Australian Book Review - January-February 2020, no. 418
Clive James in ABR
Much has been written about Clive James since his death from leukaemia on November 24. He was, of course, one of the last polymaths, with a range of skills and accomplishments that made him famous in Australia (where he was born in 1939) and the United Kingdom, where he lived from 1961 to his death. Novelist, satirist, memoirist, poet, broadcaster, lyricist, reviewer, paradoxer, essayist par excellence: what didn’t he do in print, on air, on stage?
When I became editor back in 2001, one of the first things I did was to add poetry to the magazine’s repertoire – not just because I happen to be a poet but because I felt any national review worth its salt should feature new poetry. Clive was one of the first poets I contacted. His eventual response was positive, and typically witty:
of twenty contributions from Clive James. He gave us many poems over the next decade, and a few reviews. In 2003 he attended the Mildura Writers’ Festival, where he received the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medial and delivered the La Trobe University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture. Entitled ‘The Meaning of Recognition’, it celebrated the poetry of Philip Hodgins (‘one of the glories
My desk is in chaos here, and I’m afraid the magazine and the note were victims of two separate geological shifts to the bottom of the pile … A few poems are getting through, and I’d like to try placing one or two of them in your excellent pages. If I can get my printer working I’ll fax you one soonest; it’s about Pound and Eliot as a double-act.
That poem, ‘Simple Stanzas about Modern Masters’, duly appeared in our August 2001 edition – the first
of late twentieth-century Australian poetry’). Hodgins, one of the creators of the Mildura Festival, had died of leukaemia in 1995, aged thirty-six. Towards the end of this memorable lecture (now available online), Clive said:
As a poet, I spent two thirds of my career without even a reputation. Receiving this award, I feel like someone who has run the whole race invisible and
popped into sight at the finishing line. Well, that fits. To be recognised means to be reassured that you were right to pursue a course that had no immediate rewards, and got in the road of activities that had. Poetry is something I gave at least part of my life to: a fact on which I often preened myself, at least in private. Now, to remind me that I had things easy, I have been honoured in the name of a man who gave his whole life to it, and his death as well. So the honour seems disproportionate; but I suppose an honour ought to.
Afterwards, there was a splendiferous Italian lunch at the Grand Hotel. Stefano de Pieri and Donata Carrazza fed us royally. There was a gigantic Murray Cod for Clive and Les Murray. Then they wheeled out Don Carrazza’s Rolls Royce to take Clive to the local airport. I caught a lift. While we waited for our flight to Melbourne, Clive went over to a vending machine and removed the saddest, limpest, least Italian tomato sandwich I have ever seen, and ate it with gusto. I thought to myself, You can take the boy out of Kogarah, but you can never take Kogarah out of the boy.
On page 72, we reproduce a poem first published in ABR in 2002.
‘Occupation: Housewife’ is one of many works from Clive James’s later period that addresses themes like mortality, filial ties, guilt, self-exiledom, atonement, and acceptance. Ed.
Peter Goldsworthy and Clive James at the 2003 La Trobe University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture in Mildura
Porter Prize
When the Porter Prize closed in October, we’d received 1,046 entries from thirty different countries. It was our largest field to date, by a considerable margin. Our three judges – John Hawke (Chair and ABR’s Poetry Editor), Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead –have now completed the judging, after a marathon effort (we thank them warmly).
The five shortlisted poets are Lachlan Brown, Claire G. Coleman, A. Frances Johnson, Julie Manning, and Ross Gillett (who was shortlisted for the 2019 Porter Prize). Their featured poems appear from page 53. Here is the judges’ interim report:
This year’s record field demonstrates both the depth and stylistic range evident in this vital area of our literature. The poems were notable for the currency of their engagement with social issues. ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’ by A. Frances Johnson is an unsentimental yet emotive portrayal of the situation of the elderly and their carers. A concern with Indigenous themes was evident in many entries: the forceful argument of Claire G. Coleman’s ‘That Wadjela Tongue’ was outstanding among these. Lachlan Brown’s unsettling ‘Precision Signs’ interrogates the hollowness of contemporary jargon from within. There is also a commitment to conventional form: like Brown’s poem, Ross Gillett’s ‘South Coast Sonnets’ impressively adapts and modernises a traditional end-rhyming verse structure. Julie Manning’s ‘Constellation of Bees’ is a finely observed poem of the natural world, presented with necessary ecological awareness.
This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will be held at 6 pm on 16 January at the Boyd Community Hub (Southbank, Melbourne), where ABR is based. This is a free event but book-
ings are essential. All five poets will attend. After readings – the five shortlisted poems and classics by Peter Porter – a special guest will name the overall winner.
The longlisted poets are named on our website.
ABR PodCast
The rapid extension of our digital archive going back to 1978 (when ABR was revived) will be a major priority in 2020, but we’re also looking forward to reviving our podcast, which has been dormant for a couple of years. From January 8 we will offer a fortnightly podcast: reviews, conversations, poetry and short fiction, and recordings of Calibre essays. Michael Hofmann inaugurates the new podcast with a reading of his inspired poem ‘The Resident’ about Donal Dump (aka Donald Trump). Look out for the podcast every second Wednesday.
india bound
Thanks to everyone who has already entered our current travel competition. In a first for ABR, we are delighted to be partnering with luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent to offer one lucky ABR subscriber the chance to win a ten-day adventure for two in India worth up to AU$8,250.
The prize is Abercrombie & Kent’s ‘Essential India’ tour, a sevenday private journey from Delhi to Agra to Jaipur staying in luxury Taj hotels throughout, plus the winner’s choice of a three-day extension to either Ranthambore, Udaipur, or Varanasi.
To be in the running to win this magnificent prize, subscribers need to tell us – in fifty to one hundred words – about a book that has inspired them to travel. Entry is open until 20 February 2020. All current subscribers (print or online) are eligible, and, as you know, you can subscribe online for as little as $10 per month.
Image credits and information: On page 33: The Menninger Clock Tower Building in Topeka Kansas (2013), photograph by Aaron Hall via Wikimedia Commons. On page 65: Gough Whitlam, Rudolf Nureyev, and Robert Helpman, on the set of Don Quixote as featured in Dancing Under the Southern Sky by Valerie Lawson (photograph via Australian Scholarly Publishing).
The winner will be notified in March 2020 and will be announced in our Travel issue in April 2020. Terms and conditions apply. Visit our website for more information and to enter for your chance to win!
Jolley Prize
The tenth ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on January 20, with a closing date of May 1. Terms and Conditions, Frequently Asked Questions, and the judges’ names will be available online from January 20. We welcome unpublished short stories ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words –on any subject and in any style.
Due to the continuing generosity of Ian Dickson, the Jolley Prize is worth $12,500. The division of the prize money differs from last year. There are three prizes: $6,000, $4,000, and $2,500.
In a recent survey of past entrants in our three literary prizes (approximately 5,000 in all!), we asked if they preferred a hefty first prize or a more even division of prize moneys. Eighty per cent of respondents preferred the latter: hence this review of the Jolley Prize and our other prizes.
FellowshiPs worth
$240,000
It’s a time of considerable largesse from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, which has just awarded three ‘life-changing fellowships’, each worth $80,000. The recipients are writers Stephen Orr and James Bradley, and the artist Danielle Freakley.
Stephen Orr, a past ABR Fellow, will use his Fellowship to write ‘a fictionalised reimagining of past Carl Strehlow and his fourteen-year-old son, Theodor, as they travel through the South Australian desert’. James Bradley, who has written for ABR since 1997, intends to write ‘a series of interconnected essays that will offer an engaging portrait of the catastrophe taking place in our oceans’.
CorreCtion
In our Books of the Year feature, author Enza Gandolfo’s surname was accidentally spelled Gandalfo.
January–February 2020
Barry Hill
Libby Robin
Kieran Pender
Alison Stieven-Taylor
Johanna Leggatt
Kerryn Goldsworthy
A. Frances Johnson et al.
Robert Watkins et al.
Travels in Japan
A Tim Flannery anthology
Brian Toohey on official secrecy
A biography of Olive Cotton
Ben Lerner’s new novel
Christos Tsiolkas – heat and succour
Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist
Publisher Picks
Letters
Margaret Simons, Angela Woollacott, David Bradford, Michael K. Launer, Sheila Fitzpatrick
Indigenous Studies
Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode (eds): The First Wave
Alexandra Roginski
Thomas Mayor : Finding the Heart of the Nation David Trigger
Memoir & Biography
Tom Carment: Womerah Lane Susan Wyndham
Alfred Fidjestøl: Almost Human Nicholas Bugeja
Russell McGregor : Idling in Green Places Danielle Clode
Derek Rielly : Gulpilil Stephen Bennetts
Samantha Power : The Education of an Idealist Varun Ghosh
Dennis Altman: Unrequited Love Sebastian Sharp
David Slucki: Sing This at My Funeral Merav Fima
Jon Coaffee: Future Proof Tom Bamforth
Aaron Patrick: The Surprise Party Shaun Crowe
Norman Abjorensen: The Manner of Their Going Lyndon Megarrity
History & Society
Peter Hennessy: Winds of Change Glyn Davis
Orlando Figes: The Europeans Michael Shmith
Loretta Smith: A Spanner in the Works Sharon Verghis
Bri Lee: On Beauty Suzy Freeman-Greene
Daniel Immerwahr : How to Hide an Empire Andrew Broertjes
Francesco Ricatti: Italians in Australia Diana Glenn
Fiction
Emma Viskic: Darkness for Light
Christian White: The Wife and the Widow
Garry Disher : Peace David Whish-Wilson
Catherine de Saint Phalle: The Sea and Us Susan Midalia
Peter Corris: See You at the Toxteth
Peter Temple: The Red Hand Chris Flynn
John Clanchy : In Whom We Trust Susan Lever
Language
Amanda Laugesen
Philosophy
Jonathan Rée: Witcraft Janna Thompson
Serene J. Khader : Decolonizing Universalism
Daniel Halliday
Poetry
π.O.: Heide James Jiang
Film
Adina Hoffman: Ben Hecht Aaron Nyerges
Interview
Open Page: Ceridwen Dovey
Dance
Valerie Lawson: Dancing Under the Southern Skies
Luke Forbes
From the Archive
‘Occupation: Housewife’ Clive James
Ian Dickson
Sophie Knezic
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
Felicity Chaplin
Packer & Sons
Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines
Hugh Ramsay
The Truth
Penny Wong
Dear Editor,
I would like to correct an error in Angela Woollacott’s generally favourable review of my book Penny Wong: Passion and principle (ABR, December 2019). Woollacott writes of Wong: ‘She loved her grandmother, and did not want one particular family story included in the book – but Simons tells us that, and includes it regardless.’
This is not an accurate account of what happened. As declared in the book, Senator Wong granted me interviews on the condition that anything I drew from them was cleared with her before publication. This delicate and detailed process was conducted with honour and integrity on both sides. Had Wong maintained her objection to this anecdote appearing, it would have been a serious ethical breach for me to have published it. In fact, Wong asked for a small clarifying addition and cleared it for publication. I recorded both the anecdote, and Wong’s initial reluctance and the reason for it – a fear that her grandmother would be harshly judged by readers, when such judgement was not justified.
Margaret Simons, Flemington, Vic.
Angela Woollacott replies:
I do not question that Margaret Simons drew from her interviews with Senator Wong with the integrity and process she describes in her letter. Yet I stand by what I said in my review. Here are the relevant sentences in her book: ‘Penny Wong is reluctant to have this fact printed. “People will judge. And you can’t judge what happens in that kind of deprivation.”’
A fierce little book
Dear Editor,
This ‘rather fierce little book’ (and I couldn’t agree more with this com-
Letters
ment in your review [ABR, May 2019]) hit me really hard when I read Nam Le’s essay on David Malouf recently. For old white Australians like myself, I think it is meant to. Although I once foolishly volunteered and wore the uniform of the Australian Army and served in Vietnam (Nam Le’s country of birth) for a year (1967–68), I feel more and more alienated from the country in which I was born and which I now somewhat reluctantly have to call home. I always fondly believed, incorrectly as it has turned out, that Australia was a welcoming country for those from other lands seeking its help and refuge, and that after a few years living here, such people would feel, as David Malouf presumably does, but Nam Le does not, that they had become truly Australian; that they no longer felt ‘other’.
Nam Le’s essay is challenging, instructive, and deeply thoughtprovoking. Some have suggested that it is more about Nam Le than it is about Malouf and that he has not done his subject justice. I profoundly disagree. His work in this essay has sent me back to rereading Malouf’s writings, much of which I had half forgotten. That to me is proof enough that the essay is a success. And it has not only made me reread The Boat but to long for more writing from Nam Le’s pen. I hope he won’t disappoint us by another long interval before he publishes again.
David Bradford (online comment)
Chernobyl
Dear Editor,
In her book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl guide to the future, Kate Brown has written a conspiracy theory of the first water, masquerading as a travelogue, masquerading as cultural anthropology, masquerading as first-person history. As historical research it is a failure, and Professor
Sheila Fitzpatrick should have been able to recognise this (ABR, October 2019). Brown cites a laundry list of known anti-nuclear advocates (opponents of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power), including Karl Morgan, Joseph J. Mangano, John Gofman, and Rosalie Bertell, among many others. She ignores several thousand peer-reviewed epidemiological studies published in recognised international journals, and misquotes or misuses recognised scholars such as historian David R. Marples and world-renowned epidemiologists Fred A. Mettler and the late Elaine Ron. Brown is so anti-nuclear that she even opposes nuclear medicine as part of a vast conspiracy among the US, USSR, UN agencies such as the IAEA and WHO, and private-sector nuclear utility executives.
This is truly a tour de force that should be thrown in the trash.
Michael K. Launer, Florida, USA
Sheila Fitzpatrick replies:
I’m not sure about the source of Michael K. Launer’s claimed expertise on Chernobyl, but he seems to have an axe to grind. Kate Brown, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at MIT, is a respected historian with twenty-five years of research on the Ukraine, particularly the Pripyat region, behind her. Her Manual for Survival on Chernobyl is described by Philip Ball in The New Statesman as ‘an extraordinary and important – if controversial – book’, and by Noah Sneider in The Economist as ‘magisterial’. Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and himself a Chernobyl expert, writes that ‘Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well’, while in The New York Review of Books, Sophie Pinkham praises Brown’s ‘scrupulous efforts to double-check facts’. I see no reason to change my assessment of the book.
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Australian Book Review | January-February 2020, no. 418
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‘As we go rowing’
An anthology that swells with sociability
Barry Hill
TRAVELS WITH A WRITING BRUSH:
CLASSICAL JAPANESE TRAVEL WRITING FROM THE MANYŌSHŪ TO BASHŌ edited and translated by Meredith McKinney Penguin, $24.99 pb, 382 pp, 9780241310878
Meredith McKinney, our preeminent translator of Japanese classics – among them Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, the poetry of Saigyō Hōshi, the memoirs Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō, and Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (Record of the Ten Foot Square Hut) – has delivered another marvel of absorbing, elegant scholarship. Travels with a Writing Brush crosses the country of old Japan, from north to south and from east to west, and is a quintessential travel book. It goes to places, and shows them – except that the latter is not quite true; you would not go to this book to see things objectively so much as to cue to them imaginatively.
Better say that McKinney’s book names the places of highest Japanese worth, this because they have over time become poetic places, utamakura, to which travellers made pilgrimage, and from which they departed with gratitude and sorrow, treasuring the memory traces of the sacred sites. If you think of a culture map of the first thousand years of Japanese literary history, the land would glow with hundreds of little lamps lit by the poetic imaginations of travellers, each in touch with the others over time, each defined by memories from poetry, legend, and mythology.
Sketching the matter like this might remind us of the songlines in the original Australian landscape. At the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs, I have seen a digital map lit by the sacred sites that belonged to the origin and passage of ancient songs – a sight that lifted the heart as, I imagine, their utamakura could do for Japanese travellers. This is the
marvel of McKinney’s anthology. Her labour of love, arising as it does from her years of scholarly work in classical Japanese, immerses us in a great tradition – a thought and feeling stream –of refined literary travel.
The first poem here comes from one of the oldest anthologies, the Man’yōshū, which was assembled in the eighth century with 4,500 poems.
As we go rowing around the cape of Minume hard by the island longing for Yamato cranes flock and cry
What could be simpler, or sharper? The preceding prose-poem fills out the context: ‘A sea god must be … a god divinely powerful ... to place in its centre ...’, then rushes forward in McKinney’s hand, bird cries and sea spray caught up in it all. The poem is a nice reminder of the dangers of travel, whether by sea or land.
Of course, the Man’yōshū was not only loaded with travel poems in a resonant, sometimes divine landscape. Among other things it was replete with love poems that flourished in Japanese poetry through the ages. Indeed, travel enlarged the heart’s yearning.
So many nights spent on the journey how I yearn now thinking how long since my hands loosened her crimson undersash
Travels with a Writing Brush becomes an absolutely uncompromising introduction to the Japanese sensibility
from before the time of The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu when the capital was in eleventh-century Kyoto (and the world’s first novel was written by a woman), to the artful making of Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 1689, when Bashō set off from the new capital in Tokyo. In those centuries the nature of travel changed, as did poetic forms and the social demands upon poets and their audiences. Not the least of McKinney’s achievements is her tracking of developments that sustained the core sensibility of aware (poignancy) at their heart.
Out of The Tales of Ise, we get the typical yearning of the traveller leaving the capital – ‘Travelled distances / reach back and back to home. / Yearning for all I love / I watch with envy / the returning waves.’ In the following section, self-consciousness is extended by extracts from The Tosa Diary, where the diarist feels free to adopt the persona of a woman, announcing herself in his first line: ‘I have heard that men write diaries, but a woman will try her hand at one here.’ It is McKinney’s moment to remind us that The Tosa Diary continued the diary writings of the Heian court with its ‘wit, language play and the pose of what is known as elegant confusion, a lightness of touch that offsets the weightier poems of sorrow and longing’.
Another tonal shift is registered by Retired Emperor Go Shirakawa’s startling Dust Dancing on the Rafters, a compilation from the bloody, turbulent period that followed the peaceful court period in Kyoto. The retired emperor’s passion was for imayo (‘songs of the moment’), the earthy songs of commoners, especially the asobi, the female singers of the road, often illiterate, marginal women. Their voices (along with their night-time favours) often crop up in traveller’s tales, including Bashō’s. How’s this for a come-on to an overpious traveller: ‘I’d like to go to Yawata / but the Kamo River / flows so fast / and oh so fast / flows the Katsura River! / So set your boat out / at Yodo Crossing / and come to meet me / oh Bodhisattva.’
Such an open-air poem, full of raunchy peasant gusto, is another reminder that this anthology does not over-invest
in the monologues of individual poets, most typically the Buddhist monk–poet. Apart from poems by such greats as Nōin, Saigyō, and Sōgi, who became the exemplary models for all pilgrims to utamakura, the book includes extracts from the clan-battle legends of The Tales of the Heike, from Noh plays, and from later travel journals. McKinney’s anthology swells with sociability. After all, what we have come to know as the short haiku poem (properly named here as haikai) emerged from the gatherings of Renga (linked verse) poets who pitted wits to cap each other’s poems at length. Out of such marathons the poetic jewels of Bashō emerged, including his droll and cryptic prose, which facilitated his famous masterpiece, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (or ‘Oku’, which meant ‘innermost’).
It’s too easy to say that this anthology is most worth getting for McKinney’s intrepid revisiting of Bashō (she does all of his Bones on the Wayside and the first part of Narrow Road). It must suffice to note that the complex web of her anthology is meant to lead to it, to equip us for him like no other introduction. An exemplary achievement – especially since she thinks that Bashō is essentially untranslatable because his writing took medieval constructions to the cusp of modernity, and because she thinks the meanings of those poems are not in the words: they are in the hum behind them.
Well and good, I wish to say. Travels with a Writing Brush is a beehive of a book, buzzing with superb commentary and annotations, and bound to last for generations. g
Barry
by Shearsman.
Sandy theatre
First encounters on the coast
Alexandra Roginski
THE FIRST WAVE: EXPLORING EARLY COASTAL CONTACT HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA
edited by Gillian Dooley and Danielle Clode Wakefield Press, $49.99 pb, 452 pp, 9781743056158
First encounters between Indigenous Australians and European voyagers, sealers, and missionaries often unfolded on the beach, a contact zone where meaning and misunderstanding sparked from colliding worldviews. This sandy theatre also serves as one of the enduring metaphors of ethnographic history, a discipline that reads through the accounts of European explorers, diarists, and administrators to reconsider historical accounts of the gestures of Indigenous people from within their own cultural frameworks. Europeans blinded by racial preconceptions scribbled reports about the peoples they met, often misinterpreting actions as foolish, threatening, or pointless. Yet from the late twentieth century, historians such as Greg Dening (whose extensive theoretical work positioned the beach as the great physical and mental horizon of contact history) began combing through accounts of these tense meetings to reach for the other side of the story.
The First Wave: Exploring early coastal contact history in Australia emerges from this tradition and adds a twist by bringing together chapters of granular historical research with offerings from anthropology, cultural studies, poetry, and fiction. The editors – Gillian Dooley (a literature academic) and Danielle Clode (an interdisciplinary scholar) –position fine historical craftsmanship by writers including Skye Krichauff, Valerie Munt, and Mark Dunn alongside poems by Yankunytjatjara writer Ali Cobby Eckermann and an extract from Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, among other works. Through these twenty-seven pieces, we taste the salt spray glancing off the glossy backs of dolphins and whales, commune with
juvenile dingos and castaways on K’gari (Fraser Island), and learn the devastating stories of Aboriginal women abducted and traded by the often-sadistic sealers of Kangaroo Island and Bass Strait. These historical episodes sit cheek by jowl with essays about how first encounters – especially those of Captain Cook – ripple through the cultural practices of contemporary Indigenous Australians in art, writing, music, and performance.
At its most powerful, The First Wave twines rich accounts of the past with a deep understanding of the country and cultures of particular Indigenous groups.
A reprint of an intriguing account published in 1998 by the late Torres Strait leader George Mye (pen name Eidi Wakaisu) about the arrival of missionaries on the island of Erub demonstrates the force of oral histories for recounting the past from the other side of the frontier, and lures non-Torres Strait readers to ‘come across’ to interpret words and ideas from the local language. The accompanying analysis by Anna Shnukal deepens our understanding of this work by outlining the storytelling methods of Erub, and suggests that Mye mobilised particular kinship rights through his choice of pen name.
In an equally compelling piece, Aaron Corn and Brian Djangirrawuy Garawirrtja assemble archaeological evidence and oral and written histories to explore extensive Yolŋu contact with Makassan fishermen in northern Australia. They show how Yolŋu integrated these histories into songs and culture as political statements of sovereignty, including during the charged bicentenary of colonisation in 1988.
Standout pieces amid the poems and fictional works include Clode’s
Hill’s most recent book is his selected poems, Eagerly We Burn, published in 2019
shining contribution, in which she reimagines the relationships between Yuin, orcas, and European whalers in Twofold Bay, New South Wales, through the fictional perspective of a Yuin girl. Meanwhile, a gripping extract from Catherine McKinnon’s 2017 novel Storyland portrays the fraught 1796 voyage of George Bass, Matthew Flinders, and fifteen-year-old servant Will Martin as they bobbed south of the fledgling colony of New South Wales and, posits McKinnon, misinterpreted acts of assistance by a local Indigenous group as aggression.
Dooley and Clode intend these diverse works to speak to a general audience at a time when a celebratory history of European arrival serves as the bedrock of a conservative political agenda. Yet the volume’s introduction (brief at three pages) could have done more to contextualise the plurality of these offerings by explaining how they speak to one another, and by outlining crucial historical and geographical background – signposts to help readers navigate three centuries on a giant continent. The volume would benefit from an overview of the debates and dynamics around how we tell contact and invasion histories, including the growing influence of evidence from oral history and archaeology, and the persistent question of who gets to tell these stories. In particular, readers might appreciate a discussion regarding what the historian Tom Griffiths has called ‘the necessary and creative tension between history and fiction’. Many of the individual authors work hard to set the scene for their contributions: Rowena Lennox, for example, deftly evokes K’gari in a history of dingo–human and Indigenous–European relations. But the book as a whole sometimes drifts from site to site without the rudder of time and context.
Within this mélange, an intricate intellectual history of the Portugueseborn Spanish explorer Pedro Fernández de Quirós by Daniel Hempel seems out of place in tone for a general audience. And anthropologist Peter Sutton’s narrative of the nineteen-day overland journey in Cape York in 1927 by missionaries William and Geraldine
MacKenzie, anthropologist Ursula McConnel, and Wik companions feels like a slideshow: marvellous photographs, maps, and diary entries, as well as the fruits of Sutton’s own deep engagement with the Wik peoples, float free of crucial contextual information about the sojourners, Cape York history, or Sutton himself.
The First Wave therefore arrives as a vessel bearing mixed cargo. Persistent non-academic readers may well climb
‘Voice,
aboard, and will relish the rewards. Or perhaps this volume will primarily offer passage to scholars and students searching for an encounter with just one or two works, a moment of understanding fished from the depths of a library catalogue. g
Alexandra Roginski is a research fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University.
treaty, and truth’
A deeply felt account of the Uluru Statement
David Trigger
FINDING
THE HEART OF THE
NATION: THE
JOURNEY OF THE ULU
RU
STATEMENT
TTOWARDS
VOICE, TREATY AND TRUTH by Thomas Mayor Hardie Grant Books, $39.99 hb, 264 pp, 9781741176728
he ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ emerged in May 2017 from a convention held in Arrernte country in Central Australia attended by 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from around the nation. The Statement called for a ‘First Nations Voice’ to be enshrined in the Constitution enabling, in general terms, a process of influence on future legislation and policy affecting Indigenous communities. The Statement also seeks a commitment to agreement-making between government and Indigenous groups and ‘truth-telling’ about the history of colonisation.
Details of a change to the Constitution would have to be agreed by parliament and then presented for a vote in a referendum, which would need to be passed by a majority of voters in a majority of states. Thomas Mayor’s book is part of a strategy directed at convincing Australians to vote for the Statement’s proposals. He presents notes, quotations, and opinions from seventeen Aboriginal people and three
Torres Strait Islanders that are interwoven with his own extensive commentary. All views are in agreement with Mayor that the Uluru Statement is compelling and should be embraced in light of the legacies of colonialism.
The author is an engaging writer and his first-person account includes his own deeply felt sense of injustices evident from the experiences of Indigenous people. The information about this history emerges either from the personal convictions of the author or from the stories he chose to present in his book. Readers sympathetic to the cause of Indigenous rights will likely find this approach unproblematic; those who are undecided may well prefer supportive references particularly for confronting assertions. Two examples. A deceased Yolŋu man in Arnhem Land is said to have been ‘hunted by a white man, with a lawful direction to kill him’, yet there is no information that might assist the reader to understand how or why this could have occurred. It ‘has been estimated’ that 50,000 Aboriginal children
were historically excluded from attending schools in New South Wales, but the reader has no help to know the basis for such an estimate or its reliability.
Mayor explains his work history as a wharfie and then a full-time official with the Maritime Union of Australia and his long commitment to workers’ rights. The MUA supported his travels around the country carrying and showing the Uluru Statement canvas to Indigenous communities and others. The author’s political convictions are given full expression as he recounts powerful stories from interviewees who explain their own activism as often inherited from parents, grandparents, and other family members who have inspiringly fought for Indigenous rights. One of the admirable aspects of the book is its explication of the centrality of family relationships to Indigenous life and the strong sense of collective spiritual connections to Country.
Also impressive is the author’s refusal to mask disputation among Indigenous people regarding the issues addressed in the Uluru Statement. As was noted in the media at the time, some delegates from New South Wales and Victoria left the convention, as they opposed its aspirations to work with government and suspected a conspiracy. While this was a small minority of attendees, they had loud voices, and seemingly were not impressed with
the convention’s assemblage of a group described by the author as having ‘unprecedented cultural authority’. The implications of such disagreement for a future functioning voice to parliament might have been more thoroughly addressed, as might have been the extent of a conservative political position among some Indigenous individuals that may not favour the vision of the Uluru Statement. The author does not, however, shirk the responsibility of reporting intergenerational tensions and allegations arising from different histories among Indigenous groups and individuals.
Finding the Heart of the Nation gives expression to Mayor’s own strong voice and life experiences. Of Torres Strait Islander ancestry through his father, he grew up distant from his traditional Country in what he is careful to acknowledge as Larrakia tribal land in Darwin. Through his mother, he has Polish Jewish and English ancestry, as well as Philippine and Borneo Dayak forebears through paternal great-grandfathers. The author’s primary identity does not focus on his non-Indigenous forebears. It is the Torres Strait side of his family that infuses his commitment to the Uluru Statement. He describes the convention welcome ceremony at Mutitjulu as ‘the spiritual highlight of my life’. Those interviewed throughout the book similarly may mention their non-Indigenous ancestry – English,
Irish, Scottish, Afghan, Chinese, and so on – but it is their inherited Indigenous language affiliations that feature in their stated identities. This is not incommensurate with interviewees’ positive embrace of aspects of non-Indigenous society, including ‘values’ from ‘a Christian foundation’ in north Queensland, efforts in running a mining company in Arnhem Land, and Mayor’s own fundamental commitment to the trade union movement.
