Australian Book Review – March 2022, issue no. 440 by Australian Book Review

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Gareth Evans The challenge of global extinction Sheila Fitzpatrick Theory’s long summer Penny Russell Anna Clark on history-making Frances Wilson The day of horrors Peter Rose 2021 and all that

The mire of identity politics by Mindy Gill

Berlin (5)

GERMANY Leipzig Dresden (2)

Weimar (2)

Bayreuth

Munich (4)

A new column for illiberal times

Advances

These are critical, alarming – even alarmist times. On page seven, 2021 Calibre Prize winner Theodore Ell writes about a recent outrage in Canberra that ‘exposes a violent, expansionist nihilism within our culture’: the descent by thousands of anti-vaccination demonstrators on the national capital and the subsequent closure of a popular charity event. Mindful of these illiberal developments, ABR is pleased to announce the creation of a new monthly column focused on politics. With generous support from the Judith Neilson Institute, we will publish extended long-form political commentaries intended as intellectual provocations across a range of contentious issues such as native title, climate change, lowering the voting age, and state and federal politics. The column builds on the success of the magazine’s recent turn towards a higher proportion of commentary pieces, and will draw on its existing pool of expert commentators while broadening the net to include new contributors, whose original and incisive approaches to these issues capture the temper of these activist times. We hope the column will influence political discourse in Australia, shifting it beyond the confines of the daily news-cycle into the wider context of informed intellectual and cultural debate. The column kicks off this issue with ABR Rising Star Mindy Gill’s critique of the increasingly dogmatic assumptions of identity politics and the resulting ossification of our reviewing culture. But there will be plenty more to come this year, and we welcome enquiries on potential topics of interest.

Prizes galore

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is now open, with a closing date of 2 May. Once again, because of the generosity of ABR Patron Ian Dickson, we are able to offer total prize money of $12,500, of which the winner will receive $6,000 (there are two other cash prizes). The judges on this occasion are Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella. On 19 January, Anthony Lawrence was named the winner of the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize at a Zoom ceremony. All five contestants read the poems shortlisted and published in our January–February issue, then Morag Fraser – past Chair of ABR and Peter Porter’s biographer – announced the overall winner, who receives $6,000. (Morag supports the Porter Prize with fellow Patron Andrew Taylor). Of the winning poem, ‘In the Shadows of Our Heads’, the judges – Jaya Savige, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Anders Villani – had this to say: ‘Brimming with surprise, supple, pitch-perfect imagery, linguistic energy and wit, “In the Shadows of Our Heads” is a stunningly vibrant poem by a masterful technician at the top of his game. This unusual love poem revels in the unpredictability of those connections, intellectual and physical, forged between simpatico minds and damaged bodies across space and time. A vivid, potent reminder of love’s dance of proximity and distance – at a time when these fundamental bases of human intimacy have been thrown into fraught relief – it is a work deftly attuned to our present moment.’ This is the second time Anthony Lawrence has won our poetry prize; he did so first in 2010, the year before it was

renamed the Porter Prize. After the official announcement, he told Advances: ‘To win the Porter Prize is not only a wonderful surprise, given the quality of the other poems on the shortlist, but it’s an important personal pleasure, given my respect and admiration for Peter Porter and his enduring influence in Australia and the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, when the Calibre Essay Prize closed on 17 January, we had received 566 entries from seventeen countries. Judging is now underway (the panel consists of Declan Fry, Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox). We look forward to naming the winner – and publishing his or her essay – in the May issue.

The poor cousin

Fund the Arts represents a needed and refreshing intensification of the campaign (passionate but hitherto pretty informal) to focus attention on the woeful neglect of the arts in this country and to influence the election to parliament of sympathetic independents. David Latham, one of the organisers of the campaign, writes about it on page twenty-five. There will be a related public event at Readings Hawthorn at 6.30 pm on 4 April. Speakers include Emily Bitto, Peter Rose, Clare Forster, and Ben Eltham.

John Bryson (1935–2022)

John Bryson – author and former barrister – has died, aged eighty-six. Bryson was best known as the author of 1985’s Evil Angels, which examined the trial of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain. The book was lauded as a forensic study of one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in Australian history. Spiros Zavos, reviewing the book for ABR in December 1985, noted that it is ‘much more than a reworking of the arguments for and against Lindy Chamberlain’s innocence. Bryson has consciously tried to create a work of art ... Like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a work he has been clearly influenced by, Evil Angels is concerned about the context of the tragedy and its impact on the leading players.’ Bryson had a long association with ABR, both as writer and Patron. He first appeared in the magazine in November 1980: a short story titled ‘Blowing It’. (You can read the story, and Spiros Zavos’s review, in our digital archive.) Bryson went on to appear in ten other issues, most recently in 2013.

Changes at ABR

In early February, ABR farewelled its digital editor (and all-round technological troubleshooter), Jack Callil. Jack was an editorial intern in 2018 and soon joined the staff. During his three and a half years with us, he made many notable contributions, from the ‘Book of the Week’ feature (which he proposed within a week of his arrival) to a major overhaul of the magazine’s website in 2019 of which we are all the beneficiaries. Many of our contributors will have benefited from Jack’s editorial nous and scrupulous proofreading. Jack now takes up a position as deputy production editor at Crikey. While he will continue his association with ABR as a freelance contributor, we would like to thank him for the stylish digital stamp he has left on the magazine. Ave atque vale! [Advances continues on page seven] AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Australian Book Review March 2022, no. 440

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Intern Stacy Chan, Florence Honybun, Isabella Venutti Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Image credits and information Front cover: Illustration 97813643 © Robertzsombori | Dreamstime. com Page 29: Berserkjahraun Lava Field at Bjarnarhofn on Snaefellsnes Peninsula of Iceland (Lee Rentz/Alamy) Page 61: US President Lyndon B. Johnson surrounded by security personnel arriving at the New South Wales Art Gallery on a visit to Sydney, 22 October 1966 (detail) (Photograph: John Mulligan, National Library of Australia)

ABR March 2022

LETTERS

Theodore Ell, Alistair Thomson

COMMENTARY

8 21 25 35

Mindy Gill Judith Bessant et al. David Latham Thomas H. Ford

The mire of identity politics Political interference in research funding Putting the arts on the political stage The irresistible rise of brain fog

HISTORY

12 13 51

Sheila Fitzpatrick Penny Russell Joan Beaumont

The Summer of Theory by Philipp Felsch, translated by Tony Crawford Making Australian History by Anna Clark Prisoners of the Empire by Sarah Kovner

POLITICS

16 58

Gareth Evans Gary Pearce

What’s the Worst That Could Happen? by Andrew Leigh Raymond Williams at 100, edited by Paul Stasi Culture and Politics by Raymond Williams

17 22 49 52

Frances Wilson Geordie Williamson Libby Robin Susan Sheridan

Dream-Child by Eric G. Wilson The Sinner and the Saint by Kevin Birmingham Delia Akely and the Monkey by Iain McCalman Inseparable Elements by Patsy Millett

LITERARY STUDIES

Paul Kildea

Writing in the Dark by Will Loxley

INTERVIEW

Mary Beard

Open Page

FICTION

28 29 31 32 33 34

Laura Elizabeth Woollett Debra Adelaide Brigid Magner Jennifer Mills Dilan Gunawardana Georgia White

A Great Hope by Jessica Stanley New novels from Jack Ellis, Robert Lukins, and Rhett Davis Loop Tracks by Sue Orr Australiana by Yumna Kassab The Sorrow Stone by Kári Gíslason To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

POEMS

36 48 59

Jelena Dinić Gary Catalano Eileen Chong

Close Contacts The Building Curlew

DIARY

Peter Rose

Editor’s Diary

POETRY

43 44 45 47

Sarah Day Joan Fleming Gig Ryan Paul Hetherington

Animals with Human Voices by Damen O’Brien Fifteeners by Jordie Albiston Topsy-Turvy by Charles Bernstein Collected Prose Poems by Gary Catalano

LAW

Alecia Simmonds

A Witness of Fact by Drew Rooke

PHILOSOPHY

Diane Stubbings

Feeling and Knowing by Antonio Damasio

RELIGION

Constant J. Mews

The Making of the Bible by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, translated by Peter Lewis

SCIENCE

Robyn Arianrhod

What’s Eating the Universe? by Paul Davies

ARTS

Matthew Martin

63 64 65 66

Jordan Prosser Miles Pattenden David Hansen Michael Shmith

Daniel Cottier by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly, with Andrew Montana and Suzan Veldink Belfast Benedetta The Exhibitionists by Steven Miller Die Walküre

Bernard Smith

The Solitary Watcher by Gary Catalano

BIOGRAPHY

FROM THE ARCHIVE 68

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

ABR Patrons

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Peter Allan Geoffrey Applegate OBE (d. 2021) and Sue Glenton Dr Neal Blewett AC Helen Brack Professor Ian Donaldson (d. 2020) and Dr Grazia Gunn Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO Dr Alastair Jackson AM Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Su Lesser Peter McMullin Steve Morton Allan Murray-Jones Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck David Poulton Peter Rose and Christopher Menz Emeritus Professor Andrew Taylor AM Anonymous (1)

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Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC Helen Garner Cathrine Harboe-Ree AM Professor Margaret Harris The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC (d. 2021) Dr Susan Lever OAM Don Meadows Susan Nathan Professor John Rickard Robert Sessions AM Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM Noel Turnbull Mary Vallentine AO Susan Varga and Anne Coombs Bret Walker AO SC Nicola Wass Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Anonymous (3)

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Helen Angus Australian Communities Foundation ( JRA Support Fund) Kate Baillieu Professor Frank Bongiorno AM Professor Jan Carter AM Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Professor Paul Giles Reuben Goldsworthy Dr Joan Grant Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Tom Griffiths Mary Hoban Claudia Hyles OAM Dr Barbara Kamler Linsay and John Knight Professor John Langmore AM Pamela McLure Rod Morrison Stephen Newton AO Jillian Pappas Judith Pini (honouring Agnes Helen Pini, 1939–2016) Emeritus Professor Roger Rees John Richards Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James Emerita Professor Susan Sheridan and Emerita Professor Susan Magarey AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Professor Janna Thompson Lisa Turner Dr Barbara Wall Jacki Weaver AO Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (3)

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Nicole Abadee and Rob Macfarlan Samuel Allen and Beejay Silcox Professor Dennis Altman AM Paul Anderson Judith Bishop and Petr Kuzmin John Bugg Peter Burch AM BM Robyn Dalton Joel Deane Jim Davidson AM Jason Drewe Allan Driver Jean Dunn Johanna Featherstone Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick Roslyn Follett Steve Gome Professor Russell Goulbourne Dr Michael Henry AM Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Anthony Kane Professor Grace Karskens Alison Leslie Dr Brian McFarlane OAM Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM Muriel Mathers Felicity St John Moore Dr Brenda Niall AO Angela Nordlinger Jane Novak Professor Michael L. Ondaatje Diana and Helen O’Neil Estate of Dorothy Porter Mark Powell Libby Robin Stephen Robinson Professor David Rolph Dr Della Rowley (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011) Professor Lynette Russell AM Michael Shmith Professor David Throsby AO and Dr Robin Hughes AO Dr Helen Tyzack Emeritus Professor James Walter Natalie Warren Ursula Whiteside Kyle Wilson Anonymous (6)

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The ABR Podcast Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.

Identity politics Mindy Gill

Editor’s Diary Peter Rose

Tracy K. Smith Felicity Plunkett

Brain fog

Thomas H. Ford

ABR at the movies! Miles Pattenden

Funding the arts properly

Ben Eltham and David Latham

Peter Porter Poetry Prize The five shortlisted poets

Helen Garner Lisa Gorton

Bequests and notified bequests Gillian Appleton Ian Dickson John Button Peter Corrigan AM Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy Peter Rose Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Denise Smith Anonymous (3)

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Our partners Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

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Editor’s Diary

While he has doubtless gone on recording our foibles in his journal, not for some years has the Editor given us some excerpts for publication. But over the summer – when not watching an inordinate amount of cricket and tennis, we suspect – he compiled a selection from his 2021 journal. This one is rather different in tone from past offerings, as he admitted to Advances: ‘Living through a pandemic has changed all of us. Covid has also coincided with a marked deterioration in the health of my aged mother, who moved into aged care last March. Like so many Australians, and like

Castrating their own cause

so many of my friends and colleagues, I have experienced the feelings of anguish and impotence that go with caring for a loved relative during lockdown. For better or worse, the parents of writers must indulge their recording progeny. In making my selection, I felt obliged to relate something of my mother’s story. To have done otherwise – left out the dark stuff and retained only the editorial cakes and ale – would have been blithe, even disingenuous.’ Peter Rose’s diary begins on page thirty-seven. A longer selection appears on the website, and it’s this version that he has recorded for the ABR Podcast. g

Letters

Dear Editor, ABR readers should be alerted to an outrage that has taken place in Canberra, one that exposes a violent, expansionist nihilism within our culture. On 11 February, having been removed from the vicinity of the National Library, thousands of anti-vaccination demonstrators began squatting at the Canberra Showgrounds. There the Lifeline Bookfair, a popular annual charity event in support of people in suicidal crisis, was just opening. Crowds of demonstrators harassed Bookfair volunteers, shouted foul insults through loudhailers at attendees, blocked parking areas with trucks, and finally tore down a security fence, mobbing the venue. With public safety at risk, the Bookfair closed down. The demonstrators went on to commit offences which were more serious – in their thousands, they threatened assault against a dress-up vaccination event for children, and guns were found by police at the squat – but it is the attack on the Bookfair that underlines the contempt that is driving the antivaccination movement and that signals grave societal trouble. This was more than a case of feral, wrong-headed, self-defeating hooliganism, a national version of school muck-up day, although in shutting down a charity event the demonstrators did castrate their own cause. They abused the tolerance of Canberra residents, who had been inconvenienced for days by marches through the Parliamentary Triangle – an abstract and uninhabited place where protest has a rightful stage – and who now found themselves slighted and assaulted in their own community. The Bookfair is part of the life we make in the margins of Canberra’s capital status. These people besieged that life to make a political statement. That statement was an incitement to violence against art and knowledge. The demonstrators trespassed, malevolently, to stop an event that promotes reading, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and conscience, in support of lonely and vulnerable people. The Bookfair usually takes place in an atmosphere of friendly treasure-hunting. Standing at its closed doors, the demonstrators promoted a bullying ignorance, an aggressive mindlessness, a lifestyle of passionate unreason. The message is the opposite of freedom. Trampling over the local, it made itself national. Invasive though the demonstrators have been, they are not an alien species. They are our own

people. Their homes, to which they will eventually disperse, are in cities, towns, and rural areas all over eastern Australia. Buoyant with self-belief at having got away with harming someone else’s community, they will wield corrosive influence in their own. Those who showed themselves in Canberra number more than fifteen thousand. Their sympathisers back home may number many more. To nurture the nihilist mindset on such a scale, some humane reinforcement we once offered one another must be rotting. The culture is not happy. It is not well. Theodore Ell, Canberra, ACT

The significance of memory

Dear Editor, Oral History Australia joins oral historians around the world in condemning the closure of Russia’s Memorial organisation, one of Europe’s most important oral history projects. A Russian court ordered the closure on 28 December 2021. This appalling act represents an assault on human rights and an attempt to suppress the Memorial’s significant contribution to the history of the Soviet Union. Memorial was set up in the late 1980s to document and record the crimes of the Soviet regime and the history of political repression in the Soviet Union. In a statement following the closure decision, Memorial wrote, ‘Memorial is not an organisation, it is not even a social movement … Memorial is the need of the citizens of Russia to know the truth about its tragic past, about the fate of many millions of people.’ As oral historians we understand the significance of memory and how an authoritarian state like Vladimir Putin’s Russia might wish to suppress memory to sustain a mythical version of the past which legitimises the regime. We urge Australian colleagues to protest about the Russian decision to close an oral history project that spoke truth to power. For further details, see this article by British oral historian Graham Smith, at https://www.ohs.org.uk/general-interest/ohscondemns-closure-of-memorial-international/ Alistair Thomson, President, Oral History Australia

Correction

In Abigail Fisher’s January–February 2022 issue review, a line of Pam Brown’s poetry was misquoted; ‘nimbling / an interior bozozo’ should have read ‘nimbling / an interior besozzo’. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Commentary

Till ‘real voices’ wake us, and we drown The mire of identity politics

by Mindy Gill

e can learn much about a culture by listening to how it talks about its art. The way non-white writers, for want of a better phrase, tend to be reviewed in Australia tells us a lot about how we determine cultural value. Some reviewers place a premium on the author’s biography – her identity – rather than on her work itself. The reviewer avoids critical engagement with the text in favour of a kind of reverential praise of its political messaging. This messaging isn’t necessarily determined by the content of the work, but rather by a mistaken conflation of the work with the author’s cultural identity. It’s a kind of habit, a reflexive way of reading literature, especially literature by non-white authors, as if the mere act of writing a book were fundamentally and inevitably political – or, as they say, an ‘act of resistance’. I too have nodded along to the old dictum ‘all art is political’. Its satisfying consonance lends it the heft of any halfway-decent party line. And yet I have always suspected that its meaning is opaque. I’m not suggesting that art can’t be political, nor am I underestimating its power. But, to me, political impact has never been a useful measure of art’s worth or success. As a reader, I measure a novel or a poem by its capacity to move me. This is the first imperative: all else follows. I’m thinking of the first novels I read that made me feel this way, and how, as a child, I celebrated the idea that these marks on a page had the power to change how I thought and felt. I recognised elements of my own consciousness in that of another’s – in Scout’s open-heartedness as much as in Mayella Ewell’s cowardice – and saw how, within the privacy of a book, this wasn’t a shameful thing to experience. The point of fiction and poetry to me is empathy. I feel it most strongly when I’m writing an essay of this kind. No matter how much I’d like to believe I’m embarking upon some exercise of personal discovery, I know that the truth isn’t nearly as noble. I don’t want people to see things the way I do – I want to convince them. Contemporary fiction and poetry, on the other hand, encourage you to think, and feel, more deeply. You don’t 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

fail it – nor it you – if you leave a book with your perspective unchanged, unable to identify with its premise, its language, its characters. This is not a diagnosis but an instinct, and I don’t expect each reader to feel the same way. And here is another gift that literature brings us – myriad avenues of escape and response. You don’t need to subscribe to a writer’s ideology, nor share any element of her biography, to feel a personal connection to her work. The possibilities for ‘identifying’ with someone are more than skin-deep. How reductive life and art would be if we were stirred only by those who thought and looked like us. I read because I want to make sense of life, especially the elements that are unfathomable or even repulsive to me. But it seems we no longer speak of literature as if it were mimetic of real life but rather as if it were real life itself. I have trouble with fiction’s supposed power to ‘cause harm’. The concept has become gospel, and to treat it for what it is – pure cant – is now something akin to blasphemy. My brain prefers detail to the ‘bigger picture’. Essays make me feel apprehensive; I tend to lose myself in the process of arranging my sentences into an elegant paragraph that embodies a convincing argument. Still, I am confident about the words I choose, because I take comfort in their nuance and embrace the differences in their meaning. ‘Harm’ is not a synonym for ‘hurt’, just as ‘fear’ is not a synonym for ‘danger’. This is not to say that the brain doesn’t respond to fear as acutely as it does to danger, or that our instinct isn’t to perceive them as equal threats. What troubles me is the fact that we’ve begun expecting from literature something it cannot deliver: staunch fidelity to whatever dogma it is we believe in. If it does not provide us with this superficial ideological kinship, we tend to dismiss it as unsuccessful or irrelevant. Joan Didion once said that ‘fiction is always hostile to ideology’. Writing in 1972, she stated that it has ‘certain irreducible ambiguities’. Dogma is antithetical to the very idea of ambiguity – this is a straightforward concept, but the idea, when applied to literature, becomes somehow explosive. If her essay were

published today, Didion would surely be diagnosed as a woman with a case of internalised misogyny. She slates the mainstream women’s movement for its tunnel vision and for what, to her mind, is an obvious case of confusing the aesthetic gesture with systemic change. Had her essay been written today, it would probably not be published at all, for the method of reading that Didion cautions against has become the primary way we are now exhorted to think about books. Not only have we learned to read with a preconceived framework, but we also seem to expect literature to be written with an explicit ideology or politics in mind. The veil between art and life thins, and a novel with a racist or sexist protagonist becomes an endorsement of racism or sexism by its author, never mind that the said protagonist is a fiction, nor that the character’s ethical flaws may function exactly to interrogate and criticise the belief system behind such behaviour. It is, of course, always possible that the author’s attempt will fail, that her portrayal is unconvincing and she regurgitates grotesque stereotypes – at which point the appropriate criticism can and should be levelled at the work. But it is detrimental for any reader to stymie their capacity for thinking at the initial moment of emotional response, and unconstructive to condemn the writing and its author on the basis of a moral rather than aesthetic deficiency.

o consider this phenomenon of privileging ideology and politics – or at least the performance of ideology and politics – above the artist’s own intentions, I’m going to look at the kind of language used to talk about books by non-white writers in Australia, for the criterion for evaluation differs when it comes to authors of colour. I wonder if, by examining the language that appears so often in these reviews, it may be possible to unpick the logic underpinning these forms of evaluation. Australian literary culture seems to value an idea of authenticity in poetry and fiction that I rarely see upheld anywhere other than in memoir and autobiography. The view is that these works form their own sub-species of life writing. They are read as thinly veiled memoir where ‘speaking the truth’ is paramount, and where social or political intimations are never obscured by literary artifice. Andrew Fuhrmann reviewed Ellen van Neerven’s poetry collection Throat (UQP, 2020) in The Monthly (May 2020). He began with an odd disclaimer: ‘This volume is beyond my reach as a critic.’ Fuhrmann politely disengaged from the poems at the outset, citing ‘their manifest sincerity’. The verse has a compelling prosaic clarity that conveys a sense of immediacy and earnestness, but more intensive poetic transfigurations are rare in the volume. This appears to be quite deliberate […] It is about defying the silencing of Indigenous queer and gender non-conforming identities.

Fuhrmann identified the effect of authenticity as being connected to the perceived accessibility of a work, where rejecting poetic technique becomes an act of defiance in itself. When a culture becomes suspicious of literary style and assesses a work on the basis of how well the author ‘tells the truth’, it’s clear there has been a seismic shift in how we think about literature and its

function. The purpose of writing, it seems, is to ‘elevate’ or ‘give voice to’ the stories of marginalised groups. But elevate to what, and from where, and according to whose standards? While writers of colour can, and of course do, focus on themes of cultural identity, racism, and trauma in their work, I’m concerned by moments when these themes become the sole focus of the critic – and the writer too. This is a form of appraisal that believes in the idea of such a thing as a ‘real voice’. Since they often aren’t white voices, underpinning the idea of the ‘real’ is the assumption – or expectation – that when a writer eschews literary technique and style, he or she is also rejecting the Western literary tradition. Australian literary culture has come to equate the rejection of literary craft and artifice with a progressive literary voice.

Political impact has never been a useful measure of art’s worth or success In his review, Fuhrmann goes on to say that Throat ‘demands to be acknowledged on its own terms, and in its own terms, from within its own or allied communities of discourse’. Fuhrmann is right to admit, however courteously, that there’s a largely unspoken rule that Indigenous writers and other writers of colour should not be criticised at all. However, the same rule applies especially to those from within the ‘allied communities of discourse’ – which I can only take to mean ‘people who aren’t white either’. When non-white critics (this one included) choose to engage with a non-white piece of writing as rigorously as they would any other, and when it involves negative criticism, they are derided as competitive, self-hating, and as performing for the ‘white gaze’. In short, they’re no longer being a ‘good’ person of colour. This is uncomfortably close to the idea of the ‘good migrant’, except that this time – if we continue thinking in separatist terms – the mandate is now coming from the inside. But to think that a negative review of a book by a writer of colour means that the criticism is directed towards the author’s cultural identity, rather than their work, feels less like ‘lateral violence’ (the term co-opted to describe this practice), and more like a Freudian projection. I fail to see how attention to literary style – transmuting one’s subject matter into a particular form or voice – can possibly be interpreted as colonial complicity. Although certain literary styles have been developed within the Western canon, surely it’s a mistake for readers, writers, and critics alike to treat the freedom literary innovation offers as a club with conditional entry. This is akin to insisting that there are such categories as ‘white writing’ and ‘other writing’. In a review of the anthology Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand spoken word (UQP, 2019), edited by David Stavanger and Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Andy Jackson provides a neat example of this kind of critical thinking (Cordite, December 2019). He praises the anthology’s ‘resistance to colonialism – not only on the political and personal level, but in the idea of what literature is and should be’. Although Jackson determines that ‘this is not an anthology of “identity politics”’, the final line of his piece reads: ‘Perhaps what is happening recently has been the expansion of which identities are affirmed, which aesthetics are given attention.’ I can’t help but think that this kind of paternalistic AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

assessment does a disservice to the authors under review. Rather than offering a robust and meaningful engagement with the text itself, such reviews – out of self-preservation, laziness, or deference – prefer to remain within the boundaries of what can and cannot be said about identitarian writing. But what remains unsaid when we invariably bestow praise upon a text, even when it’s beyond one’s ‘reach as a critic’, is that we’re continuing to judge the work on the basis of the author’s racial identity.

Australian literary culture has come to equate the rejection of literary craft with a progressive literary voice Returning to the idea that literary success is measured by fidelity to ‘real life’, it may be useful to analyse what happens when author and critic share a cultural identity. One might assume that the critic will be freed from engaging with the identitarian aspects of the text. Instead, they tend to focus on evaluating the accuracy of the representation of the said cultural group, much of their assessment hingeing on the portrayal of identity rather than on storytelling. This fascinates me because holding preconceived assumptions about a cultural group’s identity and its behaviours is exactly what racism does. That said, I also know the desire to ‘feel seen’, particularly when one is starved for representation, and when the only representation available to you has relied on discomfiting caricature. It’s complex territory when both racism

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and race-consciousness hold similar ideas of group identity. I’m not suggesting that we force ourselves to cease thinking in terms of groups entirely – it may not be psychologically possible – but it’s a useful observation to keep in mind, especially when talking about race and representation in literature and beyond. In a review that appeared in this magazine of Alice Pung’s novel One Hundred Days (Black Inc., 2021), writer Yen-Rong Wong begins: ‘It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to be raised in a Chinese family, especially when you are surrounded by markers of Western society.’ Later she writes: ‘Given my experiences, it is a relief to see aspects of these filial relations treated with such depth, care, and cultural consideration.’ It is the reader’s prerogative – and one of the pleasures of reading – to use one’s own life as a measure for engaging with fiction. But this is not the role of the critic. The most meaningful criticism is seldom centred on the reviewer’s own personal experiences – it results in the kind of literary assessment that serves the critic rather than the author or the writing. This form of critical engagement is just another consequence of the premium the literary culture places on identity. The reviewer is lured into the trap. On the complex mother–daughter relationships that Pung explores in her novel, Wong writes: ‘she can still tell when her mother is proud of her, even if this is never expressed out loud. This description is revealing about what it is like to be a child in an Asian family.’ It’s startling when such generalisations, which only reinforce homogenised assumptions, are accepted as valid criticism. Then again, perhaps it makes complete sense in a literary culture that defines literary success by how accurately a work meets one’s expectations of a cultural stereotype. Wong likely intended to relate Pung’s passage to her own childhood experiences – and this is precisely why I’m so insistent on attention to language. Wong’s phrasing encourages the reader to accept the antiquated, and genuinely colonial, view that a continent-spanning ‘Asian experience’ is possible. This strange feedback loop reflects the new sensitivity in our thinking about race – which should only be a good thing. However wary I might be of this new identitarian literary culture, I know it isn’t productive to rage against the inevitable. I can resist it, personally, as both a writer and a critic, but I find it more instructive to observe it. From the outside, it appears as though we’ve never handled race with more care or consideration. But it’s always easier to broadcast our political ideals than to enact or live up to them. The reality of Australian literary culture is perhaps more like that week in 2020 when we feverishly flooded social media with images of black squares, drowning out genuine Black Lives Matter resources. I can’t explain why we offer one another these perfunctory gestures of solidarity, at no personal cost, and tell ourselves that we’re ‘doing the work’. I’m no sociologist. Perhaps it’s a narcissistic enterprise. Or perhaps, in a world tilting from its axis, clinging to our identities seems like the most reasonable thing to do. g Mindy Gill is the recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award, and the Australian Poetry/NAHR Poetry Fellowship in Val Taleggio, Italy. From 2017–20, she was Peril Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief. She lives in Brisbane and is an ABR Rising Star.

