Janice Muller’s direction. Dawson’s facility with meta-theatrics and formal breakdowns is dulled in a production whose tone never quite matches its content. g Australian Realness was produced by Malthouse Theatre at the Merlyn in August-September 2019. (Longer version online)

Sarah Walker was runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize.

Dogman

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Jack Callil

atteo Garrone likes to peel back Italy’s skin to expose what writhes beneath. The director’s earlier breakout film Gomorrah (2008), an unforgettable sprawling epic, explores the Camorrah crime syndicate from its bottom-feeding wannabes to its corrupt political élite. Reality (2013), a satirical tale of a fishmonger going to desperate lengths to become a reality-television star, is a nod to Silvio Berlusconi’s amoral regime and surreal legacy. In these films, as well as others in his oeuvre, Garrone dissects morality and power, using the slow ruination of the quasiinnocent to evoke the grisly reality of Italy’s underbelly.

Dogman, his latest film, opens with bared teeth.

A snarling white pit bull, straining against a heavy chain around its neck, bites at the camera. Trying to soothe it, crooning ‘Sweetie’ as he washes its muscular back with a rag, is Marcello (Marcello Fonte), a meek, caring man who runs a dog-grooming parlour in the middle of town.

Everyone seems to know everyone here, and Marcello is well liked. Aspiring to be decent, he strives to uphold his reputation as a hard-working and dependable man.

He chews the fat at a small diner, plays soccer at night with local men, and adores his young daughter, Alida (Alida Baldari Calabria). Taking breaks from the salon to take her on vacations, he scuba-dives with her. They hold hands among schools of fish.

He also sells cocaine, a side hustle that has lured the business of the baleful Simoncino (Edoardo Pesce), a volatile, scar-ridden, boxer-nosed gangster who plagues both Marcello and the townsfolk. Simoncino does what he wants. He turns up unannounced at the parlour for a bump, doesn’t pay, snorts it in the bathroom, and ignores Marcello’s pleas to hide it from Alida. When he shatters a slot machine with his head and breaks the nose of a man at the diner, the locals conspire to have him killed. Simoncino, not so much persuading Marcello as physically forcing him, embroils him in violence and deception. Despite this, the naïve Marcello remains a sort of friend to him. He defends Simoncino, more than once saves his life, parties with him, and is seemingly attracted to the doors he opens and the power, however threatening, he holds. The relationship soon becomes unstable, though, and a series of events results in

Marcello facing the ire of the townsfolk and a conflict that threatens to consume him.

Cinematographer Nicolai Brüel beautifully presents Dogman’s callous environs of a desolate town surviving in otherwise dead surroundings. It is filmed on the same concrete-lined seascape as Gomorrah, the ‘parco degli abusivi’ or Park of Abusers, a gloomy seaside resort in southern Italy. Flesh-grey skies loom, characters walk around in crepuscular light, and seaside villas decay like cadavers.

Garrone told Brüel he saw Dogman as a ‘modern western’, so he shot the film using an anamorphic lens. Typically used for westerns, the lens allows for a unique range of cinematic qualities: a greater depth of field, more landscape detail, and a particularly heightened rendering of light and lens flare. Dogman thus feels intimate. Faces and figures are stark amid the decrepit scenery; colours and light, though drab and desaturated, feel intense and visceral. Production designer Dimitri Capuani should also be commended here, having helped to craft such a dreary, depressing bleakscape.

The grit is tangible; you feel immersed.

Such cinematic care elevates Fonte’s brilliant performance as Marcello, a contradictory, tragicomic character depicted as tender yet pathetic, cunning yet self-sabotaging.

Like those of an abandoned animal, Fonte’s ingratiating smile and large doe-eyes bring a humanity to Marcello upon which the film relies – otherwise it may have descended too far into depravity. He is frustrating: we lament his choices and question his intentions, yet he remains endearing. Fonte rightly won the Best Actor Award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, a significant feat after years of peripheral roles in a handful of films, such as ‘(Uncredited) Citizen’ in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002). Fonte’s casting was somewhat of a happy accident too: Garrone discovered him working at a community centre while casting for Simoncino at an ex-convict theatre show.

Unfortunately for such an exemplary film, there are some gaps in the plot. Marcello at one point is sent to prison, and all signs indicate he will barely survive. After a somewhat incongruous fade-to-black, he emerges unscathed, and the narrative continues without explanation.

Also, Marcello’s ex-wife and Alida’s mother, credited only as ‘Madre Alida’ and played by Laura Pizzirani, is a cardboard cut-out of a character. More involvement from her would have given the tenuous dynamic between Marcello and Alida greater depth.

Italian gangster cinema reveres the alpha male, but Dogman turns its attention to the beta. In its telling of Marcello’s loss of innocence, it is a modern-day fable, a neo-realist western, a David-and-Goliath saga. It’s also based on the true story of Er Canaro, which was much more bloody and bizarre.

Dogman, a stellar depiction of morality and the bear-trap of power, is a memorable tale of revenge best served cold. g Dogman (Palace Films) is directed by Matteo Garrone.