The author’s conversational style gives readers a feeling for the informality and intimacies of his working relationships with interviewees, many of whom were already known to him, either because they had attended the Uluru convention or were fellow activists. Mundane details of Mayor’s travels engagingly supplement the big topics discussed. He sits with an interlocutor on plastic chairs in the shade of a tree, leans against a vehicle talking while watching a football game, and enjoys a ferry ride to Bruny Island being ‘blown by a stiff salty breeze’. The author’s impressions, at times speculative, lend literary licence to the prose: ‘I sensed that what she was about to say was rarely shared, often hidden in her heart’; an interviewee’s eyes were ‘like windows to a place full of sun, river sand and beautiful Arrernte flora and fauna’; ‘I’m sure he knew what I was feeling – an overwhelming pride and connection with my island home that
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I had yearned for my entire life’. Such poetic commentary facilitates a lively story, even if it is not always clear where the interviewee’s voice becomes transposed with the author’s rich interpretations.
The book’s motif, with its spectacular cover image, is finding ‘the heart of the nation’, symbolised by Uluru as the geographic ‘heart’ of the continent. Those without Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry are not included among the interviewees, but the journey towards ‘voice, treaty and truth’ is presented as an urgent goal for all. Surely the invitation ‘to join us’, ‘to walk with us’, will be persuasive for many, whether those whose forebears have been in Australia for generations or more recently arrived migrants. The message, however, is not without complication. Describing federal parliament as occupying ‘a hill that was stolen from the Ngunnawal people’ will stoke discomfort and uncertainty for some, and risk resentment among Australians who remain proud of the history of European settlement.
The message of inclusiveness which is present in parts of Mayor’s book is important: ‘we can only find the heart of the nation together’. Unavoidably this invitation also sits alongside repeated renditions of negative and at times brutal experiences suffered among Indigenous forebears. On the one hand, a senior Yolngu man is quoted as saying that ‘our ancestors’ we sing to ‘are your ancestors too’, but we also encounter the categorical distinction between those with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander ancestry and others who are envisaged as remaining always ‘nonIndigenous’. Indeed, a sharp difference is implied between ‘modern times’ and ‘the old ways’, the latter presented as ‘the most peaceful culture with unsurpassed longevity’ and ‘a model of harmonious coexistence’, these propositions risking romanticisation that ignores the flaws and discontinuities exhibited by all societies over time.
Finding the Heart of the Nation deserves to be read widely and the issues it raises addressed across the diverse sectors of Australian society. The energy with which the author has propounded his commitment to Indigenous rights
and advancement is impressive. Further details as to how improved life outcomes for Indigenous people will arise from the Uluru Statement proposals will doubtless remain a key issue for ongoing debate. The book is indeed, as the author posits, ‘a live political docu-
Plein air
Susan Wyndham
WOMERAH LANE: LIVES AND LANDSCAPES
by Tom Carment
Giramondo
$39.95 pb, 261 pp, 9781925818215
Tom Carment the artist, writer, and man makes a perfectly integrated whole. Carment is a compact, casually neat figure who looks through round-lensed glasses and has a calm stillness even when he’s on the move, as he often is. His art and writing are also on a small scale, intimately observant, informal, and warmly appealing. He has exhibited his paintings and drawings for more than four decades and has written for almost as long, occasionally for publication and often in private. As he said at his book launch, he used to pour most of his thoughts into letters, including one he found recently that ran to thirty-eight pages.
Womerah Lane gathers more than forty ‘essays, non-fiction stories and vignettes’ written over three decades. As a collection, they create a loose memoir of Carment’s life, but chronology is less important than themes of place, history, community, relationships, memory, and art itself. The unhurried pace invites readers to dip in rather than hurry through.
Carment gives a modest summary of the subjects covered: ‘swimming, drawing, Albert Namatjira, art supplies, friends who’ve died, long journeys, the Easter Show, the Opera House, rabbit-rearing, sheep-rearing, hitchhiking, waterdivining, long-distance cycling, building construction, and even … my love of telegraph poles, typewriters and eggs.’
Carment has lived in Sydney for
ment’ and a ‘call to action’ for those who share a commitment to the resolution of colonialism’s legacies across Australia. g
David Trigger is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at The University of Queensland.
most of his life; Womerah Lane is his family’s long-time address in innerurban Darlinghurst. His opening essay describes without judgement the goings-on in the lane, from drug deals and prostitution to children in paddle pools. Carment observes his neighbours with clear-eyed affection. There’s the retired head of the Seamen’s Union whose portrait he painted four times; a man who played Barbra Streisand records loudly every day and shouted at Carment’s daughter, the only time the mild-mannered artist shouted back; a homeless man who slept under houses and promptly slipped a two-dollar coin under the gate to repay Carment’s loan.
Throughout the book, Carment’s gentle stories are yeasted with odd details and well-timed humour. The funniest recurring motif, though perhaps not for Carment at the time, is the trouble his unthreatening presence attracts. As a plein-air painter, he works on location and quickly, but not quickly enough to escape attention. People think he’s suicidal, selling drugs, or writing parking tickets; police question him; strangers chat and ask for money; a cow nudges him with its wet nose; a dog lifts its leg on his back. He’s always polite but sometimes shaken.
Almost every story, no matter the ostensible topic, is about Carment’s artistic life. Alongside the words run finely reproduced works of art he created in that place: impressionistic oils, luminous watercolours, sketchy pencil and charcoal drawings capturing both snapshot moments and movement in their shimmering lines.
From his city base, he travels the Australian continent from Queensland to Western Australia to visit friends, seek adventure, and find new locations. There are family camping holidays to the beach, working visits to country
properties, cycling trips, hitchhiking, and solitary walks in the bush, always with his portable studio of paints, panels, and folding stool. Carment is a curious reporter, recording dates and arcane facts, enhanced by the artist’s dash. He remembers the brand and variety of a cat food can stuck on a lizard’s head, sees sleeping passengers on a train as ‘plaster casts of Pompeii victims’, and notes that Grafton Anglican Cathedral is built with half a million pink sandstock bricks. The long chapter on Cooktown is a profound nugget of Australian history.
Perhaps the greatest distinction between his visual and written records is that the painted scenes are empty of people, or at most show a few vaguely outlined figures, while the stories are alive with colourful characters and conversations. On his travels, he meets truck drivers, farmers, and waitresses; he’s at home with old-timers, though his antenna twitches at the ingrained prejudices he sometimes encounters.
Carment’s wide network includes artists such as Brett and Wendy Whiteley, and writers David Malouf, Robert Gray, and Gillian Mears, whose unpredictable life he recalls through their letters. His fine account of helping to dismantle the studio of photographer Olive Cotton is quoted at length in Helen Ennis’s new biography (reviewed on page 23). This story, like most, ends delicately: ‘The next day, Olive gave me a print of a gum tree against the sky. The signature is unsteady and there are white hairs on the darks, but I like it for that.’
Accidents, illness, and deaths accumulate. The tone becomes gradually elegiac as he writes about late friends and his father, a survivor of Changi, Sandakan, and Kuching, who sat for his son four times, occasions Carment remembers as some of their most meaningful and relaxed together. His word portraits are created with the same steady gaze as the painted ones, which have often been hung in the Archibald Prize.
There is fascinating expertise in Carment’s chapters, specifically on his methods, materials, and influences from Caspar David Friedrich to Edward Hopper and Albert Namatjira. He came to still-life painting late, at the age of
sixty, inspired by the red onions in a Velázquez painting. Even then his partner, Jan, suggested that he should wait until he was too decrepit to leave the house.
In his sixties, Tom Carment remains ageless and energetic, exhibiting regularly, his style little changed but always
Flannery’s bedrock
Libby Robin
LIFE: SELECTED WRITINGS
by Tim Flannery
Text Publishing
$39.99 hb, 512 pp, 9781922268297
One of the pleasures of reviewing a book is reading it slowly, paying attention to the rhythms and its author’s intentions, impulses, and indulgences. Reading is always a conversation between writer and reader. A major collection like Life: Selected writings takes this experience to a new level. This is not just a conversation between a writer now and a reader now, but a writer then, his choices now, the sum of those choices as arrayed in a substantial blue volume, and the reader with a ‘long now’ to luxuriate in the exchange.
This is a wonderful summer book: it can be tasted in short, self-contained moments or read as a large, luminous whole exposing the historical concerns of a polymath over nearly thirty years. More than a memoir, it captures snapshots of the intellectual musings of a feisty, funny writer – sometimes angry, sometimes lost in wonder. Almost like a diary, the essays have a subtext revealing what else is happening in Flannery’s life and times: ‘Ground Zero’, for example, an essay that describes the geological and biological genesis of North America sixty-five million years ago, carries the date 2001.
Flannery speaks of exploring and growing up in museums. He describes himself as an explorer, and he writes traveller’s tales that wilfully cross times and places, unpacking ideas. He reads
fresh. This beautifully written, illustrated, and produced book enlarges our vision of Australia through the highlights of a distinctive and inspiring career. g
Susan Wyndham is a Sydney-based journalist and writer.
– and introduces – explorers’ diaries. Deeper in time are the imaginative travels of his palaeontological fieldwork. His youthful wildness was tamed through the calming mentorship of the Museum of Victoria’s vertebrate palaeontologist Tom Rich. Visits to hallowed halls of bones have shaped many of Flannery’s big ideas. He reverently describes his visit to the Humboldt Museum, the ‘finest natural history exhibition on Earth’ (in the 1930s at least). But the date of his visit, 11 November 1989, is also significant. The articulated dinosaur specimens of the ‘glorious colonial age’ of German East Africa are shadowed as fireworks blaze above the falling Berlin Wall outside. The extraordinary museum and its place in world history become the backdrop as another story unfolds. It is now 2019, and we are adventuring in eastern Indonesia, exploring evolutionary cul-de-sacs, and their near-extinct fauna, guided by knowledgeable locals. Alfred Russel Wallace formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection in the Spice Islands, a tiny volcanic archipelago straddling the equator. We end this essay scuttling outside in haste, chased by the hounds of the East German museum. Flannery takes both physical and intellectual risks in his explorations. It is the interweaving of these that makes the essays so vivid.
Adventurous, curious, and intriguing, these fifty essays work together to explore the macro and micro of life through biological, evolutionary, geological, and cosmological time frames, sometimes all at once. The bedrock of Flannery’s oeuvre is history – environmental, natural, human. His big continental natural histories, three of them, have structured his thinking over three decades. The Future Eaters (Australasia, 1994), The Eternal Frontier (North
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America, 2001), and Europe: The first 100 million years (2018) have built and rebuilt his ideas. The essays of this collection sift through the details, creating the structures that support the bigger books, and the books in turn provide kicking-off points for new essays later.
Flannery is most famous as the climate guy, author of The Weather Makers (2010), and chief councillor of Australia’s Climate Council. Yet we are more than halfway through the book, in 2005, before we find climate change in an essay. He is also a public figure, a former Australian of the Year, and we have his Australia Day address in 2002 in this collection. The history and future of Australia, the effects of climate change, and life in the public eye all demand different skills; there is no formal training for these. Flannery describes as a ‘tidal wave’ the realisation of the implications of climate change. Engagement with this most wicked problem of our times ‘swept me far from my comfort zone’. Flannery’s climate engagement begins deep in the past, following extinctions and evolutionary changes. He is equally passionate about the planet’s deep future.
To essay is to try out, to explore in another way. The range and breadth of these essays is at times breathtaking: it is invidious to select favourites from a smorgasbord that stretches from tree-kangaroo foot bones to cosmology, across reviews, new syntheses, science communication, and, mischievously, one fictional chapter from his novel, The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (2014, written under the pseudonym Dido Butterworth). Yet reading ‘The Great Aerial Ocean’ (2005) is one place to start. Understanding the atmosphere is the first step to understanding both life on Earth and what climate change means for it. When read with ‘Curiosity and Adventure’, the new introduction to the collection as a whole, one can trace Flannery’s personal journey with the idea of life. He is awed by the way he can see the planet breathing the Keeling Curve of CO2 concentrations, with a ‘great inspiration’ in the northern spring and an ‘exhalation’ of enrichment as the northern autumn sheds its biomass. Yet that same curve, with its ‘innocent
perkiness’, is the ‘Silent Spring of climate change’ as ‘each exhalation ended with a little more CO2 in the atmosphere than the one before’. This curve was the red flag that changed Flannery’s life and put his private life ‘under siege’. The collection captures both the lucid communicator in his revelatory moment and, in his fictional piece back in the safety of a 1930s museum, his humorous and writerly way of escaping the stress that becoming a climate activist brought to his life.
Flannery writes life as it happens to him. He found his mojo in the curation of bones, as a museum keeper, but he has never forgotten the exploration and engagement, the research that breathes life into collections. Working in museums means embracing the public, never being so arcane as to forget to communicate. His passion is to work alongside the people who know the living animals and their livelihoods, whatever language they speak. The partnerships forged in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and beyond were about listening, and learning ‘with’, not telling. Pen-portraits of people from places of curious creatures warm these essays, offering humour in dark moments, often at the author’s expense.
Spanning long timescales and large ideas, the essays are decorated with delicate cameos. In making sense of the blue planet, Flannery is always writing. ‘It’s my way of exploring and making sense of the world’, he says. For the intrepid fellow traveller, reading Life is a wild and wonderful ride. g
Libby Robin is the author of sixteen books, including The Environment: A history of the idea (co-authored with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin, 2018).
‘Gradual imposition and abuses’
The use and abuse of official secrecy
Kieran Pender
SECRET:
THE MAKING OF AUSTRALIA’S SECURITY STATE
by Brian Toohey
Melbourne University Press, $39.99 pb, 399 pp, 9780522872804
Cass Sunstein, a noted American constitutional scholar, once lamented: ‘The notion that the government may control information at its source is at odds with the idea that the purpose of a system of free expression is to control the conduct of representatives.’ In a liberal democracy –supposedly of the people, by the people, for the people – political opacity is inconsistent with the central premise of government.
Yet in Australia, and elsewhere, this overriding presumption of governmental transparency has been steadily eroded. As veteran journalist Brian Toohey reveals in his sweeping new book, Secret: The making of Australia’s security state, which begins with words from Australia’s defence minister of 1938 and concludes in the Scott Morrison era, the catchcry of national security has time and again distorted our political system. From a default position of openness, with limited exceptions only where justified by compelling interests, secrecy has become the norm.
From the birth of ASIO to the present day, Toohey traces innumerable national security controversies, highlighting a long history of incompetence and attempts to use official secrecy to prevent embarrassment. Secret is far-ranging, from Australia’s claims of sovereignty in Antarctica to the Maralinga nuclear testing, from the Whitlam dismissal to Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan. Toohey, a stalwart of national security journalism (most recently for the Australian Financial Review), has seen most of it up close. Secret is thus at once both a quasi-memoir and a history of Australia’s national security policy, linked by a common thread: the
use and misuse of official secrecy.
It is an entertaining read, full of intrigue, more than a few scandalous bedroom exposés and laugh-out-loud moments. Richard Nixon offers his opinion of Gough Whitlam (‘Marshall, I can’t stand that cunt’), while an American ambassador proposes to drill for oil on the Great Barrier Reef.
Secret is richly sourced, with more than thirty pages of endnotes. Toohey’s extensive archival research is evident throughout, although he complains at the end: ‘Unhappily, the archives are not easy to search.’ But the book is made all the more compelling for the personal insight that the author brings to bear. Toohey broke many of the stories that form the core of this book, facing numerous government lawsuits as a result. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, he can also reflect on the bigger picture, and uses archival material to better understand the wider ramifications of his reporting.
Toohey’s latest book has three shortcomings. First, while broadly chronological, Secret proceeds thematically. This necessitates temporal hopping back and forth, which induces confusion – compounded by occasional non sequiturs. Second, it becomes evident that Toohey is using the book to settle scores against past and present foes. Secret contains criticism of Professor John Blaxland (official historian of the Australian Signals Directorate), Sydney Morning Herald international editor Peter Hartcher, now-deceased senior mandarin Arthur Tange, former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and ex-Prime Minister Julia Gillard. These grudges may be deserved. Tange’s anger over bureaucratic leaks to Toohey saw him pressure the US em-
bassy not to grant the journalist a visa. Evans alleged that Toohey’s reporting had caused the death of Australian spies, and commenced proceedings in the High Court to prevent the publication of a story that did not exist. But the axegrinding detracts from Secret’s overall coherence.
Finally, and most significantly, Secret feels at times like several books crammed into one. Toohey makes a valuable contribution in telling the history of Australian national security policy, with titbits that even seasoned political observers will find alternately amusing and alarming. Within this, like a Matryoshka doll, is the often one-sided, sometimes fraught history of Australian–American relations. Toohey offers a timely reminder that Australia needs the United States more than it needs us. We have no guarantee of their military support in a time of need; indeed, two different American ambassadors to Canberra have admitted to not having read the ANZUS Treaty. Toohey criticises Australia’s ongoing attachment to America, and recommends a more sophisticated, multi-vector foreign policy.
Stated plainly at the beginning, and interwoven throughout, is a damning indictment of the triumph of official secrecy over government transparency. It is here that Secret makes its most important contribution. The analysis is clear-eyed (‘the past was by no means a golden era’), balanced (‘few deny there can be a legitimate role for government secrecy’), and witty (on an intelligence agent testifying as ‘Officer 1’ against Mamdouh Habib in his defamation battle with the Daily Telegraph, Toohey observes: ‘Sitting here in my Moscow apartment, I wonder what News Limited
would have to say about this practice in a Russian court’).
Australia’s national security history, and the Australian–American relations that sit alongside it, offers important context for Toohey’s warning on the decline of government transparency. Yet that central thesis sometimes goes missing down rabbit holes as Toohey recalls stories with only marginal relevance to the issue at hand. With a tighter edit, and a greater focus, Secret might have packed a heftier punch.
These are, ultimately, minor complaints. Secret offers firsthand insight into the rise of the Australian security state, backed with rigorous archival and secondary research. It is an important book that should cause all Australians to pause and reflect on the direction of our society. As Toohey highlights, over the past decade spending on our secret services has grown by more than ten per cent annually, while ‘the annual average for all government spending, including on schools, hospitals and age pensions, was under 3.5 per cent’. Our lack of explicit constitutional or legislative protections for civil liberties means that parliament has enacted laws that would never pass scrutiny in comparable liberal democracies.
Throughout Toohey’s book, which spans more than half a century, we see an inexorable creep towards a national security state. The author at one point observes: ‘there is almost no example since 1952 of an Australian government repealing a national security law without replacing it with a tougher version’. That should alarm all Australians.
If we look across the Pacific, the United States is suffering from a similar plight. In neither jurisdiction was this inevitable. Around the same time that these issues came to the fore in Australia, set against the context of the Cold War, the US government asserted official secrecy to block a lawsuit by the widows of an Air Force plane crash. At first instance, Judge William H. Kirkpatrick rejected the government’s position. This was affirmed on appeal, with Judge Albert Maris quoting jurist Edward Livingston:
No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but
many have been brought to ruin, and reduced to slavery, by suffering gradual imposition and abuses, which were imperceptible, only because the means of publicity had not been secured.
The United States Supreme Court failed to heed this warning. Its ultimate
Mega-risk
Tom Bamforth
FUTURE PROOF: HOW TO BUILD RESILIENCE IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD
by Jon Coaffee
Yale University Press (Footprint) $49.99 hb, 288 pp, 9780300228670
In Future Proof, Jon Coaffee, professor in urban geography at the University of Warwick, asks readers to imagine ‘a typical day’: radio reports of an impending cyclone; public-transport posters encouraging the reporting of ‘suspicious activity’; the path to an office (especially in a CBD) protected by hostile-vehicle-mitigation bollards. At work, computer systems will be tested for security from cyber attacks. The train home will be delayed due to a network complication, and the evening’s television will show the cyclone’s impact, discussing the relative ineffectiveness of hazard mitigation.
In this hellish yet recognisable quotidian cycle, the exception, Coaffee argues, has become the norm. New modes of thinking are necessary if human societies are to survive, let alone flourish. For Coaffee, there is a pressing need for change. He writes of an ‘implementation gap’ between the experienced reality of uncertainty and policy-making responses that are often reactive, short term, and based on addressing the problems of the past, rather than pre-emptive action to create a sustainable future. Such approaches derive from an outdated ‘steady state’ logic that assumes things will eventually return to ‘normal’. Instead, a new framework for analysis is necessary. While
judgment gave deference to the government’s desire for secrecy, and has been the progenitor of seven decades of opacity. As Toohey makes amply clear in Secret, Australia has hardly fared better. g
Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer, based in London.
much of the book focuses on the United States and the United Kingdom, it is an observation that is also painfully apparent in Australian political responses to the worsening impact of climate change and the securitisation of national political debate.
The fundamental change is that humanity faces new types of ‘megarisk’, some of which may be existential. Viable future societies depend on actions we take now. In the United States, 2017 was the costliest year on record for disasters. Drought, flooding, hurricanes, bushfires, and tropical storms caused more than US$300 billion in damage. Coaffee rightly criticises the idea that these are in any way ‘natural’, a term that blinds us to human agency. They are not ‘rare and unknowable events’ but a consequence of human activity, carbon emissions, and inequitable forms of social and economic organisation. The growing impact of disasters is, Coaffee argues, a ‘baseline against which we must act’. ‘Adapt or die’ is the stark choice posed in the book’s final chapter.
Yet Future Proof is not a pessimistic book; it offers a conception of ‘progressive’ resilience around which to frame new thinking in response to growing uncertainty. Coaffee outlines the idea’s intellectual evolution. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake led Enlightenment thinkers
to question the idea of divine fate and to posit early sociological and scientific causes for the catastrophe. By then, mathematical research into probability was leading to the development of the idea of risk. The notion that events were not ordained but had a likelihood that could be predicted underpinned subsequent forward-thinking ideas of risk management. With the ability to manage – and insure against – possible disruption, modern societies began to organise themselves around the reduction of risk. Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1986), published the same year as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, examined the systemic way in which industrial societies organised themselves to deal with the risks of industrial modernisation itself. For Coaffee, resilience thinking is the next phase of this development. Previous conceptions of risk sought to ‘colonise the future’ based on the likely recurrence of past events. Yet these approaches are no longer appropriate given current levels of uncertainty and the ‘vast and complex interconnectivity of global systems’.
Contemporary resilience thinking also derives from ecological thinking that by the 1960s was describing the complex interconnection of ecological systems. Coaffee advocates a ‘bounce forward’ version of resilience that ‘generates new and innovative ways of thinking and organising’ rather than simply restoring a pre-disaster status quo (‘bounce back resilience’). Such innovative thinking seeks to ‘break through the positivist grid of social science’ of conventional risk management. Instead, ‘resilient approaches are more about relationships, connections, and contexts than about fixed rules and linear cause and effect assumptions’. For organisations and policy makers, resilience involves a triptych of ‘adaptability, flexibility, and agility’ to deal with threats to security and to critical infrastructure, economic shocks, disasters, and the climate crisis.
Disasters, he argues, are ‘where it all comes together’. They are not ‘natural’; the most vulnerable are often the worst affected (for example, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans). People are often poorly served by an obsolete response architecture, and community coping
mechanisms can be overlooked. Current funding prioritises response over more effective investment in risk reduction, while insurance is expensive, exclusive, and often simply not available. In conflict, the privatisation of war has created a ‘postmodern’ system of disaster capital in which the West ‘creates’ disasters and profits by responding to them.
Resilience has its critics and at times has a business-school nebulousness to it. In a scene from the political satire The Hollowmen, the prime minister wants to make a major policy announcement but has no substantive ideas. ‘Future Proofing Initiative’ was the impressivesounding yet vacuous recommendation
from the PM’s policy team. Resilience has also been seen as a Trojan Horse for further neoliberal reform. Coaffee walks between these lines, countering vagueness with practical examples and critiquing, inter alia, laissez-faire approaches to insurance and urban planning, especially in the United States. Instead, his is a progressive resilience that seeks to inform key policy areas and to reduce social vulnerability in the face of growing uncertainty about what the future may bring. g
Tom Bamforth’s most recent book is The Rising Tide: Among the islands and atolls of the Pacific Ocean (2019).
Whiplash
Autopsy of a surprising election
Shaun Crowe
THE SURPRISE PARTY: HOW THE COALITION WENT FROM CHAOS TO COMEBACK by Aaron Patrick Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781760642174
You didn’t have to be Antony Green to know that by seven o’clock on election night things were looking very bad for Bill Shorten. The problem itself wasn’t complicated. While all the available polling suggested that Labor would gain support, the majority of booth results said that Labor was going backwards. Numbers were breaking for Scott Morrison, with the Liberal National Party driving a bulldozer through Queensland, while expected Labor gains in Melbourne remaining stubbornly out of reach. Echoes of Don’s Party were hard to ignore.
For Shorten, the whiplash must have been immense. While the Labor leader knew from internal research that the election was closer than publicly recognised, few people seriously believed he could lose. Why would they? A term of unbroken polling supremacy, three recycled prime ministers, a dys-
functional Coalition teetering on the edge of splitting – this was a government destined for punishment, according to all conventional wisdom. And yet, despite this very public mess, Scott Morrison somehow managed to win. This improbable victory, still shocking six months on, is the subject of Aaron Patrick’s new book, The Surprise Party: How the Coalition went from chaos to comeback. Part history, part insider journalism, it’s one of the first book-length autopsies of the election. It’s unlikely to be the last.
Patrick begins this story a year out from the vote, with Turnbull hanging on to power and Morrison his ostensibly loyal treasurer. This allows a full view of twelve strange months in Australian history: from the ‘Super Saturday’ byelections that convinced Queensland conservatives that Turnbull could never win their state; to the slow, brutal stalk-
ing of Turnbull, which ended in Morrison’s surprise ascension; to the state elections in Victoria and New South Wales, which respectively suggested doom and possible hope for the federal Liberal Party.
Patrick recalls some significant, if occasionally tangential, chapters of our recent past. Some of these already feel forgotten, like the scuffle between Turnbull’s office and the ABC, or Michael
overly personalised – Patrick seems to enjoy rubbing salt into Shorten’s considerable wounds – no honest examination of the election can avoid the question of leadership. But arrogance doesn’t explain everything. As Labor’s official election review found, the party’s large and unwieldy policy platform followed its own political logic. The foundation of this was a conviction that, after the Rudd and Gillard years, the party needed to present a balanced budget to voters. As time went on, shadow ministers developed spending proposals for their prospective portfolios. To balance these two things, Labor needed to find itself new revenue. Hence the franking credits.
Adani and the future of coal mining in central Queensland. The book does a good job of mapping this project, both publicly and behind the scenes.
Still, for all Morrison’s unexpected success, certain temptations should be resisted. One is to assume that, just because Morrison won, everything he did showed tactical genius or that everything Shorten did contributed to his eventual loss. As Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, put it, ‘You’re never as smart as you look when you win, and you’re never as dumb as you look when you lose.’ Shorten managed to hold a traumatised party together for six years, taking down two prime ministers in the process. It clearly wasn’t all bad.
Daley taking on Alan Jones over the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust. Other editorial decisions are more perplexing. Patrick spends an inexplicable amount of time psychoanalysing Alex Turnbull, the former prime minister’s son, including his place within the playground hierarchy at Sydney Grammar. For anyone living outside a select few postcodes, this is likely to feel gratuitous.
On the book’s central question, Patrick is more focused. The Surprise Party is ruthlessly and consistently critical of Bill Shorten. He depicts the Labor leader as a man overburdened by self-confidence, with ‘an unwavering certainty that he would vanquish the Coalition government’. Patrick argues that this arrogance led to unnecessary risks, particularly the party’s ambitious tax policies, aimed at wealthy retirees and investment property owners. Shorten himself, coveting the prime ministership since youth, could sell neither the vision nor his own story; his ambition was too naked.
While these arguments can be
When Morrison came to power in late 2018, he inherited a broken and demoralised party, as well as Labor’s political vulnerabilities. Paradoxically, the brutal changeover gave him more space than Turnbull ever enjoyed; people were exhausted by all the fighting. Free from conservative suspicion, Morrison had a short window to reorient the Coalition’s campaign more aggressively against Labor.
Morrison’s plan wasn’t complex; it also received important support by sympathetic parts of the media. In many ways, it reflected Turnbull’s own unfolding strategy: demonising Labor’s tax reforms, claiming a budget surplus, and then attacking Bill Shorten with every available weapon. But Morrison implemented it with relentless efficiency. Its success meant that, after two terms of conservative rule, the election was largely a referendum on Labor’s platform, by then six years in the making, built in pieces to combat three different Liberal leaders.