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History

Difficult thinking Theory’s long summer Sheila Fitzpatrick

The Summer of Theory: History of a rebellion, 1960–1990 by Philipp Felsch translated by Tony Crawford

‘T

Polity $51.95 hb, 324 pp

heory of what?’ is the obvious lay response to Philipp Felsch’s title. But for those in the know, it goes without saying that he is talking about Theory with a capital T. That strange hybrid of philosophy, ethnology, and literary criticism cast its spell over participants in the student movement in Germany from the mid-1960s and in Paris after 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, it reached the humanities departments of Anglophone academia, making a PhD dissertation without a Theory component a risky undertaking. This applied even in history, traditionally the most empirical of disciplines; and in 1994, Keith Windschuttle, soon to be prominent in the Australian ‘history wars’ about the interpretation of European colonisation, was provoked to write a whole book entitled The Killing of History: How a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists. ‘Theory’ could at any given moment mean Marxists like Louis Althusser and Theodor Adorno, structuralists like Claude LéviStrauss, so-called ‘post-structuralists’ and ‘post-modernists’ like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze, and, finally, in the waning days of Theory’s long summer, even thinkers formerly regarded as right-wing like Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt. To qualify as Theory, the work had to be abstruse, preferably using esoteric language to deter uncommitted readers; it had to be in fashion with an in-group whose members self-identified as outsiders; and, in Felsch’s portrayal, it had to be available in paperback. Theory shared with philosophy the quality of not requiring empirical proof for its statements, but differed from philosophy in not requiring logical justification either. The illogicality of many of the aperçus of Theory became almost a trademark, especially in its French incarnation. Only thoughts ‘which do not understand themselves’ could be true, Adorno claimed. What was essential was that the text be ‘difficult’ and its truths not self-evident, and that it be read with passion. The backbone of Felsch’s book is the small Merve publishing house, set up in West Berlin in the 1960s, which continued to respond to new waves of Theory for three decades. (It’s a pity that the publisher changed the ‘long summer’ of the German title, Der lange Sommer der Theorie, to just ‘summer’ in the English: one of the remarkable things about the season of Theory is that it went on for so long.) An important backdrop is West Berlin itself, that anomalous zone of conspicuous capitalism where cheap rents abounded and earnest conversation flourished, separated only by Checkpoint Charlie from the austere Soviet-bloc socialism of 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

East Germany. The point of making Merve the centrepiece is that it focuses the story on Theory’s readers, not its writers. Merve’s editors were themselves passionate readers, discriminating but deeply respectful of the work they published, whose journal ‘transformed readers into fans, and authors into philosophical fashion icons’; they were part of a movement that embraced Theory not just as a set of intellectual ideas but as ‘a claim of truth, an article of faith and a lifestyle accessory’. Just why West Berlin’s youth should have set themselves so diligently to ‘the practice of difficult thinking’ is never entirely clear. Recent history was a part of it, for this was a generation trying to deal with not only their parents’ past acceptance of the Nazi system but also their present refusal to discuss or explain that acceptance. It was a cohort that, in the 1970s, would produce the ‘Red Army Faction’ terrorists led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof (Baader himself, in prison, took the opportunity to catch up on his Theory reading). Apocalypse was never far away, with deaths (of the author, the book, society) and ends (of history) favourite Theory tropes. Theory is traditionally the antithesis of practice, and part of its appeal to this generation arose from its frustration that practical action seemed both necessary and impossible. Hence the popularity of the paradoxical formulation that Theory was a form of practice, and that studying it (‘theory-work’) constituted not escapism but productive engagement. ‘Is theory practicable or not?’ one baffled student asked Adorno. ‘Are your endeavours aimed at changing the world?’ Standing Marx on his head, Adorno set out the paradox that ‘only theory that is not immediately aimed at changing the world … is able to change it at all’. Felsch himself, born in the West German university town of Göttingen in 1972, is not of the generation he writes about. He was a student writing his PhD in the 1990s, just as the Theory wave changed course and broke on the shores of academia; it was presumably as a successful rider of this wave that he reached his present position as Professor of Cultural History at the Humboldt University in Berlin (once the pride of the East, now the competitor of the Freie Universität in former West Berlin). That is the same time I encountered it, on arriving in 1990 at the University of Chicago, probably one of the most Theory-driven campuses in the United States at the time. Scholars of American history still did not have to worry about Theory even at Chicago, but, with colleagues shuttling back and forth between Chicago and Berlin and Paris, it was de rigueur in my field of European History. On the plus side, Theory meant relativism, scepticism about ‘grand narratives’, and abandonment of the illusion of objectivity, and brought with it a whole set of interesting new topics and perspectives. On the minus side, scepticism was a weapon that Theory people used to destroy opponents rather than a tool to be directed at their own assumptions and data. Indeed, the opposite was true: one of the characteristics of ‘theoretically-informed’ work was the extraordinary reverence shown towards the chosen authority – Foucault or Habermas or whoever it might be – whose obiter dicta could be quoted, in the same way earlier generations might have cited biblical texts or Shakespeare, as truths that did not need further justification or supporting evidence. Felsch’s stance (well captured by his English translator, Tony Crawford) is that of a wry but sympathetic participant–observer.

You end the book uncertain as to whether you should marvel at the grandiose pointlessness of it all, or celebrate a movement that put pure thought, accessed by careful reading and refined through intense discussions with comrades, at the very centre of life. Who is to say, anyway, that the long summer of Theory didn’t have an influence in the ‘real’ world? Preparing to write this piece, I was surprised to learn from Eyal Weizman (writing in the London Review of Books, 16 December 2021) that the current Israeli chief of staff, Aviv Kochavi, credits his new strategy for military control of the Occupied Territories – namely, battering through the walls of Palestinian dwellings as if they were non-existent – to Deleuze’s concept of rhizomes (don’t ask, but it’s derived from the botanical term for spreading root systems). Given that Kochavi is married to a theoretically informed gender

historian, this might be taken as a personal quirk, but American ‘counter-terrorism analyst and popular blogger’ Jeff Vail can be found on the web making a similar argument that al-Quaeda had ‘rhizomatic’ qualities that the US military should emulate. But let’s forget military strategy and get back to Theory itself, using a typical Theory move involving paradox and inversion to turn Deleuze on his head. This reveals a new truth: Theory was a rhizome in which the spreading root system hung in the air. g Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015) and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). The Shortest History of the Soviet Union will be published in March. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.

History

Memory. Silence. Time.

A puzzling, provocative look at historiography Penny Russell

Making Australian History by Anna Clark

Vintage $34.99 pb, 429 pp

here are many ways one might write a history of Australian history, but from any angle it is a heroic project. In Making Australian History, Anna Clark is open about the difficulties, the possibilities, and her choices. How do you make sense of Australian history, she asks, amid a ‘swirl of changing sensibilities, methods, culture, politics and place’? How do you trace the story of a discipline across time, when each generation has defined the contours and boundaries of that discipline differently? How do you write a genuinely inclusive history of Australian History – one that gives due place to the full range of historical forms, not just those approved in academic circles? Behind these questions lurks the one raised by the book’s title: what does it mean to ‘make’ history? Clark uses the idea of ‘history-making’ to capture practices that ‘sit outside the formal discipline but have nevertheless had an impact on it’. While acknowledging that there are real challenges to making the discipline itself more inclusive, Clark insists that this is still a conversation historians should have. We must, she suggests, recognise ‘the potential of diverse history-making practices and texts to bridge some of the gaps in our historical canon’. Walking in the Dyarubbin–Hawkesbury region, Clark was struck by the way ‘uneven layers of Aboriginal and colonial history overlap’ in the landscape. She was moved to ponder forms of history-making that predated the Western discipline of history

by many thousands of years. And she was driven to rethink the structure of the book she was writing, to ‘break out’ from a conventional narrative form and adopt instead what she describes as a ‘ponderous (but I hope not circuitous)’ analysis of the ‘structure, functions and ethics of the discipline itself ’. The book, while certainly filled with ponderings, is far from ponderous. Clark’s writing is lucid, engaging, open, and unpretentious. The book, she hopes, will be a ‘discussion starter’; it is not intended as the final word. Threaded throughout are echoes of conversations Clark has held over many years: with herself; with colleagues, peers, and mentors; and with some of the historians whose work she reflects on in the book. (Perhaps this is in itself an illustration of how history is ‘made’.) Her reflections unroll in unexpected directions: always thoughtful, sometimes quirky, often provocative, occasionally profound. Though not circuitous, the structure is certainly not linear. Each chapter is built around a specified ‘text’ that serves as an object for examination and explication. Some of the selected texts are conventional products of the discipline – school textbooks or academic treatises. There is no suggestion, however, that they hold an especially privileged place in the canon of Australian history, or in the book itself. Each has been chosen only as the starting point for treatment of an evocative theme. Each chapter weaves across, through, and beyond the text to discourse upon the larger issue. Nation. Gender. Country. These chapters sit, on equal terms, with others built on different forms of history-making: the Australian War Memorial, a convict ballad, an anguished reappraisal of a pioneering family’s history, a celebrated lecture, a heated radio debate. More striking still are the alternative, subversive histories created by Indigenous Australians: rock art recording the arrival of the first white ships, fish traps of ancient date and ongoing historical significance, the first ‘Day of Mourning’ in 1938, a poem that wrestles with the weight of the recorded and unrecorded past. Each text opens a new theme for reflection. Memory. Imagination. Silence. Time. Some texts are familiar, others surprising and fresh; together, they allow Clark to cover a good deal of territory. In a book of such range, it is unsurprising that the quality of discussion should be uneven (she’s confident on memory, conscientious AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Category

Thanking healthcare workers For two years now, healthcare workers around the world have worked tirelessly on our behalf during the Covid-19 pandemic. The staff and board of Australian Book Review are full of admiration for healthcare workers of all kinds. We know what immense risks are being run by nurses, doctors, aides, orderlies, and administrative staff in our hospitals, aged care facilities and medical clinics. We’re immensely grateful to the sector for its commitment and self-sacrifice. What an example they set for other citizens.

Good doctors and good poets share a calling that seems to be the only one in life. Both see the world as beautifully appalling, the inhabitants survivors of its strife. Each starts off with a discipline so daunting it seems that no one will survive the test. Failed fellows will surround them with a haunting that lasts all life like an unwanted guest. The lives of a myriad ‘poets’ will be saved while tens of the truly talented expire. Battalions of banality be braved before the psyche’s surge begins to tire. But at the end, whether by pen or knife, they know the one imperative is Life. ‘Sonnet for Dr Michael Kennedy’ by Bruce Beaver

14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

on contact, predictable on convicts, perceptive on nation and protest, provocative on colour, puzzling on gender). Inevitably there are gaps, perhaps the most notable being the near absence of any discussion of class or labour history. Times have changed. It’s a horizontal, democratic structure. The innovative form opens possibilities for thinking about history and history-making in expansive, non-prescriptive ways. But the looseness of the form poses some problems, too. While Clark is avowedly eager to promote a conversation, she seems strangely reluctant to set out its grounds, or to choose her own – let alone defend a unifying argument. Openness contributes to ambiguity, perhaps to some unthought-out positions. While advocating the inclusive expansiveness of ‘history-making’, Clark nonetheless retains a capitalised ‘History’ to signify the ‘discipline’ – the subject as taught in schools and universities. For all its democratic appearance, then, the book holds firmly to the notion that a discipline of ‘History’ survives and matters, retaining its power to ‘shape the national story’, make or break careers, and rule upon the legitimacy of different forms of history-making. Clark seeks to put this ‘scholarly’ (ostensibly objective, empirical, evidence-based, analytical) understanding of Australia’s history into conversation with a wider variety of imaginative, commemorative, sentimental, angry, subversive alternatives. The Anzac story may be sentimental, she writes, but it’s ‘also genuine’. Fiction and poetry employ imagination to go to places where disciplinary historical practice cannot; historians should nonetheless heed the moral, ethical, and cultural insights that these works can yield. Indigenous art, oral history, and memory offer stories not verifiable by scientific historical method, but these should not be ignored. Much of this is incontrovertible. Less clear is where the conversation should go next. Should the discipline of ‘History’ expand its favoured methods to include those of memoir, art, and song – or should the discipline be even more narrowly defined, while ceding authority to these other forms? How should we understand, let alone alter, the place, role, or standing of the discipline in the wider culture of ‘history-making’? Sometimes Clark blurs disciplinary boundaries in the name of inclusiveness; sometimes she reasserts them in the name of engagement. The slipperiness of the ground makes the conversation hard to follow, but I missed any clear defence of critical, sceptical, analytic history as a valuable corrective to propaganda, sentimentality, misrepresentation, or misunderstanding. I missed, too, any clear delineation of the disciplinary field of ‘Australian History’ today. While acknowledging that its contours and boundaries have shifted over time, Clark refrains from attempting to pin down its present form. Yet her very plea for a more inclusive history evokes the spectre of one that is not so – a ghostly image of authoritative and exclusive national history-making that few historians writing in Australia today would aspire to. I found myself wishing that Clark had done more to represent the multiple possibilities, the richness, the expansiveness, the critical edginess that characterise the best contemporary Australian

history writing: cultural, legal, sexual, domestic, industrial, or carceral histories of Australia’s varied communities, for example. I wanted her to turn her eyes away from the glaring light of the national story and to seek richer historical narratives of Australians in the shadows.

Clark is confident on memory, predictable on convicts, provocative on colour, puzzling on gender But if I sometimes suspected that Clark was artificially prolonging the life of the very problems she aims to critique, such fears do the book less than justice. The elusive shadow arguments are a product of Clark’s deliberate choice to eschew the conventions of scholarly debate and to adopt a horizontal structure and a looping, meditative, discursive style. The issues she raises – both by what she says and what she has chosen to leave out – are of

Day of Mourning, Sydney, 26 January 1938 (Russell Clark/Man Magazine, State Library of New South Wales)

vital and continuing significance. They are not easily resolved, and Clark does not pretend to resolve them. Reading her book, I was in turn engaged, beguiled, puzzled, unconvinced – and provoked, in the best sense of the word. It will take much more than a thousand words to grapple with the teasing, unsettled issues she has raised. Her questions still echo in my head, and I look forward to thrashing them out in future conversations with friends and colleagues. In that sense, this bold, expansive, disarming, baffling book has succeeded in its aims. g Penny Russell is a historian of families, intimacy, and social encounters in nineteenth-century Australia. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and her books include (with Nigel Worden) Honourable Intentions? Violence and virtue in Australian and Cape colonies, c.1750 to 1850 (Routledge, 2016) and Savage or Civilised? Manners in colonial Australia (NewSouth, 2010). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Politics

Serious risks

Meeting the challenge of global extinction Gareth Evans

What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Existential risk and extreme politics by Andrew Leigh

MIT Press $44.99 hb, 240 pp

ost people, and certainly most politicians, don’t spend much time or emotional energy thinking about whether human life on this planet will still exist in one hundred years’ time, or what efforts might need to be made right now if we and our descendants are to avoid extinction. More Covid-scale pandemics, and the increasingly obvious reality of global warming, are both now being seen – though still not universally – as serious risks demanding serious policy response. They may prove to be game changers. But, here as with other potentially huge man-made risks, complacency generally prevails. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been hard to animate policymakers and publics anywhere in the world about the risk of annihilation by nuclear weapons – and even harder to alarm anyone but a handful of aficionados about developments in artificial intelligence amounting to a measurable threat to our very existence. Andrew Leigh, as so often, sees things differently. With the same extraordinary energy and polymathic reach – more than a little alarming to us lesser mortals – that he has brought to publishing eight books on multiple subjects in the less than twelve years that he has been a member of the Australian Parliament, not to mention running marathons and devoting quality time to his young family, he has now published a wake-up call on the reality of global existential risks that should be hard for any of us to ignore. Leigh’s focus in What’s the Worst That Could Happen? is not on ‘natural’ risks such as asteroid impact, super-volcanic eruption, or stellar explosion, which, though beloved by some catastrophists, he not unreasonably assesses as being either so remote or so beyond human capacity to avoid, or both, that they are not worth worrying about. His book is rather about the anthropogenic risks posed particularly by out-of-control artificial intelligence, engineered pandemics, climate change, and nuclear war, which, Leigh suggests, together add up to a one in six chance that within a century all human life will go the way of dodos and dinosaurs. He relies for this extraordinary figure on the Australian Oxford philosopher Toby Ord’s highly praised analysis in The Precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity (Hachette, 2020), which assesses these individual risks of extinction as ranging in magnitude from one in 1,000 (nuclear war and climate change) to one in ten (out-of-control artificial intelligence). Leigh’s book (like Ord’s, which Robert Sparrow reviewed in the December 2020 issue of ABR) would benefit from more detailed explanation 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

of the methodology behind both these individual judgements – involving, essentially, knowledgeable guesstimates rather than anything more robustly objective – and especially the arithmetic (not obvious to the uninitiated reader) which enables them to be distilled, collectively, into odds of one in six for human extinction. But these figures are certainly not incredible, and they should concentrate our minds.

Leigh’s book is about the anthropogenic risks which, he suggests, together add up to a one in six chance that within a century all human life will go the way of dodos Where Leigh breaks new and very interesting ground, going beyond anything in Ord’s work, is in drawing a link between existential risk and extreme politics. His book is as much about the anatomy, and dangers, of populism – on both the left and right – as an incubator and accelerator of these risks as it about the risks themselves. The basic storyline, and he develops it very persuasively, is that ‘tackling long-term threats requires four things: strong science, effective institutions, global engagement, and a sense of cooperation and order. Populists are anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-international and anti-irenic.’ (‘Irenic’, he helpfully reminds us, means to strive for peace and consensus.) In short, ‘we should no more expect populists to be good crisis leaders than we should expect jockeys to be good at basketball’. And it gets worse: if populists coming to power within democratic systems succeed in becoming authoritarian demagogues – a recurring phenomenon from Hitler to Hun Sen, and with the Trumps, Orbáns, Erdoğans, Bolsonaros, and perhaps Modis of this world giving us plenty to currently worry about – then populism itself becomes a dangerously destructive force. The difficulty, as always, in addressing problems of this magnitude is to come up with prescriptions that are both achievable and likely to be effective. Leigh’s proposed responses to the various specific risk scenarios he discusses are hardly original, but there is plenty of value in their repetition when publics are as disengaged, and policymakers as slow to act, as for the most part they all still are. On nuclear weapons, for example, he is right to stress the utility of focusing, in the first instance, on risk-reduction measures, including the universal adoption by the nuclear-armed states of ‘no first use’ doctrine, de-alerting launch systems, and reducing overall stockpile numbers. To ensure that the development of super-intelligent computer systems serves legitimate human goals rather than becoming capable of destroying our very existence, he is right to advocate the adoption of appropriate universal programming principles, ultimately embodied in a formal and enforceable global treaty. To diminish the risk of pandemics, Leigh is unadventurous but right to insist on the necessity of investment in scientific research, disease surveillance, surge capacity and stockpiles, and strengthened international guardrails against bioterrorism. And it is hard for any even half-informed observer to disagree with his insistence that potentially catastrophic carbon emissions must be cut by investing in renewables, restricting power plant discharge,

Biography and assisting developing nations in following a cleaner path than that managed by their advanced predecessors. When it comes to meeting the scourge of populism – and all the inadequate risk response and other bad policy this enables and encourages – some reviewers have found the author’s action prescriptions, which focus basically on national institutional reforms to restore democracy’s strength in countries where it is under stress, as more than a little limp. For the American readership to whom this book is primarily addressed, it no doubt makes sense to emphasise the utility of some relatively modest measures (albeit none of them remotely easy to implement in the present hyper-partisan US political environment) that would make the electoral system less obviously flawed than it now is. But the recommended panaceas of weekend polling days, compulsory voting, independent re-districting, and ranked-choice voting have all been part of Australia’s democratic system for many decades. While they may have spared us some of populism’s worst excesses, it is hard to argue – certainly on the evidence of the past decade – that they have done anything at all to deliver the kind of intelligent, principled, far-sighted, and, above all, competent government that is necessary to address effectively not only current domestic problems but also potentially more distant global existential risks. That said, I am inclined to be more forgiving of Leigh’s difficulty in solving at a stroke the problems of contemporary governance that he so lucidly identifies. As someone who has struggled for decades both at home and abroad, arguing for and trying to deliver better public policy, not least in relation to global public goods, I am acutely conscious of just how difficult it is to change mindsets and priorities. But, hard as it sometimes seems – not least in the digital age – for reason to trump raw emotion, rational arguments for better policy, unexciting though they might appear, must be made, carefully, systematically, and relentlessly. My own mantra has long been that optimism is self-reinforcing in the same way that pessimism is self-defeating. Achieving anything of lasting value in public life is difficult enough, but it is almost impossible to do so without believing that what seems to be out of reach really is achievable. And it is important to keep things in perspective. Community norms do change, sometimes with stunning speed, as we have seen with gay marriage and gender sensitivity more generally, and increasingly with attitudes to climate change and fossil fuels. Good political leadership matters more than anything else, but even when things seem at their most desolate, we know that pendulums do swing, wheels do turn, and that presidents and prime ministers do change. If good policy is to prevail – and no policy issue could be more important than the survival of our planet – voices of rationality, decency, and optimism must be heard. Andrew Leigh’s voice on these issues is one that matters, and What’s the Worst That Could Happen? deserves to stimulate long-overdue debate both in Australia and internationally. g Gareth Evans was Australia’s Foreign Minister 1988–96, President of the International Crisis Group 2000–9, and Chancellor of the Australian National University 2010–19. His latest book is Good International Citizenship: The case for decency (Monash University Press, March 2022).

The day of horrors

Charles and Mary Lamb’s double-singleness Frances Wilson

Dream-Child: A life of Charles Lamb by Eric G. Wilson

Yale University Press US$35 hb, 516 pp

he life of Charles Lamb reads like a tale by Charles Dickens. In 1775, a sweet-natured boy is born in the Inns of Court, the ancient legal district in the City of London. The boy’s father, John Lamb, works as clerk, scribe, and all-round dogsbody for an imbecilic barrister called Samuel Salt – the names themselves are Dickensian – who does nothing without first consulting his servant. Charles, the youngest child by eleven years, grows up amid the great halls, libraries, chapels, staircases, sundials, fountains, and hidden orchards of the Inner Temple; his early youth is an Eden, but there is a serpent in the garden, because madness runs in the Lamb family. His mother is chilly and aloof, but Charles is adored by his sister, Mary, who gives him the love she has been denied and teaches him to read from the encomia on the tombstones. Aged seven, he is wrenched from Mary’s arms to board at Christ’s Hospital, a charity school for the bright children of poor parents, and there he meets another dream-child called Samuel Coleridge, who will be his lifelong friend. Despite his academic promise, Lamb leaves school aged fourteen, by which point he has reached his full height of five foot nothing. He is not expected to enter the university: the boys who go to Oxford and Cambridge are those destined for the church, and Lamb can never preach because he stammers. He will therefore spend the next thirty-three years working in the Accountants office of East India House. Because he stammers he will also become a drunkard: a wit and a punster, Lamb can articulate his flow of ideas only when he is inebriated. Aged twenty he writes poetry, frequents alehouses, falls in love, and spends six weeks in a madhouse in Hoxton. Lamb never has another episode of insanity, but on 22 September 1796 he returns home to find Mary in the kitchen, holding the bloody knife which she has just plunged into her mother’s heart; had he not wrested it from her, she would have wielded it on their father and aunt as well. The murder of his mother by his sister is the central event of Lamb’s life, although he will also once catch a swallow flying. ‘I date from the day of horrors,’ he tells Coleridge. The clocks now stop: nothing will ever happen to Lamb again. To save Mary from imprisonment in a lunatic asylum, he pledges to take care of her, and this is what he does. He is, after all, a child of the justice system. From now on, Charles and Mary Lamb ‘house together’, as he puts it, ‘old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness’. William Wordsworth describes them similarly as ‘a AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

double tree / with two collateral stems sprung from one root’. that of David Lynch – Wilson’s reassessment of ‘St Charles’ (as Despite wanting to, Lamb will not marry, because of Mary’s William Thackeray called him) brims with gusto; this biography madness, and he will stay in the job he loathes in order to pay for is alive all over. Channelling the familiar style of Elia himself, the introducher care. Every year or so, when she loses her mind, he will walk with her to the local asylum, her straitjacket over his arm, and tion is written in the second person: ‘You are walking westward then wait anxiously for her return. ‘I am a widow’d thing, now … Look out! Coach-and-four!’ Several of the book’s paragraphs thou art gone,’ he writes when Mary is incarcerated. And every are enclosed in parenthesis, and Wilson shifts easily between few years, the siblings will pack their books and Hogarth prints present and past tense. He is more interested in Elia than in and move to a different part of London, where the neighbours Lamb himself – or rather, he is interested in the ironic gap do not know them. They once go as far north as Enfield, but it between Lamb and his persona – which makes Dream-Child a literary life in the fullest sense. Elia, which sounds like ‘a liar’, is is not a success; neither cares for rural life. also, explained Lamb, a ‘name without a Lamb lives for his sister and his meaning’. As Elia, Lamb indulged his friendships. He mourns when Coleridge love of theatrical comedy and sevenabandons him for Wordsworth, but the teenth-century baroque, and his need for Lambs befriend the Wordsworths too, escape. Elia writes about ordinariness: and also William Godwin, William the frictionless air of the South Sea Hazlitt, and Mary Shelley. When Mary offices, his happy childhood, his friends Lamb is sane, she and Charles host weekand relations, his love of the theatre and ly dinners where he drunkenly recites of old china teacups. ‘diddle diddle dumpling’. In his leisure Wilson’s reading of the dynamic time he discovers the English drama of between the Lambs is surely right. In his the sixteenth century and writes about version, Mary is the saviour of her brothit in ‘Specimens of English Dramatic er rather than the other way round. ‘If Writers who lived about the Time of Mary hadn’t done what she did, he might Shakespeare’. He publishes a novel have passed through the portal of lunacy called Rosamund Gray (1798) and stages again. But after she killed he had to settle a play called ‘Mr H- ’, which is hissed by for smaller rebellions: gin, punning, pothe audience. When he and Mary turn etry.’ Mary carried the madness for them Shakespeare’s plots into tales for children, both; this is how their double-singleness Lamb has his first success. The volume, worked, and Charles added her sacrifice say the critics, ‘stands unique … without to his burden of guilt (which included his rival or competitor’. Double-singleness preference for his sister over his mother). works best as his literary style, and so ‘Their relationship is one of the most Lamb invents a familiar called Elia who fascinating in all of literature,’ Wilson describes, in essays for the London Magwrites, ‘on a par with the interactions of azine, a whimsical version of Lamb’s life Charles Lamb from The Ridpath Library of Universal the Brontë sisters.’ Would that he had that does not contain the day of horrors. Literature (The Fifth Avenue Library Society, 1899) developed this comparison further, or When he dies aged fifty-nine, after fall(University of California Libraries via Wikimedia explored the Romantic sibling-love in ing on his face in the street, Mary lives Commons) more depth. In the Lake District – a the last thirteen years of her life alone. It place Lamb abhorred – Wordsworth was better this way, for he could not have was living in double-singleness with his own sister, Dorothy, survived without her. The version of this story told in Dream-Child is ‘darker’, says who would herself go mad after he married; meanwhile, Byron Eric G. Wilson, than Lamb’s earlier biographers have allowed. had a child with his half-sister, and Coleridge routinely fell in Wilson has no time for Coleridge’s ‘gentle-hearted Charles’ (‘the love with the sisters of his friends’ wives. Sisters, in the Romantic moniker Lamb most loathed’), or Wordsworth’s ‘gentle and frolic’ circle, were almost akin to wives, and Lamb’s bond with Mary essayist. His own Lamb is a ‘bitter and desperate’ melancholic recalls what Elizabeth Hardwick said of Scott Fitzgerald and the constrained by mind-forged manacles. A drunk, wrote Lamb in schizophrenic Zelda: ‘the burden and his bearing of it were at ‘Confessions of a Drunkard’, is ‘not a man with drink added. His the very centre of his moral being. It was his plot, his story, his very being is drink’, and this is the man described by Wilson. symbol, image, destiny, obsession.’ Lamb’s essays, said Virginia Woolf, were ‘flawed and imHe replaces the dotty antiquarian with an alcoholic pioneer of autofiction, an anti-imperialist trapped in the cogs of Empire. perfect though starred with poetry’. The same might be said of ‘Imagine Jonathan Franzen,’ Wilson argues, ‘the passionate Dream-Child, a huge and eloquent book in which Lamb lives animal rights activist, writing ads for a drugs company experi- and walks, a little drunkenly, again. g menting on animals. Or David Foster Wallace, satirist of global capitalism, joining Google’s branding team.’ However uncon- Frances Wilson’s six books include Burning Man: The ascent of vincing the analogies – Lamb’s ‘strangeness’ is also compared to D.H. Lawrence (Bloomsbury, 2021). ❖ 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Category

DEMOCRACY HAS A LONG HISTORY, BUT DOES IT HAVE A FUTURE?

