Fifteen years ago, the new Rudd government announced the creation of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs), to be administered by the Minister for the Arts. There were two prizes at the outset – fiction and nonfiction – each worth $100,000 – tax free to boot. Given the precarious incomes of most Australian writers, the prizes could not have been more welcome. Later, after some lobbying, young adult and children’s fiction were added, followed by poetry and Australian history. Sensibly, like other literary prizes, the PMLA organisers decided in 2011 to reward all the shortlisted authors, not just the winner.
So far, so good.
Doubts soon arose when, first, Kevin Rudd and then Tony Abbott chose to exercise the prime minister’s prerogative to overturn the judges’ decision. Rudd, possibly troubled by the title, deemed Frank Bongiorno’s The Sex Lives of Australians unacceptable and gave the prize to Ross McMullin’s Farewell, Dear People. The following year, Abbott declared Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People co-winners in the fiction category. We learned later, from Les Murray no less, that Carroll’s novel was the judges’ unanimous first choice. Writing in ABR Arts, I asked: ‘Have we really come to this? Taxpayers fund these awards: why should they be in a politician’s personal gift?’
The shortlists for this year’s PMLAs can be viewed at https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards. As with all prizes, there are some curious inclusions and exclusions, but quality, we always hope, will prevail, notwithstanding prime ministers’ sentimental attachments.
Three features of this year’s awards are surprising. Of the ten judges serving on the fiction/poetry and non-fiction/ Australian history panels, eight live in New South Wales. All five of those appointed to judge our best non-fiction and Australian history of the year are in New South Wales. It’s obvious that the authorities take seriously Paul Keating’s old adage: ‘If you don’t live in Sydney, you’re just camping out.’
Remarkably, six of those ten judges have close associations with The Australian newspaper. This includes no less than three literary editors (including the current one, Caroline Overington). The other three are Troy Bramston, a senior writer and columnist with The Australian, Peter Craven (a frequent columnist), and Chris Mitchell, a former Editor-inChief (2002–15) and current columnist.
No other media organisation is represented on these two panels. How can such a preponderance be justified? Try to imagine the furore if the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize were dominated by a single media organisation – let alone the Murdoch press. We know that the Morrison government appointed these panels prior to the May 2022 federal election. It’s further proof of that regime’s cosy association with News Corp.
Finally, and not for the first time, the timing of the PMLA ceremony has dismayed booksellers and publishers. It’s to be held on 13 December, in Launceston. That gives the book industry all of eleven days to galvanise sales before Christmas.
Mark Rubbo, managing director of Readings, told Advances:
I think the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are the worst-run prizes in Australia; there is no consistency in the timing of the announcements of either the shortlist or the winner, giving neither booksellers nor publishers the opportunity to promote the shortlisted and winning authors. The 13 December date for the announcement is a perfect example of this; there will be no time for booksellers to get copies of the winners in time for Christmas, and therefore no point in publishers expending resources in promoting these books. These prizes should be amongst the most lauded and talked about in the country; the ad hoc way they are scheduled suggests that the prime minister and the minister for the arts have little respect for, or understanding of, the work of Australia’s authors.
Readings works closely with major prizes, such as the VPLAS, the Stella and the Miles Franklin, and have worked hard to promote the shortlists and the winners – with growing success. Those prizes understand it is not just about giving writers some money but also about helping those writers find readers and enhancing their careers.
We put these concerns to the organisers and received this statement from a departmental spokesperson for the PMLAs:
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognise and celebrate the exceptional literary talents of Australians. Each year the Awards’ judges are selected from experts across the literature industry, and panels comprise authors, illustrators, poets, historians, academics, publishers and journalists. Appointments to the 2022 panels were made by the previous Government in early 2022.
Each year the judges and the composition of the panels are reviewed. Diversity, in all ways including across geographic location, gender, expertise and differing backgrounds, will be considered by the current government for the appointment of the 2023 Awards’ judges.
The Awards have been hosted in a range of capital cities since they began, including Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. This year a regional location has been selected, reflecting the importance of promoting literary excellence in diverse communities.
Considerations made when selecting the Awards date include parliamentary sitting requirements and the availability of the Prime Minister in considering the Award recommendations. Planning for future dates is under careful consideration.
Everyone at Australian Book Review – like writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers in general – wants the PMLAs to flourish. So they should, as our principal national awards, with a hefty price-tag from the federal government that might otherwise be used to bolster the risible budget allocated to literature by the Australia Council. But until such time as the PMLAs are delivered promptly, with representative juries and free of sectional interests, they seem doomed to irrelevance – precious for the honoured writers, but otherwise about as consequential as a hill of beans.
Peter RoseDisclosure: The Editor was a PMLA judge in 2009 and was shortlisted for poetry in 2013.
December 2022, no. 449
First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
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Front cover: A Tin Horse on the Tin Horse Highway in Western Australia, 2014 (detail). This sculpture is part of the famous collection of Tin Horses on the Tin Horse Highway, an open air gallery by the roadside between Hyden and Kulin in Western Australia. (Julie Mowbray/Alamy) Page 43: New South Wales State Archives: NSW Police; RNCG-3755, NSW Police photo books, 1920–1953. [6/19668] 163/139 Iris Eileen Mary Webber, 20 November 1941.
Page 63: Fred Williams and Ian Armstrong in London, 1952 gelatin silver photograph, Private Collection. Reproduced courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria.
Stephen Charles
Michael Richards
Kevin Foster Ben Wellings
Lynette Russell Michelle Staff
Gordon Pentland Zora Simic Patrick Mullins
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Jacqueline Kent Matthew Cunneen Ben Brooker
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Kieran Pender et al. Paul Long
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Labor’s new anti-corruption bill Alec Bolton and Australian Book Review
Subimperial Power by Clinton Fernandes The Great Experiment by Yascha Mounk
European Vision and the South Pacific, Third Edition by Bernard Smith The Australians at Geneva by James Cotton Jeremy Bentham and Australia edited by Tim Causer, Margot Finn, and Philip Schofield Panopticon vs New South Wales and other Writings on Australia edited by Tim Causer and Philip Schofield
The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner by Grace Tame The Successor by Paddy Manning The Naturalist by Brendan Atkins Rilke by Lesley Chamberlain Bryce Courtenay by Christine Courtenay Matthew Flinders by Gillian Dooley An Eye for Talent by John Clark Planisphere Coronation Chicken Visiting Peter
Books of the Year
The BBC by David Hendy & This Is the BBC by Simon Potter
The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher
Willowman by Inga Simpson Iris by Fiona Kelly McGregor The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane Three short story collections Two graphic novels Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman
Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goosen
Ordinary Time by Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy Wandering with Intent by Kim Mahood Kin edited by Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew
The Invention of Power by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Constructing Economic Science by Keith Tribe
Open Page
RBG: Of Many, One Fred Williams: The London Drawings Joyce Carol Oates
Desert Channels by Libby Robin, Chris Dickman, and Mandy Martin
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ABR was greatly saddened by the recent death of long-time contributor and Patron Colin Nettelbeck. Colin was an author and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisholm Chair of French. He also taught at the University of California (Berkeley) and Monash University. He first wrote for the magazine in 2005 and would go on to appear regularly until 2020, often reviewing works of French fiction, history, and biography. In 2012, Colin’s poignant, meditative essay ‘Now They’ve Gone’, was runner-up in the Calibre Essay Prize. In it Colin wrote movingly about the lives and deaths of his mother, May, and his mother-inlaw, Melba. His essay ‘Kneecapper: A Trip to Happiness’ was shortlisted for the 2010 Calibre Prize. One of Colin’s most
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Dear Editor, Thanks to Penny Russell for her kind and insightful review of my book Elizabeth and John (ABR, November 2022). She raises one particularly interesting question, summed up by her statement, referring to conventional judgements of John Macarthur: ‘his personal shortcomings are exacerbated by what he represents’. That’s to say, he is usually judged as one of the lead characters in the original invasion of New South Wales.
There are several important issues embedded in this statement. First of all, it implies very clearly that books such as this are bound to offer moral judgements on the past. That is certainly true. It also implies that historical actors are to be judged for their lives as a whole. That might be a matter of opinion, but if so then there is another question. In making such judgements, must we also take account of what he or she represents?
In the book, I have tried to draw a clear line between questions of personal character and questions of representation. The effort is there in every chapter. Both matter, but from the point of view of history-writing – not to say the assessment of human character in any circumstances –I can’t think of anything more important.
One of the leading characters in the book, the lawyer Saxe Bannister, in his own efforts to give a new moral basis to relations between invaders and invaded, spoke about the need for ‘justice at every step’. That’s also the aim of this book.
In his History of Australia, Manning Clark took it for granted that, even in the narrow world of colonial Australia, certain men and women might be remembered today as figures of high tragedy. History is literature – it is an exploration of humanity – and that means both remembering and forgetting what they represent. Starting with that ambivalence can take the history of the invasion period in new directions altogether, as I have tried to show.
I have also been inspired by fictional writing (obviously), including historical fiction. Take the late Hilary Mantel’s three-volume narrative of the life of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light). Mantel not only draws brilliant portraits. She also says, or implies, something wonderfully
enlightening about the cultural relativity of violence. It’s clear from her writing that making individuals in some sense representative of their time is crucial to good portraiture. Not only the portraits but also the context provided for them are more telling as a result.
In some sense, Elizabeth and John has been an attempt to combine Hilary Mantel’s methods with, say, George Eliot’s (in Middlemarch, etc.) – shooting at the moon, of course, but certainly, for me, worth the effort.
Alan Atkinson, Dawesville, WA
Penny Russell replies: Many thanks to Alan Atkinson for this response to my review of Elizabeth and John. Alan seeks to understand individuals in the context of their time, and as representative of it. Elizabeth and John offers a sympathetic rendition of the Macarthurs’ thinking and an exemplary portrait of the assumptions and world view that guided their pragmatic and ethical choices. But historians –even historical biographers – are not concerned only with human character. They study ideas in action, and actions have effects, intended and unintended. No individual’s moral reasoning or self-justification could be expected to address the far-reaching, unimagined effects of their everyday actions. The historian, armed with the benefit of hindsight, should at least try. Character and representation matter, but so does historical agency.
Dear Editor, Professor James Walter has produced a generous, thoughtful, and balanced review of my new book Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia (ABR, November 2022). I lap up the praise and quibble with the criticisms in the usual manner of authors, especially when both come from a scholar on whose large body of stimulating research and ideas the book draws. But I should correct the suggestion that I made the ‘bald assertion’ that ‘[John] Howard was committed to increasing inequality’. The actual quotation did have a little hair, and was also slightly more nuanced: ‘Schools would soon need to have a pole on which to fly the national flag if they did not want to be financially penalised. Such stunts provided the theatrical side of
a government that was committed, in its more substantial policy making, to the steady increase of inequality.’ While only delivered in passing, it is a judgement that, I think, bears scrutiny.
Frank Bongiorno, Scullin, ACTAs usual, James Walter, in his survey of Ross Walker’s book Harold Holt: Always one step further, has written a careful and insightful review (ABR, October 2022). But I wonder about the suggestion that Robert Menzies and Harold Holt were too willing to follow US policy in Vietnam. My memory of Australia’s role in the Vietnam War is that the Liberal government actively encouraged the Johnson administration to escalate. As Menzies famously proclaimed, he saw the war as ‘a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans’.
This may only be a difference in emphasis, but given the eerie resemblance to current political rhetoric it seems important to make the point. The Morrison government seemed to echo its 1960s predecessors in its enthusiasm for encouraging conflict between the United States and China.
Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.It is certainly true that, in relation to the Vietnam War and the US alliance, Robert Menzies and his successors (including Harold Holt) were seeking ‘a way into’ the diplomatic dialogue and military commitment to Vietnam being considered by the United States after the French rout at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They were exceedingly concerned about the wider potential for communist aggression, and sought, through ANZUS and SEATO, to achieve something in the Asia Pacific like the defence umbrella offered by NATO in Europe.
There is arguably some resemblance between subsequent attempts, especially by Menzies, to secure the US alliance and the Morrison government’s ratcheting up of the China threat and effort to insinuate itself into partnership with Britain and the United States through AUKUS. But, while intent on winning ‘great and powerful friends’, Menzies’ and Holt’s senior colleagues and officials – Percy Spender, Richard Casey, Garfield Barwick, Arthur Tange, and Paul Hasluck – advocated caution about the dangers of hewing too closely to the American line, and only gradually reached the conclusion that engagement in the conflict (on American terms) was inevitable.
There are fine biographies of each of these major players, and the Cabinet documents on which the biographers draw are usefully assembled in Peter Edwards’s Crises and Commitments (1992) and David Lowe’s Menzies and the ‘Great World Struggle’ (1999). Such research persuades me that Menzies and Holt were too willing to follow US policy, but I remain unpersuaded that they encouraged Lyndon Johnson to escalate.
Dear Editor,
Your compelling review of Shannon Burns’s memoir Childhood highlights not only the graphic story of a traumatic and abusive childhood but also how, as an adult, Burns has unceasingly
put himself together again and again, each time as if for the first time (ABR, October 2022). We learn how trauma haunts Burns’s conscious and unconscious mind and also remains in his body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic events. How could he have known that too often the worst – the unimaginably painful aftermath of his abusive childhood – was yet to follow, as when he admits to having felt, in his undergraduate years, ‘a murderous impulse on listening to his polished classmates’. Then he admits that even as an adult he ‘still fears his mother more than anyone or anything’.
Your review highlights a deeply revealing story not only about the long-term effects of childhood abuse but also the lasting power and influence of narrative – narrative that helps people like the stoic Shannon Burns to cope, find rewards, and rebuild their lives.
Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA
Dear Editor, Has Geordie Williamson confused his poets? Surely ‘Time’s wing’d (sic) chariot hurrying near’ is from Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’? George Herbert might have been pleased with the phrase, though.
Jeffrey Sheather, Dulwich Hill, NSW
Dear Editor, It is a paradox that fine fiction is a mode of truth-telling and Gail Jones’s novel Salonika Burning well justifies ‘taking liberties’ with historical fact. Once again she uses her art to bear witness. Diane Stubbings’s review astutely redirects attention to Jones’s interest in ‘the processes by which “truth” is composed’ and the diversely personal nature of perceived truth (ABR, November 2022). Jones exposes the cost of words and actions, the ‘pretty lies’ and fragility of characters tenaciously striving to sustain life amid the futile and relentless hell-on-earth of war. Within the novel, Jones’s conscripts and volunteers tend mercilessly recycled soldiers in a state of exhaustion beyond words, but even at this outpost of humanity, language may save or destroy. Stubbings’s review highlights the courage, tact, and ‘elegance’ of Gail Jones’s latest novel.
Lyn Jacobs, Aldgate, South Australia
Dear Editor, Diane Stubbings’s review of the play Emilia suggests that ‘the extensive and spurious use of Shakespeare’s words ... might be read as the suppression of Emilia Bassano’s voice’ (ABR Arts, November). If interested in the proof supporting the playwright’s presumption, consider reading my recent book, Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author (Routledge, 2022). Stubbings insightfully asks ‘whether Emilia was a religious poet in the style of John Milton’. There is tantalising evidence in Milton’s first Italian sonnet that the older Emilia was Milton’s teacher (Edward LeComte, Milton Quarterly, 1984).
Mark Bradbeer, online comment
The National Anti-Corruption Bill 2022 was introduced into parliament by the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus KC, on 28 September 2022. After the second reading speech, the NACC Bill was sent for consideration to a Joint Select Committee, which duly completed its report in time to enable the Bill to be considered for enactment in November.
The proposed legislation, some 220 pages long, is aimed at eliminating corruption in the federal public sphere, as well as restoring trust and transparency in our democratic institutions. The National Anti-Corruption Committee will be able to in vestigate serious or systemic corrupt conduct affecting any part of the federal public sector. The definition of ‘corrupt conduct’ is broad and encompasses conduct by a public official that involves an abuse of office, breach of public trust, misuse of information, or corruption of any kind. The NACC will have a full suite of powers similar to those of a Royal Commission, and will be able to use its powers to investigate a corruption issue if the Commis sioner considers that it could involve serious or systemic corrupt conduct. The NACC will be able to hold public hearings, and at the end of an investigation, the Commissioner will be required to produce a report containing findings and recommendations; such reports may include findings of corrupt conduct, but not of criminal guilt. The NACC will be independent, but subject to oversight by a Parliamentary Joint Committee and an Inspector. It will also be supervised by the Federal Court of Australia. The NACC must afford procedural fairness to individuals or agencies who are the subject of adverse findings.
Other welcome features of the Bill are the inclusion of members of parliament and staff as potential subjects of inves tigation, and the assumed interaction with Codes of Conduct and standards of parliamentary and ministerial behaviour; preventative and educational functions aimed at improving integrity and informing the public sector and the entire com munity about corruption risks and vulnerabilities; powers of initial inquiry on the basis of complaint, referral or own motion; mandated referral of potentially corrupt conduct by agency heads; and protections, including immunity for whistleblowers and journalists.
Those preparing the Bill must have been greatly assisted by the Member for Indi’s draft Bill, which was proposed but left untabled late in 2021. Dr Helen Haines’s work was specifically credited by the attorney-general in his speech.
Despite the generally satisfactory nature of the Bill, there are several major problems, and a variety of questions remain to be considered by the Joint Select Committee. The first of these is a limitation on the NACC’s ability to conduct public hearings. The Bill entitles the NACC Commissioner to hold a public hearing only if exceptional circumstances justify doing so, in addition to being satisfied that it is in the public interest. Labor’s national ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) design principles announced prior to the election included no mention of ‘exceptional circumstances’. This limitation will be a severe restriction on the NACC’s ability to hold public hearings.
Most Royal Commissions of an investigatory nature hold their hearings in public. Such hearings expose corruption and misconduct to the public; they increase public trust that allegations of misbehaviour are being investigated fairly and in the public interest; they make investigations more effective by encouraging additional witnesses to come forward; they educate and improve the integrity of the public sector, as well as educate the entire community about such matters; and they deter others from engaging in corruption and misconduct in the future.
In 1982, Sir Anthony Mason, then a judge of the High Court, stated in the Builders Labourers’ Federation case in the High Court that an order that a commission proceed in private ‘serious ly undermines the value of the inquiry; it shrouds the proceedings with a cloak of secrecy, denying to them the public character which to my mind is an essential element to an inquiry of this kind’. Murray Gleeson AC, former Chief Justice of the High Court, said in his review of the NSW ICAC that ‘public inquiries, properly controlled, serve an important role in the disclosure of corrupt conduct. They have an important role in disclosing the ICAC’s investigative processes.’ Similarly, Tony Fitzgerald AC said: ‘The proposal to close anti-corruption hearings and repress information on public issues to save those involved from embar rassment demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of democracy. Effective democracy depends on informed voters.’
Public hearings are regarded as essential by the Commis sioners of ICAC and Victoria’s IBAC (Independent Broadbased Anti-corruption Commission), as a crucial mechanism in promoting integrity and investigating and exposing corruption.
The inclusion of the phrase ‘exceptional circumstances’ in the NACC Bill is taken from the Victorian IBAC Act, but IBAC Commissioners have repeatedly asked the Victorian government
Labor’s new anti-corruption bill by Stephen Charles
to remove the limitation since it seriously restricts the number of investigations in Victoria taking place in public. In addition to the unsatisfactory vagueness of the phrase, and the resulting possibility of court challenges, only rarely will an investigation meet the test of ‘exceptional circumstances’.
It is generally assumed that this detrimental change to Labor’s original proposal for the NACC resulted from an Opposition offer to support the Bill provided the alteration was made. The government may have welcomed this, since it will lead to fewer public hearings by the NACC during Labor’s term in office; or it may have decided that it is preferable to have the NACC legislation enacted as soon as possible, hoping to strengthen it later. Experience has shown, however, that attempts to toughen integrity legislation have little prospect of success.
There are various other matters of complaint with the NACC Bill of less significance than public hearings. For example, the NACC’s jurisdiction will not capture corrupt conduct by third parties, unless there is wrongdoing by a relevant public official. The government’s purpose is apparently to limit the quantity of work the NACC will be expected to cover because of the likely enormous number of complaints it is expected to receive. But investigations of procurement dealings, whether those of the defence department or elsewhere, will usually involve at least two parties to a proposed transaction: the public servants and outside parties who may be attempting to deceive or corrupt honest public servants. There is much to be said for the view that such matters should be left within the NACC’s jurisdiction, leaving it to the Commissioner’s discretion whether a matter justifies investigation.
A third problem relates to the Parliamentary Oversight Committee, which will have, in addition to its oversight function, the right to deal with appointments to the NACC of the Commissioner, a Deputy Commissioner, and the Inspector. It will also review the NACC’s budget and finances. Under clause 173, the Chair of the Committee must be a member of the government, giving the government control of the appointments and funding of the NACC.
The removal of politics from the determination of budgets and finances for anti-corruption bodies such as the NACC is necessary to ensure that governments of whatever persuasion cannot be able to interfere with the independence of the agencies that are established to hold them to account. There can be no better way of stifling a body such as the NACC than by cutting its funding. Accordingly, the funding of the NACC should be the responsibility of an independent statutory commission or tribunal, with all evidence, reasoning, and recommendations tabled in Parliament to promote full transparency.
Furthermore, appointments of persons to the roles of Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner, and Inspector are of criti cal importance and should be open, merit-based, and transparent, with selection based on an independent panel’s assessment of an applicant’s merit against publicly available criteria. The fact that the balance of power in the Oversight Committee rests with the government of the day has the potential to adversely impact on public confidence in the independence of the NACC.
A variety of other matters such as Client Legal Privilege and retrospectivity were also considered by the Joint Select Com-
mittee, which must report shortly.
That it was possible to introduce the NACC Bill into parlia ment only some four months after the federal election is a major achievement for Labor, and a triumph for the attorney-general and his staff. The Bill is extremely complicated and covers a number of highly controversial questions, but it has been largely well received by the public and the press. It will be the fulfilment of a signal electoral promise if the government is able to complete that achievement by the enactment of the NACC legislation by the end of this year. The absence of a federal anti-corruption body was regarded by Transparency International as a ‘gaping hole’ in Australia’s integrity system and was a factor in Australia’s fall in Transparency’s Corruption Perceptions Index from seventh in 2012 to eighteenth in 2022. The enactment of the NACC will, it is to be hoped, commence the restoration of Australia’s reputation for integrity in the eyes of the world. g
Stephen Charles is a retired Australian judge who served on the Supreme Court of Victoria Court of Appeal between 1995 and 2006. He is a board member of the Accountability Round Table and the Centre for Public Integrity. He is the co-author, with Catherine Williams, of Keeping Them Honest: The case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms (Scribe, 2022).
This is one of a series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
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Subimperial Power:
in the international arena by Clinton Fernandes
Melbourne University Press $24.99 pb, 175 pp
When the Howard government committed Australian troops to fight in Afghanistan in 2001, and later in Iraq, it did so without recourse to parliament or the courts. Not only can the prime minister sanction the despatch of the nation’s forces to fight overseas, he or she has no need of parliamentary approval. Indeed, there is no requirement to debate such a proposal before a decision is made. Australia has no equivalent of the US War Powers Resolution of 1973, which limits the president’s freedom to make war.
While reform of this extraordinary power is possible – the High Court has noted that parliament has the power to ‘limit or impose conditions on the exercise of the Executive power’ – no government has seen fit to pursue this option. Australian gov ernments of all persuasions have preferred to retain the power to deploy forces as they see fit and to keep parliament out of the gravest decision that any democracy can take – to risk the lives of its service personnel. Other lesser powers, Norway and the Netherlands among them, foolishly attached to the conventions of democracy, insist on parliamentary authorisation for the des patch of forces. Some have interpreted Australia’s retention of executive authority and the dynamic role in world affairs that it has enabled as a mark of strength. The former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, insisted in his sternest Widow Twankey voice that Australia was not ‘middling’ or ‘average’, like those democratic lightweights Norway or the Netherlands, but ‘a con siderable power and a significant country’ – as evidenced by its prominent role in world affairs where it faithfully supports the foreign policy adventures of its principal ally, the United States.
If Australia’s wars have been Australia’s choice, there has been a remarkable consistency about the conflicts that it has elected to join and the role in world affairs that this has afforded it. As Clinton Fernandes points out, the much-trumpeted ‘rules-based international order’ that Australians have fought and died to uphold is nothing more than a euphemism for an imperial order in which the United States sets the rules, its allies assume their allotted supporting roles, and the rest of the world does as it is told. Demonstrating support for the United States ranks ahead of all other priorities in Australian foreign policy, and every opportu nity to reinforce this fidelity is taken up, regardless of risk or costs. When the Howard government committed the nation’s forces to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, over the protestations of the Labor opposition, its principal strategic considerations were political,
not military. Its modest contingent of ground forces largely stayed out of trouble in the far west of the country. This was such a quiet area that Special Forces personnel who were deployed there were subject to regular ribbing from their coalition colleagues about the pristine condition of their assault vehicles. It is little wonder that their equipment scarcely lost its showroom sheen as the Australians were not in Iraq to provide muscle – their mere presence fulfilled the nation’s principal political goals. A con fidential Australian Army study of the Iraq War revealed that the true strategic intent of Australia’s military commitment was to safeguard and improve the nation’s relations with the United States. Of course, this was not what the Howard government told the public. Its repeated assertions that the invasion of Iraq was a defensive measure – to discover and destroy Saddam Hus sein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and ensure that the threat of Islamic terrorism was confronted in the Middle East rather than the suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney – were just ‘mandatory rhetoric’ calculated to keep the public onside. ‘The true centre of gravity, from Canberra’s perspective,’ the secret Army study revealed, ‘was to not jeopardise the Washington alliance.’
If this wasn’t bad enough, Fernandes reveals that far from protecting the Australian public from the threat of Islamist terror ism, Australian intelligence, like its British and US counterparts, knew that the invasion of Iraq, along with other acts of Western adventurism in the Middle East and North Africa, would directly increase that threat and produce a significant expansion of terror ist activity. That is to say, the Australian government knowingly made foreign policy decisions that exposed the Australian public to greater risk. Australian foreign policy is a matter of priorities and demonstrating the nation’s relevance to the United States clearly occupies a higher priority than safeguarding the security of the Australian people.
If you think that the Australian government is above such cold calculation, consider the case of the Poate family. Private Robert Poate was one of three Australian soldiers murdered by a rogue Afghan Army sergeant, Hekmatullah, in a green-on-blue attack at an Australian Forward Operating Base in August 2012. Instead of facing the death penalty, after seven years in an Afghan jail Hekmatullah was moved to Qatar, where the United States and the Taliban were hammering out a peace agreement – without the involvement of the Afghan government. At the conclusion of these talks, despite the protestations of Poate’s father, Hugh, and the evident discomfort of some Australian politicians, the United States approved Hekmatullah’s release from custody. He walked free when Kabul fell to the Taliban.
The hard truth for the Poate family and all those who have lost loved ones to terrorist attacks or suffered their effects, the government would argue, is that the prioritisation of our relations with the United States has been in the country’s interest. It has ensured that, for more than eighty years, ever since the British surrendered Singapore and Australia turned to the United States to underwrite its security, the country has finished on the winning side in the fights that mattered and has reaped the political and economic benefits of sub-imperial service. In return for its faithful projection of US power in the region, its demonisation of Wash ington’s enemies and its embrace of their friends, even when this has jeopardised the country’s relationship with its principal
trading partner, Australia has benefited from the rules-based international order. That this order has preserved the interests of a small coterie of developed nations at the expense of a host of developing countries and their people, locking them into a sub ordinate role in the supply chain providing raw materials, cheap labour, and cut-price manufactures, makes clear that the order Australia defends looks manifestly unfair to those disadvantaged by it, while the rules it is founded on are ultimately underpinned by the threat of brute power.
Yet Australia is both the agent and the object of this rulesbased order, both a beneficiary and a hostage. Foreign investors own up to seventy-five per cent of shares in the nation’s top twenty companies that comprise around half of the market capitalisation of the Australian Stock Exchange. US-based investors are the largest shareholders in sixteen of these top twenty companies. As owners of the equity, it is these shareholders that determine the corporations’ priorities. A dependent economy is no basis for an independent foreign policy. Hence, Australia pursues its strategic interests by working, under the auspices of the United States, to sustain an integrated economic system that supports the interests of global investors. The prosperity of élite Australian investors, and with it the Australian economy, is underwritten by the same conditions that ensure the prosperity of élite US investors.
As US alarm at China’s assertiveness has grown, so Australia’s political position has become increasingly uncomfortable. As the recent deterioration in its relations with China demonstrates, Australia’s sub-imperial lieutenancy is in open warfare with its economic imperatives. The lessons of history show that Australia’s room for manoeuvre is circumscribed and suggest that the most consequential decisions about the nation’s future for almost a century will either be taken out of its hands or be determined by the interests of others.
Sixty thousand years of unbroken Indigenous occupation make a mockery of the national anthem’s former boast that we are ‘young’. Clinton Fernandes’s remarkable book makes a compelling case that our freedom is hardly less illusory. g
Kevin Foster is Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, and has pub lished widely on war and the media. His latest book is AntiSocial Media (MUP, 2021).
The Great Experiment: How to make diverse democracies work by Yascha Mounk Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 356 pp
This is an optimistic book about the future of democracy in diverse societies. Yet optimism about democracy is a scarce commodity in 2022. Engaging with the prevail ing pessimism forms the basis of Yascha Mounk’s prognosis for democracy in diverse societies. This makes it a worthwhile book, despite some absences in the analysis.
The Great Experiment – Mounk’s depiction of the uncertain future for democracy under conditions of ethnic and religious diversity – is another in a growing list of titles that offer ways to sustain, or even save, democracy. It is an engagement with the spirit of our times, something we might call the politics of po larised pessimism, in which both progressives and conservatives think they are losing.