There is no escaping Morrison’s credit for this electoral pirouette. Beyond the strategic discipline, he managed to connect with regional and suburban voters in a way Turnbull never could. Part of this was his carefully cultivated image, marked by unpretentious clothing, fatherhood, and a performative love of rugby league. Part of it was his deliberate wedging of Labor over
The other temptation is to make grandiose claims about the deeper significance of May 18. Every election is important; as another prime minister once said, they all change the country. But it’s not yet clear that this one will ‘redefine Australia’, as Patrick suggests, or that people chose ‘capitalism over paternalism’ in some definitive way. It is certainly true that people chose caution over uncertainty – Scott Morrison over the Labor alternative. It remains to be seen whether they will do the same next time.
While Patrick indulges in both tendencies on occasion, he can be forgiven these flourishes. This is a book about Scott Morrison’s remarkable triumph, which even his enemies cannot deny. The question is whether a political campaign built around opposition and critique, which excelled in destroying a more ambitious agenda, will also work as a project of government. g
Shaun Crowe is the author of Whitlam’s Children: Labor and the Greens in Australia (2018).
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten in the House of Representatives, 2016 (photograph by Matt Roberts, ABC via Vikimedia Commons)
SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE 29 FEB – 4 APRIL
CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE 9 – 18 APRIL
ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE 23 APRIL – 10 MAY
WILLIAM
Messiahs and cheerful koalas
Lyndon Megarrity
THE MANNER OF THEIR GOING: PRIME MINISTERIAL EXITS IN AUSTRALIA by Norman Abjorensen
Australian Scholarly Publishing $49.95 pb, 284 pp, 9781925984064
How many of us would really want to be prime minister?
The road to The Lodge is littered with depressing tales of ambitious politicians abandoning their friends, principles, and even their own authentic voice in order to secure the Top Job. Then, once you’ve fulfilled your life’s ambitions, voters and your own supporters are liable to tire of you and seek a new political hero. Nevertheless, prime ministers become accustomed to the power, public attention, and perks of office; they find it difficult to choose the ‘right time’ to leave office.
Clinging to office is one of the major themes explored in Norman Abjorensen’s The Manner of Their Going, a study of the political and personal factors that have led to each and every prime ministerial exit since 1901. Originally published in 2015, the text has been updated to include Malcolm Turnbull’s defeat in 2018. As a distinguished political scientist, historian, and journalist, Norman Abjorensen brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the project. The book is well researched and displays a strong awareness of the major works of scholarship on the federal political scene over several decades. However, more intense study of official and private papers at national institutions, such as the National Library of Australia, would have assisted in creating a more original contribution to Australian political history.
Arguably, the most intriguing section of the book deals with the Hawke–Keating era and, in part, the role of the media in the rise and fall of both Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. While
massaging the media has long been part of a prime minister’s toolbox, the Hawke–Keating years saw an intensification of this strategy. Indeed, Abjorensen implies that a significant aspect of Hawke’s fall from power in 1991 was his belief that he had a ‘direct line into the public psyche’, bypassing the press gallery in favour of ‘his preferred radio presenters’. Keating, on the other hand, knew the importance of cultivating journalists desperate for good copy. This undoubtedly assisted in boosting the ambitious politician’s successful second bid for the leadership.
The author is especially critical of Keating’s alleged obsession with ‘big picture’ themes at the expense of acknowledging the general concerns of voters. While this probably contributed to his defeat in the 1996 poll, the neoliberal agenda (such as privatisation, corporatisation of the public service, free markets, and the ideology of competition) was also a key election issue, and John Howard’s Coalition appeared – wrongly as it turned out – to be offering the electorate some relief from rapid economic and social change.
Elsewhere in the book, Abjorensen demolishes some fondly regarded myths. Edmund Barton, often viewed by political historians as the ‘natural choice’ as the first national leader, is convincingly revealed as a sick and exhausted man by the time of Federation, who was given a great deal of encouragement by his fellow ministers to leave office. In another important revisionist account, the author vividly portrays Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, not as a noble founding father but as a man who betrayed his Liberal ideals and his political allies for temporary political advantage.
While the book is often entertaining, its focus on systematically describing and explaining the reasons for each leader’s departure from office is ultimately limited in scope: just as we are beginning to understand the life and times of one leader, the conveyor belt moves on and the next prime minister’s rise and fall is presented in the text. There are no images of prime ministers to help the reader view each leader as
a ‘real person’; Abjorensen’s completist approach to the task necessarily means that in order to fit twenty-nine former prime ministers into a short book, biographical aspects are neglected in favour of narration; and finally, the authorial voice is undermined occasionally by an uncritical use of secondary-source quotations. The evidential basis of Abjorensen’s various quotations from selfserving ex-politicians might also have been corroborated more fully with other sources. But what self-respecting author looking for some added historical colour could resist Stanley Melbourne Bruce’s gentle dig at his successor, Joseph Lyons?
He [Lyons] was a delightful person. He couldn’t run a government but he could win elections. His resemblance to a cheerful koala, his eleven children, his family-man appeal, were irresistible to voters. He did, however, need someone to hold his hand in the early days and I did it …
Despite some reservations, this study of prime ministerial exits usefully reminds us that much of the history of the Commonwealth Parliament has been marked by periods of intense instability and uncertainty. In the early twentieth century, the dominance of progressive Liberal politicians was challenged by the rise of the Australian Labor Party, which shared much of the ideology of Deakin and other Liberals but was more disciplined as a voting bloc. This was anathema to many independent-minded Liberals. By the end of the 1900s, the progressive Liberals had been pushed, reluctantly and painfully, towards conservatism in reaction to Labor. The more recent exits have been less ideological than in the past and more driven by internal political conflict, a reflection, perhaps, of the great divide between the ‘insiders’ (the political, business, and media class) and the ‘outsiders’ – the rest of us. g
Lyndon Megarrity is a Queensland historian and tertiary teacher. He is the author of Northern Dreams: The politics of northern development in Australia (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018).
‘Drawing with light’
A compelling biography of Olive Cotton
Alison Stieven-Taylor
OLIVE COTTON: A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY by Helen Ennis
Fourth Estate, $49.99 hb, 544 pp, 9781460758342
Alover of photography since childhood, by the time Olive Cotton, who was born in Sydney in 1911, was in her twenties she was already creating the pictures that were to define her as one of Australia’s foremost women photographers, although this would not be acknowledged until the 1980s. Apart from the photographs she made, Cotton left little material trace of a life that spanned nine decades (she died in 2003). This lack of physical evidence presented a challenge for biographer Helen Ennis, a former curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia and an art historian, who has nonetheless managed to weave a compelling, if at times diaphanous, narrative.
The book is divided into six parts: Cotton’s personal journey, her evolution as an artist, the progress of the medium, and shifts in Australian society. This juxtaposition creates a fascinating historical account that is captivating and illuminating. Importantly, it also serves to ground a tale that is at times stitched together by supposition and possibility, Ennis acknowledging that, ‘as a biographical subject … Olive has surprisingly little weight’.
In piecing together Cotton’s story, Ennis has drawn on various sources: anecdotes from those who knew Cotton; Ennis’s own recollections of her friendship with the artist; Cotton’s children, Sally and Peter; the private papers of Cotton’s first husband, photographer Max Dupain; and the few personal items that Cotton kept in an old trunk on the property near Cowra, NSW, where she lived for more than half a century. The trunk’s contents, or lack thereof, are a metaphor for Cotton’s acceptance of the impermanence
of life and of photography as an act of remembering.
The first half of the book is largely concerned with Cotton’s childhood and her burgeoning friendship, and later love affair, with Dupain. As the story unfolds, Cotton emerges as a woman of substance, a pioneer who was unafraid to challenge conventions but was also a romantic soul who wanted to live life with passion. As an eighteen-year-old, Cotton saw herself as a thoroughly modern woman who wanted to carve her own path, a view coloured by a life of privilege. Growing up in an affluent family, Cotton lived in a sprawling mansion in Hornsby with a live-in maid. Holidays were spent at the family’s beach house at Newport, where she first met Dupain when she was thirteen. Hers was not an idle life. Cotton studied for a Bachelor of Arts, attending university when it was rare for women to do so. Instead of going straight into teaching, as was expected, she chose to work with Dupain in his studio, where she attracted her own commercial clients. The studio was also a social hub, providing the pair with what Cotton labelled her ‘happy family’.
Cotton and Dupain married in April 1939, but their union was shortlived. Citing abandonment, Dupain was granted a divorce two years later; Cotton had moved from Sydney to Mittagong and taken a job as a teacher. Her refusal to return to her husband, as the judge ordered, was cause to ratify the decree absolute. There is a suggestion that Cotton felt her marriage was one of familiarity rather than passion, but there is little known of her feelings at this time. Rather, the narrative unfolds through Dupain’s private letters and anecdotes from those who knew the
ALMOST HUMAN: A BIOGRAPHY OF JULIUS THE CHIMPANZEE by Alfred Fidjestøl Hachette
$32.99 pb, 241 pp, 9780733642791
The biography has long been reserved for human subjects. It is a genre largely predicated on the idea that only humans live lives sufficiently rich and complex to be worthy of sustained examination. Countless books have centred on different kinds of animals, yet few have fallen within the biographical category. Most are found in the children’s, zoology, or fiction shelves at bookstores.
Alfred Fidjestøl has shaken, though perhaps not toppled, these assumptions with Almost Human, the tale of a likeable but hapless Norwegian chimpanzee named Julius. It spans over forty years of Julius’s life, dedicating much space to his turbulent childhood. Fidjestøl recounts, in distressing detail, how Julius’s mother, Sanne, neglected him. ‘Julius appeared starved; he grew silent and seemed nearly dead’, he writes. Two senior staff members at the Kristiansand Zoo, Billy Glad and Edvard Moseid, were forced to intervene and brought Julius home to live with their families. For Julius, those were wonderful times, as he indulged in the pleasures of cake, painting, and companionship. However, his bonds with the human world meant that his reintegration into the chimpanzee community would prove difficult.
In following years, Julius’s existence was marred by dysfunction and alienation. He was victimised by the community’s alpha male leader, Champis, fathered babies who died as infants, and made repeated attempts to escape from the chimpanzee enclosure. Simultaneously, Norwegian media spun false, romanticised narratives about him.
Even apart from its subject, Almost Human is not a conventional biography. Fidjestøl takes some liberties with the form, drawing on a wealth of information concerning chimpanzees and other animals, including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal’s work, enhancing readers’ appreciation of non-human life. Almost Human is an unashamed act of animal advocacy, at a time of mass endangerment and extinction. Nicholas Bugeja
couple. This leaves the reader to imagine what might have compelled her to make such a dramatic life change. Divorce in those days was difficult, uncommon, and socially frowned upon.
Despite their personal problems, Cotton returned to Sydney to run the studio while Dupain was in the military. During this time, she was introduced to Ross McInerney, then a soldier. As Ennis notes, the portrait that Cotton took
tent, where they lived without running water or electricity for several years before buying Spring Forest, the property near Cowra where she would spend the rest of her days. (Readers will recall Ennis’s ABR Fellowship essay ‘Olive Cotton at Spring Forest’, published in the July–August 2013 issue.) Here they lived in a two-room cottage and raised their two children before moving into the property’s old barracks in 1974. By all counts it was a remote and minimalist existence, but Cotton did not forsake the privilege of her lineage, taking her children for summer holidays to Newport while McInerney stayed behind. During these separations, Cotton and McInerney wrote to each other frequently. These letters were kept, offering a rare bounty to Ennis.
objects. With Tea cup ballet, Cotton made her international début; the picture was exhibited in the London Salon of Photography in 1935. It wasn’t until fifty years later that Tea cup ballet became recognised as an exemplar of Australian modernist photography.
of McInerney in 1942, which features in the book, conveys an intimacy between the sitter and photographer that is undeniable. The glint in McInerney’s eye, his shy smile, and the close composition indicate that love most definitely was in the air, but it would be more than two years before the pair married. It wasn’t just romance Cotton craved, it was also dependability and sexual fidelity, desires she revealed in the few letters that remain of her correspondence to McInerney during the war.
When McInerney and Cotton married, the newlyweds set up home in a
There are long hiatuses in Cotton’s career: twenty years between working in Dupain’s studio and opening her own in 1964 in Cowra, and another twenty before her work was widely recognised. Ennis connects Cotton’s intermittent photographic output to the overall narrative by interspersing chapters throughout the book that are dedicated to specific images.
The chapters that delve into the nuances of Cotton’s photographic practice deliver some of the most satisfying moments in the book. In a chapter on Tea cup ballet, one of Cotton’s best-known photographs, Ennis discusses the artist’s capacity for ‘drawing with light’, Cotton’s description of photography. Cotton’s creativity and photographic skill come to the fore in this ‘ballet-like composition’ fashioned from inanimate
These short chapters deliver important insights into Cotton’s artistic practice, but the images also reveal aspects of her personality. Her resourcefulness is found in the intricate still-life compositions made from everyday items; her romantic heart is reflected in her capacity to find the exotic in the ordinary; her willingness to experiment can be seen in the play of light and shadow; and her love of nature is indicated in her intimate depictions of the natural world. While Ennis has proven her skill in crafting an engaging story about a woman she describes as ‘a background figure’, the weakness of the book lies in the poor reproduction of Cotton’s photographs. This is incredibly disappointing: the pictures are crucial to introducing a new audience to Cotton’s work and to demonstrating why she is so important to the history of photography in this country. g
Alison Stieven-Taylor is a lecturer in journalism at Monash University and is writing her PhD on photography as social change.
The trunk on the verandah at Spring Forest (2016) photograph courtesy of Roger Butler, from the book under review.
NEW FROM CHICAGO
VOLCANOES AND WINE
From Pompeii to Napa Charles Frankel
Frankel takes us across the stunning and dangerous world of volcanic wines. He details each volcano’s most famous eruptions, the grapes that grow in its soils, and the people who make their homes on its slopes, adapting to an ever-menacing
THE DAILY SHERLOCK HOLMES
A Year of Quotes from the Case-Book of the World’s Greatest Detective
Arthur Conan Doyle
Edited by Levi Stahl and Stacey Shintani
With a Foreword by Michael Sims
For a Holmes fan, there are few pleasures comparable to returning to his richly imagined world. No book published this year will bring that fan more pleasure. Come, readers. e game is afoot.
THE DAILY JANE AUSTEN
A Year of Quotes
Jane Austen
Edited and with a Foreword by Devoney Looser
“ is slim volume is the perfect stocking stu er for the Janeite in your life. . . . At less than 200 pages, it packs a lot of pleasure in a fast read.”— NewsWhistle
A SMALL DOOR SET IN CONCRETE
One Woman’s Story of Challenging Borders in Israel/Palestine
Ilana Hammerman
“ is is the work of a sensitive, courageous soul. Its stories of injustice and oppression might be overwhelming were it not for Hammerman’s example of facing it all with compassion and courage.”— Foreword Reviews
THE VIEW FROM SOMEWHERE
Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity
Lewis Raven Wallace
“Extraordinarily engaging, psychologically penetrating, and intellectually absorbing. In short, this is a new classic of topical lm studies and the literature of art and war.”— Booklist landscape.
“An outstanding and urgently needed critique of journalistic orthodoxy. . . . Ought to be required reading in journalism schools everywhere.”— PopMatters
NIGHTMARES IN THE DREAM SANCTUARY
War and the Animated Film
Donna Kornhaber
Chisholm’s charm
Danielle Clode
IDLING IN GREEN PLACES: A LIFE OF ALEC CHISHOLM
by Russell McGregor
Australian Scholarly Publishing $49.95 pb, 285 pp, 9781925801996
Australian nature writing has come a long way in recent years. Not only do we have an abundance of contemporary nature writers, but we are also rediscovering the ones we have forgotten. The neglect of Australia’s nature writing history, with its contributions to science, literature, and conservation, is happily being redressed with recent biographies of Jean Galbraith, Rica Erickson, Edith Coleman, and now a new biography of Alec Chisholm.
Chisholm is one of the best-known Australian nature writers. His first and most famous book, Mateship with Birds, was republished by Scribe in 2013. Born in 1890 in rural Victoria, and spending his working life in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, Chisholm lived through much of the twentieth century and was a leading figure in the golden age of Australian nature writing and the birth of the modern conservation movement. Russell McGregor’s biography documents Chisholm’s long life in scrupulous detail, aided by a significant body of archives and Chisholm’s own autobiographical work.
Chisholm’s early childhood in rural Victoria reveals no great affinity for nature, beyond the usual pursuits of shooting birds and collecting eggs. It does, however, betray a predilection for his own company and some difficulty getting on with others, suggesting that his legendary curmudgeonliness was not just an acquisition of old age. Jour-
nalism seems to have been the catalyst and driver of Chisholm’s career. Like E.J. Banfield and Donald Macdonald, he was employed by newspapers and spared the need to work freelance unlike most female nature writers of the time. Like his contemporaries, Chisholm was staunchly nationalistic in his patriotic appreciation for Australian nature, but he lacked the militaristic and masculinist overtones of some others.
McGregor describes Chisholm’s ongoing role in various ornithology and field naturalist clubs. His conservation work ranged from lobbying for Queensland’s Animals and Birds Act 1921 to being a figurehead for conservation in the 1950 and 1960s But it was his popular nature writing, in newspapers, natural history journals, and books, that had the most impact, alongside his promotion of nature study in schools. Such influence can be difficult to measure, but McGregor presents enthusiastic letters from Chisholm’s readers, testifying to his inspiration and long-term impact. It is rather a shame that not much of Chisholm’s writing appears in this book. As a historian, McGregor seems uncomfortable with Chisholm’s ‘lavish style’ and regards its whimsical, literary, anthropomorphic, and poetic features as faults rather than popular narrative devices of the time that delighted his readers. The charm of Chisholm’s writing is apparent whenever it does appear, such as in this passage about the ‘vagrant Hawkesbury sandstone’ of Sydney:
I love its brooding solemnity and the friendly roughness of its surface, whether festooned with lichens and moss and ferns and orchids or merely stained by the centuries: I love its shadowed cliffs and pillars and turrets, its fantastic caves and niches in which the brilliant lyre-birds nest, its tumbled masses upon which the Old People have left their curious carvings for the white successors to wonder at, and its reckless hillsides where the smooth-barked angophora trees, decorative but aloof, cling on and about the rocks and sometimes split great slabs of sandstone asunder in their growing. And the gleam that lights the great face of the sandstone after rain, as it has lit that austere face for a thousand
thousand years; the furtive trickling of water between ferns and moss into quiet pools; and the merry adventuring as the creek gathers volume and falls over rocks and cliffs – how these things invite the soul.
A little dated, perhaps, but it makes me want to read more of Chisholm’s own words.
Not everyone’s life story makes for a good story or has a great mystery to uncover. Biographies, particularly of scientists and writers, are challenging. The recent J.R.R. Tolkien biopic, for example, was widely critiqued for being just a bit too ordinary, as if audiences were disappointed that such an influential and imaginative writer could be so mundane in real life. Focusing on the person instead of their work sometimes detracts from the very thing that makes them appealing. Chisholm is interesting because of his love of nature and his ability to communicate that fascination. He was clearly an inspiring public speaker and a wonderful companion on a bushwalk, but perhaps not someone you’d want to make small talk with. I kept hoping the story would focus more on what Chisholm was doing and what he was looking at (the major conservation battles and the wildlife) rather than his personality and daily activities..
Nonetheless, this is a worthy biography of a man who deserves to be remembered for his important work. The book is an easy read, well structured with thorough referencing and a useful index. It will be a valuable resource in biology, history and philosophy of science, and literary studies. While the price and minimal production values might be off-putting, it is likely to be popular among bird enthusiasts and those interested in natural history more broadly. More importantly though, this book is a useful contribution to our literature on Australian nature writers, on the origins of our conservation movement, and on the role nature plays in our efforts to define what it means to be Australian. g
Danielle Clode’s biography of nature writer Edith Coleman, The Wasp and the Orchid (2018), was shortlisted for the National Biography Awards.
Two worlds
Stephen
Bennetts
GULPILIL
by Derek Rielly Macmillan
$29.99 hb, 246 pp, 9781760784973
Australians have admired distinguished actor David Gulpilil in films like Walkabout (1971), Storm Boy (1976), The Tracker (2002), and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002). Not so many will be familiar with the details of his recent life, as related by journalist Derek Rielly. We find Gulpilil dying of lung cancer in Murray Bridge, an unprepossessing town on the lower Murray River in South Australia. He is surrounded by friends and cared for by the heroic Mary Hood, a retired nurse who has dedicated much of her life to caring for Aboriginal people in the Top End. This follows several bleak years living as a ‘long grasser’ on the fringes of Darwin and doing time in Berrimah Prison on charges of serious assault during a drunken fight.
A key philosophical question posed in Rielly’s narrative is whether, as Gulpilil’s artist friend George Gittoes maintains, Gulpilil should return to die among his own people in Arnhem Land, or whether, as his more pragmatic friend, actor Jack Thompson suggests, he is better off staying where he is ‘because in his homeland there is nothing but humbug … And there’s not much doubt he would wind up with nothing to his name and he’d die in the long grass. Whereas here, he’s looked after, respected and has some mates, he goes down to the pub for lunch and he and the cook are good mates.’
Gulpilil has touched many hearts during his long and celebrated career, but the most moving passage of this book was Rabbit-Proof Fence co-star Natasha Wanganeen’s account of her first glimpse of him on a television set at South Australia’s Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission, where she grew up. Wanganeen describes Gulpilil playing Fingerbone Bill in Storm Boy: ‘I looked at him and said, he’s like me, I’m like
him. And it made me feel good. It made me feel happy and proud. When I looked at him, he let me know I had a place here. That it’s a part of us, we’re here! It’s such a beautiful thing to an Aboriginal child when you grow up on a Christian Mission. Watching him be so happy and free and such a larrikin. That’s exactly us!’
This passage represents one of the few Indigenous voices in the book. Gulpilil’s life and Indigenous experience generally are mainly filtered through accounts from his many white associates. These include filmmakers Phillip Noyce (director of Rabbit-Proof Fence), Philippe Mora ( Mad Dog Morgan ) , and Rolf de Heer (Charlie’s Country, The Tracker, and Ten Canoes); co-stars Jack Thompson, Damon Gameau, Gary Sweet, and Paul Hogan; artists George Gittoes and Craig Ruddy (whose portrait of Gulpilil won the 2004 Archibald Prize); and Richard Trudgen, a fortyyear veteran of the Arnhem Land outstation movement and fluent speaker of Yolŋu Matha, whose 2000 book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die offers Rielly an important key to understanding the cultural challenges faced by Gulpilil in negotiating two radically divergent worlds.
Fêted by European society, like Bennelong and Namatjira before him, Gulpilil represents for white Australians the embodiment of traditional Aboriginal culture. Yet Trudgen claims that after being discovered as a young man by British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg for the 1971 film Walkabout, Gulpilil lost connection with his traditional culture ‘because it just wasn’t part of his practice when he was out with Europeans talking with them all the time. The great disappointment of Gulpilil’s parents was his lack of traditional knowledge.’
Charlie’s Country (2014) offers a more cogent biography than Rielly’s book and is perhaps the most powerful film about Aboriginal Australia I have seen. De Heer probably saved Gulpilil’s life by visiting him in Berrimah jail and persuading him to make this semiautobiographical film, which won him Best Actor in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section.
Gulpilil is rich in hilarious anecdote,
but in terms of engagement with blackfellas, Rielly is by his own admission a complete neophyte. The author was also precluded from visiting Gulpilil’s homeland because of Gulpilil’s declining health. He faced the additional challenge of interviewing a highly laconic biographical subject for whom English is a third or fourth language.
There is a kind of ocker naïveté to Rielly’s surf-magazine writing style; we are unnecessarily regaled, for instance, with accounts of certain figures smoking bucket bongs, while in another passage, when the author is sent to recover a painting from Gulpilil’s bedroom, the reader becomes an uncomfortable participant in Rielly’s voyeuristic invasion of the actor’s privacy, as he gives a detailed inventory of every item in his bedroom. Glossing over Paul Hogan’s inane dismissal of the Aboriginal land rights movement in the film Crocodile Dundee (1986), the author comments wistfully that ‘watching Paul Hogan smoke Winnie Blues and reminisce as he sat on a bench in his daughter’s suburban front yard was a reminder of an Australia long gone’. Rielly’s previous book, Wednesdays with Bob (2017), showcased another Australian good old boy, the late Bob Hawke.
Rielly’s memoir is a modest yet honest attempt to capture something of the significance of this great Australian artist in his final days. The book’s real strength is perhaps its depiction of the powerful emotional impact that Gulpilil has had on ordinary white Australians with no direct experience of Aboriginal culture, and of how his performative genius has helped to reshape their understanding of Australia’s First Peoples. g
Stephen Bennetts is a Perth-based writer and anthropologist. ❖
Calibre Essay Prize
Worth $7,500 • Closes 15 Jan 2020
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 and in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental.
The judges are J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton and Peter Rose.
For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: australianbookreview.com.au
We gratefully acknowledge the long-standing support of Colin Golvan AM QC and Peter and Mary-Ruth McLennan.
‘One never seems to have enough money’
The tribulations of an Etonian premiership
Glyn Davis
WINDS OF CHANGE: BRITAIN IN THE EARLY SIXTIES
by Peter Hennessy
Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 624 pp, 9781846141102
On 3 October 1962, Hugh Gaitskell rose to address the annual Labour Party Conference in Brighton. He had been Labour leader for nearly a decade and was widely tipped to win the next general election, due within two years. Gaitskell’s message was clear and vivid: Britain must never join the European Economic Community. To do so, he told delegates, would ‘mean the end of a thousand years of history’.
While Gaitskell campaigned hard against a place in Europe, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – ‘Supermac’ in political circles – was slowly melding a coalition of Conservative colleagues in favour of applying for EEC membership. As Macmillan saw it, the Conservative Party was split between romantics and realists. The romantics yearned for empire, quoting Churchill on an island standing alone. The realists, with Old Etonian Macmillan at their head, believed in some stark truths: Britain’s influence in the world was in sharp decline, its economy sluggish, its famed innovations in military hardware and pharmaceuticals long lost to the Americans. Without a European agreement, reasoned Macmillan, the slide would accelerate. While Britain languished, France and Germany were thriving amid unbroken growth and prosperity. Conservative pieties aside, Macmillan saw no viable alternative to a European alliance.
The contest would end sadly for both leaders. Through significant diplomatic skill, Macmillan carried his party only to lose to a more formidable foe:
President Charles de Gaulle had no wish to see Britain join the six members of the EEC. De Gaulle let the whole application process play out in public and then, as Macmillan always feared, said non. The French president offered a calculated insult, announcing his veto of British membership at an Élysée press conference while standing next to American President John F. Kennedy, and thus enlisting the world’s media and Corps Diplomatique as witnesses.
In Winds of Change: Britain in the early sixties, Peter Hennessy counts the cost. De Gaulle’s decision, he argues, ‘deprived Harold Macmillan of his place in the very top flight of British prime ministers’. Supermac was close to tears when the news broke. Such is the detail in this new 600-page history of Britain between 1960 and 1964 that we are treated to cabinet minutes as Macmillan inched his way toward Conservative agreement and then to extended extracts from De Gaulle’s media conference. Britain, declared the president, has ‘in all her work, very original habits and traditions … In short, the nature, structure, circumstances peculiar to England, are different from those of the other continentals.’ The account concludes with Macmillan’s private diary entry; his pen ‘scorched the page’, says Hennessy, as Supermac recorded his anger and bitterness at being denied this long-term goal for his premiership.
Soon, speculation began about how long the sixty-nine-year-old Macmillan could remain in the role. The prime minister equivocated between leaving a successor plenty of time before the
next election and staying to steer Britain through the difficulties of currency crises, Rhodesia, ministerial scandals, and the insurmountable challenge of reviving growth in a listless British economy. Within a year of his defeat in Paris, Macmillan would be forced from office by a combination of illness and Conservative Party nervousness.
Hugh Gaitskell too would not survive long the debate about Britain and Europe. Gaitskell’s health was failing before the Labour conference, and his warning about the loss of British independence would prove his last major public statement. Four days after de Gaulle’s veto, Gaitskill died at the age of just fifty-six of an autoimmune disease at Middlesex Hospital. It would be Harold Wilson who led Labour to a narrow victory over Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the general election of 15 October 1964; and Wilson who overturned Labour policy and applied for EEC membership, finally achieved in 1973, during Edward Heath’s Conservative premiership.
Winds of Change is traditional state history superbly done. Hennessy, doyen of British political journalism, moves readers through the many layers of his subject, a Britain struggling to define its role in the world as it shed colonies and suffered economic eclipse. The contemporary resonances are hard to miss – not just the central narrative about Europe but concerns about immigration, debates about Polaris missiles and Britain’s future as a nuclear power, and changing mores about sex, media, deference, and social mobility.