‘In this jaded age, where democracy appears under attack from all sides, this rich little volume reads like a tonic.’ —Scott Ludlam

The final, posthumous collection of poems from Australia’s unofficial poet laureate

THE STORY OF AN EMPIRE MADE AND AN EMPIRE UNDONE

‘... if I were a Stalinist, I would have said that those who ignore this book deserve … if not a Gulag sentence, then at least a year or two of harsh re-education!’ —Slavoj Žižek

Les Murray left a trove of last poems. Various, intriguing and moving, this is a wonderful final collection from Australia’s greatest poet – including a title poem that calls up the spirit of continuous creation, ‘out of all that vanishes and all that will outlast us’. Continuous Creation is the perfect gift for long-time fans of Murray and new readers alike.

OUT NOW BLACKINCBOOKS.COM

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Literary Studies

‘Litter, glass, black soft dust’ A scattergun study of wartime writers Paul Kildea

Writing in the Dark: Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon Magazine by Will Loxley

Weidenfeld & Nicolson $32.99 pb, 399 pp

n late March 1941, more than six months into the relentless German aerial campaign that was then destroying great swaths of London’s fabric and spirit, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her heavy overcoat with stones and waded into the River Ouse. Her suicide occurs halfway through Will Loxley’s scattergun study of English writers and writing during the war, though its inevitability haunts the first half of the book, as claustrophobic as the pea-soupers that had defined London’s self-image in the centuries before the Blitz took on that singular responsibility. Loxley presents Woolf prior to her suicide as a slowly dimming lodestar, her diminishment marked by sudden, thrilling flare-ups. A new generation of writers and thinkers had emerged from the boggy catastrophes of World War I – a generation dismissive of the cack-handed architects of the world’s predicaments, and one all too wary of what it sensed was coming – and its members wanted their published words to mean something. Woolf disliked this generation’s cynicism and doubted all the Marxist and anti-fascist panaceas it conjured along the way. It was a generation that too easily evinced ‘first discomfort; next self-pity for that discomfort; which pity soon turns to anger’. Why should poets be politicians? Vanity Fair pootles on perfectly well without reference to the Battle of Waterloo, until that delicate moment when George Osborne’s death in the field demands a temporary recalibration. It’s not that Woolf couldn’t incorporate contemporary events into her writing (‘All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster powder,’ she describes the aftermath of the raid that badly damages her former apartment in Tavistock Square); it’s more that she chose not to. This interwar sea change in English literature is not the main focus of Loxley’s book, though it shapes a very good chapter on the tensions that grew between established and emerging writers as the 1930s marched on. (‘Come on, Virginia, don’t disgrace the older generation,’ Leonard Woolf gently admonishes his wife after she has savaged some luckless young writer at dinner.) Yet the two institutions Loxley has chosen to bookend his tale – the Hogarth Press, which Virginia and Leonard founded in 1917, and Horizon magazine, Cyril Connolly’s buccaneer initiative of 1939 – do underscore the cultural, stylistic, and existential changing of the guard then underway. Of course, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood are the bright sentinels: their defection to America in 1939 exposed the considerable fault lines in what Samuel Hynes later heroically

20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

attempted to corral together as the Auden Generation. Yet this well-trodden ground – the denunciation in the House of Commons; the earnest, homophobic dismissal in editorials of the pansy poets; Evelyn Waugh’s snarky portrayal of the two in Put Out More Flags – is passed over soon enough and an altogether richer crew is assembled. George Orwell, John Lehmann, Stephen Spender (inevitably), and Waugh all appear. Orwell is initially either a prig or a prude, dismissing the ‘so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging’, though he more than makes up for his lapses of judgement with a burning sense of righteousness (still with us today), not least in his dogged prediction and advocacy of an independent India. A giggly-drunk Dylan Thomas (at times a violent one too) shows up, appeasing his near-daily hangovers with a morning double-shot of whisky, a pint of bitter, and then spaghetti bolognese. (In the year after his early death, his drunk widow, Caitlin, attends the first performance of Under Milk Wood only because Louis MacNeice drags her there.) Arthur Koestler has only a walk-on part, but what a beauty it is. In his essay for Horizon in October 1943, he pens the most chilling and prescient line of the whole gang – the equal of anything Orwell wrote in Spain or Waugh in Abyssinia. ‘There are trains which are scheduled on no timetable, but they run all over Europe. Few people see them because they start and arrive at night.’ When Osbert Sitwell accuses him of playing a ‘very wicked’ trick on his unsettled readership, Koestler issues a retort that prefigures the trials at Nuremburg, the books by W.G. Sebald, and the wondrous, great social-democratic experiment in West Germany from 1949 onwards: ‘As long as you don’t feel ashamed to be alive while others are put to death and guilty, sick, humiliated, because you were spared, you will remain what you are: an accomplice by omission.’ Does it all add up to much? Yes and no. There is no literary criticism, bar the lovely final ten pages, which read a little as if Loxley has rescued them from another landing place, perhaps one more scholarly guarded. And for all the bombs and blackness, London is nowhere near exciting enough a character; these astonishing talents certainly wrote in the dark, but so too did they fuck and fight and feed and feud in it. With this generation and this city, none of these activities ever tires us, no matter the passage of time. Less is sometimes, um, too little. Yet Loxley has identified his own night train, one that travels alongside Penguin Books and Brideshead Revisited (1945), but which ultimately goes its own way. He has not obeyed Virginia’s firm direction (‘For heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you’re thirty’), and nor has he supplanted Stephen Spender’s The Temple (1988) or Humphrey Carpenter’s The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and his friends (1989) or even Matthew Spender’s A House in St John’s Wood: In search of my parents (2015). Yet in choosing a pudgy editor and critic as his hero – one who junked his initial wartime determination to ‘keep the calendar at 1938’ in order to stand proudly, if often disapprovingly and jealously, with the ramshackle Auden Generation – he has found his own way through the crowd. g Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten: A life in the twentieth century (2013) and Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (2018).

Commentary

The education minister’s jackboots Political interference in research funding

by Judith Bessant, Faith Gordon, and Rob Watts

o one can doubt the combined impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and Australian policy responses to mitigate its effects, over the past few years. While assessing which groups or sectors suffered more than others will only lead to an invidious victimological contest, we can agree that Australia’s thirty-seven public universities took a number of heavy hits after March 2020. In the year to May 2021, senior managers in Australian universities shed 40,000 jobs, most of them casual teachers, and sixty per cent of them were positions held by women. Unsurprisingly, many inside those universities, along with commentators outside, concluded that the federal government’s decision not to offer JobKeeper payments to public universities reflected a deep animus against and fear of universities. Some reflected on the hostility directed towards the ‘cultural Marxists’ who, it is fantasised in some quarters, still exercise their hegemony in these ‘ivory towers’, notwithstanding the fact that the 2019 report by former High Court Justice Robert French definitively scotched allegations about a rampant ‘woke left’ ruthlessly crushing dissident voices in the academy. If disinterested observers had doubts about this hostility towards universities on the part of Scott Morrison’s government, those misgivings were dissipated in an ‘unfortunate gift’ delivered on Christmas Eve 2021. It was a more than difficult year for the thousands of academics who endured the extraordinary and unexplained delay in the annual announcement of successful ‘Discovery Projects’ in the much sought-after Australian Research Council grant applications. With a success strike rate of just nineteen per cent, these awards are competitive as well as prestigious. In the context of cutbacks to university research funding, they can make or break the future of university research centres. This uncertainty about the ARC results ended when the results were announced on 24 December. As in the two preceding years, that message came with a nasty sting in the tail for some of us. While 587 Australian Research Grants were funded under the Discovery Program, six grants were vetoed by the acting Education Minister, Stuart Robert. The news sent shockwaves through the academic community in Australia and attracted international comment. We were in a team of seven researchers who learned that our application titled ‘New Possibilities: Student Climate Action and Democratic Renewal’ was ‘Recommended to but not funded by the Minister’. (This has since been removed and replaced by the wording ‘Not Funded’.) Five other teams were likewise subjected to the power of ministerial veto provided for in the Australian Research Council Act 2001. This legislation does give wide powers to the minister even though section 33 (c) of the Act says the minister must not direct the CEO ‘to recommend that a particular proposal should, or should not, be approved as deserving financial assistance’. However, section 52 (4) of the Act states that ‘the Minister may (but is not required to) rely solely

on recommendations made by’ the Australian Research Council. This is an example of extreme political interference in research that is greatly out of step with comparable jurisdictions such as Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand. However, as we all know, this is part of a longer political pattern in Australia under Coalition governments. The Australian federal government’s interference in what is entirely an independent process overseen by the ARC College of Experts has happened before. In 2006, Minister Brendan Nelson vetoed seven ARC grants. Under Scott Morrison’s government, Simon Birmingham vetoed eleven grants in 2018–19 and Dan Tehan vetoed five grants in 2020. This time, Minister Robert defended his intervention, claiming that the projects were not ‘in the national interest’ or ‘value for taxpayers’ money’, despite the fact that the projects applications had been through a long-established, well-tested, and rigorous independent peer review process before being recommended for funding. The reaction by senior university leaders such as ANU’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, and by the ARC itself, highlights how the acting minister stepped over some lines we might have thought were impregnable in a liberal democracy. Sixty-three current and past ARC Laureate Fellows wrote to the CEO of the Australian Research Council and to Minister Robert expressing their concern about ‘the way that applications for 2022 ARC Discovery Projects were managed’. They observed that projects covering ‘topics like climate activism and China … are vital for the future well-being of Australia’. The ARC College of Experts also urged the government to ‘adopt standards in line with the Haldane Principle’, which holds that ‘decisions on individual research proposals are best made through independent peer review, and government ministers should not decide which individual projects should be funded’. They called on the government to legislate to ensure future ‘independence of the ARC and prevent political interference in research grants’, and called for changes to protect the ‘rigour and integrity of the ARC’s grant assessment process’ by ‘ending the Minister’s use of the National Interest Test to make unilateral decisions on individual projects outside of the peer review process’. Two members of the ARC College of Experts took the unprecedented step of resigning, stating that they were ‘angry and heartsore’ and had made their decision to resign ‘in protest’. If we take a broader view of this particular minister’s veto of ARC recommendations, we can see a pattern of arbitrary decision making without reference to, or constraint by, principles of natural justice. As such, ministerial discretion constitutes an assault on the core liberal principle of natural justice. The Morrison government’s reputation for doing this is getting worse. Sometimes there is more than a sign of deep corruption. The ‘sports rorts’ case of 2019 depended on ministerial discretion overriding the due process AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Biography established and managed by a relevant department dealing with hundreds of applications for community sports funding. A different and more serious kind of corruption associated with the exercise of arbitrary ministerial power has long operated in Australia’s decision not to recognise the right of asylum seekers to have rights. Currently, section 501(3) of the Immigration Act 1958 allows the immigration minister to cancel a visa arbitrarily on grounds of character or security and to set aside a finding made by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, all without appeal. The ‘robodebt’ project initiated by Scott Morrison in 2015 likewise highlights the damage done by untrammelled ministerial power riding roughshod over principles of natural justice, for which the $1.8 billion legal settlement of 2021 only partially recompenses its victims. Fair procedures in decision making are a fundamental component of the rule of law. Australia’s common law recognises a duty to accord a person procedural fairness before a decision that affects them is made. As High Court justice Robert French, author of the 2019 report on academic freedom, noted: A failure to give a person affected by a decision the right to be heard and to comment on adverse material creates a risk that not all relevant evidence will be before the decision-maker, who may thereby be led into factual or other error. Apparent or apprehended bias is likely to detract from the legitimacy of a decision and so undermine confidence in the administration of the relevant power (French 2014; 25/47).

Significantly, we have no formal right to appeal the decision by Minister Robert. Finally, as concerning as the subversion of natural justice is, the Morrison government’s attack on academic autonomy is just as alarming. In our case, it silences researchers working with young people on a crucial policy issue. Some 1,000 universities in ninety-four countries, including ten from Australia, have signed the Magna Charta Universitatum. The charter restates why universities are important. According to the Charter, a university ‘must serve society as a whole’ and that ‘to meet the needs of the world around it, its research and teaching must be intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power’. A central tenet of the Charter is that ‘freedom in research and training is the fundamental principle of university life’. That freedom is precisely what Minister Stuart Robert’s jackboots have damaged so profoundly. On a positive note, Green’s Senator Dr Mehreen Faruqi has initiated a Senate Inquiry proposing that a bill first introduced into the Senate in 2018, designed to remove the veto powers from the minister, be reconsidered. It is a long overdue reform that might help mitigate some of the harm this government has done to Australia’s universities. g Professor Judith Bessant, School of Global, Urban and Social Sciences, RMIT University. Associate Professor Faith Gordon, ANU College of Law, Australian National University. Professor Rob Watts, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

The trouble with ideas

How Dostoevsky wrote his way to salvation Geordie Williamson

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, a crime and its punishment by Kevin Birmingham

Allen Lane $53.25 hb, 432 pp

here really isn’t another biographer like Joseph Frank – nor a biography to place beside his 2,400-page, fivevolume life (1976–2002) of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the wildest and most contradictory of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Frank set out in the late 1970s – a time when historically grounded literary scholarship was losing favour in the academy – to fix Dostoevsky (1821–81) in the complex matrices of Russian history, politics, religion, and culture. An author who had been read in the English-speaking world as a hallucinatory thinker, somewhat detached from reality, could now be seen as one fully imbricated in his era and milieu. Frank’s project furnished a model to which later life writers might at least aspire. Think of Reiner Stach’s exhaustive threevolume life of Kafka (2002–13), which located the Czech fabulist in the welter of Mitteleuropan life in the twentieth century’s early decades – or of Michael Gorra’s ambitious The Saddest Words (2020), a rereading of William Faulkner’s body of work through the prism of the American Civil War. Gorra, indeed, provides cover copy praise for Kevin Birmingham’s The Sinner and the Saint, a work that replicates Frank’s encyclopedism but funnels it into a single storyline, that of the real-life inspiration for, and the genesis and writing of, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). But why Crime and Punishment and not, say, The Brothers Karamazov (1880) or The Idiot (1869) – both arguably greater achievements? Or even Notes from a Dead House (1862), that hinge-work describing Dostoevsky’s years in Siberian exile? In a dramatic opening chapter, which zeroes in on the earliest moments of the novel undertaken while Dostoevsky was trapped, ill and penniless in a hotel in the German resort town of Wiesbaden during September of 1865, having lost everything at roulette, Birmingham persuasively argues that Crime and Punishment is both the key that opens the lock to his late creative efflorescence (‘four of the greatest novels in Russian literature – in all literature’) and a world-changing text in its own right: Decades later, it seemed clear that the Russian had started a revolution in ‘the artistic thinking of humankind’ – that’s how the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin put it. He argued that Dostoevsky’s novels ‘provide a new artistic model of the world’. His novels are gatherings of autonomous voices interacting with one another beyond the control of an overriding authorial voice.

Jolley Prize 2017 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story, with $12,500 in prizes. The 2022 Jolley Prize closes on 2 May 2022. It honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English.

Judged by Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500 previous winners 2021 Camilla Chaudhary

2020 Mykaela Saunders

2019 Sonja Dechian

2018 Madelaine Lucas

2017 Eliza Robertson

2016 Josephine Rowe

2015 Rob Magnuson Smith

2014 Jennifer Down

2013 Michelle Michau-Crawford

2012 Sue Hurley

2011 Carrie Tiffany & Gregory Day

2010 Maria Takolander

The Jolley Prize is generously funded by Ian Dickson

Full details and online entry are available on our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

‘Bakhtin,’ concludes the author, ‘called this innovation the polyphonic novel, a form that transcends the simplicity of centuries of monologic art.’ Birmingham is content to cede to the older formalist critic closer readings of the novel; however, there is another angle he wishes to explore. And that is the way the radically new form inaugurated by Dostoevsky interacts with the world as it is: ‘a narrative where notions and theories, dreams and hallucinations seep into a criminal investigation, a quest for material evidence of a crime’. St Petersburg – a tsar’s grand dream of a capital plonked down in a frozen, misty swamp – is both the novel’s physical setting and an architectural metaphor for the novel’s weird meeting of the empirical and illusory. Birmingham’s thesis, one that he explores in the coming chapters with both scholarly rigour and a dash of Dostoevsky’s own febrile poetry, is that Crime and Punishment is not a novel of ideas – it is ‘a novel about the trouble with ideas’: Dostoevsky’s novel is about how ideas inspire and deceive, how they coil themselves around sadness and feed on bitter fruit. It is about how easily ideas spread and mutate, how they vanish, only to reappear in unlikely places, how they serve many masters, how they can be hammered into new shapes or harden into stone, how they are aroused by love and washed by great rains and flowing rivers.

‘It is about how ideas change us,’ writes Birmingham, ‘and how they make us more of who we already are.’ Which is to say, The Sinner and the Saint is a book about the way those theories and arguments that surrounded Dostoevsky during his youth and maturity in his native Russia – and right across Europe and the New World – were absorbed into the author’s mental bloodstream and modified in the process. The Sinner and the Saint proceeds, then, as a series of chapters in which an account of Dostoevsky’s intellectual development alternates with an exploration of the life and crimes of a man who would furnish the model for Raskolnikov: the poet–murderer Pierre François Lacenaire (1803–36). Lacenaire first came to Dostoevsky’s attention in the early 1860s, when the author and his brother Mikhail were combing European journals for material worthy of translation and publication in their first magazine. It was in a French collection of infamous criminal trials that the author happened across Lacenaire’s 1835 trial for double murder and his eventual execution. What fascinated the Russian about Lacenaire was his determination to provide intellectual justifications for his crimes. In a world where criminals were almost regarded as a sub-human species, Lacenaire was a polished product of the French bourgeoisie. He went to university and intended to study for the law. He wrote poetry and was familiar with the radical fringes of early nineteenth-century thought. That such a man might attack and murder in cold blood a man and his mother using a sharpened file, and then have the temerity to claim his criminal actions were not only justified but the logical outcome of a society in which inequality was enforced by the state, made Lacenaire something new. Michel Foucault considered the attention and even fame granted to Lacenaire as the expressions of a shift from public 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

reverence for older folk heroes to that of the bourgeois anti-hero, a romantic criminal whose story prefigured the modern genres of true crime and the novel of detection. But Dostoevsky saw in Lacenaire something closer to home: a confusion of thought and impulses for which he felt personal sympathy but also a degree of repugnance. Birmingham shows how Dostoevsky’s time in Siberia exposed him to men who had murdered and yet who were in all other respects ordinary. He came to appreciate that even the most terrible crimes may be committed by individuals caught up in circumstance. And the feudal police state of tsarist Russia had much circumstance to offer. Still, Dostoevsky was fundamentally altered by his time in Siberia in other ways. The Western liberal ideas that fed his youthful political activism – the egoism of Max Stirner, the utopian socialist thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon or Charles Fourier – were replaced by a conservative, if idiosyncratic, Russophilia. Western individualism became for the Russian author a social disease of which Lacenaire was a morbid symptom. If Birmingham spends the first half of the book laboriously wheeling these opposing positions into line, it is worth the wait. By the time we have circled back to the ‘small, mid-level inn situated among beer houses across from the railway station’ in Wiesbaden, the structures of thought and feeling that formed Dostoevsky have been exhaustively laid down. What follows is a drama of creation, in which Birmingham brings microscopic detail and a sense of drama to the composition of Crime and Punishment. We read of the hunger and desperation the Russian faced at that moment – of the scattered notes and ideas gradually gaining coherence as he wrote by the stump of a candle the hotel servants refused to replace. The ideas came fast: Dostoevsky wrote fifty pages, then a hundred, all in a few days. We learn how the author filled his available notebooks then turned them upside down to continue writing. ‘On some level,’ Birmingham suggests, Dostoevsky ‘had been playing a game of brinkmanship with himself, engineering a moment of literary salvation’: He had pretended that escaping to Europe and winning at roulette would be his salvation. The hand of God would rescue a virtuous, long suffering man through the unlikely instrument of a tiny ivory ball. And when the salvation didn’t come, when he was utterly ruined, his eyes would be opened at last, and he would realize that he could be saved only through writing.

‘So by the time he picked up his pen in Wiesbaden,’ writes Birmingham, ‘the ink that flowed onto the page had become the product not of a secular confession but of a genuine calling ... The story taking shape in his notebooks was God’s true saving instrument.’ If Joseph Frank’s biographical project worked like a map of the author’s life drawn on a one-to-one scale, The Sinner and the Saint takes a single, mighty tributary of Dostoevsky’s career and sails it from mountain source to river delta. It makes for a thrilling ride. g Geordie Williamson has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008.

Commentary

‘Not being talked about’ Putting the arts back on the political stage

by David Latham

‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’ Oscar Wilde

hen the Morrison government decided in December 2019 to axe the federal arts department and to fold it into the department of infrastructure, transport, regional development, and communications, it was a strong signal – if another was needed – of the low esteem and influence the arts wields in Canberra. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The decision was made just months after the 2019 election campaign, when the Liberal Party offered no arts policy, and Labor only a nominal one. The depressing news came on the back of a decade of crisis and neglect for the sector, well before the spectre of Covid wreaked havoc for many artists and performers. Creativity in Crisis, a report released in July 2021 by media academic and arts journalist Ben Eltham, and Senior Economist at the Australia Institute, Alison Pennington, detailed how the Australian arts sector has been eviscerated over a long period of time. Among other things, the report showed that since 2014 the ABC has had $783 million stripped from its annual budgets. Music and arts funding in schools has been gutted. Streaming video on demand services (SVOD) such as Netflix and Stan carry only two per cent Australian content. Children’s television budgets are half what they were a decade ago. After last year’s May budget, the National Archives was forced to crowdfund to help save Australia’s cultural legacy from crumbling to dust. Similarly, the Throsby Report points out that in the past decade federal government arts and cultural expenditure decreased by 18.9 per cent per capita. During that period artists’ income fell by nineteen per cent. Given the slow burn, the question for the arts sector is what is being done to respond to this long-term decline in arts investment and infrastructure? Part of the problem for the arts community has been its sheer breadth. The nature of the political lobbying is another factor. Spending a day in Canberra or organising a special meeting or delegation with the relevant minister – where you deliver research and anecdotes from case studies, and the minister exits the engagement with a stock of social media images – is not a strategy that works if you have no political leverage and are effectively on ‘the outside’. And that’s where the arts undoubtedly are right now. In recognition of this reality, Fund the Arts was formed in 2021 by a coalition of concerned media, advertising, lobbying, and arts professionals to address the problems besetting the sector. Fund the Arts is running a media and ground campaign in marginal seats aimed at making neglect of the arts a political liability. We want to ask these politicians – before their constit-

uents – what are you doing for the 400,000 people working in the creative sector? What are you doing to nurture the next wave of Australian voices? Fund the Arts has developed its own policy response as a touchstone for political contenders. Some of that is about funding, such as adding $300 million to the ABC budget or $70 million for regional and community arts, and some of it is policy driven, such as twenty-five per cent Australian content quotas for SVOD services. Fortuitously, the Voices movement has helped break the policy logjam. In 2019, Labor merely had to move a half step from the government’s non-policy to outpoint the coalition. Today, Fund the Arts has meetings organised with Voices of Candidates looking to broaden their policy positions and appeal to constituent concerns. Many of these will be using their media platforms to deliver FTA campaign messages in whole or in part. Through targeted advertising, social, and traditional media, we will be pressuring political candidates in twenty marginal seats to support the arts. We will also distribute scorecards for each party/candidate based on their arts policy. Fund the Arts has identified three key demographics that will receive tailored messages making the arts relevant to their concerns and interests. Writers and publishers have serious concerns about current funding. The 2020 Australian Society of Authors survey showed that eighty-one per cent of respondents earned less than $15,000 per annum – fifty-eight per cent of those less than $2,000. Literature received just six per cent of Australia Council grants and initiatives. But fighting for literature without supporting broader investment in arts infrastructure is futile. In so many arts disciplines, organisations that received funding in the past are failing today due to the diminished size of the overall arts funding pool. Of relevance to the world of literature and writing, Fund the Arts is fighting for 300 Creative Fellowships ($85,000 per annum over three years) so that artists can refine their craft. We’re pushing for $133 million of Australia Council funding for individual artists and for small to medium organisations. We’re pushing for a change in policy settings so that Australia is not only an importer, but also an exporter of art and culture. To make this campaign succeed, we need your support. Join writers like Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood, and Joanna Murray-Smith – and ABR’s own Sarah Holland-Batt and Peter Rose (both FTA Ambassadors) – to put arts back on the political agenda. g David Latham is a lobbyist, PR director, and journalist. Contact him at www.fundthearts.com.au. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Open Page with Mary Beard

Mary Beard is one of the world’s leading classicists and cultural commentators. She is professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is Twelve Caesars (2021).

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

That has a very particular resonance as we approach what we all hope might be the beginning of the end of Covid. I can’t wait to get back to Rome. I’m currently writing a very different book on Roman emperors from Twelve Caesars, looking back to the ancient world itself and trying to think harder about what life was really like for them: what they did all day, etc. So, I really want to get to Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli again soon.

What’s your idea of hell? A walking holiday!

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

It has to be ‘sincerity’. It’s not that I want to advocate ‘insincerity’ as such, but I dislike the way we let bad arguments off the hook on the grounds that that they are sincerely held!

What’s your favourite film?

Usually it’s the last one I enjoyed. But if I was choosing one for my ‘desert island’, and allowing myself a bit of sentimentality, I think I would go for Casablanca.

And your favourite book? That really is impossible!

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

I am afraid this is for curiosity value (it would probably make for a dreadful party and some terrible table manners): Boudica, the famous British rebel against the Romans; Mary Wollstonecraft; and any Roman slave you could persuade to come along and tell us about antiquity from their point of view.

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

I can’t stand the word ‘woke’, whether it is used as a compliment or an insult (though full disclosure: I do use it myself!). I would bring back the adjective ‘Vitellian’ after the Roman emperor Vitellius, to mean a particularly sumptuous banquet.

Who is your favourite author?

There are too many to list. But I am very conscious that I was drawn into the Roman world by reading the second-century ce historian Tacitus, who analysed the early Roman empire. I vividly remember, when I was at high school, reading his biography of his father-in-law, Agricola. There, in the mouth of one of Rome’s enemies, he describes the effects of Roman conquest on the conquered: ‘they make a desert,’ he wrote, ‘and call it peace’. I don’t think anyone has summed up empire better.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

From my childhood, I have a huge soft spot for Jane Eyre. 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

(Princeton University Press)

Interview

She taught me to admire wry resilience.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Taking infinite care with the words. I admire writing where every word is in the right place, and where the prose ‘works’, whether it is on the page or read out loud. That takes time (I don’t believe that good writing is ever quick). Take a look at Philip Pullman or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie if you want to know what I mean.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

When I was a student, the books of Moses Finley taught me that it was possible to work on the ancient world and to be politically engaged.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. I used to be very keen on Iris Murdoch novels. It’s not that I don’t admire them any longer, but I don’t admire myself for admiring them. Too much upper-class adultery.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

There are some great history ones: Dan Snow’s ‘History Hit’, or Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘The Rest Is History’.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Twitter and email. I am very easily distracted,

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? Expertise and wit. I like them to see more in, and about, the book than I could. There are a handful of reviewers whom I would read no matter what they were reviewing. Ferdinand Mount is one.