Of course, there should be nothing too wrong with losing. In a confident and robust democracy, to lose should be met with equanimity: surely ‘our’ side will win again sometime soon. But this is not how things feel today in liberal democracies. Defeat provokes fears of an existential crisis: the inevitable eclipse of former majorities and all the benefits that went with that status; or the onset of authoritarianism with all the historically induced fears that attend such a development.
The origins and manifestation of the politics of polarised pessimism do not make a story that needs much retelling. To his credit, and despite the vitriol hurled at him as a German Jew for raising such issues in public, Mounk doesn’t dwell on this part of the analysis. The majority of the book is devoted to what we might do to move out of this spiral of ideology.
Some of these ideas to make diverse democracies work are worthy but easier said than done. Mounk’s prescriptions include: making everyone wealthier in a sustainable way; providing a generous and supportive welfare state; creating and sustaining political institutions that support meaningful participation for active citizens; and fostering a culture of mutual respect. All of these things are undoubtedly desirable, but how to make them possible is less well explained.
It is worth drawing attention to one assumption that underpins Mounk’s analysis and hence the policy suggestions in this book: that democracy functions best under conditions of national homogeneity. This idea has a long provenance – it can be found in early liberal writings on democracy – and has provided an unspoken frame for much thinking about, and practice of, democracy since. But beyond this, and at a tactical level, Mounk’s
Demonstrating support for the United States ranks ahead of all other priorities in Australian foreign policy
analysis points to an interesting revival of ideas from the more optimistic 1990s: that progressives should not abandon the idea of the nation to conservatives, betting on the nation’s immi nent demise. As George Orwell pointed out in the 1930s, this is something they have been doing (in vain) for a long time. Instead, Mounk suggests that a revived nationalism based on liberal ideas of mutual respect and empathy might be the basis for a meaningfully shared public realm.
Mounk’s goal is a worthy one. This remains true even if the depiction of what this might look like can sound trite: the idea of a ‘group of friends drawn from every racial and religious group [getting] drunk at a Tex-Mex bar whilst “Old Town Road” blares from the speakers’ as ‘the future we should aspire to’ diminishes the intent. But the goal is worth adhering to. ‘The project of making diverse democracy thrive is the project of building a meaningfully shared life,’ he writes. ‘It is therefore more likely to succeed if we build deeper connections, empathy and solidarity between different groups.’
In this regard, Mounk moves beyond the concepts of ‘the melting pot’ and the ‘salad bowl’ (the ideas engaged with in this book are principally drawn from US debates) towards what we might call an empathetic nationalism. Here he intro duces the metaphor of the civic nation as a ‘park’ where members of diverse groups can participate in conditions of equality, opting in when they like but able to seek the support of their group as they need, yet all within the boundaries of the park.
Importantly, Mounk asks us to work with, rather than against, the grain of the human tendency to form groups. Diversity for Mounk means ethnic and religious diversity. Gender, a major cleavage in intra-group inequality, is little considered in this book. Furthermore, ‘the park’ appears to be a place where there is an optimal level of equality, which is not something that characterises liberal democracies today. Since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, citizens have all been ‘in this together’, but only in the sense that although everyone on a plane is in the same aircraft, some people are in business class.
Mounk’s ideas for how to attain a meaningfully shared public life, set out in the final chapter, encourage us to seek connection with those who are different from us, politically as well as ethnical ly or religiously. Here we might make a distinction between fearful and hateful people. Hateful people will be beyond reach, but fearful people can be assuaged. We can create a meaningfully shared nation if we can overcome people’s fears through lived experience.
This may underestimate the extent of political polarisation. What if the other side is not as committed to liberal, pluralistic ideas – or even democracy itself – as ‘our’ side? It also places the citizenry in a state of permanent politics. In this mode, citizens are asked to do a lot of the policing of political boundaries. The personal has indeed become political and it can take its toll. There
is only so much politics people can take. It might also be that diversity per se is not what makes democracy difficult. Australia is hyper diverse and, when viewed comparatively, functions well. The real problem might be people and organised groups who reject pluralism – the foundational condition for democracy. Stylistically, the writing in The Great Experiment can be an noying. Mounk has a tendency to support claims with statements such as ‘from India to Brazil’ or ‘from France to Japan, and from Germany to the United States’, when presumably he means ‘in
India and Brazil’ and ‘in France, Japan, Germany and the United States’. Such rhetorical devices don’t lend his overall argument an air of authority.
But it is important to end on an optimistic note. It is hard be ing an optimist. In comparison, pessimists have it easy: pessimists only need to be right once to have their world view confirmed; the optimist must be right all the time. Mounk has taken on this challenge and should be supported. Nations belong to pro gressives as well as conservatives. Tolerance must have its limits: liberal democrats are fully justified in opposing illiberalism and authoritarianism. Racism and xenophobia are no good for any one: obviously not for those who experience such prejudice, but neither for racists who have to carry hate and anger around with them at all times, ready to police some racialised social boundary.
It is easy to be pessimistic about democracy today. Yet history reminds us that democracy itself was fashioned out of conditions of stark inequality and deep polarisation – in fact it emerged from the struggles against inequality and polarisation. Democracy contains within it the seeds of its own propagation. g
Wellings is the head of Politics and International Relations at Monash University.
by Bernard Smith
The Miegunyah Press $49.99 pb, 370 pp
In the 1990s, I was a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne writing on the representations of race in the School of Historical Studies. Geoffrey Dutton’s White on Black: The Australian Aborigine portrayed in art (1974) and Ber nard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific were essential reading. Over the subsequent three decades, interest in Dutton’s White on Black seems to have languished, but Smith’s magnum opus remains an indispensable text. Writing in Meanjin in 1960, Robert Brissenden noted that European Vision was ‘an extremely
essay by Palmer and Greg Lehman.
The second edition of European Vision and the South Pacific was published in 1985. In the preface to this edition, Smith marked the rising consciousness around Indigenous issues and what he called cultural relativism. Yet he also bizarrely repeated the false hood that the ‘Tasmanians and Terra del Fuegians’ experienced ‘extermination’. Even in the 1980s, this was a contentious and disputed concept challenged by Indigenous activists and scholars. It is immensely satisfying, therefore, that the introduction to this third edition is co-authored by the Trawulwuy scholar Greg Lehman, an internationally recognised colonial art historian, curator, and author. Sheridan and Lehman stress the contem porary importance of the ‘contribution Bernard Smith [made] towards a more critical understanding of the ideological and art historical processes at play in the British imagination of how native peoples might, and might not, fit into its expanding em pire’. Smith’s monumental work is often recalled as foundational to the postcolonial scholarship that dominated the ‘nineties and noughties’. I recall it being the topic of many discussions at the Postcolonial Institute in North Melbourne, a weekly intellectual home to many in Melbourne’s scholarly community.
The South Pacific is the stuff of legends, a beacon for tourists, renowned for ‘off the beaten track’ beach holidays. More often these days, we think of parts of the Pacific as endangered due to sea level rises, climate change, and environ mental catastrophe. The Pacific is the largest and deepest of our planet’s oceans, known for millennia to countless generations of islanders. Yet it was unknown to Europeans until the sixteenth century. Although many historians and Pacific scholars have carefully documented the tumultuous impact of Euro pean exploration and subsequent colonisation, Smith, sixty years ago, demonstrated that the Pacific region also affected scientists, scholars, and even the general public in Europe. The Pacific, its cultures, and people played a key role in the European imaginary. This impact included the crumbling of creationism, a rethinking of Linnaean categorisations, and the rise of science in the understanding of the larger world.
valuable and distinguished piece of work, one to which historians and scholars in many fields will be gratefully indebted for a long time’. I doubt he could have possibly imagined that sixty-two years later we would be reading the third edition of this mon umental work, now edited by Smith’s biographer, art historian Sheridan Palmer, with an excellent introduction and contextual
However, exploration was not only a British affair. Over hundreds of years, the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch mapped and encountered the Pacific islands and their peoples and cultures. Much less emphasis has been placed on the non-English speaking explorers, scientists, and artists. This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of what is widely regarded as the first map of the Pacific Ocean, in a significant atlas by Dutch cartographer Hessel Gerritsz (1581–1632). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Gerritsz’s map, along with publications by the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (1563–1614), had a significant impact on Dutch and French depictions of the South Pacific and helped popularise the name ‘Australia’.
Such is the Australian obsession with the British that these earlier voyages and their depictions of peoples and cultures are a mere footnote in most history books. The pandemic interfered with the fanfare commemorating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Captain Cook’s mapping of the Australian east coast, a milestone that illustrates how Anglocentric our histories tend to be. Compare this with with the commemoration of the Dutch charting of the Western Australian coast, which was virtually confined to Perth. The Cook celebrations were meant to be Australia-wide, with a circumnavigation à la Matthew Flinders touted as a possibility. Smith, by focusing on the late eighteenth century onwards, manages to reinscribe the centrality of British exploration.
The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist diplomacy in the interwar years by James Cotton
Melbourne University Press $39.99 pb, 255 pp
Since the first edition of European Vision and the South Pacific, Sheridan and Lehman note, there has been enormous growth in interest both in Indigenous cultures, and in the dispossession, resistance, and resurgence of Indigenous people. In each edition of Smith’s book, the text is largely the same. The second edition was moderately expanded and more fully illustrated. In the third edition, only typographical errors are corrected, and there are fewer images. In their own way, both editions’ introductions and framing essays offer an excellent overview of the ways in which the field has developed. The reissuing of Smith’s two previous introductions is useful and can be read as an iterative discourse across six decades. As Sheridan and Lehman note: ‘Not only is this work a significant text for understanding the world in which we live, it critically engages with the humanities, colonial histories and cultural relativism that reverberate within the contemporary phenomena of globalisation.’ Thus, European Vision continues to shape the ways that we see and apprehend the past. Appropriately framed, it is almost timeless.
Melbourne University Press, under the Miegunyah imprint, has produced a handsome volume and a fitting successor to the previous editions. I do, however, lament the reduction in the number of illustrations, and I will probably refer to the second edition when I need to consider images. All three volumes will sit on my bookshelf, perhaps not dipped into as often as in the past, but standing as a fine achievement that was sixty years in the making. Kate Challis – art historian, designer, granddaughter, and literary executor – is clearly passionate about Bernard Smith’s legacy. I am in complete agreement with her assessment in the preface that European Vision and the South Pacific ‘pioneer[ed] global cross-cultural and interdisciplinary studies’ and ‘its ongoing importance has never diminished’. g
Lynette Russell is Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Professor at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies, at Monash University.
In October 2022, the United Nations announced that its Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Pro ject (LONTAD) was complete. For the past five years, archi vists in Geneva have been preserving, scanning, and cataloguing more than fourteen million pages of historical documents, mak ing them accessible to researchers around the world. Harnessing a technology that people a century ago could hardly imagine, this project has extended the League of Nations’ foundational values of sharing knowledge and cooperating across borders into the twenty-first century.
The sheer scale of this archive is testament to the ambition of the League of Nations (1920–46) – the precursor of the United Nations – as an experiment in international governance. People initially had high hopes for the organisation, but its legacy has often been considered in negative terms. Traditionally, histo rians have focused on its failure to institute collective security and to deal with a series of international crises. In recent years, a new body of scholarship has begun re-evaluating the League, exploring its work across a variety of social, economic, and hu manitarian activities. As historian Susan Pedersen explained in a 2007 article in the American Historical Review, the most pressing question now is not ‘why the League failed’ but rather ‘the more properly historical question of what it did and meant over its twenty-five-year existence’.
James Cotton’s The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist diplomacy in the interwar years contributes to this growing his toriography. Whereas much of the existing literature is centred on the Northern Hemisphere, this book brings an antipodean perspective, exploring how Australians worked with and within the League and the affiliated International Labour Organisation (ILO). Showing them to have been active contributors to the Geneva project, it ‘is intended to carry the revolution in League studies further into Australian historical inquiry’.
In setting up this story, Cotton offers a useful overview of Australia’s relationship with the League during what was a ‘formative phase’ of the country’s diplomatic activities. While Gallipoli is often flagged as the ‘birth of the nation’, Australia’s independent membership of the League was central to its emerg ing sense of nationhood. At the same time, imperial dynamics continued to be influential; many contemporaries promoted the similarities between this internationalist experiment and the Empire–Commonwealth ideal. Cotton appropriately emphasises
The Pacific is the largest and deepest of our planet’s oceans, known for millennia to countless generations of islanders. Yet it was unknown to Europeans until the sixteenth century
the reservations of authorities who were desperate to safeguard the White Australia policy from international scrutiny, evoking the limits of the interwar spirit of internationalism. Alongside this exploration of the League’s diplomacy, he also shows how ‘technical work’ – across areas as diverse as the plight of refugees and global health – formed a growing part of Geneva’s activities.
The bulk of The Australians at Geneva is devoted to the diverse array of individuals who engaged with the League. It concentrates on those who were not government representatives but instead League and ILO employees, unofficial delegates, visitors, and lobbyists. As Cotton rightly points out, readers would be more likely to know of novelist Frank Moorhouse’s fictional character Edith Campbell Berry than of any of the real Australians who spent time in Geneva.
The book’s three central chapters each focus on an underrecognised Australian who worked in Geneva: William Caldwell (an ILO employee), Raymond Kershaw (the first Australian administrator in the League’s Secretariat), and Hessel Duncan Hall (who worked in the Secretariat’s Opium and Information Sections). Their stories show Australians making major contributions to the work of these organisations while also seeking to raise support among wider audiences at home. Although they were not of especially privileged backgrounds, all three were white, Oxford-educated men who spent much of their lives in the Northern Hemisphere – common characteristics worthy of further interrogation.
Following these in-depth portraits, Cotton draws attention to the many other people who engaged with the League and the ILO. He highlights the experiences of Australian em ployer and worker representatives, ‘temporary collaborators’, other ancillary staff, and even an MI6 spy, albeit in less detail. These short biographical sketches showcase the varied activities Australians undertook at Geneva as ‘active if unobtrusive agents of a major turn to internationalism’. This work is underpinned by thorough research that pieces together archival fragments from across Australia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Here Cotton also explores the contributions of Australian women such as the Perth-based feminist, Bessie Rischbieth, who successfully argued for a woman to be included in the Australian delegation to the League’s yearly Assembly (and who fulfilled this role in 1935). Although no single woman is given a whole chapter, the discussion evokes the broader context of feminist ac tivism that intersected with internationalist currents at this time, showing how women were active, passionate, and independent contributors to conversations about the League.
These subjects constituted, in Cotton’s words, an ‘untypical group’. Only a limited number of people worked for the League and the ILO, and it was certainly not the norm for Australians to be so actively involved with far-away Geneva. So what should we make of such unrepresentative lives? They may not reflect
the experiences of most Australians, but they are important for understanding what was possible at this moment when the country was finding its feet and people around the world were rethinking the norms of global politics. Such life stories provide opportunities for understanding the diverse experiences and ideas people had during the interwar years, as well as the ways in which individual outlooks met broader structural factors such as settler colonialism to produce political and intellectual thought.
While this book’s scope and purpose do not always allow the author to explain what each of these lives reveals about how and why Australians turned to Geneva, by shedding light on them it will surely stimulate interest in this topic and provide a strong basis for future analysis. The gender dynamics shaping Australians’ relationships with the League, for example, are ripe for further exploration. So are questions about how Australians who were less globally mobile engaged with Geneva from afar. These, among others, are important tasks for historians to tackle next.
This book was created through in-person visits to Geneva before the League’s vast quantities of archival material were made available to researchers from the comfort of their own desks. The Australian historiography it will help to spur on will benefit from the greatly increased access made possible by the LONTAD project. The Australians at Geneva is a timely addition to ongoing efforts to reconsider this early experiment in global governance. In a world that is at once even more connected than the League’s founders could have imagined and persistently fractured, under standing internationalism is just as pressing as ever. g
Michelle Staff is a PhD candidate in the Australian Nation al University’s School of History. She is a transnational gender historian, currently researching feminist internationalism during the interwar period.
the Year. To quote the selection panel, Tame was appointed for demonstrating ‘extraordinary courage’ and for ‘using her voice to push for legal reform and raise public awareness of the impacts of sexual violence’.
The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner: A memoir by Grace Tame Macmillan $49.99 hb, 354 pp
Grace Tame was sixteen years old, and it was 2011, when the first account of the repeated sexual assault and child abuse she had endured as a victim of her fifty-eight-yearold high school maths teacher, Nicolaas Bester, appeared in her local newspaper, the Hobart Mercury. She was hanging out with two close friends, their parents were at work, and she thinks it was probably the school holidays. The headline (‘Teacher Admits to Affair with Student’) was accompanied by ‘a huge picture of his face’ and a ‘romanticised description’ of the first time her abuser had exposed himself to her.
Tame did not yet have the language she has since acquired to comprehend what happened to her, including the term ‘groom ing’. Nor, evidently, did the media. Through her tears, she spoke directly to the journalist responsible, David Killick, who offered to publish anything she wanted to say. For Tame, ‘the damage had already been done’. The ‘injustice’ was that the story had been written without speaking to her at all. ‘Survivors just want you to listen to them,’ she writes, ‘in the same way you listen to perpetrators. Is that too much to ask?’
Seven years later, Tame disclosed her story to a journalist far better equipped to receive it: sexual assault survivor advocate and Walkley Award winner Nina Funnell. In 2018, Tame’s case launched the #LetHerSpeak campaign created by Funnell to change gag laws across the country which prevented survivors from telling their stories in their own name. A year later, the Tasmanian Supreme Court ruled in Tame’s favour, and in April 2020, the Tasmanian law was changed to allow survivors to speak out. On 25 January 2021, Tame became the first Tasmanian and first known sexual assault survivor to be named Australian of
By the end of her term, the ABC reported that the Sexual Assault Support Service (SASS) in Tame’s hometown had seen a considerable increase in referrals. Tame had become one of the most recognisable figures in the country, with a strong media presence. There was a dedicated episode of Australian Story; two addresses to the National Press Club, including one with Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal staffer who was allegedly raped in Parliament House; and lots of social media, with Tame’s often irreverent tweets (@TamePunk) a regular highlight. Then came the tabloids and the trolls. Pictures of Tame with a huge bong went viral. Come the next Australian of the Year ceremony, she refused to smile for the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, and instead gave him a frown and a side-eye glance. By this point, whatever some people thought of Tame, her straight-shooting style and commitment to her cause were widely admired.
Given the extraordinary circumstances of Tame’s emergence in public life, and the current historical moment in which histor ical sexual abuses against children have come or are coming to light in unprecedented numbers, a memoir or biography (or both) was inevitable. What is more surprising – though it shouldn’t be – is what kind of memoir it is. For anyone who has been paying even the remotest attention, it is clear that Tame is her own person, with talents including, but hardly confined to, powerful oratory. Her memoir reads like a book written on her own terms, starting with Tame’s self-portrait on the cover and a title that requires a prologue by way of explanation. Even when sharing that she did not win every editorial battle – her suggested title was Diamond Miners and Rock Spiders or Daddy Issues – Tame succeeds in asserting her dark humour and ultimate authority over telling her story her way.
The disconnect between media portrayals and her own lived experience and self-perception is a recurring theme. Tame has ‘watched in bemusement, from a distance, as a version of a person who is supposedly me has been haphazardly crafted by a portion of the nation’s media. I don’t know her.’ Throughout, she corrects misrepresentations and false assumptions (she’s not a man-hater, and if she must be boxed in, Tame is ‘more of a centrist’ than a ‘diehard leftist’). She indicts some of the worst media offenders (Bettina Arndt obviously, for sympathetically platforming Tame’s abuser, but also a News Corp journalist who sent her partner Max a ‘barrage of
The 2023 Calibre Essay Prize is now open for submissions. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2,000 to 5,000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the seventeenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize.
The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. Our judges are Yves Rees, Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox. Entries close on 30 December 2022.
For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au
‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’
TheodoreEll, 2021
‘In my essay, I sketched the kind of narrative I have always hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Prize is an important step in that struggle.’
YvesRees, 2020
The Calibre Essay Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan.
texts’, demanding a comment on Tame’s autism as a possible reason she frowned at the prime minister). To go overnight from ‘obscurity to extreme media scrutiny’, writes Tame, ‘is not something you can prepare your nervous system for, even with ample warning’.
Tame’s tenure as Australian of the Year, however, is only a subplot in her compellingly digressive memoir. Tame wants her readers to know where she has come from and that she is much more than just a survivor of sexual abuse. Her parents, extended families on both sides, vast network of friends ranging from her school days in Tasmania through to her years living in the United States and those acquired since, and various mentors and supporters (including the comedian John Cleese, who com missioned Tame to do the artwork for the fortieth-anniversary Monty Python’s Holy Grail tour merchandise) are lovingly evoked. Occasionally these tributes tip over into indulgence, but Tame’s decision to honour and record these relationships reinforces the sense that her memoir is a reclamation – of her own experience and possibly on behalf of other survivors, whose lives are some times reduced to their most devastating details.
At the same time, Tame potently shows how deeply abuse and its traumatic effects have shaped her life to date. The chapter on her tender and secure relationship with Max is especially touching, yoked as it is to a complex relationship history shaped by trauma in which, as Tame puts it, her ‘initial frame of reference for interacting with men was with a sadistic child abuser’. Here and there, Tame pans out to align her specific experience with wider patterns – for example, that ‘women with autism have three
times the odds of being sexually abused’ – but the true force of her memoir resides in how idiosyncratically she navigates her way through the material. What may seem like a detour – a riff on James Bond movies, John le Carré novels, or the late Robin Williams – is usually revealed as another route through which to reveal the indelible impact of trauma, or to take perpetrators and the wider culture that enables them to task.
While her memoir is unwieldy at times, Tame is a gifted and spirited storyteller who convinces us there is more to come – less tethered to the story she campaigned to tell in her own name. For this reader, The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner brought to mind another high-profile and uniquely assembled memoir, Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nanette (2022). As it happens, both writers are Tasmanian, queer-identified, neurodivergent, survivors of sexual violence, at home on the stage as stand-up comedians, and love their families (or most of them, in Tame’s case – her maternal grandfather being the exception, because of damage wrought on two families). Since Gadsby’s memoir, and the stage show that inspired it, she’s been freed up to tell other kinds of stories. Towards the end, Tame wonders if the memoir would have been more powerful had she written ‘less about the abuse and the man who perpetrated it’. But she also liberates herself by staking a claim for her future as a writer: ‘There will be more books that don’t mention his name than those that do. My life is just beginning.’ g
Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.
Before and after can’t be helped. Spring torrent, sudden and swift, loss minus catastrophe.
Tangle of branch and bower, birdcalls at dawn on the wakeup app. Before and after can’t be helped.
Banked tears from years back, unstopped: batten down, take shelter. Loss isn’t catastrophic.
You are my world, my constancy: a nightlight to keep the ghosts away. Before and after can’t be helped.
Quincunx of flower and bark, coiled wire, the magic ratio of parts: loss minus catastrophe.
Transfinite give and take, a bitter pill, unsweetened. Before and after can’t be helped but loss is no catastrophe.
Black Inc.
$34.99 pb, 346 pp
In the 1990s, seeing a ‘hot-red weapon’ of a motorbike be ing ridden into the News Corp car park in Sydney, journalist Paddy Manning could not help but ask, ‘What’s that?’ Still wearing his helmet, the rider answered that the bike was an MV Agusta – at which point Manning realised he had yelled at Lachlan Murdoch.
This encounter, described in the acknowledgments of The Successor, hints at the dual focus of the book. Yes, it’s a biography of Lachlan Murdoch, but Manning’s eye, now as then, is drawn more to the noisy, barely tamed vehicle that Murdoch oversees. In the United States, Fox Corporation is regu larly accused of coarsening public debate, fuelling the rise of Donald Trump, and promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19, immi gration, election integrity, and more besides. In Australia, News Corp is well known for its news paper dominance, its clear ideolog ical bent and willingness to bully, and its indulgence of discredited theories and arguments on issues ranging from climate change to gender and sexuality. Knowing how and why Fox and News Corp operate as they do is important; so too is knowing what their futures might be under a man whose life, dramatically speaking, has reached its crucial third act.
Lachlan Murdoch is the third mogul for whom Manning has played Boswell; he is also the third subject to have refused him cooperation. Eternally undeterred, Manning annexes press clippings domestic and international, mines existing biographies and histories for insight, and – most
acutely, in this book as in those on Nathan Tinkler (2013) and Malcolm Turnbull (2015) – extracts from business filings and disclosures the information necessary to illuminate his subject’s commercial dealings. He supplements all this with copious interviews, on the record and off. The result is pacy and illu minating, if more distant than one would like and padded by gossip column-style detail and pocked with cliché (on one page alone, Lachlan is ‘paddling hard’ only to be set adrift ‘in limbo’; then, he ‘rolled up his sleeves’ and, despite just ‘keeping the seat warm’, made ‘some big calls’, the first of which was a plain bit of ‘management 101’). As the first biography of a figure exercising significant influence, it is a valiant effort, especially with a figure who has remained enigmatic and silent where possible.
The life Manning lays out is a neat Bildungsroman. Surround ed by the Murdoch family mythos from a young age, Lachlan was willingly pressed into the family business. After studying philosophy at Princeton, he was dispatched to entry-level jobs – at the printing presses for Sydney’s Daily Mirror, as a junior reporter for the San Antonio Ex press – before being appointed general manager of Queensland Press Ltd when he was twentytwo. Skipping up the corporate ladder over the next six years, Murdoch worked to grow the Courier-Mail, led the efforts of the breakaway Super League, reinvigorated The Australian , and more besides. The effect was threefold. His penchant for journalism was tempered by the exigencies of financial returns; he made a deep, ingrained con nection with a particular idea of Australia; and he gained the cre dentials he felt were necessary to be his father’s eventual successor.
Yet for others those creden tials were always in question. Lachlan’s relocation to the Unit ed States in 2000 was followed by the unravelling of One.Tel, the fad telecommunications provider into which News Corp had poured $575 million, partly at Lachlan’s urging; the arising proceedings were then paralleled, in the United States, by disdain and brusque treatment from both News Corp executives and his own father. Lachlan’s decision to walk away from the company, in 2005, and to return to the coun try he terms home – Australia – was catalysed by Rupert’s withering dismissal to Roger Ailes, head of Fox News: ‘Don’t listen to Lachlan.’
In a narrative that he almost certainly had a hand in prom
ulgating, Lachlan proved himself his own man through his Australian-based private investment company, Ilyria. His choices were not all winners – some, in fact, were outright disasters – but the results were plain. He invested shrewdly in FM radio and took a successful stake in the Indian Premier League through the Rajasthan Royals. He did not invest in The Bulletin, even though its history appealed to him. He became a billionaire in his own right. Retrospectively, too, his decision to exit News Corp became one of his best. It left him untarnished by the opprobrium that arose from the discovery of the rampant phone hacking taking place at the News Corp-owned British tabloid, News of the World
Then, in 2013, with Elisabeth Murdoch one year dead, his father divorcing Wendi Deng, brother James Murdoch’s rep utation in the mire, and the cloud of scandal only seeming to grow around the company, Lachlan accepted his father’s plea to return to the family business. It was a decision made, it seems, from pity: ‘Lachlan knew that his father had been through the wringer […] Lachlan felt he could not refuse, at a time when his father seemed vulnerable.’ Nearly a decade later, Lachlan is the uncontested and publicly anointed heir to the media empire his father has spent so many years building.
These were not easy years. Lachlan had cleaned up sexual harassment scandals at Fox, dealt with Donald Trump, and been deeply involved in the sale to Disney of a range of Fox assets, including 20th Century Fox and stakes in Sky, Star, and Hulu. The increasingly secure financial position that the Disney deal brought about, however, has been accompanied by questions about Murdoch’s complicity in, and approval of, Fox’s increasingly toxic broadcasts. As academics Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal
Roberts have argued, Fox News has accredited and amplified the excesses of radical, right-wing news sites in American discourse and become a propaganda outlet affecting only the trappings of professional journalism.
In these detailed later chapters especially, Manning exposes an apparent contradiction. There is the handsome, pleasant, softleft, ‘touchy-feely’ liberal of Lachlan Murdoch’s youth, established in the book’s first third; then there is the Lachlan Murdoch of the latter two-thirds, who talks of free speech in henhouse sentences, pals around with Tony Abbott and the IPA, presides over Tucker Carlson programs on the racist ‘great replacement theory’, and cuts away from the congressional hearings that have exposed Donald Trump’s role in the storming of the US Capitol. What happened? Did Lachlan Murdoch change?
The evidence mustered by Manning suggests not. Murdoch has long been vigorously conservative, and it seems that he has seen in Fox’s current position a synthesis of ideology and prof itability. But if the slightest sense of unknowing remains – as if Murdoch were still wearing that motorcycle helmet – there is none at all about the nature of the company his father built and which he now leads. Pursuit of profit, tribal affiliation, disregard for high ethical standards, the determination to dominate: all these characterise Fox Corporation and News Corp just as well as speed, noise, and red paint do for an MV Agusta. Time will reveal whether any difference between vehicle and rider, company and owner, is important enough to remark upon. g
Patrick Mullins is the co-author, with Matthew Ricketson, of Who Needs the ABC? (2022).
The Naturalist: The remarkable life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch by Brendan Atkins
NewSouth $34.99 pb, 198 pp
The Australian Museum is starting to develop something of a literary landscape of its own. This is not so much through official publications such as Ronald Strahan’s Rare and Curious Specimens (1979) or the flagship magazine in its various incarnations from Australian Natural History to Explore. Rather, it is through more creative or expansive stories of the weird, wonderful, and personable, from Tim Flannery’s amusingly fictionalised historical recounting of The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (2014) to James Bradley’s disturbing future fiction The Deep Field (1999). Museum spaces – front and back of house – have an intriguing capacity to inspire and document their own strange and evolving histories.