Jack Callil is Assistant Editor at ABR. ARTS

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From the ABR Archive

Peter Carey’s celebrated novel True History of the Kelly Gang was placed sixth in the 2019 ABR FAN poll. Morag Fraser reviewed it in the November 2000 issue of ABR. Her review (edited slightly here) is one of hundreds of earlier features from the print edition being added to our digital archive, accessible by subscribers.

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ou can’t escape the black square with the ominous slit: it’s about as familiar and inevitable in Australia as the icon for male or female. Ned’s iron mask now directs you to the National Library’s website of Australian images. There it is, black on red ochre, an importunate camera, staring back as we look through it. It’s modernist, postmodernist, merged into desert art just as surely as Ned has been incorporated into the Dreaming of the Yarralin people of north-western Australia. The black imp of myth and Sidney Nolan’s depiction is now wild and out of control – as unpredictable as a Mimi spirit and about as omnipresent.

I don’t believe Peter Carey set out to tame the mythic Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang. True, he gives him back a face, real feet that need real boots, a memorable voice, and a familial context. Carey is an unabashed apologist – a romantic apologist what’s more – for Kelly and his clan, but he is also too much the ironist not to be alive to the density and contradictions of the historical record. He seems almost as interested in why Ned Kelly matters to Australia, what he says about what we have been, and what we want to believe about ourselves, as he is in revising or revisiting the old story. Or at least that’s the subterranean pulse. The wherefore. But novelists transmute wherefores into story, and Peter Carey, whatever else you might say about him, is a master at telling a tale, and a slave to the imperative.

The tale he tells in True History of the Kelly Gang has a dramatic logic and a necessary economy of means. Carey shapes the story, neatens many (not all) of the ragged edges of the conflicted Kelly history. He explains rather more perhaps than can be explained, even by the now immense historical archive. Carey’s Ned is a boy too attached to his mother. ‘Hubba hubba Mamma is your girl’ is his brother Dan’s drunken taunt. The Oedipal bond is a deft narrative device – it explains some of Ned’s moves. With his mother still imprisoned, Carey’s Ned knows his duty – to get money (the bank robberies), see his mother free, and assume responsibility for the family.

Carey’s Ned also has a woman/wife and a child. The wife is dispensable. Carey ships her off to California so she is not around to complicate the determined tragedy of the last stand at Glenrowan. But the child is the destined recipient of the first-person narrative of the novel, the thirteen bundles, variously manufactured, bound and scrawled, of ‘true history’. She is also their rationale: ‘Parcel 1 ... National Bank letterhead ... my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie 72 O CTOBER 2019

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may I burn in Hell if I speak false.’

The ‘True’ of the title is a multilayered tease. Carey’s story keeps intersecting with historical and traditional material. He magpies as and when it suits his imaginative purpose and structural intent. He quotes, often to prefigure.

His Ned, at age fifteen, concludes that ‘such is life’ when he witnesses the fate of a snip-horse, an accidental casualty of one of bush­ranger Harry Power’s exploits. ‘She had taken the bullet high in her shoulder and when she cooled would certainly be lame for good. [Ned is shot in the right leg at Glenrowan.] Thence only death a sledgehammer between her blindfolded eyes such is life.’

There is a little too much of such flagging in the novel.

It reads like rigging fate. But that, I think, is the way Carey builds his figure of Ned: as a man destined, by extraordinary capacity and circumstance, to a kind of monomaniacal martyrdom.

Carey twists the record. His Ned kills Mr Murray’s heifer and the father, John ‘Red’ Kelly, takes the blame – and the fatal jail term for it. It was actually John Kelly who killed and butchered the heifer. But the incident in Carey gives substance to Ned’s sense of responsibility and of doom.

He co-opts Irish myth. Ned hears a banshee and immediately finds an old man dead. Tom Buckley in his miner’s hut: ‘dressed in the uniform of some foreign king I don’t know why.’ He explains the wearing of another kind of uniform, the dress, associated first, and shamefully, with his transported Irish father, John Kelly, and later worn

by Dan Kelly and Steve Hart. Mary Hearn, Ned’s woman, ‘knows’ what it means and so chastises the boys with a history lesson in bizarre Irish vengeance. ‘This costume is worn by Irishmen when they is weak and ignorant.’

What follows is an appalling Irish tale of torture and cruelty, which Carey tells marvellously.

The voice of the narrative, Ned’s first person, uncomma’d, untutored, lyrical, and sinewy sound had its source in Carey’s first encounter, decades ago, with Kelly’s Jerilderie letter. It’s a remarkable and sustained technical achievement. Huckleberry innocence by Carey facility out of historical record. Of course, it appropriates the high public rhetoric of the Jerilderie letter to an anachronistic private purpose, but that is Carey’s fictional prerogative.

If it strains at times, it’s because Carey has a plan for his Ned rather than because he can’t hold his own tune. He can. And it is a wild tune.

But I do wonder whether it isn’t a tune that will be better heard outside Australia than in. Our problem might be that we simply know too much. g