How do you find working with editors?

I feel so grateful to the editors I have worked with. They have saved me from any number of errors and infelicities.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I have had great fun at many festivals – the less posh they are, the more I like them.

Are artists valued in our society?

Valued? Yes. Adequately remunerated? No.

What are you working on now?

I am writing a (sort of ) sequel to SPQR. The book takes the story a bit later, but more to the point it looks at the figure of the Roman emperor (which I didn’t much do in SPQR). I am trying to stand back from the usual biographical format, one ruler after the next, with their anecdotal idiosyncrasies. I’m looking at what emperors in general were all about. g

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Fiction

Party people

Fictionalising Labor’s years of hope Laura Elizabeth Woollett

A Great Hope by Jessica Stanley

‘T

Picador $32.99 pb, 406 pp

here are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,’ Vladimir Lenin has been credited with saying, with reference to the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s a sentiment that immediately springs to mind when reading Jessica Stanley’s A Great Hope, a début that, while not billed as historical fiction, is deeply concerned with history and its making. Stanley’s titular ‘great hope’ is former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, during his rise to office in 2007. John Clare is one of the men who helped get him there, a union leader and dyed-in-thewool Labor voter with his own political ambitions. John’s mysterious death in 2010, when he was found impaled on the fence of his house after an apparent fall from the rooftop, provides a centrepiece for the novel’s action. It is a thrilling set-up, allowing Stanley to dip in and out of time, tracking the vicissitudes of the Rudd–Gillard governments (2007–13) – from landslide victory, to legislative impotence over the environment, to the 2010 leadership spill – under the guise of a whodunit. Stanley’s project is ambitious, as she embraces a wide range of genres, including murder mystery and family saga, while eluding their constraints. With a career background that includes journalism, politics, and publicity for the television show Neighbours, Stanley confidently inhabits the professional spheres of her cast, evoking with ease the sterile muck of newsrooms, two-star conference hotels, and Melbourne–Canberra flights. Yet A Great Hope is above all a character-driven narrative, and the women surrounding the charismatically mediocre John Clare leave a lasting impression. ‘God knows he’s disappointed enough women,’ Stanley has John reflect at the novel’s inception, right before falling to his death. These disappointed women include Grace, his hostile wife of more than twenty years; their firstborn, Sophie, loose cannon and scandal-magnet; and Tessa Notaras, a serious and self-sufficient younger woman with whom John becomes involved while she is a member of his staff. There is also the eternally sidelined son, Toby, Grace’s favourite child and unwitting ear to John’s marital regrets (‘[I]f you’re in a relationship and it’s not quite right, don’t just grit your teeth and stick it out. You matter too’). If Stanley deals at times in stereotypes – the frigid first wife, the bratty daddy’s girl, the underling-turned-mistress – she also deals in their subversion. Nobody in A Great Hope is exactly who they seem to be at first glance. The inner monologues and vocal 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

mannerisms of the Clare women in particular are distinct, and Stanley delights in their contradictions and imperfections. Grace is both a sensitive individual who is concerned about climate change and the kind of woman who enjoys the power trip of pointing out another’s use of plastic bags instead of canvas. Sophie is a sympathetic and captivating central character, despite coming out with lines like, ‘I literally don’t give a fuck about Timor.’ For the most part, Stanley juggles the large cast of A Great Hope effectively. Even secondary characters, such as Sophie’s cloying and ambitious boyfriend, Sam, are memorable. Nonetheless, one does get the impression that Stanley revels in the inner-workings of certain characters over others, sometimes to the detriment of the novel’s structure. A neighbour, Girl, is introduced early on as Grace’s confidante and acolyte, only to largely disappear from the action until she becomes pertinent in the book’s final third. Toby, while lovingly rendered, fades into the background by comparison with the magnetic Clare women and Tessa. Although this wallflowerishness is certainly true to character and emblematic of the plight of a mild-mannered child in a family of large personalities, it does mean that his arc can feel low-stakes, despite the inclusion of an on-campus sexual harassment plot. One wonders if Stanley might have achieved a tighter narrative by engaging with a more limited set of perspectives. The non-linearity of A Great Hope is both a strength and an occasional source of frustration. By and large, Stanley uses leaps in time to great effect, drawing tension from the staggered disclosure of information, the interplay of past and present; in short, the novel is never boring. Stanley’s confidence as a storyteller and trust in her readers are evident in her avoidance of obvious time markers and era-specific window-dressing. In a less graceful author’s hands, a reference to the first season of MasterChef would be just that: a reference. Stanley uses it to initiate a major character’s media career. That said, there are points where readers may find it difficult to orient themselves in time, especially if they aren’t overly familiar with (or interested in) the events of the Rudd–Gillard years. This is particularly true of Sophie’s storyline as it becomes more convoluted. Like Curtis Sittenfeld and Jane Smiley before her, Stanley shows how personal losses and gains can have political (and by that token, ethical) ramifications. Nobody is more committed to the Labor Party than the starry-eyed lover of the union leader, nor more reactionary than that same woman, spurned. Arguably, the political narrative falls somewhat to the wayside toward the end of the book, with Stanley’s evident desire to grant her characters a ‘happy ever after’ – and have them come out as good guys in the eyes of history, for all their missteps – leading to a dulling of the social commentary that animates the earlier sections. Perhaps this is Stanley’s point: that, for many, the personal subsumes the political; that her characters are, ultimately, people capable of a ‘happy ever after’ – even if that fabled future implicitly takes place in the Australia of Tony Abbott and his ilk. g Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of a short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016), and two novels, Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018) and The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021).

Fiction

Mutable worlds Ambition and audacity Debra Adelaide

In one scene near the end of the novel where Fin’s father is negotiating with him, we share a threshold moment of clarity about Fin’s fugitive parent and his own life, his sense that he’s about to leave the world of childhood adventures and road trips and enter a new, as yet uncharted, one. He is at once devastated by and understanding of his father’s choices. The details of this scene are so poignant that I felt like my heart had been taken out and squeezed then replaced in a slightly different spot.

have said this already in a recent review, but it is a special kind of novelist who can write about young characters yet still engage the adult reader. It’s also a special book that can handle the burden of what cover quotes are fond of labelling ‘warm-hearted’ or ‘big-hearted’ fiction. To me, such descriptions usually mean the kiss of death for credibility, but warm-heartedness is exactly what Jack Ellis’s Home and Other Hiding Places (Ultimo Press, $32.99 pb, 311 pp) delivers, without lapsing into sentimentality. Ellis offers a compelling story about a family that is divided, directionless, and under pressure. The focus is on eight-year-old Fin, recently brought to live in Sydney with his grandmother by his mother, Lindy, who is trying to flee her demons, find a job, and generally prove that she is not the loser everyone seems to think she is. This is a world where people struggle to be decent but are weak, compromised, or slapped down at every turn. Lindy is deluded and unstable, set up to be a victim, while Fin’s father is unreliable and mostly absent, yet they are both trying as hard as their circumstances allow. No character is judged or stereotyped, and even Fin’s cold and disapproving grandmother surprises everyone, including the reader, at the end. There are other strong characters: Fin’s great-grandmother, the chain-smoking Josie, and the neighbouring kid, Rory, who almost steals the show with his military turn of phrase thanks to the influence of his grandfather, and his old-school survival skills, which he passes on to Fin. Despite the serious dysfunctionality of its characters, the story is far from bleak. Fin is sweet-natured, innocent, and totally likeable. He sets off on mad adventures such as attempting to sail to New Zealand with Rory in a tiny boat, thinks his grandmother is trying to poison him, runs away at the threat of trouble, but maintains a core of kindness and generosity that belies his youth.

obert Lukins’s Loveland (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 344 pp) promises to be an ambitious novel, setting up mysteries and pursuing its storyline through the point of view of two main characters. In Queensland, May hears that her grandmother has died and left her a property previously unknown: a house in Nebraska, in a former amusement park called Loveland. Meanwhile, a backstory set in the 1950s focuses on her grandmother as a newly married young woman, and builds to the dramatic revelations as to why she journeyed halfway across the world and kept the details of her previous life a secret. May leaves her husband and son and travels to Loveland to settle the inheritance, but starts to forge friendships with some of the locals, including a woman who reveals she once had an affair with May’s grandfather. Changing her mind about selling, May tells her husband over the phone that she’s leaving him, provoking his unexpected arrival later on. At first, Loveland appears alluring in its historical reach and highly visual setting, while the two-handed narrative provides an interesting structure. There is a spectacular fire in the background of the story, signalled in the prologue, along with some shocking violence. And yet the passive voice, the arbitrary action, and Lukins’s penchant for broad-brush scenes rather than details mute the novel’s impact and keep the characters at a distance. The prose is wordy, so that simple actions like answering a phone seem overly significant, imposing an unnecessary weight on the story. But the biggest problem is the passive female characters, and the unrelentingly sinister males. May has chosen to marry young to an abusive, controlling man, as if doomed to repeat the mistakes of an earlier generation, but the reason why is never explained. Mysteries like these demand much more context.

ou’ve got to love a novel that takes risks, tries something new, and ultimately gives you a good shake-up. Rhett Davis’s début novel, Hovering (Hachette, $32.99 pb, 293 pp), balances on the edge of implausibility but remains entirely convincing. This is partly because right at the start we are given

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something ordinary and familiar – the arrival home from overseas of Alice, an artist and activist – and partly because Davis has such a deft hand. We first meet Alice just before landing, peering out the aeroplane window at Fraser, a city that is like Melbourne, but not. The place seems different after sixteen years. But then the taxi she takes to her old family home is blue, not yellow, and although the driver goes in the wrong direction, they arrive all the same. Alice is coolly greeted at the door of the family home by her younger sister Lydia. Homecomings, sibling rivalries, personality clashes: Hovering exploits simple and familiar scenarios. But something is a bit off, and all this is hinted at before the end of the first paragraph. So much is effortlessly dealt out in the first chapter – indications that Alice is fleeing some conflict, or worse; her very mixed feelings about having to return; a brief rundown of her years overseas; Lydia’s feelings expressed in a terse email exchange – that I was hooked. Meanwhile, the city is under a mysterious threat. Buildings, lawns, parks, streets – everything is liable to shift place or change size and colour from one day to the next; even the family home eventually gets a lofty relocation. The residents accept these changes with resignation, although feverish theories abound as to the cause. Instead of weather reports or bushfire alerts, they get daily bulletins on the changes to their world. The bizarre quickly becomes commonplace in this novel. All through I was persistently reminded of a Howard Arkley painting. Stare long enough at his technicolour, airbrushed suburbanscapes and they begin to look normal.

Within the family there are shifts and variables. Alice’s sudden and unexplained departure years earlier left Lydia feeling abandoned. Their parents have retired to a life of pleasure-seeking on a series of artificial holiday resorts. Lydia’s teenage son George now only communicates via emails and text messages. In the meantime, Lydia suspects her sister is a fake, or a clone. Something about Alice is not quite right: she can now cook, for a start. Is Lydia justified in her suspicions? She spends her days data-mining and analysing, her nights shut in her bedroom gaming. What would she know about the real world? But that is the point. The real world is mutable, called into question at every turn of the novel. The virtual city that George is quietly creating in his bedroom might be more reliable and authentic. Hovering is an audacious and original novel. There is a lot going on as Davis explores contemporary anxieties about place, ownership, and landscape – not to mention that whole question about the blurring of reality. He uses a range of forms and genres – radio scripts, computer coding, transcripts of feeds, tables – and while not everything he throws at the novel sticks, the serious questions raised about insecurity and miscommunication compensate for that. This whole novel is just so quirky and appealing that it will be interesting to see what Davis does next. g Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of more than a dozen books. She is also an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney. Her latest book is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (Picador, 2019).

Great Australian storytelling

A dark, bittersweet portrait of a mother and son’s fragmented relationship, by an award-winning Australian novelist.

Australia’s foremost biographer looks back on her own life and the circumstances, events and choices that shaped her career.

Unleash your inner flâneur and join Robyn Annear on a series of walks that showcase the hidden histories of Melbourne.

TEXTPUBLISHING.COM.AU

30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

New fro m Tex t Pu bli shi ng

From the author of Mister Pip comes this poetic and dreamlike novel that explores family, otherness and acceptance.

Fiction

Spirals and echoes Sue Orr’s second novel Brigid Magner

Loop Tracks

by Sue Orr Upswell Publishing

$29.99 pb, 334 pp

fter being published to acclaim in Aotearoa by Victoria University Press in 2021, Sue Orr’s Loop Tracks was picked up by Terri-ann White, formerly of UWA Publishing, now at Upswell Publishing. A second-time novelist, Orr is represented by agent Martin Shaw, who has also supported authors such as Pip Adam and Ingrid Horrocks to be published across the Tasman. Loop Tracks features a slightly wonky, freestyle Spirograph image on the cover, an image Orr’s protagonist, Charlie, describes as a ‘dahlia’. She reflects on the Spirograph as part of her childhood, which was abruptly ended by pregnancy at fifteen. The novel moves between Charlie’s predicament in 1978 and the New Zealand lockdown of 2020. In the days before lockdown, Charlie’s autistic grandson Tommy returns from a gig where he has seen and heard a looper pedal in action for the first time. Tommy is fascinated with the spirals of recorded sound that seemed to go on and on endlessly when in fact there must be a finite number. Charlie reflects: I wonder how he saw it: whether music and math moved in the spirographical circles of my favourite childhood toy, whether there was any room at all for warm pulsing human bodies on the dance floor of his mind … Tommy likes his loops intact: connected, sturdy in infinite construct.

This novel is formally organised around loops – Charlie’s repetitive knitting, bush tracks circling the city and of course, the looping of time and of the narrator’s thoughts with regular flashes from her difficult past. The central drama is the adoption of Charlie’s baby in the late 1970s. Like many young women, she was compelled to erase this chapter from her official record and pretend it never happened. She describes this traumatic period as a ‘dirty smudge’ – the more you try to clean it up, the more it spreads, leaving ‘indelible traces of itself everywhere.’ Charlie’s teenage naïveté is both comical and confronting. A series of misunderstandings ultimately prevents her from going through with an abortion, partly triggered by her reading of glossy magazines while the plane to Sydney (a common destination for New Zealand women seeking abortions) is delayed. Hungry and nauseous, Charlie walks off the delayed plane. As a flight attendant struggles to recall her, the aircraft departs. Once spellbound by daydreams about the young man responsible for the pregnancy,

Charlie realises that he is never going to be in the picture. In the acknowledgments, Orr thanks a friend whose story was the kernel for the novel and the doctor and trail-blazing abortion advocate Margaret Sparrow, who fought for women’s reproductive rights. Through Charlie’s story, Orr criticises the practice of forced adoption, which redistributed babies, often through underhanded means, causing lasting devastation. Charlie recalls that teenage mothers were made to deliver on their sides so they didn’t see their babies, making them easier to remove. A few years after the airport incident, Charlie catches a plane to start studying linguistics in Wellington but finds that the echoes of the missed flight are still with her: ‘These days we call it triggering, but back then it was just a really bad churning of your guts, followed by a freefall of thoughts and words into a smouldering silent panic.’ She develops a disfluency that leaves her literally speechless at times and she ‘slips sideways’ and abandons her studies for another career path. We are not told much about Charlie’s life post adoption but gather it has been difficult, including strained relationships with her parents who die early, a brief marriage and no other children, until her four-year-old grandson Tommy is dropped off by his angry father. Tommy’s neurodiversity means that he does not feel any shame about his heritage – something that Charlie feared – instead the cycle of shame and anger ends with him. Despite the potential for dullness, Orr manages to create a coherent narrative out of people staying at home during the 2020 lockdown. With Tommy and his girlfriend living with her, you might expect a cosy family dynamic, but the return of Charlie’s estranged son unsettles any sense of domestic harmony. We see the characters drifting apart – Charlie begins a romance with an expat neighbour while surreptitiously smoking by the hedge, prompting a reconnection to a ‘sassy’ younger version of herself, Tommy resorts to compulsively compiling Covid statistics day and night. Like the experience of lockdown, this section of the narrative has a breathless quality, no doubt paralleling the world Orr inhabited while completing it. The context allows for the inclusion of political details, specifically Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the health restrictions, and her re-election in 2020, which has been a source of interest here in Australia where events have played out in a more rancorous and deadly ways. The ‘bad old days’ of Charlie’s youth are compared with the kinder leadership of Ardern, whose government successfully decriminalised abortion in 2020. It’s hard to see the still raging pandemic from a distance, yet fiction can show us its propensity for generating both unity and fragmentation. This polarisation is figured through Tommy’s experiences of falling in love, locating his father and becoming disillusioned with him, while being radicalised by online groups that speak to his need for certainty and belonging. With the help of her friend Adele, Charlie comes to see her adoption story as symptomatic of a place and time. Loop Tracks is a novel packed full with ideas, enough for several books, but the author’s preoccupation with the wrongs done to girls and women strikes the most urgent, resonating note. g Brigid Magner is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at RMIT University. She is the author of Locating Australian Literary Memory (2019). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Fiction

Breaking and entering Piecemeal transgressions of a small town Jennifer Mills

Australiana

by Yumna Kassab

Ultimo Press $32.99 pb, 292 pp

ustraliana opens with a break-in. Lifting away a flyscreen, strangers climb into a man’s house, help themselves to his biscuits. The crime doesn’t feel important – it’s the fourth in a month, we’re told – but the intrusion does. It evokes the entanglements of small towns, the way in which lives intersect, physical proximity breaking down the barriers of class and culture and personal choice that can divide urban populations into subcultures. As a declaration of intent, the image of trespass is pretty clear: there is no real privacy in this town, and as readers we’re about to gain access. In the first two sections of the book, short, interlinked stories ripple out, often connected by an object: a stolen silver spoon, a child’s jumper, a stone. The short story writer’s knack for the telling gesture is everywhere, a craft refined through microfictional practice. Kassab draws on real-world observation and careful listening. There is a lightness of touch to her direct and lively prose. Kassab moves nimbly from character to character, sometimes barely touching the ground before lifting off again. Like a long, immersive tracking shot in film, the technique brings the reader into the book’s world quickly and constructs an illusion of stories unfolding before our eyes in real time, offering a voyeuristic pleasure. This effect is occasionally punctured by leaps in time, sudden movement between event and memory. The temporality interrupts the illusion, but after a while the choice makes sense; it’s closer to how time actually works in our inner lives. We fall and rise through memory as we move through space. This eventfulness, this layered being, is perhaps more prominent in small towns or neighbourhoods where one has lived a long time. That some people are marked by what happened to them years ago, or that some relationships remain limited by past events, feels authentic. Small communities share lifetimes of connection and transgression, and such stories are rarely consistent in memory. It’s promising territory for a novel. The community in question is in regional New South Wales, the region in and around Tamworth, where Kassab has been living and teaching after growing up in Western Sydney. Her first book, The House of Youssef (2019), drew on direct experience, taking the reader into the milieu of Lebanese-Australians, first and second-generation migrants. That book also deployed microfictional techniques to enter homes and inner lives at points of crisis. There are traumatic and difficult events here, too: a break-up, 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

a suicide, various failures of duty. Acts of violence, arson. Drought and flood. The quickness of movement can sometimes give these stories an iterative sense of despair or bitterness that is common in fiction about regional Australia. I found myself wondering why hurt is so much easier to depict than the deep care that can also define small town life. A polyphonic approach calls for restraint. Kassab’s eye roves coolly, and there is a matter-of-factness to the interiority of her characters that is often subtly powerful, though it can veer into cliché (‘Water off a duck’s back’ ,‘the final straw’, etc.). Drought and poverty are ever-present, while other challenges are suggested, such as pollution from mining and the climate crisis. A father dreams: ‘Fields freedom fantasies failure.’ A child’s voice appears as a single, floating paragraph. A light touch becomes more useful as the material darkens, as slowly the stories begin to ease into a kind of pastoral horror. Later sections of the book offer more integration. ‘The Blind Side’ deals with one farmer’s transgressions as a town metes out its own version of justice. Over several chapters, a portrait of relationships and shared history gives a sense of entanglements through time. Here, Kassab’s commitment to realism is at its most pronounced, even prompting a declaration that ‘names and places have been changed’, lifting off the flyscreen between fiction and documentary. Elsewhere, the attachment to realism drifts away altogether. In ‘Pilliga’, a ghost story, Kassab explores the Australian gothic, evoking a haunted landscape, the bush as a site of death and disappearance. ‘What do people do out here? They disappear,’ says one character. Later: ‘We think it is an ancient land but he tells me it is a burial ground.’ As this story’s narrator toys with skulls in a dry riverbed, I can’t help recalling Tony Birch’s notion of the supernatural or haunted landscape as a salve for historical violence, a displacement of human accountability. When the Pilliga has been the subject of such a thorough investigation as Eric Rolls’s A Million Wild Acres, this feels like a missed opportunity for more depth. To title this novel-in-stories Australiana is a provocation. While aiming to interrogate national myths and identity, Kassab risks going over old ground, reinforcing the notion that the rural context offers authenticity, albeit bleak, or accepting the notion that some nebulous identity lies to the west of the Great Dividing Range. Questions about why these myths persist, about colonisation and the politics of land, are passed over in the detail of ordinary lives. This is where the gestural falters. The final section of the book is a poetic treatment of Captain Thunderbolt’s enduring presence. This feels tacked on, reinforcing a suspicion that Australiana could have been packaged as a short story collection. A novel can sustain plenty of formal fragmentation, but the more interesting stories here are those that connect. Kassab is a writer adept at breaking and entering: at stepping into the lives of others and bringing us their fears and hurts. The patchwork technique works well, and when it offers insight into a community and its relationships, it can be very satisfying. But Australiana doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of that first uneasy trespass. g Jennifer Mills’s latest novel is The Airways (2021). ❖

Fiction

Hearts on sleeves Kári Gíslason’s latest saga Dilan Gunawardana

The Sorrow Stone by Kári Gíslason

University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 240 pp

n his extraordinary journey through Iceland’s history, Saga Land (2017, with Richard Fidler), Kári Gíslason described Icelanders as ‘being reserved’ and ‘a bit severe’ at first glance, likening them to the Hallgrímskirkja church that looms over Reykjavik with its enormous basalt column wings and stony façade. The first three days I spent alone in that city gave me a wholly different impression of its people. On my first day there in 2013, I was greeted by what appeared to be most of the city’s population lined up on the Lækjargata strip waving flags, smiling from ear to ear, and dancing as the annual Gay Pride parade rolled by in all its garish joy. The following night, as I chomped on one of Iceland’s famous hot dogs from a van by the waterfront, a young woman, soused to high heaven, threw her arms around my neck and yelled ‘I luff you!’ in my ear until her friends, doubled over with laughter, dragged her away. The morning after, in a souvenir store, the young man behind the counter asked me where I was from. When I answered ‘Australia’, a dark cloud crossed his face and he mumbled, ‘Oh, my girlfriend left me for an Australian’, as he daintily popped my little model fishing boat in a paper bag. It’s not a stretch for me to surmise that Icelanders, contrary to how they are often perceived, actually wear their hearts on their sleeves. As Gíslason observes in Saga Land, ‘it doesn’t take much to get under the sternness’. Thanks to the authors of the Icelandic Sagas, including Gíslason’s direct ancestor Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), we know that the fates of Icelanders across centuries are often dictated by matters of the heart and other organs. In the Njáls Saga, Hrútur’s manhood is cursed for sleeping with the ageing queen mother of Norway. This leads to a chain of bloody events over decades. In the Laxdæla Saga, the close friends Kjartan and Bolli both fall in love with the beautiful Guðrún, leading to their mutual destruction; and in the Gísla Saga, the outlaw poet Gisli kills a man deemed unsuitable for his elder sister Thordis, resulting in their family’s exile to from Norway to Iceland, a love quadrangle across neighbouring farms, and Thordis stabbing the hitman she paid to kill her brother (retribution for killing two of her lovers). It’s this saga that forms the basis of Gíslason’s second novel, The Sorrow Stone. The backdrop of Gíslason’s retelling shifts between the rural fjords of Norway and Iceland at the midpoint of the tenth century ce; Hakon the Good of Norway, indoctrinated at the English court, spreads the word of Christ across his kingdom, and Vikings

return to their home harbours in longships filled with treasures and slaves. In Iceland’s Westfjords, a woman flees across farmlands with her twelve-year-old son. They carry a shield to protect them from the icy winds, and a cursed blade that moments ago was embedded in the leg of a man she was honour-bound to kill. This saga’s heroine is Disa, a resident of the ‘shit-soaked island of storm and rocks’ who was exiled years ago at a young age from her home in the ‘warmth and light’ of Surnadal, Norway. As Disa is pulled along by the whims of the men who smother her throughout her life – her father, her brothers Gils and Kel, her lovers Bo and Grim – we learn of the tragic events leading up to the birth of her son, Sindri, and of their eventual escape.