Brendan Atkins, an ecologist who was once himself the editor of the museum’s magazine, continues this process with his latest book, The Naturalist. Rather than focusing on the charismatic megafauna of museum history – George Bennett, Gerard Krefft, Gilbert Whitley, or even Tim Flannery – Atkins writes a biography of a fig ure who has slipped into the shadows: Allan Riverstone McCulloch (1885–1925) – ichthyologist, collector, artist, exhibition designer, photographer, educator, adventurer, who died at forty under tragic circumstances.
Museums offer multi-layered experiences, from their impos ing architectural façades to the particular arrangements of arte facts and specimens in their exhibition halls, symbolised by the once popular dioramas (of which McCulloch was a master) artful ly illuminating an illusion of past worlds. Yet the basements and warehouses stacked with accumulated research collections that lie beneath these public displays have a more complex history: they represent dead specimens collected to preserve the diversity of life and cultural artefacts that simultaneously conserve cultural heritage, often through theft and appropriation.
The life and work of McCulloch offers just such a nuanced and complex exploration of museum life. Born in 1885 and appren ticed as an unpaid cadet at the age of twelve, McCulloch trained in fish taxonomy and scientific illustration and became a world authority on Australian fish, a talented artist and exhibition de signer, and a skilled science communicator pioneering the use of photography, cinematography, and radio. Yet these achievements, as Atkins notes, are rarely acknowledged in official histories.
Brendan Atkins’s account of McCulloch’s life and career bravely eschews the standard chronological approach of biography for a more thematic approach. While this does result in some rep
etition and backtracking, it has the effect of a gradual layering of the story, like successive work on a painting, adding light and shade, detail and perspective, gradually bringing the subject into focus.
In truth, while McCulloch’s museum position provides the impetus for this biography, it is not his office nameplate or even his scientific work that is the most interesting part of his life. McCulloch’s work seems to have progressed in spite of the bureaucratic constraints and challenges of the museum, or more particularly its trustees. Boards, it seems, have ever been stacked with members whose main qualifications would appear to be the size of their bank accounts and their connections, rather than their expertise or commitment to the core goals of the institutions they meddle in.
While McCulloch’s life in Sydney fills in some important gaps and new perspectives in the museum’s history, with some intriguing side notes into the local art scene, the book really starts to shine when McCulloch leaves the labyrinthine politics of the institution that employs him and escapes into the field.
The contrast between ‘museum McCulloch’ and ‘field McCulloch’ is dramatic. At the museum he seems to exist in a troubled world, constrained by poor finances, burdened by work and family, and often ill. In the field, he emerges into the bright, invigorating nature-filled light of Lord Howe Island, Papua New Guinea, and, finally, Hawaii. Rather than the erratic tempestu ous man depicted by his more famed successor, Gilbert White, McCulloch in the field is described as good-natured, capable, hard-working, resilient, and well-liked. The field clearly suits him, as scientist, artist, and person, far better than the office.
Lord Howe Island is clearly a place of refuge and restoration for McCulloch – understandable given its spectacular scenery, equitable climate, and amazing wildlife. It is a true ‘naturalist’s paradise’, as he termed it, though not without its problems, with McCulloch documenting the devastation wrought by introduced rats. McCulloch would no doubt be delighted to learn that follow ing the successful eradication of feral cats, pigs, and goats on the island in the 1980s and 1990s, rodent eradication programs are also proceeding successfully, with tangible environmental benefits.
McCulloch’s expeditions to Papua New Guinea with Frank Hurley were naturally more challenging. Here the line between research, private adventure, and public entertainment blurs and buckles. Hurley’s goal was to create dramatic photographic and documentary images of a land and people little known in Western society. McCulloch’s role was to collect cultural artefacts and natural history specimens for the museum. The challenges of collecting and preserving natural history specimens in a tropi cal environment are extreme. Cultural artefacts are often more durable, but the means of acquiring them can involve highly questionable practices of cultural theft and misappropriation. This remains an issue for the repatriation of museum collections today.
Atkins’s biography of McCulloch does not shy away from the darker aspects of his subject but provides thoughtful and consid ered illumination of a complex life that contributed much to our understanding of Australia’s fish, in particular, and the natural world of the Australasian region. Museum exhibitions, with their combined educative and entertainment function, are backed not only by decades of research and collections but also by the personal stories of the people who created them. We are all the richer for having a better insight into all the shades of this one. g
Rilke: The last inward man by Lesley Chamberlain Pushkin Press $39.99 hb, 320 pp
Since his death in 1926, almost a century ago, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke has remained an anomaly. He was doomed, Lesley Chamberlain says in Rilke: The last inward man, to be a poet ‘in between’: a bridge between modernism and Roman ticism, his work an inevitably compromised attempt to reclaim the consolations of metaphysics for a secular age. Despite this –or perhaps because of it – Rilke’s poetry has remained enduringly popular. There are dozens of translations of his notoriously com plex poetry into English, and a plethora of critical writing, some of it leaning into a sentimentalised hagiography that is too easily parodied. In Reading Rilke: Reflections on the problems of translation (1999), William H. Gass perhaps best catches the ambivalence one feels approaching the man and his work:
With a romantic naiveté for which we may feel some nostalgia now, and out of a precocity for personality as well as verse, Rilke struggled his entire life to be a poet – not a pure poet, but purely a poet – because he felt, against good advice and much experience to the contrary, that poetry could only be written by one who was already a poet: and a poet was above ordinary life (Villiers de L’IsleAdam’s famous quip, ‘As for living, we shall have our servants do that for us,’ described his attitude perfectly).
In her own book-length overview of Rilke, Chamberlain is a little sceptical of Gass, but perhaps she could have used some of his robustness. Gass’s fascination is rooted in a deep respect for Rilke’s ‘internal intensity’, which he says demands an ‘abso lute intimacy’ of the reader. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this intimacy produces impassioned readers and interpreters, among whom I count myself, and that everyone who engages deeply with his work creates their own particular Rilke. But I own that Rilke: The last inward man disappointed me: it feels like a missed opportunity.
Somehow, rather than bringing Rilke’s work forward into the twenty-first century, Chamberlain places it back in its time as a great poetry marked by Rilke’s self-obsessed nostalgia for an expression that is on the verge of vanishing altogether. ‘For much of my life,’ Chamberlain writes, ‘I’ve been drawn to Rilke because in his presence art can still stand in for a dying capacity for spiritual contemplation.’ She lists the inevitable reservations, citing Theodor Adorno and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then tells us that Rilke was ‘possibly given to us to help us withstand Wittgenstein’.
It is a dichotomy that is argued throughout the book: the rich ness of Rilke’s inwardness versus the brutal exteriority of modern ist surfaces. And it’s certainly true that, as Chamberlain argues, Rilke’s poetry is as much a part of modernism as T.S. Eliot’s, a reflection of the great social and political ruptures of the early twentieth century. It is also true that his sensibility was at odds with many of the dominant voices of mid-century Europe, such as Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. In 1936, says Chamberlain, Adorno claimed that the future was Kafka, not Rilke, and called Rilke’s inner life ‘pernicious escapism’. Chamberlain’s conclu sion – ‘He built his own castle and invited no one in’ – seems to confirm those judgements.
Rilke: The last inward man is really a series of discrete essays, which generates a not entirely inappropriate sense of fragmenta tion, and is well researched and extensively footnoted. But there are odd elisions. In positing Rilke as the ‘anti-Wittgenstein’, for instance, Chamberlain says that Wittgenstein thought Rilke was ‘poisonous’, but doesn’t note that Wittgenstein was also one of his patrons, nor Marjorie Perloff’s suggestion that Wittgenstein never in fact read his poetry.
More problematically, in the chapter ‘Sexuality, Childhood and the Beginning of Things’, Chamberlain almost gleefully –and to my mind reductively – argues, via The Third Elegy, that the root of all Rilke’s poetry was masturbation (‘It took trans lators into English three decades before they dared name this event’). Perhaps it’s here that Chamberlain’s thesis of Rilke as a locked castle most ruptures. After all, Rilke had lovers, even a wife, and his writing is endlessly dialogic – it’s peopled with dedicatees, references to friends and so on. His persistent soli tariness is that of the outsider who can’t fit in, but who longs to communicate.
Chamberlain extensively discusses Rilke’s formative relation ship as lover and, later, friend of Lou Andreas Salomé (jarringly referred to as ‘Lou’), but there is zero mention of the possibility that Rilke was bisexual. Yet in his Life of Rilke (1996), Ralph Freed man strongly suggests that he was traumatically expelled from military school because of an intense homosexual relationship with a young man, Rudolf Fried. Chamberlain’s Rilke remains, despite an undeniable gender fluidity, resolutely heterosexual.
What’s glossed here is a quality that brings Rilke vividly into focus in the twenty-first century: how his poetry enacts his struggle with the dichotomies – masculine/feminine, death/life, spirit/flesh, inside/outside, and so on – that shaped and scarred both the world he was born into and his own psyche. Chamberlain leaves Rilke imprisoned in the binaries he attempted to escape all his life, with violence, failure, and, sometimes, sublime grace.
Perhaps the book’s most useful insight is that Rilke once had an ambition to study biology. Much of Rilke’s modernity lies in his precise observations of the natural world – his poetic language, especially in his ‘obscure’ later poetry, often makes you think of the complex sciences, of flocking or fluid mechanics. Chamberlain is absolutely correct about the materiality, the sheer sensuous pleasure, to be found in Rilke’s poems. But perhaps the best way to understand that is to read the poetry itself. g
Viking
$39.99 hb, 448 pp
In the introduction to her book about Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012), Christine Courtenay writes: ‘To be Bryce’s wife was both a joy and a privilege, and I remain proud of the con tribution I made to our years together. Not long after we became a couple, he said, “I love you very deeply and we make a fantas tic team, but you do realise you have taken on a full-time job looking after me? Plus, for seven months a year you’re a writer’s widow while you wait for me to finish each book.”’ It is a para graph that reveals something about their relationship, including its power balance.
Christine Courtenay came into her husband’s life fairly late; when she met him, he was already the mega-selling author of The Power of One, Tandia, and April Fool’s Day, as well as twenty other novels. He wryly said that for years his books had become fixtures under Australia’s Christmas trees, along with the socks and the chocolates. Christine, an accomplished businesswoman herself, was employed first as Courtenay’s publicist. Before and after they married, they worked together to ensure that Bryce Courtenay remained one of Australia’s bestselling authors.
Here she describes a young boy born in South Africa, brought up with his sister mostly by his single mother, Paddy. He spent his early years in small towns while his mother looked for work. Though his education was constantly interrupted, he became an omnivorous reader, particularly of the novels of Charles Dickens. He managed to be accepted by the prestigious King Edward VII school in Johannesburg. After leaving school, he worked as a min er in Rhodesia (before it became Zimbabwe), saving his money to pay for a journalism course in London.
While studying there, in 1955 he met Benita Solomon, and three years later they emigrated to Sydney, where they married and had three sons. Courtenay talked his way into Australia’s fledgling advertising industry, and was instantly successful. During his thirty-four years in the industry, he became creative director of three advertising agencies and renowned for such campaigns as ‘Louie the Fly’ (for Mortein insect spray) and The Milky Bar Kid.
Courtenay’s ability to connect with his audience and to sell products was an enormous asset when he embarked on a career as a writer of fiction. He started off spectacularly in 1989 with The Power of One – still his bestselling title – and from then on wards wrote one book a year, set in South Africa or in Australia, and always timed for the lucrative Christmas market. His first
marriage broke down, and after a few years he married Christine Gee. Bryce Courtenay died in 2012. According to Wikipedia, he sold more than twenty million copies of his books worldwide during his lifetime.
All very straightforward, but this account has a few problems. The first part of the book contains heartrending detail about Courtenay’s miserable childhood in orphanages, abandoned by his mother while she looked for work. But the chronology is confusing: how much time did he spend there, and how often did he see his mother, his father? If he started telling stories in Afrikaans as a six-year-old, when and how did he learn English?
Christine Courtenay artlessly reveals that Bryce was known as a ‘bullshit artist’ and that his children referred to ‘Dad facts’, and some of his stories do stretch credulity. Did he really think of the plots of twenty-three novels while he was recovering from a bad accident? He mentioned seeing on television the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 in Rhodesia, but television did not come to Africa until several years later. Then there is the hyperbole. Saying Bryce Courtenay more or less invented popular writing in Australia is a bit much. What about Tom Keneally? Ruth Park? Carter Brown? E.V. Timms? Arthur Upfield? And did The Power of One really attract the largest advance paid for a first novel in Australian publishing history?
Especially in the first half of the book, I developed the sus picion that Christine Courtenay dutifully recorded everything about Bryce that he told her, without much checking. It’s hard not to be pernickety about all this, but Christine Courtenay doesn’t provide any sources for her quotes or her figures, and the book doesn’t have an index.
Christine Courtenay shows us a man who loved gardening, cared a great deal about his audience, was a champion of popular Australian writing, and worked hard to produce the books that people bought eagerly, whether they were regular readers or not. As she says, Bryce Courtenay was in many ways a complicated man, whose deprived childhood left him craving for love and acceptance: she felt sometimes, she said, that the success and admiration he had were never enough. There is poignancy, too, in the story of Bryce’s haemophiliac son Damon, who died at twenty-four of AIDS-related complications resulting from a blood transfusion.
This isn’t a properly researched biography: there are too many unchecked assertions for that. Nor is there much about Bryce Courtenay’s influences or his work as a writer (although it’s clear that because his publishers accepted everything he wrote, he was editor-proof). The author concentrates on his sales and tends to call the books ‘iconic’ or ‘brilliant’. This book isn’t a memoir, either. Given how much Christine Courtenay obviously adored the man she married, I guess it’s unrealistic to expect critical analysis, but she herself carved out a stellar career as a publicist and businesswoman in the travel industry, and she did not need to make herself merely a supporting player in her own story. This book is strictly for the fans. g
Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer. Her memoir Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin, 2020).
Australia’s ‘foundational thinker’
Gordon Pentland
Jeremy Bentham and Australia
edited by Tim Causer, Margot Finn, and Philip Schofield UCL Press, £30 pb, 422 pp
Panopticon versus New South Wales and Other Writings on Australia edited by Tim Causer and Philip Schofield UCL Press, £25 pb, 616 pp
On the centenary of Jeremy Bentham’s death in 1932, there was widespread and somewhat macabre interest in the Australian press in the commemorative dinner at University College London, at which Bentham’s famous auto-icon made an appearance as the guest of honour. Some of the more serious commentary sought to educate readers about this ‘human bridge between the thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ and more especially about his relationship to Australia. New South Wales was established as an experimental penal colony just as Bentham (1748–1832) was reaching the height of his powers, and could hardly fail to play a dynamic and critical role within his thinking on crime and punishment. Given the origins and nature of the colonies that became Australia’s states, they could not but bear some imprint from the house-philosopher of the Victorian British state, making Bentham, in Judith Brett’s assessment, Australia’s ‘foundational thinker’.
It is perplexing, then, that a diligent bibliographical search just a few years ago for scholarly materials on ‘Bentham’ and ‘Aus tralia’ would have yielded comparatively slim pickings: a handful of articles on Bentham’s attitudes to the developing penal colony, on his works as providing the ballast for anti-transportation arguments and inspiration for the Rum Rebellion, as well as furnishing the blueprint for penal policies and representative democracy. Any search was just as likely to ferret out work dealing with Bentham’s nephew, George Bentham, a celebrated botanist and author of the seven-volume Flora Australiensis (1863–78).
These new books, products of the gargantuan Bentham Project at University College London, are the central planks in a very welcome and accessible corrective. Panopticon versus New South Wales collects Bentham’s scattered works on Australia, with expert editing and contextualisation. The companion volume, taken together with the earlier edition of Memorandoms by James Martin (also edited by Tim Causer) and two recent special issues of Revue d’études benthamiennes, means we now have more than twenty new critical essays on Bentham’s relationship with Aus tralia. Perhaps best of all, the entirety of this work is available in open-access format.
The texts that comprise the critical edition are clustered around the 1790s and the early 1800s when Bentham was rest lessly (and ultimately fruitlessly) puffing and pressing on British ministers his panopticon scheme, a proposal for a penal institution with an emphasis on surveillance, discipline, and the reform of
offenders. The last text – the unpublished 1831 ‘Colonization Company Proposal’ – provides a substantial sketch for a colony in southern Australia and raises the tantalising puzzle of Bentham’s more general views on colonies and colonialism, something taken up gamely by a number of contributors to the companion volume.
There was an inevitably symbiotic relationship between Bentham the penal entrepreneur and Bentham the commentator on Australia. As Deborah Oxley highlights in her opening essay to the collection, Bentham was operating at a moment pregnant with opportunity. The burgeoning ‘criminal fiscal state’ was slowly drifting away from criminal justice experimentation and exemplary capital punishment towards more comprehensive and expensive schemes. Bentham’s panopticon was a move within that marketplace; transportation was the great rival product. For the most part, Bentham treated Australia as a foil, a monitory failure to meet the five ‘ends of penal justice’ – example, reformation, incapacitation, compensation, and economy. Needless to say, the panopticon met those ends impeccably.
Ironies and the unintended consequences of Bentham’s writings run through many of the essays. As Hamish MaxwellStewart makes clear, Bentham and his subsequent interpreters derided transportation and penal colonies as not only ineffectual, expensive, and unconstitutional, but also as regressive.Transportation and the convict colony reeked of the lash and direct judicial violence on bodies. Such methods came to be seen, especially through a crude reading of Foucault, as relics or accidental ‘sur vivals’, out of time in a nineteenth century filled with scientific prisons, workhouses, and schools. Following Maxwell-Stewart’s lead, a range of contributions flesh out his ‘colonial panopticon’ – interlocking systems of surveillance and discipline – through detailed examples. The ‘colonial reinterpretation’ of the panopticon in the shape of Fremantle Gaol on the Swan River Colony, and the incarceration of Indigenous people on Rottnest Island, almost out-Benthamed Bentham.
There was clearly an opportunistic dimension to Bentham’s engagement with the Great Southern Land. As soon as it became clear that his panopticon project was a lame duck, he dropped any sustained interest in the continent until the end of his life. But in his commentary he also ranged beyond his penal checklist in ways that had unforeseen consequences. This was perhaps clearest in two works in the critical edition, the published Plea for the Constitution (1803) and the unpublished ‘Colonization Company Proposal’.
The first text’s unwieldy full title reveals the breadth of its challenge to the constitutionality and legality of the New South Wales colony: A Plea for the Constitution: shewing the enormities committed to the oppression of British Subjects, innocent as well as Guilty, in breach of Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Petition of Rights; as Likewise of the several Transportation Acts; in and by the design, foundation, and government of the penal colony of New South Wales: including an inquiry into the right of the Crown to legislate without Parliament in Trinidad, and other British colonies Here again, translation, adaptation, and reinterpretation are key themes. Edward Cavanagh shows the submerged continuing power of imperial thinking within Bentham’s apparently more ‘domestic’ focus after 1803 and the collapse of the panopticon scheme, while Anne Brunon-Ernst demonstrates the impact of
the Plea in New South Wales itself, albeit via the mediation of Bentham’s good friend Samuel Romilly.
Providing an apparent contrast to this broadside against the legality of the New South Wales colony is the ‘Colonization Company Proposal’. Written late in life, it seemingly overturned many of the anti-colonial commitments of Bentham’s earlier works, not only on New South Wales, but more famously in his advice to the revolutionary French National Convention, only published in 1830 as Emancipate your Colonies! This has long been a creative conundrum in Bentham historiography: was there some underlying consistency between the apparent anti-colonial and pro-colonial Benthams, or some kind of abrupt conversion at the hands of zealous colonial reformers like Edward Gibbon Wakefield? Philip Schofield’s essay is firmly in the first camp; his nuanced account of the ‘Proposal’ and its vision of South Australia producing a dictator and ultimately becoming a self-governing, independent republic reconciles it carefully with earlier commitments.
Schofield highlights, however, another aspect of the ‘Proposal’ which haunts most of the other essays in this collection: the near complete absence in Bentham’s work of those indigenous peoples whose interests might be at stake in the establishment of a colony, whether comprising convicts or free settlers. It becomes impossible to square this silence with Bentham’s utilitarian premise that ‘each was to count for one and no one for more than one’, and so Schofield condemns the South Australian prospectus as ‘morally wrong’. This theme is most powerfully and systematically addressed in Zoe Laidlaw’s essay. She embraces the brief of
examining the texts that comprise the critical edition, this time forensically interrogating their silences. Bentham’s silence on indigenous people is compounded by the skewed debate on Bentham’s colonial or anti-colonial credentials, which reinforced the key dynamic of settler colonialism: ‘erase the natives – or at least their sovereignty – and seize their land; seize the land and erase the natives’.
That a single volume of mostly unpublished work can elicit such a wide range of interventions is testament to the fertility of Bentham’s thought and the questions around criminal transportation, incarceration, settler colonialism and their legacies that it still prompts. Many of these legacies in the Australian context are potentially unsettling ones and it is to the credit of editors and contributors that these have been tackled head on. Certainly, when the bicentenary of his death rolls around, Bentham scholarship will be in rude health. g
Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University. He has published widely on the political history of Britain since the late eighteenth century. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History (2018). ❖
There was an inevitably symbiotic relationship between Bentham the penal entrepreneur and Bentham the commentator on Australia
For progressive Australians, 2022 was a year of optimism. But in these turbulent times, there is much work to be done to translate that hope into concrete reform that makes Australia a better place. My book of the year, Ben Schneiders’ Hard Labour: Wage theft in the age of inequality (Scribe), was a powerful reminder of the inequalities at the heart of Australian society. Schneiders, an investigative journalist, has broken most of the major wage-theft stories in Australia over the past decade, revealing hundreds of billions in unpaid wages by major companies. Hard Labour, his book-length account of that reporting, explains the frailties in our industrial system that permit such widescale exploitation and offers suggestions for reform. Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia (La Trobe University Press, reviewed in the November 2022 issue of ABR), by Frank Bongiorno, promises to become the definitive Australian political history. Essential summer reading.
Two of the year’s strangest and most dazzling publications are by the bestselling children’s book author Katherine Rundell. Reading Super-Infinite: The transformations of John Donne (Faber) is like finding yourself plugged into the national electrical network, while in The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure (Faber), Rundell’s bestiary of endangered creatures, we learn that ‘a pangolin’s tongue is longer than its body. It keeps it neatly furled in a pouch near the hip.’ In The Hyacinth Girl: T.S. Eliot’s hidden muse (Virago), Eliot scholar Lyndall Gordon reassesses the life of the poet in the light of the 1,200 letters to Emily Hale made available to the public in 2020. What emerges is a Jamesian tale of crossed wires, suppressed desire, and wasted time. Harrowing to read, The Hyacinth Girl was clearly also harrowing to write, which gives the book its lyrical and fragile quality.
My book of the year is the short story collection How to Gut a Fish (Bloomsbury), a début collection by Irish writer Sheila Armstrong. With opening lines such as ‘The moon is always one second old’, each story is absorbing on every page. Peter Doyle’s Suburban Noir: Crime and mishap in 1950s and 1960s Sydney (NewSouth) extends his fascination with the relationship between the underbelly of Sydney and the photographic documentation of crime scenes. A must for crime buffs. Julie Gough is one of Australia’s most important artists. Her body of work, documented in Tense Past (Tebrikunna Press), interrogates colonial violence and the myths of terra nullius. It is a vital work in search of truth over lies. Camilla Grudova’s novel Children of Paradise (Atlantic) will appeal to readers who love movies and the seedy bughouses and picture palaces of the past. It is disturbing, off-centre, and beautiful.
Fiona McFarlane’s The Sun Walks Down (Allen & Unwin, 12/22) is an ambitious and magnificent accomplishment, and a likely classic in the making. Set in the South Australian outback in 1883, its action refracts around the search for a missing six-year-old boy, Denny Wallace, lost in the bush after a dust storm. McFarlane’s polyphonous approach takes in the lives and voices of all who fall within the search radius: police, Indigenous trackers, landowners, cameleers, a schoolteacher, a priest, women, children, and a pair of artists who capture, contemporaneously, the awe and terror of the bush and its monstrous sunsets. Oscillating between the real and the surreal, the known and the imagined, McFarlane’s prose is dreamlike and sharply unsettling. Her sentences cleave through the landscape and the lives of her characters with ferocious accuracy, tenderness, and ambivalence, reminding us that Australian history, and the idea of Australia itself, are always matters of perspective.
Some books you never want to end, so much do you love the characters. Some books never seem to end, no matter how much you want them to. And some books you rip through as if your life is going to end tomorrow. That’s how I felt about Jessie Cole’s remarkable memoir Desire: A reckoning (Text). I read it in one visceral session. Reckoning is the perfect subtitle: both a noun and a verb, an account and an action. This raw, pulsating, liquid-hot book is written in real time, as Cole evaluates and calculates the costs of her present affair with an older man. At the same time as her body twitches and her anxieties lurch, both onto her lover and onto the page, Cole is forced to tally the price paid for living in a forest, on a flood plain, in the age of anthropogenic climate change. The feelings are big, the ideas are big, the effect is lush and generous and unsparing.
If 2021 was the year of Damon Galgut, this year it was Elizabeth Strout. We even had two new Lucy Barton novels: Oh William! and Lucy by the Sea (both Viking). Strout seems like a new kind of Jane Austen: so dry and luminous, with a matchless imaginative fecundity. The extraordinary cache of Emily Hale letters, finally available, will change our sense of T.S. Eliot forever. In The Hyacinth Girl, Lyndall Gordon writes with her wonted acuity. Closer to home, Shannon Burns’s unflinching memoir of an abusive upbringing – Childhood (Text, 10/22) – elevates an often lazy and indulgent genre. Clinton Fernandes’s revelatory book Subimperial Power: Australia in the international arena (MUP, 12/22) reminds us that Australia’s reflexive bellicosity is not just attributable to our naïve colonial craving for recognition, but also to our willing enmeshment in US capital and diplomacy.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s vivid, harrowing memoir, The Uncaged Sky: My 804 days in an Iranian prison (Ultimo Press, 6/22), is essential reading as we follow the waves of street protests in Iran today. Written with gripping immediacy, it is informed by forgiveness: her departure from Iran is ‘both a homecoming and an exile’. Jim Davidson’s Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland (Miegunyah, 10/22) is an elegant double portrait and an incisive study of the making of national culture. In Bedtime Story (Scribner, 5/22), Chloe Hooper tenderly explores children’s literature for stories that might help her children understand family illness and the spectre of death. Don’t miss Sam Vincent’s funny and smart My Father and Other Animals: How I took on the family farm (Black Inc.), which reveals the revolution in Australian farming. And Australian Deserts: Ecology and landscapes (CSIRO, 5/22) by Steve Morton, with photographs by Mike Gillam, is destined to be a classic of scientific nature writing.
Her title is preposterous – The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies (Swift Press) – but I defy you to read the first page
of Jo Lloyd’s short story collection and not marvel. There’s an antiquated magic in her prose. A man drowns and his bones are watched by the ‘untalkative actuaries of the deep’. Sorcery! I was also bewitched by Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose (Fourth Estate), an ink-hearted fable of a literary hoax and its lifelong repercussions. It’s the kind of novel that makes you ravenous. After I read it, I sought out everything Li had written. I wanted it all. And finally, the brilliant Aussie writer and critic Anwen Crawford has produced a zine about author income, Decorum Serves the Rich (available as a PDF on her website). It has never been harder for Australian writers to forge sustainable careers. Crawford pins the big, cruel, exploitative mess to the page. Essential reading.
Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (Giramondo) has attracted much attention this year: wonderfully controlled prose, depth beneath apparently simple observations, strange absences. A fabric provokes a reflection on people who can look at the world – leaves, trees, rivers, grass – see its patterns, and express these in cloth. Mark Considine brings together years of detailed research into contracting out public services in the brilliant The Careless State: Reforming Australia’s social services (MUP), a book which looks back over recent administrative history with evidence and precision. Julianne Schultz, too, has drawn together sustained reflection in The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation (Allen & Unwin, 10/22). She traces contending visions of the country and offers her own aspiration for fairness and engagement. Meanwhile, in Eliot After ‘The Wasteland’ (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), we get a picture of the young poet already old, living like the rest of the world with the implications of his masterwork. T.S. Eliot did not welcome discussion of his personal life, but Robert Crawford has shown us why the biography and the work are closely intertwined.
It’s been a good year for débuts. Shannon Burns’s memoir Childhood is a surgical account of youthful trauma and literary redemption that will, I suspect, go on to be regarded as a classic. Burns writes class like no one else. Speaking of class, Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited (Scribe, 6/22) is a visual and intellectual feast that tackles unionism’s past and present. It’s a rousing book that adds to an exciting wave of Australian graphic storytelling. Watch this space; there’s more to come in 2023. In terms of fiction, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls (Scribner, 10/22) blew my head off – in the best possible way. Anne Casey-Hardy creates little shards of stories that distil all the violence and mystery and drama of girlhood into a few scant pages. Then there’s Losing Face (UQP). George Haddad’s coming-of-age novel is my favourite so far to come out of Western Sydney. The protagonists, Elaine and Joey, are absolute charmers who still live rent-free in my head.
I spent 2022 revisiting classics of African literature, so it is fitting that Safia Elhilo’s Girls That Never Die (One World),
a profound book of poetry, makes my list. The Sudanese American’s writing is intimate and haunting, throbbing with such vulnerability I found myself turning away from the pages to breathe. On the pains, shames, joys, and salvations of diaspora Sudanese Muslim women today, Elhilo is unmatched (in English, at least). On the other side of the world, another slim tome captured my heart; Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber). Keegan is a master of the short novel form, the elegant simplicity of her prose lending a fable-like quality to her work. A fictional tale based on the true stories of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, Small Things Like These is a moral tale asking the timeless question: what would you do, in the face of injustice?