Hennessy locates himself in this grand narrative: a schoolboy through the Macmillan years, watching his peers seek places in the new universities then opening across England.
Popular culture intrudes occasionally – The Beatles make a cursory appearance, television ownership spreads through the land, Private Eye begins publication, and, inevitably, Philip Larkin is quoted on 1963. But this is, unapologetically, a political history. Hennessy tells a story of slow political transformation toward a meritocratic Britain. He drifts from the topic only when recounting his childhood love of trains. Hennessy recalls the snowy winter of 1962–63 as the Greater Western Class 2800 engines would ‘steam past the playing fields of Marling School’ where he was a student. The political reporter can describe vicious political coups and humiliating ministerial disgrace with equanimity, but his sadness when the elegant A4 steam locomotives stop running is hard to miss.
Winds of Change includes evocative photos, from Enoch Powell on a pogo stick to extol the virtue of exercise to Bertrand Russell at a disarmament march in Trafalgar Square. Perhaps the most telling image is Harold Macmillan, uncomfortable in the back of an open-top limousine during a visit to Florida, sitting next to a youthful John Kennedy, the embodiment of American power and prestige. When a year later the world came close to nuclear war over Cuba, Britain would be consulted but remain largely irrelevant in the tense negotiations that followed. Its time was past. Macmillan, with a lifetime of international and military experience, could only watch like the rest of the world, and hope that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev made a fatal miscalculation. Then, with a sigh, he had to turn back to the irresolvable economic crisis that underscored every moment of his administration. As Supermac put it simply in a private note to the queen, ‘as always, one never seems to have enough money’.
Winds of Change is a cogent and compelling account of just four years in the making of modern Britain, 1960 to 1964. To convey Britain’s story, Peter
Hennessy draws on archives and contacts, personal encounter with players, and a journalist’s eye for the small detail. He looks ahead, too, noting the first signs of collapse in the Keynesian consensus, and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, a young MP from Grantham who, as prime minister, would turn over much of the policy architecture that Macmillan embraced.
In this third volume of Hennessy’s series on postwar Britain, we see again
how the past shapes the present. As Macmillan steered Britain toward Europe, he opened only the first chapter of a long-unresolved debate. We may yet test Supermac’s private hypothesis that Britain has no future without Europe. g
Glyn Davis is CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at ANU. Previously he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne (2005–18).
Stopping all stations
A bustling and exhaustive history
Michael Shmith
THE
EUROPEANS: THREE LIVES AND THE MAKING OF A COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE by Orlando Figes Allen Lane, $59.99 hb, 576 pp, 9780241004890
It was what Lawrence Durrell described as ‘the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe’s body’ that steadily transformed nineteenth-century Europe into a cultural and social unity that would last until the outbreak of World War I. Not everyone was happy about this. Rossini, who was terrified of trains, stuck to coach travel, while others, including the German poet Heinrich Heine, took a sort of reverse-Brexit view, writing: ‘I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea breakers are rolling against my door.’
The Europeans , Orlando Figes’s bustling and exhaustive history of this time, forms the natural sequel to his admirable account of Russian culture, Natasha’s Dance (2002). Figes sees the inexorable expansion of the railway system as synonymous with an increased circulation in people, letters, news, and information, ‘leading to a widening public sense in all the railway nations of belonging to “Europe”’.
The Europeans is a whole rail journey unto itself: the literary equivalent of a whistle-stop tour, but with things to learn and relish at every stop along the way. Figes’s masterstroke is how he squarely places human involvement at the forefront of his narrative. This is in the form of three distinct Europeans: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818–83); the French-born mezzosoprano Pauline Viardot, née García (1821–1910); and her husband and onetime manager, the French critic, scholar, and author Louis Viardot (1800–83).
Pauline Viardot (younger sister of the great soprano Maria Malibran) was the most celebrated singer of her day. Her vast repertoire ranged from Monteverdi and Handel to ‘modern’ works by Rossini, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and, later, Wagner, who presented her with a score of Meistersinger inscribed ‘An der Meistersängerin Mme Viardot’. In addition, Pauline was the first foreign singer to perform the Russian repertoire in the original language.
Throughout her life, Pauline’s fame and stratospheric fee structure remained
unwavering: ‘Never sing for nothing’ was her credo. This applied even to singing at Chopin’s funeral in 1849, for which Pauline charged two thousand francs, or roughly half the cost of the entire event. She was also an accomplished teacher, keyboard player – her instrument of choice was made by French organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1848 at a cost in today’s money of $95,000 – and composer of several hundred works, including songs and operettas.
In St Petersburg on 9 November 1843, during Pauline’s Russian tour, Louis Viardot was at a party and was introduced to a tall young nobleman with a high-pitched voice, who had been to every one of Pauline’s performances. A few days later, Louis introduced his wife to her admirer, and she would later recall him as ‘a good hunter and a bad poet’. This was Turgenev, who instantly fell in love. His unilateral declaration would take some years to be reciprocated, but the die was cast. Pauline also changed her mind about his poetry.
The relationship between Turgenev and the Viardots was an always discreet ménage à trois, conducted across much of Europe, as the peripatetic family spent various spells in France, Spain, Russia, Germany, and Britain. Although this is not a prurient bedroom-gazing book, some inevitable speculation occurs: for example, was the father of Pauline’s fourth child her husband or her lover?
Of greater interest, and in keeping with the wider ambitions of The Europeans, is what Turgenev and the Viardots achieved outside the various châteaux, mansions, dachas, and lodging houses the family collectively occupied for more than half a century. It was the people they knew, as well as the changing times in which they lived, that set the momentum of this illustrious book. For example, Turgenev, who became a good friend of Flaubert, campaigned to have the Frenchman’s novels published in Russia. ‘He acted in effect as his literary agent, publisher and translator.’ As a result, Turgenev became a go-between for the St Petersburg and European literary scene.
Quite often, almost within the space of a page, the narrative swiftly oscillates between the purely personal and the
more general, enhancing rather than diverting from the main subject. For example, a mention of how Turgenev’s novel Home of the Gentry (1859) uses the piano to illustrate the mannerisms of the aristocracy arises from a longer essay on the thriving piano industry (in Britain alone, more than two hundred firms were manufacturing 23,000 pianos a year); from here, the subject expands again, into how the sheet-music industry, particularly transcriptions of symphonic or operatic works, changed the way composers earned their living.
Another example. Turgenev’s interest in the relatively new art of portrait photography transforms into a section that explains how new techniques of mechanical reproduction made photography more accessible and affordable, resulting in early versions of fan magazines – or Galeries des contemporains – that promoted people such as Pauline Viardot. This, in turn, leads to an account of photography’s influence on visual artists, especially the development of plein-air painting that would herald the birth of the Impressionist movement.
Sometimes, the action goes in reverse. For instance, an expansive section on the rise of the guidebook and its effect on nineteenth-century tourism, with the English in Italy wandering everywhere with Murray’s Handbook in hand, suddenly brings Louis Viardot into focus: while accompanying Pauline on her European tours, he visited museums and wrote about their collections in a series of five guides published between 1852 and 1855 under the general title Guide et memento de l’artiste et du voyageur
Figes’s book is at once a celebration of times past and a lament for time present. From this vantage point, it presents a persuasive argument for a united Europe, especially when brutal Brexit reality has it otherwise. The Europeans makes one appreciate anew the irony of the apocryphal Times headline, ‘Fog in the Channel, continent isolated’. g
Michael Shmith is a Melbourne writer and editor. His latest book, Cranlana: The first 100 years, is published by Hardie Grant.
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Force of nature
Sharon Verghis
A SPANNER IN THE WORKS: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF ALICE ANDERSON AND AUSTRALIA’S FIRST ALL-GIRL GARAGE
by Loretta Smith Hachette
$32.99 pb, 353 pp, 9780733642104
On the evening of 6 August 1926, Alice Anderson donned her driving goggles and gloves, waved to the cheering crowds outside Melbourne’s Lyceum Club, and got into her tiny two-seater Austin 7. With her former teacher Jessie Webb beside her, the boot packed with two guns, sleeping bags, a compass, four gallons of water, a supply of biscuits, and, strangely, two potatoes with red curly wigs, she tooted the horn and set off. Her mission?
A three-week pioneering trip to the never-never. ‘There is only one main route from Adelaide to Darwin, and that is only a camel track,’ the tiny young woman behind the wheel said breezily of the 2,607-kilometre journey ahead of her. ‘We are not going to stick to the beaten track.’
When historian Loretta Smith first came across a brief snapshot of Anderson in a biography of legendary garden designer Edna Walling, she was intrigued. At twenty-nine, Anderson had already crammed several incarnations into one short life: mechanic, inventor, entrepreneur, owner of Australia’s first all-women garage, and the first woman to provide a private motorised service to the public, but she was missing, like so many other pioneering women, from the pages of Australian history. Who, Smith wondered, was this rebellious, contrarian force of nature, ‘small and pugnacious’ as her family described her? In A Spanner in the Works, Smith brings Anderson’s outsized story to colourful life via an archaeological trawl through university archives, intimate letters, and interviews with relatives. Anderson was born in 1897, and her love of speed emerged early. At the
age of ten, she was flying along on her aunt Isabel’s bicycle; at twelve she was galloping through bush near the family’s run-down cottage in Victoria’s rugged north-west.
The so-called horseless carriage story had begun a little over a decade before Anderson’s birth, with Karl Benz’s unveiling of the first petrol car in Mannheim in 1885. By 1915, the year she slid behind the wheel of her birthday gift, a shiny, eight-seater Hupmobile, Australia’s motor-vehicle population had reached 38,000, representing one of the world’s quickest uptakes of car ownership at the time. As Smith writes, driving was aligned with notions of freedom, independence, and exploration – a seductive idea in such a vast country.
Women were not immune to this message. So-called ‘lady motorists’ were a new cultural phenomenon, despite a male backlash against female mobility (a letter by the Automobile Club Victoria’s solicitor arguing that ‘women drivers lack the nerve and judgement of the stronger sex’ was typical of the prevailing sentiment). Groundbreaking women motorists like French motorsport star Camille du Gast and British speedster Dorothy Levitt were busy proving men wrong from the 1900s onwards. Anderson was determined to join this intrepid band. She first learnt to drive lumbering char-à-bancs on the treacherous Black Spur before setting up a private chauffeuring service from her landlady’s backyard in Melbourne’s Kew. Wearing breeches, boots, a shirt, and a tie, she was often mistaken for a boy. Her clients came from Melbourne’s moneyed class; she drove them to the opera and theatre, scenic bush spots, and shopping expeditions on Chapel Street.
In 1919, Miss Anderson’s Motor Service, an all-women garage staffed by a band of handpicked and trained garage girls, opened with a launch party including the likes of a young Robert Menzies and Dame Nellie Melba. The press breathlessly charted the rise of this ‘boyish-looking figure in dungarees generously ornamented with very real grease’; the deeply conservative Melbourne establishment, unsettled by her bold flouting of social and gender codes, murmured darkly about sexual ‘inverts’
and moral transgressions.
It is a strength of this book that Smith weaves Anderson’s story so adeptly into this wider tapestry of sexual politics, cultural mores, and the development of feminism in 1920s Australia, although feminist motoring historian Georgine Clarsen believes Anderson was part of a generation of ‘radical individualism’ prizing individual accomplishments over gender difference.
Flipping a defiant finger at the naysayers, Anderson trained more than thirty young female chauffeurs, invented a trolley device that would later be copied to global success, and led touring parties to South Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania.
Then came that historic trip to Australia’s Dead Heart. Crowds cheered as the tiny Austin, covered in red dust, chugged into Alice Springs. Here, Anderson would cross paths with young British pioneer aviator Alan Cobham. It was a serendipitous meeting; back in Melbourne, she had already begun plans to attain her pilot’s licence. As Smith writes, ‘Alice was ready to fly above the clouds.’
A mere week later, however, Anderson was dead. On a Friday evening, 17 September 1926, two of her garage girls found her bleeding from a gunshot to the head. A coronial inquest concluded that her death was accidental, but Smith suggests that this is far from the complete truth.
Smith’s mission was to exhume Anderson from history’s footnotes and to reinstate her as one of Australia’s true pioneers, but we are left with a sense of frustrating intangibility, a big question mark around this truncated life. Who would Anderson have gone on to become? What was her true destiny: motoring pioneer or daredevil aviatrix? Might she have become another Nancy Bird Walton?
As Smith writes, ‘the past can throw up fragments that raise more questions than they answer: pieces like a photograph or letters that tell part of a story, leaving us to guess at the rest.’ g
Sharon Verghis is a senior arts and features journalist. She is also currently studying postgraduate law. ❖
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
‘The spread’
An
accomplished and insightful novel
Johanna Leggatt
THE TOPEKA SCHOOL
by Ben Lerner
Granta, $29.99 pb, 282 pp, 97817783785360
Modern US culture has a peculiar love of the extracurricular world of teenagers, valorising the spelling bees, debating competitions, and varsity-level football games of its youth. In Ben Lerner’s new novel, The Topeka School, the interscholastic debating trophy is so sought after that tournaments resemble verbal combat, in which high-school competitors rely on sly technique rather than substance. Witness the use of what our teenage protagonist, Adam Gordon, aptly refers to as ‘the spread’: a rapid-fire, near-hysterical diatribe designed to deliver so many arguments in such a short amount of time that the opposing team will be unable to address each point. These verbal sprinters may be sweating under the strain of 340 words per minute, but they will take home the trophy regardless because of the opposing team’s inability to counter their gasping gibberish. As Lerner notes, a ghost wandering the
high-school halls would perceive interscholastic debate as ‘less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual’.
The Topeka School is the final instalment in Lerner’s compelling auto-fiction trilogy, with his two previous works, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014), exploring the inner world of a Ben Lerner stand-in, who also goes by the name of Adam Gordon in Leaving the Atocha Station but is represented by an unnamed narrator in 10:04. The Topeka School focuses on Adam’s highschool years in Topeka, Kansas, and for the most part shifts his story into the third person, while granting his psychologist parents, Jane and Jonathan, first-person exposition. Lerner was a talented debater in Topeka and the son of two prominent psychologists, and the Lerner/Gordon story expands to explore his parents’ years at a renowned psychiatric institute, the Foundation, which is a fictionalised version of Topeka’s Menninger Foundation, where Lerner’s parents worked. Jonathan is
establishing a rather irrelevant film and video division at the Foundation, while Jane has written a bestselling self-help book on female empowerment, which attracts declarations of love from women at Topeka’s grocery store and open hostility from the city’s loner men. (Lerner’s mother, Harriet Lerner, wrote the bestselling book The Dance of Anger: A woman’s guide to changing the patterns of intimate relationships [1985].) In italicised sections and through a masterful use of passive voice, the novel also gives us access to the disturbed and inarticulate musings of local outcast Darren Eberheart, who is initially ridiculed by his classmates but is eventually brought into the cool kids’ circle with horrifying results.
descend into incomprehensible speech when faced with personal upheavals. Interestingly, Jonathan’s main role at the Foundation is to get the troubled, mid-western boys of Topeka to open up, kids from respectable families who suddenly turn mute and become anti-social, despite no evidence of trauma.
In The Topeka School, the interscholastic debating trophy is so sought after that tournaments resemble verbal combat
The novel is largely set in the late 1990s when Bill Clinton was president and liberal democracy had seemingly gained a foothold in America, but train your eye on the homes of the mid-western cities, Lerner seems to be saying, and you will find an identity crisis among angry white boys, enjoying privileged lives in cookie-cutter housing, while quoting rap stars to whom they cannot relate. These are boys who always ‘spread’ when parties become hostile: who beat to a pulp an opponent at the slightest provocation, while their parents are ‘coming back from date night in Kansas City or making perfunctory love’.
Adam is pulled between two worlds. He wants to be a ‘real man’, to swear and bench-press like one, but his hippie parents are frustratingly available to him, and while Jonathan and Jane are beset with their own problems, there is a remarkable steadiness to Adam’s home life that just might save him from the toxic masculinity of his peers. This solid family unit will frustrate Adam in his teenage years, cast him as an outlier if only in his own mind, but it will sustain him emotionally as a husband, friend, and father in his later life. Adam will not join the ranks of those he calls the ‘lost boys’, even if he is prepared to mimic their chat, their swagger, until he can escape to an east-coast university.
Much of Adam’s animus towards his parents stems from his fears about how much he needs their tenderness, and so he punishes them in eloquent speeches, dismissing their world of thoughtfulness, describing his father’s men’s group as ‘machismo bullshit’. ‘You’ve got that wrong,’ Jonathan retorts, pointing out that his coterie was a pro-feminist collective. Adam would attempt to ‘spread’ his parents, but as psychologists they embrace confrontation and this only enrages Adam. Slammed doors and punched holes in the wall result from their monumental efforts at understanding their son. The capacity of language to illuminate traumatised parts of the psyche is a common theme in the novel. Jonathan’s research is devoted to a language-based psychoanalytic technique called ‘speech shadowing’, while at various points of the book, both Jane and Adam
Perhaps the most intriguing section is led by Jane, who, in a precursor to twenty-first-century trolling, receives threatening phone calls from angry men who label her a ‘home-wrecker’. She employs a wonderful device for humiliating the men, insisting she cannot hear them, that the line is terrible, until they are shouting their insults and, upon hearing their own words out loud, hang up in shame. But such vitriol takes its toll. After Adam sustains a concussion, Jane’s internal speech to a ‘higher power’ is telling in its learned shame: ‘I’m a bad wife, a bad mother, a bad daughter, a home-wrecker,’ before pleading, ‘just let him be okay and I’ll behave.’ This internal pleading is a wonderful device that Lerner also deploys during Jonathan’s story. When Jonathan is visiting Adam at the hospital, his pleading is informed by what he is most deeply ashamed of: ‘I promise I will never be distracted from my wife and child again; I will never, not for an instant, begrudge Jane her success.’
Jane is most deeply disturbed by the language of a former extemporaneous debating champion, Peter Evanson, who is brought in to teach Adam how to combine hokey regional idiom with verbal fluency, how to hold his body just so, and how to gesticulate for maximum impact. During rehearsal one day, Evanson tells Adam to stop bobbing his head when he ‘gets going’ on a point. His mother bristles at the editing out of the idiosyncratic tic that signals Adam is lost in a poetic space, this expression of his selfhood, and baulks at the ‘choreographed spontaneity all in the service of manipulation, of winning’. It’s a brilliant scene and goes to the heart of Lerner’s case against the charlatanism of emotionally impoverished mid-western boys, parents, US politicians, Trump. In a sense, The Topeka School is one lengthy debate speech, a well-written, persuasive text that highlights Lerner’s ability to prosecute a case, as well as his command of pace and scansion, his poetic touch. Lerner, of course, is no longer a teenage debate champ doing whatever it takes to win – and crucially he attacks ‘the spread’ rather than using it for cheap effect – rendering this critique of life in modern America, a nation he describes as ‘adolescence without end’, as one of the most accomplished and insightful novels of recent times. g
Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based critic and journalist.
Style and suspense
Auspicious times for Australian crime fiction
David Whish-Wilson
These are exciting times when the new normal for Australian crime fiction is strong domestic interest and sales, but also international attention in the form of Australian-only panels at overseas writers’ festivals, plus regular nominations and awards in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Whether this is a literary fad or sustainable in the long term – with Australian crime fiction becoming a recognisable ‘brand’ in the manner of Scandi-noir or Tartan-noir – will depend largely upon the sustained quality of the novels produced here.
This sounds like an obvious thing to say, but the good news is that Australian crime novels rarely feel as though they’re the over-hyped or rushed-toprint product of authors struggling to meet the demands of multi-book deals. A strong and savvy ecosystem of independent publishers has produced some of the bestselling titles, but also novels containing some of the genre’s most beloved characters.
Emma Viskic’s PI Caleb Zelic is one such character, and Darkness for Light (Echo, $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781760685812) is the third book in her award-winning series. In keeping with the two previous novels in the series, Darkness for Light is a propulsive thriller sustained by a writer with a sharp wit and a seemingly effortless facility for maintaining and building tension within scenes and across chapters, as well as over the longer story arc. The result is a novel that starts with a hard acceleration and builds significant momentum from there – something that any writer will tell you is incredibly hard to achieve. The danger, of course, is that keeping to such a pitch can result in reader fatigue, a sense that the narrative is straining for effect. That is never the case in Darkness for Light, which has everything to do with the character of
Caleb Zelic. Profoundly traumatised after recent events, Caleb is receiving counselling and has managed some significant integration into the deaf community. He is soon to become a father. His new and effective mantra is ‘Make Good Decisions’. Gentle to himself and others, he is fragile. So, unfortunately, is the layer of safety built around him. Upon receiving a call to meet a potential client, only to discover that a murder has taken place, Caleb is drawn back into the world that he’s worked so hard to escape from – subsequent to the return of his former PI partner, the now fugitive Frankie.
A copper subsequently appears who may or may not have gone rogue, running an investigation that is accompanied by a growing body count. When Caleb is forced to take charge of a minor, a smart and observant girl who is fascinated by Caleb’s deafness and whom he teaches to sign, the stakes are raised even higher. Amid the skilful plotting and sustained tension are scattered genuine literary delights, such as the description of Tedesco, a jaded, health-food-loving detective, who sets up a meeting in a suburban park: ‘Tedesco was standing by a food van, eating what looked like a bowl of grass. A large man with close-cropped hair; hunched over his food, he looked like one of the boulders artistically scattered throughout the park.’ While such descriptive verve is part of the genre, what sets Caleb’s observations apart is the role that his deafness plays in his interactions with others, in that the focus required for him to move through the world draws important detail to the surface that might otherwise skate through, enlivening the narrative with sharp insights into character and place, but also playing a key part in advancing the plot of this stylish thriller.
Descriptive verve and clever plotting are also key aspects of Christian White’s second novel, The Wife and the Widow (Affirm Press, $32.99 pb, 334 pp, 9781925712858), a more than worthy successor to his début, The Nowhere Child (2018).
While it is the highly inventive plot that will stay with many readers, as White masterfully manipulates the novel’s structure to draw the two main storylines together, it is his characterisation that really elevates this novel and amplifies the emotionally powerful ending. Deftly using a braided narrative structure that raises the stakes within each instalment from the ‘wife’ and the ‘widow’, with each chapter ending at precisely the right moment to ratchet up the suspense, the two central protagonists, Kate and Abby, separated by class and opportunity as much as by physical distance, are each beautifully drawn, together with their immediate family.
Kate lives in Melbourne with her daughter and husband, John, who fails to return from a business trip to London. Abby and her husband, Ray, together with their two teenage children, live on the island of Belport. Abby works at a local supermarket and teaches herself taxidermy, while Ray is a handyman and property caretaker.
The island itself is an important character, for The Wife and the Widow is a novel where the internal landscapes of the characters and their family dynamics are reflected in the brooding and secretive island landscape where the storylines converge. Belport, a fictional island off the coast of Victoria in the Bass Strait, now in the off-season, is a place that ‘should have felt bigger with fewer people in it, but it was [instead] somehow smaller, as if the coastline was slowly closing in’. While Abby has lived most of her life on the island, she’s still considered something of a blow-in: ‘the wrinkles on his forehead deepened. Abby had seen this look a number of times, on the faces of many of Belport’s lifers. Biller was trying to determine her security clearance.’
A meditation on grief and trauma as much as it is a gripping crime novel, The Wife and the Widow is to be especially recommended for its inventiveness and
risk-taking in terms of plot, in particular. It is a risk that pays off handsomely for the attentive reader.
Garry Disher’s Peace (Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781922268150) is his second novel featuring Constable Paul ‘Hirsch’ Hirschhausen, set in the rural South Australian town of Tiverton. Remarkably, Disher is the author of some fifty books. A blurb on the back of the novel, taken from a review in The Australian, states, ‘Garry Disher has been giving us highly intelligent literary thrillers for decades and he gets better and better.’ This is no idle claim, as Disher’s recent novels attest, and Peace displays the full palette of a writer at the top of his craft.
The novel proceeds with a great deal of patience, as befits its setting in a town and region where the crimes are generally at the lower end of the scale – petty theft, DUI, assault, etc. Having been exiled to the sticks for unwittingly being part of a corrupt detective squad, Hirschhausen lives a simple life, in a home not very different from the earliest police stations scattered throughout rural Australia: small office at the front, small living quarters at the back. Despite only being stationed in Tiverton for a year, Hirsch has managed a degree of integration into the life of the town by way of effective community policing, dropping in to see isolated people and participating in the town’s social calendar (Christmas is coming soon and Hirsch has been nominated as town Santa).
Hirsch has genuine affection for many of the town residents, and is wisely wary of others, such as the brilliantly drawn passive-aggressive town busybody, Martin Gwynne, and the hard-as-nails but dysfunctional Flann family. When some thefts and acts of petty vandalism occur, and some beloved animals are slaughtered, Hirsch has his hands full. Following the surfacing on YouTube of an embarrassing video of Hirsch, events quickly escalate, drawing media focus to the small town and building thereafter towards the novel’s dramatic conclusion. Peace is a masterful crime novel whose many pleasures include its incisive characterisation, its nuanced reading of Australian rural life and history, its brilliant plotting, and Disher’s always painterly eye. g
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David Whish-Wilson coordinates the Creative Writing program at Curtin University. His new novel, True West, is published by Fremantle Press.
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Heat and succour
Kerryn Goldsworthy
DAMASCUS
by Christos Tsiolkas
Allen & Unwin
$32.99 pb, 440 pp, 9781760875091
The man traditionally held to have written about half of the New Testament is variously known as Saul of Tarsus, Paul the Apostle, and St Paul. Initially an enthusiastic persecutor of the earliest Christians, he underwent a dramatic conversion shortly after the Crucifixion, and it is on this moment that his life, and Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel, both turn. Damascus covers the period 35–87 ce, from shortly before Paul’s conversion until twenty or more years after his death. This chronology is not straightforwardly linear, with an assortment of narrators recounting their personal experiences, at various times and from various points of view, of Christianity’s birth and spread amid the brutal realities of the Roman Empire. Most of us know of Damascus mainly in the context of St Paul and the moment of his conversion to Christianity – at that point still no more than an outlawed sect in its raw infancy – as described in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘And as he journeyed he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from Heaven: and he fell to the earth …’ The cover of Tsiolkas’s new novel features Caravaggio’s 1601
painting Conversion on the Way to Damascus, which, like this novel, puts heavy emphasis on the physicality of spiritual experience. Here is Tsiolkas’s version of this moment:
He is racked by tremors, his bones as fragile as the empty shells of the sea. He lurches upright, reaching for the radiance, for heat and for succour, but as soon as he does the light is gone and all is darkness. He falls away from his body and from the world but not before he hears the voice …
Tsiolkas is a harsh poet of the body, and this novel resembles his previous work in its preoccupation with bodily functions and experience, and in its insistence on keeping flesh and blood to the fore. There is one particular virtuoso passage in which we hear from one of the several narrators, a damaged Roman soldier called Vrasas, as he and two other former soldiers sacrifice a bullock to the gods in hope of their prayers being answered. This is a four-page stream of consciousness, violent and ecstatic and drenched in blood and guts and fire, that must have been even more exhausting for Tsiolkas to write than it was for me to read. Damascus is a visionary novel full of wild energy and passion, but it is not for the faint-hearted.
Apart from the vivid, brutal, pagan figure of Vrasas, and of course Paul himself, other characters who loom large in the telling of this story include Lydia of Macedonia, an early convert whose faith is total and who has made the turning of the other cheek into an art form, and the Saints Timothy and Thomas. Thomas is an intriguing figure in this novel, presented here as Christ’s actual twin but also as his shadow side, for Thomas is a robust and earthy pragmatist, the ‘doubting Thomas’ who could not believe in the Resurrection.
As with Dead Europe (2005), Tsiolkas’s new novel takes a sweeping international perspective, in contrast to his début novel, Loaded (1995), The Slap (2008), or Barracuda (2013), all of which drill down into particular social and moral landscapes of contemporary Australian society. While the subject matter and setting of Damascus are
departures from Tsiolkas’s previous novels, his themes remain the same: class and power, masculinity and sexuality, violence and cruelty. The teachings of Jesus are set in stark contrast to the realities of this society, where any act of generosity or gentleness is swept away by the cross-currents of instinctive hostility and brutally exercised power. Paul himself is represented as a tortured figure, a self-hating homosexual, and a lecherous drunk, who wrestles till the end of his life with various deadly sins: ‘for my jealousy, for my pride, for my spite … Saul laughs at his own vanity; one more sin to be forgiven.’
Reading this novel requires a balancing act from the reader: to keep track of its characters and follow its sometimes disorienting narrative trail by recalling whatever one knows or remembers of the New Testament, and at the same time to remember that Tsiolkas is taking the sorts of liberties a biblical reimagining requires, as no doubt Geraldine Brooks found in writing The Secret Chord (2015) or Colm Tóibín in writing The Testament of Mary (2012). In an author’s note to this novel, Tsiolkas makes the distinction between historian and storyteller, and in doing so gives the reader an indication of one of his purposes in writing it:
If Judea had not fallen to Roman occupation and siege, if the temple in Jerusalem had not been destroyed, it is possible that Christians would have remained a forgotten Jewish sect. Such speculation is tantalising for an historian, but as a storyteller what I want to convey is the catastrophic consequences of that war and occupation on the refugees who survived the annihilation of their homelands.