Thanks to the authors of the Icelandic Sagas, we know that the fates of Icelanders across centuries are often dictated by matters of the heart and other organs Subtle, well-paced, and compelling, the narrative switches between the urgency of Disa and Sindri’s flight and Disa’s pluperfect telling of her own saga before the plotlines knit together. Gíslason’s expansive knowledge of Icelandic history and culture lends authenticity to his characters’ actions and musings. Through direct, non-flowery prose, he taps into the animism that endured in the tenth-century Norse psyche with descriptions of water in the bays as ‘the colour of dark steel’, ships returning to harbours like ‘whales full of treasures to cut open and spill into the valley’, and mornings in autumn taking ‘longer to take shape’. Not yet tethered to Christian notions of morality, the men of The Sorrow Stone carry out honour killings dutifully and (mostly) with the same amount of reluctance as slaughtering livestock for sustenance – nobody here can afford to turn the other cheek. As Disa remarks: ‘Father said preachers spoke more shit than our farmhands.’ Gíslason wisely places the larger geopolitics of this era in the background and teases out the strands of human yearning that lie hidden between the succinct accounts of families, conflicts, and scandals in the Sagas. The perspectives of women are largely missing in these foundational texts, and Gíslason imbues his protagonist Disa with desire and a vulnerability that allows readers to feel the leaden impact of her losses and to view the male characters in her orbit through a more critical lens. After rattling off several poetic names for the ocean – ‘chain of man’, ‘paths of ships’, ‘belt of the islands’ – Gils only has one descriptor for the heart: a sorrow stone, to which Disa asks, ‘no more than that?’ suggesting a pathos behind Gisli’s killing of Thordis’s lovers in the original saga, or perhaps a forbidden, unrequited desire. Few authors have such an intimate and academic understanding of Iceland’s harsh and beautiful landscape, the essence of its people, and the importance of weaving stories to form a personal and national identity as Kari Gíslason. As we stand back and regard his tapestry, a perspicacious study of love in various forms – potent, forbidden, furtive, unrequited – reveals itself. g Dilan Gunawardana manages the ACMI website and edits its Stories & Ideas section. He is a former Deputy Editor of ABR. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Fiction

Houses of indifference

Hanya Yanagihara’s three versions of America Georgia White

To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

Picador $32.99 pb, 720 pp

n 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life was published to a critical response so effusive as to seem almost hyperbolic. Jon Michaud of the New Yorker described the novel’s depiction of the Promethean repetitiveness of trauma as ‘elemental, irreducible’; Garth Greenwell declared in The Atlantic that ‘the great gay novel’ had finally been written. Even critics who viewed the novel less favourably acknowledged its extraordinary affective force. In one of the few unflattering reviews, Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Review of Books savagely describes the novel as ‘little more than a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in’. Yanagihara’s third novel, To Paradise, is a very different creature – not just from A Little Life but also from most other works of fiction. A sprawling fin-de-siècle novel that is about more than one siècle, it tackles many of the same concerns that appear in late nineteenth-century fiction: disease and degeneration and decay; the rise and fall of empires; the nervous anticipation of a crueller future. Each of its three sections takes place in the ninetythird year of a different century; each is named after places that promise, ill-fatedly, to be a paradise; and each is leashed together by several teasing motifs, among them the ambiguous repetition of the novel’s title. The first section, ‘Washington Square’, is set in an alternate version of 1893, where New York has seceded from the United States to form part of the Free States. Here, same-sex marriage is both legal and commonplace – though racial and class inequalities persist – and yet David Bingham, the lone bachelor of a wealthy family, is living an aimless, cosseted life. An encounter with a beautiful man of more limited means prompts him to reconsider what kind of life he wants, even if it means leaving the Free States for California, where ‘to be a Bingham was to be an abomination, a perversion, a threat’. His decision made, the narrative ends abruptly and jumps forward a hundred years. In 1993, another aimless young man named David Bingham is living with his much older partner when he receives a letter from his estranged father. It contains the tale of ‘Lipo-wao-nahele’, a thirty-acre parcel of land belonging to the Hawaiian royal family. Its name is initially translated as either the Dark Forest or the Forest of Paradise, but by the letter’s end it has many more meanings: sovereignty, nationhood, delusion, neglect. The final section, ‘Zone Eight’, is set another century forward again. This time, the protagonist is a woman, cohabitating

34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

with her husband in a functional but sterile marriage. In their world, viral diseases and punishing quarantines are a matter of routine; this society, too, is both functional and sterile. A series of historical letters provide more context as to how this world came into being, drawing some suggestive parallels with our current era. Though the sections appear in chronological order, they are not sequential parts of an overarching plot. Rather, they resemble a Greek chorus, a collective of voices all singing the same story. In each of these Americas, there is a David, an Edward, a Charles, and an Eden; in each ’93, the families of Bingham, Griffiths, and Bishop (all named after famous Christian missionaries to Hawaii) play an integral role. Readers may notice similarities with the concentric structure of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) – at one point in 2093, the narrator stops to listen to someone recounting the tale of ‘a man who had lived here, on this very island, on this very Square, two hundred years ago’ – but whereas Mitchell’s overlapping plotlines allude to humanity’s interconnectedness (‘what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?’), the echoes and repetitions in Yanagihara’s produce a feeling of futility. Her many Davids fail and must confront their failures over and over again; her alternate Americas are all haunted by yet more Americas that might have been. Indeed, it is a work by Henry James (and Yanagihara certainly has a fondness for Jamesian syntax) that provides the closest analogue to the novel. In James’s short story ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), an ageing protagonist becomes tormented by thoughts of the life he has not led and, by extension, of the person he did not become. His obsession with this other-life and other-self eventually climaxes in a ghastly face-to-face encounter with an apparition who, though resembling his own shape and size, is but ‘an awful beast’. When he wakes, neither he nor the reader is entirely sure what he saw or what it means. Is he – and are we – meant to be thankful not to have become such a monster? Or is this a cautionary tale against becoming lost in speculation, forgetting that our one (little) life, however imperfect, is all there is? The promise of a better life is America’s ultimate creationist fantasy, and To Paradise is certainly a novel very much concerned about the nation in which it is set. To Yanagihara, America and paradise both resemble the jolly corner of James’s story: they are vessels that hold more power in the mind than in reality; they are houses of indifference onto which we project our fantasies and myths. If To Paradise is, in parts, just as sentimental as A Little Life (Yanagihara’s victims are unfailingly the passive, helpless prey of circumstance and impulse; the wrongs committed by her wrongdoers are always very wrong indeed), it is also far more nihilistic. Each of its three sections involves the same taunting scenario: a character abandoning everything they know for the promise of paradise. Unfortunately for them, in their author’s matrix, heaven and hell alike happen to be empty: all the angels and devils dwell here. g Georgia White is a writer and PhD student based in Naarm/ Melbourne. Her other writing has appeared in Overland, SBS Voices and Eureka Street. She researches Victorian Gothic and supernatural fictions.

Language

Covid on the brain The irresistible rise of brain fog

by Thomas H. Ford

t was, inevitably, in a Zoom meeting that I first noticed the phrase. A colleague, excusing some minor oversight, explained it away with the words: ‘Sorry, Covid brain fog.’ Although I hadn’t consciously registered the expression before, I knew exactly what she meant. Brain fog is a commonly reported symptom of Covid-19, both during the acute phase of the illness and as part of the condition known as long Covid. It serves as a catch-all term for a range of cognitive and affective impairments, including attention deficits, problems with speaking and memory, dizziness and disorientation, emotional discalibrations, fatigue, depression, and anxiety. Terminologically, brain fog is vague and imprecise, perhaps usefully so. Although it is sometimes mentioned and discussed in the clinical literature on Covid, it is not strictly a clinical term. It belongs instead to a quasi-medical middle ground that exists somewhere between clinical language and googlised self-diagnosis. So it comes from that discursive zone so massively expanded in the past two years that lies at the interface of medicine and mediatised public concern. It is a term of Zoom culture, of hashtagged epidemiology. My colleague was speaking during one of Melbourne’s lockdowns in 2021, when comparatively few people in Australia had Covid. She certainly didn’t have it. Her Covid brain fog was symptomatic in the cultural rather than the medical sense. What she was referring to were the cognitive effects of working in lockdown and in a collapsing higher education system. The symptoms may have been similar: difficulty concentrating, memory lapses, anxiety, tiredness, and so on. But they were caused not by the novel coronavirus, at least not in any direct sense, but instead by the pressures simply of living – things like employment, and parenthood, and everyday life – over the past two years. I was in another Zoom meeting when a different Melbourne lockdown

was announced. As the news filtered through from messaging platforms and other social media, everyone started crying. Perhaps brain fog offers no more than a fuzzy label for this condition. Still, when my colleague used it, I felt that she was naming something real – real enough to cry about on Zoom, at least. Google Ngram – the favourite tool of the hobby philologist – identifies two key moments in brain fog’s linguistic career up until 2020. The most recent is a steep rise in the frequency with which the term appears in published English-language writing. This rise began in the late 1990s in alternative medicine and self-help, when brain fog started to appear in books on such subjects as hypnotic suggestion, essential oils, the Atkins and the liver detox diets, and holistic approaches to chronic fatigue. More recent titles include The Brain Fog Fix: Reclaim your focus, memory, and joy in just 3 weeks, published in 2016 and rated 4.4 from 745 ratings on Amazon.com. It is surely no coincidence that this was also the period of the increasingly pervasive circulation of neural imaging. From the 1990s, brain fog, although terminologically imprecise, had a set of clear visual correlatives in the public imagination. The term evoked the blurry smudges familiar from neuroimaging and neuroradiology. That grey fogging there: that is the cancer, the stroke, the lesion. But for all its apparently millennial flavour, the term is much older. Brain fog first entered the language in the 1870s, principally in medical publications. There it tended to be linked to, as a scientific paper presented in New South Wales in 1891 put it, ‘the influence of modern civilization on the production of insanity’. More specifically, brain fog was linked to the mental derangements brought about by literary, educational, and intellectual labours. Case studies included a clergyman who, ‘both in preparing and preaching his sermons … felt as though there was “mist in his brain”’, and an overworked book reviewer ‘who AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

got into a state of brain fog, and broke into poetry’. A chapter on ‘insanity relating to the higher classes’ from 1878 identified brain fog as a condition caused by ‘the excessive cramming’ characteristic of modern schooling, in a passage that would be much quoted by educational reformers in coming decades. Faced with the massive modern expansion of printed knowledge, the brains of intellectual workers, it seemed, had been befogged.

Covid brain fog was symptomatic of the cognitive effects of working in lockdown and in a collapsing higher education system Behind these medical uses lay the second paragraph of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), which began ‘Fog everywhere’ and continued for another 160 words, no fewer than eleven of which were repetitions of the word ‘fog’. Fog was indeed everywhere in Bleak House: in the atmosphere, in the legal system, in the perceptions and motivations of the characters. It was also everywhere in nineteenth-century literature more generally: recall, for instance, the gothic atmospherics of Edgar Allan Poe, or of the Brontës. Literary historians have shown that Dickens’s fog was just one example of a widespread cultural metaphorisation of meteorology taking place in this period, during which literature was increasingly dedicated to modelling, mediating, and communicating atmospheres. Always implied in this atmospheric

turn was that literature – writing, education – might itself be something like an airborne communicable disease. That link, at any rate, was what underwrote the medical designation of brain fog as an occupational hazard of literary life, an atmospheric madness of writing, in the 1870s. Dickens’s novel was first published in serial form. The pandemic circuits of contemporary brain fog run on newer platforms and accelerated media. But that shift has only heightened the force of a paradox already present when brain fog was first coined in the nineteenth century. Brain fog is how we’ve all got Covid on the brain. It names the impaired cognitive atmospherics of this airborne pandemic. And its fuzziness as a term points to the fuzzy impossibility of writing clearly about our current condition – about what is to be done, and about how we might do it – while sick, or in lockdown, or precariously employed, or isolated, or depressed. Or on Zoom. Brain fog is what makes it hard to think about brain fog right now. Brain fog everywhere. g Thomas H. Ford is a Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. His most recent book, How to Read a Poem: Seven steps (Routledge, 2021), was reviewed in the January–February 2022 issue of ABR. ❖ This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Close Contacts My husband has returned. A traveller whose flight was cancelled has found his way home. He slowly unpacks while I make space for the unexpected. The house is full of him. I find him everywhere. He hovers in the kitchen and takes over the knives. He lifts paper to the window’s light and slices it with the sharpest blade. I keep saying wash your hands, this virus is deadly. We wait from a distance for the world to return. He cuts the tender loins and offers a slowly cooked dinner. I look for a tablecloth. We talk and take time to hear how each other’s sentences end. The sky is empty of temptation. In the corner, the suitcase still lurks with a broken zip and an old address. An invitation. If we had a choice where would we rather be?

Jelena Dinić

Jelena Dinić’s latest poetry collection is In the Room with the She Wolf (Wakefield Press, 2021). 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Diary

Editor’s Diary by Peter Rose

anuary 1 Hindmarsh Island. Rose early and sped across the water to inspect the wetlands where hundreds of ibis were roosting – a marvellous sight. But we won’t be going to New South Wales in the middle of the month, following a Covid outbreak in Sydney. Victoria has closed the border, causing much predictable lamentation. January 5 Three am: there’s no point not starting the day, as my mother is much on my mind following a serious illness. I begin to fear this woman will be left with few happy memories of life. I think of Darl’s awful words in As I Lay Dying: ‘It takes two people to make you, one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.’ So I turned to Wallace Stevens’s The Auroras of Autumn, whose third stanza is full of magnificent valedictions about his mother: … It is the mother they possess, Who gives transparence to their present peace. She makes that gentler that can gentle be. And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed. She gives transparence. But she has grown old. The necklace is a carving not a kiss. The soft hands are a motion not a touch. The house will crumble and the books will burn. They are at ease in a shelter of the mind And the house is of the mind and they and time, Together, all together …

January 7 A day that will live in infamy, as they are already saying in the United States, though it was January 6 there. I was listening to breakfast radio when they announced that the joint sitting of both houses of Congress, intended to ratify Biden’s election as president, has been overrun by a huge mob of Trump supporters, incited by the president and his goons, Giuliani among them. Soon anarchy prevailed at the Capitol, whose security was exposed as unbelievably lax. It took hours for them to begin to clear the steps of the Capitol, while the fascists roamed around the Capitol with their smug signs and Confederate flags. I watched all day, numb, disbelieving. January 12 Up Toorak Road comes a Japanese woman, masked, bandy-legged, carrying an enormous cardboard box almost bigger than herself. She must be replacing the oven. January 13 Read, no luxuriated in, the criticism of Alfred Kazin: his essay on T.S. Eliot and the even more remarkable and perverse Henry Adams. Is Kazin becoming my favourite critic, eclipsing Virginia Woolf ? His amplitude, his elegance, his fearlessness. January 14 Well, if Kazin is my favourite critic, Vidal is the saltiest and most malicious. I have been reading some of his essays from the 1980s, when he was obsessed by tenure-seeking, theory-riddled academics. I love his riffs about Americans’ vacuity and Orson Welles’s dog – ‘a totally unprincipled small black poodle called Kiki’. No one else would/could describe a canine as unprincipled – except Henry James. Even Vidal’s brief introductions are malign. In both of them he declares that AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

he will never write his memoirs (‘I have never been my own subject, a sign of truly sickening narcissism’). Within a decade or so Vidal had written two memoirs. David Gelber of the Literary Review likes my Garner review (‘a zestful piece’), but I was mortified, on rereading it, to discover that I had used ‘finest’ thrice. Now David is resolved to read Harry Kessler’s inimitable journals, which I extol in my review. I first met David at the Literary Review’s cramped little office in Soho. David told me about an LR event at his grandfather’s house in the country. Curious, I asked him where his grandfather lived. ‘Blenheim,’ he said quietly. January 28 Nice responses to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which has been won by Sara M. Saleh. Sara’s family wants to frame the media release. She told us there is no letter P in Arabic, so they are having trouble processing it. When Danielle Blau, another shortlisted poet, joined us in the virtual green room the gent sitting beside her turned out to be Steven Pinker, her stepfather. At least he knows about ABR now. Helen Garner and I exchanged emails about old photos and my volatile dream life. Helen said it seems to carry ‘a lot of psychic freight’. January 29 Margaret Court has been made an AC in the national honours, so I fulminated in an e-newsletter. I congratulated Kerry O’Brien on declining his AO in the Australia Day honours following Court’s elevation. February 1 I was interviewed for a Creative Clunes short film on the Life Cycle of the Book. The subject was reviewing and being reviewed. I admitted that I don’t mind being reviewed negatively by those I disregard or dislike – prefer it even. I mentioned John Forbes’s taunt on the eve of the publication of my first book: that I wouldn’t like his review when it appeared next day. (So I obliged Forbesy by never reading the review. I often wish writers – sensitive souls – would do likewise.) When I was asked about online reviewing (Amazon, Goodreads, and such), I couldn’t resist: ‘There’s something to be said for expertise, and reflection.’ February 9 Never did I think to address the Rotarians, but so I did this morning, at the invitation of one of our patrons. They asked me to speak for twenty minutes: I did so precisely, fluently, without notes. I have become shockingly glib. Thence to the retirement village for Mum’s reassessment for the Home Care Package. The assessor was sympathetic, thorough, and clearly shocked by Mum’s condition. Mum told us she now weighs thirty-nine kilos. February 21 Remarkable dream in which my parents decided to euthanise themselves and tried to persuade me to do the same. I balked at the end and awaited news of their demise – and all the media hullabaloo that would surely follow. February 23 Watched a wonderfully trashy film called Woman of Straw with Sean Connery and Gina Lollobrigida – and Ralph Richardson saying the most indecent and racist things. 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

February 24 In a dream I was in Adelaide with John Coetzee and others. John asked me what disappointed me most. Humanity, I replied rather formally. Benignly, interestedly, guardedly, JMC asked me if I thought I felt this way because I hadn’t – here he was very tactful – engaged in many intimate conversations for some time. By which he probably meant psychoanalysis. February 25 Since we all wonder, in the age of Covid, if we have drinking problems, we were heartened by a New Statesman report that Queen Elizabeth consumes four cocktails each day – a regal example. She will outlive us all. February 26 Mary-Kay Wilmers has retired after thirty years as sole editor of LRB (which she still owns). There is a rather smug interview on the podcast with the great Andrew O’Hagan. Wilmers is hilarious about fiction reviewing, which she considers facile and bloodless – the last vestige of the welfare state, as she puts it. Certain words she abhors then excises (e.g. ‘moving’, ‘poignant’). Like us she always trims ‘amidst’, but I am not sure how vigilant she is about ‘very’, which we nearly always remove. (Only Kate Llewellyn has noticed this. She once greeted me as ‘the enemy of very’.) February 27 To Middle Park for a long walk. When I asked a sullen old Greek fisherman what he hoped to catch on Kerford Pier, he looked at me as if I were about to assassinate him – or arrest him (we all fear arrest these days) – but eventually proffered ‘Snapper’. March 2 Humorous exchange with Andrea Goldsmith. She’s appalled that I have never read Bellow, whom she reveres. Once I tried The Adventures of Augie March, much commended by Geordie Williamson, only to find it unwelcoming. But we’re agreed on Philip Roth. I have been rereading all the late, short novels prior to reviewing Blake Bailey’s biography of Roth. They stand up much better than I recalled. March 21 We went to the NGV and admired some of Joseph Brown’s pictures in the wing named after him – that foolish indulgence. When will the NGV integrate Brown’s bounty and free up that space? March 22 We have moved Mum to a nursing home. Respite they call it. March 23 The ABR/JNI Editorial Cadetship has closed with a total of 118 applications. March 25 After work we had a drink at Southbank. Suddenly about sixty police marched past, heavily armed, there to guard slightly fewer genial Extinction Rebellion demonstrators who were bound for the News Corp headquarters, where they promptly lay down in the foyer, wonderfully precise, as if they did it every night. April 7 This evening I saw The Father, with luminous performances from Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins.

Those closing minutes will stay with me for a long time. I came home and needed a stiff drink. April 8 Woke early and finished Alfred Döblin’s little book of reportage, Two Women and a Poisoning, based on a remarkable trial in Berlin in 1923, six years before his great novel of Berlin. Visited Mum after work. She was in bed, at 5.45 pm. I begin to feel bitter about what life has done to my brother and now my mother. April 10 At Readings, I chatted with Mark Rubbo (newly bearded). We commiserated about 2020. Mark jokingly said he’s suffering from a form of PTSD. Aren’t we all? April 14 Cynthia Ozick has a magisterial review of the Roth biography, which is already attracting a remarkable critical literature. One quote from American Pastoral moved me: ‘It’s the damn poignancy of everything that rocks me a little.’ May 27 We learned early that the lockdown will commence this evening. Once again our office will remain open. Lockdown means we can’t visit Elsie, potentially for weeks. May 28 The streets are empty. People seem resigned to lockdown, used to the drill. June 2 I have persuaded Patricia Fullerton to allow us to publish her charming, idiosyncratic memoir of her visit to the collection of Hilma af Klint in 1996, long before the world discovered this artist, who now seems likely to disrupt the arthistorical landscape, having prefigured the early Abstractionists – Kandinsky and all – by ten years. Trish must be one of the first people to see the work. June 11 Sheila Fitzpatrick and Billy Griffiths and I met to choose the two Calibre winners, from a shortlist of

Ever since biblical times, animals have been clashing with human laws.

three. Anita Punton’s essay ‘May Day’ firmed in everyone’s estimation and ultimately came second. Theodore Ell’s essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’ was a clear winner. Then I made Theodore very happy indeed. Sometimes I think Beejay Silcox knows all the interesting people in the world. It was she who encouraged Theodore to turn his accounts of the Beirut explosion into a Calibre essay. Both married to diplomats, they are close friends. July 15 David Malouf rang, sounding chipper. He wanted to wish us well for this week’s ABR event at the Judith Neilson Institute in Sydney, so I explained that it’s been cancelled. David told me about the new HOTA Gallery at Surfers Paradise. We will miss him when he comes down for the concert version of Voss in August, but we’re planning to hear the Adelaide repeat in September. As ever, David had all the dates in his head. June 16 This evening we watched the new documentary on Nureyev. I thought I knew all there was to know about the Russian, but this was illuminating. Then we realised it was sixty years ago to the day since Nureyev’s defection to the West. June 17 I am rereading Nostromo: densest and most ‘inscrutable’ of novels. (How many times did Conrad use that word?) So rarely does one feel a novelist knows the dismal, corrupt, irreformable ways of the world (e.g. the brilliant, subtle, brief scene when Charles Gould visits, and bribes, the local supremo who mistakes Donizetti for Mozart). Lockdown restrictions ease tomorrow night; now Sydney seems vulnerable again. I have no doubt we will go on enduring these lockdowns every few months, around the country, to some degree of severity. June 20 Ian Dickson is devastated to learn that James Merrill, whose letters he is reviewing, had seen eighteen operas by the time he was twelve. Ian thought he was doing well.

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July 8 We drove to Castlemaine and called on Cathrine Harboe-Ree, now happily ensconced there. We reminisced about ABR, of which Cathrine was deputy chair in the 1990s (eventful years). She marvels that anyone still speaks to me after thirty years in publishing.

donor, he said: ‘I can afford it, and it gives me great pleasure.’ Damien Maher, a young Australian in Oxford, came up with the best excuse I’ve heard in my three decades as a publisher when apologising for being late with a review. He’s been hit by a car but will submit it by Sunday.

July 10 Sydney is in for it now: fifty cases yesterday. A monthlong lockdown seems inevitable.

July 27 Woke at five, anxious and forensic. I have a publishing seminar to lead in five hours’ time. Then I finished Decline and Fall. As I did when I was young and learning to write, I found myself marking every second limpid line:

July 11 I went on with Julia Parry’s book on Elizabeth Bowen: those fascinating tensions and torsions between her and the caddish Humphry House (Parry’s grandfather), and that great passage where Bowen addresses him as the committed writer she always is, even in bed with him. ‘Remember that you had Elizabeth Bowen to contend with – I mean, a confirmed writer. Someone accustomed to getting herself, or himself, across without outside opposition … One spends one’s time objectifying one’s inner life, and projecting one’s thought and emotion into a form – a book … Because it is hard for me (being a writer before I am a woman) to realize that anything – friendship or love especially – in which I participate imaginatively isn’t a book too.’ Parry’s not a brilliant writer, but this doesn’t matter when the story is as fascinating as Parry’s triangulated one about her grandparents and the inspiredly selfish Bowen. July 15 Suddenly, we’re back into lockdown, wretched news which lowered everyone. One year ago I confidently predicted that by this stage in 2021 we’d have gone through five lockdowns. And so we have. They all thought I was mad. July 19 Everyone’s being circumspect, as the local numbers continue (sixteen today) and as NSW goes from bad to worse (still 100 daily). I didn’t leave the office once and travelled both ways on empty trams. At work I took a call from a gentleman wanting to know if his business could stay open. July 24 Never had I thought to watch the Olympics, but that’s what we did – even the rowing. Meanwhile, stupid antilockdown, anti-everything protests in Sydney and Melbourne: thousands of morons and exhibitionists. I remembered this quote from Elizabeth Strout’s novel My Name Is Lucy Barton: ‘It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government – education, food, rent subsidies – are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.’ July 25 We inspected Mum’s unit before it goes on the market. I never want to see it again – too sad. Then we dropped some things outside the nursing home, including a long letter. It’s odd to be writing again to Mum. It brings back memories of my long missives from Europe in the 1970s. I remember Dad telling me that she threw one of them across the room, desperate to know my news but defeated by my handwriting – ‘Arabic’, she called it. July 26 A thumping donation has arrived. When I thanked the 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Many a young reporter was handsomely commended for the luxuriance of his adjectives. Up and down the shining lift shafts, in and out of the rooms and along the labyrinthine corridors of the great house he moved in a golden mist. Mrs Best-Chetwynde reappeared from her little bout of veronal, fresh and exquisite as a seventeenth-century lyric.

August 3 I’m awake with the rubbish bins, always fascinating the city’s preliminary shivers and dronings. Marvellous to rise to Montale (a Montiliano again). Then this beautiful passage about death in Galgut’s novel In a Strange Room. A journey is a gesture inscribed in a space, it vanishes even as it’s made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. The roads you went down yesterday are full of different people now, none of them knows who you are. In the room you slept in last night a stranger lies in the bed. Dust covers over your footprints, the marks of your fingers are wiped off the door, from the floor and table the bits and pieces of evidence that you might have dropped are swept up and thrown away and they never come back again. The very air closes behind you like water and soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

August 4 I am reading Tim Bonyhady’s new book on godforsaken Afghanistan, currently being overrun, again, by the vermin Taliban after the US withdrawal (much good that adventure did anyone). August 5 Coffee with Paul Dalgarno this morning after he accepted a couple of books for review. Inevitably we discussed the pandemic, wondering when lockdown might recommence – a week, two? Within hours the state government has announced another lockdown – from 8 pm! So much for our dinner at Three Idiots in Richmond with Paul Kildea. I asked Anders Villani if he wanted to cry off from drinks, but we went ahead and met at the fromagerie near Readings. Lygon Street was packed (we sat on the footpath). It was like Carnevale, everyone buzzy. It’s all too believable – there’s a kind of acceptance. I have no doubt we’ll go through this for months to come. On the way home I went to Three Idiots and collected a mountain of takeaway Indian – in solidarity.

August 9 All people can talk about – lament – is the lockdown. Everyone is so abject, so leaden. August 11 Long chat with Houellebecq scholar David Jack about an article on Giorgio Agamben and the pandemic for the October issue. Controversial though the subject may be and loath though I am to give succour to anti-vaxxers, it’s time ABR published something on this endless submission, or is it servitude? Meanwhile the government has extended the lockdown for another week. August 15 In the window at the Avenue Bookstore I spied another of those small Princeton compilations from the Classics. I thought the title was How to Be Continent. Putting on my glasses, I realised it was How to Be Content (which is much harder). August 23 Finished Frances Wilson’s brilliant Burning Man and read Auden’s essay on DHL in The Dyer’s Hand. Auden, though almost as silly in his private talk as Lawrence, is always the most sensible of literary critics. Here he is on writers: ‘Very few writers can be engagé because life does not engage them: for better or worse, they do not quite belong to the City.’ It’s a point I tried to make in a review of one of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels: how unusual Mantel was in really understanding the machinations of power. August 26 John Rickard has reviewed Dennis Altman’s book on the strange persistence of monarchy. In it he notes that the long-lived Thai king, outraged by Rodgers and Hammerstein, banned The King and I. It went ahead here, though (not even ‘Ming’ could stop it). John was in the cast of the first Australian production, in 1962. September 1 I did enjoy my podcast interview with Frances Wilson. She was mordant about earlier biographers. ‘They write about him as if he were a normal person, not the weirdest man who ever lived.’ September 7 C. is bolting through War and Peace, for the third time. First time he read it for the love story, then the history – now the battles. I’m reading Giorgio Agamben’s rather shorter book Where Are We Now? The epidemic as politics. David Jack has given me a fascinating essay on the Italian philosopher’s libertarian response to the pandemic. ‘And what is a society that values nothing more than survival?’ I think DHL would have approved. Wouldn’t he and Nietzsche despise this timorous, platitudinous age? September 10 Mum’s insurer has written to her asking if she is thinking of ‘getting into golf ’! Visits to the nursing home are no longer possible, following a Covid case in one of the homes. September 11 Stupendous amounts of newsprint devoted to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. What of all the horrors caused by US mendacity or ineptitude?