Telling Tennant’s Story: The strange career of the great Australian silence by Dean Ashenden (Black Inc., 5/22) was riveting. Revisiting the frontier Northern Territory town he grew up in in the 1950s as the son of a school teacher, Ashenden uses the history of Tennant Creek to understand the great Australian silence about Indigenous dispossession and resistance and its gradual, still incomplete, dismantling. John Fitzgerald’s Cadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party (UNSW Press) is an illuminating account of the merging of nationalism and communism in contemporary China under the rule of the cadres and the relegation of the common people to outsiders with no right to participate in public life. It taught me a lot. And as a one-time editor of Meanjin, I enjoyed Jim Davidson’s witty, meticulously researched dual biography
of Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith, editors of Meanjin and Overland respectively: Emperors in Lilliput.
In Breathless: The scientific race to defeat a deadly virus (Bodley Head), science writer David Quammen offers a comprehensive and lucid account of the impact and origins of Covid-19. Breathless reads like a thriller, one that illuminates the science behind the pandemic and offers salient warnings that the next pandemic is already brewing. Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Facemaker: One surgeon’s battle to mend the disfigured soldiers of World War I (Allen Lane, 11/22) documents the work of ground-breaking British surgeon Harold Gillies. A man of great solicitude and tenacity, Gillies’ pioneering efforts reveal the struggle medical science faced – and continues to face – in keeping pace with the science of war. Two novels from Ireland left indelible impressions. Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (Tramp Press) is a beautifully observed account of a young couple living in an isolated cottage, the rhythm of their lives synchronising with that of the natural world. And Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These quietly yet forcefully demonstrates how the smallest acts of compassion can begin to right the greatest wrongs.
Justin E.H. Smith’s The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (Princeton University Press, 7/22) is not the book you think it is either. Rather than just offering another jeremiad about the baleful impact of social media, disinformation, etc. Smith
traverses hundreds of years of thinking about knowledge and technology to explain the arc of techno-utopianism. The book is replete with startling facts, shimmering ideas, and great imaginative leaps, but written with a welcoming warmth. I was a little dismayed when I learned that Werner Herzog had novelised his fascination with Hiroo Onodan, the last Japanese soldier to surrender, twenty-nine years after World War II –the facts surely required no enrichment. But Herzog pulls it off in The Twilight World (Bodley Head): as Onoda melts into the jungle of Lubang Island in the Philippines to wage his one-man war, you feel like you might almost have followed his example yourself.
Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited was a highlight of my reading year. Wallman’s knack for powerful images and his deep knowledge of union history ensure that every page holds inspiration, while his personal experiences and signature bent humour make it excellent fun. Unlimited Futures: Speculative, visionary Blak and Black fiction (Fremantle Press), edited by Rafeif Ismal and Ellen van Neerven, has kept me company all year in thinking about the role of speculative fiction, the power of the imagination, and how to make space for more intersectional conversations. I devoured Iris (Picador, 12/22), a compelling story of poverty, love, and defiance from Fiona Kelly McGregor. Like Sydney itself, Iris Webber is a complex character. McGregor brings them both to life; the voice transported me to the 1930s with all its sounds, smells, pains, and pleasures. Also irresistible was Sophie Cunningham’s work of post-pandemic autofiction, This Devastating Fever (Ultimo, 9/22) – a fearless text, delightfully unhinged.
Set in 1980s Ireland, Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These confronts the appalling history of the Magdalene laundries. But Keegan’s real subject is the silence of the smalltown community, in which everyone knows the truth but no one says a word. Young unmarried mothers, whose babies have been taken from them, serve as forced labour in the laundries. While the community’s dirty linen is made sparkling white by their labours, the young women are kept in squalor, under lock and key. When church and state collude, can anyone speak out? Keegan finds an unlikely voice of dissent in this quietly devastating story of conformism, fear, and the abuse of power. For an unsettling blend of comedy and crime, look no further than Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday). The unpredictable genre-bending author of Life after Life explores the nightclub world of 1920s London with her usual panache.
Another fruitful year for poetry. My favourites are Sarah Day’s Slack Tide (Pitt Street Poetry), a book of deep contemplation of the issues of our times: climate change, racism, the consolation of nature, and places under threat. Each poem is an attainment few can match, the poetry is superb at every level. Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar, (UQP, 6/22) is also marvellous for its poems of loss, lament, change, the effects
of place, and the dynamics of memory, which are explored through dramatic and metaphorical ingenuity. The poems about her father’s illness are profoundly affecting. Anthony Lawrence and Audrey Molloy’s collaborative work Ordinary Time, (Pitt Street Poets, 12/22), is a remarkable confluence of imaginations that takes the reader into a hallucinatory search for self and home. The book is more than just the sum of alternating poems: it’s a poetic bond of unforgettable power.
In these damnably interesting times, it gets harder to read. It’s like All Watergate All the Time. The world is running a vast attention deficit: everything and everyone demands ours, but we barely have it to give. I was surprised and grateful to be able to disappear into Brigitta Olubas’s entrancingly good Shirley Hazzard: A writing life (Virago). One thinks, maybe: time-dividing, happy expat, fortune’s pampered darling, poetry-quoting dweller in ivory towers (New York and Naples, New York and Tuscany, New York and Capri) – and she and the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller did marry on the day of John Kennedy’s assassination – but there was plenty of futile engagement and distraction in that life, too. It’s hard to imagine more of a lost cause than the United Nations, and Hazzard tilted at it endlessly in letters to the press and speeches and articles. One of yours/one of ours/one of theirs? Whichever way, it’s time to adopt her: one of the more distinguished late twentieth-century novelists in English.
The first ‘Day of Mourning’ protest occurred in Sydney Harbour on 26 January 1938 at a First Fleet re-enactment. That took courage because, as historian Anna Clark notes, the First Nations protesters ‘weren’t just “making history” that day, they were also history-making’. That is, they were remembering invasion from an undocumented, yet thoroughly central, perspective. History may be written by the winners, but the structural exclusion of ‘others’ extends far beyond the primary accounts of armies and the contests of politics. Clark’s Making Australian History (Vintage, 3/22) reveals the weighted assumptions that have limited formalised history’s curiosity and disguised its pseudo-rigorous methods. It exposes a professional chauvinism in which official records – themselves implicated – prevailed while oral and visual accounts were routinely excluded, dismissed as subjective. Clark’s book heralds a historiographic awakening. By retooling notions such as Colour, Emotion, Distance, and Silence, she invites professional history’s moral and methodological rescue.
Philip Short’s Putin: His life and times (Bodley Head, 9/22) is my choice for anyone who wants to learn more about Ukraine’s invader, although the book was written before the war.
Timothy Phillips’s The Curtain and the Wall: A modern journey along Europe’s Cold War border (Granta) describes a journey along old flashpoints and observation places on Russia’s western and southern borders, some of which are no doubt being recommissioned as I write. For an ethnographic-cum-
geopolitical account of Russia’s long border to the east, see the terrific book by Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey, On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China border (Harvard University Press).
There’s Lionel Fogarty’s complex revolutionary love song, Harvest Lingo (Giramondo, 9/22) and Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s journey through inner-city Perth/Boorloo towards sobriety, Clean (Upswell). These very different works make radically generative use of language to challenge oppression and to enunciate modes of change. Georgina Arnott’s expertly introduced Judith Wright: Selected writings (La Trobe University Press, 5/22) is a powerful selection of the great environmental and rights activist poet’s non-fiction. From David Herd, the inviting and inclusive act of walk-speaking that is Walk Song (Shearsman), which belongs in the ambit of the brilliant Refugee Tales project, with its ‘local action’ and ‘act of welcome’: the political lyric that walks the page. And from the United States there’s the deep intoning of Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s Look At This Blue (Coffee House Press), a confronting Californian ‘anti-ode’, with its interweaving of trauma, ecological crisis, and systemic colonial abuse. I have spent much time with Adam Aitken’s layered, anti-colonial Revenants (Giramondo, 6/22). Finally, a translation: Alison Croggon’s intense Rilke Duino Elegies (Newport Street Books, 7/22).
Until I read Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever, I couldn’t have imagined a wildly funny novel about Leonard Woolf, filled with pitch-perfect Bloomsbury parody, writerly gloom, time travel, ordinary travel, mountainous footnotes, and ghosts. The narrator wanders through a world of impending climate collapse and literary rejection with fantastic determination and sharp intelligence, describing her manuscript as ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life but with Leonard Woolf and nihilism’. I haven’t been so moved and entertained by a book for a very long time. In Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, the narrator travels in Japan with her mother, who, in a famous church in Osaka, suggests that we ‘pass through it [life], like smoke through branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere’. The daughter immediately deflects this, suggesting a quick departure. This is a wonderful, tense, and wise novel about limitation and intimacy.
Les Murray’s posthumous collection Continuous Creation: Last poems (Black Inc.) was a major publishing event, one likely to grow in significance in future years as Murray’s importance becomes increasingly recognised. I also enjoyed novels by two old masters: Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger (Picador), typically enigmatic but also darkly droll in its correlation of human society with mathematical equations, and Ian McEwan’s Lessons (Jonathan Cape, 10/22), a novel that probably tries to encompass too much but nevertheless reads the cultural history of the past sixty years with a scathingly
intelligent, summative eye. Among academic works, Jarrod Hore’s Visions of Nature: How landscape photography shaped settler colonialism (University of California Press, 7/22), written by a history lecturer at UNSW, is a beautifully produced account from a comparative perspective of how nineteenthcentury photographers in England, the United States, and ‘the Tasman world’ appropriated scenes of nature for complex artistic and political purposes.
The year’s most urgent reading for anyone who cares about Australia’s fragile literary culture was Anwen Crawford’s selfpublished zine Decorum Serves the Rich. Pitiful and powerful, it needs not just to be read but to be acted upon. I was bowled over by the writing in Ben Walter’s dense and gorgeous What Fear Was (Puncher & Wattmann, 7/22). Full of appearances and disappearances, environmental sadness and wonder, it is Tasmanian gothic and so much more. Oliver Mol’s hurtling collision with pain and creativity, Train Lord (Michael Joseph), won my heart. Mol has taken sustained suffering (a ten-month migraine) and transmuted it into art both intense and humble. The prose in Scottish newcomer Ryan O’Connor’s The Voids (Scribe) soars higher than the condemned Glasgow skyscraper in which his solitary protagonist lives, transcending the grungy, grinding plot with brutal lyricism.
The history-fiction contact zone was well represented. Chris Womersley’s The Diplomat (Picador, 7/22) is set in 1991, five years on from the theft of Picasso’s The Weeping Woman, the subject of his novel Cairo (2013). Centred on a minor character in the earlier novel, it is a darker tale of dreams shattered and self-deceptions exposed. Paul Daley’s Jesustown: A novel (Allen & Unwin, 9/22), another story of a homecoming from London, explores shame, grief, and a far greater theft: that of the bodies of Indigenous people. Anna Clark’s Making Australian History challenges us to consider history-making beyond the conventional forms, while Alan Atkinson’s Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm (NewSouth, 11/22) similarly stretches the reader’s sense of what history might be. Marion Stell’s The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket (UQP) is a splendid account of a neglected aspect of sports history that says much else about mid-twentieth-century Australia.
In a personally hectic year, I found myself pulled towards short books with clear, plain prose. Their beauty and lucidity froze things for a moment, allowing me to feel and think. Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour (Harvill Secker, 5/22) is a small, sharp knife of brilliant precision: it cuts through everything it should. There are wonderful phrasings – ‘arrogant little sapphires’ – but its real wonder is how often Heti surprises us with the way things are. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow moved me: it is a subtle work that blends clarity and opacity. Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins: On the pleasures of reading and writing (Europa Editions) is both a personal work, explaining shifts in her
writing, and a broader exploration of the way literature is made from both discipline and spillage. Right now, I am loving Barry Hill’s Eggs for Keeps: Poetry reviews and other praise (Arcadia), his reflections on poetry, literature, and mountains. The diary entries are wonderful.
2022 has seen some impressive publications in Australian history, so much so that I can’t keep up with them! Of those I have managed to read, Frank Bongiorno’s Dreamers and Schemers stands out for its compelling narrative and the breadth of its scholarship. In Elizabeth and John, Alan Atkinson manages like no one else before him to recreate the private and public worlds of Elizabeth and John Macarthur. Anna Clark’s Making Australian History broadens our understanding of what Australian history can be, both on and off the page, while James Curran’s Australia’s China Odyssey: From euphoria to fear (NewSouth, 8/22) is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the historical context of Australia’s relationship with Xi Jinping’s China.
I don’t know how to summarise Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, but I do know that I’d follow its protagonist, Bobby Western, and McCarthy’s sentences, anywhere. The novel – his first in sixteen years – is dense, mercurial, and told almost entirely through Western’s conversations with other salvage divers he works with, the people he drinks with; with waitresses and policemen and the acquaintances he’s known for a day or a decade. The opening chapter of The Passenger is written entirely in italics, and begins with the line: ‘It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones.’ I opened this book and wanted immediately to bring it home. You might feel the same.
As each generation dies, their wisdom dies with them. That’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing such a resurgence of the dark forces – fascism, populism, anti-Semitism – that caused so much carnage in the 1930s and 1940s. And that’s why stories matter: because they connect us to one another and the past by telling us who we are, how we got here, and where we’re headed. All of which is why the death of historian Stuart Macintyre in November 2021 was such a loss. Thankfully, Macintyre left us a wise and humane gift, The Party: The Communist Party in Australia from heyday to reckoning (Allen & Unwin, 4/22). It’s an important book. In fiction, I greatly enjoyed The Diplomat, Chris Womersley’s scabrous take on 1990s Melbourne, as well as Kay Dick’s rediscovered dystopian masterpiece, They (1977). In poetry, I keep reading and rereading another wise work: Lisa Gorton’s Mirabilia: New poems (Giramondo, 10/22).
Kaveh Akbar’s The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 poets on the divine (Penguin) offers a ‘modest study’ of doubt, the
divine and the ‘wide mysterious gulfs’ between them. Work by poets including Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Paul Celan, Hafez, Li Po, and Virgil is woven with Akbar’s quiet, striking commentary. Poet Carl Phillips’s My Trade Is Mystery: Seven meditations from a life in writing (Yale University Press) follows his non-fictional work on daring and imagination into a nuanced and luminous ‘show of respect for mystery’, brushing the limits of the knowable to consider ‘how to live as a writer’. Gillian Sze’s Quiet Night Think (ECW Press) is named after a literal translation of the title of a Li Bai poem. Slivers of poetry and prose gather to meditate on spaciousness: the mother–writer’s quest for opportunities to think, gaps in the ‘fractured dialects I grew up with’, necessary silence and creative hesitance.
I was really taken with two significant contributions to Australian literary studies this year. The first was Judith Wright: Selected writings, expertly edited and introduced by Georgina Arnott. Without ever losing its moral gravity, Wright’s prose sparkles with insight and prescience. I also really loved Roger Osborne’s fine study The Life of Such Is Life: A cultural history of an Australian classic (Sydney University Press, 8/22). Such Is Life is the Tristram Shandy of the Bulletin School, with its updrafts of wry abstraction that presage Gerald Murnane. Finally, and admitting to a smidge of hometown bias, I genuinely think the joint winners of last year’s Dorothy Hewett Prize (I was a judge) are both electric new voices in Australian writing. Kgshak Akec’s Hopeless Kingdom (UWAP) is a powerful mother–daughter story that opens up the Australian-African experience. Josh Kemp’s Banjawarn (UWAP, 4/22) brings a scintillating prose to the outback gothic. It came as no surprise that Banjawarn has recently picked up a Ned Kelly award.
Despite its forbidding length, Jon Fosse’s Septology (Giramondo) – the Norwegian author’s meditation on art, religion, love, and life – is the reading equivalent of settling into a float tank. Time and space dissolve in its pages, characters melt into one another, narrative loops and folds like a Möbius strip. It helps in this regard that the former teacher of Karl Ove Knausgaard chooses not to employ full stops throughout the texts, a self-imposed restraint which should feel like an Oulipian gimmick, but instead frees the narrative to pulse, rhythmically, in all directions at once. Anna Clark’s Making Australian History suggests that traditional Western templates for historiography aren’t always fit for purpose in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Her calm, measured, humane argument grounds itself in the idea that history-making has a deeper record on this continent than most of us can imagine. The result is a bracing work of intellectual reconfiguration. Finally, a cheat: the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (UQP) reminds us how much resistance the inherited form of the novel first offered the author who would give us Carpentaria and The Swan Book. In these pages, you can feel Wright testing the limits of approved style and narrative
form, looking for cracks where her imagination might find purchase or push through. Thrilling are those moments when Wright first permits her big-sky aesthetic to unfurl. It is as if the unimpeded poetry of Country finally overwhelmed its banks and flooded across the page.
I found Brenda Niall’s My Accidental Career (Text, 4/22) a moving and gratifyingly positive account of academic life for a woman in mid-century Australia. It is also a fascinating study of the making of a writer out of a character both diffident and determined. Curiosity helped. So did a honed mind, loyal friends, and loving encouragement. Jim Davidson’s Emperors in Lilliput, a double-headed study of Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith, titans of Australian letters, was a visual pleasure and bracing to read – how tumultuous were their political and literary times! And how important that they should be chronicled by an eloquent historian who was a player himself. The National Gallery and the Art Gallery of South Australia mounted two outstanding exhibitions this year: Jeffrey Smart’s paintings at the NGA, and Pure Form, Japanese Sculptural Ceramics, in Adelaide. The exhibitions were revelatory, and their catalogues more than mere adjuncts – beautifully written, illuminating reminders.
In Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a village coal purveyor, Bill Furlong, struggles to find a way to wholeness amid the menacing Catholic shadows of 1980s Ireland. This novel has Keegan’s signature diamond-cut brevity and, with a nod to Dickens, carries the most moving kind of social portraiture. Diane Glancy’s A Line of Driftwood: The Ada Blackjack story (Turtle Point Press) recomposes the epic life of a young Inupiat woman through an artfully balanced mixture of verse and archival documents. Over the years, Glancy has become one of the American First Nations writers whose work I love the most, though she remains largely unread in this country, possibly due to her overt Christianity. Carmel Bird, however, is well known to us, and now even more so after her memoir, Telltale: Reading writing remembering (Transit Lounge, 9/22). I loved Telltale for its teeming immersiveness
and its haunting yet loving portrait of the author’s childhood in Launceston.
2022 was a slightly messy year of reading for me, but two of its highpoints came early, and were also hangovers from 2021: Jennifer Down’s immensely accomplished and deeply empathetic Bodies of Light (Text, 10/21), and Tony Birch’s wonderful book of poetry, Whisper Songs (UQP), which negotiates the intersection of personal loss and historical truth with incredible intelligence and power. I also hugely admired Karlie Noon and Krystal De Napoli’s entry in Thames & Hudson’s First Knowledges series, Astronomy: Sky Country, which uses the personal narratives of the authors to explore not just the sophistication of Indigenous celestial knowledge, but also its deep significance to cultural continuity and caring for Country. On the international fiction front, I loved the exploding narrative and formal high jinks of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (Corsair, 5/22), Jonathan Escoffery’s fascinating exploration of race, migration, and economic precarity, If I Survive You (Fourth Estate), and Daisy Hildyard’s thrilling exploration of entanglement and interconnection, Emergency (Fitzcarraldo Editions).
Orhan Pamuk’s mighty historical novel Nights of Plague (Hamish Hamilton) stands out for its sheer scope and imaginative richness. Set in 1901 on a fictional Mediterranean island, it combines the broad-canvas satisfactions of the nineteenth-century novel with some of the conventions of detective fiction, its timely themes and political intrigues expanding into a meditation on the issues of secularism, cultural identity, and nationhood. I also appreciated Adam Ouston’s Waypoints (Splice, 8/22), an appealing short novel written in long, fluid, circumlocutory sentences that betray the influence of a certain strand of European modernism, but which have a distinctly Australian inflection. Organised around the story of the narrator’s attempt to recreate Harry Houdini’s failed attempt in 1910 to become the first person to achieve a piloted flight in Australia, the novel’s philosophical musings on all manner of topics present a winning combination of dark humour and formal ambition. g
Recipients can access new issues, archival material going back to 1978, and discounted prize entries. And for a limited time, gift subscriptions cost $60 for digital only (RRP $80) and $90 for print plus digital (RRP $100). These festive discounts only apply until 31 December 2022 so get in quick!
‘It is tragic how few people ever “possess their souls” before they die … Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Spare me the black ties
Spare me the oaken attitudes, the platitudes of parliament Spare me Windsor Castle, the Cinque Ports – Calais even, branded on our hearts Spare me the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Hanovers and the Windsors Spare me our vestigial appreciation of history – all those lies Spare me the hurried, ill-fitting suits of the broadcasters Spare me the gashed shaves eulogising the regal dead Spare me the reporter’s incongruous green tie which he will regret until the day he dies, like a dropped catch or a faux pas on falling in love Spare me love Spare me the own goals of my own formation Spare me glib aubades of the cynical Spare me the practised intonation of the mourners
Spare me the duke of Norfolk’s deliberations, grave though they are Spare me the funeral if you don’t mind – just speed it up!
Spare me, dammit, the vox populi Sanction hallucinogens, satire, merriment
Imagine the inappropriate – ten days of public polyamory Spare me the furtive humour of the mourners, the off-camera mockery Spare me the despair of Spare, the ruthless brittleness of brothers Spare me Coronation Chicken
Spare me, in the bowels of Christ, the prime ministerial recollections Spare me, god help us, John Howard OM or whatever he is (CREEP – Campaign to Re-Elect the Prime Minister)
Spare me the overhead footage of the purple Bentley bound for the capital Spare me the honours list, the uncles slaughtered in Flanders Spare me Aunt Rosemary and her sherried remembrances
Spare me deference, good manners
Above all spare me the impeccable ladies-in-waiting Bring back Crawfie when she’s needed – all her audacities
Tell us about the crumpets, the naughty French lessons
For god’s sake spare me the Abdication – Uncle David and his ‘ice-veined bitches’
Bring back Wallis! Blessed are the chic!
Spare me the corgis, the pedigrees
Spare me the rumoured infidelities
Spare me the discreet mistresses, the oily-royally correspondents
Spare me the rampant lachrymosity of the subjects
Spare me Spare me Spare me
When I began work on A Maker of Books, I had no idea that Alec Bolton had succeeded ‘Peter Pica’ (the pub lisher and bookseller Andrew Fabinyi) as a pseudonymous critic of Australian book design and production for Aus tralian Book Review. He called himself ‘Martin Em’. I had set out to explore in detail Alec’s achievement as a letterpress printer of distinction at his private Brindabella Press, and also his long ca reer in Australian publishing, but this was an unexpected discov ery. The clue was a letter from Alec to John McLaren, the then editor of ABR, which I found in a completely unrelated file in the Alec Bolton papers at the National Library of Australia. When I looked at Martin Em’s ‘BookShapes’ columns, published between 1978 and 1982, Alec’s distinctive voice was quite apparent.
He began by chiding his fellow publishers, gathered for the Australian Book Publishers Association design awards of 1977–78, for inattentiveness during the presentation:
It seemed that many publishers who were present did not feel obliged to pay attention, their complacency abetting rudeness. One could almost hear them saying, ‘Well, yes, this was a disaster area up ’til the sixties, but we’ve fixed it now. Everyone knows that Australian books today are the equal of the world’s best.’
While he conceded that matters had improved in recent years, he at tributed this to Peter Pica’s frequently critical remarks and promised to follow suit, beginning with a trenchant cri tique of a recent biography of Sir Robert Menzies as a ‘shoddy production’:
The author appears to be emphasising numerous lines and even paragraphs by the use of bold type; but then we realise that these are photoset correction lines that have emerged from the processor with a heavier density but which have been stripped in regardless. The two lines of the centred title are not quite centred, and for that matter not parallel either. Page numbers … wander nervously in and out of the margins … A portrait drawing on the front of the jacket is repeated in reverse on the back, as if left and right were all the same to this subject. What we infer from
this book is that nobody in the publisher’s office could have cared for it. There is no worse fate.
On the other hand, he praised books designed with ‘generous pages and a confident use of white space; illustrations and text working together without strain’ and books printed with good judgement in both leading and typeface selection.
Martin Em’s comments are well worth revisiting. They also reveal much about Alec Bolton’s ambitions at his Brindabella Press, the private press which is the main focus of my attention in A Maker of Books. Of one book reviewed in 1979, he comment ed that ‘It is typical of so many books that we see today, where different hands have clearly been at work on different parts of the job. For my part I like books that are coherent and all-ofa-piece.’ ‘The Australian book is by and large a good-looking piece of merchandise,’ he wrote a little later. ‘Sophistication and con fidence have advanced hand in hand and taken Australian publishing over. However, some books that I have looked at closely have proved disap pointing in points of detail. It seems that the abundant skill which is at work in making books is often hard-pressed by the need for high productivity. Too little time; too many slips showing.’
While he could be just as critical of his own shortcomings as a printer, many of the books he designed and printed by hand with painstaking care and attention to detail at the Brind abella Press stand out as some of the most attractive Australian books of the era. So too do the books published by Alec during his day job, as the found ing publisher at the National Library of Australia. Both the books of the Brindabella Press and the NLA titles of that era continue to de serve close attention from publishers, printers, and readers today. g
Michael Richards is the author of A Maker of Books: Alec Bolton and his Brindabella Press (NLA Publishing, 2022). ❖
Alec Bolton’s columns (under the nom de plume Martin Em) are all available in ABR’s digital archive.
The BBC: A people’s history by David Hendy Profile Books, $49.99 hb, 655 pp
This Is the BBC: Entertaining the nation, speaking for Britain, 1922–2022 by Simon Potter Oxford University Press £20 hb, 320 pp
This year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) celebrates its centenary as the world’s largest and old est broadcasting institution (the US company NBC was founded four years later, in 1926). Whether it will reach its bicentenary, or even have another ten years of life in anything like its current form is a question facing other British institu tions such as the Conservative Party, the monarchy, and indeed the Union of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland itself. Placing the BBC among this group signals its estimable role in defining an imagined community but also the possibility that the existence of these other entities and their function in this process might be finite, subject to challenges from their own internal contradictions as much as from hostile external forces without.
As its part in the recent spectacle of the funeral of Elizabeth II demonstrates, the BBC is an institution anchored to the tradi tion and continuity manifest in the sovereign’s lineage or in the yearnings of the Tories; at least it has been since fairly recently. Yet it is also a product and producer of modernity. The BBC has embodied and mediated versions of historical change in the very invention of broadcasting in a distinctively British guise; in the building of the technical infrastructure with which it enveloped the country in order to serve and address its audiences, and in the creation of ways of representing worlds real and imagined. As these new histories from David Hendy and Simon Potter make clear, the sound, voice, reach, and reception of the BBC are very different from what they were at its inception, even if there are vestiges of its original remit, as determined by Royal Charter: to inform, educate, and entertain.
The task for both is an ambitious one. At the outset, Hendy ponders whether a history of the BBC is even possible. The formidable challenge faced by him and Potter is how to make sense of its millions of broadcasts, the range of personnel who have made it function, the very roles invented in order to do so, its extensive archives, and the wealth of commentary generated by and about it. The story of the BBC has been told many times, and one encounters familiar and unavoidable structuring points at work between them. These include the BBC’s origins as the British Broadcasting Company and the formulation of its work in the terms of a public service, the testing of its degree of inde pendence from the state by the General Strike of 1926 and during World War II, the galvanising effect of commercial television in
the 1950s, and the antagonism of the market-driven ideology and deregulatory zeal of Margaret Thatcher. An overarching theme of both books is the embattled state of the BBC – not as a contemporary condition but as constitutive of its historical development. This is summarised most explicitly in Hendy’s structure and narrative approach across four sections: ‘Crucible’; ‘War’; ‘Consensus and Conflict’; ‘Attack and Defence’.
The books are complementary in their insights, building as they do on each author’s established scholarly engagement with the BBC, including citation of each other’s work. Hendy is a practised writer on public service broadcasting, and on radio in particular, which is a curiously exclusive preserve among histori ans and media scholars given its global impact. His Noise: A human history of sound and listening (2013) accompanied his own foray onto the airwaves, while Life on Air (2008) provided a history of Radio Four, a station approvingly described by Sebastian Faulks as a defining site of the BBC’s role, albeit one that might equally infuriate, its ‘middle-brow seriousness’ heard by some as a com placent and cloying middle-classness. Hendy’s authorised, albeit insistently independent study, draws on substantial mining of the archives, which allows for much original detail. Potter’s pedigree and political attention is evident in work such as Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British world, 1922–1970 (2012); his focus informs a leaner ‘critical, unofficial, and unauthorized analysis’.
Consequently, Potter is rather more strident in his coverage and organisation, with conclusions across each chapter, though not unwelcome, giving an air of the textbook. Hendy has space to dig deeper into incident and personality, taking a more self-con scious and writerly approach. He seeks to bring us close to the BBC through the prism of a ‘people’s history’, his aim to portray the women and men who have ‘handcrafted’ the BBC. While not entirely humanising the organisation, this has the effect of countering unhelpful caricatures, whether a ‘po-faced, hectoring “Auntie”’ or the idea of ‘formulaic and machine-tooled’ program ming. Through this method, a remarkable cast is brought vividly to life, including shaping founders like John Reith (General Manager), Arthur Burrows (Director of Programs), and Cecil Lewis (Deputy Director of Programs). Inevitably perhaps, such forceful personalities stand out in one’s reading but also reinforce the recurring sense of eccentric happenstance and improvisation in the BBC’s progress and formulation, if not other aspects of British life. Lewis, for instance, barely eighteen when he fought as a pilot in the Great War, appears to have been little more than a drifter, boasting ‘no profession, no job, no training in anything other than flying’ with ‘a certain unfocused, undirected ability’. Remarkably, he recalled of the BBC’s gestation: ‘We didn’t know what we were doing, we were simply finding something which could be broadcast … it was a sort of free for all in which everybody was free to come up with any idea that seemed likely to be any use.’ Such quotes have the effect of reminding one of the contingencies of both broadcasting as organisation and the nature of its outputs.