The novel’s further message for us concerns the teachings of Christ, with their emphasis on justice and compassion, on generosity and mercy and equality, in our own time when so many self-proclaimed Christians in powerful places have moved so far away from these ideals. g
Kerryn Goldsworthy is a former Editor of ABR
Flotsam
Susan Midalia
THE SEA AND US
by Catherine de Saint Phalle
Transit Lounge
$25.50 hb, 186 pp, 9781925760415
Catherine de Saint Phalle already had an impressive publication history – five novels written in French and one in English – when her elegantly written, often heart-breaking memoir Poum and Alexandre was shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize. Her new novel, The Sea and Us, is her third book written in English since she came to Australia in 2003. Its title works both literally and symbolically. The Sea and Us is the name of the Melbourne fish and chip shop above which the middleaged narrator, Harold, rents a room, having returned to his childhood city after eighteen years of living and working in South Korea.
The sea, and other forms of water, are also used to evoke his awareness of psychological displacement, and his struggle to find a meaningful identity. Early in the novel, invoking the maritime categorisation of what he calls the ‘disconsolate objects’ of flotsam, jetsam, ligan, and derelict, Harold wonders, with his characteristic sense of detachment, whether he can be rescued or reclaimed in his new Melbourne life. He also attributes his sense of being unmoored from his Czech inheritance – at one point he ‘wonder[s] if this is a Czech thing, losing one’s existence’ – as well as from some unspecified adolescent trauma that leaves him feeling unsettled and confused.
The early stages of the novel, which alternate between his South Korean past and his Australian present, create sympathy for his sense of loss. His happy memories of his lover Ha-yoon (sitting with her on the banks of the Cheonggyechon Stream feels like ‘a watery belonging’) are shattered by her betrayal. Using the symbol of pottery to which he will elsewhere return, he describes being ‘broken up – two words, two shards of poetry’. However, his memories of other
people raise questions about his limitations as a character and narrator. While he admires the apparent self-possession of Sung-ki, a homeless old man, and Marylou, a young, seemingly resilient sex worker, his punning description of them as his ‘Seoul mates’ feels unwittingly dismissive of the cruel realities of their lives. His perception of the master potter, Do-yun, is similarly suspect, suggesting as it does his own desire for completion instead of an awareness of the elderly man as a separate individual. In each case, the novel subtly suggests that for all Harold’s astute observations, he remains oblivious to the more complex dimensions of the characters’ lives. Once returned to Melbourne, he begins to experience his new dwelling as a ‘raft’ – a metaphor that suggests a precarious but necessary form of safety. Two Australian characters are used to suggest more hopeful possibilities for the future: his landlady, Verity, and Ben, the embodiment for Harold of youthful enthusiasm and independence. Harold’s narration suggests a growing sense of optimism in terms of purposive actions – painting and furnishing his new home, resuming his pottery – and in the breezier tone he adopts. Meeting Verity for the first time, he thinks: ‘I like people who make a comment before greeting a perfect stranger. It seems to announce a busy inner life that can’t be switched off on command.’ While he is attracted to the woman’s genial surface, his use of the reductive word ‘busy’ tends to reduce her to the stereotype of the cheery landlady: a cliché that the story will later brutally dispel. This is also the case with his belated reassessment of Marylou, one which generates a profound change in him from being derelict (cargo one has no hope of reclaiming) to ligan (wreckage which can ultimately be saved).
The creation of Harold’s intense inner life is for me the great strength of the novel. Looking outward to the physical world of people and places, he is given to inventive analogies and unusual turns of phrase. Perhaps the most idiosyncratic example of his use of analogy is his comparison of female pubic hair to ‘some ring road around the city at night, wild and purring with cars’.
The ludicrousness of this idea proves to be the point when later in the novel Harold is confronted by the irreducible reality of a suffering female body. He is also inclined to think in terms of literary allusions, a strategy that begins to feel less like the sign of a cultivated mind and more akin to self-protective self-enclosure. The novel is also good at registering the disjunction between his rich inner life and the ordinariness of his speech; there is a pervasive sense that the surface he presents to the world does not, and perhaps cannot, correspond to his subterranean self.
In formal terms, The Sea and Us has the poetic compression of a novella; it offers complex meanings in the relatively brief space of 186 pages. The final stage of the narrative shifts to a radically different mode, in which Harold’s linguistically embellished language and reflective tone are replaced by conspicuously pared-back prose and urgent pacing. This sudden change in form and style enacts Harold’s unexpected release from paralysing self-consciousness into the joy of connection with others. I was not entirely convinced by some resolutions and coincidences at the end, but The Sea and Us excels in its depiction of the anxieties, flaws, and hopes of a damaged man. Existentially adrift but longing to live on the solid ground of human community, Harold joins de Saint Phalle’s gallery of intriguing, at times eccentric, and always engaging characters. g
Susan Midalia is a Perth-based author of three short story collections and the novel The Art of Persuasion (2018).
NEW FROM
MASKS
Bowie & Artists of Artifice
Edited by James Curcio
Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents David Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the “mask,” then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers.
WRITING BELONGING AT THE MILLENNIUM
Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place
Emily Potter
Writing Belonging at the Millennium explores the idea of unsettled non-indigenous belonging as context for the emergence of potentially decolonized relations with place in a time of heightened global environmental concern.
MORALITY BY DESIGN
Technology’s Challenge to Human Values
Wade Rowland
Rowland argues against postmodern moral relativism and the idea that only science can claim a body of reliable fact; challenges currently fashionable notions of the perfectibility of human individuals through technology; and argues for the validity of common sense.
THE PUNK READER
Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global
Edited by Mike Dines, Alastair Gordon, Paula Guerra, and Russ Bestley
The Punk Reader is the first edited volume to critically interrogate punk culture in relation to contemporary, radicalized globalization. Documenting disparate international punk scenes, including Mexico, China, Malaysia, and Iran, The Punk Reader is a long-overdue addition to the study of punk.
FAN PHENOMENA: HARRY POTTER
Edited by Valerie Estelle Frankel
More than ten years have passed since the end of the series, and Potterheads still can’t get enough. In this volume, enthusiasts and scholars explore the culture of the fandom, its evolution, and how it managed to turn a boy wizard into an international icon.
CONNECTING PEOPLE, PLACE AND DESIGN
Angelique Edmonds
Connecting People, Place and Design examines the human relationship with place, how its significance has evolved over time, and how contemporary systems for participation shape the places around us in our daily lives.
Gone, but not forgotten
Chris Flynn
SEE YOU AT THE TOXTETH: THE BEST OF CLIFF HARDY AND CORRIS ON CRIME by Peter Corris, selected by Jean Bedford Allen & Unwin
$29.99 pb, 334 pp, 9781760875633
THE RED HAND: STORIES, REFLECTIONS AND THE LAST APPEARANCE OF JACK IRISH by Peter Temple
Text Publishing
$32.99 pb, 387 pp, 9781922268273
Two of the greatest Australian crime writers died within six months of each other in 2018. Peter Temple authored nine novels, four of which featured roustabout Melbourne private detective Jack Irish, and one of which, Truth, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010. Temple died on 8 March 2018, aged seventyone. Peter Corris was more prolific, writing a staggering eighty-eight books across his career, including historical fiction, biography, sport, and Pacific history. Forty-two of those highlighted the travails of punchy Sydney P.I. Cliff Hardy. Corris died on 30 August 2018, seventy-six and virtually blind.
That their respective publishers have issued nearly simultaneous compendiums that contain previously unpublished fiction, reviews, essays, and columns seems a fitting tribute to the contributions both men made to their houses. It is also a boon for readers. Fans will lap up Corris’s ‘An ABC of Crime Writing’ manual and Temple’s 100-page unfinished Jack Irish novel. Those unfamiliar with the work of either author are provided with enjoyable springboards into their messy, hardboiled, accomplished worlds.
Let’s start with Corris. What a writer he was. In the introduction, his widow, Jean Bedford, claims that Corris rarely plotted his stories: they simply
flowed. Dip into any of the twelve Cliff Hardy short stories that follow and you will find this hard to believe. The first, ‘Man’s Best Friend’ was written in 1984, while the last, ‘Break Point’ appeared in 2007. The consistency of tone is remarkable, as is the sense of a man ageing yet keeping up with the changing times. Mobile phones and the internet appear as the detective’s craft evolves, while Hardy learns to employ his experienced brain rather than resort to fisticuffs in problem solving.
Collections of short stories can often be jarring, as the reader reinvests in new scenarios and characters every twenty pages, but this pitfall is avoided here. The effect is akin to following a detective over the course of a few months’ worth of cases, even though decades have passed. Corris never flagged in his enthusiasm for Hardy’s melancholic life of small-time corruption and local hoodlums, of Glebe’s descent into gentrification. Ironically, the early stories are reminiscent of Mickey Spillane’s violent Mike Hammer series, which Corris later professes to dislike, saying they have a, ‘mindless, fascist character’. Once the guns and knockout punches are set aside, Corris moves more towards Dashiell Hammett, a register he satisfyingly settled on throughout the Hardy novels.
His late-in-life columns for the Newtown Review of Books, some of which are collected here, candidly reveal the author’s disappointments. Lee Child’s later work and the fact none of Corris’s stories ever made it to the screen are notable bugbears.
Corris mentions our other featured author in passing, under ‘G is for gambling’ in his A-Z. ‘Gambling has not featured much … in crime fiction, though it crops up in Dick Francis’s racing novels (see H for horses), and Peter Temple’s character Jack Irish (Bad Debts, 1996, and following) is a punter and variously involved in the world of racing.’
Indeed, he is. The cover photograph of The Red Hand shows Temple scrutinising the form guide. Inside, we are presented with a number of alsorans, including Temple’s screenplay for
Valentine’s Day, a football comedy that was screened on the ABC in 2008. That, and many of his ‘reflections, reviews and essays’, are arguably of limited interest and only for completists, although he does deliver a refreshing brand of dismissive sarcasm in excoriations of John le Carré and Kathy Reichs. ‘Absolute Friends joins the list of recent le Carré novels that resemble Zeppelins: huge things that take forever to inflate, float around for a bit, then expire in flames.’ Then, on Reichs’s Grave Secrets: ‘And it is a fact that many writers peak early and then trundle downhill with the sound this book makes: the hollow noise of empty garbage bins being dragged back to base.’
Only six short stories are offered, with length seeming to equate to strength. ‘Missing Cuffney’ (2003) and ‘Cedric Abroad’ (2010), at twenty-two and forty pages respectively, permit Temple to flesh out scenarios and characters. It may sound counterintuitive given his preponderance for quickfire banter, but I always found his long-form work less indulgent. The world of his novels seems vast and densely populated. Every character is armed with a loaded retort. If at first he felt like an Australian Elmore Leonard, as his career progressed, he broke free of convention and became something all his own.
Lovers of Jack Irish will be thrilled and devastated to read 20,000 words of what publisher Michael Heyward dubs High Art. If the title is meant to be a nod to the crime writer who conquered the literary world, its significance is apt. The book, or what there is of it, is dazzling. Irish’s plethora of new simultaneous cases is instantly engaging, short-circuiting the brain as we scrabble to work out how they are all connected –a hobbled racehorse, the disappearance of an art assessor, a restaurant shake-down, and, through it all, the enigmatic Jack Irish, barely holding it together. It ends just when you’re completely hooked and the realisation hits: Peter Temple is gone; we will never know the answers. g
Chris Flynn is the author of two novels, A Tiger in Eden (2012) and The Glass Kingdom (2014). His forthcoming novel is Mammoth (2020).
‘Tropes of terror’
IN
Susan
Lever
WHOM WE TRUST
by John Clanchy
Finlay Lloyd
$28 pb, 246 pp, 9780994516558
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed systemic mistreatment of vulnerable children over decades. Though these crimes have not been the exclusive province of the Catholic Church, its education system has brought more children into intimate care by religious orders, and even those never abused have observed the tics of brutality in some of their teachers and mentors. In a note at the end of his new novel, In Whom We Trust, John Clanchy mentions James Joyce’s hell-fire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the recurrence of these ‘tropes of terror’ in the rhetoric he heard as a Catholic schoolboy in 1960s Melbourne. The system has long-standing practices of psychological control.
Rather than address child abuse as a contemporary problem, In Whom We Trust focuses on an Irish priest, Father Pearse, who is working out his last years as the ‘permanent temporary’ parish priest in Gippsland during World War I. It dramatises the arrival at his presbytery of an adolescent boy, a runaway from St Barnabas’s Orphanage in St Kilda, and the boy’s insistence that Pearse take action against the main perpetrator of
sadistic sexual abuse in the orphanage. Their confrontation initiates Pearse’s memories of his own boyhood in Ireland and the series of personal failures that led to his vocation. He has been a mediocre priest, never speaking out of turn or seeking preferment. His duties as chaplain to the orphanage include hearing the confessions of both the children and the Brothers who run it. In this role, he has been privy to the children’s ‘sins’ of impurity and has absolved the Brothers who are practised in the craft of evasion. Nevertheless, the children see him as the only outsider with a sense of decency who might help them.
Thomas Stuart, an orphan from the streets of London, has a natural intelligence and nothing to lose by defying the system. He has enlisted in another institution, the army, as an avenue of escape, but he wants to protect the children left behind. He knows that Pearse has evidence of abuse in the form of a diary, written by the teenage Molly Preston, and insists that it be read and presented to church authorities. Through this diary, Clanchy conveys to us the detail of the abuse of Molly and Thomas. Molly’s honesty and simplicity of expression allows Brother Stanislaus’s cruelty to be presented with tact; it focuses on the after-effects of abuse and her concerns to protect Thomas, rather than the horrors of sexual exploitation. Molly, it suggests, has been abused by so many people for so long that she has developed a stoicism and a degree of self-blame. She is kept strong, though, by access to the diary as a form of resistance.
Thomas, on the other hand, has learnt the sophistry of Church doctrine. He argues with Father Pearse about the fine points of confessional confidentiality and the nature of sins of omission, pushing the priest to recognise his moral responsibility to cause trouble. When Pearse finally visits the bishop to ask for Brother Stanislaus’s removal, he must be ready to counter these defensive rationalisations. Disturbingly, these arguments will be familiar to anyone following the Church’s current justifications for its protection of the criminals in its midst. The privacy of the confessional is elevated above the rights
of victims. Little has changed. By placing this story in the past, Clanchy resists any direct comment on the current situation, though its relevance to the present must be obvious to readers. In fact, his depiction of Father Pearse’s crisis a hundred years ago appears rather optimistic as he invites us to hope, with Thomas, for justice. Father Pearse and his bishop are men seeking
The Catholic system has long-standing practices of psychological control
a quiet life, rather than monsters. Yet the relationship between the secular clergy and religious orders was, and seems to be still, a matter of difficult politics. Within the system, even good men find it difficult to act.
Clanchy has been publishing sensitive and finely structured short stories for decades. In this novel, his focus on a small cast of characters in a circumscribed place and time creates a sense of confinement, whether within the walls of the orphanage or the system of the Church. It shifts effortlessly between Father Pearse’s meditations, the drama of his confrontations with Thomas and the bishop, and Clanchy’s restrained and engaging creation of Molly’s diary. There is a quiet discipline to this art that resists the potentially sensational nature of its subject.
Setting the novel in a time of war provides another level of challenge to Thomas and his fellow orphans and a further restraint on Father Pearse’s desire to return to Ireland. It provides the kind of universal threat that might have overwhelmed any concern for the rights of children. Yet I wondered at the lack of any reference to the accusations of the Irish Catholic disloyalty in the early years of the war, or to the Easter Rising in Dublin. I kept expecting Daniel Mannix to appear. These obvious absences reinforce the sense that the novel is as much about current circumstances as historical conditions. g
Susan Lever is general editor of Cambria Press’s Australian Literature Series.
Whither wowser?
by Amanda Laugesen
Lexicographers, especially historical ones, are always interested in the way words fall in and out of fashion. But while we spend a lot of time tracing the first usage of a word and trying to figure out its origins, we pay much less attention to when or why a word falls out of common usage.
Why do words cease to be used? For some words, the reason is clear. We no longer listen to gramophones or refer to unmarried women as spinsters. Technologies shift, as do our attitudes. But there are also words that fall out of fashion for no apparent reason. We simply seem to stop using them. For example, it is unlikely you would hear anyone still using the word bonzer these days, although in the early twentieth century it was ubiquitous. While we might still understand what it means, we would be unlikely to use it unselfconsciously, if at all.
I have become intrigued with this question of where words go and why they stop being used. Some are on a slow decline, and this seems to be the case with wowser, a word I was doing some work on recently. Bruce Moore, in his book What’s Their Story? A history of Australian words (2010), describes wowser as a ‘core word’ of Australian English. Much of his discussion in the book is concerned with the origin of wowser. And it’s a great story: the word was most likely coined by John Norton, editor of the notorious Sydney newspaper Truth. Norton himself claimed to have come up with wowser, and the first evidence we have been able to find confirms this. (It’s a common phenomenon for someone to claim to have invented a word, but only a few have the evidence to prove their case.) The earliest usage found so far is in Norton’s newspaper, in the headline from 8 October 1899: ‘Willoughby “Wowsers” Worried’. Norton later wrote that he first used wowser at a Sydney
City Council meeting when he referred to Alderman Waterhouse as ‘the white, weary, watery, word-wasting wowser from Waverley’. As Moore points out (and as is obvious), Norton was fond of alliteration. Certainly, the word appears many times in Truth, and there seems to be no reason to disbelieve Norton’s claim. There is a popular story that wowser is an acronym for a temperance slogan, We Only Want Social Evils Righted, but there is no contemporary evidence to support this theory.
Wowser quickly came into common usage in Australia. In the 1890s and early twentieth century, those called wowsers were often the temperance campaigners who disapproved of drinking alcohol, but later included those who would frown on anyone having too good a time. Australians continued to use the word for anyone seen to be somewhat puritanical. It inspired all sorts of lexical creativity, with wowserdom, wowserish, wowserism, wowseristic, wowserland, wowsey, and wowsery all being recorded in The Australian National Dictionary. The feminine forms wowserine, wowserette, and wowseress also enjoyed brief popularity through the first two decades of the twentieth century.
So it perhaps seems curious that wowser might now be on its way out. It certainly hasn’t yet passed out of common usage, but it does appear to be on a downward trajectory, when looking at the frequency of mentions in the media and examining corpus evidence. One possibility for this decline is that we are now more ambivalent about the kinds of things that were once defended against the puritan wowser: drinking excessively and gambling, for example. Equally, we are unlikely to have large sections of the population concerned with other behaviours that were once frowned upon by wowsers, like swearing or staying out late.
But let’s not count wowser out just yet. There is a slight trend in current usage that suggests a way wowser might go in the future. And this is found in attacks against what is referred to on the right of politics as ‘political correctness’. Protesters, feminists, and environmentalists have all been accused of being wowsers in recent times. Using wowser aims to call on a century and more of Australian history to argue that complaining about certain things is just plain un-Australian. Wowser has always been used to condemn those who are seen to be stopping us doing what we feel we should be able to do and enjoy doing. But let’s hope we are not seeing a trend that equates wowser with politically correct as a weapon wielded by the right.
The last word on wowser, for the time being, must go to C.J. Dennis for providing the most memorable definition of the word. In his Backblock Ballads and Other Verses, published in 1913, he defines wowser thus: ‘an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder’. g
Amanda Laugesen is director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre.
Gamified self
Suzy Freeman-Greene
BEAUTY
by Bri Lee Allen & Unwin
$19.99 pb, 150 pp, 9781760876524
My local shopping centre has seven nail bars, two waxing salons, and a brow bar. A cosmetic surgery clinic touts ‘facial line softening’ and ‘hydra facials’. A laser skin clinic offers cosmetic injections. Three other beauty temples offer ‘cool sculpting’, ‘eyelash perms’, and ‘light therapy’ for skin. I live in a gentrified, workingclass suburb in Melbourne’s inner west. I’ve never set foot in these beauty shops, but they’re replicating like cells.
It’s almost thirty years since Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was published. Wolf’s 1990 analysis of the economic power structures underpinning our seemingly ‘natural’ beauty ideals was ground-breaking. Reading this book at the time, I fumed. Yet I was hopeful, too. Women might reject the industrialscale body policing (cellulite, facial hair, breast shape) and create different definitions of beauty.
How laughable my optimism seems now, in an age of pouty Instagram influencers and YouTube make-up tutorials. What’s different about today’s beauty industry is that so many women (and quite a few men) are so publicly in thrall to it. No one is forcing people to transmit their cleavages to the world via Instagram or pay surgeons thousands of dollars to rebuild their bottoms. Capitalism has sold the pursuit of the ideal body shape as an ‘empowering’
activity involving endless, costly work. As Bri Lee writes in Beauty, social media’s mass reach enables us to self-police our appearances ‘in perpetuity’.
Lee’s earlier book, Eggshell Skull (2018), was a vivid, brave memoir of her time as a judge’s associate in Queensland, during which she gradually found the courage to press charges against the man who molested her as a child. Eggshell Skull combined observational writing and the confessional mode to make a larger political point about the justice system’s inadequacies and the importance of speaking up. As a court employee, Lee sat through rape trials and saw firsthand how hard it was for a woman to be believed.
Beauty, in contrast, is essay-length and feels like it was written in a hurry. An examination of our oppressive beauty ideals, chiefly told through Lee’s quest to be thinner, the book begins memorably. ‘The house I rented through 2017,’ she writes, ‘was the first place I had ever lived or even stayed in for an extended period of time where I had never thrown up after dinner.’ By 2018 this craving for the ‘small ritual’ of purging her body has returned as she begins a publicity tour for Eggshell Skull. Starving herself, she writes, is a form of control; an outward shaping of the body to conceal inner turmoil.
Beauty is a claustrophobic read. Much of the narrative centres on Lee’s efforts to look good for a glamorous magazine shoot, a portfolio of ‘Visionary Women’. She drinks black coffee, whips herself for eating four squares of chocolate, and receives Instagram updates from a gym called Skinny Bitch Collective. She spends almost $300 on treatments to get rid of pores and acne scars. One day, she eats nothing but two light Cruskits and three mini pieces of sushi. When she hits 61 kilos, she goes shopping for jeans. When she reaches 60.5 she starts smoking again. I was swept along by the elegant prose, marvelling at the horror of it all. Yet I couldn’t help wondering why someone so obviously intelligent, with an oftmentioned supportive boyfriend, wasn’t getting professional help (or if she was, why it isn’t mentioned in such a selfexposing book).
Lee’s attempts to shape her body are interspersed with her thinking and reading about the sources of self-esteem and the workings of the beauty industry. She reads Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations , pondering self-discipline as a source of contentedness. She considers the psychology of fashion: how having a beautiful body has become an ethical ideal. Some of the most interesting observations she quotes are from Will Storr’s 2017 book Selfie. Social media, suggests Storr, has ‘gamified the self’. People are suffering ‘under the torture of the fantasy person they’re failing to become’.
Inevitably, Lee’s ‘Visionary Woman’ shoot does not go to plan. She is thinner, yes, but when the magazine comes out, her portrait is close-cropped. Only her face, hands, and forearms can be seen. The face is a ‘chubby-cheeked, freckle-faced girl’. This picture – and the realisation that such magazines fuel the beauty industry’s oppressive standards while talking of empowerment – is a lightbulb moment for Lee. From here, her narrative moves into more overt social critique. She talks to a young, black woman about the pressures on women of colour to look a particular way, and she discusses The Beauty Myth’s continued relevance. She throws out her scales, celebrates buying size-12 undies at Kmart and vows to relegate beauty to a fun, low-key hobby ‘like my occasional forays into painting’.
Still, I found Beauty a disappointing follow-up to the brilliant, bracing Eggshell Skull. It felt too confessional at times, lacking deeper political analysis. Changing individual behaviour is admirable, but, as Wolf wrote in 1990, we need political activism – female solidarity – to empower women to turn away from ‘the market’s images’. Australians now spend $1 billion annually on cosmetic procedures alone. (The stakes keep raising: Brazilian butt lifts, body sculpting.) If we collectively ignored the ludicrous ideal bodies presented to us in our feeds, in our magazines, imagine the time and money we could redirect elsewhere. g
Suzy Freeman-Greene is the Arts and Culture editor of The Conversation
Power and Obama
Varun Ghosh
THE
EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST: A MEMOIR by
Samantha Power
William
Collins
$32.99 pb, 592 pp, 9780008274917
For two and a half decades, Samantha Power has been an advocate for US intervention to prevent genocide around the world – as a war correspondent, as an author, and as a member of the Obama administration (2009–17). The Education of an Idealist is a deeply personal memoir of that experience.
The book is divided into two parts, reflecting the distinct stages of Power’s career before and after joining the Obama administration. The tensions and conflicts between the two stages echo throughout The Education of an Idealist, as Power’s early commitments clash with the limitations of being one part of the broader administration.
As an intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC in 1993, Power immersed herself in the breakdown of the formerYugoslavia, self-publishing a detailed timeline of events for journalists and policymakers, and eventually forging a letter on stolen Foreign Policy letterhead to obtain a UN press pass in order to see the conflict up close.
In the years that followed, Power made frequent trips to the Balkans, writing stories for newspapers and magazines in the hope that her writing might generate support for US intervention. Power’s reportorial account of those years – describing harrowing encounters with Serbian soldiers, near-death experiences on mountain roads, the gallows humour of besieged Bosnians, and the dystopian effect of the war on the Balkan landscape – is engrossing. Yet by 1995 she was growing sceptical of her own role: ‘With no end to the war in sight, I was starting to feel increasingly like a vulture, prey-
ing on Bosnian misery to write my stories.’ After returning to the United States later that year, Power enrolled in Harvard Law School but remained obsessed by the Balkan situation. Arriving in Boston to the news that NATO airstrikes had broken the Sarajevo siege, Power cried tears of relief.
While at Harvard, Power began work on a treatise about American inaction in the face of genocide. A Problem from Hell: America and the age of genocide (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize and made Power, at thirty-three, one of America’s most prominent and uncompromising voices on the moral necessity of humanitarian intervention.
The second part of The Education of an Idealist traverses Power’s time as a member of the National Security Council and then as ambassador to the United Nations. With refreshing candour, Power records her early struggles to master bureaucratic processes, manoeuvre politically, and deal with the gendered language and entrenched sexism of the US national security apparatus.
There were other challenges. Power gave birth to her two children while working for Obama. Their presence, perhaps unusually for a political memoir, is ubiquitous – whether it is daughter Rian, a noisy feeder, being overheard while Power was on the phone with Secretary of State John Kerry; or son Declan muttering, during a White House conference call, ‘Putin, Putin, Putin … When is it going to be Declan, Declan, Declan?’ Power’s ability to manage an overwhelming number of work and family responsibilities is inspiring.
The Obama administration was not without foreign-policy achievements in Power’s portfolio. US-led (or US-supported) military interventions prevented the mass slaughter of civilians in Libya, the Central African Republic, and the Sinjar Mountains near the Iraq–Syria border. US leadership in the fight against Ebola in West Africa may have prevented a calamitous global outbreak of the disease. Smaller advances –defeating a resolution in the UN General Assembly to strip same-sex couples of spousal benefits, and passing a UN Security Council resolution requiring the United Nations to expel whole
peacekeeping units whose soldiers were accused of sexually abusing civilians – are cited as evidence of moving the needle positively.
The raw and often startling honesty that Power brings to the personal and professional aspects of her narrative does not always translate into a convincing account of some of the Obama administration’s less understandable foreign-policy choices. After declaring a ‘red line’ on the use of chemical weapons, Obama baulked at taking action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for deploying sarin gas against thousands of civilians on the outskirts of Damascus in August 2013. As the book reveals, Obama planned to order airstrikes immediately following the attack. However, in the nine days it took for UN weapons inspectors to withdraw, Obama’s position changed. The president instead sought Congressional approval for airstrikes, a move interpreted as a way to avoid military intervention. Power criticises UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon for not withdrawing UN inspectors swiftly enough and expresses her view that the president should have ordered the airstrikes. However, Power stops short of explicitly criticising Obama. A later chapter is principally devoted to justifying her decision not to resign over the issue, though, confusingly, Power also emphasises the mounting consequences of the administration’s failure to intervene in Syria. Other uncomfortable topics – the administration’s limited efforts to counter Russia’s strategic reassertion, its failure to deal with the rise of ISIS, and its unwillingness to reckon with the civilian deaths caused by America’s targeted-killing program – are substantively avoided.