Late walk near the Shrine, refreshing. The startling verdancy of oaks. We don’t even remotely fantasise about planning ahead any more – restaurants, parties, travel. Anything. September 12 We’re so bored we’ve begun to haunt cemeteries. This morning we visited the Melbourne General Cemetery and then the streets of Princes Park. Near Arnold Street we met Gideon Haigh. He was amused by Australia’s hypocritical outrage about Afghanistan: the decision not to play a test against the national team. I congratulated Gideon on his book on Dr Evatt. He thought it time to resurrect Evatt. Not a good time for sales, though. Mark Rubbo reports a forty per cent downturn in sales this year. September 18 Finished Pride and Prejudice, sufficiently awed by its formal and claustrophobic perfection. (Such ironies: they pelt at us like squash balls.) September 21 The fourth series of The Crown has rightly won many Emmys, including one for Gillian Anderson. A young interviewer asked the diva whether she had discussed her performance with Mrs Thatcher. Anderson paused then said that she hadn’t spoken to Margaret lately. It reminded me of the time we went to a media preview of the biopic Hoover. A young publicist stood up and referred to ‘the great J. Edgar Hoover’ to titters from the older cinéastes. September 22 I was summoned to the nursing home and this time I was able to enter Mum’s room. Mum was sound asleep and could not be woken for forty-five minutes. When she stirred she wanted to know that everyone was all right. I imagine her last words will be enquiries about others – not a bad way to go. She had slept through this morning’s earthquake. It said everything, in a way. The woman who loved news more than anyone I’ve ever known – our Reuters Rose – was oblivious. October 3 Began the day with some essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, hoping she had written about Austen but somehow doubtful. Here she is on Faulkner – his ‘hallucinated imagination’. Now I must read Sanctuary, which she rates, with typical precision, as one of his ‘six or seven’ masterpieces. Hardwick is drily hilarious about Bernard Berenson, whom anyone could visit at I Tatti, such was his need for American company, news, she hypothesises. ‘You had a belated feeling you were seeing the matinee of a play that had been running for eight decades.’ October 4 Awake at four and at my desk an hour later, head racing – lively week ahead. Enjoyed Hermione Lee’s essay on the multiple biographical versions of Austen. No one was as malicious as Austen (only Gwen Harwood perhaps, who must have liked her). Here is Austen on Mrs Hall of Sherbourn, who ‘was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright – I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

October 7 When I offered a contributor Evelyn Juers’s book The Dancer, she declined, saying that the only time she ever went to the ballet she was asked to leave because of her snoring. Alighting from the tram coming home (same driver even), I was nearly cleaned up by a car at Tivoli Road for the second night in a row. It’s dangerous out there. October 9 The twentieth anniversary of the launch of Rose Boys. Lots of memories of that day at Victoria Park. Everyone seemed to be there, including champions whom I idolised as a child, all queueing up with my friends and relations. At least I can say I have signed autographs at Victoria Park. October 10 Long, anguished, strangely inevitable dream about my mother, from which I would waken, half-conscious, with relief, only to return to it. I was looking after her, taking her out, returning her to the nursing home, surprised at one point that I had allowed her to drive, worried for her, myself. She was somewhat younger – recognisable – and at one point she began singing to me in that beautiful, unforced voice I had almost forgotten – exactly as she would always sing around the house when I was a child. So I have heard her again. October 11 I was sure I’d read all of Philip Roth, but somehow I missed The Professor of Desire, the first David Kepesh novel. Now I am relishing its post-Portnoyan indecencies. October 15 ABR’s Adelaide Festival trip, which we began promoting yesterday, has sold out. We even have a waitlist.

congratulations. I told him it was a necessary, chastening book. November 6 Our first venture into town since the Second Punic War. At Hill of Content I bought Everyman’s thumping edition of DHL’s stories. Began Teju Cole’s Black Paper, which opens with a thrilling chapter on Caravaggio. Now I really must visit Messina. November 27 I always enjoy Anthony Burgess’s reviews – workmanlike in the best sense. Full of little jewels too, like this: ‘[Beckett’s] devotion to Joyce was extreme. Joyce was proud of his small feet, and Beckett tried to make his own feet as small in homage. The over-tight shoes were not merely a homage; they were a mode of self-excruciation wholly in keeping with the Beckettian view of life as a place of pain.’ November 28 So here we go again! Omicron – possibly resistant to vaccines – has been detected in South Africa, and it’s spreading fast. God help us. December 6 To Sydney for the week: my first visit since March 2020, unbelievably. I’m based at the Judith Neilson Institute’s splendid headquarters in Chippendale. December 30 To the nursing home this afternoon. Mum was wakeful at first but the PM’s press conference soon put her to sleep.

November 1 Last night I dreamt I slept outside Mum’s nursing home, waiting to be let in.

December 31 Delivered the summer issue to Readings. Bernard Caleo, who reviews two graphic books in the new issue, was behind the counter. We did a high five. Punctilious, newcomer Constant Mews has sent me his review of a book on the making of the Bible. How I love getting my hands on other people’s text. Onwards! g

November 5 Finished Sean Kelly’s withering study of Scott Morrison on the tram and promptly emailed my

Additional extracts from Peter Rose’s 2021 journal appear online, along with those from 2012, 2013, and 2014.

October 17 Lockdown ends, so they say, on Friday.

This first-ever collection of Australian poet Judith Wright’s nonfiction is a compelling portrait of a prescient voice on modern Australia

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Poetry

Out of the planetary test tube A rewarding début from a Porter Prize winner Sarah Day

Animals with Human Voices by Damen O’Brien

Recent Works Press $19.95 pb, 95 pp

amen O’Brien’s first collection is an exceptional accomplishment. His individual poems have won several competitions (including the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize). O’Brien signals the emphases of Animals with Human Voices in his afterword, stating that the world has become a ‘meaner’ place during the ten years of its completion: ‘a place of harsh politics, that values outrage over kindness, tribalism over empathy’. He concludes: ‘Like the animals of the title, the poems are voices for human problems and troubles, for the little moments and cares of the human condition.’ If poetry in its various forms can be seen as a gauge of human perception and preoccupation at a given time, the subjects in Animals with Human Voices cover much that is prevalent in the world today under the wider themes of human vulnerability and uncertainty: environmental degradation, climate change, materialism, extinction, the impact of human behaviour – on ourselves and on everything else. These are recurrent and resonant foci of the times in which we live and to which much contemporary poetry is responding, multifariously. O’Brien’s compelling lyric poems speak to public concerns and philosophical challenges in a way that makes the reader look inwards as well as outwards. It is not the case that the lyric by nature eschews social engagement. Critics such as Theodor Adorno and Jonathan Culler claim that public perception of lyric as the expression of individuated experience is a recent development. By contrast, they draw the tradition back to the ancient Greeks, when lyric spanned the private and the public. In O’Brien’s work, an energetic tension emerges between the two. For a collection provoked and disturbed by the meanness

of the world, and at times devoid of hope in its view of human troubles and the future, Animals with Human Voices contains plenty of humour – mostly ironic – and love. Humour within serious poetry is a feat I admire ( John Tranter and John Forbes spring to mind). O’Brien’s humour is mostly nuanced and oblique. It can be cosmological in scale: ‘It will keep surprising you, this universe, its infinite / humour’. ‘Dust’, a series of six meditations on entropy, is a twenty first-century echo of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ from which its epigraph comes. Dust swirls through the pages of this remarkable poem, literally and symbolically: from the desertification of Libya viewed from space, to sloughed skin cells, or the soils of the Amazon rainforest leaching into the Pacific; from the detritus of offices and the shreds of workers’ contracts, to the dust blown by coal trucks and building sites, and to the accretions of the Anthropocene. The accumulative rhythms and sound patterns of O’Brien’s language – redolent of Anglo-Saxon with its oral tradition of lists and alliteration, pace, and abundance of metaphor – get under the skin. Part four concludes singularly: ‘Nothing in the / long average of infinity can be done to clean the world.’ ‘Measures of Truth’, another long poem, tackles its subject through five distinct narratives. It begins with the incontestable truth of the Earth’s history as revealed in Antarctic cores: ‘hairs of ice’ pulled out of ‘the thousand-year frozen pelt’. Part two looks at the truth that dementia reveals and hides; part three reflects on what the web of a spider, high on cocaine, might reveal of truth, art, or genius. Part four begins: ‘A planet is the only testtube that we possess, / large and wide enough and old enough / to encompass the truth.’ Recurrent interplay occurs between the cosmological and the minutiae of human activity. Such swings form a conceptual rhythm that brings together the diverse forms and subjects of the whole collection in a startling way. O’Brien trusts his reader to stay with him as he leaps, for example, in ‘Measures’ from the black hole at the centre of the galaxy to Krushchev’s Cold War ban on rock and roll. The link is revealed through the metaphor of the title. In the tradition of the many marvellous poems written about and from the point of view of animals, O’Brien’s are affecting and have a mood and character of their own, impelled as they are by twenty-first-century pressures and urgencies. The compelling opening monologue is from the point of view of an earthworm. Despite the somewhat twee title, ‘A Rainbow Made of Soil’, the speaker’s character and ontological position are instantly

The Life of Such Is Life

A Cultural History of an Australian Classic Roger Osborne SYDNEY STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

arresting: ‘If I am lost, I have been lost since I was born. / There are no gods for worms, we are each alone. / How would a god find me, scratching in the dark?’ This, and the following poems about trilobites and spiders, introduce the reader to the context of long time and universals in which so many of the works in this book are embedded. What is in a spider that it may link invisible point to invisible point, stretch inference over abyss, mark casualties, connect nothing to nothing? … …We’ll move along those lines ourselves one day …

So much is quotable. In ‘Mangrove Canal Road’, the reader’s

ear becomes trained to the quietening assonance of boat wrecks, subsiding into mud and silt, whose ‘hearings’ are ‘constantly deferred’ by ‘the slow courts of the ocean’. In ‘Atlas Carried the World’, the fireman Stanislav – read all firemen and women – ‘rescue[s] the future from the burning past’. Here and there, lines are overladen and in the odd poem proselytism outweighs the humour, as in ‘A Survey of Australia’s Religions’. In contrast, the tightness of ‘The Prayer of Small Men’ creates more biting social satire. I am not sure why explanatory notes were thought necessary to accompany the poems. But these are minor reservations about a collection that will reward many readings. g Sarah Day’s latest poetry collection is Towards Light (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018).

Poetry

An upward fall A poet’s quest for totality Joan Fleming

Fifteeners

by Jordie Albiston

Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 97 pp

very poet has his or her addictions: words they use over and over again, ones they own ‘by right of obsessive musical deed’ (to quote Richard Hugo). For Emily Dickinson, it was thee, thou, and Death. For Sylvia Plath, it was him, nothing, go, and gone. For Gabriel García Lorca, it was sangre, lagrimas, negro, and corazón. For Jordie Albiston, it just might be world, the word that aims to contain everything. A will to capture world, to thoroughly catalogue internal experience, is the engine of Albiston’s latest collection, Fifteeners. One substantive sequence titled ‘Omegabet’ orders twenty-six poems from ‘Apple’ to ‘Zed’ – a constraint that gathers meditations ranging from the mite to the matriarch; that gathers angels, Tuesdays, Father Time, and the chaos of the self under the primary rubric of the building blocks of English. Another sequence titled ‘The Five Wits’ invokes the Elizabethan tabulation of all human psychology according to just five faculties of the soul: ‘Reason’, ‘Instinct’, ‘Imagination’, ‘Fantasy’, and ‘Memory’. Another longish poem composed of multiple conjoined ‘fifteeners’ – Albiston’s invented form, the fifteen-line sonnet – is titled ‘Poem on Life’. What could be a more fitting title for a poem on the totality of living and being? ‘You summon the sea’. The trouble with the cataloguing impulse, of course, is that it is impossible to appease. How can a collection of poetry – even 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

a poet’s entire oeuvre, thirteen books in Albiston’s case – capture and contain world ? Worlds, perhaps, is more doable. (Albiston has said that she knows when a poem is done: it clicks physically into place like the door of a Porsche.) The plural worlds grants a multiplicity of perspectives and a multiplicity of containers for experience, releasing a poem, or a book, from the task of unrealisable totality. Totality, to my mind, is connected to perfection: another impossibility. Ben Lerner supposes that this tension between the actual (a finished poem in the world) and the virtual or the dreamedof (an ideal song in a realm of pure possibility) underlies the suspicion and awkwardness non-poets often express upon first encountering those of us imprudent enough to identify ourselves as poets. In The Hatred of Poetry (2016), Lerner writes, ‘We were taught at an early age that we are all poets simply by virtue of being human … Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and an accusation.’ It follows that The Ideal Poem – personal enough to be true to life, universal enough to connect with everyone – is a dream, a value (‘Poetry’) that real poems can never achieve. Albiston, in an interview from 2017 in Cordite Poetry Review, cheerfully disagrees with this sentiment. If anything, upon finishing a poem, and hearing the ‘click’, she experiences ‘an upward fall’ – a glimpse of transcendence? Transcendence is present throughout this collection. The first poem in Fifteeners versions the anonymous Christian mystic text ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, with the word ‘God’ replaced by ‘Poem’ or ‘Poetry’. The speaker here affirms that the poem is not for ‘fleshly janglers’, ‘open praisers’, or ‘tellers of trifles’, but is, rather, intended for those readers who stir after the secret spirit of all Poetry its specials and dooms & they full gracious disposed to be called by the Poem to be one with Poetry

Here, Albiston invokes the Poem as reverent container, encompasser of Life, transcendent song. The tension between the virtual and actual, the realm of the ideal song and the compromised crash-to-earth, is an unmistakeable preoccupation of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, ‘Boy’, and ‘Poem on Life’: We opened our beaks and we sang – it was A song no one heard not even the stone

Later in the collection, playful irreverence comes to the fore, to undercut the idea of the Poem’s perfect music: the fall, the apple, the song that’s impossible to hear, the fact of the poet impossibly ‘fastened to / words by a leash of longing’. (I have my own ‘leash of longing’ for a better cover design, something at least as carefully made as the music of the superb poems inside.) In fact, by their very form Albiston’s ‘fifteeners’ insist on imperfection. The fifteeners are decasyllabic quintains with strange sonic textures and vertiginous, funny line breaks. These anomalous ‘sonnets’ are mapped imperfectly over the ‘perfect’ (which is to say, Shakespearean) form, like a picture copied on tracing paper then knocked askew of its source. Instead of meter, the lines are mapped by syllables, creating a live throb of idiosyncratic rhythms. The rhymes a reader would expect to encounter at the end of a line are kicked forward, and drop to the line below. The chime of the couplet is often found in a single line, or at the centre of a stanza. The last stanza of ‘Elephant’ is typical:

Fifth limb & sailcloth ears & this summit Of puckers this mosque of tusk this final Freight of largesse & love declines unto Dust & the tiniest grasses pitch & Sigh & the sun switches off with her eyes

Joy and zest, paeans to family, motherhood, and love, and the delight of offbeat rhythms are constants in these poems. Sober meditations on disaster, of which there are of course several! – look at the times we are living in – are upended with a weird sonic jollity, an injection of fizz that bubbles the worlds’ shadows and makes them dance. Albiston’s Everything in Fifteeners is made with great tenderness. It puts me in mind of a poem called ‘Hills’ by Aotearoa poet Dinah Hawken, where she asks, ‘Who put the el / in the word world, / changing things forever?’ It’s an old woman, of course, ‘in the days before writing / when words dwelt in the body’, resting her tongue, ‘by chance and lovingly, on the roof / of her mouth before sounding the d / that is always ending the word word’. The roof of the world appears, and with it, hills, ‘lovely / and potentially touchable’. g Joan Fleming is the author of the collections Failed Love Poems (2015) and The Same as Yes (2011) from Victoria University Press, and two chapbooks. Her post-collapse verse novel Song of Less is forthcoming in 2021 with Cordite Books. She holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University.

Poetry

The aversion of conformity A genre-frisking collection Gig Ryan

Topsy-Turvy

by Charles Bernstein

Chicago University Press $41.95 pb, 170 pp

harles Bernstein, born in 1950, is a prolific poet and theorist of Language poetry, which arose in the 1970s in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War movement (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it). As with similar movements in many countries, including Australia, this now semi-institutionalised poetry began as radical revolt against an established verse culture that preferred its poetry to be an easily palatable, Inauguration-worthy commodity. Instead, Bernstein and his colleagues variously practised a ‘multi-discourse text’ that chipped away at the boundary between poetry and critical theory. ‘Poetry is the aversion of conformity,’ Bernstein writes in an early essay, rephrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a site of perpetual

enquiry rather than the expedient repose of fixed meaning. My mind’s abind in double and thriple blinds Scarcely can I see what’s right in front of me I stumble and stare at things no longer there My head’s in the hopper, unscrambled by doppler The planet is warming but not to me ... What happened to disjunction, parasols, and ennui? (‘The Wages of Pascal’)

He encourages what he calls ‘dysraphism’, a mis-seaming of the poem that repels soporific absorption. Topsy-Turvy, Bernstein’s nineteenth book of poetry, is divided into four sections: ‘Cognitive Dissonance’, ‘As I love’ (title from Louis Zukofsky’s “A”), ‘Locomotion’, and ‘Last Kind Words’, a blues song by Geeshie Wiley that is also the book’s epigraph. Topsy-Turvy mashes up adages, quotations, questionnaires, interviews, rough-cut rhythms such as ‘Covidity’, and both real and imaginary translations. As in previous books, Bernstein frisks any genre for potential, simultaneously mocking and respecting each constraint: Confide only in friends from past five years ... Signs of compatibility include sudden rain, heightened gait, and tender elbow. High risk of falling into dark matter ... Preferred alcohol: Trappist brandy (spritz). (‘Twelve Year Universal Horoscope’) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Some poems simply answer a poem’s title, such as ‘A Unified some poems without fully acknowledging the history they dissect. Theory of Poetry’, the poem being ‘I don’t think so.’ Bernstein As lively and polyphonous as his poems, the essays also reel with rips up poetic decorum and dismantles any clingy lyricism aphorisms, puns, and scathing humour, such as the itemising of The New Yorker’s bland ‘water’ poems through clunky rhymes that require the in My Way, or the jeremiads of ‘Recanreader to refocus away from expected torium’ in Attack of the Difficult Poems musicality to the poem’s faktura, to (2011) that recant his own methods question what poetry can be by exagas being ‘contrary to the Books of the gerating what is absent. ‘Content can Accessible Poets’, or his amusement at never equal meaning,’ he writes in A non-poets confidently judging poetry Poetics (1992), veering from Robert because they too are ‘human’. DifficulCreeley’s ‘Form is only an extension ty to Bernstein is not an obstruction of content’. Some poems are layers of to apologise for, or to, but a furthering dialogic arguments and corrections, of possibility: ‘Innovation is not so juxtaposed with a comic glee that obmuch an aesthetic value as an aesthetic scures their subversiveness. ‘My father necessity’ (Attack of the Difficult Poems). would be a yarn salesman’ is a drumroll Sometimes the jollity that defenesof the famous (mainly men) that partly trates canonical works is more feeble ridicules the banal categorising of pop slapstick than aesthetic assault, but psychology: ‘Annibale Carracci is a even these incursions are elegiac, prenarcissist / Bacon is riddled with ridserving while debunking. Along with dles / Dowland is a real human being Charles Bernstein at the Writers’ and Literary Translators’ actual elegies (including one to Sean / Marlowe is heartless / Shakespeare is International Conference (Stockholm, 2008) Bonney), Topsy-Turvy’s cross-currents delusional / Galileo has a Jewish cast (Андрей Романенко via Wikimedia Commons) of the upheavals of Covid-19, the of mind / Caravaggio is not emotional instabilities of migration, translation enough.’ Statements qualify each other to constantly reframe the poem, which is itself thinking, and so itself, each implies distance and loss. In Bernstein’s continuing tug between lyric song and radical polemic, there is an irrepressible can never conclude. For Bernstein, poetry is innately fluid, hypertextual, always inventiveness that simmers over savagery of intent: an encountering, a ‘becoming’, as Heidegger and Schlegel theorised. If seriousness is sought, comedy will follow, and vice versa. The enemy of my enmity is my calamity. His borrowings satirise the misty sanctification draped over the COMMENTARY: Don’t say “I told you so” until you’re wrong. originals: ‘We were / the fire before / the fire was / ours. Now it’s COMMENTARY: Indignation intensifies heartburn but is / theirs’, (‘The Gift Outright’). Mallarmé’s hallowed ‘Un coup de preferable to heart failure. dés’ is scrambled in ‘Theory of Pottery’, as also in earlier poems, COMMENTARY: The enemy of my enmity is my sentimentality. thus subtly proposing an alternative poetics: (‘Swan Song’) ... Better hung out to dry than be buried alive. Fancy is at the root of illusion and the soul of truth. – A kick in the ass will never abolish asses.

Collaboration also undermines traditional authorial voice: hence the interviews and discussions that are equally poems. ‘Echologs’, co-written with Richard Tuttle, is a spirited modernising of the poetry match in Virgil’s ‘Eclogue 3’: ‘Those abide prize crap adore boring poems, / watch them milk jackasses and water stones.’ Strewn with allusions and recraftings from Milton to Rimbaud to William Carlos Williams to the Bible, Bernstein’s echo-poetics drag each poem across a rubble of erudition, just one example being ‘No then there then’, which sounds like Gertrude Stein, but is from Augustine’s Confessions (11.13.15), imagining that time would not exist without God, its creator. Bernstein has published and edited countless essays and translations, as well as co-directing PennSound, a massive archive of poetry readings and interviews. It is hard to thresh the poems away from his swarm of affably directing essays, or to appreciate 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Gig Ryan has published six books of poetry and her New and Selected Poems was published in 2011. She was Poetry Editor at The Age from 1998 to 2016. Her next book of poetry will be released in late 2022.

Poetry

Baudelaire’s dream

(1989) won a Pulitzer Prize – have given the form prominence. Claudia Rankine has written highly distinguished prose poetry and Canadian poet Eve Joseph’s Quarrels (2018) won the GrifGary Catalano’s distinguished prose poetry fin Prize. Today, much of the genuinely experimental poetry by Paul Hetherington Anglophone writers is being written by prose poets. In Australia, too, there has been an often unacknowledged burgeoning of an innovative prose poetry over the last half century. This rise is evidenced by the high quality and diversity of the inclusions in the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020), and it is also demonstrated by the volume being reviewed. Gary Catalano was a consummate Australian poet, art critic, Collected Prose Poems and short fiction writer who died aged only fifty-five in 2002. by Gary Catalano He mostly wrote fairly brief lineated poems and prose poems, Life Before Man publishing books which often mixed both forms. His lineated $24.99 pb, 232 pp poetry is highly accomplished, and although he never quite fitted he poetry community in Australia, as in the United King- into the dominant, often combative poetry cliques of his period, dom, has been slow to accept prose poetry as a legitimate his work has a secure place in Australian literary history. In many cases, his prose poetry represents the best of his poetic form. Yet there have been celebrated exponents of prose poetry over nearly two centuries – and even longer if the writing, and it is gratifying that Des Cowley has now edited prose component of the Japanese Haibun, developed by Matsuo a volume of Catalano’s collected prose poems. Reading these prose poems together not only confirms the Bashō (1644–94), is understood as prose strength of Catalano’s poetic voice but also poetry. demonstrates their powerful connections, The European prose poetry tradition especially in terms of imagery and technique. was started in France by Aloysius Bertrand They are informed by a broad knowledge of (1807–41) through the 1842 publication of culture, particularly Australian and Europethe quirky Gaspard de la Nuit – Fantaisies à la an visual art, and with important ideas about manière de Rembrandt et de Callot. Bertrand’s human conduct and judgement. work initially sold few copies but was a It is unusual in Australia for a poetry powerful influence on Le Spleen de Paris by book to be published with such fastidCharles Baudelaire. Published posthumousious attention to the layout of poems ly in 1869, this volume famously inaugurated and the overall design of the volume. the modern prose poetry tradition, and in Every prose poem has its own doubleits preface Baudelaire stated that he ‘had page spread – even the shorter works – and dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose’. the generosity of white space allows CatSince then, the list of well-known French alano’s works to breathe and expand. This prose poets has grown long, including lucomplements the artfulness of his language minaries such as Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane and of the prose poem form. He constructs Mallarmé, Max Jacob, and Francis Ponge. richly complex sentences and paragraphs In the last fifty years or so, American Gary Catalano (Gazebo Books) that appear to unfold effortlessly as they and, to a lesser extent, Canadian poets have cluster, aggregate, create and release tension, also taken up prose poetry with enthusiasm. Writers such as Russell Edson, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Mark Strand, and harness particular rhythms – while also allowing convincing Maxine Chernoff, Peter Johnson, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles shifts in perspective. These prose poems combine sharp, detailed observation with Simic – whose prose poetry collection The World Doesn’t End

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

a powerful sense of the quotidian’s strangeness. For instance, a prose poem entitled ‘Quotidian’, begins: ‘Yes. That the day was an ordinary one can be proven by this one fact: there were no fat men in the trees.’ As Catalano comments on the stereotype of ‘philosophic figures, somewhat sad of visage, who inquire into the meaning of things’, it is evident that his purpose is parodic. Yet the prose poem has a serious dimension, too, asking the reader to consider what an ‘ordinary’ day might actually be, and how we make meaning from what we know. More generally, Catalano’s prose poems often refer to everyday encounters and familiar objects. He writes of driftwood, an incinerator, a dump, a cupboard, fruit, birds, waves, and stones – all things that may be seen, touched, or held. The prose poems possess a disarming combination of directness and obliquity, and are consistently inventive in their use of figurative language, often for the purposes of defamiliarisation. For example, in ‘Silver and Gold’, breaking waves have ‘the sound of a hand sifting through a bag of grain’. There is, too, a recursive quality to some of these works, as prose poems accumulate related detail, or return with a modified perspective to where they started. Importantly, there is also a neo-surrealistic quality inhabiting many of these works. This is different to the surrealism of twentieth-century European prose poets and also gentler than the neo-surrealism employed by American poets such as Edson or Simic. However, Catalano was presumably aware of such examples and many of his works have a dream-like strangeness that challenges conventional understandings and perceptions and sometimes create notional scenarios. An example is the short poem ‘Incidents from a War’: When the enemy planes flew over our city they disgorged not

bombs but loaves of bread. Can you imagine our surprise? We ventured outside after those planes had disappeared from the sky, and what did we find there but heaps of broken bread at which the pigeons were already feeding?

This prose poem shows Catalano’s liking for imagist techniques; many of his works are like verbal paintings or photographs. Indeed, the openings of his prose poems frequently convey a sense of the writer framing a scene and inviting the reader to join him in examining it. Examples are: ‘A room at night, a room in which the curtains are stirring’; and ‘In a country far from here a young boy stands beneath a mulberry tree’. In showing the reader so convincingly how weirdly ordinary and how strangely familiar the world may be, Catalano is arguably Australia’s most successful and distinguished twentieth-century prose poet. He is one of few poets in this period to write extensively in this form and to demonstrate a sustained capacity to extend prose poetry’s boundaries. Even his slighter works repay close reading. These prose poems are undemonstrative and consistently illuminating, opening new pathways in their insistence on the value of poetry written in prose. This important volume reminds readers that poetry comes in various, sometimes unexpected forms and should be celebrated accordingly. g Paul Hetherington co-wrote Prose Poetry: An introduction (Princeton, 2020), and co-edited Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (MUP, 2020). He has published sixteen volumes of poetry and prose poetry and won or been nominated for more than thirty national and international awards and competitions, recently winning the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He is Professor of Writing at the University of Canberra.

The Building

Because of its gloomy appearance the building is like a defeated army, and the gloom is so heavy it makes handling difficult and postage quite out of the question. Still, if you wish to transfer its impression to someone don’t despair at the apparent impossibility of it; there are some things you can do, and it’s always better to feel like a winner than be dragged down by your enemies. I say this to you because these enemies of yours are hiding behind the stinking and spider-infested bushes which grow at the building’s corners. See, there is one over there. There’s a pen-knife clutched in his hand and a concentrated look of intense hatred standing, apparently at attention, in each of his eyes. And this is the building you have been waiting to enter! Move closer and you will see a single word rudely carved above its padlocked door: fame.

Gary Catalano

48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Biography

Mickie and her monkey A complicated family history Libby Robin

Delia Akeley and the Monkey: A human-animal story of captivity, patriarchy and nature by Iain McCalman

Upswell $29.99 pb, 232 pp

its centre a free-standing elephant ‘family’ of eight, charging. It still invites conversations with visitors. McCalman documents the appalling carnage and waste in the hunt for the biggest possible bull elephant with perfect tusks. Yet more than one hundred years after they died, the dramatically mounted animal bodies continue to hold pride of place. Now the museum celebrates the artistic presentation of the great taxidermist, rather than the heroism of his hunt. The Hall itself opened as a posthumous memorial to two Great Hunters – Roosevelt and Akeley. It is bright and open, belying its dark secrets. The elephants at its centre were never a family until they were dead. Yet they live on, long after the human families that collected them had unravelled. The Hall showcases Africa, its animals and their habitats, in a place distant from the heat and dust of the continent. Its walls are lined with twenty-eight vitrines of animals featuring original habitat dioramas of ecological and aesthetic precision. Dioramas are something for which the American Museum of Natural History is now justly famous. Yet they were dreamed up far from Manhattan, by Akeley after a terrible encounter with an injured elephant in Kenya that ripped open his face. Delirious and bedridden, nursed in the jungle by Mickie (and entertained by JT Jr), he poured his fever into planning exhibits. ‘Why stop at resurrecting the bodies

amily histories are always complicated. Delia (‘Mickie’) Akeley and her monkey, JT Jr, are the titular family in this intriguing book, but its story includes the grand global family of colonial museums, and the personal families of Theodore Roosevelt and the author, Iain McCalman. The book opens with a hunting expedition in Africa (1909–12), where Mickie meets JT, and the key elements for the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York are collected. The expedition unfolds in kaleidoscopic cameos, rich with the sights and smells of ‘darkest’ Africa. Animals are ever-present in this history, macro (elephants and lions) and microscopic, including tsetse flies, ticks, and other fever-making creatures. The tale of the African Hall is enriched by McCalman’s sensitive reading of Mickie’s biography of JT (1928) and her Jungle Portraits (1930). Carl Akeley, hunter and taxidermist for the Manhattan museum, has a dream: a ‘family’ of elephants charging together at the heart of his future gallery of Africa. The expedition he leads comprises three other hunters: Chicago journalist John T. McCutcheon, businessman Fred Stephenson, and Akeley’s wife, Mickie. The expedition team becomes more complicated when it acquires a feisty infant female vervet monkey. ‘JT Jr’ was so called to annoy the journalist (that is, JT Sr) who regarded the monkey as a liability. Mickie insisted that JT Jr should join them. Some one hundred local porters also accompanied them, as befitted a museum expedition. When JT became attached as firmly to Mickie as the human child she and Akeley never had, a young local boy, Ali, was employed to look after JT so that Mickie could shoot elephants. The museum’s quest for a large, perfect bull elephant attracted the attention of former President Theodore Roosevelt (‘The Colonel’). Roosevelt’s party included his son, Kermit, forty African porters, and a professional ‘white hunter guide’. The museum needed the sort of sponsorship that Roosevelt’s name attracted, and Roosevelt liked the museum publicity for his African sojourn. Leslie Tarlton, the Australian guide Roosevelt employed, was a forebear of McCalman. Delia Akeley, 1915 (The American Museum Journal via Wikimedia Commons) The Akeley Hall of African Mammals features at AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

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and habitats of an elephant family group?’ muses McCalman. ‘Why not create a great temple of nature to exhibit “habitat dioramas” … [for] all the major East African wildlife groups? […] Lying helpless in his cot [Akeley] yearned to deploy his taxidermic talents to recreate the “peace and beauty” of this African wilderness.’ Akeley is a perfectionist and a workaholic, his singleminded vision driving even his unconscious hours.