As Potter argues, a history of the BBC should not make the mistake of confusing its endurance for continuity, yet both books are imaginative exercises in evoking the entry into British life of broadcasting, its sedimentation and habituation as part of
the horizon of everyday life and of the definition of education, information, and entertainment. While this is no longer the preserve of the BBC alone in the United Kingdom, and has not been for a long time, its longevity and mutable character offer a yardstick by which we might measure changing social and cultural relations, and how they have been conceived and mediated. These are most evidently mapped around categories such as class, gender, race, and sexuality, revealing the challenge to the BBC of how it has sought to speak to and for everyone, especially when the conceptual toolkit of those authorised to do so has often proven limited.
One example is Hendy’s chapter on the BBC’s respon siveness to postwar migration. Entitled ‘Strangers’, it echoes Clair Wills’s Lovers and Strangers: An immigrant history of post-war Britain (2017), synthesising a range of sources and his own re search to illuminate stories about this moment and its enduring legacy that prove difficult to rec oncile to any pat sense of progress. As Hendy comments, much of the immediate coverage of Com monwealth migration was dealt with in journalistic terms, ‘race’ a signifier marking the migrant rather than a term extending to the host communities, portrayed as impacted on by the presence of largely alien and unwelcome newcomers.
Hendy and Potter both re port on John Elliot’s 1956 television play A Man From the Sun and its account of West Indian experience in London. Hendy describes how the writer aimed at a ‘new level of realism’ in dealing with his subject, ‘sinking into the background, talking and listening to people, going to parties, to church, to work, and generally be ing a fly-on-the-wall’. Regardless of the reflexive contributions of progressives like Elliot in the BBC, what is evident overall is a structural failure of imagina tion across the organisation – to understand, include, represent, and respect a diverse humanity. Certainly, every positive gesture is balanced by an example of an insult proving the rule. Hendy tells of the mistreatment of Jamaican Una Marson and the prej udice she experienced because of her audacity in being creative, expert, and confident. The endurance on television until 1978 of the egregious Black and White Minstrel Show receives particular attention by both books. Analogies abound across the treatment of gender, class, and sexuality, on screen and off, posing questions about the BBC’s role as a leader or follower of social change.
As suggested, while both books touch on similar reference points, they are distinctive and divergent. Hendy seems less in terested in the 1970s than does Potter, for whom this is a period of ‘stagnation’ following on the back of the ‘transformation’ of the 1960s. For instance, he covers the establishment of that great educational institution, the Open University, long supported by programming on the BBC2 TV channel. In the days before video recorders, students needed to be up early in the morning or late at night to access subject lectures in broadcast form.
This banal but innovative scheme illustrates the importance of programming as more pro nounced in Potter’s history, where prodigious reference to titles is deployed and an chored to institutional and social themes. In one section for instance, we travel through a vista of 1960s radio situation comedy via mentions of The Navy Lark (1959–77) and The Men from the Ministry (1962–77), via popular present er Kenneth Horne’s Round the Horne (1965–68), to encompass that show’s celebrated ‘Julian and Sandy’ characters. While male homosexuality was illegal until 1967, this duo, realised by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick, used innuendo, double entendre, and camp style in tan dem with the subcultural slang polari to reference gay stereotypes and lifestyles.
Such figures and program titles offer a shorthand for meaning and cultural memory in both books but draw atten tion also to the degree to which, without extensive elaboration, their specificity will resonate for different readerships. While both authors occasionally in clude their reader in an address to ‘we’ and ‘us’, the idea that the BBC’s story is solely a British concern is belied by detail of its international role, reach, and impact, making it for Potter ‘the sin gle most important institution generating British soft power and overseas propaganda’. It is curious that in the United Kingdom, while those of the left are critical of it, those that claim to be the voices of conservatism in the country are so unremittingly hostile to the BBC and what it is thought to represent, not simply in its programming but in its very existence. Potter and Hendy are equally invested in an evaluation of the BBC’s value in response to intensified threats and attacks on its remit, its capacity for political ‘balance’, and, through its funding – levied in a licence fee – its sustainability. To be clear, they are both attuned to its
contradictions and considerable deficiencies but also to what is at stake should it disappear which is, as they elaborate, an in creasingly realistic proposition. Hendy’s closing chapter appraises the BBC as ‘On the Rack’; Potter sees it ‘At Risk’. On one hand, this situation is exacerbated by the BBC’s continued mission: successfully adapting to changing conditions – the coming of digital for instance – but in so doing, expanding and changing to become a creative institution like no other, unrecognisable to its original formulation. For some, the result is that it skews the country’s cultural economy, for others its political economy, the perennial complaint being that the BBC is hopelessly biased and dominated, as in the title of Jean Seaton’s history, by Pinkoes and Traitors (2015). Yet as the former economics editor, Robert Peston, is quoted by Hendy as saying, the idea that the BBC is in any way left-wing is ‘bollocks really’. On the contrary, recent exchanges of personnel between the Conservative Party, its supporters in business, and the BBC’s management and board signal the nature and direction of its politicisation.
What Hendy and Potter both do in different ways is to highlight the problem with making sense of the BBC in a reduc tive manner that characterises it as having and enforcing on its personnel and audiences a particular social agenda and political outlook. Vitriolic criticism is often focused on a few current affairs programs and the mediation of government policy in particular. Beyond this, the immense variety of operations and output makes it difficult to take seriously accounts of an instrumental political bias or a laying of blame at its door for contemporary ills such as tolerance and inclusivity. Are these objectionable values encoded equally into the children’s television programme Telly Tubbies, into televised church services, radio’s Test Match Special, and the BBC’s website? Of course, the very existence of the BBC’s Asian Network, or the appearance on the latest series of Strictly Come Dancing of Paralympian Ellie Simmonds, are enough to send Daily Mail commentators and some viewers into paroxysms of outrage.
What is equally accessible and effective about the contribu tion of Hendy’s and Potter’s books is a sense of the complexity of
the BBC as a cultural institution. It can be understood in terms of its similarity to other organisations – say in its bureaucracy, hierarchy and specialised roles. But it is also distinctive in nurtur ing the conditions necessary to produce innovation, authenticity, and commitment in its workforce, whether in reporting the world or in its creative imagination. To understand this complexity is a useful corrective to aspects of everyday media studies and ‘com mon-sense’ theories which generalise about the apparent power and manipulation exerted by the BBC.
The BBC may not survive in its current form, if at all – not because it lacks an abiding purpose but because the breadth of the values it has represented are possibly inimical to contemporary Britain, which would be as unrecognisable to its founders as would the broadcaster they invented. The centenary of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2032 will no doubt generate similar attention from historians. As with Hendy’s and Potter’s work, the question is what to do with accounts of institutions which have played a part in defining, embodying, and underwriting nation, community, and culture. Whether it operates satisfactorily or not, a public broadcasting institution is at the heart of a national conversation and can be held accountable in a manner unlike commercial television, radio, or the press. As is apparent in these books, a history of such institutions is also a means of assessing the future. As Potter cautions, ‘Anyone who cares about what we read, watch, and listen to, on television, radio, or online, should think about what life would be like without the BBC, and about how the Corporation might, in the future, find new and better ways to serve all our needs.’ g
Paul Long is Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries and Director, Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre. ❖‘We didn’t know what we were doing, we were simply finding something which could be broadcast’
The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The untold story of the international spy network by Richard Kerbaj Blink
$32.99 pb, 414 pp
Richard Kerbaj is the latest in a long line of journalists and other writers to write a book on the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). His major claim is that he has conducted interviews with more than a hun dred current and former intelligence officers, as well as four for mer prime ministers, Britain’s Theresa May and David Cameron, and Australia’s Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. The willing ness of so many intelligence officers to speak openly to a journal ist, and in some cases to be identified by name, is a mark of how far the relationship between the agencies and external writers has come.
In the first decades after World War II, when what we now know as the Five Eyes arrangements and many of the individual agencies were established, the authorities sought to impose, by such measures as the Official Secrets Acts 1911–89 in Britain and the Crimes Act 1914 in Australia, virtually complete secrecy, not only on their operations but even on their very existence. In fact, while using the courts to suppress unfavourable or unauthorised stories, the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 employed trusted writers to reveal their achievements. It was by exposing the hypocrisy of this policy that the young Turnbull gained world headlines in the Spycatcher cases in the 1980s.
By the 1960s and 1970s, many books criticised the British and American agencies, often prompted by the disasters of the Cambridge Five in Britain and by the revelations by congressional committees in Washington of the misdeeds of the CIA and the FBI. In the first two decades of this century, a new series of controversies erupted arising from the practices of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and techniques such as waterboarding by US agencies in the so-called War on Terror; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which the British government justified by an intelligence assessment in what Kerbaj calls the ‘Iraq Dossier’ or the ‘September Dossier’, but that was more widely called the ‘dodgy dossier’; and the 2013 revela tions by Edward Snowden of the extent of electronic surveillance by the American and British signals intelligence agencies. All of these aroused intense controversy in the United States and the United Kingdom, which reverberated in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Seeking to restore public trust in the agencies, while still protecting secrecy where it is essential, governments have adopted a number of measures. Some agencies have published official
histories; agency heads have been more willing to speak public ly, and on the record, about what their colleagues do; and now, it seems, many intelligence officials are willing to speak to a relatively new and inexperienced journalist.
Now based in London, Richard Kerbaj started his career in journalism on The Australian. His former colleagues here have helped to promote this book. A magazine article has told of the ambition, energy, and flair for developing personal relationships that turned a Lebanese-born teenager with poor English working in a Melbourne milk bar into a leading Fleet Street journalist, an award-winning documentary maker, and now author of a book on intelligence and security. One of his several mentors has reportedly said that Kerbaj has not been ‘held back by the self-doubt that comes from knowing how much you don’t know’.
While there is much to admire in this backstory, it must be said that the title’s claims to tell ‘the secret history’ and ‘untold story’ of the Five Eyes relationship are largely hyperbole. The first parts of the book – on the World War II origins of the AngloAmerican intelligence relationship known as UKUSA and its Cold War extension to include Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – cover territory that will be familiar to many readers. The existence and importance of the Five Eyes arrange ment was well known long before it was publicly acknowledged in 2010.
Kerbaj adds a few nuances, by quoting from the diaries of Guy Liddell, an important figure in British intelligence, and some times by using a little-known individual as the hook on which to hang a chapter. This adds a personal dimension to episodes in the development of links between the British and American intelligence communities, where many of the major figures have already been the subject of numerous accounts.
The latter parts of the book, dealing with the impact on the intelligence agencies of counter-terrorism and counter-espio nage in the twenty-first century, benefit more substantially from Kerbaj’s personal experience as a journalist on The Times and The Sunday Times in London, his role in producing documentaries on British-born jihadi terrorists and on the KGB’s poisoning of the Russian defector and former spy Alexander Litvinenko, and his interviews with current and former intelligence officials.
As might be expected, these officials for the most part defend the Five Eyes arrangements in general and their own involve ment in particular. Access to them has clearly helped Kerbaj to conclude, after describing at length the ‘unaccountability and rogue practices’ of some agencies and the misuse of intelligence by political leaders such as Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Donald Trump, that the Five Eyes network remains essential for the defence of liberal democracies.
Australian readers will gain some insights into the value and relevance of the Australian (and Canadian and New Zealand) contributions to the Five Eyes, as perceived from Washington and London. The foundation of ASIO and the 1954 Petrov Affair are covered in familiar detail, although Kerbaj does not seem to have caught up with the revelation, most recently described in Phillip Deery’s Spies and Sparrows (2022), that Evdokia Petrova was a more competent intelligence officer, and therefore a more significant defector, than her drunken, womanising husband. There is little on the other Australian agencies and nothing on,
for example, the creation of the Office of National Assessments in the 1970s or its upgrading in 2018 to become the Office of National Intelligence, in part to match comparable developments in the other Five Eyes nations.
While Kerbaj deals at length with the enormous impact of Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, quoting extensively from interviews with successive heads of the British signals intelli gence agency GCHQ, the book has only one passing reference to Wikileaks and does not mention Julian Assange by name. The Putin government’s grant of Russian citizenship to Snowden was announced when this book was in press.
In an interview that Kerbaj quotes at length, Malcolm Turn bull criticises, more vehemently than in his own memoir, A Bigger Picture (2020), Alexander Downer’s handling of a matter relating
The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher
Bridget Williams Books
NZ$69.99 hb, 732 pp
Across the past fifty or more years, indigenous peoples in Aus tralia, Canada, and New Zealand have increasingly made political and legal claims about sovereignty and land. As this has occurred, numerous scholars in a broad range of disciplines – especially law and history – have tried to explain how these two matters were dealt with by the British empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Often that work has been done in the hope that it will bolster the indigenous peoples’ claims or redeem the settler societies whose legitimacy has been drawn into question because of their unjust treatment of First Peoples.
In these circumstances, many Australians have looked across the ditch in envy. They have been convinced that New Zealanders are better able to tackle these difficult matters because their an cestors made a historic agreement – the Treaty of Waitangi – at the very outset of colonisation on the basis that its indigenous people were sovereign and owners of all the land, thereby enabling both Pākehā and Māori New Zealanders today to make moral, political, legal and constitutional claims in regard to authority, rights and history that are accepted in Aotearoa New Zealand in ways they are evidently not in Australia, hence the Uluru State ment’s call for truth-telling, treaty-making, and an Indigenous voice to parliament.
Unbeknown to most Australians, this conviction owes more to a particular kind of history-making than it does to any un
to alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The book has clearly been produced at great speed, going to press in July and being published in October. Kerbaj is thus able to refer to the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, although he does not mention that the American and British agencies took the highly unusual step of publicly revealing their knowledge of Putin’s preparations before he began his ‘special military operation’.
Kerbaj’s first book may not be ‘the untold story’ or ‘the secret history’ of the Five Eyes intelligence network, but it is an engaging and readable account of some of its major episodes. g
Peter Edwards is the author of Law, Politics and Intelligence: A life of Robert Marsden Hope (2020).
contested body of historical fact. As one New Zealand historian pointed out many years ago, little of the historical writing about the Treaty of Waitangi has been executed in a manner that would satisfy the English historian Herbert Butterfield’s famous dictum that historians should seek to understand the past on and in its own terms. Indeed, much of it has been designed to meet some contemporary purpose. This has especially been the case when the history-making has taken the form of foundational history. This is a kind of historical work in which an author claims that some event or text was the product of moral or political or legal principles that founded the nation. Consequently, it resembles mythic rather than scholarly history, and thereby provides an egregiously incomplete account of the past.
Ned Fletcher’s book is a foundational history par excellence. He seeks to persuade us that the Treaty was the legal basis upon which the British Crown claimed possession of the islands of New Zealand in 1840. He contends that those responsible for the drawing up of its English text regarded Māori as a fully sovereign people and owners of all the land, and conceived of the Treaty as a legal agreement by which the British Crown acquired only as much sovereignty as it required to assume authority over its own people and protect the rights and privileges of Māori and guaranteed to them not only title to every acre of the country’s land but ongoing authority to govern themselves. He also holds that those same historical actors regarded the Treaty as consti tuting the foundations of the (nascent) New Zealand nation. This argument chimes with the legal, political and historical interpretation of the Māori text of the Treaty currently dominant in New Zealand while a claim by Fletcher that the Treaty’s Māori and English-language texts ‘reconcile’ has been hailed by his publisher as a means of resolving present-day conflict between Māori and Pākehā over sovereignty and governance and thus unifying the nation, despite the fact that he does not examine the Māori text in his book.
Fletcher sets about his task as though he has been handed a legal brief. (He is a lawyer by profession, has been a Crown pros ecutor, and this book is a revised version of a PhD thesis in law.) He makes point after point to advance his case; adduces practi cally all the relevant historical sources and cites at great length
those parts of them that seem to support it; painstakingly rebuts each and every argument contrary to his own, or at least those he finds useful to acknowledge; omits any thorough consideration of important points that tend to undermine the cogency of his argument; and neglects to discuss in any thoroughgoing way those parts of the historical record that draw his claims into question. By using these tricks, he might well convince unwitting readers.
But Fletcher’s argument is badly flawed. In large part this is because it rests on a series of dubious assertions or assumptions that he does not seek to test and which obscure several awkward historical facts. Soon after making the Treaty, the British Crown claimed possession of New Zealand (or parts of it) on grounds other than the Treaty, including the legal doctrine of discovery. The imperial government sought to assume sovereignty by making an agreement with many local chiefs, even though it regarded them as neither fully sovereign nor owners of all the land. It did so for reasons that were as much diplomatic and political as they were legal and moral, and so were inherently pragmatic rather than simply principled in nature. It instructed its agent to make a treaty that only had two conditions: the Māori were to cede sovereignty to the British Crown as well as the pre-emptive (that is, sole) right to purchase land. There is no evidence to suggest that it envisaged the agreement that was subsequently made with some of the chiefs as one that was meant to provide the basis for the colony’s legal and political arrangements at the time, let alone in the future.
Fletcher’s argument also rests on three especially problematic claims: that the meaning of any text such as the Treaty of Waitan gi can be discovered merely by considering the purpose or intent
of those who are said to be its authors, rather than contemplating how that text was received, not least by Māori; that the meaning that might have been bestowed on the Treaty at the time it was made, rather than the discussion and debate that has taken place about it since, best accounts for its historical significance in the sense of both meaning and importance; and that the original (1840) understanding of the Treaty is more important than any later understandings of it, historically speaking. None of these propositions can withstand critical scrutiny. They reveal a loss of perspective about the making of the Treaty in 1840 that char acterises much of the historical discussion and debate about it.
Fletcher’s account is also unsatisfactory because he fails to engage with and thus alert lay readers to the most important historical scholarship of the last twenty or so years that draws his argument into question and/or undermines his publisher’s claim that this book is a ground-breaking scholarly contribution to understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi. This tome is undoubt edly a prodigious piece of research, but in seeking to account for the British government’s purpose in making the Treaty, its author is unwilling or unable to distinguish the wood from the trees. The result is a remarkably turgid work, the publication of which is somewhat puzzling, given its publisher has an enviable reputation for presenting a good deal of New Zealand’s finest historical scholarship to lay audiences. g
Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash University. His new book, Ruth Ross, te Tititi o Waitangi and the Making of History will be published in May 2023.
In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.
Why there are so few novels deploying cricket as their defining motif is a question that warrants its own thesis. Pressed to name a ‘cricket novel’ many readers might nominate Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Yet, while Netherland concerns itself (in part) with efforts to found the New York Cricket Club, cricket operates for O’Neill predominantly as a baseball trope, a means of explor ing the aspirations of immigrant Americans in the wake of 9/11.
In the Australian context there is Steven Carroll’s The Gift of Speed (2004) – about a young boy in thrall to the West Indies cricket team – but few other novels spring to mind. Beach and backyard cricket commonly function as expressions of the Aus tralian summer, but to understand anything of the mythology of Australian cricket – what it represents beyond its statistics and scorecards – it has been generally necessary to look to sports journalists, such as Greg Baum and Gideon Haigh.
Inga Simpson steps into this apparent void with Willowman. While a distinct change of pace from the dystopian notes of her most recent novel, The Last Woman in the World (2021), Willowman has its wellspring in the same contemplation of nature – its beauty and sanctity – that characterises so much of Simpson’s writing. The best cricket, the novel stresses, acquires the condition of music, ‘humanity, spirit and nature [working] as one’.
Allan Reader crafts cricket bats, shaping their distinctive form from the white willow he grows on his own small plantation on the outskirts of Melbourne. He longs to make bats that are unique; to shave away the layers of wood and find the magic, the ‘transcendence’, within: ‘it’s one-part mystery. But get the right combination, the perfect bat for a great player, and something mythic can happen.’
Reader searches for that ‘once-in-a-generation’ player who might be able to bring a bat he has made to life. He finds the man he is looking for in up-and-coming Queensland batter Todd Harrow. He studies Harrow’s game, sculpts a bat that will amplify Harrow’s natural talents and sends it to him, hoping the young gun will use it: ‘I’m invested in Harrow now, my happiness tied to
his career, his success. It’s almost as terrifying as falling in love.’ Harrow’s backstory is full of Bradmanesque echoes. His father, a dairy farmer and cricket tragic, has laid down a wicket in his fields so that Harrow and his sister can hone their skills. While still a schoolboy, Harrow advances through the ranks, scoring century after century, eventually being drafted into the Australian squad. Harrow comes to believe that his meteoric rise has been expedited by Reader’s bat: ‘the bat had gifted him additional powers, taking his game to the next level’.
Much of Willowman reads like a boy’s own adventure. If there is a match to be won in incredible circumstances or a courageous innings to be played, it’s almost guaranteed that Harrow will be involved. To this end, Simpson borrows key moments from crick et history – not least Rick McCosker’s 1977 Centenary Ashes innings, played with a broken jaw – to bolster Harrow’s legend.
The effect is a portrayal of Australian cricket that is not only romanticised but also heavily sanitised. Significant moments of sportsmanship from the game’s recent annals, no matter within which national team they originated, are here ascribed to the fictional Australian team. And there is something almost quaint in Australian cricketers being depicted as the innocent victims of sledging, rather than its most notorious perpetrators.
There is, Simpson writes, a ‘synchrony between the craftsmen and the game itself, [a] mutual evolution’, and the first half of the novel celebrates this synchrony, the relationship between Harrow and his bat seeming to anticipate the transcendence for which Reader has been reaching. Yet the novel’s trajectory, its intention even, shifts in its second half, the focus turning towards the relationship between Reader and his adult daughter Katie, and the rekindling of Reader’s love for music (he once hoped to be a professional oboist). Despite the agreeable warmth in the scenes between Reader and his daughter, and the flurries of excitement deriving from Harrow’s pluckier feats, the novel, like Harrow’s career, simply peters out.
Too often Willowman’s narrative is confined to the com mentary box – all the thrills and frustrations of the game come second-hand. Passages of play are rendered in excessive detail (even for a cricket lover) and there is a tendency for exposition to supplant storytelling, the history and culture of the game occasionally reading like half-digested passages from Wisden: ‘But then World Series Cricket came along, with its corporate sponsorship, coloured clothes and colourful characters, and changed the game for ever. A lot of it was for the better, too. Players weren’t even paid properly before that.’
The best sporting novels tend to look for a pulse within both the sport and its reception that might betray something of a na tional psyche, and Simpson’s decision to make cricket the subject of Willowman rather than its metaphor fundamentally limits the novel. Had Simpson’s narrative paid more than fleeting attention to the gay male cricketer she introduces (there are still no openly gay cricketers in international men’s teams), the racially abused First Nations cricketer, or even Harrow’s gifted sister, whose cricketing prowess begins to overshadow her brother’s, Willow man might have emerged as something more than a genial, if ultimately unsatisfying, summer novel. g
$34.99 pb, 464 pp
The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.
Iris Webber, the protagonist of Fiona Kelly McGregor’s eighth book and fourth novel, Iris, plays the accordion. Living in Sydney’s inner-city Surry Hills in the 1930s, Iris wrests inde pendence and joy from this, as an alternative to being a ‘prossie’ and as respite from pervasive brutality. Though busking – ‘begging alms’ – is illegal, it’s a simpler way to make a living for Iris, en meshed and dependent on a net of underworld unlawful activity.
McGregor’s Iris is a fictional version of Iris Eileen Mary Webber, née Shingles. More is known about Tilly Devine (‘Queen of Woolloomooloo’) and Kate Leigh, women who battled for control of inner Sydney, running razor gangs, brothels, and ‘sly grog’ shops, and circulating stolen goods and drugs. While it was illegal in New South Wales for men to run brothels or to profit from sex work, these laws did not extend to women, creating the opportunity that Devine and Leigh seized. Both were formidable, but also ruthless, attacking women and men, something their legacy blurs. There is now a wine bar in Darlinghurst called Love, Tilly Devine; it proffers fine wine (legally) and ‘Italian nibbles’, and snaffles its distractingly twee name from someone who was probably a criminal sociopath. Iris, poor, savagely assaulted from a young age, with no one to protect her but herself and a shiv or knuckleduster, tends to be remembered less affectionately.
Fact and fiction work together in this two-handed artistic project, with meticulous research into Iris’s life and milieu given breath through fiction’s imagining. The nature of evidence and testimony – and the way the law can crimp and thwart the lives of those with little choice but to work outside it – are related strands. Literate, canny Iris spends a lot of time in court, and is aware of the law’s performativity and tripwires. ‘Every time you think you’ve won,’ she observes, ‘you need to take a step back and look again. Usually up. That’s where the real winners are. Looking up you see the Law. And the rich people it protects.’
McGregor delivers slivers of Iris’s life, unchronologically; she works deeply in the grain of each moment. This includes slang of the era: ‘lamping’, ‘yiking’, and ‘jobbing’, ‘tootsies’ and ‘angie’. Narrative momentum builds around questions of what Iris has
(or hasn’t) done. This draws readers close to Iris before there is any opportunity to assess her guilt, forestalling easy judgement. Slashes of narrative depict a culture of risk and betrayal, violent reprisal, subterfuge, and raids. Lives split by incarceration, flight, and life-saving self-invention are portrayed in jagged chapters, as they are lived.
For Iris, this begins with an early marriage to an older man, the trauma of solitary miscarriage, and incarceration for shooting her husband in the buttock. She moves to Sydney and is swept into sex work. Her story is surrounded by other people’s, especially those of women in similar circumstances. This produces a choral or chord-like effect against the melody of Iris’s narrative. There is a plethora of characters to keep track of, just as Iris needs to stay alert to a host of potential enemies.
Braiding chapters in the first person with others in the third, McGregor explores how the life of a woman like Iris can be seen, and how she evades this. This includes heteronormative and sexist lenses through which women’s lives are judged, as well as caricatures of women who don’t conform. In On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979), American poet Adrienne Rich describes the unspoken that becomes unspeakable, including
[w]hatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language …
McGregor’s work across forms has always boldly spoken the unspeakable. Through the depiction of Lillian Armfield, a police officer keenly interested in Iris, lesbophobia comes into focus. And as Iris salvages sexual agency from objectification, she weighs the bliss of erotic discovery with her beloved Maisie against internalised homophobia, kissing ‘the smell of myself all over her face, rank and fascinating’. This gathering of narrative slivers embodies a refusal of the linear narrative so often a vehicle for stories shaped with moral conclusions, especially the ‘Reader, I married him’ or ‘shedunnit’ of conventional closure. Narrative porousness – McGregor keeps the weave of the novel open –formally enacts imaginative and political resistance, witnessing what is unknowable through even the most careful research.
A love story and criminal proceedings jostle alongside other parts of a life, including Iris’s cleverness (even Armfield wrote that Iris had a ‘brilliant brain’) and passions. Iris’s life is grim, yet there is quiet satisfaction in moments sharing a meal with women friends, celebrating a win by buying a tin bath-tub, or consoling herself by playing the accordion for her own pleasure. Though the novel is partly about restoring to Iris a sense of a life and depicting her agency, McGregor is both too smart and too ethical to pretend to know her fully – though she’s a vivid character. In an afterword, McGregor describes offering a story ‘suspended between the possible and the probable’.
This is an exhilarating squeezebox of a novel, fine-grained in its historical detail and its reimagining of a time- and stereotypeflattened woman. The instrument of the novel, in McGregor’s hands and with her ferocious intelligence, makes rich, insubor dinate music. g
Patrick Allington
$32.99 pb, 416 pp
Early in The Sun Walks Down, Mary Wallace – mother to six-year-old Denny, who has gone missing in a dust storm – throws her husband a ‘general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people’. It’s a symptomatic moment early in a novel that contains myriad displays of perplexity by various characters – at each other, at situations they create or must navigate, at the meaning of life.
The Sun Walks Down is Fiona McFarlane’s third book of fiction, following her startling début, The Night Guest (2013), and a short story collection, The High Places (2016). It is set in late colonial South Australia, in and around the fictional town of Fairly in the southern Flinders Ranges. The district’s farmers are trying to grow wheat: some have committed ‘to at least one more harvest’, while others have ‘already given up’ or soon will. McFarlane’s prose evokes ambitions and absurdities, but also the familial richness, of white people’s attempts to tame the land.
The plot is unremarkable: a child is missing in harsh terrain – perhaps lost, perhaps kidnapped. The days pass, the sun is pun ishing, the searchers may or may not be competent. But beyond the opening pages, there is little tension. The story’s qualities stem not from the account of the search for Denny but from the big-picture questions the search enables.
MacFarlane’s sprawling cast of characters crowd the page. They include, among others, Denny’s parents and sisters, his absent adult brother and his grandparents. McFarlane’s portrait of Cissy, Denny’s oldest sister, is particularly fine. Cissy is a wonderer, a sceptic, an acute observer. She stands up to authority, especially when it is at its most wrong-headed. McFarlane captures Cissy’s fierceness, desire for knowledge, ambition, and contempt for the foibles and failures of adults, without falling into the trap of making her infallible or magically capable.
Other characters in the district include a matriarch whose adult sons have usurped her authority: ‘It’s been quite startling to Joanna … to hold so little sway in her own household, and so suddenly.’ There is Billy, an Aboriginal man who has worked for and with Denny’s parents for many years. Denny’s father, Mathew, rarely refers to Billy’s ‘blackness’, preferring to ‘operate on the principle that the less he acknowledges it, the more likely it is to go away’. There is a police officer, Sergeant Foster, who arrives from the north to take over the search for Denny from the local constable – and, more importantly from Foster’s perspective, to find the subject of his next book, to make history and myths
in real time. And there is a husband and wife travelling north, creating art. He is Swedish and intimidated by the sky, she is English and determined to prioritise art. To the locals, he is the artist and she is his wife.
There are many other characters, from bartenders to teachers to Afghan cameleers to Irish and Aboriginal maids. McFarlane’s portraits are precise and deft; the inner worlds she offers are revelatory. Some characters are abbreviated, as if necessary but incomplete pieces of a panoramic view. Only Mr Daniels, the hapless vicar, slips towards caricature. At a wedding breakfast after the dust storm, he faints; in his efforts to help with the search for Denny, and to support the family, he seems most useful when unconscious.