The Education of an Idealist offers a captivating account of Power’s early life and career. The detail and candour make the book a valuable guide for a career in international relations. However, Power’s involvement in, and defence of, Obama’s unambitious foreign-policy agenda and inconsistent actions might have diminished some of the author’s hard-won credibility. g
Varun Ghosh is a Perth-based barrister.
‘What
a Collosus
shall we be’
A coloniser that balks at the term ‘empire’
Andrew Broertjes
HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE:
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE GREATER UNITED STATES
by Daniel Immerwahr
Bodley Head, $35 pb, 516 pp, 9781847923998
On 7 December 1941, Japan bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that it was a date that would ‘live in infamy’. Those who heard his radio broadcast knew that the United States would be drawn into the war that had engulfed Europe and the Middle East. But for some, the content of FDR’s address was baffling. People in the US-held Philippines, who had also been subjected to attack, wondered why the focus was primarily on Hawaii, and not the devastation that had been wreaked on them too:
A reporter described the scene in Manila as the crowds listened to Roosevelt’s speech over the radio. The president spoke of Hawai’i and the many lives lost there. Yet he only mentioned the Philippines, the reporter noted, ‘very much in passing’. Roosevelt made the war ‘seem to be something close to Washington and far from Manila.’ This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail.
‘To Manilans the war was here, now, happening to us,’ the reporter wrote. ‘And we have no air raid shelters.’
It is this strange reality, of territory held but barely acknowledged by the United States, that opens Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A short history of the greater United States. Immerwahr has constructed a fast-moving page-turner that examines the strange duality of a nation that has engaged in imperial and colonial expansion, and yet has consistently shied away from the term ‘empire’. The book is dedicated to ‘the uncounted’, those
people who live in territories controlled by the United States, but who have no voice and no vote. On the eve of World War II, this figure numbered just more than eighteen million people. For a nation whose revolutionary break from imperial control was defined in part by the statement ‘no taxation without representation’, this is a particularly cruel irony.
The first wave of imperial conquest was on the mainland of what is now the United States, achieved primarily through purchase from other imperial powers, and the conquest of the indigenous inhabitants. Those indigenous inhabitants who had not perished through military conflict or disease were wrenched from place to place, their lives and livelihoods dictated by the federal government. It was a pattern that would be repeated as the United States expanded its territories off the mainland.
The Spanish–American War of 1898 was the turning point for US imperialism. Internal expansion gave way to external, with the destiny of the post-Civil War nation now seen to be in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. Leading the charge, sometimes literally, was Theodore Roosevelt. Empire, in his eyes, was America’s destiny. These years saw the United States take over the remnants of the once powerful Spanish empire, expanding into Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Accompanying these occupations was a powerful sense of racial superiority, and a ‘civilising mission’ similar to the British Empire’s global engagements. At the same time, debates raged from Congress through to the popular press about whether these subject peoples
could be incorporated into the United States:
This was, in other words, a different kind of expansion … not taking land and flooding it with settlers, but conquering subject populations and ruling them. ‘It is one thing to admit scattered communities of white, or nearly white, men into the rights of citizenship,’ one writer put it, ‘but quite a different matter to act in the same way with a closely packed and numerous brown people.’ Or as the sceptical Speaker of the House put it, less politely, ‘I s’posed we had niggers enough in the country without buyin’ any more of ’em.’
The subject populations that fell under the dominion of the United States would endure much under its rule. In a particularly harrowing section, Immerwahr details the activities of Cornelius Rhoads in the 1930s, who viewed Puerto Rico ‘as an island-size laboratory’ for his medical theories: ‘a place to try out ideas while facing few consequences’. In a precursor to the infamous Tuskagee experiment, Rhoads would refuse to alleviate the conditions of hookworm-infected patients suffering from anaemia, preferring to track the progress of the disease. Writing to a colleague in Boston, Rhoads stated that the Puerto Ricans were:
beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere … what the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be liveable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination
by killing off 8 and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far.
Rhoads would go on to engage in chemical-weapons testing during World War II, sometimes on willing volunteers, sometimes on prisoners. Out of this research came the beginning of chemotherapy, and consequent accolades for Rhoads. A major medical prize was named after him by the American Association for Cancer Research, until protests by Puerto Ricans in 2003 saw the name changed.
The United States was the only nation that emerged from World War II
stronger than when the war began. A new international order had been formed, as former European colonial empires collapsed and transformed into the proxy battlefields of the Cold War. America’s imperialism would be as much cultural and economic as martial during what was dubbed ‘the short American century’. Terms like ‘cocacolonisation’ were coined to describe the spread of American culture and ideals around the globe. Nowhere is this better covered than in the chapter ‘Language is a Virus’, which explores the intertwining of American imperialism and the growth of English as the global lingua franca. The US global influence includes roughly eight hundred military bases, many located in nations with which the United States had previously been at war – Germany, Japan, the Philippines – as well as ostensible allies like Saudi Arabia. The consequences of these extended military presences have led to what Chalmers Johnson referred to as ‘blowback’ in his book of the same name. The most apocalyptic form of this blowback against American imperialism came on 11 September 2001. The response, quickly called ‘the war on terror’, shared some similarities with the imperialism of old, with ‘American values’ standing in for ‘civilising missions’. But George W. Bush and his cabinet were keen to emphasise that they were a ‘liberating power’,
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not an imperial one. Few were convinced.
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams that: ‘We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a Colossus shall we be when the Southern continent comes up to our mark!’
The Spanish–American War of 1898 was the turning point for US imperialism ... Leading the charge, sometimes literally, was Theodore Roosevelt
Daniel Immerwahr has provided a timely, succinct account of exactly what this ‘Colossus’ has done. While the occasional bouts of humour seem a little forced (interesting though the subject may be, no chapter should ever be called ‘Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guano but Were Afraid to Ask’), the writing is crisp and focused, providing an ideal entry to a complex topic for the layperson. The work on US imperialism is showing no signs of diminishing in the post-9/11 world. How to Hide an Empire: A short history of the greater United States is a fresh and original contribution to the literature. g
Andrew Broertjes teaches history at the University of Western Australia. He is currently working on a book about controversial US presidential elections from 1800 through to 2000.
Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, 1903 (Rockwood Photo Co. via Wikimedia Commons)
In its interrogation and negotiation of contemporary theoretical frameworks and practices at the core of the Italian–Australian migration complex, Francesco Ricatti’s comprehensive study offers a fresh and lucid understanding of the interrelation of core issues and processes affecting settlement and governance of immigration strategies for Italian arrivals in Australia during the past one hundred and fifty years.
In a relatively short volume, considering its broad subject, Ricatti’s analysis is nevertheless amply illuminated by the key foci of historical narrative, identity, and memory viewed through a transcultural frame. The author captures the resilience and inventiveness of migrant protagonists operating in the dioramas of pre- and postwar enterprise: a cultural context replete with strategies that go beyond the well-versed catalogue of the crystallisation of cultural mores and the calcification of traditional values and customs, as well as the familiar socio-economic stories of financial success and endeavour. In reconfiguring the migration narrative’s staple coordinates, Ricatti’s approach represents a fundamental shift in our thinking and a significant revision of the theoretical underpinnings of past decades of scholarship on Italy’s mass-migration history.
At the heart of this multi-layered process is a transcultural approach that gives recognition to questions of decoloniality and intersectionality. The remaining frames in the author’s hexadic model are the notion of intensity inherent in migrant lives, orientation (‘connection between embodiment and emotional emplacement’), a more critical understanding of belonging conceptualised as the ‘uncanny’ or ‘unhomely’, and situating the role and influence of transcultural memory in the everyday lives of migrants who settled in both urban and isolated areas of the continent and whose unyielding memories shaped future action. In his analysis, the author elicits categorisations and assumptions from existing historiography in order to arrive at a detailed and singular representation of the multiple facets of Australia’s Italian migration story and the contribution that first-generation settlers, in particular, have made to the nation. The necessity and timeliness of the undertaking are outlined by Ricatti: ‘There is now, perhaps, enough historical distance to start re-evaluating Italian migrants’ working lives and socio-economic conditions without having to rely on the rhetoric of sacrifice, hard work, and contribution to the hosting society.’ As such, Ricatti’s focus extends to considerations
of phenomena and processes involving transcultural realities and the experience and impact of transnational relocation and settlement in the host country that, for Italian migrants in the postwar years, necessitated measuring themselves and their cultural concerns against the stringent determinants of assimilationist policies.
Balanced and judicious in its delineation of the major factors contributing to the integration of Italian arrivals over many decades, the volume covers core issues of mobility, religious belief, parochialism, racism, ethnic identity, class exploitation, sexuality, ageing, linguistic markers, political ideology, and events – for instance, the role of the Italian fasci all’estero (overseas Fascist organisations) – Italian language media, cultural maintenance, intergenerational tensions, the agency of women, transculturation, and the renegotiation of boundaries. Each chapter presents an abstract and keywords as front-line features to introduce the discussion, with the initial chapter mapping out the theoretical framework and its examination of the importance of a ‘transcultural, decolonial and intersectional approach’. A useful compendium of critical references provided at the conclusion of the chapters assists in tracking pertinent secondary sources for the thematic elements under discussion.
An outline of the historical massmigration story of Italians in Australia proceeds chronologically in chapter two, and it is well supported by selected demographic data interspersed with germane insights on women’s migration histories that span questions of cultural maintenance, employment, gender equality, and the phenomenon of proxy brides. The analysis then turns to considerations of work and socio-
economic mobility in chapter three, followed by a strongly argued chapter on issues of racism and racial ambiguity in a settler–colonial context. Where the historical record reveals intake from both northern and southern Italy, the author underscores the estrangement of regional groups as a result of whiteness policy, the discriminatory practices of racially-based selection, and incontrovertible evidence of marginality and cultural dislocation. Ricatti tackles head-on the challenges of whiteness and racial ambiguity and situates whiteness at the core of the nation’s identity, class structure, and democratic principles, thereby pinpointing the legitimising of select regional group identities to the detriment and exclusion of others.
Insights on family and generational negotiations are explored in chapter five, with Ricatti affirming that family values are employed by migrants ‘as tools to perform, negotiate, and justify certain practices, according to their individual, family, and community needs’. Lastly, an examination of transnational ideologies and transcultural practices in chapter six casts light on issues related to language, religion, politics, and ethnic media. In his concluding remarks, the author presents a synthesis of other topics and thematic concerns beyond the scope of the volume but deserving of further reflection. It affirms the need for a ‘transcultural history of resilience, resourcefulness, and creativity’.
In sum, Ricatti offers challenging new perspectives that greatly enrich and deepen our awareness and understanding of transnational and transcultural practices in synthesising Italian–Australian migration history over a 150-year trajectory. In his compelling overview, Ricatti obliges us to reconsider and re-evaluate crucial questions of belonging and regional identity transferred to an alien context, and how migrants reposition themselves and their families in the new environment, thus enabling readers to reimagine and reconceptualise memory, identity, and place-making as seminal points of intersection and engagement. g
Diana Glenn is Emeritus Professor of Italian at Flinders University.
Ifsays and naysays
Charting the limits of human knowledge
Janna Thompson
WITCRAFT:
THE INVENTION OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH by Jonathan Rée Allen Lane, $75 hb, 768 pp, 9780713999334
Mary Ann Evans arrived in London from country Warwickshire in 1851 into an environment of intellectuals who believed in the progress of the human spirit through criticism of superstition and the application of science. Working first as a translator and critic, she became for a time the editor of the Westminster Review, a journal that had been turned by John Stuart Mill into a forum for philosophical radicals. Evans had plans to write a critique of the doctrine of immorality but her partner, George Lewes, who was famous for a work on the lives of philosophers, encouraged her to write fiction. She began with sketches of rural life using the name George Eliot. Evans’s career as a philosopher, the ideas that influenced her, and her engagement with the other philosophers of her time are some of the subjects of Jonathan Rée’s unorthodox history of philosophy in the English language. It is unusual, first of all, because many of the people whose stories he tells are not now regarded as philosophers and are never mentioned in standard histories of philosophy. The English-speaking philosophers who feature in these histories – Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Mill – are present in Rée’s book, but they appear in the company of other intellectuals of their times who had preoccupations that, in some cases, had little to do with the reasons for which they are now celebrated. Adam Smith, whom we meet in 1751 at the beginning of his career as a professor at Glasgow University, was a philosopher with a historical bent. The book for which he is famous, The Wealth of Nations, was a digression from work he regarded as more important.
Witcraft is also unusual because it has no plot. Rée objects to histories of philosophy that progress through the ideas of a canonical set of philosophers, explaining why they were wrong. The usual effect, he says, is to persuade readers that philosophy is a waste of time. Each chapter of Witcraft describes, at fifty-year intervals beginning in 1601, what people were doing in the name of philosophy, and the social circumstances in which they were thinking and writing. The result could have been a boring catalogue of ideas, but Rée is a good storyteller, as much concerned with the idiosyncrasies and relationships of the people he discusses as with their philosophical doctrines.
An account of philosophy that takes a snapshot approach to its history is inevitably packed with people and their ideas. Rée imposes order on the material he has collected by focusing on the intellectual development of particular individuals – not necessarily the most important thinkers of their time – and their relationships. William Hazlitt Sr, who in 1801 is sitting for a portrait painted by his son, John, is a preacher influenced by followers of Locke and a member of a circle of radicals, including Joseph Priestley, who advocated a Christianity free from superstition. Their radical Christianity put them on the side of American and French revolutionaries. Meanwhile, William Hazlitt Jr – later the famed essayist and critic– struggles to write down his ideas about personal identity, encouraged in his efforts by Samuel Coleridge. Readers may forget many of the details, but they will get Rée’s point: philosophy is a social activity dependent on historical influences and interactions between people.
Philosophical communication needs a language, and the development of philosophy in the English language is one of Rée’s main concerns. In 1601, when humanists were challenging the ossified Aristotelian syllabus taught in universities, they were also struggling with the task of translating philosophy into the vernacular. Inventing philosophy in English required a translation of philosophical terms into a language that was not a direct descendant of Latin. One translator proposed that ‘dialectic’ should be called ‘witcraft’, a conditional sentence should be an ‘ifsay’, a negation a ‘naysay’. But most translators preferred to import Latin or Greek terms into English, and new words like ‘aristocracy’, ‘democracy’, ‘axiom’, and ‘cynic’ found their place in the language.
The ideas of foreign philosophers also made their way into English. In 1651 the Puritan academic Anthony Tuckney fulminated in vain against the growing popularity of the ideas of ‘a newfangled French papist by the name of Rene Des Cartes’. German philosophy came into fashion in the nineteenth century. Coleridge did his best to come to grips with ‘the most unintelligible Emanuel Kant’. Evans translated Strauss and Feuerbach, both with a reputation for promoting atheism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, attacked for being ‘a transcendental purveyor of the enemies of religion, Kant and Hegel’, decided that ‘transcendentalist’ was a good description of the ideas of his philosophical circle.
The meaning of ‘philosophy’ itself is a product of its times. In the seventeenth century, concerns of philosophy and theology were indistinguishable. Under the influence of Descartes and Robert Boyle, philosophy became a means of obtaining truth unblemished by superstition. For Locke and his followers, the job of philosophy was to chart the limits of human knowledge by explaining how our ideas are derived from experience. Adam Smith believed that philosophy was essentially historical. Hazlitt and his friends thought that it was a means of liberation. Mill, enthused by the ideas of Auguste Comte, equated philosophical radicalism with social and scientific progress.
Others believed that philosophy was
primarily a source for personal growth. For Evans, it was a means of taking possession of an intellectual heritage from as many perspectives as possible. Emerson’s transcendentalism focused on the progress of the human soul. Philosophy, according to William James and his friend Thomas Davidson, was rooted in real life and cultivated in people ideals necessary to democracy. James feared that philosophy was developing into an academic discipline of interest only to other academics, and Rée gives us reason to think that his prediction had indeed come true by the midtwentieth century.
If there is a story embedded in Rée’s history, it is a tale of how philosophy
freed itself from academic irrelevance and then, after a few centuries of creative diversity, found itself back in the same predicament. As a philosopher, I recognise the truth in this reading of history, but philosophy, even in the academy, has always managed to escape pessimistic dismissals of its value. If we were to extend Rée’s history to 2001, perhaps we would find signs of vigour in interdisciplinary collaborations, applications of philosophy to social and moral problems, and the movement to teach philosophy to children. g
Janna Thompson’s most recent book is Should Current Generations Make Reparation for Slavery? (2018).
Structural injustice
Gender justice without imperialism
Daniel Halliday
DECOLONIZING UNIVERSALISM: A TRANSNATIONAL FEMINIST ETHIC by Serene J. Khader Oxford University Press, $53.95 pb, 200 pp, 9780190664190
In November 2001, the United States – along with Australia and its other allies – prepared to embark on the now notorious military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time, some effort was made to justify these actions to the American public. It fell to Laura Bush, the First Lady, to deliver the apparently feminist case for the so-called War on Terror. Speaking on national radio, Bush focused on Afghanistan and the plight of its women. Military intervention, she said, would save women from ‘brutal degradation … by the Taliban regime’. Detailing various ways in which women of Afghanistan suffered privations not shared by its men, Bush assured the American public that ‘the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’.
We can put aside the familiar objections to the Bush administration’s
warmongering, along with doubts about whether it was motivated at all by concern about the oppression of Afghan women. Another question concerns what sort of reasoning sat behind the claims of Laura Bush. More generally, we might query what goes on whenever Westerners try to identify injustices suffered by women in the Global South, and how such thinking infects subsequent attempts to intervene ‘on the ground’.
Serene J. Khader’s remarkable book bravely and effectively confronts such questions. Many of us would not consciously accept that we only try to help women in the Global South by finding ways to make their culture more like our own, as if Western liberal society is a sort of ‘endpoint of moral and human progress’. Indeed, Bush’s speech made conspicuous efforts to endorse what Khader
calls ‘universalism’ – the view that oppression can be tackled through moral values shared across cultural or group differences: One doesn’t need to be a wealthy, white, American Christian like Bush to be troubled by how the Taliban treats women – our ‘common humanity’ is enough.
Yet Bush still wanted to draw attention to Afghan women being punished for wearing nail polish. The freedom of Western women to wear cosmetic products and high heels, not to mention other ways of making their bodies compliant with aesthetic norms, is held within our own Western system of rewards and punishments, one in which women have it tougher than men. The response that it is still worse to be an average Afghan woman than an average Western woman is often offered as a way of ending this conversation, and sometimes by scholars Khader criticises. But it changes the subject. Emphasising who is most oppressed evades the question of whether saving from oppression drifts into a kind of ‘missionary feminism’, where saving approximates conversion into another way of life.
If we can’t be universalists, the worry arises that we must instead be relativists: burqas, even genital mutilation, are just ‘their culture’. Khader’s more constructive approach is to ‘decolonize universalism’, with an emphasis on the harm done when gender injustice is exacerbated by Western efforts that are not as universalist as they suppose themselves to be. A key point is that ‘feminism [as] opposition to sexist oppression is compatible with different judgments about the presence and causes of oppression in different cases, as well as with the employment of different practical strategies and different moral vernaculars in different cases’. In other words, we can and should continue to be troubled by the severe oppression of women in the Global South. But we need greater awareness of the social structures within which such women find themselves. Such structures will differ for women in Afghanistan, India, Sudan, and Aboriginal Australian communities (Khader discusses each). Attention to these differences will help us to identify and prioritise possible
changes. Unbounded pursuit of Western liberal ideals will not.
Khader develops this approach over the book’s length. It is commendably concise but dense in argument. The power of Khader’s analysis is perhaps best conveyed here by repeating examples she uses. The case of microcredit (small loans) to women in the Global South has been touted as a means of empowerment through financial independence. But by overlooking established local norms, microcredit schemes have often subsidised men’s withdrawal from traditional responsibilities. The loans actually increase women’s burden as they are now expected to do something with the money while continuing to perform traditional unpaid labour, like cooking and cleaning. Attempts to promote educational opportunities for young girls have been offered as another device for securing emancipation. Yet the provision of education can overlook the fact that early marriage (and associated entry into a kinship structure), despite its associated harms, may yet offer a more reliable route to security and economic well-being. In short, reducing women’s oppression is not as simple as finding ways to bring about ‘the right to exit and refuse marriage’. I came to Khader’s book without anything like her expertise in feminist theory or in injustices (contemporary or historical) outside the Western countries in which I’ve lived. I read the book as an optimist about Western liberalism wary about the hazards of evaluating other societies from a Western liberal perspective. Having learned a great deal from Khader’s book, it is from this perspective that I would suggest that the idea of ‘Western liberal values’ does not, after all, refer to just one thing. Western liberalism is open to interpretation, and internal disagreement, and has evolved over time. Khader does not deny this, but her focus is often on a strand of liberalism she calls ‘independence individualism’. This involves a preoccupation with economic-oriented values, such as the promotion of markets, entrepreneurship, and the enhancement of women’s autonomy with respect to financial affairs.
Khader’s criticism of independence
individualism is well made, particularly on the case of microcredit. But enlightenment liberal values don’t start or end with market individualism. Ideas about rule of law, a free press, and universal suffrage can be endorsed alongside scepticism about the promise of markets or capitalism to deliver social progress. In their institutionalised form, they also tend to be more present in the West than in the Global South. Changing whole institutions is, of course, harder than the sort of piecemeal ‘missionary’ interventions discussed in the book. But such efforts might avoid assuming that women are helped most by gaining a means of getting away from their husband.
Khader demonstrates that if Western liberals are to have something to offer the women of the Global South, they must acknowledge a higher burden of justification than is typically supposed. Khader’s book also illuminates an important general lesson about injustice, namely that piecemeal attempts to fix some part of an oppressive structure will fail unless attention is paid to the rest of that structure, the explanations for its existence, and which of its parts might need to be preserved even if other cultures find them hard to swallow. As Khader notes, ‘the tragedy … is that feminist change is typically going to require changes to relationships women are genuinely self-interestedly invested in’. In bringing these complexities to light and showing how they might change our approach, Khader has produced a pioneering work. g
Daniel Halliday teaches at the University of Melbourne and works mainly on topics at the intersection of political philosophy and economics.
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
THE SHORTLISTED POEMS
My Father’s Thesaurus
You drove faultlessly until sundown. As dusk fell, trees lit Magritte black, discreet ideas of near and far merged, and your words, sotto voce then forte, rolled out a new Babel of vigilant accountancies, cornball song, plant catalogues, expletives and chess moves. That the banks could not be trusted was a saying you’d taken for granted since the Great Depression. Now the phrase bloomed in your brain. At dinner you said, for reasons of efficiency: the banks were past the mustard. We lovingly accepted the joke, while in the wet yard the dog chased its tail, saw nothing loveless to incriminate. Later, fear grew: school-tie gerontologists, nurses, phone calls, bills – lacking tact. Sheet music’s random dots perplexed, rainspots bearing no relation to the cruel beauty of pianos. All could betray, induce the agitation of sunsets. You watched the piano and played the sunset. You insisted: every good boy deserved flight, all cows ate gravel. We read your blended agendas uneasily. Then random hatred arrived with showgirl fanfare, disfiguring your old kindness. For peace, we concurred on a mattress bank; the district nurse was trying to poison you. Mostly, words aligned, neat as jam jars, the fruity, sunny order of Fowlers Vacola. But we played codebreakers as evening fell, fighting through thickets of translation until the night you drove the car
into the garage wall, blue shoe on the accelerator, brown on the brake. With a bang, words collided around your head like trams not yet waited for. The foul sunset was to blame. A week later suspension came, plotted by a gimlet-eyed medico. We failed the first test with you, then the second in the Colac Coles carpark, lost trolleys whirring and clacking. You’d driven at snail pace on country roads then rocketed across a petunia’d town roundabout, a bollard bent beneath the wheel. This betrayal, you said, having never brooked a fine, was the bitter end. The nuances of fast and slow, slow then fast, cannot be understood by criminals. We hung our heads and hid the report in the glovebox, not accepting a dickey wheel. My mother and I drove you home from the test among paddocks and cattle, vast distances suddenly too close, like a bellicose stranger with bad breath, strained sun falling like a thief behind the hill. It, too, had been a shamer, a radiant form with a signature. None of us spoke or decoded. There was nothing left but to hack through the last forests until the axe quietened, and you were half-calm in night’s velvety armchair, dog roiling at your feet like a spinning top. I had one just like it once, you confided after furious silence and tea, taking my hand, turning it round and round, bemused, as if you wanted to test it, detach it and send it whirring into the cold, free universe.
A. Frances Johnson
Precision Signs
‘This is officially first / this is the third’ Chance the Rapper
iii. Processing is in Back to the motorway again, shuffling infinite rows of line-break auto-excuses in the changed traffic conditions. Petroleum gifts us the cartographic illusions of intimacy, reimagining polyphonic prose as some engine-effective thing that draws us close. If I did contract-cheat, then why didn’t I get perfect marks? Tradies deal in air-conditionals, selecting authentic essay-writing solutions to expose our algorithmic spaces that trick and flicker. Outer suburbs still feel like home: the gated reverb of small-crimes, the silent havoc of introduced species. But each day’s just another investigation report about the day that came before it. That’s all we deserve, really, a host of change-agents wielding quality degrees.
ii. Crisis openings
Really? A host of change-agents wielding quality degrees spawned on the map in a place you hadn’t yet scouted? What did you do? There’s the evidence you doubted, planted by a livestream of living water, among trees that appear aspect-ratioed and 100% !important; please go on to defeat all the bots once and for real. Controlled humans are now reminded to breathe by devices sold in heaven’s equivalents, copied and pasted from Elysian source code. An employer pivots from the cloud, announcing his no dickheads hiring policy. A second follows up with an all dickheads hiring policy. Applause is spontaneous and v/loud. It’s an e.g. of how profound wisdom can actually be, like yelling fire while on board a fully-booked cruise (bound for immediate shores).
i. Session pricing
A fully booked cruise bound for immediate shores, a keystroke logger hidden in your assessment file, a volta that makes the addiction story worthwhile: seen in the drone’s viewfinder, all this could be yours. Bits of the city exist to be driven past, page refreshing backgrounds that blur and sometimes catch fire. Phone-on-lap means it’s not slab-dark when entire estates appear on the map’s periphery. Impressive as a key stakeholder feedback-looping the process, you sense the finely tuned universe cutting across lanes. The moon’s an allegory for night mode. Those newly built houses slide silently by. You’re just accessing the spreadsheet data, summoning a levelled boss back to the motorway again, shuffling infinite rows.
Lachlan Brown ❖
Constellation of Bees
Sixteen and just a touch of down above the lip, he scrapes honey from each wax hexagon, explaining the procedure for how to empty combs and centrifuge remaining gold. Banksia is a flow
dark as coffee grounds, but this is wildflower pour from native blossoms, curling red phalanges and startling yellow tips, on a wasteland of dunes at the reserve. Just two years in,
the colour is a giveaway – caramel with opaque crusts, not the cocky’s joy from auntie’s beat-up tin with its lion badge and eyes that followed him around the bush, even where
the sky had pin-hole stars arranged like ziggurats this silver beast was on its back, one eye toward the night-sky emu with starry feathers navigating home. He’s learned to parry natives –
Blue-Bands, Teddy Bears – mostly honey bees, a deft jouster protected by a smoking urn to calm them with the trickery of scrubfire. He’s studied the vermilion Tulip Tree, its invasive stealthy seeds, its poisoned chalice blooms with flagrant, open cups – nightclub porn for bees who stupefy and die within its lights, a crypt of littered bodies spilling out.
Why speak of such amazements – who could not love such industrious devotion to calyx and to breeze? The day a white van arrived delivering a payload – odourless and lethal –
for a neighbour’s spider problem, fumes laid waste to every hive: worker, drone and high command. Thirty thousand gone, like rabies through a town. He rebuilt
the hives alone, carefully nurturing the clan learned that bees’ anger is astonishing –self-effacing sentries into self-sacrificing drones, ratcheted with pheromones, death-
fighting like a home-town mob at closing time. Wiser now, he sees triggers to their rage. Death of a Queen means colonies ferment with unacknowledged anguish – body spirited
away, no grief or striped attendants edging past. An empty cell, now vacant, soon to be a wealth of light in honeycomb: bees deal with absence and death in their own way.
Julie Manning
That Wadjela Tongue
The urge to tell my truth is resting upon me like a fever; like a weight; like a hot sodden blanket. I want to tell you …
How when we step forward, when we tell you who we are; we steer With our mouths, with our lips, with our tongues; with Our breath. We speak ourselves into being.
It pours from our lips shaped by our tongues and that ectoplasm shapes itself; becomes Who we think we are.
I need to tell you that the surface of a tongue, that shapes words, that tastes the world; is skin.
And my Father’s skin is the wrong colour;
And I am the wrong colour; not as dark as my father. I cannot Talk my skin darker.
Words are weapons and those colonisers have disarmed me; they have stolen
The language from my family; killed who still spoke it and Stilled the Country’s breath – that wants to pour
From my tongue; They banned the speaking of language, made people Too scared to speak, frightened the breath from them. I cannot
Speak the sacred words of country, I cannot speak to my love of
My ancestors; the bones in the land, the land
In my bones; in the language they understand.