Animals are ever-present in this history, macro (elephants and lions) and microscopic, including tsetse flies, ticks, and other fever-making creatures The ‘front-of-house’ story is the grand African Hall, the envy of every imperial museum. McCalman also unpacks the ‘back-of-house’, exploring the silences in the vitrines, beyond the elephants’ roar. JT was a central part of the Akeleys’ domestic life in Africa, in their Manhattan apartment, and later at the Rock Park Zoo, Washington (where she died in 1924). She is an absence in the Hall. Mickie, too, is missing from the museum today, appearing only briefly in a website blog about women scientists. The Akeley name was added to the Hall in 1936, but it did not honour Mickie. Mary Jobe Akeley, the museum’s Special Adviser to the development of the African Hall, who had married Akeley in 1924, deliberately excluded his first wife (and her monkey) from the Akeley family history. McCalman’s forensic sleuthing restores Mickie to her early role as an important observer of monkey behaviour. She became a leader of her own African expeditions, working closely with Batwa and Bambuti (Pygmy) peoples in Congo. Her intuitive understandings of animals and people revealed much that the heroic masculine hunters never grasped. Blinded by anxiety about their American manhood, the white male hunters missed the opportunity to observe JT on her own terms, distracted as they were by ‘the conjoint activities of exhibition, conservation and eugenics’. This book is about Africa but also about the stifling limits of New York that drove Akeley, his two wives, and JT to different sorts of madness. Fevers are often associated with African jungles, but the expectations of the urban jungle of Manhattan added another level of craziness. As museums serve postcolonial audiences today, their silences and historical aspirations become even more important. Delia Akeley and the Monkey is a highly original dive into the intergenerational museum family. McCalman has rethreaded interspecies and colonial stories together, even finding a niche for the bon-bon bowls of his African childhood. Those bowls, made from an elephant’s toenails, were all that was preserved from an ‘imperfect’ bull discarded by the Colonel. He presented these tiny personal treasures to his white hunter guide. More than a century later, McCalman has finally restored the animals left behind to the story of the African Hall. g Libby Robin works as an independent environmental historian with museums in Australia, Germany, Estonia and Norway. Her most recent book is The Environment: A History of the Idea.

History

War without mercy A woeful erosion of humanity Joan Beaumont

Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW camps by Sarah Kovner

Harvard University Press US$35 hb, 336 pp

region, depending on the local command. Whether individual prisoners lived or died was a matter of chance. But, contrary to what many Australians might have thought, there was no policy or mandate from Tokyo to mistreat or kill prisoners, even when the Japanese faced defeat in 1945. In developing these arguments, Kovner focuses on the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, and Korea. This choice – the primary audience for the book is presumably American – allows her to examine a range of conditions: from the terrible privations of US troops during the Bataan Death March, to some almost model camps. Although prisoners were paraded through the streets of Korean cities, and their camps were often spartan, conditions compared favourably with many camps south of Hong Kong, where access was denied to the International Committee of the Red Cross (whose records Kovner has trawled and uses extensively). Kovner’s case studies demonstrate not only the lack of consistency in Japanese behaviour, but also the degree to which the Allied prisoners were affected, negatively, by tit-for-tat reprisals. The Pacific war, as John Dower has memorably said, was a ‘war without mercy’ on both sides. Japanese internees within the United States and prisoners in Asia became bargaining chips in a cycle of reciprocal reprisals. Captured Allied airmen were often executed if they were shot down, because the Japanese believed that the aerial bombardment of Japanese cities was a war crime.

he suffering of prisoners of the Japanese dominates many Australians’ memories of World War II. More than 22,000 men and almost forty women were captured in Southeast Asia between 1942 and 1945. About 8,000 of them died. Traditionally this high death rate has been attributed to a mix of Japanese cruelty and their refusal to observe international humanitarian law. The military code of bushidō, it is argued, meant that Japanese soldiers had no respect for enemies who had surrendered. They did not recognise that prisoners had rights under international law, since the Japanese authorities promised to observe the Geneva Convention of 1929 only mutatis mutandis – that is, as Japanese laws and local circumstances allowed. From mid-1942 on, Allied prisoners of war, like Asian labourers from occupied territories, were seen as a useful but utterly disposable labour force. Moreover, the liberal use of corporal punishment within the Imperial Japanese Army’s disciplinary system meant that prisoners were slapped and beaten, even for minor infringements. Their guards – often Korean and thus on the lowest rung of the IJA’s military hierarchy – were themselves treated violently. This new study by a young American scholar, Sarah Kovner, does not dismiss these arguments; nor does it deny that many Allied prisoners and Asian labourers died of excessive work, malnutrition, and poor medical care. However, rather than accepting ‘as a given’ that Japanese society had a code of conduct that required prisoners be treated cruelly, Kovner argues, first, that Australian and Dutch prisoners of war with beri beri at Tarsau in Thailand, 1943 the neglect was a problem of logistics. The numbers (Australian War Memorial P00761.011) captured in early 1941–42 far exceeded what the Japanese authorities anticipated. In such circumstances, POWs are always vulnerable. Some 32,000 German POWs in They had good reason: perhaps 100,000 Japanese died in one atAllied hands died in three months of the European winter of tack on Tokyo in March 1945. The local Japanese population also 1944–45. suffered terribly as the US blockade became a stranglehold in the Second, since the Japanese were pushed to their logistical last year of the war. Why should Allied prisoners of war benefit limits fighting the Chinese and the Allies, they did not attach from such food parcels as the Red Cross managed to deliver? any priority to the care of POWs, who were often held in remote Comparatively few Australians were held in camps in Japan locations. Third, the Japanese military failed to create a system of and Korea, so Australian readers might question the relevance administration or a chain of command that was clear and able of Kovner’s findings to Southeast Asia. Indeed, her command to enforce standards that might have protected POWs. Hence, of detail is less sure in relation to this region. She claims, for conditions in camps varied dramatically across the Asia–Pacific example, that the Japanese did not recognise rank among their AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

prisoners: but even on the Thai–Burma railway, Australian officers were rarely forced to do manual work, a privilege that could have meant the difference between life and death.

Contrary to what many Australians thought, there was no mandate from Tokyo to mistreat or kill prisoners Nonetheless, Kovner’s main arguments – that the maltreatment of prisoners owed much to poor planning, lack of central policy and control, and logistical failures – remain persuasive. To be sure, Australian prisoners suffered from almost sadistic cruelty. On Ambon, the camp commandant, an interpreter named Maskiyo Ikeuchi, pointlessly overworked already starving Australian prisoners to the point where nearly eighty per cent of them died. But we should note that by 1945 Ambon was isolated, physically and psychologically, from Japan by a blockade that meant, as Kovner and Australian scholars such as Lachlan Grant have pointed out, that more than 2,000 Australian POWs died when the ‘hell ships’ taking them to Japan were torpedoed by the US Navy. Logistics also explains – if it does not excuse – the high death rate suffered by Allied prisoners at the most remote camps

on the Thai–Burma railway. As the 1943 monsoon set in, and prisoners moved beyond access to the Kwae Noi River, road transport collapsed. The resulting malnutrition contributed to the deaths of twenty-nine per cent of Australians in F Force. Of course, work on the railway should have ceased, at least until the rains eased. Here the well-being of their workforce was a lower priority for the Japanese military than completing this strategic line of communication as quickly as possible; similar priorities prevailed elsewhere. Thus, the main thesis of this book holds true across Asia: simplistic notions of culturally determined cruelty do not fully explain the maltreatment of POWs, even though the conduct of the Pacific war was clearly infused with racism on both sides. The chaos of war, and the plea of ‘military necessity’ – alas, so often the trump card during warfare – played a major role in this woeful erosion of humanity. g Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, author of Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013), and joint editor of Serving our Country: Indigenous Australians: War, defence and citizenship (2018). She is currently writing a history of Australia in the Great Depression.

Biography

Her mother’s sentinel An unmissable filial portrait Susan Sheridan

Inseparable Elements: Dame Mary Durack, a daughter’s perspective by Patsy Millett

Fremantle Press $34.99 pb, 464 pp

nother book about a mother by a daughter, I thought when I saw this one, summoning to mind Biff Ward’s In My Mother’s Hands (2014), Kate Grenville’s One Life (2015), and Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter (2018). But while each of those books presents an impressive woman cramped – sometimes tragically so – by her postwar circumstances, in this case we have a subject who was nothing short of a national treasure. Mary Durack (1913–94), made a Dame of the British Empire in 1983, was well known nationally as an author and literary figure. She was prominent in numerous enterprises, such as the Aboriginal Cultural Foundation and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame. If that combination of causes sounds incongruous to today’s ears, it was not so to Durack. Her major project was the history of her immigrant Irish family’s land-taking in south52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

west Queensland and the Kimberley, published as Kings in Grass Castles (1959) and Sons in the Saddle (1983), a saga that fed into twentieth-century settler Australians’ hunger for a mythology of heroic pioneering, and of paternalistic relations with the First Nations peoples they displaced and dispossessed. Throughout her life, Durack was a prolific writer – of occasional poetry, stories, plays, radio scripts, and children’s stories (illustrated by her sister Elizabeth). She published several narrative histories, including The Rock and the Sand (1969), about the Catholic missions in the Kimberley, and a novel, Keep Him My Country (1955), where, rather like Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929), the love between an Aboriginal woman and a white station owner bestows on him a spiritual bond to the land. All this productivity took place amid a busy life of family, friends, and acquaintances, so that Durack frequently complained that she had insufficient time to devote to the writing that she saw as her vocation. Her marriage, like her own mother’s, produced a brood of children but was conducted in a somewhat semi-detached manner. Her husband, Horrie Miller, pioneer aviator of the north, spent much of his time living in Broome, while she stayed in Perth with the six children (just as her own mother had done when her husband was working on the family properties in the Kimberley, only coming to the city during the wet season). Durack was a central figure in Perth literary life, and this book gives a vivid if rather jaundiced impression of countless parties thrown, meetings held – mostly the Fellowship of Australian Writers – and a constant stream of callers. Patsy Millett is sardonic about her mother’s sociability and her desire to nurture the literary efforts of others – not least about the nuns and priests

who required Durack’s attention with their projects, most notably Bishop Jobst (avatar of the priest played by Geoffrey Rush in Bran Nue Dae). It seems that Durack could never resist a request to read a manuscript, readily reaching for her editorial blue pencil. The most famous of her protégés was Colin Johnson (Mudrooroo), with his first book, Wild Cat Falling (1965).

It seems that Durack could never resist a request to read a manuscript, readily reaching for her editorial blue pencil Durack had a number of supportive women friends, foremost among whom was the brilliant ophthalmologist Ida Mann, who shared her bush-writing retreat with Durack. Then there were Durack’s publisher and confidante, Florence James, and her cousin, the conservationist Kathleen McArthur, the pioneering outback photo-journalist Ernestine Hill, and the anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry. By contrast, her male admirers are given short shrift in this book, whether they were poor things requiring her help or badly behaved visiting writers like Hal Porter. All except for Robert Hill, Ernestine’s son, who for a while was a closer part of the family than anyone knew. One might expect the daughter’s perspective on such a maternal paragon to be somewhat ambivalent – and Patsy Millett, Durack’s eldest daughter, does not contradict this expectation. As an adult, she saw it as her role to ‘straighten out the muddle’ of her mother’s life. She shared Durack’s belief that she never realised her potential as a writer and could have achieved much more had she been ‘more disciplined, perhaps less outgoing and more ruthless’. By her own account, Millett did her level best to encourage that necessary discipline and ruthlessness – to keep both family hangers-on and mendicant outsiders at bay. Since her mother’s death, the work on this monumental book completes the process, by documenting all the help Durack gave to those others, and the extent to which she was used by them. But Millett complicates this defensive and protective role by expressing exasperation at her mother’s uncritical generosity and characterising herself, freely and wittily, as a kind of gloomy Greek chorus, as her mother’s ‘sentinel’, she of the ‘censorious eye and caustic tongue’. Her efforts are regularly ignored. While she expresses impatience with her mother, Millett’s attitude to her father borders on the hostile. One can read between the lines that Horrie Miller was very hard on his eldest daughter, while adoring his second, Robin, who followed in his footsteps in becoming a renowned outback pilot, and died tragically young. He was also, in his infirm old age, very ‘difficult’ and demanding of Durack, who was twenty years his junior but herself already unwell. There is macabre humour in the scenes where he is banished to ‘Sunset’, the nursing home, and plots to buy a car and effect his escape. Yet the glimpses of Horrie in quotes from his letters to Durack

show him to be a dab hand with a pen, and a man of perceptive wit, albeit a monster of egotism. Millett is hard on those who abused her mother’s generosity. Not only her father but also her aunt, the redoubtable Elizabeth, her uncle Reg, and her brother-in-law Herbert Dicks all come in for a merciless and apparently well-deserved verbal beating. The story ends in a tumult of unseemly family fighting over Durack’s papers (which included the Durack family archives). Mary’s siblings Reg and Elizabeth took legal action, and Millett accuses them of ‘hounding my mother to death’. The fight inevitably became public, attracting such headlines as ‘Author Sued for Diaries’ and ‘Dying Dame in Diaries Fight’. Millett saw it as a ‘battle over who had the right of ownership over Durack’, and in a way this book can be seen as her assertion of triumph in that battle. She had a plethora of sources: not only the family papers that her mother kept and used, but many letters and journals – all the women in the family kept journals, including Gran (Durack’s mother, Bess) until she was near ninety. Indeed, this habit was ‘a family condition, like the carpal tunnel syndrome affecting our hands’. The book’s perspective is set by the decision to begin the story at the time of Millett’s birth, so that the first twenty-five years of

Patsy Millett (Fremantle Press)

her mother’s life are taken as read. For those who want to read about Mary Durack’s youth, the joint biography of the Durack sisters by Brenda Niall, True North (2012), offers a perspective entirely different – and highly recommended – from that of this unmissable daughterly one. g Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in Humanities at Flinders University. She is the author of Nine Lives: Postwar women writers making their mark (2011). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Law

Questions of character The troubled history of Colin Manock Alecia Simmonds

A Witness of Fact: The peculiar case of chief forensic pathologist Colin Manock by Drew Rooke

Scribe $32.99 pb, 240 pp

rew Rooke begins A Witness of Fact in the viewing gallery of Adelaide’s Forensic Science Centre, his eyes scanning the stainless steel benchtops, scissors, ladles, a pair of ‘large, heavy-duty shears used for cutting through ribs’, and an arsenal of knives of different styles and sizes – ‘what you would see in a commercial kitchen’. The atmosphere is cool, sterile, and menacing. This is where disgraced forensic pathologist Colin Manock worked for thirty years. Given that this book is about Manock, the opening could be confused with scene-setting. But there is a deeper significance to the author’s choice of words, one that goes to the heart of his book: what transforms knives in a commercial kitchen into specialist tools of medical forensics? How is our trust in the criminal justice system dependent upon our thinking of the ladles and scissors not as ordinary objects but, when placed in the right hands, as the instruments of experts? Who has the authority to speak for the dead or to interpret the mute language of deceased flesh? And in Colin Manock’s case, what do we do about the four hundred criminal convictions secured by someone juries believed to be an expert witness but who had few formal qualifications beyond that of a general practitioner? For anybody who has read legal academic Robert Moles’s work, there is little that is surprising in Rooke’s book. The cases that Manock botched as chief forensic pathologist and the wrongful convictions he secured have all been analysed by Moles. Rooke takes Moles’s academic research and enlivens it with lucid prose and a human dimension. He interviews judges, barristers, police officers, and litigants, and uses the tools of narrative non-fiction – thick description, a first-person narrator, and the placing of all doubts and questions on the page – to create

Be seen about town.

a readable, and shocking, book. It is not, as the blurb says, ‘investigative journalism’, because the story has already been unearthed. But Rooke does well to bring the issues together and present them in a manner accessible to a wide audience. Colin Manock served as South Australia’s chief forensic pathologist from 1968 until 1995. Untrained in histopathology, he was never formally qualified for the role, as his employers knew and later judicial inquiries discovered. Desperate to fill the position of forensic pathologist, the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science (now known as Forensic Science SA) awarded Manock the job even though his experience comprised nothing more than basic medical training and four years’ lecturing in the University of Leeds’s Department of Forensic Medicine. Young and inexperienced, Manock arrived in Adelaide in the late 1960s to begin the work he would do for the next thirty years: conducting autopsies to diagnose the cause, timing, or manner of suspicious or unexplained deaths, and explaining his findings in court. Juries sent innocent people to jail and let the guilty walk free on the basis of his evidence. But the story of Colin Manock is not simply one of a lack of expertise. It goes to questions of character. Manock was arrogant, lordly, and cavalier. He relished guns and murder mysteries. As a child he enjoyed dissecting animals, as an adult he preferred the company of the dead. He married several times, most recently to a dominatrix whose fetish chamber includes a mortuary table with an autopsy kit. He helped to train Dr Harold Shipman, a serial killer who murdered at least 230 of his patients. In a vocation that demanded specialist knowledge, self-abnegation, and a commitment to dispassionate, disinterested science, Manock was a showman who traded in charismatic authority. He preferred storytelling to science and seemed to regard himself as part of the prosecution. Uncertainty and impartiality were not close companions for Manock; he held fast to a version of truth clumsily cobbled together from bodies he was never qualified to take apart. What are some examples of his ugly science? In the section entitled ‘cases’ we meet, among others, David Szach who served fourteen years in prison for allegedly killing his partner and hiding the body in a freezer where it was later found in the foetal position. Manock declared that the cooling time of a body had to be lengthened by forty per cent if it was found in the foetal position, a number that, according to the independent expert pathologists later reviewing the case, ‘had been plucked from the air’. There is the fifteen-year-old Aboriginal boy Gerald Warren who died in a racially motivated attack that involved him being

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54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Philosophy beaten with a metal pipe with a threaded end and run over by a vehicle. Two men were convicted of his murder. Extraordinarily, Manock concluded that Warren had simply died after falling from a moving vehicle and that marks on his hand and face were caused by his corduroy trousers. We also encounter Aboriginal man Derek Bromley, convicted of the murder of Stephen Docoza, who, in 1984, had been found dead in the River Torrens,; Bromley’s appeal to the High Court is proceeding as I write. Once again, Manock gave unequivocal evidence: Docoza’s death had been caused by drowning and his injuries had been inflicted before he died. On review, a forensic pathologist with special expertise in drowning stated that there was ‘no scientific basis’ for this finding and that Docoza’s immersion in water for five days meant that distinguishing between post mortem and ante mortem injuries was impossible. And there is also Henry Keogh, who successfully appealed in 1995 against his homicide conviction for the drowning of his fiancée in a bath at their home. Manock argued that Keogh had lifted her legs in the air and then pushed her head under water. Before the Medical Board and the Medical Tribunal, Manock later admitted that there was no scientific support for his opinion that the staining of her lungs suggested drowning and that there was ‘no proper basis’ for his belief that the woman was conscious while drowning, which precluded a slip and fall. Rooke devotes his final chapter to Manock’s legacy. How could he have been allowed to practise when his incompetence was proven on so many occasions? It’s a question which takes the story out of the province of portraiture and into the realm of institutional failure. Here we might blame those working for the prosecution who unreasonably pressed for a conviction or opposed claims for wrongful conviction even when other experts revealed the inaccuracy of Manock’s opinion. We might also point our finger at the tight-knit legal fraternity in Adelaide, a small city where the legislators or judicial authorities are all too implicated in the scandal to launch the Royal Commission into Manock still urgently needed. South Australia’s former Director of Public Prosecutions, Paul Rofe QC, has defended Manock and former Attorney-General Trevor Griffin declared an Inquiry unnecessary. There is also the tendency on the part of barristers and lawyers to not mention Manock’s lack of qualifications in their appeals, negating their duty to disclose to the court. This is happening right now in the Bromley case under appeal in the High Court. In telling this story, Rooke joins a chorus of journalists, academics, and citizens who have spent the past few decades campaigning for justice; people more committed to revealing the truth about Manock than many judicial experts. He also shows the problems of presuming a chasm between medical ‘fact’ and lay opinion. The transformation of a knife into a scalpel – its transmutation from an ordinary object into a technical instrument capable of divining the truth – is not a self-evident fact but a product of our belief in the certitudes of medical expertise and the incontrovertibility of specialist knowledge. Polite doubt, a quality so lacking in Manock, is something we might foster to remedy the harms he caused. g Alecia Simmonds is a Senior Lecturer in Law at UTS.

Owning experience

The conversation between body and mind Diane Stubbings

Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious by Antonio Damasio

Hachette $39.99 hb, 247 pp

n Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious, neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher Antonio Damasio asks us to imagine life without consciousness. We would, he argues, still have patterns of neurochemical, sense-derived information ‘flowing in our minds, but [that information] would be unconnected to us as singular individuals’. Key to Damasio’s interpretation of consciousness is that we know we are the owners of our mental and physical experiences. Consciousness is ‘a state of mind … [wherein] the mental contents it displays are felt, and those mental contents adopt a singular perspective’. Essentially, feelings – those neurochemical signals that ‘[mirror] the state of life within a body’ – operate as a bridge between body and mind, consciousness proceeding from our recognition that these feelings encapsulate ‘the world within [and] around’ our individual selves. Readers who have encountered any of Damasio’s previous books – notably Descartes’ Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999), and The Strange Order of Things (2017) – will be familiar with the thesis Damasio sets out here: that it is impossible to understand consciousness without understanding both the neurochemical networks that underpin brain function and the body within which those networks are housed. Damasio stretches the notion of consciousness beyond the mere firing of electrical connections within the brain and nervous system and, by extension, beyond articulations of consciousness that depend, for example, on the emergent properties of neural networks or the quantum effects of the electro-magnetic fields emanating from neural activity. Specifically, he stresses that consciousness arises through, and in turn feeds into, a dialogue that is constantly occurring between, in broad terms, body and brain; ‘from the brain conniving and commingling with the world within our bodies’. Consequently, there is no room in Damasio’s thesis for science-fiction scenarios in which the ‘brain’ is uploaded to a computer. To do so, Damasio asserts, would be the equivalent of uploading a recipe – you’ll have the algorithm necessary for a particular dish, but you’ll capture neither its taste nor its texture. This emphasis on consciousness as an embodied phenomenon has made Damasio’s work of interest beyond the borders of scientific research. His rejection of Cartesian dualism and his argument that apprehending the interplay between mind and body is central to understanding both our sense of self and the evolution of culture continue to be significant influences in the fields of, for example, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

experiential phenomenology and affect theory. Offering what is fundamentally an executive summary of his thinking about consciousness, Damasio makes clear at the outset that Feeling and Knowing deals solely with his ideas, deliberately omitting ‘the connective tissue and … scaffolding’ framing those ideas, an approach that has both its benefits and detriments.

Damasio stretches the notion of consciousness beyond the mere firing of electrical connections within the brain and nervous system One of the strengths is the degree to which this configuration of Damasio’s argument underscores the evolved nature of consciousness, thus rebutting the contention that a phenomenon as complex and apparently mysterious as consciousness – much like Paley’s watch – could only be accounted for by divine intervention. Rather, as Peter Godfrey-Smith similarly demonstrated in Metazoa: Animal minds and the birth of consciousness (2020), the foundations of our own consciousness were laid down by primitive organisms aeons ago (and are still evident in, for example, bacteria), the organisms’ capacity to survive dependent on their ability to ‘[sense] others like them … [to sense] their environments … [and to respond] intelligently to what they sensed’. Crucially, the drive towards homeostasis – the optimal calibration of the environmental parameters on which life depends – is central to this response. As biological life became more complex, Damasio argues, organisms evolved nervous systems that facilitated the neural representation of external and, vitally, internal environments, the latter through a mapping of ‘the state of [the organisms’] own bodies [as they regulate] the internal organ functions required by the necessities of life’. These representative patterns were the first emanations of mind, and it is this ability to represent the spatial and temporal contexts of existence, to manipulate those representative images to find creative solutions when homeostasis is threatened, and thereby to nurture a conception of one’s own selfhood – one enhanced through the accretion of memories and of a personal history – that is pivotal to our comprehension of how and why consciousness developed. Feeling and Knowing’s distillation of Damasio’s decades of research makes for a concise and accessible book. However, its truncated nature introduces as many questions as it answers, particularly in terms of the biological mechanisms by which these effects are made manifest (the occasional detours into brain anatomy offer minimal insight and are perfunctory at best). Similarly, the extent of the difference between human and non-human consciousness gets limited attention, Damasio’s note that the point of demarcation ‘sits with the scale of invention and the degree of complexity and efficiency shown in the construction of [the organisms’] responses’ to their environment barely skimming the surface. The bite-sized chapters, although reinforcing the gradations of evolutionary adaptation from sensing to feeling to knowing 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

that mark Damasio’s account, result in cumbersome overlaps and repetitions. Further, despite acknowledging the importance of the evidence supporting his thesis – the ‘connective tissue’ provided by case studies, brain research, and introspective accounts of consciousness as offered by writers such as Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf – the absence of such evidence makes Feeling and Knowing seem lightweight and incomplete (and thereby ripe for misappropriation), certainly when compared to such illuminating and richly argued books as The Strange Order of Things. Readers who have not encountered Damasio’s work before will find Feeling and Knowing a useful place to start, but for anyone who is already acquainted with his thinking, or who wants to engage with the meat of his argument, The Strange Order of Things is certainly the better option. Either way, if we are to appreciate fully the culture, creativity, and moral choices that define us as human, Damasio’s argument that we cannot unravel the nature of consciousness without recognising the continual conversation that occurs between body and mind – between ‘body chemistry and the bioelectrical activity of neurons’ – warrants our attention. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Religion

Assembling orthodoxy Outlining how the bible came into being Constant J. Mews

The Making of the Bible: From the first fragments to sacred scripture by Konrad Schmid and Jens Schröter, translated by Peter Lewis

Harvard University Press US$35 hb, 440 pp

he Bible is a collection of books with a long history. Not surprisingly, there is little agreement as to precisely which books it contains and what their collective importance might be. In The Making of the Bible, a distinguished Old Testament scholar, Konrad Schmid, and an equally prominent New Testament specialist, Jens Schröter, have combined forces to produce a volume (elegantly translated from the German by Peter Lewis) that outlines how different forms of the Bible came into being. Their focus is historical and philological rather than theological or literary. Yet the story they tell is engrossing: that of an unstable world needing to attend to the values of God’s kingdom. They help a non-specialist reader appreciate the fascinating diversity of ways in which the Bible’s message was regularly reinterpreted in a changing political situation. The literary structure of the Christian Bible as we know it gives the impression of providing a complete history of the world.