McFarlane’s third-person narration continually shifts its gaze from character to character. To this discursive approach, she adds periodic bursts of first-person commentary, delivered by different, sometimes minor, characters. These first-person interruptions add more discursiveness. But they also help emphasise a wide mix of experiences and world views, reinforcing that there is no single version of the story about the people, their lives, and the land they live on.
If the plot serves McFarlane’s panorama of people, the many characters help her lay out political, cultural, and social themes, and to challenge an ordered and simplistic version of the past. She examines big questions about colonisation, the centrality of the Christian God in the creation of South Australia, multi culturalism, and gender and labour:
The day opens and it closes and Mary is making beds, cooking meals, feeding animals, brushing hair, mending dresses, sweeping floors, writing letters, washing shirts, wringing sheets, churning butter, dressing children, straining milk, clearing tables, knitting socks, fetching water, hoeing the garden and darning stockings.
Most significantly, the book undermines the wishful think ing that ‘settlement’ in South Australia was a gentle, moderate undertaking. The town of Fairly and its surrounds are built on an ongoing foundation of racism and exploitation. McFarlane shows this plainly, without over-simplification; she also presents a tangle of official and unofficial agency and authority, not least between white employers and Aboriginal workers.
I may be reading too much into what is a historical novel, but one achievement of The Sun Walks Down is that it captures something of the muted essence of South Australia – in the twenty-first century as well as in colonial times.
McFarlane achieves this partly by the way she depicts and uses the landscape, the space, the dust, the unrelenting dry heat, the description of distant Adelaide as ‘that charming, airless town’. She also undermines conventional assumptions about progress, and makes use of an assortment of characters who grapple, each in their own way, with a mix of conformity, even piousness, and free-thinking.
At one point, Billy thinks, ‘A lost child is the thing white people are most afraid of. It’s the one cost of settling on this country that they consider unreasonable.’ The Sun Walks Down is partly about whether Denny returns to his family. More than that, it is about how people he knows act and think and dream. g
Debra Adelaide
What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.
The other risk of the very short story is its ephemeral nature; those weak on narrative can be merely a wisp of smoke in a breeze. In Miniatures: A collection of short stories (Night Parrot Press, $24.99 pb, 175 pp), Susan Midalia’s very short shorts (well over one hundred of them) prove that it’s possible to offer a story – that is, something with a narrative, with progression – within a few words. Some of these stories are a page, some a paragraph, while one is only a sentence. Witty, endearing, subversive, inventive, delightful – there are many apt adjectives for these beautifully polished gems.
In other hands, the risk does not always pay off. For exam ple, some of the microstories in Julia Prendergast’s Bloodrust (Spineless Wonders, $24.99 pb, 160 pp) rely entirely on voice or mood rather than narrative and they seem somewhat provisional, still in draft. That said, they also flow like poetry: the final story, ‘Riddled Gestures’, is more poem than prose. Midalia’s pieces are undeniably stories and her style is realism, but Midalia’s scenarios are not necessarily realistic ones, and the fine control she main tains draws us into their surreal and surprising premises, even in that one-sentence story.
Despite (or maybe because of) this, identifying specific
to read the entire collection in one sitting, and while much of my hour was spent smiling, it is hard to ignore the implications of this. Is this mere diversionary reading? So many stories, so much hard work, imagination, and intelligence, to be consumed so quickly? All these little gems. But is describing the stories as ‘gems’ damning the collection with faint praise?
I don’t want to do that, so I shall mention some: ‘In the Park’ features technology as the enemy of human communication, with an unexpected bittersweet twist; ‘Subversion’ will appeal to punctuation Nazis with guerrilla tendencies; while ‘The Session’ is another of several literary stories, this time for language pedants. ‘For Sale’ describes an argument between a married couple, over said Hemingway story, in which she snaps at him that he is stupid and insensitive and she doesn’t know why she married him, while he replies, ‘Now, that’s a story.’ Despite this, he does not get the final word, or rather six words.
The whole collection may resist lasting effect, but the skill and economy in Miniatures are admirable. By contrast, any concerns about Prendergast’s Bloodrust (the status of its microfictions aside) assuredly have nothing to do with it being delightful or diversionary. This is a rough and tough col lection, but this feels intentional. You also get the feeling that the book has not been permitted to stand on its own feet, judging by the huge number of endorsements from other writers. This is a pet hate of mine: prelims stuffed with praise only compromise what should be a virgin reading of a book. Impatience and cynicism are not the best attitudes to bring to an opening page. Fortunately, the first story here copes.
In ‘Contrapuntal’, a mother having a birthday dinner with her grown-up family gradually expresses frustration and resentment as she contemplates the whole ‘fuckwittery of mothering’, until finally barking an order that echoes her own mother. The brittle opinions and raw feelings here are reflected in language that is choppy, heavily reliant on punctuation, filled with hyphenated hybrids (‘love-hated’, ‘pain-eyes’, ‘womb-poisoning’), accumulated adjectives, and sentence fragments. The effect is one of barely contained and mostly negative emotions, and this continues across the entire collection, where pain and violence, either actual or suppressed, dominate. The characters are destructive, angry, wound-up, vulnerable, confronting. The title story, one of the longest, features a young woman negotiating several relation ships in succession, while obliged to confront nature’s powers
is admirable but it is also overly busy, and the lack of intimacy between reader and character is problematic.
‘Like Clay’, however, is powerful – for me the best in the collection. Here a teenage boy has helped his mother birth his baby sister at home. With an emotionally absent father and other chips on his shoulders, Clay simmers with the menacing tension that many of the other characters, especially male ones, in Bloodrust have, but here it is funnelled into the right places, and the result is unexpected and wonderful.
If the stories in Bloodrust mostly deliver raw emotional punch es, those in Katerina Gibson’s Women I Know (Scribner, $29.99 pb, 246 pp) demonstrate an intellectual and imagi native power in their fearless probing into corners of the human world we didn’t even think existed until now. The collection is Gibson’s first and the stakes are impressively high, the ambitions mostly fulfilled. In its acid, world-weary voice and subtle pro gression, the title story could almost belong to Dorothy Parker, though Parker surely is not one of Gibson’s influences: George Saunders, Joy Williams, and Lorrie Moore are more likely con tenders. In ‘Women I Know’, an older woman is ostensibly con versing with her granddaughter, trying to come to terms with the public disgrace of her own son; few details are provided but the granddaughter’s silence and her decision to cut her hair are poignant indications of the extent of his crimes, and by implica tion the inheritance of shame.
Good as this story is, there are better ones. As the maybeHemingway microstory proves, it is not what is stated that counts, but what is omitted, and what a reader is empowered to envisage. Thus ‘Constellation in the Left Eye’ is a standout. A young refugee worker in a factory process line inserts eyeballs into lifelike dolls. Beyond that we learn very little, but the simple lucid voice of the narrator describing her work conveys a weight of context, and says much about the status of refugees, about class and working conditions, about culture and gender and power imbalances, about female vulnerability – all via omission; the restraint and creative control are such that this story remains long in the imagination despite it never explaining where or for what these dolls are used.
But longer stories also unfold with ease. ‘As the Nation Mourns’ is an intriguing account of an insomniac and thus confused marine researcher who is haunted by her recently dead and famous naturalist father, and who seems as vulnerable to exploitation as the rare species of fish she is determined to preserve. Deadpan acceptance of increasingly bizarre scenarios is common in this collection. In ‘Glitches in the Algorithm’, a woman’s curated online version of her life eventually supplants her real self, while in ‘Fertile Soil’ a series of odd coincidences leads a woman to discover she has a double, though that is far from the end of the story.
Interrogations of female experience prevail in the stories. ‘Intermission II: On the Mythology in the Room (Field Notes)’ is both a diversion in the form of a tour guide talking us through stereotypes of women and also a serious question about literary representation. ‘Schedule’ is a witty comment on the gendered nature of the corporate world and the perennial struggle between the working and family life.
Despite its main theme, the project of Women I Know does
not involve valorising, defending, or explaining women. Indeed, the irony rippling through stories like ‘Schedule’ reveals an author prepared to question and disrupt everything. This is an assured collection, audacious, dark, comic, and full of surprises – it de mands to be reread, several times. g
Debra Adelaide has published eighteen books, including novels, short fiction, and essays, the most recent of which is The Innocent Reader (2019).
Fantagraphics Books $41.95 hb, 236 pp
Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish Scribe
$39.99 hb, 208 pp
The covers of comic books/graphic novels/sequential nar ratives, call them what you will, have a fundamentally different relationship to the contents of their books than the covers of ‘ordinary’, text-only works. For the latter, the cover image is usually produced by a designer whom the author does not know and may never meet. In the case of comics, however, the cover image is made by the same hand that creates the images that proliferate within the book. The cover of a text-only book is communicating a sense of what the book is like through the totally different language of images. For the browser, that’s like trying to decide whether to attend a concert on the strength of a billpost er. With a comic book, the sort of thing you see on the cover is the sort of thing you get inside. A comic book begins before you even open it. Basically, you can judge a comic book by its cover.
Two recent début graphic novels by Lee Lai and Tommi Parrish (friends and ex-Melburnians now living in Montreal) give us a chance to examine this relationship of cover to content, and to broach the vast discussion of a comic book maker’s style, their approach to art and design, their visual voice. Both these books focus on a pair of women working away at the mystery of a complicated romantic relationship. These characters are flailing through the doldrums of their twenties and thirties, assailed by momentum-sapping cocktails of aimlessness, depression, alcoholism, anxiety, and self-hatred. Oof. In both books, one of the protagonists goes back to live with their parents. The father supports the mother and the mother battles with a brittle, baffled incomprehension at her daughter’s mental health woes. So much for the older generation. Luckily, both books feature young children (in Stone Fruit a niece, in Men I Trust a son) and
on the pages on which they appear these narratives become most emotionally vivid, as the children demand attention and action from their beleaguered, becalmed mothers and aunts. Panels dominated by images from children’s television– Garfield and Peppa Pig – not only tell us what shows the children are watching but also gesture towards the main characters’ affliction by a sense of childish helplessness. The actual children, on the other hand, display occasional adult levels of empathy for, and forgiveness of, their careening carers. Forces for id, imagination, and energy, their appearances give both narratives the chance to burn brightly for brief stretches.
Lee Lai’s Stone Fruit, published by the esteemed US art comics publisher Fantagraphics Books in 2021, was shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize. Her fine, controlled black-ink linework is highlighted against backgrounds occasionally coloured with muted blue-grey gouache which lends the book a measured, considered tone that Lai holds in tension with the shaky emotionality of her characters. Bron and Ray’s stalling relationship is brought fitfully to life by their sessions of wild play with six-year-old Nessie, Ray’s niece. These sessions blow oxygen onto the last embers of the couple’s faltering partnership, and while the cover of the book shows us these three walking together, legs scissoring, a second glance confirms that Bron (on the right) and Ray (on the left) are only connected by the body of Nessie in between them. Lai deploys a visual technique in order to display the enormity of Nessie’s transformative in fluence on Ray and Bron’s life which is so daring and delightful that I won’t describe it here, except to say that it is the graphic equivalent of a spectacular magic trick. Even if you never intend to buy this graphic novel, leaf through the first ten pages at your local bookshop and you’ll see what I mean. Astounding. This visual joie de vivre is gestured towards in the cover image of the book, but only the sequential, panel-to-panel nature of reading comics can animate it into thrilling life on the page.
The cover of Tommi Parrish’s Men I Trust also belongs to a late point in the narrative, and stirs despair in the reader when we realise what led that character to be standing at a bus stop late at night with cars gliding obliviously past her. If the emotional life in Stone Fruit is visually expressed in con tained, restrained monochrome, in Men I Trust the art is brim ming with wincing, raw abandon. Each panel is painted in full colour, and each double-page spread presents itself to the reader as a polyptych painting before we zoom in to read and absorb the individual panels. Parrish eschews the traditional strip of white space between panels known as ‘the gutter’, so that each painted panel butts up against its neighbours above and below, increas ing the impression that every page of panels comprises a single painting. The characters are designed big and chunky, with huge thighs and arms, vast hands, and small heads. Facial features are minimally indicated, which pushes our reading energies back to wards the bodies. It’s like reading a comic populated by Henry Moore sculptures. Eliza is a single mother and Sasha, who is pur
suing her, has moved back in with her parents. As in Stone Fruit, depression, anxiety, and being overwhelmed are core to this nar rative; these feelings are enacted by the characters and provide the main topic of their conversations. The other principal charac ter is Andrew, a reality show property developer who is so overtly a slimeball that his main function seems to be to guarantee the irony of the book’s title.
Men I Trust is also published by Fantagraphics Books in the United States, but the Australian edition is being released through Scribe Publications, a Melbourne publisher which is taking a strong interest in graphic novels, with more in the pipeline according to senior editor David Golding. Both of these handsomely produced graphic novels investigate the ne gotiation of a romantic relationship through the chicanes and heavy weather of mental illness, and each showcases promising visual sequential work by Australian comic book makers who are deep in the process of developing and refining their visual voice. Exciting times. g
Paul Giles
pb, 548 pp
The dedication in Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel reads ‘For the survivors’, and its epigraph is taken from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849), to which Kingsolver’s title pays a sly homage. Her book is a self-conscious reworking of Dickens’s famous novel about an orphan making his way in the world, with Kingsolver’s treatment being narrated by a boy born as Damon Fields in Lee County, Virginia. He acquires his nickname partly from the colour of his hair and partly from the venomous copperhead snake, and after losing his father and mother he finds himself thrown back on his own resilience and talents to keep moving forward. There are many structural parallels with Dickens’s novel – the malevolent Uriah Heep, for example, morphs here into a similarly sinister figure known as ‘U-Haul’ – but these literary allusions never become too intrusive, and Kingsolver’s novel is robustly realistic in its general demeanour.
While Dickens is the most direct model, Demon Copperhead has an iconoclastic hero whose colloquial, first-person style may put the reader more in mind of classic American fictional rebels such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow’s Augie March. Just as Huck Finn mocks the Sunday school axioms of the Widow Douglas, so Demon mocks clichés about ‘bad choices’ delivered by the department of social services, while resisting their bureaucratic method of ‘rotating and merchandising foster boys’. Demon develops instead a sturdy self-reliance that enables him to survive the poverty of a trailer house, various forms of abuse by his stepfather and other relatives, and also a crippling knee injury that ends his promising high-school football career. Despite these setbacks, he always seeks to avoid being categorised as ‘Poor Demon’ or defined by adults: ‘What if I was depending on the Miss Barkses of this world,’ he asks, ‘instead of my own bad self?’
For Australian readers, this rejection of ‘Mom-assigned names’ and an eagerness to reinvent personal identity might seem culturally alien. Though Demon is interested in the hybrid ‘Melungeon’ blood that he inherited from his father, there is little sense here of acquiescing in tribal or ancestral loyalty. Instead, he admires chameleons such as ‘Snoop Dogg’ or ‘Scarface’ who do not ‘stick with the name they start out with’. This power of invention is reflected in Demon’s ultimate career success, which comes from his skill in drawing cartoons. Such artistic expertise enables him to devise imaginary superheroes that strike a chord with newspaper readers and thus to escape from the confines of
Lee County, which he describes as ‘a place where you keep living the life you were assigned’.
In the past, I have sometimes found Kingsolver’s fiction to be uncomfortably burdened with Christian rhetoric, and there are elements of subdued religiosity permeating this novel, as when Demon describes April as ‘the month of the whole sorry world praying for deliverance’. For the most part, however, the narrator’s energetic and engaging idiom scrupulously avoids sentimentality and draws the reader in through its often vulgar but endearing ly rebarbative account of the various torments he undergoes. Demon aptly describes his childhood as ‘a four-star shit show as far as I’d ever seen, so I was glad to be done with it’.
Kingsolver lives and works on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains, and one of the themes that runs through this novel is the way rural communities are neglected by contemporary American society. Demon observes how ‘the superhero that looks out for farms instead of cities’ is a figure entirely absent from US popular culture, with television’s Beverley Hillbillies representing for most Americans their fixed idea of country folk as ‘Hicks, rednecks’, and the Appalachian region of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia widely understood to be ‘the dog of America’.
Demon distinguishes sharply between the kind of practical knowledge and sense of satisfaction taken from planting tobacco crops, and an academic environment where you are treated as a ‘dumbass’ if you don’t know ‘the difference between a state and a commonwealth’. Though Kingsolver does not press this point unduly, there is a strong sense here of rural parts of the republic being patronised by urban centres in the same way that Demon himself is patronised by adults. His comment on how these people are demeaned by stereotypes such as ‘Rednecks’ and ‘Deplora bles’ offers a broader insight into the conservative consciousness of present-day America. Because of the extravagant follies of Donald Trump himself, it has been too easy for commentators to dismiss the rationale, resentments, and sense of injustice felt by the many people off the beaten track who gravitated towards Trump’s campaigns, and Demon Copperhead offers perceptive insights into this way of thinking and feeling.
In her acknowledgments, Kingsolver writes that her book is for ‘the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who’ve lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files’. Yet this novel doesn’t read at all like a plea for sympathy. Instead, it is carried by a spirit of comic rambunctiousness that is characteristic of the best American fiction, and it is a pleasure to read, through all of its 548 lively pages. Part of the book’s charm derives from the slightly twisted pleasure it takes in the local details of Lee County life – the bargain aisles of Walmart, the bad television, the used-car commercials from Crazy Marv (‘At these prices you’ll know I’ve lost my marbles’). This is a polemical novel that manages to keep its polemic within check. Rather than preaching or pleading, it frames its pointed ethical directives within a self-mocking, empathetic narrative that renders the novel’s political impact all the more compelling. g
Ned Beauman’s latest novel – his first since Madness Is Bet ter Than Defeat (2017) – marks something of a stylistic departure for the British writer. Where Beauman’s work has for the most part experimented with history and genre, Ven omous Lumpsucker is set squarely in our collapsing planetary fu ture. With typical wit (something that has fortunately not been lost with the shift in subject matter to climate change) Beauman prefaces the novel using a devilish author’s note:
This novel is set in the near future. However, to minimise any need for mental arithmetic on the reader’s part, sums of money are pre sented as if the euro has retained its 2022 value with no inflation. This is the sole respect in which the story deviates from how things will actually unfold.
For all its environmental gloom, Venomous Lumpsucker hap pens to be a particularly funny novel about climate change, putting it in rare company with the likes of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), Ian McEwan’s Solar (2009), and Jane Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013). In a fatalistic field, Beauman’s contribution to climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, offers distinct lines of enquiry concerning the Anthropocene, ‘a hellish time to be alive’.
The novel is set in the near future, a time when ecological col lapse is well underway and publicly accepted to the point of being merely subsumed into the inexorable march of algorithm-driven, capitalist progress. But ‘even the boldest advances in technology [cannot] keep up with the rate of collapse’. Central to this is the rampant marketisation of extinction: the annihilation of whole species reduced to datapoints in biobanks (archives of DNA samples that are soon-to-be sabotaged), and a credit system not unlike that of the ways governments account for carbon emissions today. A key species amid the global slaughter is the fictional eponymous fish, soon to be certified as intelligent by Swiss bi ologist Karin Resaint and therefore granted an elevated status, much to the chagrin of mining executive/extinction mogul Mark Halyard, who, in a grave misstep, has potentially wiped out the very last one. In a classic set-up, Resaint and Halyard are brought together by their shared interest in the fish’s survival.
The ensuing hunt is hilarious and devastating in equal por tions, taking the unlikely partnership across Europe, mainly the Baltic, as well as ‘The Hermit Kingdom’, a post-Brexit Britain taken to the extreme, closed off and isolated. No one even talks
about the United States anymore, for fear of embarrassment. And while the prose crackles with intelligence throughout, the interactions and exchanges between Resaint and Halyard provide a discursive depth that other ecological thrillers often lack:
‘You don’t believe that anything can have value of its own beyond what function is serves for human beings?’ … Resaint asked Halyard to imagine a [lush] planet in some remote galaxy … ‘[I]f an asteroid smashed into this planet … nothing would be lost? Because nobody in particular would miss it?’
‘But the universe is bloody huge – stuff like that must happen every minute … Honestly it sounds to me like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles.’
The future Beauman conjures is one of the most fully realised in climate fiction, adorned with intricate detail and plotting. The economic and social systems on which this future is predicated are reminiscent of the dense systems of Kim Stanley Robinson’s worlds, yet never seem to dull the proceedings. Beauman has a rare knack for levity around heavy subject matter: ‘Everyone agreed that to lose an intelligent species was the gravest loss of all, and so, although such extinctions could not be prohibited outright – that would not be a nimble free market solution – they should be very sternly disincentivised.’ Deeper into the novel it becomes clear that the author’s prefatory note, facetious as it might be, speaks also to creative self-assuredness. On our current trajectory it is difficult to imagine a future vastly different from that of Venomous Lumpsucker, marred as it is with ‘mutant COVID-24’ and the extractive forces of algorithmic, technological capitalism. There is a clear sense that the novel’s pre-dystopian past is precisely our present. Beauman’s is therefore more a work of extrapolative fiction than of speculative fiction, detailing ‘how things will actually unfold’.
Well, up to a certain point.
The credibility of his world established, Beauman sets about having fun, taking the latter half of the narrative to increasingly complex and mysterious heights, knitting together Resaint and Halyard’s fish hunt, the biobank sabotage, and various intercon nected subplots, concluding in a ridiculous sequence in Cornwall. Yet this playfulness is never at the expense of profundity, the two complementing one another in a dialectic that authors of climate fiction often struggle to balance:
[Halyard] heard that these people you met inside [prison] were not fondly disposed towards environmental crimes, not the guards and not the other prisoners either. It was never good to be the culpable human face of an ongoing mega-tragedy affecting every living being.
This might well polarise readers; after all, the collapse of the biosphere is no laughing matter. Nor is it for Beauman, whose take on human destruction never strays into the over-simplistic. In contrast to the more earnest sentiments of contemporary environmental writing, Beauman articulates how comedically absurd the details of human exploits are against the backdrop of a grander, planetary tragedy. Venomous Lumpsucker is not only Beauman’s strongest work to date, but also one of the most en joyable novels about extinction. g
by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Harvill Secker $35 hb,
219 pp
In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami describes himself as a ‘very ordinary person’ who has ‘a bit of ability’ in writing nov els. It is a point Murakami labours in the eleven essays loosely focused on the craft of writing in this book, where he variously insists that ‘I was just a regular guy who in his spare time tossed off a novel that happened to go on to win a new writer’s prize’. While it is difficult to imagine that an international bestselling author is a kind of everyman figure, these statements are put under pressure in this volume in discussions about his ‘magical’ creativity.
Two examples will suffice: Murakami describes his ‘mental chest of drawers’ and also his automatic process, dubiously named ‘Automatic Dwarves’, as being akin to the first time he drove an automatic car and imagined there were dwarves in the gearbox, ‘each in charge of operating a separate gear’. This kind of pairing of the everyday with the extraordinary (and occasionally inappropriate) and Murakami’s appeal to magical realism and neo-surrealism are features of his fiction. His use of memorable conceits and slant ways on his writing life are important elements in his essays on writing, but they chart his remarkable rather than mundane circumstances.
The essays explore a range of topics from more practical ideas to deeply esoteric themes, and contain some cracker lines. In ‘Are Novelists Broadminded?’, Murakami states: ‘Writers are basically an egoistic breed, proud and highly competitive.’ Some of the more useful essays for writers include ‘Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel’, where Murakami discusses the importance of writing a set number of words each day (for him this is the equivalent of sixteen hundred words) and the importance of feedback; ‘What Kind of Characters Should I Include?’, which includes ruminations on his early use of first-person narration and his current preference for the third person; and ‘A Completely Personal and Physical Occupation’, which foregrounds ‘mental toughness’ and ‘loneliness’ as part of the writerly experience. Some of the most memorable moments are expressed in ‘When I Became a Novelist’, where Murakami reanimates the ‘satisfying crack when bat met ball’ at a Yakult baseball game and ‘it suddenly struck [him]: I think I can write a novel ’. He also writes about the time he held a carrier pigeon with a broken wing: ‘as the warmth of the wounded pigeon sank into his hands’, he knew he would win a literary prize.
Murakami’s long rant in ‘Literary Prizes’, where he tries to argue that he was ‘relieved not to have won’ the prestigious
Akutagawa Prize, exposes his bitterness towards critics of his work and unfavourable reviews. It is a theme rehearsed in many essays, including ‘Are Novelist’s Broadminded?’, where he discusses a review of his book Underground (2000) and specifically the criticism of it as ‘[a] display of ignorance of the basic rules of nonfiction’. This provokes the diatribe: ‘I had not attempted to write nonfiction per se; rather, I had attempted to produce a work unbeholden to any genre that handled “nonfictional” material. I had stepped on the tails of the tigers who guard the sacred sanctuary of nonfiction, and they were angry.’
In Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami again attempts to challenge the boundaries of autobiography and memoir by arguing that while his book will be read by many people as ‘autobiographical essays’, it is not what he intended. Instead, he labels the essays ‘somewhat self-indulgent personal writing’ and a ‘record of a personal thought process’ that he hopes might be ‘a little useful in a practical way’. While the collection’s usefulness as a tool for writing or becoming a writer is debatable, there is little doubt that the opportunity to read some of the thoughts and ideas that sparked Murakami’s famous novels will excite his fans. This is especially the case for the zealots known as harukisuto, who have become famous for their passionate devotion to the writer, and also to Team Hashirundagaya, which runs in the same races and marathons as Murakami in an attempt to get closer to him. In Novelist as a Vocation, he allows the reader access to some of the private moments that have been most relevant to his writing career. His repeated acknowledgment that writers’ greatest responsibility is to their readers demonstrates his understanding that the key to his longevity as a writer is partly about a faithful and enduring readership.
Murakami notes in the foreword to this collection that there is a seven-year time lag between its 2015 publication in Japan and its subsequent translation and publication in English. Furthermore, he began writing the essays in 2010 with the first six chapters serialised in the Japanese magazine, Monkey. Murakami notes as a kind of apologia:
During these past seven years we’ve experienced all kinds of crucial events, including the Corona pandemic, and wars breaking out around the world. These circumstances have forced us to make some significant changes in our lives. These essays, though, do not reflect those changes, or the individual changes I’ve experienced myself.
This seems like a missed opportunity for a new and updated version of the book. So much has changed for writers since the beginning of the pandemic. Without reference to this period, many of the essays read as relics of a more mobile and interactive time for writers. Adding two more essays to the end of the book to address some of the key points for writers over these seven missing years would have given the volume greater relevance. Murakami states, ‘I have no idea if this book could serve as a guidebook or introduction to help those hoping to write novels’. Given his success as a writer, however, there is little doubt it will be a popular text used in schools, universities, and writing centres. While there are some illuminating moments in the es says, becoming a novelist as a vocation remains a tantalising but unlikely prospect for the majority of readers. g
These strange years of pandemic and lockdowns certainly brought challenges and unusual experiences – those of constraint but also, surprisingly, of opportunity and rich ness. The curious spaces we occupy in the ether have become a seedbed for conversation and exchange; for connections that otherwise might not have found a field in which to prosper. Despite or perhaps because of the limits of the digital, perhaps even because we were undistracted by physical proximity, these spaces seemed to offer the potential for a raw honesty – lacunae of sotto voce conversations which brought us ironically into a form of seemingly unmediated communication. From the her metically sealed bubble of lockdowns, digital connect took on the intensity of embodied dialogue, the intimate voice in the ear.
This is apparent in the new collaborative volume by poets Audrey Molloy and Anthony Lawrence. ‘Are there things you never knew you loved, / until our lives were altered, / the new jargon of social distance / too big for our mouths?’, they ask in Ordinary Time. What essential understandings and experiences were we suddenly able to touch in the strangeness of that time of isolation? As Lawrence and Molloy tell us in the preface, they had not actually met until the launch of this book. Early in the pandemic they commenced an exchange of work, one poem at a time, building slowly and inexorably a fabric of intense poetic and personal connection. Like a kind of ‘epistolary love letter’, these poems, and the synergy of book which they have produced, embody this kind of space in which physically separate individuals weave conversations together that challenge notions of what being ‘together’ might actually mean.
The rhythm of these one-for-one poems embodies this dance of connection. There are moments when it seems possible to tell ‘which poet is which’, to differentiate styles and hear the distinctive cadences of the older established male poet and the younger Irish-Australian female poet. However, as in the deep textures of any relationship, we also hear both voices melding together as ‘Anthony’ and ‘Audrey’ throw words, images, ideas, the art of textual poesis into the crucible of their shared space, the tabula rasa of electronic forms of communication. Something in one poem is responded to, or riffed on, in the next and thus the conversation meanders and returns. For instance, one voice begins:
One day, the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, on a life-supporting planet,
a woman in a Mary Quant dress will cross the road, unaware she carries the tiny germ of me.
The next voice takes up the thread:
As I tightened the last bolt, I surrendered to the image of mothers, one in a Mary Quant dress and one in tennis whites, airline hostesses off duty, crossing roads as we ebb and flow in respective bathyspheres.
There is some ordering that stitches these conversations together: five sections loosely built around notions or images of time, mortality, the clarity of light, the wash of the sea, the possibilities and the limitations of love. However, this is not primarily a poetics of intentional conceptual structuring but a poetics of listening and speaking and allowing that flux to go where it will. Drawn on by the ping of the email or the erotics of the dancing dots of Messenger, the dialogic texture of this book emerges in a manner both organic and charged with anticipation:
I confess. I have been delivered from sorrow by the popcorn thrum and the sine wave of three dots on the Messenger pane … telling me you are writing, a poem is on its way.