My Country does not speak
That Wadjela tongue.
Words are weapons, they outlawed my tongue, they Gave me theirs; their tongue that drips water and can only speak
Of a green the wrong colour, has words for the wrong flowers that Has no words of their own for yongka or waitch; their language that has A word for ‘orange’. They dragged my language off the land, scraped My tongue they could not quite bring themselves to cut out.
Words are weapons, they gave me theirs; language is a weapon And they armed me.
My language, I never spoke, belongs there on my Country, it anchors My family to home, anchors home on our family. Their language; it’s spoken By so many, they have tried to control
The world with it; gave it to everybody and now it
Belongs to everybody. Their language is a weapon that is aimed only at them.
My people’s language is
Better for talking to country, wadjela’s language I learned first, is better to arm myself
For war; as a weapon it’s aimed at their minds. I sharpen it Their language, I polish it; I make it mine; I want To outstrip them, want to make them jealous of my tongue; of my words.
When my father was a child he was not allowed to Visit his grandmother, he told me that, told me
He has been there twice, that he stayed
Outside; he was not allowed in the house. Words on paper
Said, if he didn’t meet his family he would not be black
Enough to take; he would not have a file would
Not appear on that Neville man’s paper.
Words are weapons
I’m fighting back; I’m armed; With that Wadjela tongue.
Claire G. Coleman
South Coast Sonnets
We drove across the estuary, a field of wind-stained calm, its rippled sheen reflecting a dull acreage of sky. Where had the mirrored clouds been that they lived for a moment in that flattened version of the sea, that roughed up version of a river? We saw a battened sail, its ribbed skin taut with a slooped urgency. The river-imaged sky was a helpless backdrop, a flecked plain of tidal doubt. Would the future be staged upstream or downstream? The sailor was again tacking into the world’s wind. The threadbare bridge we crossed had always been there.
We were instant coastal addicts. Our first wonder was a suppressed surf, a withering offshore wind. We practised not being blown into the sea. Just enough leaning inland did it for us.
Next day we leaned towards the ocean arm in arm, wind-resistant visitors embraced by what was now an onshore gale. Was this a marriage rite? Gestures of spray rose from the rocks and drifted over us. We knew the wind that blessed us was a turncoat. We took on trust the gift we couldn’t avoid, a getaway ocean wedding. We wore the veils of spray.
Call it the eternal southerly. Breakers bloomed and faded, ghost cliffs retreating into the sea. An endless coastal uproar betrayed our inland certainties. A dusk walk took us down a slipshod path skirting the maelstrom. We stood back
from the edge of an ocean truth, immensity ending in collapse, the earth-shaking landfall. Above us clouds were turning into high-speed scraps of themselves. We were lovers in a gale-force world. The long gusts wailed as they came at us.
We saw the surfer calling it a day, riding in towards the undermined bluff we stood on. No beach lay in wait, but he casually half-planed into shore, or what there was of it. We worried when he disappeared from sight. Then the yellow tip of his board came up through a hole in the scarred platform of rock behind us. What runs below the sea-wrecked surface of a place like this, what do the locals know that they can rise like bearded seals out of the ground? There’s always safe passage somewhere, but it lies hidden. We are cave believers. Lord we have seen the risen man with his finned board.
The dedicated ocean spent years laying down the small laws of sand. Edges of the continent disintegrated into loose shores, gold beneath our feet. The beaches harboured us. Even with bad weather beating at their doors, they were stretches of close comfort. Our footprints receded together, a stitched wake trailing behind us. Weightless strands of foam crawled after each other. In the end, the wind turned us home through the dunes, but we were a told story by then, our staggering narrative written step by step across the sea’s terrain.
Ross Gillett
SURVEY
Publisher Picks
To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2019 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite recent releases – all published by other companies.
Robert Watkins
(Head of Literary and Head of Illustrated, Hachette)
When I look back at the quality of Australian publishing for 2019, I found this task particularly difficult. But when I consider the books my mind returns to often, two stand out. First, Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in ABR, 1/20), a masterpiece by an author I admire greatly, set in a time and place I am not unfamiliar with (having spent my formative years in a deeply Christian household). It was quite the religious experience (pardon the pun). Tsiolkas interrogates masculinity and class in a way few writers do, in such an assured manner. I believe this work might be his best yet. My other highlight is Tara June Winch’s extraordinary novel The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, 8/19). Winch has generously gifted the reading public a work rich in language and country. I often found myself returning to passages just to soak in their beauty.
Aviva Tuffield
(Publisher, University of Queensland Press)
The increasing success of Aboriginal authors has been much commented on in 2019, which was also the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages. One book that stood out for me was Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite).
Charmaine Papertalk Green’s unforgettable collection is a dialogue with her mother, inspired by letters the latter wrote in the 1970s: it’s both an indictment of cultural genocide and a reminder that the written word can be used for good, by conveying love and connection. I also admired Favel Parrett’s novel There Was Still Love (Hachette, 11/19), about the intergenerational experiences of a family separated by war. It’s a polyphonic work, but the children’s voices sing out the loudest.
Catherine Milne
(Publisher, Head of Fiction, HarperCollinsPublishers Australia)
The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson (Affirm Press, 4/19) was difficult to read – so real, so confronting, so visceral in its immediacy and intensity, but the novel has stayed with me more than any other this year. As our country burns and we know the bitter taste of smoke in our mouths, I can’t get the rising sense of disbelief and bewilderment that Isobel experiences in the refugee camp out of my head – nor her courage. This is writing as an act of radical empathy, imagination, and – in those terrifying, deeply moving final scenes – true beauty.
Nathan Hollier
(Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, Melbourne University Publishing)
Samia Khatun’s Australianama: The South Asian odyssey in Australia (UQP) stands out for me. Khatun focuses on people and experiences within Australia that have received little attention before. She brings to this task impressive, multilingual learning from different cultural traditions, an inspired yet thorough approach to research, an intriguing narrative, an admirable capacity for skilled navigation of complex philosophical areas, and an affecting willingness to share aspects of her personal story and her journey in researching and writing this book. This is certainly a stimulating work for readers and may well be so for Australian history as a whole.
Phillipa McGuinness
(Publisher, NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press)
Too Much Lip (UQP, 10/18) rode into my reading life
the way its protagonist Kerry Salter rides into Durrongo on her stolen Harley: loud, fast, and super-smart. I caught author Melissa Lucashenko in conversation during the year; she talked about pre-colonial Indigenous civilisations and dispossession. But this brilliant writer always reminded her audience that Too Much Lip is funny too. She’s right. The hoop pine on Granny Ava’s island stands alongside other literary trees of 2019, including those that star in Sophie Cunningham’s wonderful collection of essays City of Trees (Text, 5/19), which I read with a mix of admiration and sadness, the latter prompted by Cunningham’s own losses and the planet’s.
Meredith Curnow (Publisher, Knopf, Vintage, Hamish Hamilton, Viking) Narratively straightforward, Tony Birch’s The White Girl (UQP, 8/19) had me ever alert for the violence underlaying this remote, dry, and dying settlement. You know it is going to hit, but the beautiful, nuanced storytelling and the dignity of the strong, wonderful, and vulnerable Odette and Sissy carry you forward. As Edmund Burke warned us, when good men do nothing, evil can triumph. The constabulary of Deane allowed this, but the simple goodness of people like Henry Lamb and Odette are there to inspire us all to be better people. This is a vivid and emotional exploration of the scars colonisation has left on this country.
Barry Scott (Publisher, Transit Lounge)
Nick Gadd’s Death of a Typographer (Arcadia) is the story of a revered Dutch-Jewish typographer called Pieter van Floogstraten whose childhood is spent hiding in cellar. Out of darkness and grief – the Nazis capture his mother – blossom strange fonts. Tiring of adult success and rivalry, he disappears to remote monasteries and towns, all the while creating a secret font that pays tribute to the small people of this world. But his movements are followed by a trail of murders. An intriguing, imaginative mystery story that it is impossible to pigeonhole. I was also moved by The Palace of Angels (Wild Dingo). Perth-based author Mohammed Massoud Morsi encourages you to engage with characters at a deep emotional level and to put a face to the rawness of life in Gaza.
Sophy Williams
(Publisher, International Director, Black Inc.)
Two very different books linked by a common thread stood out for me this year. Both tackle hate – online and in the broader culture. Stan Grant’s slender but powerful essay On Identity (MUP, 8/19) eloquently explores the divisive power of labels and how they can fuel anger and stifle conversation. This is a personal and emotional account from a famous Australian who identifies as Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Dharrawal, and Irish, but wonders why he must choose. Ginger Gorman was trolled online, her life threatened. This lead her on a Jon Ronson-style investigative journey into the terrifying world of cyberhate. Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout (Hardie Grant Books, 3/19) is utterly compelling.
Martin Hughes
(Publishing Director, Affirm Press)
In Favel Parrett’s There Was Still Love, a short, tenderly crafted novel to savour, the small and quiet scenes are the most memorable. It’s about the power of love to endure over distance, disappointment, and dislocation, with an impact that is magnified over time. Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt (MUP) is also about love. While Morton shows that the denial of love can choke the spirit, guaranteed love – such as he received from his mother – can break the downward spiral of poverty and family decay. It’s an extraordinary tale of survival filtered through humour, heart, and controlled anger.
Georgia Richter
(Publisher, Fremantle Press)
Lisa Gorton’s volume of poems, Empirical (Giramondo, 10/19) is a masterclass in the genre: a perfect manifestation of content and form sitting in exquisite tension. In particular, her poem series about Melbourne’s Royal Park has the urgency and poignancy of a threatened space, the present freighted with the past of human intersection and interaction. Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador, 9/18) is surely one of the books of the decade –in its inception, its delivery, and its desperate message. It doesn’t get more powerful than this pastiche of life writing, poetry, and acute observation texted in fragments of Farsi from behind Manus’s prison walls. g
After the Mardi Gras
Sebastian Sharp
UNREQUITED LOVE: DIARY OF AN ACCIDENTAL ACTIVIST
by Dennis Altman
Monash University Publishing $29.95 pb, 245 pp, 9781925835120
The fortieth anniversary of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras might have been an occasion for unbridled elation. Held in March of 2018, the celebration came soon after the bitterly fought battle to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia. Dennis Altman, a pre-eminent figure in Gay Liberation, paints a different picture of the Mardi Gras. His new book, Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist, conveys a sense of unease despite the frolicsome charms of such festivities.
According to Altman, the veterans in attendance are left with the ‘odd sensation of having been turned into talismans, simultaneously memorialised and passed by, as successive generations reinvent themselves in ways we couldn’t imagine’. Fatigued, Altman soon leaves the carnival, taking a long detour through the dirty backstreets to his hotel. This quiet moment acquires a powerful resonance, for the peripheries are indeed where this memoir is prone to wander. Its exploration of contemporary queer culture lingers over the problems that remain unresolved: the blind spots in its politics, the missing pieces in its history, the open wounds of its past.
The diaries excerpted here cover the years following the election of Donald Trump as president, but their account of the period inevitably draws on earlier memories. A visit to the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in Sydney prompts a winding meditation on time spent in the United States during the heady days of the 1970s. The layered structure of these recollections underscores the complicated ways in which the past and present intertwine. Altman marvels at the presence of old continuities, as when he suggests that a drag queen popping into a bar in San Francisco might bear a close resemblance to someone he saw on the same strip forty years ago. More often, his perceptions evoke a sense of loss. He laments the devastating toll of AIDS, which claimed the lives of many of his friends and associates. Some of the most affecting passages in the book express grief over the death of his partner, Anthony Smith, who died from lung cancer. Peering through the window as he drives around Melbourne, he realises that the city has already changed in ways Anthony would no longer recognise, and that ‘each day the dead are further lost to us’.
The literary presentation of the text itself takes on an almost elegiac quality. Altman points out that many gay men of his generation came to terms with their sexual desires through the narratives of writers such as Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal. (In an early passage, he explicitly refers to Isherwood’s diaries as the precedent for the records of daily life collected in this volume.) Altman discloses a desire to preserve the literary tradition as it becomes endangered by the ascendancy of visual and new media. The most striking aspect of this gesture is the diffidence with which it is made. Reflecting upon his remarks at a public speaking event, he writes: ‘I define queer history as being ultimately about the desire to know that there are other people out there like us, and regret the decline of reading, particularly of imaginative literature, among so many queer activists. If someone had the presence of mind to challenge me I’d have to acknowledge I have no proof for that assertion.’
Ironically, the recognition of this ambivalence points towards the literary virtues the book seeks to champion. After all, this is a memoir that takes great relish in its ability to accommodate speculation. The sentiments it expresses are seldom presented as unquestioned facts. Instead, the jottings in the diaries are pitched as a series of provisional and fragmentary impressions.
This approach enables Altman to cast doubt over a wide range of assumptions, including his own. For instance, he brings a critical eye to Australia’s enduring but increasingly tainted romance with the United States, which comes to mirror his own mixed feelings for the country. (His formative experiences there set the stage for his vocation as a writer and activist; now he grows more and more disillusioned by its violence and injustice.) It is worth stressing that the scepticism he applies to received wisdoms is filtered through the cautious declaration of his own dissent. A case in point: he repeatedly takes issue with the widespread use of the LGBTI acronym, but he also acknowledges that the term ‘queer’, his preferred alternative, runs the risk of offending older members of the community who recall its pejorative uses in the past. On another occasion, he tempers his complaint about the depletion of radical potential in queer activism with the concession that he himself only ever dabbled in the counter-culture of his heyday.
If Altman means to pass on a message to the next generation, it cannot be reduced to a crude slogan. Perhaps the careful nature of his deliberations is itself instructive. The memoir’s most powerful legacy is its insistence that we resist the dangers of presuming too much. Instead, it provokes us to grapple with the strange ambiguities and contradictions inherent in our time. Dennis Altman invites us to step outside the parade for a moment and wander through the shadows. g
Sebastian Sharp is a Melbourne-based writer who completed a PhD in English at the University of Western Australia, exploring camp in contemporary culture. ❖
From Fitzroy to Heide
James Jiang
HEIDE by π.O. Giramondo
$39.95 pb, 560 pp, 9781925818208
Heide is the final instalment of an epic trilogy that began with 24 Hours (1996) and was followed by Fitzroy: A biography (2015). It also marks a departure for π.O. In this third volume (the only one in the trilogy not to be self-published), the unofficial poet laureate of Fitzroy turns his attention away from the migrant and working-class characters of his beloved suburb toward the names that line the bookshelves and gallery walls of the nation’s most august institutions. In more than 500 pages of verse, Heide plots the history, and colonial prehistory, of the artistic milieu that gathered at Sunday and John Reed’s property in Heidelberg. The book’s concern with institutional memory aligns it with Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), a film famous for its unblinking gaze down the corridors of the Winter Palace in the Hermitage Museum. Both works share an architecture of historical imagination in which the museum becomes a memory palace where the artist’s acts of listening and recording conserve without being conservative.
Heide, like Fitzroy, comprises interconnected portraits of local landmarks and historical personages. The first section details the founding of the State Library, the National Gallery of Victoria, and a School of Painting, though the main action happens to be unfolding elsewhere, namely in the plein-air artists’ camps at Box Hill, Mentone, and Heidelberg. The second and much longer section charts the rise and fall of the Reeds’ home as a synecdoche for the fortunes of Australian modernism. The villains in this story are institutions as much as individuals. π.O pulls no punches: Sidney Nolan emerges as a vicious and vindictive ‘root-rat’, while
John Reed is dismissed as a ‘fellowtraveller’ who had ‘credentials, Zero. / Can’t paint. Can’t draw. Can’t sculpt. Nothing.’ These personal failings are merely the surface irritations of a much more systemic malaise that the poet diagnoses as ‘the dead weight of / a Patron’s hand’ and the invidious cult of genius such hands sponsor.
Cutting across the vertical relationship between artist and patron is a whole network of horizontal relations held together in ‘divine delirium’. The history of modernist art in this country is an intimate history of couples (and their uncoupling): the Reeds, Moya Dyring and Sam Atyeo, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, Mirka and Georges Mora, Ailsa and Vic O’Connor, Cynthia and Sidney Nolan. (Heide itself is dedicated to Sandy Caldow, an artist and poet as well as π.O ’s partner and collaborator.) More than one modernist work of art has sprouted from the ash heaps of a marriage, and π.O tallies the cost of the radical experiments in art and conjugality, a cost largely borne by women and children. In a sense, the Heide story really begins with Sunday’s first marriage to an American adventurer, Leonard Quinn, who left her infertile after infecting her with gonorrhoea, and ends with the suicide of Sweeney, the Reeds’ adopted son. In one of the book’s most delicate moments, a poem about Cynthia Nolan concludes with a sequence of names (‘Cynthia’, ‘Hansen’, ‘Nolan’, ‘Reed’) cast adrift across the page, testifying to a self serially made and unmade by love. Obsessed by the shipwrecked Eliza Fraser, Sidney was blind to the wreckage closer to home.
Many of the stories in Heide have been told before, but seldom with such gusto, and always with an unexpected kink. The Ern Malley hoax is recounted as an act of cultural terrorism (‘Suppose, one could load / a train carriage full of explosives, and // rail it into / the very heart of Modernism’) with a surprising connection to the Whitlam dismissal. But the handling of this celebrated scandal is emblematic of one way in which Heide falls a little short of the brio and freshness of Fitzroy. While the hoax unfolds in the sequence of poems entitled ‘Fort St. Boys High’,
the schoolyard shared by the hoaxers is neither lined with lived experience nor realised with the pungency of local detail we might expect; it is merely a convenient framing device.
Heide’s cast of characters is not always easy to like, though the poet’s ambivalence does not forestall his fascination with mavericks such as ‘(the wit / twit)’ Alister Kershaw, a poet who penned two Denunciads against the Heide set and later wrote a history of the guillotine. The fascination is partly autobiographical: Kershaw’s father almost singlehandedly set up the Bonegilla Migrant Camp where π .O and his family were first settled. But it is also temperamental: both poets are deeply sceptical about cultural gatekeeping of any kind.
One is also grateful for the return of Danila Vassilieff, a Russian-born Australian painter and sculptor who served in the Don Cossack cavalry, exhibited in Paris, and settled in Australia in 1935. ‘He painted Fitzroy, like a ghetto’ and ‘by the 1950s he’d worn-out / his ethnic credentials’. In 1958:
[…] He died of a heart attack in John Reed’s arms, out at Heide (collecting up all the sculptures, he left stored there).
It’s good luck to find a knot, in a shoelace. The left part of the brain, is in charge now.
In Fitzroy, the poem had ended with Vassilieff’s clearing out a shed ‘(where they / stowed their Nolans)’. The muting of migrant pathos in the new version perhaps suggests the poet’s own wariness about ‘wearing out his ethnic credentials’.
π.O.’s work has always emanated from the right part of the brain of Australian poetry, and it is an irony that the eminently modernist Heide is unlikely to be available at its namesake any time soon. This is a shame. Who better to reconsider our heritage industries than the pre-eminent poet of local heritage himself? As Sunday Reed once put it: ‘What big sooks we are.’ g
James Jiang is a writer and academic based in Melbourne. ❖
Ballistic
Aaron Nyerges
BEN HECHT: FIGHTING WORDS, MOVING PICTURES
by Adina Hoffman
Yale University Press (Footprint)
$37.99 hb, 249 pp, 9780300180428
In his long poem The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane balances the breadth of his epic vision against a compressive energy, a ballistic sort of expression: ‘So the 20th Century – so / whizzed the Limited – roared by and left.’ Since Crane worked in an American tradition of poet–prophets that includes Walt Whitman and the undersung H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), it is tempting to grant him that. The twentieth century did roar by and go. And the 20th Century Limited, the luxurious passenger train connecting New York to Chicago, furnished it (and him) with an expression of the century’s quarrelsome momentum, its loud, emblematic modernity. That iconic, bullet-shaped train also provides the title and setting for one of Ben Hecht’s most successful comedies, Twentieth Century (1934) A buzzing farce directed by Howard Hawks, it was adapted from a Broadway show of the same name, which Hecht wrote alongside his utmost scrivenerin-arms, Charles MacArthur. For those interested in the screwy art of the insult, get aboard. A delirious tour de force awaits, in which John Barrymore, playing the pompous theatre director Oscar Jaffe, gets to call his stage manager an amoeba!
When, in 1954, Hecht published his memoir – a book that ‘bounces along’,
according to Adina Hoffman, with an American brand of glee – he had long since known he would call it A Child of the Century, a reference to the historical epoch, the Broadway romp he wrote with MacArthur, and the train that whizzed him from Chicago to New York, New York to Chicago, and momentously to Hollywood. Hart Crane, incidentally, had been dead for two years by 1934. But Waldo Frank remembered him, in an allusion to William Wordsworth, as ‘a child of modern man’, a person who lived in intimacy with ‘cities, machines, the warring hungers of lonely and herded men, the passions released from defeated loyalties’. Though Crane shot through, Hecht held on, through decades that would deepen the poignancy of those same intimacies.
Hoffman’s new biography of Hecht portrays him as a synecdoche of the century, though it is too nuanced to ride that as its explicit thesis. Hoffman – a poet herself – compresses her subject in order to expand it. She shows Hecht detonating verbal explosives amid some of the most consequential fissure points of his age. She generally eschews inspections of his personal intimacies to build a research foundation around his politics, movies, and books.
Hecht the writer came to international renown in the small-magazine culture of interwar modernism, among the likes of Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Ezra Pound reported him to be the ‘one intelligent man in the whole United States’ (a rib on his homeland as much as a compliment to Hecht). The impression Hecht made on the international modernist set had been shaped by an apprenticeship in print. The exploits of Chicago’s tenement life had not until the 1920s been the fare of newspapers, but Hecht pioneered a tough-nosed, streetwise reporting style that would fuel his career as a modern novelist, and as a screenwriter who excelled in quick-witted comedies and grimy gangster flicks.
Before the advent of sound, Hecht became one of the first literary luminaries to work for the Hollywood system. Unlike F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, both of whom notori-
ously chafed under it, Hecht thrived there, working alongside MacArthur in cigar-smoked sessions punctuated by games of backgammon. Today he is better remembered as a scenarist than a novelist. In 1968, Jean-Luc Godard said of Hecht that he ‘invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today’. He was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the firstever Academy Awards, and perhaps did more than any other writer to establish the generic architecture of crime film and wordy comedy. But Hoffman deepens the story of Hecht the moviemaker, bringing attention to his role as producer and director, and arguing for his forerunning status in the American independent movement.
Finally, in the realm of politics, Hoffman’s biography is perhaps at its most interesting and complex. Part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, the book braids the lineaments of literature and film with that of Hecht’s Jewish identity. Catalysed by conflict, Hecht declared that he became a Jew and an American in 1939, an odd statement since he had always been, in some ways, both. Hoffman leaves no question that Hecht became most emboldened by the task of bringing the enormity of extermination camps to the attention of US citizens. Later he became a propagandist for a Jewish state in Palestine. Defined of a piece with his mean-street pugnacity, to be a Jew meant fighting for Jewish lives. With this in mind, Hoffman speculates on the consequences of Hecht’s Zionism more directly than she attends to its historical conditions. Her skills as a writer here compensate for historical limits entailed by biography, as she lets the personality of political actors substitute for a thoroughgoing review of their context. In this she may strike some as overly cautious. From another standpoint, hers is a poetic form of compression that allows the book to whiz along like the man at its heart, to roar by like the Hechtian century that carried him. g
Aaron Nyerges is a lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. ❖
Scars of the past
Merav Fima
SING THIS AT MY FUNERAL: A MEMOIR OF FATHERS AND SONS
by David Slucki
Wayne State University Press
US$27.99 pb, 280 pp, 9780814344866
Sing This at My Funeral is not your conventional ghost story. Invoking Franz Kafka’s words, ‘Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters’, this moving memoir by David Slucki gives shape to the ghost of Zaida Jakub, the grandfather he never knew. Following his beloved father Sluggo’s death in 2015, the author, a Melbourne-born professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, discovered a series of letters written by Zaida Jakub to his brother Mendel in Los Angeles over three decades. Weaving together excerpts of these letters and incorporating family photographs, the memoir reconstructs the story of Zaida Jakub’s profound personal loss during the Holocaust and examines its effects on subsequent generations. In Slucki’s own words, this book is about ‘how the difficult memories of the past shaped the relationships between fathers and their sons, how the ghosts kept multiplying, never far from the surface’.
Having lost his first wife and two sons at the hands of the Nazis, Zaida Jakub arrived in Melbourne in 1950 as a European refugee. A devout Bundist (note the irony, as it is a staunchly secular, social democratic movement), he became a pillar of the Polish‒Jewish community in his adopted neighbourhood of North Carlton. The Holocaust remains, to this day, at the forefront of the Bundists’ consciousness, and they are committed to preserving its memory. This is the movement into which Jakub’s children and grandchildren were born, and the legacy they inherited from him.
In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, composed as he was fleeing
from the Nazis in 1940, Walter Benjamin writes of an angel banished into exile and pushed toward the future, powerless to reverse the course of his flight as he observes the catastrophe that was the source of all subsequent ruins: ‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.’ Slucki endeavours to do just that as he explores his relationship with the father he admired so much and the experiences of the past transmitted by his own father. He cites scientific research suggesting that DNA is modified by trauma and is thus genetically inscribed into the flesh of future generations. In open-ended questions that force readers to reflect on their own lives and roles as parents, the author asks what kind of father he would like to be to his son, Arthur, to whom this book is dedicated, and what values he would like to instil in him, given his tragic family history.
The Yiddish theatre is one of the most powerful vehicles through which the values of the Bund are transmitted to the younger generation. The chapter entitled ‘The Slucki Method’ is particularly compelling, as it probes the impact of an arts education and its role in shaping young people’s lives. The author’s father was a respected drama teacher and theatre director who inspired generations of students and aspiring actors. In 1995, he was recognised as Victorian Teacher of the Year for his innovative teaching methods. Sluggo believed in the power of the theatre to build community and enrich society, and it was there that he put his commitment to Mentschlekhkayt – treating every human being with dignity – into practice. The theatre contributed to the strong bond between father and son and to the author’s own sense of identity and professional development. Significantly, it is at the Melbourne Yiddish Theatre that he met his wife, Helen, at the age of thirteen.
Written with raw, candid feeling, this memoir attains its emotional climax not at the description of Sluggo’s sudden death at the age of sixty-seven or even of his funeral, but, rather unexpectedly, in the epilogue, when the author cites his father’s conciliatory email, sent
after their most serious fight (up to that point, their relationship sounded quite idyllic). As French novelist Marcel Proust once said: ‘An artist expresses not only himself, but hundreds of ancestors, the dead who find their spokesman in him.’ David Slucki is one such artist, literally giving voice to his now-voiceless ancestors and to the numerous ghosts that accompany him on his life’s journey. Though his literary prose is vivid, the frequent shifts in register to colloquialism are at times jarring, as are the proofing errors throughout the book.
In a drive to ‘populate or perish’, Australia absorbed many migrants, including Slucki’s grandparents, fleeing Europe after World War II. As such, Melbourne – the only place in the world where the Bundist movement officially exists today – appears to be an appropriate setting for the investigation of themes such as the relationship between the past and the present and the effect of trauma on the victims’ descendants. No wonder, then, that Melbourne was also chosen by Maria Tumarkin, whose Stella Prize-nominated work of non-fiction, Axiomatic (2018), grapples with similar issues. Nonetheless, in recent years, Australia has tightened its immigration policies. Iranian‒Kurdish journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani’s recent liberation from Manus Prison raises questions about Australia’s ongoing treatment of refugees. What traumas will their children and grandchildren carry with them? Which ghosts will continue to haunt them? As Slucki eloquently puts it, ‘When you grow up amidst the scars of the past, you can’t help but be shaped by that … The ghosts don’t call ahead; they appear when you least expect them.’ g
Merav Fima is a PhD candidate in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Monash University. ❖
Ceridwen Dovey
Where are you happiest?
Hiking the bush track around Berry Island in Wollstonecraft and listening to pop hits.
What’s your idea of hell?
Being trapped in a state of permanent distraction.
What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Moderation – in anything in life. I like excess!
What is your favourite film?
Dirty Dancing (1987), directed by Emile Ardolino
And your favourite book?
At the moment, one of my favourites is All Joy and No Fun: The paradox of modern parenthood, by Jennifer Senior.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. I’d love to hear them discuss modern relationships.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
I hate the word ‘unfurled’ – it’s overused in literary fiction (I’m guilty of this myself). And it would be fun to bring back the expression ‘to get munted’.
Who is your favourite author?
Right now, I’m in a phase of obsessing over Chris Kraus. She is so funny in her writing, but also serious.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
The cold, imperturbable, yet strangely empathetic character of Faye, who is the narrator in Rachel Cusk’s recent trilogy of novels (Outline, Transit, Kudos).