The precise nature of the exchange that builds in Ordinary Time is hard to define. It is playful and deadly serious, a dialogue of two professional practitioners of poetry, one that is also intensely personal. It has an intimacy that has its origins in the ostensible seclusion, the camera obscura, of the digital letter – be it email or the Messenger pane – where it seems that anything can be told, where love in its broadest sense might allow each voice to speak, to explore, to find the words with which to viscerally engage another person. If Ordinary Time can in part be read as a series of love letters, what is constructed is also a love letter to poetry itself, as a mode of understanding and expression that privileges reflectiveness and expansiveness, that is able to cradle the extremities and the dailiness of human experience.
As the epigraph from Leonard Cohen suggests, ‘We didn’t know it was the ‘60s then. / We just thought it was ordinary time.’ Occupying the ‘era’ of the pandemic – scarcely over yet and still uncertain in its legacies – was not a perspective Lawrence or Molloy (or any of us) had at the time; we were just living, day by day, managing uncertainty, riding the waves of isolation, interiority, and longing. ‘Ordinary time’ is also the space that the separated ‘blood brothers in poetry’ or the would-be lovers long for: a precious moment in which the usually bolted door of ‘time is ajar’ and the unexpected – in the shape of the poem – might slip through. g
$35 pb, 270 pp
Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle sta tion in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey
meaning in the colonised landscape of the Tanami deserts.
Mahood’s new book, Wandering with Intent, brings together a collection of essays written over a period of fifteen years that traverses terrain that has been shaped by both a lifetime of ex perience in the desert regions at the centre of the continent and the ‘undertow of its original custodians’. Having lived in ‘the zone between black and white’, at places such as Hooker Creek, Finke, Alice Springs, Mongrel Downs, and, later, the communities of Mulan and Balgo, Mahood’s life, as she describes it, has been ‘entangled in particular Aboriginal families in multiple ways’ and her ‘sense of the world has been constructed by that experience’. Mahood’s writing is compelled by this point of intersection and emerges from her observations of the places, both physical and psychic, where cultural systems encounter and ‘battle and subvert each other’.
Mahood, an essayist who is comfortable with uncertainty, acknowledges her flaws and contradictions, and those of the people she writes about. She pre-empts criticism of her being a white woman writing so frankly about First Nations peoples, and wonders in the preface to the collection ‘what the impli cations of cancel culture and identity politics might be’ for her. In revisiting her earlier essays, Mahood flags that she has not edited out ‘what might now cause offence and attract criticism’ because to do so would be disingenuous. Some readers might bristle at Mahood’s candid descriptions of First Nations lives, experiences, and knowledges, or find her use of terms like ‘white slavery’ jarring, but for Mahood these moments are an honest reflec tion of an imperfect attempt to ‘understand and communicate’ the fraught zone between Black and white worlds that she has occupied for much of her life.
set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and mem ories (2016).
Mahood’s interest in collaborating with First Nations people to co-create maps was entangled with her family’s role in dispos session; her own name is etched onto a map of the area, which was created by her father. She acknowledges in Position Doubtful that ‘exploration and colonisation are part of my heritage’. As symbolic representations of places that help us to figure out where we are and where we want to go, maps are an apt metaphor for Mahood’s body of writing that centres on the uncertain search for self and
In ‘“Kardiya are like Toyotas”: White Workers on Australia’s Cultural Frontiers’, Mahood constructs a withering critique of remote community dynamics, where more often than not the ‘white population … is disproportionately influential while being unequipped, unprepared, or unsuitable for the work it does’. First published in Griffith Review in 2012, the essay went viral when it was circulat ed widely among white settlers (myself included) who were living and working in remote desert communities. Reading Mahood’s observations in the wake of the 2019 shooting of Kumanjayi Walker by policeman Zachary Rolfe in Yuendumu, I was struck by the essay’s continued relevance ten years after it was published. In shining a light on the ‘sociopaths, the self-right eous, the bleeding hearts, and the morally ambiguous’ who ‘ma nipulate … injustice as a means of maintaining power’, Mahood lays bare the world that Rolfe described in text messages as the ‘wild west’ – a place where conditions are ripe for white men and women to see their positions of power as an opportunity to play out their ‘cowboy’ fantasies in a place ‘with no rules’.
In essays such as ‘The Seething Landscape’ and ‘The Man in the Log’, Mahood explores examples of collaboration that ‘run counter’ to the trope of dysfunction depicted in ‘“Kardiya are
like Toyotas”’. The improvised space between black and white worlds has been central to Mahood’s life, and ways of working in the overlap between First Nations and settler Australia is a key thread that runs throughout this collection. In ‘From Position Doubtful to Ground Truthing’, she traces the trajectory of her own co-mapping projects with First Nations peoples over twenty years, and in doing so traces the development of a philosophy and methodology of collaborative practice that is ‘open-ended, responsive to the priorities of the people involved, and only provisionally driven by outcomes’.
There is a deep sense of searching in this collection; of wandering with the intent of trying to understand more deeply a place that Mahood describes as ‘central, necessary, cross-wired into my neural circuits and the geography of my body’. In this sense, Mahood’s collection diverges from the lineage of Aus tralian desert writing that has been overwhelmingly dominated by white men such as Ernest Giles, Baldwin Spencer, Frank Gillen, J.W. Gregory, C.T. Madigan, T.G.H. Strehlow, and, more recently, Nicolas Rothwell and Mark McKenna, to name just a few. Although Mahood is mapping the country in her attempt to understand it, she is not trying to conquer the country, or to
know it in a Western epistemological sense. Rather, she resists certainty and instead emphasises listening in order to understand the many truths and meanings that reside in places. Mahood’s work is an important contribution to a growing body of writing about the inland that is being shaped by women’s perspectives, both black and white, who are ‘less oppressed by the existential void, less impressed by the explorer narratives’ and bring a ‘very different sensibility, and one whose time has come’.
While Mahood’s probing essays offer valuable insights into the complex intersections between First Nations and settler Australia, some readers may feel that the time has come for a deeper engagement with the racist, settler–colonial structures that shape the world that is central to her writing. Yet, Mahood writes that her experiences in the grey zone have produced in her ‘a kind of moral inertia, which manifests as an acceptance of the way things are, rather than as a desire to fix or change them’, which she confesses can ‘leech away the energy to feel strongly about things that warrant strong feelings’. g
Shannyn Palmer’s first book is Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and history on a central Australian pastoral station (MUP, 2022). ❖
i.m. Peter Porter
I should have seen all those words crowded at the door of Peter’s apartment when I stayed with him –so many jostling verbs outstretched adjectives and nervy adverbs all rubbing shoulders with those little ands and buts and ors, etc. But I didn’t. His shepherding voice and kind manner ushered me past them. They were there as usual, but for another time when he could invite them in – his customary friends – undistracted by visitors, so they could roam and explore, until with patience and a home-made miracle their jostle would subside and they would converse with him and later, on the page with us.
Andrew Taylor’s most recent collection is Coogee Poems, with Travis Taylor (Baden Press, 2021).
last eleven years of his life. The following section considers his relationships with voyages and islands. Dooley then investigates his social networks for insights into his character and opinions, before embarking on a discussion of his foremost passions of reading, writing, and music, and concluding with ‘Occasional Pieces’, various contemporary Flinders-themed writings cele brating and considering his life. While this structure effectively foregrounds various aspects of his life, the disjointed narrative style may prove unsatisfying to readers unfamiliar with Flinders.
261 pp
Few names are so ubiquitous in Australian culture or hold such a significant position in its history as that of Matthew Flinders. More than one hundred sites across Australia have been named in his honour, commemorating his accomplish ments as a navigator, hydrographer, cartographer, and scientist. Among them are several statues featuring Flinders with Trim, his ever-faithful pet cat and companion, as well as numerous geographic landmarks, electoral districts, and a university.
Flinders’ short life was as remarkable as it was tragic. He was the first European to circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1798, proving it to be an island, and Australia three years later, after which he produced the first complete map of the country. Docking at Mauritius for repairs in 1803, Flinders was arrested by the French au thorities and detained for more than six years, estranging him from his wife. Their eventual reunion in England was cruelly cut short by his untimely death at the age of forty.
Early biographers tended to present Flinders as a hero. In The Life of Matthew Flinders (1914), Ernest Scott hailed the captain as an ‘Englishman of exceptionally high character’. Later writers such as Sid ney Baker and Geoffrey Ingleton painted a harsh portrait of an arrogant man whose stubbornness was his downfall. Miriam Estensen’s 2002 biography presents a more even appraisal. As its subtitle suggests, in Matthew Flinders: The man behind the map, librarian, literary scholar, and Flinders aficionado Gillian Dooley embarks on a journey to discover the person beneath the legend. Focusing on his personal life and characteristics, she seeks to counterbalance previous accounts that were overly concerned with his career and achievements.
Dooley structures her book not as a conventional, chronolog ical biography, but as a series of essays edited from her previous talks, presentations, conference papers, and other research on Flinders. These are divided into five parts, organised themati cally. The first focuses on his Private Journal, written during the
Guiding Dooley on her quest to better understand Flinders son, brother, father, husband, friend are his writings. Through out, she presents revealing excerpts from his journal, the official account of his circumnavigation of Australia, A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814), and numerous letters to friends, family, patrons, and other personal connections. These are supplemented by the writings of figures who featured prominently in his life.
Dooley has spent decades writing on Flinders; she is driven by an enthusiasm readily conveyed in her prose. With deep empathy and vivid imagination, she humanises a man whose historical distance and celebrity status would otherwise make him forbidding to a modern reader. Excerpts from his works allow us a front-seat view of his innermost thoughts and feelings his humour, ambition, love, depression, and anguish. Dooley’s Flinders is not an arrogant man but one who valued his honour like most British naval officers of the period. Hardly religious, he possessed a scientific curiosity and rationality that were char acteristic of the Enlightenment as well as a love of culture congruent with the era’s romanticism.
Published by a non-academic press for a general audience, the book partially eschews academic scaffolding and con ventions. In some ways, this absence is detrimental to Dooley’s project, which would have benefited from some basic source analysis early in the text. Since firsthand descriptions of Flinders are scant, she relies on his writings to deduce his innermost thoughts and feelings. However, to understand such sources we need to know why they were written and for whom, what conventions such texts follow, and the nuances of the genres they belong to. We also need to become acquainted with the semantics of the period. This is not to say that Dooley lacks a grasp of such matters, but simply that the reader is sometimes left ponder ing the rationale for her interpretations.
The tone and style of Dooley’s writing vary between chapters, reflecting their different intended audiences. This makes for a mildly jarring reading experience. In the absence of a chrono logical structure, she is made to repeat important information that contextualises key moments in Flinders’ life. Likewise, the repetition of quotations from his writings on occasion burdens the text’s flow and becomes monotonous. Nonetheless, Dooley’s book is an engaging read, written in an easily accessible style that
allows Flinders’ personality to shine through.
Today, the legacies of many traditional Australian heroes – including, notoriously, James Cook – face mounting public scrutiny and condemnation as their role in colonisation and dispossession proves increasingly repugnant to some modern sensibilities. Dooley acknowledges Flinders’ complicity in the British Empire’s colonisation of Australia and indeed his violent interactions with First Nations peoples. While not absolving him of wrongdoing or treating him as a saint, she encourages us to see Flinders as a man of his times, extraordinary and flawed but
Big data and the origins of the West Miles Pattenden
far from irredeemable.
Dooley’s work renews Flinders as a figure who possessed many of the virtues still valued in Australia hard work, affection, and courage, to name a few and justifies his continuing status in settler historical consciousness as worthy of admiration. Her evocative reconstruction of Flinders the man will go a long way to making that possible. g
Matthew Cunneen is a historian of convict Australia and a re search editor for the ADB at ANU. ❖
that de Mesquita’s understanding of that conflict comes across as all inside out. He posits that the prime effect of the Concordat of Worms (1122), and its counterparts between the pope and the kings of England and France in 1107, was to weaken the pope’s position and not, as the rest of us have it, to herald a golden era of papal influence and power.
The Invention of Power: Popes, kings, and the birth of the West by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Public Affairs $42.99 hb, 345 pp
We live in an age that worships data. If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism. Naturally, quantitative-minded academics have become the high priests of this religion, and they now seem to think they are the authorities on everything. When they cyni cally use trendy tools to legitimise what are really very old precon ceptions, it is as if the linguistic turn and those other movements that sought to ground scholarship in careful, close-read qualitative analysis of texts and contexts never happened. At least, that is the impression one gets from reading this somewhat surreal contri bution to debate about the significance of the European Middle Ages from American political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
The Invention of Power: Popes, kings, and the birth of the West is lavishly illustrated with charts and graphs and references to incentives and game theory. Its author homes in on ‘concordats’, that is, on agreements between the pope and secular rulers which set boundaries for their respective spheres of influence. But de Mesquita is interested only in the early concordats of the twelfth century, not the later ones that changed and undermined them. Moreover, and ironically, he has resurrected one of the oldest theses about the Middle Ages: that the conflict between emperor and pope known as the Investiture Controversy was a key catalyst of paradigmatic demise and of European modernity. The Inves titure Controversy mattered because it triggered a separation of Church and State. Yet what will particularly perplex the many scholars who have pored over primary source material and the dense (often highly Teutonic) historiography on this subject is
The heart of de Mesquita’s study is a detailed analysis of what he calls ‘the concordat game’ – a competition between pope and secular rulers over the appointment of bishops, as regulated by the 1107 and 1122 agreements. According to de Mesquita, the terms of the concordats incentivised popes to consent to royal candidates for bishoprics who were loyal to the secular rather than the ecclesiastical power. So long as an episcopal see remained vacant, the Crown pocketed its revenues, and this effectively forced the pope’s hand. Moreover, the richer the diocese, the stronger the incentives were on both parties – for the king to nominate a henchman and for the pope to acquiesce to him, even if through gritted teeth – because the financial stakes were high er. Thus, gradually, papal control over ecclesiastical institutions in France, Germany, and England was loosened and national churches, prototypes of those later to emerge in the German and English Reformations, consolidated. The self-confident charts that support these propositions include such exemplary propo sitions as one comparing the ‘calorific potential and secularism’ of dioceses and ‘economic expansion over fifty-year periods given prior diocesan secularism’. Neither the inherent unreliability nor the methodological problem presented by generating the data used to populate such charts is much discussed.
The most interesting question about this book is, perhaps, simply why de Mesquita, a distinguished practitioner in his field, wanted to write it. In some ways it ought to gratify medievalists that finding an explanation for ‘the birth of the West’ remains a holy grail even for present-minded members of the Academy. And yet, what confuses here is the scant attention that de Mes quita pays to other recent attempts to address his own chosen subject. His solution – that politics and institutions were key –
If Covid-19 has taught us nothing else, it is that arguments advanced via assertions of statistical significance are practically impervious to criticism
takes us back not only to the occasionally quoted Charles Tilly (whose Coercion, Capital and the European States: 990–1992 is now thirty years old), but also to several generations of crusty, dyspeptic Whigs. It could also be said that rather too much of de Mesquita’s secondary reading also exhumes their defunct scribblings. Of more recent theories that stress the importance of economic factors, or of geography or climate, there is very little beyond a cursory bibliographic acknowledgment. At least this means the reader is spared Niall Ferguson’s Civilization (Penguin, 2011) and his six ‘killer apps’.
Part of the rationale for this oversight is surely that de Mes quita sees his contribution to debate as quite apart from that wider corpus: he grounds his departure of ‘the West’ from ‘the rest’ in a somewhat earlier era than Ferguson. Yet this book still commits the original sin inherent in much of that grand theory literature: it seeks a single key event or variable that explains Western exceptionalism without much self-awareness as to the essential futility of that exercise. De Mesquita’s choice of the medieval concordats as a starting point for Western modernity is novel in a certain sense, but this itself makes his failure to immerse himself in the rich and insightful research around his chosen theme by trained historians particularly disappointing. Happily enough, much of the best work in this field is currently in English. Benedict Wiedermann’s Papal Lordship and European Princes, 1000–1270 (OUP, 2022) is an exemplary and learned ac count of the context which drives much of de Mesquita’s inquiry. Other young scholars, including Benjamin Savill, a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, and Daniel Armstrong, a postdoctoral fellow at St Andrews, are also making important advances on our understanding of the pre-concordat situation. For the post-1122 world, de Mesquita would have done well to read the writings of Barbara Bombi, now author of a major work on Anglo-papal re lations in the fourteenth century (OUP, 2019). One might go on.
The choice of title, The Invention of Power, raises a further question: where might Foucault be in all this (he is certainly not in the bibliography)? Even more irritating than the book’s overblown rhetoric is its quasi-conspiratorial tone. ‘It turns out’ becomes an oft-repeated phrase, as if Bueno de Mesquita wants to invite his reader to accompany him on a personal journey to discovery. Moreover, wider reading within the modern historiography of papal diplomacy and relations with secular powers could have helped him to avoid some of the unfortunate inaccuracies in the text. A casual statement that ‘by the time of the Thirty Years’ War, nepotism was close to eliminated in the papacy’ was certainly alarming to me; it would also likely have come as news to the many seventeenth-century Romans who denounced Urban VIII (r. 1623–44) as the greatest nepotist of them all. The second half of this sentence, ‘apparently returning the selection of the pope to the same religious considerations as had dominated that choice before the creation of the Papal States’ just cannot be taken seriously. Misreads such as these highlight the ongoing importance for Australia and other Anglophone democracies maintaining actual specialists in premodern history in our ‘sector-leading’ universities. g
Duke University Press US$25.95 pb, 239 pp
Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was an interdisciplinary thinker who helped establish the field of the environ mental humanities (or ecological humanities); in 2012 she also co-founded the scholarly journal Environmental Hu manities. Having initially trained in anthropology, Rose strove to push that field and other ethnographic studies beyond their stubborn anthropocentrism. She came to Australia in 1980 from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, to undertake PhD research in Aboriginal Australia. Her thinking was shaped by the decades she spent with Aboriginal mentors and friends in the Northern Territory communities of Lingara and Yarralin. Across her writ ing, in books such as Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction (2011) and Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness (1996), Rose demonstrated and promot ed attentiveness to, and ethical engagement with, the plethora of beings on Earth.
The essays in Kin form a tribute to Rose’s writing and ad vance her conceptual frameworks. Though kinship is a theme throughout, the book takes its name most directly from an essay contributed by the Bawaka Collective, an Indigenous and nonIndigenous, ‘more-than-human’ research group (David Abram coined ‘more-than-human’ in his 1996 book The Spell of the Sen suous; the term draws its meaning from early European accounts of Indigenous cultures’ connections with the non-human world, and aims to unsettle Western anthropocentrism). The essay uses the Yolŋu term ‘gurruṯu’ to speak of a web of relations; they write: ‘Gurruṯu is the way we are related to one another and to everything … [it] positions us, but it does not suggest a conflation of difference, does not let mother become daughter; rather, it honors our connected kinship as it lives the cyclical relationality of our existence’. I noted that this cyclical ‘relationality’ is repre sented within the essay, with the following refrain repeated almost identically eight pages apart: ‘For Yolŋu, even though someone may have passed away a long time ago, they are still alive.’ Their ‘Ending with the Wind, Crying the Dawn’ is a moving and lyr ical tribute to Rose; it speaks not only of their mutual respect, but vividly evokes the ‘milkarri’ or ‘songspirals’ cried and keened by Yolŋu women – within which, they write, Rose has a contin uing place.
What is the value of writing, even writing as complex as this, when species extinctions are accelerating, and settler cultures continue their evisceration of the earth in the name of progress,
or of short-term survival? Should we not act, instead of writing? On this subject, Thom van Dooren notes that Rose ‘insisted that storytelling in the mode of bearing witness was a vital respon sibility. To refuse to turn away, she argued, was “to remain true to the lives within which ours are entangled, whether or not we can accomplish great change”.’
The Bawaka Collective provide another reply, in speaking of the world-making quality of storytelling: ‘Our lives and deaths keep the songspirals alive. And the songspirals keep us alive too. Learning and singing and keening and crying – these keep Country alive too.’ A further function of storytelling, which Kin aptly demonstrates, is its ability to defamiliarise our industrial world, which tends to render banal, or to ‘naturalise’, the ‘earth-shattering violence’ (Kate Wright, in this collection) of techno-capitalist societies.
James Hatley, in his essay on the near-extermination of Buffalo in the state of Montana, memorably calls extinctions a ‘deanimation of world’, referring to the fact that they do not occur in isolation but have catastrophic effects on all beings with which a species is entwined. ‘What begins as Buffalo genocide culminates in prairie ecocide,’ he writes. ‘Deanimation of world’ is itself an elaboration on a thought by van Dooren: that anthropogenic extinction does not have the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, ‘excising one creature from among the many’, but instead is like ‘a dull knife tearing at and shredding the multiple threads of entanglement by which a living kind has previously both sustained its world and been sustained by it’. Likely intensifying Rose’s notion of a ‘double death’ – where ‘the dead are left with no living descendants’ – Hatley builds up to describing a ‘Regime of Harrowing’ in Montana:
The doubling of the harrowing of this land, that in its very harrowing it is rendered harrowing, turns out to be not simply a metaphor or a poetic trope, a quick turn of phrase; it’s also an earthly condition, one with teeth in it, teeth of metal … where vast congregations of Buffalo once roamed the prairie and now wheat fields stretch out in every direction.
Hatley’s is one of several essays in Kin that pay sustained attention to a specific situation concerning non-human life. In doing so, they yield keen insights or arguments that are broadly relevant to inter-species relationships, to histories of such, or to settler cultures’ assaults on the environments that sustain them. Other examples in Kin are van Dooren’s essay on the many spe cies of snails that have become, or are on the brink of becoming, extinct in Hawaii; Kate Rigby and Owain Jones’s essay on ‘road kill’ in Canberra; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s essay on the socially complex, colonially inflected activity of bird watching on the island of Waigeo near West Papua; and Catriona Sandilands’s hybrid poem–essay on ‘Scotch broom’, an ‘exotic-invasive species’ of plant in the southern coastal region of British Columbia.
The most theoretical or conceptually dense, and in this case rewarding, contribution is Isabelle Stengers’ ‘Awakening to the Call of Others: What I learned from existential ecology’. Her essay probes the idea of an objective, disinterested ‘Science’ and its exploitative relationships with its subjects, in contrast to interest ed, ‘entrepreneurial’ scientific practices that might accommodate
a more-than-human ‘cosmopolitics’. Another theoretical essay, Stephen Muecke’s ‘After Nature: Totemism revisited’, argues alongside Rose that for Aboriginal peoples, totemism – which was often mocked by modern European cultures – ‘was no arbitrary or symbolic set of beliefs but was a real system in place in mul tiple-universe societies’. Muecke critiques the artificial division between (human) ‘culture’ and an undifferentiated ‘nature’ – an ontological split he argues derives from the Enlightenment, and which has unfortunately had enduring effects in European and settler societies.
An enormous pile of buffalo skulls at the C.D. Glueworks, Rougeville, Michigan, 1892 (Everett Collection Inc./Alamy)
At one point, I started noting down neo-compound words in the collection: ‘lifedeath’; ‘pastpresents’; ‘natureculture’; ‘tech noculture’; ‘deathzone’, etc. Some of these (e.g. ‘deathzone’) were used by Rose, while others have been coined in her spirit to better describe a reality. They are particularly concentrated in Donna Haraway’s excellent essay, which uses Patricia Piccinini’s ‘technocultural’ works of art to reflect on species endangerment and responsibility in the hyper-technologised present. ‘Living endangered means living in technoculture; it is the condition of flourishing – or not – on Earth now for most critters,’ Haraway writes. ‘Living well in technoculture is part of the obligation of taking care of unexpected country.’
Kin has inspired me to read back through Rose’s body of work. While it is clearly a boon to environmental humanities scholar ship, there is a need for rigorous publications like this – which incrementally elaborate the ‘relational ethics’ that are possible between humans and non-humans (Rose) – for a non-scholarly audience. I hope that, as thinkers continue their imaginative dialogues with Rose, they are able to reach out to others, and in turn find more and more hands willing to meet theirs. g
Prithvi Varatharajan is a poet and essayist who lives in Mel bourne. His début collection of poems and prose, Entries, was published in 2020 by Cordite Books.
Coach House Books
$39.99 pb, 368 pp
Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography
is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and remember this is also your big opportunity to explain what a wonderful person you are and how you’ve been consistently misunderstood …
Clark (no ‘e’) may not feel misunderstood exactly, but his memoir, An Eye for Talent – a diaristic account of his remarkably enduring directorship of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) from 1969 to 2004 – certainly reads like the seizing of an opportunity to burnish the author’s legacy.
The book joins others by contemporaries of Clark – Jim Sharman’s Blood and Tinsel (2008) and David Williamson’s Home Truths (2021) to name two – as insider chronicles of Australian theatre’s coming of age. The beats are well-trodden, from the early dominance of commercial theatre under the aegis of J.C. Williamson’s to the rise of ‘indigenous’ (i.e., not US or British) playwriting via trailblazing works such as Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) and the ‘ocker’ plays which constituted the New Wave of the 1970s.
Where Clark’s pragmatic account differs from its aforemen tioned predecessors – besides being far drier and less personally revealing – is in placing the creation of NIDA in 1958 as an equally important milestone in the development of Australian theatre as, in Julian Meyrick’s words, ‘a project, a set of meaningful relationships rather than a heap of contingent outcomes’.
From the start, NIDA was intended to be, as Clark writes, ‘not an academic drama school but an artistic organisation with an appetite for risk and invention’. By the mid-1950s there was wide agreement within the fledgling industry that ‘a vocational theatre school would have a profound effect on the development of a gen uine Australian theatre’. That would entail, in the eyes of inaugural NIDA Director Robert Quentin, a style of acting that was ‘simple, direct and vigorous’, neither as ‘correct’ as English acting nor as ‘introverted and emotionally self-indulgent’ as the then new American Method school.
In 1963, following ‘three years in a university no-man’s land’,
NIDA was given a permanent home in Sydney: an obscure collec tion of Kensington Racecourse buildings owned by the University of New South Wales which, though virtually derelict, would house the institution for the next twenty-four years, a period Clark notes is still referred to as ‘a golden age’ by senior graduates.
What follows, at least in this telling, are decades of ragsto-riches ascendency, much of which Clark indexes to the long list of ‘old boys’ – actors like Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, and Sam Worthington, as well as numerous designers and technicians – who went on to achieve fame and success in Hollywood. Perhaps there is no other way to boil down the profound cultural impact of an institution like NIDA than to endlessly name-drop like this, but the result begins to resemble one of those useful but colourless official histories that line the shelves of theatre foyer book stands.
There are, disappointingly, few admissions of failure here, only approving critiques of NIDA productions, as from the seem ingly ever-supportive H.G Kippax of The Sydney Morning Herald, are quoted – and Clark gives little insight into his evolution as either director or administrator. The reader is left to speculate on Clark’s directorial craft and educational ethos, which are only ever discussed in the most general terms: ‘teach the person not the subject’, ‘training is cumulative not sequential’, and so on.
Readers of Clark’s generation may be unbothered by his relative social conservatism – perhaps to be expected of someone who grew up in 1950s Tasmania – but for millennials like me the book makes for uncomfortable reading at times. Women are frequently referred to as ‘girls’. Early NIDA productions involving actors in yellowface and blackface are described with little critical reflection. In the book’s final pages, Clark bewails theatre compa nies that are more ‘concern[ed] for diversity and gender … than talent and skill’ without, curiously, acknowledging NIDA’s history of systemic and institutionalised racism, brought to light in 2020 by a group of alumni, students, and former staff. Significant cultural change followed, but Clark has little good to say about NIDA’s governance on either side of his resignation in 2004.
The neo-liberalisation of the higher education sector, as well as NIDA’s increasingly academic turn under a succession of chairs from the 1980s onwards, clearly still rankles with the author. Clark was tempted to resign years before he did, but writes that that would have ‘handed victory to the vipers. Better to take arms against a sea of academics and lawyers – and by opposing, end them.’
Between these pages, it is hard to get the measure of Clark’s success in this. By his own admission, when he left the board (remaining a member of the NIDA Company), his knowledge of the institution was limited to ‘annual general meetings, play productions and to publications’. In his newfound capacity as an observer, he bristles at ‘the semi-commercial Open Program begin[ning] to overshadow the core business of the school’.
That’s as may be, but another kind of shadow – that of Clark’s nostalgia for ‘the glory days’ – is being cast here too. In a recent Hollywood Reporter article on the top twenty-five drama schools in the world, NIDA – currently led by graduate John Bashford – placed a more than respectable fourteenth. The show, in other words, goes on, something for which Clark might have justifiably claimed some credit had he chosen to end this book on a less prematurely eulogistic note. g
Constructing Economic Science: The invention of a discipline 1850–1950 by Keith Tribe Oxford University Press £64 hb, 456 pp
Don’t let the title put you off: this book is not purveying social theory but investigates the historical process by which economics became a university discipline in Brit ain, focusing on how that event changed the nature of economic knowledge. It thus mixes intellectual and institutional history of the highest quality. ‘Constructing’ in the title refers to the cover image of the model built by Vladimir Tatlin and his colleagues of his planned 400-metre tower. Tatlin was a ‘constructivist’ in the sense of the Russian art movement that needed engineers not philosophers. The tower was never realised, much like the am bitions held for economics by Alfred Marshall, its champion at the University of Cambridge, c.1885–1908, who sits at the centre of this book.
Tribe is the only person who could have completed this study. It draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of British economic literature, which Tribe has been mastering since his book Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (1978). That research has been conduct ed in parallel with work on the history of German economics, beginning with Governing Economy: The reformation of German economic discourse 1750–1840 (1988). The combined effect is one of Tribe’s distinguishing features as a scholar – the ability to view the British through German eyes and vice versa. This, incidentally, makes him one of the few people in the world who can conduct source criticism on Karl Marx’s Capital, the results of which are devastating for Marx’s standing as an economic theorist and historian (see chapter six of Tribe’s The Economy of the Word).
The intersection of German and British economics is also at play in this volume. The German story is one of a policy discourse (Kameralwissenschaft) that was being taught at university to future administrators until it was transformed into metaphysical soup once it came into contact with post-Kantian philosophy around 1800, and then disappeared into irrelevance. Seen from this point of view, the comparatively modest penetration of British univer sities by German metaphysics in the nineteenth century prompts the question: what happened to British political economy? We have not been in a position to answer this question due to the sorry state of the history of economics.
This situation has been improving over the past fifty years or so because historians of political thought have started reading figures such as Adam Smith. But they have hardly got beyond 1800 and have therefore little to say about Ricardo and noth ing about the role of universities in changing the structure of
knowledge. Tribe has had to do it all by himself. The book thus emerges from the stubbornness of a scholar who was prepared to visit university archives from Oxford to Dundee to discover the contexts surrounding such low-level, university-specific decisions as whether or not to create a new degree, which academics to hire, and how to revise curricula.
This recovery represents both the book’s original source base and its major methodological challenge to those intellectual historians who are accustomed to studying ‘context’ as other ideas disclosed in texts. Tribe’s point is that in the age of research universities most of these texts were only written because the authors had academic careers and responded to the incentives arising from this way of life. In other words, academic careers created academic economics; before then, economics was tied to parliamentary and political debate and, to a lesser degree, to the vocational needs of commerce students. This is a major revision to the usual narrative that has Alfred Marshall oversee ing the institutional embodiment of neoclassical economics at Cambridge in the form of the Economics Tripos, established in 1903, as if neoclassical economics existed in the wild and was simply domesticated.
Tribe makes four correctives to this account. First, Marshall is unassimilable to what we think of as neoclassical economics because he was focused on building a toolkit for addressing social problems.
Second, Marshall’s dream of producing accomplished grad uates did not materialise owing to a lack of students capable of acquiring the organon or reasoning apparatus that Marshall had fashioned for the vocation.
Third, degrees in Commerce were the original site for teach ing economics in universities but the economists outmanoeuvred their rivals and set up their own citadels; they did so not by relying on any demand from the public or private sectors for trained economists but by capturing university committees.
Fourth, Marshall’s legacy withered shortly after his death in 1924 as the London School of Economics came to set the national curriculum, not Cambridge.
This brings us to Lionel Robbins, a charismatic huckster who became a professor at the London School of Economics in 1929 at the age of thirty. Robbins’s knowledge of economics, the world around him, and the German texts that he liked to cite was demonstrably circumscribed. This, Tribe suggests, allows us to make sense of his turn to methodology and the pneumatic world of supply and demand curves: he made the most of what he had, which was not a lot. Tribe mostly treats the demise of Marshallianism and its replacement by what is essentially today’s Microeconomics 101 with the historian’s detachment; it is neither good nor bad but simply what happened. At certain points, how ever, one encounters grumpiness in Tribe’s presentation, which might be a cover for despair that the project for an empirical and ‘social’ science devolved into a playground for third-rate mathematicians and reformers in a hurry. g
Ryan Walter teaches the history of political and economic thought at the University of Queensland, where he is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Studies. His most recent book is Before Method and Models (OUP, 2021) ❖
Fiona Kelly McGregor has published eight books, including Buried Not Dead and Indelible Ink Her latest title is the historical novel Iris. McGregor is also known for her performance art and event curation, and contributes regularly to The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, and The Monthly.
I would head west to witness the effect of rain across the continent. As the floods recede, I’d check out the Barka, Murrumbidgee, and Darling rivers. If accessible, I’d camp at the AWC property near Kathi Thanda: the wildlife would be going crazy, the birds and the flowers. Or I’d go to México.
What’s your idea of hell?
Peter Dutton as PM.
What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Chastity and decorum – characteristics overwhelmingly expected to be demonstrated by women, which are only excuses for patriarchal oppression.
What’s your favourite film?
I’ll have to name a few. Zed, Aferim, Sembene (biopic), I shot Andy Warhol, Il giardino dei Finzi Contini.
And your favourite book?
This changes all the time. In the past year, three outstanding ones were Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, and Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever. An abiding touchstone is Judith Hemschemeyer’s edition of the Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Pemulwuy, Claude Cahun, Chavela Vargas.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
I really dislike the term ‘politically correct’. I’d like to hear ‘shivoo/shivaroo’ again – an old Australian term for party, possibly of Cockney origin.
Who is your favourite author? Naaaaah – can’t choose!
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
I honestly can’t think – maybe James Baldwin from his nonfiction writing? I was captivated for many years by the voice/ personality of a Japanese poet called Yosano Akiko – the Rexroth translations. But she is quite mysterious – I don’t know much about her.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Courage to push the envelope. Vision and voice.
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
Tintin and Asterix were the books I taught myself to read with as a pre-schooler.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. Tolkien. I would never read him again.
Do you have a favourite podcast?
I like The Daily, 7am, The Book Shelf, and The Art Show.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
When I have to do too many jobs to pay the bills. My hyperactivity and digital distractions. I can only write novels with my phone switched off, and Wifi disconnected.
What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?
Acuity, bravery, deep knowledge of the subject, curiosity, style. I’m an art critic, so I’ll name art critics and essayists: Hetti Perkins, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Tristen Harwood, Neha Kale, Paul Kelaita, Alison Croggon, Coco Fusco, Chris Kraus.
I love it. The tougher the better. I’m a bit prolix, so I need tough editing. I’m notorious for handing finished work back and saying ‘More, let’s go another round!’
I love the opportunity to spend time with peers and colleagues, and talk directly to readers. But I dislike festivals that focus on celebrity and impose hierarchies. I’d like to see more panels on the day-to-day reality of writing, to demystify us and create appreciation for our labour and craft. Festivals, if run as corporate events, can crush the very thing they are supposed to be for. If run with communal values, they can be wonderful.
No. In general, only their success is valued, not their place as workers.
An essay for an exhibition catalogue and a personal essay. I’m also planning novels – I have ideas for five! I’ll get started on the first one during the coming holidays. g
play, Ginsburg tells the audience her strategy: ‘Be smart, smile. Be strategic. Be a lady.’ No angry feminists here.
I was struck by this vision of feminism – so white and polite –and in many ways a rejection of the sorts of loud, angry activism of the #MeToo movement and the women’s liberation movement. The play seems to imply that women, and people of minority groups, only get the equality they deserve if they are on their best behaviour. Ginsburg in RBG is angry, but it is the kind of demure and controlled anger that is more akin to disappointment. The only time in the play when Ginsburg loses her cool is in her criticism of Trump, thereby undermining the separation of executive and judicial powers by trying to influence a presidential election. Even then, the audience presumably agrees with her assessment of Trump’s character.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), the late and great asso ciate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, was notoriously difficult to decipher. She was shy, enigmatic, and unused to clamour. Her career was distinguished by her sharp arguments and belief that due process, not reactivi ty, is the route to a fairer society. How, then, do you represent the interiority of a person who made herself inscrutable? According to RBG: Of Many, One, the new play by Suzie Miller, author of the acclaimed Prima Facie, it is hidden emotion – a deep well of quieted outrage – that propelled Ginsburg’s life work.
Directed by Priscilla Jackman, RBG is structured around Ginsburg’s interactions with three presidents that were defining moments in her career: the interview with Bill Clinton that led to her nomination for the Supreme Court in 1993; Barack Obama’s attempt to have Ginsburg resign to pave the way for another liberal justice; and her public censure of the presidential nominee Donald Trump. Heather Mitchell, in a bravura performance, portrays Ginsburg not just over this nearly thirty-year period, but from the ages of thirteen to eighty-seven. It is remarkable to see Mitchell go from the ungainly movements of a teenager to the stooped shuffle of an elderly woman.
Mitchell’s performance carries the weight of the entire show. Her resemblance to Ginsburg is uncanny, and you could almost believe that Mitchell is the true embodiment of Ginsburg’s inner world. But the problem of writing a one-woman show about someone as sphinx-like as Ginsburg is that any representation will be a projection of what the writer, and audience, hope Ginsburg to be. To be sure, this is true of any historical figure portrayed in a play. It is an issue of dramatic epistemology: because we can never truly know what the character/icon is thinking or feeling, we fill any lacunae with our own desires.
Who, or what, then, do we need Ginsburg – or ‘the Notorious R.B.G.’ as she is affectionately known on the internet – to be? Something akin to a feminist saint, an almost unflawed paragon of virtue who won battles for gender equality, and dissented from the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of civil rights laws, without needing to resort to overt expressions of fury. At one point in the
There is something of the mise en abyme about the play’s form as a monodrama, Mitchell’s performance, and the hagiographical treatment of Ginsburg. RBG features a single character and is performed by a single person, obscuring the complexity of both the collaborative nature of theatre-making and collective move ments. Even the play’s title collapses singularity and multiplicity: Ginsburg is both an exemplar and the everywoman.
Ginsburg, in the culture at large, is a synecdoche for the American feminist movement’s hard-won legal advancements. There is no doubt that Ginsburg was an extraordinary woman, let alone human being, but the play paints her achievements as though they were not joint efforts. The script’s focus on Ginsburg’s emotional and domestic worlds obscures the fact that Ginsburg may have been representing causes in court, but she did not do all the work alone. This is partly to do with the play’s form: it is monologue, after all. It is difficult to represent the teams, col leagues, and activists whose work led to the realisation of legal successes when there is only one character on stage.
While the script doesn’t attend to the small army of legal and activist professionals who worked alongside Ginsburg in the fight to end gender discrimination, RBG is a tender representation of those who loved and were loved by Ginsburg. RBG is both a legal drama and a love story. The audience learns about Ginsburg’s husband and primary supporter, Marty, who facilitated Ginsburg’s career by taking on a larger share of domestic labour than was the norm for twentieth-century marriages. The play tenderly dramatises the decades-long love and deep respect the couple shared, and the scenes detailing their mutual sacrifices and care in the face of loss are moving.
RBG: Of Many, One is an elegant, feeling play. Designer David Fleischer creates a relatively unadorned stage. A few choice costume changes represent different historical events and the process of ageing. The script is sharp, and Mitchell’s performance is engrossing. We learn about Ginsburg’s passion for opera, which at significant moments in the play is used to interesting (and emotive) effect by composer and sound designer Paul Charlier.
I do wonder, however, who this production is for. Some members of the audience were visibly moved – and Ginsburg’s life is indeed moving. But we are not in America; Ginsburg is not an Australian icon. Her battles are not necessarily ours. Australia has, is having, its own fight for women’s liberation. Surely there is a complex, difficult, unsaintly Australian feminist icon out there deserving of her own dramatic treatment? g
How rare an experience it is to be in an exhibition where you feel you are in the presence of the artist at work. It is as if you are watching the artist’s hand and eye moving swiftly in perfect unison as he outlines the object of his intense looking, repeating contours, making corrections, starting afresh, appear ing to breathe life into his subjects, and thinking all the while.
Of the five hundred or so drawings that Fred Williams brought back with him to Melbourne in 1956 after a five-year stint in London, over one hundred and twenty are included in this wonderful and engaging exhibition Fred Williams: The London Drawings (Ian Potter Gallery: NGV Australia, until 29 January 2023). These are not highly finished works; apart from one or two drawings, they are sketches done on the spot. Some appear to have been worked over later; others were used as studies for works in other media, notably etchings. All convey a sense of immediacy, a sense of the living moment. To those familiar only with Williams’s later paintings and prints of the Australian landscape, this exhibition will reveal a different Williams – an observer of the human form, of people and animals at rest and in motion, and of a very different landscape.
Williams had completed his formal art training at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Art School before he left for London at the end of 1951. He was twenty-four years old. An appetite for work and study had also taken him to George Bell’s school and to regular drawing outdoors. Even before his departure for England, he was known for his determined, in deed frenetic pace of work. His friend, the artist Ian Armstrong, described him at the Gallery School discarding one sheet after another in ‘clouds of charcoal dust’. He won a drawing prize at the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1947; two years later, the NGV purchased one of his drawings. Despite this early recognition, Williams was self-aware enough to be in no hurry to finish his education. He went to London to deepen his artistic knowledge, as both a practising artist and as one who wished to familiarise himself with the great art in the museum collections there. Having little money, he had to support himself and so found work at a framing establishment while enrolling at the School of Art of the Chelsea Polytechnic, where he attended evening life-drawing classes, a practice he continued throughout his five years in London. The drawings from the nude that he made there, and the fellow students and others he observed, form the first of four thematic groupings in the exhibition, the others being animal studies, views around London and the countryside, and the music hall drawings.
In many of the nude studies, one can see the process by which the drawing was created, beginning with traces of an initial armature, followed by the application of vigorous and repeated contours and then shading with the flat end of the drawing im plement – usually red conté crayon – to depict tonally the physical bulk of the human body. More drawing might follow, sometimes in a different medium or colour, as adjustments were made and emphases applied. Although these stages may be separated and
analysed, the pictorial result is wholly organic and fluent, while adding a temporal dimension to the work. The naked body is a challenging form to draw, and in London Williams returned to it repeatedly as an essential activity in keeping his drawing and observational skills exercised. He was well aware of the funda mental place of drawing in the training and practice of artists in the European tradition. ‘[D]rawing exposes all,’ he wrote later in his diary. To make the statement more emphatic and personal, he added ‘[It’s] certainly true of me.’
The animals at Regent’s Park Zoo, which he would visit on weekends with Francis Lymburner, provided Williams with yet more complex forms and frequently moving subjects. A swift drawing of a squatting gibbon captures the fleeting moment of
eye contact between species. Other sketches show a panoply of African animals including cheetahs, tigers, lions, a sharp-eyed secretary bird, and several of an elephant. The elephant drawings culminate in a large, finished work in black conté in which the animal is shown in profile, teetering on the edge of a raised ground, presumably the barrier in the animal’s enclosure visible in photographs from the 1950s. (Elephants are no longer kept at London Zoo.) There are echoes here of Rembrandt’s draw ings of lions and elephants, and of Goya’s etched elephant in one of the plates of the Disparates, but Williams’s depictions are spontaneous and by no means imitative.
The scenes of London depict glimpses of people going about their daily life. It is in this section of the exhibition that we get a sense of London at a particular period of history. A summary sketch of a one-legged pedlar on a crutch balancing his wares on his head, and night-time views of unlit streets, remind us that London was still recovering from a catastrophic war that had ended barely six years before Williams arrived. The landscapes –of canals, thatched buildings, and open fields – are drawn mostly
in pen and ink, but there are also fine examples of Williams’s skilful and spontaneous use of brush and wash. The example of Rembrandt’s drawn and etched landscapes lies behind many of the English scenes, and seeing them grouped together here serves to emphasise the radical nature of Williams’s break with the European pictorial mode of representing landscape after his return to Australia in 1956.
Williams’s drawing, at its most exuberant, appears in the music hall subjects in which his attention shifts in turns from performers to audience. The performers’ actions are captured mid-movement; they juggle, somersault, dance, play music, and sing as the drawn line moves swiftly, arresting the scene on paper, while retaining its spirit and sense of movement – even, seemingly, its sound. Williams can also capture effectively moments of silent introspection: female performers quietly waiting their turn in the wings are the subject of two of the drawings. The audience is shown interacting in groups or individually reacting to the action on stage. Some writers have detected an undercurrent of sadness in Williams’s music hall subjects, yet the effect of this display is overwhelmingly one of liveliness. This is due to the linear vivacity of the drawings, the artist’s all-consuming attention to his subject matter, and to the sheer number of sketches that he made.
The exhibition is selected from a magnificent gift of drawings recently made to the NGV by Lyn Williams, the artist’s widow, and the Williams family. It is appropriate and timely that an exhibition drawn from this gift should be held, accompanied by a fine and fully illustrated (though, in some respects, eccentrically designed) catalogue published to acknowledge the generosity of the donors. Cathy Leahy, Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the NGV, is the curator of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue to which she has contributed the introductory essay on Williams’s London years. Deanna Petherbridge has written on aspects of the graphic imperative of Williams as draughtsman. Chris Stephens provides an overview of the English art scene in the 1950s. Fiona Gruber gives a brief history of the music hall, which provided Williams with theatrical subject matter, especially for his drawings and prints, not to mention a warm environment in winter. Louise Wilson has provided a technical analysis of Williams’s drawing materials. Lyn Williams, who met her husband in 1960, has contributed a brief personal account of what she knew from Williams of his years in London.
The NGV has been systematically building its collection of Fred Williams drawings and prints over many decades, by pur chase and especially by gift. However, this latest donation is in a class of its own and is rightly being celebrated in this show.
The exhibition is elegantly installed with wide ledges placed along some walls for the horizontal display of related material, mostly photographs of Fred Williams in England, but also many etchings and gouaches. Chairs are helpfully provided. The labels with short explanatory texts are excellent and help viewers to better understand the work in question.
This exhibition is free of charge and is not to be missed. g
Irena Zdanowicz was from 1981 to 2001 Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2003, she collaborated with Stephen Coppel for the catalogue of the British Museum’s exhibition, Fred Williams: An Australian vision.
Here is a list of things you won’t see the great American writer Joyce Carol Oates doing in this documentary: looting, detonating a bomb, strangling children, having sex, eating, eating human flesh, sleeping, kissing, cussing, mastur bating,masturbating over a corpse,screaming,lobotomising a lover, shedding tears (though she comes close), or being murdered.
In case you don’t know, all these things occur in Oates’s fiction – some repeatedly, if not routinely. It helps to know this when viewing Stig Björkman’s Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind, since it adds a note of suspense to the Swedish director’s portrait of his softly spoken subject.
There is nothing obviously cinematic about Joyce Carol Oates’s existence. The documentary makes a point of this from the open ing shot. A cumbersome microphone occupies the foreground; we hear footsteps as a blurry figure approaches, then comes into focus as Oates in extreme close-up, not sure where to look. Is she nervous, Björkman asks? Of course she is: she is ‘not a film person […] not an actress’.
Shot almost entirely by day at Oates’s spacious home in New Jersey, in a sober natural light, the new footage has a cool clarity which contrasts starkly with clips from older studio interviews. In her unpretentious study, the camera dwells on details of her person and surrounds. We see her cats, her small clean hands, her slightly grimy laptop and desk. We pan across long-hand draft or notes, and proofs with emendations and (sometimes) doodles. She is surrounded by books, family photographs, and what appear to be small painted portraits of herself. We spy not one but two copies of her picturebook Naughty Chérie (2008), which was marketed as ‘a purrrfect bedtime story’.
As the Guardian noted in 2004, nearly every review of an Oates book begins with an attempt to tally her works (she herself has long since lost count). She seems to have published around sixty novels. Björkman dispatches the mixed blessing of this staggering hypergraphia upfront, via clips from numerous tele vision interviews. He addresses her politics in a similarly indirect manner, via her Twitter attacks on the man she calls ‘T***p’. Early sequences establish the documentary’s characteristic devices:
the use of intertitles with Oates quotes; lightly animated head lines, tweets, and emails appearing onscreen; novel excerpts read by Laura Derne over archival footage, beginning with the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, the subject of Oates’s National Book Awardwinning novel them (1969).
A visual subplot involves a journey through decades of fashion. In 1960s interviews, the big-haired, doe-eyed Oates looks luminously young and improbably chic; she might be Lisa Minnelli’s shy, studious cousin. In some of the new footage, she sports a determinedly gothic black straw hat, while her pencilled eyebrows – drawn the same way over decades – might be inspired by Edith Piaf. Meanwhile, Oates’s manner and habits of speech remain remarkably consistent.
Like many of Oates’s many novels, the film has a loosely associative structure, although broadly there are two acts: the first examining her literary career in different historical contexts; the second delving into more personal matters, her marriages, family history. For the first half, Oates’s second husband, Charles, remains in the background with the cats, but he comes to the fore midway through to reveal a dry sense of humour beneath his slightly unkempt exterior. Meanwhile, Oates nervously giggles and writhes, coming alive as a very different woman: blushing, tender, flustered. That Charles died in 2019 makes their scenes together more poignant. One of the most moving readings comes from Oates’s raw memoir A Widow’s Story (2011), which concerns the loss of her first husband, Raymond J. Smith.
While Björkman largely keeps out of the way, he explains in an early voiceover that he was drawn to Oates’s work after reading Blonde (2000), her massive novel about Marilyn Monroe, the sub ject of a recent, controversial Netflix adaptation, which features a talking foetus. He speaks about the difficulty of winning her over to the project. But who is Björkman’s target demographic? Why should we care about Oates, and why now?
Besides the relentless relevance of her work’s themes, from campus sexual assault and political conspiracy to corporate greed and environmental disaster, there is its prestige and sheer volume. In addition to the novels, Oates – a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize – has published many hundreds of short stories, as well as poems, plays, memoir, essays, and copious criticism. Depending on which book of hers you are reading, Oates could be described as a realist, a political writer and social critic, a master of gothic horror, an impressionist, a satirist, an experimentalist. She writes of urban and rural settings, rich and poor, past and present, public and private life, the fantastic and the mundane. She pub lished four books in 2021 alone, aged eighty-two, following hard upon her novel Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars (2020), which runs to more than 900 pages. With such quantity, it can’t all be quality – but who has the time to check? I assume that Björkman had no hand in the billing of the film as a ‘comprehensive examination of [Oates’] life and art’.
Oates and Björkman are roughly coeval, but Björkman’s output is relatively modest. His documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words received a special mention for the 2015 Cannes Film Festival L’Œil d’or. His other films include the satirical short To Australia With ... Love, a response to the banning of Björkman’s film I Love, You Love from the 1969 Melbourne Film Festival.
As for ‘comprehensive’ coverage of Oates’s art, Björkman’s
documentary is surprisingly uninterested in literary questions of genre or prose style, process and craft. Ask her about the diagrams, the sketches, I wanted to shout. Perhaps he did: perhaps the answers weren’t interesting, or weren’t forthcoming. I also kept wondering when and how the documentary would deal with the characteristic violence of her fiction, which is arguably getting nastier in its graphic depictions of extreme sadism, sexual preda tion, and so on. It didn’t – perhaps because Oates is weary of an swering questions on this front, having maintained over decades that her novels are violent because life, not least American life, is violent. But if you found your way into Oates through novels like Zombie (1995) and Babysitter (2022), the omission is striking: you would never know from this documentary that the woman onscreen has penned such lines as ‘I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole and you’d never know it’ (Zombie) or proposed the serial killer as analogue for the writer’s imagination, with its ‘caprices and amorality’.
Oates is a fearless writer, in any medium, but this is not a fear less documentary. It is respectful, up close, never too personally invasive (there is no mention of Oates’s estranged, institutional ised sister). What Oates voices is all voluntary memory, although her body language betrays currents of alarming strength running below. As often as she is eloquent, the author is hesitant or even halting, answering questions with eyes trained inwards, far from fully present. Trying to describe her rural upbringing in upstate New York, she keeps snagging on the word ‘primitive’.
But how much of all this is performance? I think back to one of her journal entries from 1976, where she describes consciously projecting a ‘girlish’ persona, concealing her ‘calculating’ self behind this ‘naïve’ front; another from 1978 complaining that people see her as ‘big-eyed and shy and tremulous’, scorning one reporter who saw ‘fear’, whereas she felt ‘hostility’.
Although excerpts from Oates’s novels are often paired with her response to questions on points of her own life, the film is never heavy-handed in suggesting biographical parallels. Oates herself supplies some of the connections, openly describing the 2007 novel I’ll Take You There (from which the documentary takes its title) as being based on her college experience, and explaining how the novel The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007) was inspired by her beloved paternal grandmother, whose gravedigger father committed suicide following the attempted murder of his wife and child.
The film loses momentum in the final quarter, when the di rector seems at a loss as to what visuals to provide to accompany readings (one irrelevant shot of train tracks seemed to repeat), and begins to push the limit with talking heads.
In a 1976 interview for The Paris Review, Oates suggested that ‘[t]he average review is a quickly written piece not meant to be definitive’. During the time it took me to write this review, Oates has doubtless written far more (she has certainly been tweeting to her 224,000 followers, mostly about her cats and Elon Musk). The film itself is certainly not meant to be definitive: the inexhaustible Oates is an inexhaustible subject. At its end, she remains an enigma. For a woman who has long queried whether she even has a personality, this is surely inevitable. g
A longer version of this review appears online.
In this issue, Shannyn Palmer reviews Kim Mahood’s essay collection, Wandering with Intent. Palmer recalls the impact, within remote Indigenous communities, of Mahood’s 2012 essay ‘“Kardiya are like Toyotas”: White Workers on Australia’s Cultural Frontiers’. Mahood has explained that kardiya means ‘whitefellow, but it might as well mean stranger’ in the Kimberley. In the May 2011 issue of ABR, Mahood reviewed Desert Channels: The impulse to conserve, by Libby Robin, Chris Dickman, and Mandy Martin, showing us another dimension of cross-cultural relations in remote Australia. Here is an edited version of that review, which opens with a familiar scene.
In recent months a significant part of Australia has been sub ject to deluge and flood. As the continent recharges its waterways and water tables, we are like an ant nest into which a cu rious child has thrust a hose – rushing about rescuing and shoring up, patching and rebuilding, behaving as if this upheaval is an aberration, and as if building towns and cities on flood plains is sensible.
As I write this, record downpours in the Boulia region have turned the channel country into a slow-moving inland sea for the third year in succession. The pulse of the desert has been beating fast in recent times, after a period in which it was barely discerni ble. Climatic events that are seen as catastrophic when they occur around the rim of the continent are recognised as the norm as you move inland. That these patterns, or pulses, are the norm is evident in the boom-and-bust adaptations of the ecology of the region, the profligacy with which life exploits the unpredictable inundations, and the capacity to switch to survival mode during hard, dry times. In the face of an unpredictable future, the desert may have lessons for the whole of Australia.
Desert Channels tells the story of this iconic and remote region. Like the braided channels of the desert waterways that give this part of Australia its unique character, the book weaves together the multiple strands that make up its cultural and natural environ ment. While a strong ecological thread runs through the book, as much attention is paid to the people, both Indigenous and nonIndigenous, who make up Australia’s character today and who have occupied and explored it in the past.
In the prologue, written jointly by environmental historian Libby Robin and archaeologist Mike Smith, reference is made to ‘an old idea that the structure of a landscape affects not just the ecology of a region but also its historical geography’.
The book begins with an introduction to the locality and its bio-regions by ecologist Chris Dickman, who for twenty years has been visiting and studying the Desert Channels. Dickman provides scientific gravitas with an engagingly lucid style, and his expertise and passion infuse subsequent chapters with a sense of pleased astonishment that the natural world can present so multifarious a character.
An essay by historian Tom Griffiths goes some way towards reclaiming the testimony of writer Alice Duncan-Kemp, who grew up on Mooraberrie Station at the beginning of the twentieth century. The empathy that allowed Duncan-Kemp recognitions and insights also made her suspect as a reliable witness, and her detailed observations of the lives and customs of the local Indigenous people, recorded in a style that echoed Aboriginal techniques of storytelling, undermined her credibility among the scientists of her own culture.
Contemporary local testimony is provided by Karen and
Angus Emmott, exemplary custodians of country for which they feel a profound attachment and responsibility. The observations and natural history collections of Angus Emmott, who developed a passion for natural history as a child, have made a significant contribution to the scientific understanding of the region.
Subsequent chapters explore the diversity of the natural envi ronment through its plants and animals, birds, insects, and reptiles, its fossil record, the ecosystems of its rivers and artesian springs
A series of ‘Interludes’ punctuate each section with painting sequences by Mandy Martin, whose artistic project is committed to the recognition of aesthetic values as an intrinsic part of en vironmental values.
What emerges as one makes one’s way through the book is a sense of how many people are working together towards a single goal: the sustainability of a unique and significant region. Desert Channels first draws the reader into an appreciation of the ecological and cultural value of the channel country, and in the final section of the book delivers a group of essays dedicated to models for conservation.
Pastoralist Guy Fitzhardinge argues that ‘The formal conser vation estate will always be too small to meet the goals for con servation sought by the urban population.’ Much of the channel country is under pastoral leases, and Fitzhardinge goes on to de scribe partnerships which include local pastoralists, scientists, and national and international non-government organisations, and to outline practical strategies by which production and conservation can coexist within the market-driven economies of today.
In his essay on desert livelihoods, Mark Stafford Smith uses the term ‘desert drivers’ to describe the feedback loop between unpredictable climate, scarce resources, sparse population, and remoteness, and the impact these factors have on the financial livelihoods of the people who live there. The same factors are responsible for the survival of the desert’s great resources of cultural and natural heritage, and it is on these more reliable resources that Stafford Smith argues that desert livelihoods can be built. ‘The future of these livelihoods depends on establishing the value of inland Australia in the national mind.’
Luke Keogh uses his essay to tell stories within stories, allow ing Indigenous voices to speak alongside scientists and historians. In the final chapter, Robin describes the scientific sharing of knowledge that has contributed to the extensive resource now available. This is how one hopes science works, with an eye on the greater good, the advancement of knowledge rather than the advancement of careers, and a passionate curiosity about the natural world in all its variety and strangeness. g
1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp
1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair 1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs
1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite
1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street 1983 Don Watson reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s The Blainey View 1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach 1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker
1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders
1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance 1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History 1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White 1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins 1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism
1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley 1993 Peter Straus reviews David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon
1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper 1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage 1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting 1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks 1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour 1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems 2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net 2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems
2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon 2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers 2004 Daniel Thomas on the reopening of the National Gallery of Victoria 2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith
2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht 2008 Richard Holmes’s Seymour Lecture on biography 2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands 2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard
2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead 2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel 2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton
2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour 2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses 2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience 2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’
2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments 2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize 2021 Declan Fry on Stan Grant
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Designed for those interested in working in journalism in the international field, Monash University’s International Relations and Journalism double master’s degree provides insight to some of the key issues in international relations together with an opportunity to work with award-winning journalists and academics as you cultivate high-level skills in research and reporting across all media – print, online, radio and video.
Learn more about the Master of International Relations and Journalism double degree: monash.edu/arts/study/MIR-Journalism