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Resilience, persistence, quiet commitment, staying power – in other words, the ability to keep writing, and remain curious about self and others, year after year.
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
During much of my childhood, my mother was bravely and passionately insisting on teaching postcolonial African literature to (mostly) white university students in apartheid South Africa. I was probably way too young to fully understand it, but Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 début novel, Nervous Conditions, was one
of the books my mother was teaching, and it had a huge impact on me.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
Enid Blyton. I inhaled her books as a child – I even wrote my very first childhood short story in imitation of her writing (my story included the ultra-British phrase ‘Mum’s a brick’, which I can safely say I have never used again). So it’s disturbing to look back at those books now, and see how offensive they are. Also, I read recently that she was a terrible mother to her own children.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Too few, and very unreliable, working hours – I’m still the primary carer of young children, and take on a lot of freelance writing to earn a living. It’s difficult to find any time to work on longer-term, slower-burning fiction projects.
What do you think of writers’ festivals?
My experiences at writers’ festivals (all of them in Australia) have always been overwhelmingly positive. It’s such a joy to be around other writers – after all that solitary time! – and to be forced to rethink some of my own assumptions and bad habits or lazy thinking as a writer.
Do you read reviews of your own books?
Generally, I try not to, for the sake of my own mental health. But even if I don’t read reviews, I always appreciate that somebody has taken the time to read and respond (whether positively or negatively).
Are artists valued in our society?
My sense is that writers are fairly low on the totem pole of value in our society at the moment, at least politically and economically. It’s almost impossible to make a living making art, which tells a story in itself of what we value.
What are you working on now?
I’m in a period of creative experimentation and wanting to try something new (or maybe I’m just having a midlife crisis!). There might be a chance to write a sci-fi romance – something I’ve always wanted to do – and I’m also thinking about starting work on a long-term non-fiction book about social and environmental justice in outer space.
Ceridwen Dovey’s most recent book is Inner Worlds Outer Spaces (Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
(photograph by Shannon Smith)
Guys and dolls
Luke Forbes
DANCING UNDER THE SOUTHERN SKIES: A HISTORY OF BALLET IN AUSTRALIA
by Valerie Lawson
Australian Scholarly Publishing $59.95 pb, 374 pp, 9781925588743
‘Haskell was the epitome of the word he coined – “balletomane” ... When he sat front of house, Haskell could revel in the aesthetics. Slipping behind the curtain, he could investigate the tensions, byzantine feuds and gossip.’
Valerie Lawson is a balletomane whose writing on dance encompasses newspaper articles and advertorial essays for a general readership. Lawson’s lavishly illustrated Dancing Under the Southern Skies, like Arnold Haskell’s mid-twentieth-century popular histories of ballet, substitutes stories about ballet and ballet dancers for a cohesive historical narrative about ballet in Australia. Portraits, images of ballet dancers posing in photographers’ studios, and ephemera are reproduced in the book; but the total sum of stage photos – of dancing – can be counted on one hand.
The observation that Lawson echoes her source material – such as Haskell’s writing – is reflected in Lawson’s own preferred narratives, which revel in the theatrical blurring of ballet dancers’ lives on and off stage. For Lawson, Anna Pavlova not only interpreted a dying swan in The Swan (1905), at the end of her life she became a sick bird. Of Olga Spessivtseva – celebrated for her interpretation of Giselle’s ‘mad scene’, and who suffered a nervous breakdown in Australia – Lawson writes ‘[in] ballet, there are many dolls … some of them dance until they are destroyed, or until they destroy themselves’. The mystification of ballet history will thrill readers who value dancers’ extraordinariness, and will irritate others, including dance scholars eager to be taken seriously by fellow academics.
The trouble with Dancing Under the Southern Skies is its promise to deliver more than a balletomane’s good yarn: specifically, a revisionist history of bal-
let in Australia. In reality, it consists of chronologically ordered, discrete chapters, half of which concern European dancers who toured Australia from 1926 onwards, the year Pavlova first came here. The latter half of the book relates experiences of Europeans who visited then stayed, as well as Australians who came home following successful ballet careers abroad, to contribute to local ballet.
Nonetheless, Lawson suggests in a preface that she uncovers the ‘British Council’s intervention in Australian culture after World War II’; how the ‘thread that runs through’ the book is the ‘beginning and end of the intervention’. Dancing Under the Southern Skies does not strictly adhere to its own path. Nor does it convincingly show that British authorities were hostile toward ballet by Australians. Lawson refers to a supposed British exertion of power in chapter eight, in a passage on the exhibition Art for Theatre and Ballet (1940), curated by Tatlock Miller, featuring theatrical designs from Britain. No mention is made of a second exhibition in 1942, also curated by Miller, titled Australian Art for Theatre and Ballet. This weakens her argument that British influencers directly affected or contained Australian ballet.
The ill-defined British hand in Australian ballet reappears in chapter eleven, ‘The British Invasion, 1947–49’. The ‘campaign began in May 1944’, Lawson explains, ‘with a letter from a British Council representative in London to the British High Commissioner in Canberra’ expressing anxiety about the popularity of American books, music, and documentary films, but not ballet. The Rambert Ballet’s 1947 tour is portrayed as an instrument for reasserting British cultural dominance in Australia, although Lawson notes how the company quickly become a ‘two-nation troupe with more and more Australian dancers joining the company’.
Against the background of harmonious links between British ballet and (settler-colonial) Australian ballet, it is regrettably ironic that Lawson equates a British ballet’s tour to Australia with invasion. In doing so, Lawson implicitly denies Australia’s settler-colonial foundations, further positioning settler colonists and migrants as ‘natives’ de-
fending a sovereign cultural ‘landscape’. This blindspot limits significantly a more novel historiographical intervention in Dancing Under the Southern Skies: Lawson’s attempts to acknowledge Aboriginal histories parallel to, and sometimes intersecting with, ballet history. The book begins and ends with references to Aboriginal performance, intermittently discloses settler-colonists’ brutality (unrelated to dance) against Aboriginal people, and, conversely, construes ballet dancers’ consciousness and appropriation of Aboriginal cultural practices as empathy with Aboriginal people.
The purpose of such ‘recognition’ in a book otherwise isolated from ‘history wars’ discourse and Indigenous perspectives is made more questionable by its exclusion of Aboriginal participation in ballet: notably absent are Rex Reid’s Corroboree (1950), and Kira Bousloff’s Kooree and the Mists (1960), and Woodara (1963), non-Aboriginal ballets that appropriated (actual and fictional) Aboriginal stories and identities and featured Aboriginal performers in minor and major roles.
Lawson apologetically responds to non-Aboriginal ‘Aboriginal-themed’ ballet, stating that the ‘notion of cultural appropriation was decades away’. Indicative of the pre-eminence of settler-colonial voices, perspectives, and interests in Dancing Under the Southern Skies, such statements subvert subaltern cultural rights prior to the currency of certain academic terminology.
By contrast, passages on the Australian Ballet’s organisational history, and the positive rather than disruptive role British women played in its development, make a more valuable contribution to ballet history. Anne Woolliams and Maina Gielgud, former artistic directors discussed in the book, have previously attracted little sustained interest in dance writing. A summary of internal disputes between dancers and the company’s administrator, Peter Bahen, during Marilyn Jones’s stewardship of the Australian Ballet offers insights that would be unlikely to appear in a house publication. g
Luke Forbes is a PhD candidate at Monash University. ❖
Packer & Sons
Ian Dickson
You would have to be living under a rock the size of Uluru not to be aware of the reassessment of the masculine sense of dominance and entitlement that is sweeping the Western world at the moment. From an American president who has openly boasted of assaulting women to a member of the royal family who, in an interview about his relationship with a notorious paedophile, blithely ignores the damage that this man and his cohorts inflicted on young women, we have seen a stunning lack of empathy towards the less powerful and well connected. In the business world, some consider this to be a requisite for success. It has become something of a truism to claim, as does Jon Ronson in his controversial book The Psychopath Test (2011), that a high percentage of CEOs have psychopathic tendencies.
But what of those young men, destined from birth to control large corporations, who start life as ordinary, vulnerable children? In the case of the Packer children, they have to be ‘toughened up’. To quote Oscar Hammerstein, they ‘have to be carefully taught’ to suppress any signs of vulnerability, to hide emotion and to be constantly aggressive. Their world, in Kerry Packer’s estimation, is dominated by big gorillas. To succeed they must be the biggest and most belligerent in the jungle.
This unremitting pressure to ‘succeed’ has also taken its toll in the sporting world. Recently, in The Sydney Morning Herald, there was a quote from Maurice Duffy, a ‘mindset coach’, about the cricketer Steve Smith that could be taken as a description of the underlying theme of Tommy Murphy’s new play, Packer & Sons. Speaking of Smith’s relationship with Cricket Australia, Duffy says, ‘Steve doesn’t necessarily fit into that culture the way they were looking for. The burden and what was expected of him to behave in a certain way was obviously pushing him in certain directions that perhaps he was uncomfortable with and struggling with.’ For Kerry, the world he was destined for became a natural fit. But Duffy’s words could easily apply to his brother, Clyde, and his son, James.
Nobody could accuse Murphy of a lack of empathy. In plays like Holding the Man (2006) and Mark Colvin’s Kidney (2017), he has shown understanding of, and compassion for, people in extreme circumstances. Now he has taken on the ultimate testosterone-fuelled world of the Packers.
When the apparently mild-mannered Frederick Packer arrived in Hobart in 1852 to take up the position of organist at St David’s Cathedral, he would have been amazed to learn that he was to be the founding patriarch of one of Australia’s leading media dynasties. Murphy doesn’t take us that far back. He covers the period from Sir Frank’s dominance to James’s One.Tel disaster in 2001. We get to see Frank’s continual denigration of ‘fatty’ Clyde, Clyde’s rebellion and ouster, and ‘dumb-dumb’ Kerry’s rise to prominence as he moved the company from print to television. The filial relationship is then repeated with James’s attempts to emerge from his father’s shadow and bring the company into the digital world. This gives us plenty of dramatic and amusing moments, but by limiting his play to business dealings and omitting his characters’ private lives, what we get is a series of incidents rather than a deeper exploration of these men’s characters. Kerry, for example, goes from being a falling-down drunken mess in one scene to a cunning ruthless manipulator in the next. We see the result but not the process. Murphy succeeds better with James, because James is openly vulnerable. One of the most telling scenes occurs between James and his close friend and One.Tel business partner, Jodee Rich. One.Tel has just acquired a GSM operation and the two are celebrating. But the only way these two can express their affection for each other is through a juvenile wrestling match.
Other than a slight opening-night uncertainty with the lines, Belvoir has done Murphy proud. The play covers various locations and eras, and Eamon Flack’s deft direction makes sure that the audience is always aware of where and when the scenes occur. Romaine Harper’s design, Nick Schlieper’s lighting, and Alan John’s music are all effective, and Nigel Poulton has given us some alarmingly realistic fights and has presumably choreographed the amazingly limber Josh McConville’s drunk scenes.
With his size, his natural dominance, and the sense of danger he brings to the stage, John Howard is ideal casting for Sir Frank and the older Kerry. Murphy and Howard make us feel an amused, if somewhat terrified, respect for the man. McConville nicely differentiates the young Kerry and James. Brandon McClelland is a self-important Clyde who finds himself completely out-maneuvered by the brother he disastrously underestimated. There are no weak links in the cast, although one might quibble that the great John Gaden is seriously underused.
At the play’s end, standing in the wreckage of the One.Tel disaster, James echoes the cry of Saul Bellow’s Eugene Henderson: ‘I want, I want.’ In Henderson the Rain King (1959), the eponymous protagonist is a rich, successful man who realises that there is something vital missing in his life. By the novel’s end he has found it. It is to be hoped James will too. g
Packer & Sons was presented by Belvoir St Theatre in November–December 2019.
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines
Sophie Knezic
In Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines, the National Gallery of Victoria presents a double portrait of the late, iconic, New York-based artists Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) and Keith Haring (1958–90), becoming the first public museum to place their careers in direct dialogue. The retrospective presents many of both artists’ signature works. The vibrant juxtaposition creates a narrative of two ambitious rebels as rising stars in 1980s New York, as well as a compelling snapshot of the heyday of the city’s bohemian Lower East Side.
Crossing Lines has been guest-curated by the art historian and curator Dr Dieter Buchhart, after his recent monograph exhibitions on Basquiat (Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Barbican Art Gallery) and Haring (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris).
It is crammed with more than two hundred works of art: mainly paintings and drawings but also journals, notebooks, painted objects, documentary photographs, and even MTV video footage of the young Basquiat as a fashion model and Haring body-painting celebrities like Grace Jones.
In a nod to 1980s glamour, one of the rooms is filled with portrait photographs taken by Maripol, the French expat fashion designer and photographer, shot mainly in the club scene showing edgy poseurs strutting for the camera, their asymmetrical clothing, dramatic make-up, and tousled hair typifying the era.
The exhibition charts a broad chronology from Haring’s and Basquiat’s early years, including collaborative works made shortly after the artists met in 1979 at the Manhattan School of Visual Arts where Haring was a student; their immersion in street culture and graffiti; their subsequent move into the commercial gallery world; and their forays into the fashion and music scenes. Throughout, a sense of youthful exuberance abounds.
While both artists made lively paintings and drawings, the differences in their visual languages and sociopsychological temperaments are stark. Basquiat’s works burn with a frenzied artistic energy and a sketchy, expressionist aesthetic that continued throughout his career. His paintings and drawings reveal an intuitive grasp of how textures and colours can briskly interact – almost at cross purposes. Oilsticks and crayons in contrasting hues zigzag across the canvas, and wet paint is gouged with the end of a brush. Words are scribbled across surfaces and later scratched out. There is the feel of an artist working at furious speed.
Yet within the restless dynamism and unmistakable drawing facility of Basquiat’s images, something both juvenile and melancholy is evoked. The subject is often a solitary figure: a scrawny young man with dark skin, isolated against a chaotic ground. Faces are cartoonishly drawn with goggle eyes, pug noses, and bared teeth, seemingly childlike yet also vacant and unknowable. The notebook drawings expose this sense of isolation, but it persists even in the larger paintings, with their more complex compositions.
Untitled (Pollo Frito) (1982) writhes with frenzied mark-making. A disembodied head drifts on a sizzling orange ground, while patches of the canvas are violently inscribed with pithy signifiers: ‘danger’, ‘broken glass’, and ‘pollo frito’ –a Spanish term for fried
chicken but also a racist slur for black Americans. Ishtar (1983), seething with energy, is studded with stick figures, floating heads, and a palimpsest of words: ‘Ishtar’, the Mesopotamian goddess of war and love, is scrawled across the surface multiple times alongside more enigmatic references.
Haring’s work, as animated as Basquiat’s, expresses its dynamism in a contrary way. The figures are not depicted through nervously sketched lines but in a reductive, schematic manner. Their bold graphic lines and genderneutral forms suggest the early-twentieth-century Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education): the graphic system for visually translating statistical data into pictorial form, developed by the scientific philosopher Otto Neurath in Vienna in the 1920s. In a historical twist, Haring’s notational forms unwittingly pre-empt the vernacular of emoticons and emojis now routine in contemporary digital communication.
Certain motifs recur across Haring’s works: crawling babies and jumping dogs, but mostly the unisex cipher as an irrepressibly dancing figure. Often placed in absurd scenarios, the exuberant movements of these figures suffuse the images with an upbeat vitality and humour. Untitled (1983) presents a warped bacchanal of quivering schematic forms: a giant caterpillar balancing a mainframe computer and a sword-wielding figure surrounded by a trio of headless dancing men. The whole scene pulses with energy.
In Untitled (1982), two schematically rendered angels raise their arms jubilantly above a crawling figure enveloped in a mushroom cloud, which could also be read as an Afro hairdo. More political meanings percolate beneath the surface comicality: the mushroom cloud signifies the lurking nuclear threat of the Cold War as well as a more specific reference to the partial meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Haring’s home state of Pennsylvania in 1979.
Basquiat’s works similarly hold latent signifiers of dissent: Untitled (Pollo Frito), for instance, includes the word ‘asbestos’ in reference to the 1982 downfall of Manville Corporation after years of asbestos-related injury claims. Indeed Basquiat’s very impetus to represent dark-skinned figures in his works can be interpreted as a mode of racial resistance and a precursor to the contemporary movement #BlackLivesMatter.
While art charged with political mission is now not uncommon, Basquiat’s and Haring’s protest at the evils of corporate capitalism and racial violence did not adulterate their love of the subcultural worlds of indie music and fashion, the fertile ground of the subway and the street. Their idiosyncratic aesthetic visions, so redolent of an epochal era of New York, are fuelled with a sheer vivacity that continues to effervesce. g
Keith Haring / Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines is showing at NGV International until 13 April 2020.
Sophie Knezic is a writer, scholar, and visual artist who works between practice and theory.
Hugh Ramsay
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
‘Australia I think does not yet realise what she has lost in him but she will in time & I & some others I know will do what we can to make his memory live.’
(Letter from John Longstaff to John Ramsay, 3 October 1906)
It is with the artist John Longstaff’s words of condolence, quoted above, that the Hugh Ramsay exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra draws to a close. Ramsay (1877–1906) was a promising Australian Edwardian painter who lived and worked for a time in Europe at the start of the twentieth century. His works constitute some of the most innovative and visually arresting examples of early-twentieth-century painting in Australian collections, while his sketches and illustrated letters tell of the experiences of youth and travel in the exuberant period that preceded the Great War.
The current exhibition and its associated catalogue reveal the prodigious nature of Ramsay’s output, with a focus on the genre in which he excelled: portraiture. Nonetheless, it is hard to view the artist’s oeuvre outside of the spectre of his early death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. Heaviness hangs over a retrospective
Hugh Ramsay, Self-portrait in white jacket (1901-02). Presented through the NGV Foundation by Mrs Nell Turnbull, niece of the artist and by her children John Fullerton, Patricia Fullerton and Fiona Fullerton, Founder Benefactors in 2002, National Gallery of Victoria..
that covers a mere fourteen years of artistic production. Viewed in a more positive light, the current exhibition constitutes a humbling testament to what can be achieved in a very short space of time.
Despite the brevity of Ramsay’s life and career, curator Deborah Hart takes up Longstaff’s mantle and seeks to keep his memory alive. The show starts with Ramsay in Melbourne displaying his artistic skill as a student at the National Gallery School. The nude and figure studies on display constitute an apt starting point for an artist who continued to experiment with tone and brushwork in his renderings of human faces and hands. A sombre note is introduced with two macabre Victorian narrative paintings: At Last (1896) and Anxiety (c.1899). The former depicts a sick mother in a humble interior, accompanied by her two children, hands clasped in thanks or supplication towards the approaching middle-class women in black coats and dresses. The narrative is clear: the bourgeois saviours have come ‘at last’. The artist’s sisters, Madge and Jessie, also make their first appearance; Madge is in mourning, holding a book, while Jessie wears a white dress with blue ribbons and holds a doll. We will witness them grow up over the course of the exhibition – a moving testament to the familial bonds that Ramsay’s art records.
to face with individuals now relegated to history. That Ramsay attempted to paint Nellie Melba’s likeness when she visited his studio in Paris in 1902 constitutes a poetic vignette about the kinds of interactions that portraits have the potential to record. To my mind, the most fascinating portrait on show is Madge of 1902. The artist’s sister stands upright, in full length, wearing a formidable gold and black hat, pink blouse, and black skirt. She appears beside white lilies in a blue vase and in front of a grey, white, and brown screen. The explanatory panel includes quotations from letters sent by Hugh to Madge (significantly, many of the panels in the exhibition include quotations from Ramsay and his contemporaries): the first letter, written soon after his sea voyage to Europe, describes Madge and her ‘splendid hat’ as the last thing he saw as his ship pulled away from the dock; the second, dated 18 October 1901, refers to Madge in a ‘cerise silk blouse’ and ‘black skirt’ at her début, which Ramsay was unable to attend. Then there is the portrait itself, produced on the artist’s return to Melbourne. The work, viewed in relation to the artist’s correspondence with his sister, merges the experiences of leave-taking, adventure/absence, and return – mirroring the trajectory of the artist’s life and the exhibition it inspired.
In 1900 Ramsay travelled to Europe, remaining primarily in Paris until ill health forced him to return to Melbourne in 1902. In his Parisian work, we see scenes of the artist’s studio in Montparnasse, and get a sense of the bohemian experience of expatriate artists with little money but great ambition. At this point, Ramsay also clearly took up smoking cigarettes, a necessity for any avant-garde artist. New characters are introduced, including George and Amy Lambert, whom Ramsay met on the ship out from Australia, the artist’s world having evidently expanded. At the same time, Ramsay increasingly turned his attention towards his own self-image. (Models, of course, cost money; painting one’s own visage is free.) At this point in the show there is a predominance of self-portraits by Ramsay and portraits of him by fellow artists – a case study in how we see ourselves and how others see us. The mythological subject painting, Venus and Adonis (c.1901), along with Consolation (1901) and Nude Reclining (1901), come as surprises, returning us to Ramsay’s earlier figure and nude studies, as well as to themes of loss and grief.
Portraits and self-portraits offer rare opportunities to stand in the place of the artist or mirror, and come face
The retrospective draws to a close with works produced by Ramsay on his return to Melbourne, such as An Equestrian Portrait (c.1903) and Two Girls in White (or, The Sisters) (1904). It is worth viewing Two Girls in White, a strikingly relaxed study in whiteness, no doubt inspired by the work of James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, while standing in front of a photograph of Jessie, Nell, and Madge on display in a glass case in the centre of the room. Generally, the family resemblances in this room are striking. Again we see Ramsay turning his attention to his own face in a series of self-portraits that show him pointing a finger, wearing glasses, and boasting facial hair. What we do not see is the artist as invalid. Rather, an unfinished portrait of Mrs Lily Robertson (1905) and an ornate but understated bereavement card represent a life and career cut short, and a reputation on the brink of revival. g
Hugh Ramsay is being exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia from 30 November 2019 to 29 March 2020.
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University.
Hugh Ramsay, Two Girls in White (1904) also known as The Sisters. Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The Truth
Felicity Chaplin
For much of his working life, Hirokazu Kore-eda has been preoccupied with the question of what makes a family a family. Following on from the critically acclaimed Shoplifters (2018), which received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, The Truth continues to explore the idea of family: the roles we assume, the parts we play, and, above all, the lies we tell. It also interrogates our attachment to the idea of truth, something which for Kore-eda we may never, as humans, reach.
The Truth, Kore-eda’s fourteenth feature and his first made outside his native Japan, is the sentimental story of a very unsentimental woman, a grande dame of French cinema, Fabienne Dangeville, played by real-life grande dame Catherine Deneuve. On the occasion of the publication of her memoirs, entitled The Truth, Fabienne is visited by her estranged screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), actor son-in-law Hank (Ethan Hawke), and granddaughter Charlotte (Clementine Grenier), who have flown in from New York. It does not take long for the cracks to appear: even as Lumir arrives at the family home, a lavish maison privée in central Paris, Fabienne tells a nervous interviewer to continue because it is only her daughter come to congratulate her. Nor does it take long for Lumir to discover that her mother’s memoirs do not reflect her own experiences of childhood but are more about making Fabienne appear a better mother than she was. Fabienne is a battlehardened, impenetrable, and yet nonetheless enchanting and compelling woman who is proud that she put her art before her family. When accused by Lumir of being a bad mother, Fabienne replies: ‘I’d prefer to be a bad mother, a bad friend, but a great actress.’ You get the distinct feeling she means it.
In this part film within a film, part chamber piece, the action is divided between the family home and the lot on which Fabienne’s latest movie is being shot. The Truth largely revolves around the relationship between Fabienne and Lumir, but it also deals with the relationships between minor players, largely filtered through the mother–daughter relationship. The film employs some obvious symbolism: the grounds of the beautiful family home in the 14ème conceal
a prison behind them; in the sitting room, the granddaughter discovers a toy theatre in need of repair; and the film Fabienne is making (a B-grade sci-fi melodrama aptly called Memories of my Mother, set partially in outer space) sees her playing the daughter of a mother who does not age, a reference not only to the immortality of celluloid but also to the way the child still persists in the adult. And the film is set in autumn, which not only provides visually sumptuous shots of the sprawling garden and Parisian streets, but also serves to indicate the stage of life Fabienne is entering.
Yet Kore-eda’s film manages to escape heavy-handedness, primarily due to the complex layering of its symbolism and the strength of Deneuve’s performance. François Truffaut once said of Deneuve that she ‘adds ambiguity to any situation and any screenplay, for she seems to be concealing a great many secret thoughts, we sense there are things lurking behind the surface’. Even the most apparently sentimental moments are quickly undermined by Fabienne’s ambivalence. In a moving exchange in which mother and daughter at last come together in a tearful embrace, Fabienne shatters the moment by expressing regret over the waste of emotion that could have been better used in a particularly difficult scene she had shot the previous day.
The Truth functions largely on a meta level: it is full of references to Deneuve and her career, signified visually through movie posters and costumes (such as her signature leopard-print coat) and intertextual references to her films, including Belle de Jour, 8 Women, Donkey Skin, and The Last Metro, and actors and directors she has worked with. The central enigma of the film is the spectral figure of Sarah Mondavan, a contemporary and rival of Fabienne’s who died before making it big. Sarah is a multilayered presence: she is the ideal of motherhood for Lumir against which Fabienne is measured; a reference to Deneuve’s sister, actress Françoise Dorléac, who was killed in a car accident on the brink of stardom; and that part of herself Fabienne had to ‘kill off’ in order to become the woman she is.
The Truth is an absorbing melodrama that plays in a very Shakespearean way with questions of performance and reality. The world of Kore-eda’s film is a stage upon which each character struts and frets. Deneuve’s Fabienne is a compelling character: hard and warm, funny and luminous, the shining centre of a dysfunctional family which nonetheless somehow thrives in its dysfunction. Binoche shows great emotional candour as Lumir, and Hawke is solid as the ‘second-rate’ American television actor who knows his place. With no resolution, and no reliable characters (even the granddaughter ends up deceiving Fabienne at the behest of Lumir), we are left with the idea that truth is in the eye of the beholder: we believe what we want to believe about ourselves and others. For Kore-eda, truth is the prison in which we are incarcerated; it is the enemy of poetry. g
The Truth (Palace), 107 minutes, is directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda . Felicity Chaplin is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in French Studies at Monash University.
From the ABR Archive
Clive James’s poem ‘Occupation: Housewife’ appeared in our June–July 2002 issue, one of many new poems he published in ABR. It then appeared in his The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003 (Picador). Peter Goldsworthy – one of James’s shrewdest critics – reviewed this volume in our March 2004 issue. The poem, and his review, appear in our digital archive, which is accessible by subscribers.
Occupation: Housewife
Advertisements asked ‘Which twin has the Toni?’
Our mothers were supposed to be nonplussed.
Dense paragraphs of technical baloney
Explained the close resemblance of the phoney
To the Expensive Perm. It worked on trust.
The barber tried to tell me the same sheila With the same Expensive Perm was pictured twice. He said the Toni treatment was paint-sealer Rebottled by a second-hand car dealer And did to hair what strychnine did to mice.
Our mothers all survived, but not the perms.
Two hours at most the Toni bobbed and dazzled Before the waves were back on level terms, Limp as the spear-points of the household germs
An avalanche of Vim left looking frazzled.
Another false economy, home brew
Seethed after nightfall in the laundry copper. Bought on the sly, the hops were left to stew Into a mulch that grunted as it grew. You had to sample it with an eye-dropper,
Not stir it with a stick as one mum did.
She piled house bricks on top, thinking the gas
Would have nowhere to go. Lucky she hid
Inside the house. The copper blew its lid
Like Krakatoa to emit a mass
Of foam. The laundry window bulged and broke. The prodigy invaded the back yard. Spreading across the lawn like evil smoke It murdered her hydrangeas at a stroke And long before the dawn it had set hard.
On a world scale, one hardly needs to note, Those Aussie battlers barely had a taste
Of deprivation. Reeling from the boat
Came reffo women who had eaten goat
Only on feast days. Still, it is the waste
I think of, the long years without our men, And only the Yanks to offer luxuries
At a price no decent woman thought of then As one she could afford, waiting for when The Man Himself came back from Overseas.
And then I think of those whose men did not: My mother one of them. She who had kept Herself for him for so long, and for what?
To creep, when I had splinters, to my cot With tweezers and a needle while I slept?
Now comes the time I fly to sit with her Where she lies waiting, to what end we know. We trade our stories of the way things were, The home brew and the perm like rabbit fur. How sad, she says, the heart is last to go.
The heart, the heart. I still can hear it break. She asked for nothing except his return. To pay so great a debt, what does it take? My books, degrees, the money that I make?
Proud of a son who never seems to learn,
She can’t forget I lost my good pen-knife. Those memories of waste do not grow dim
When you, for Occupation, write: Housewife. Out of this world, God grant them both the life She gave me and I had instead of him.