This, at least, is the way the Bible is read by those who see it as a divinely ordained record, that begins with Creation and then lays down the Law of Moses for the Hebrew tribes, before presenting the teaching of the prophets about the abuse of this Law, prior to introducing the story of salvation in the New Testament. The antiquity of the Old Testament is an illusion. The earliest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible are those found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the first century bce. The notion of a fixed canon of sacred scripture is largely a consequence of orthodox Christian concern for an authoritative record. Needless to say, our understanding of the formation of this canon has transformed over the last hundred years as a result of codices in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Together, Schmid and Schröter unfold the significance of these discoveries, which collectively show that the history of the Bible is much less fixed than has been imagined. Over the past century, it has become evident that the oldest texts in the Hebrew Bible derive from oral traditions put into writing no earlier than the ninth or eighth century bce. Like any Indigenous songline, these orally transmitted stories mapped out territory believed to be sacred. They tell stories about spirit ancestors who could inspire the community by their heroic leadership and vision. Of particular value in this book is the account of the contrasting perspectives of the northern kingdom of Israel, and of Judah in the south, focused around Jerusalem. The fact that Jerusalem is barely mentioned in the Torah suggests that much of it was composed in the north, whereas the historical books derive from just one of the twelve tribes, that of the Jews, who looked back to the royal traditions of Jerusalem. This tension about the importance of the Temple at Jerusalem in observance of the Law of God would persist to the time of Jesus. His ancestry from the line of David is of great importance in Matthew’s Gospel, but not that of Mark. There was an age-old suspicion in Galilee of the political ambitions of Jerusalem. The Samaritans had their own version of the Bible, in which Jerusalem had no place. Jesus was not the first to complain about how religion was being hijacked to benefit the interests of a ruling élite. The historical approach taken by these two authors certainly helps us appreciate the diversity not just of political circumstances, but of religious perspectives within the sacred texts of Hebrew tradition. The price of their focus on politics in relation to the Hebrew kingdoms is underplaying the particular contributions of individual storytellers and moralists. As the prophets regularly reminded their readers, God’s law demanded concern for strangers, widows, and orphans. The willingness of the prophets to speak truth to power still demands our attention. The sacred narratives preserved by those Jewish leaders returning from exile in the late sixth century bce served not just to legitimise a re-established community but also to chastise a society that seemed to be slipping away from justice and compassion for the sake of power and ambition. One of the merits of this volume is its emphasis on the continuing fluidity of sacred texts well into the time of Jesus. Even the term ‘New Testament’ is an invention from the second century. Recent New Testament scholarship has revealed the diversity of ways in which great stories of the Hebrew scriptures are retold in the Gospels in relation to Jesus. The focus of this volume is not so much on the literary strategies

of New Testament writers as on the gradual way in which certain of their writings acquired particular authority. Their consistent theme is that Jesus lives out, even to his death and resurrection, the message of these scriptures. Yet those who spoke about Jesus in a Greek-speaking community like that of Antioch necessarily interpreted his teaching differently from those in Jerusalem, prior to the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce. The figure of Paul is central to this story, at least in those communities that did not want to keep full observance of the Jewish law. At the same time, Jesus was a Jew, and his teaching could only make sense in relation to the Hebrew scriptures. For that reason, the early Christians (or Nazarenes as they were initially called) decided that they needed to keep reading those scriptures, to maintain their identity.

The history of the Bible is much less fixed than has been imagined Perhaps the most intriguing part of the story told in this volume is the process by which the Christians of the second century decided to identify a canonical body of texts. They were stirred by the arguments of Marcion, a Greek Christian who loved the letters of Paul, but considered that Jesus had nothing to do with the God of the Old Testament. Schröter, a specialist in this issue of the formation of the Christian canon, helpfully unpacks the role of Marcion in this process. As with the translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek a few centuries previously, there was never any precise agreement as to what constituted a sacred text. We can imagine these early Christian communities maintaining their own songline, mapping out their version of the path taken by their saviour and his teaching about how they should develop. Only gradually did these oral traditions get written down and collected into an agreed corpus of narratives and letters known as the New Testament. The Ethiopian Bible includes apocalyptic texts like the book of Enoch, written to oppose foreign occupation, but excluded elsewhere. Each community had its favoured texts. Schmid and Schröter conclude this volume by returning to the formation of a canonical Hebrew Bible in competition with that of Christians. For both Jews and Christians (as well as those who prefer to avoid either label), perhaps the deepest lesson is the value of pulling together the stories and songlines of different communities. Their multiplicity forces us to imagine how we might retell those stories in our own time for the audiences we wish to reach. g Constant J. Mews is an emeritus professor at Monash University, where he taught from 1987 to 2021 and was Director of the Centre for Religious Studies, within its School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies. ❖

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Politics

Problemshifter

Williams at 100. Still, Stasi is undoubtedly correct when he identifies Williams as a potential source of the materialist aesthetic criticism North advocates. The tensions between criticism One hundred years of Raymond Williams and historicism are typical of the fixed oppositions Williams Gary Pearce questioned. The strength of the collection issues from its reading of Raymond Williams Williams beyond earlier phases of critique and defence. It doesn’t at 100 edited by Paul Stasi attempt to outline or summarise Williams’s development, and Rowman & Littlefield, assumes familiarity with his work. It allows a pathway into it by $180 hb, 210 pp focusing on some key conceptual categories, particularly in the first section. Williams is well known for a historical semantics Culture and Politics: that weighs ‘keywords’ such as ‘culture’, ‘industry’, ‘democracy’, Class, writing, socialism ‘class’, and ‘art’ against the changes in life and thought they by Raymond Williams register. The book seeks to apply this approach to Williams Verso, $39.99 pb, 240 pp himself. Thus, Anna Kornbluh’s evocative opening essay focuses he 2021 centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth was a on his use of the word ‘mediation’ and its role in representation moment of acknowledgment but also involved some as- and the creation of common meanings for Williams, along with sessment and testing of his ongoing relevance. Williams his understanding of culture. One wishes for more on the conseemed to live many lives: son of a railway worker in rural Wales, nection between this and Daniel Hartley’s equally penetrating Communist Party member, wartime tank commander, tutor in discussion of ‘distance’ as denoting incorporation, separation, and the Workers’ Educational Association, novelist, author of key reified thinking. This presents us with the modes against which texts within cultural and media studies, professor of drama at ‘mediation’ was presumably pitted. While Williams was an insightful participant in the cultural Cambridge University, founding figure of the British New Left, television reviewer and commentator, socialist activist and Welsh debates of his time, this book sees the main value of his work in his distinctive methodology. Mathias nationalist, cultural and Marxist theNilges wants to remind us ‘not only of orist. what was said but also of how things Early reception of Williams’s were formulated’. Williams’s theory of work, especially by fellow socialists, cultural materialism is pertinent here. emphasised his continuities with the Thomas A. Laughlin argues that, in the culturalist tradition he documented face of various forms of subjectivism and defined in the book that made and objectivism, Williams enacted a his name: Culture and Society (1958). ‘problemshift’ in cultural theory (and From the 1980s there was greater Marxism) by bringing cultural activity appreciation for the innovative aspects and production into the realm of mateof his work, albeit with some criticism rialist criticism. Laughlin is interesting over his neglect of gender and race. on how Williams was influenced by Raymond Williams at 100, edited by both the Western Marxist engagement Paul Stasi, presents some consideration with culture and the materialism of of Williams’s work by a new generaclassical Marxism. He treated the tion of scholars. This takes place on received Marxist idea of culture as a the back of a modest renaissance of superstructural reflection of the ecointerest in Williams’s work that has nomic base as a problem rather than an produced a journal, an annual lecture, explanation. Reading Laughlin, we see and a regular conference at the behest how North’s construction does not take of the Raymond Williams Society. The full account of Williams’s emphasis on centenary also brings a new collection Raymond Williams in the 1980s the constitutive aspects of culture as (Gwydion M. Williams via Flickr) of Williams’s writing: Culture and Polpart of a whole social process. itics: Class, writing, socialism. It is some thirty-four years since Williams’s untimely death A single cloud amid this celebration drifts in from Joseph North’s recent criticism of Williams in his Literary Criticism: at the age of sixty-six. At different points, the book’s authors atA concise political history (2017). North argues that Williams’s tempt to measure Williams’s usefulness for engaging present-day cultural materialism facilitated a wider shift away from a polit- issues. This is evident in two separate essays on ‘utopia’ by Nilges ically informed aesthetic criticism to an academic historicism and Mark Allison. As Nilges points out, the relevance of utopia preoccupied with scholarship and knowledge production. While seems unlikely given the pandemic, the climate crisis, and the I think Williams would have found interesting questions raised rise of the authoritarian right. Williams’s thinking about utopia, by North’s cultural political intervention, Stasi spends some time however, was formulated precisely in such a period of stasis and batting away North’s critique in his introduction to Raymond the ‘crisis of futurity’ that occurred with the Thatcherite emphasis

58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

on short-term strategic advantage. It is this sense of blockage that puts utopia on the agenda. This is utopia not as a simplistic projection (think Elon Musk’s colonisation of space) but as a method, involving the historicisation of social and political problems and thinking through to rational and convincing alternatives. The book’s second part undertakes the riskier but necessary task of applying Williams’s work to new contexts. This sometimes involves a not very satisfactory mere translation of Williams’s terms into new situations. More penetrating are attempts to press and reconfigure such terms in the development of new insights. Hartley takes up the argument against distancing academic modes to argue for linking democracy and cultural literacy, particularly in current debates around decolonising the curriculum. Stasi employs Williams’s outline of the novel as a ‘knowable community’ containing a dialectic between individual lives and the wider social situation to understand the work of Arundhati Roy. Madhu Krishnan looks at the ‘selective tradition’ of African writing offered by the rise of world literature. Daniel Morden’s interesting chapter applies Williams’s materialist understanding of media and communication to ‘platform capitalism’.

n reflecting on Williams’s legacy, we should not neglect to read the work itself. Culture and Politics: Class, writing, socialism is a carefully curated collection of his writing, ably introduced with explanatory footnotes by Phil O’Brien. Despite being something of a collection of lost pieces – transcribed recordings, unpublished or overlooked works – it still manages to be remarkably representative of Williams’s work as a whole. Of particular interest are a chapter on Herbert Read, excised for reasons of space from Culture and Society; an early version of his base and superstructure essay; and an essay on modernism, previously only available in truncated form. There are further essays on working-class literature, popular culture, the sociology of culture, and socialist strategy. One article that prompts an adjustment in our understanding of Williams is ‘The Future of Marxism’. Writing in the early 1960s, Williams here foreshadows themes usually associated with a later period of his work. As critics noted after the essay’s recent publication in New Left Review, it includes a more explicit internationalism evident in the essay’s concern with world economy and empire. It also includes a critical defence of different Marxist traditions he would again take up later. The essay and collection underline the consistency of Williams’s writing and warn against attempts to quickly pigeonhole him. The caveat in this defence of Marxism is an emphasis on what Williams would later call ‘operative theory’, i.e. theoretical approaches prioritising engagement with the historical specificities of our current society over the parochialism of academic disciplinarity or replaying the ideological debates of the past. Read together, these works provide a useful entry into the kind of operative theory Williams spent a lifetime developing. In this way, they signal a more productive and developing conversation about Williams’s work and the resources it provides for engaging a world still in need of his insight and activism. g

Gary Pearce has written for publications such as Jacobin, Overland, and Eureka Street. ❖

Curlew For M.F.

What is the use of a full moon now we do not harvest by its light? There is no one else standing here, lifting their face to the star-studded sky. Do you see the moon’s craters, its dark side? It simply hangs there, brilliant white – * In the living room the children and I mime spinning on an axis. We tread an elliptical path around the sun of the dying woman. Later, she gifts me six pieces of gold. Weight of a blessing from the living: a Möbius bangle, blue sapphires in bezels. Her name in Arabic, hanging from a chain. * Almásy said, Every night I cut out my heart, but in the morning it was full again. Black consumes the luminous orb even as the girl learns how to spell gibbous, waxing, waning. Do not swallow the bright coin we place under your tongue. * A bolus of bread. It rises, it fills with air, it is eaten. Dust to flesh to dust to dust. The frozen smiles of family framed in silver. I draw the curtains. Moonlight falls across the bedlinen. Behind your lids, all will fade, and turn to ink. Outside, a curlew cries. We see the glitter of a scythe.

Eileen Chong

Eileen Chong’s most recent collection is A Thousand Crimson Blooms (2021). ‘Curlew’ was longlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. The Almásy in my poem refers to Count Ladislaus de Almásy, the titular character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient (Bloomsbury, 1992), where the quote is also drawn from. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Science

Heady stuff

A mind-bending look at evolutionary cosmology Robyn Arianrhod

What’s Eating the Universe? And other cosmic questions by Paul Davies

Allen Lane $35 hb, 192 pp

aul Davies, the British physicist who brightened up the Australian science scene when he was a professor at the University of Adelaide in the 1990s, is currently director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. Beyond describes itself as ‘a pioneering center devoted to confronting the really big questions of science and philosophy’. It also aims to present science publicly ‘as a key component of our culture and of significance to all humanity’, something Davies has been doing for thirty years, in popular talks, articles, and books such as About Time (1995). Davies won the million-dollar Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1995. The title of his bestselling The Mind of God (1992) indicates his approach, although his goal was to show that there is no inherent conflict between religion and science, and to suggest that a spiritual sense of awe comes from contemplating the universe – God’s creation if you prefer – rather than religious dogma. Interviewed for the Washington Post soon after his win, Davies said that in contrast to the post-Newtonian view of the world as ‘a gigantic collection of stupid particles colliding like cogs in a machine’ that locks human beings in its ‘cosmic juggernaut’, new scientific insights into the origin of the universe were ‘more reassuring’, suggesting a ‘grand design’ with ‘a deeper underlying meaning and purpose’. Three decades on, at the end of What’s Eating the Universe?, Davies revisits this topic. He suggests that, although we construct meaning to enrich our lives, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the universe itself has any meaning. He speaks of understanding rather than ‘grand design’, marvelling that, ‘Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to spawn beings who are able not merely to watch the show but to unravel the plot, to engage with the totality of the cosmos and the silent mathematical tune to which it dances.’ So, Davies says, there is a ‘stark’ choice for cosmologists: accept that the universe exists for no reason and ‘get on with the practical job of doing science’, or accept that the science rests on ‘a deeper layer of rational order’. The latter seems to be Davies’ preference. If it is right, then the ‘biggest of all the big questions discussed in this book’, he says, ‘is whether science will ever advance to the point where we can fully grasp that deeper layer’. It’s certainly heady stuff, this cosmos of ours. People have been wondering, painting, and telling stories about it for thousands 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

of years. Like many of us, I sometimes feel uneasy at the phenomenal cost of modern cosmological research, although this is not something Davies discusses. Perhaps it is relative – think of the coordinated, labour-intensive effort it must have taken to build Stonehenge and other ancient astronomical-ceremonial structures, including the Wurdi Youang stone circle in Wathaurong Country, Victoria. What Davies does talk about are the fruits of this modern research, and they are dazzling. Most of us have marvelled at gorgeous pictures of nebulae and that stunning photo of Earthrise. More recently, we have seen one of the most mind-bending phenomena of all: the event horizon and shadow of a black hole. Using words rather than cameras, Davies gives an equally awesome perspective on our profligate, expanding universe, in which, he says, space itself is growing by a staggering hundred billion billion cubic light years every day. Even our own sun is enormous: ‘we now know that its core is a gigantic thermonuclear bomb going off at 100 billion megatons every second. The reason we’re not blown to smithereens is that the explosion is smothered by the weight of half a million kilometres of overlying gas.’ It is hard to comprehend such numbers, yet there is a prevailing view among cosmologists that ours may be just one of an infinite number of universes. Davies doesn’t think this hypothesis explains nagging questions such as when the laws of physics come into play, so there is plenty to think about in this concise story of the evolution of cosmology, even for readers familiar with the subject. Some might wish for more technical detail, such as Davies’ earlier books provided, and on some of the same topics, but here we have a handy, updated overview. Each short chapter deals with a ‘big question’ or concept: why is it dark at night, how do we know the Big Bang happened, where is the centre of the universe (a trick question), what is dark energy, is time travel possible, can the universe come from nothing, are we alone, and much more. As for ‘what’s eating the universe’, the question arises because there’s a mysterious cold patch in the constellation Eridanus that ‘looks as if a cosmic giant has taken a huge bite out of the universe, leaving a super-void’. Trying to explain it, cosmologists have come up with apocalyptic scenarios that rival the most imaginative science fiction. Davies’ brief discussions of his own experiences help bring the subject alive – such as hearing Stephen Hawking speak on his ‘sensational claim’ that quantum effects make black holes glow and eventually evaporate. Confounded, Davies ‘put in some arduous work’, ultimately confirming and extending Hawking’s conclusion. Then there is the ‘so-called Bunch-Davies vacuum’ and its relation to inflation theory, and Davies’ stint at Nature, trawling through submissions from readers trying to disprove Einstein’s (now amply confirmed) prediction of time-warps. Davies is modest, though, noting the many who have made bigger contributions. His accessible book – humanised by references to historical players from Ptolemy to Einstein to Laura Mersini-Houghton – showcases a great quest for understanding; a quest that continues to uncover new wonders, and new questions, about our astonishing universe. g Robyn Arianrhod is an affiliate in the School of Mathematics, Monash University, where she taught for many years. Her latest book is Thomas Harriot: A life in science (OUP, 2019).

Category

A R T S AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Decorative Arts

Realising the ‘home beautiful’ The first scholarly study of Daniel Cottier Matthew Martin

Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer

by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Max Donnelly, with Andrew Montana and Suzan Veldink

Yale University Press US$50 hb, 260 pp

mong the most celebrated of nineteenth-century British decoration firms, but one that is almost completely forgotten today, was Cottier & Co., founded by the Glaswegian decorator and stained glass artist Daniel Cottier in 1869. The volume Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of this decorator and his eponymous firm. With branches in London, New York, and Sydney, this was a remarkable international enterprise disseminating the principles of Aesthetic interior design, the movement that construed the role of art to be the provision of uplifting delight through visual beauty. A series of essays by a group of eminent art historians, including leading historian of nineteenth-century art Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, considers Cottier’s initial training as a stained glass artist in Scotland, the founding of his London decorating firm, the establishment of the New York and Sydney branches of the business, and the influence Cottier’s activities as a dealer had on the art markets in London and New York. The second half of the nineteenth century in Britain saw the decoration of houses become serious business, and not just in economic terms. The industrial revolution had not only led to the multiplication of cheap, poorly designed furnishings for the home; by tempting labourers to seek work in the new factories, it also contributed to urban over-crowding, poverty, and crime. In the minds of many of the establishment, these phenomena were linked. Influenced by new social Darwinist ideas, they believed they were witnessing a degeneration of society and, with a logic which can seem puzzling from a twenty-first century perspective, the perceived decline in aesthetic standards was understood to be a symptom of this malaise. The same logic suggested that improving the taste of society at large could reverse this degeneration. In other words, art could save the world. One result of these developments was the rise of the interior decoration firm. The home was viewed as a microcosm where aesthetic, political, and cultural values were nurtured – a beautiful home in correct taste served to shape upstanding citizens. Firms such as Morris & Co. in Britain and Herter Brothers in the United States offered their clients everything needed to realise the ‘house beautiful’. Cottier & Co. was a part of this new artistic world. The absence of surviving company records has long hampered work on the firm and its activities. In this volume, authors draw upon a range of archival sources to inform their studies, including auc62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

tion catalogues, written descriptions of decorative schemes, period photographs of interiors, and examples of the stained glass, furniture, and ceramics produced in Cottier’s workshops. The firm’s surviving painted interiors, the majority of which are to be found in Australia – including Government House in Sydney and the interiors of the former English, Scottish and Australian Chartered Bank in Melbourne – inform Andrew Montana’s essays and make this book of especial local interest. Although the artistic ‘culture wars’ of the British design reform movement can seem rather distant from colonial Australia and its very different socio-economic conditions, Cottier’s enterprise is a reminder that the wealth present in Australia in the 1870s and 1880s tied colonial society very closely to currents of contemporary taste in Britain, the country that remained the cultural touchstone for a majority of settler Australians. While Robert and Joanna Barr Smith patronised Morris & Co. in Adelaide in the 1880s, Cottier’s firm provided clients in Sydney and Melbourne with access to Aesthetic designs directly from London. Indeed, as Chu and Montana reveal, Cottier’s firm was a major international force in the promulgation of Aestheticism – Cottier provided the cover design for the first edition of the American art critic Clarence Cook’s The House Beautiful (1878), a seminal statement on Aesthetic principles applied to the domestic interior. Chu and Veldink also provide fascinating new information on the role of Cottier as an art dealer. Although Aestheticism promoted the equality of the fine and decorative arts, the Aesthetic interior, with its carefully harmonised decorative schemes, was not always an easy environment in which to place paintings. Cottier collected and dealt in artists of the Barbizon and Hague schools, tonal painters whose work was more easily incorporated into these interiors. It was Cottier’s interest in, and promotion of, these modern Dutch painters especially that established a taste for their work in both London and New York. Intriguingly, the firm’s attempts to sell paintings to Australian clients failed. The firm’s Sydney branch, established in 1873 in partnership with fellow Glaswegian John Lamb Lyon, did, however, produce stained glass and painted decoration incorporating local flora, evidencing accommodation of local taste. The firm’s rapid descent into oblivion in the wake of Cottier’s death in 1891 is also considered. The fall from fashion of stained glass, Cottier’s first artistic metier, likely played a role here. Stained glass was an important element in Aesthetic interiors. Where modernists would endeavour to open the house up to the outside world through plate glass windows, Aesthetic designers created self-contained interior worlds with light filtered through stained glass – the outside viewed, literally, through art. But stained glass’s association with ecclesiastical contexts contributed to the decline of the medium, and Aestheticism, in the ever more secular twentieth century. The book is well researched and engagingly written. The only criticism that might be made of this volume is a lack of integration between the individual contributions – greater crossreferencing between essays would have resulted in a tighter overall narrative. Nevertheless, this is a major contribution to the rehabilitation of a forgotten figure and provides fascinating insights into the confluence of art, commerce, and cultural politics in the nineteenth-century Anglosphere. g

Film

Split screen

Kenneth Branagh revisits his Belfast childhood Jordan Prosser

Caitríona Balfe, Jamie Dornan, Judi Dench, and Jude Hill in Belfast

n the sunny streets of Belfast in 1969, nine-year-old Buddy ( Jude Hill) fights imaginary dragons with a wooden sword and a shield made from the lid of a garbage bin. When his Ma calls him home for tea, he races through the neighbourhood, bright-eyed and carefree. But the afternoon idyll is quickly shattered by a small army of Protestant rioters laying siege to the street, smashing windows and firebombing cars in a targeted attempt to weed out any remaining Catholic residents. As the mob approaches, the camera orbits Buddy in captivating slow motion, his sword and shield rendered useless and childish in the face of this real-world violence. That is, until Ma uses the bin lid to deflect actual projectiles as she shepherds her boy safely into their house. It’s a dazzling opening sequence, and the perfect summary of Belfast’s colliding themes of childhood innocence and social upheaval. The only problem with this scene is the high bar it sets. It offers a level of stylistic quality and narrative clarity that the film never quite reaches again. Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh as a semi-autobiographical, black-and-white love letter to the place, time, and community of his childhood, Belfast (Universal Pictures) divides its time and attention between two distinct storytelling modes: an affable coming-of-age narrative about Buddy and his family, and a historical drama set during the Troubles, the religious conflict that plagued Northern Ireland from the late 1960s well into the 1990s. After the powerful opening sequence, we get to know Buddy and his peace-abiding Protestant family, including his Ma and Pa (Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan) and his Granny and Pop ( Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). We see Buddy fall in love, mix with the wrong crowd, mourn the inevitable death of a loved one, and eavesdrop as his parents clash over money troubles and the idea of uprooting their children from their beloved city, which is fast becoming a war zone. When Belfast switches gears, we see streets barricaded, supermarkets raided, and tough-talking Prot-

estant militants like Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) threatening Buddy’s Pa to fully commit to their violent ‘clean up’ efforts, or else. These disparate halves coexist but never truly gel, and the film’s split focus means that we only ever get the most rote and conventional aspects of each. The overwhelming sweetness of the film’s coming-of-age narrative can’t help but temper its political elements (especially with Van Morrison’s persistent, happy-golucky lyrical score). Even Branagh seems undecided whether to treat later scenes of civil unrest with po-faced realism or to inject them with a dash of benign comedy. Given that Branagh is depicting a version of his own childhood, one might expect an origin story of sorts. How did this gentle, working-class boy from Belfast become one of the world’s finest Shakespearean actors and Hollywood directors? But instead of his family’s woes and the violence on the streets providing a crucible for Buddy’s creativity, his childhood development runs more or less parallel to these events without feeling as though they ever really overlap. Even when Buddy is taken to the cinema or the theatre, and we’re ready to discover how a burgeoning love for art and storytelling helped this young man through these difficult times, Belfast doesn’t fully make the connection. Beyond a stylistic splash of colour, these day trips are rendered as just another pleasant childhood memory. Still, the film is charming in many ways, particularly its performances. Hill is terrific as Buddy; he’s the sort of child actor that makes audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief when he proves more than capable of carrying the entire film on his small shoulders. Balfe and Dornan bring plenty of heart and mettle to their roles as Buddy’s parents, generating meaningful drama even when the film never really makes us doubt their odds of a happy ending. And Dench and Hinds routinely steal the show as Buddy’s grandparents, with their gentle banter and pearls of no-nonsense wisdom. But again, some of this easy charm compromises the film’s overall originality. The fact that these characters are never even named, referred to only by their familial monikers – Ma and Pa, Granny and Pop – makes it clear that Branagh is presenting us with idealistic, nostalgic archetypes. This is an economical but reductive move; he’s made it easy for us to like these characters, but difficult to truly get to know them. Ultimately, a project like this is measured not by how well it enshrines one person’s precious memories but by how effectively it translates those memories into universal experience. Belfast suffers from the inevitable comparison to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018), another black-and-white period piece inspired by the filmmaker’s childhood. Roma made its deeply personal experiences feel almost primally relatable, and its depiction of historical violence horrifyingly real. By contrast, Belfast is like a slideshow from someone else’s holiday; it will always mean more to them than it will to us. Perhaps Branagh overestimated our appetite for his story, or underestimated the work it would take to earn our full investment. His film excels as an endearing, coming-ofage dramedy, but it adds little to the genre. Much like its young protagonist, Belfast’s heart proves bigger than its ambition. g Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer, and a graduate of the VCA School of Film & Television. His short films have screened at dozens of international festivals. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Film

Convent life gone wrong Paul Verhoeven’s titillating new film Miles Pattenden

Charlotte Rampling in Benedetta

atholicism gets a bad rap when it comes to sex these days. The Church fixates on condoms and abortion. It isn’t always big on homosexuality either. Paul Verhoeven’s new ‘historically inspired’ film, on one level, explores the hypocrisies that arise from such callow credos: the religious renounce the flesh but flagrantly eroticise spiritual and interpersonal relationships. Carnal obsessions abound in Benedetta (Hi Gloss Entertainment). Nuns mortify themselves (quite literally) and male clergy are reassuringly lascivious. The whole film is as revealing of the female figure as you would expect from the director of Basic Instinct (1992) and Showgirls (1995). Indeed, those who buy their ticket for the soupçons of Sapphic frottage are unlikely to be disappointed. The question, though, as with any baroque invention, is whether the sum of this art is greater than its parts? Verhoeven’s ‘convent life gone wrong’ melodrama is full of lush visuals from austere Romanesque churches to immaculately ironed wimples. And it endorses a seemingly simple moral message: that it can be hard to tell the wryly cynical from the downright crazy. Yet the script’s layers of self-consciously ironical detachment are such that you can’t quite tell if Verhoeven takes the whole thing seriously or not. One-liners are good and the audience will guffaw. But is the joke on the Catholic Church or just on those who would lap up such sensationalising costume romps? Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira), our eponymous heroine, is an intensely enigmatic sort of tragedian. We first meet her on screen as that stubborn, spoiled little rich girl whose parents are escorting her to a nunnery (Verhoeven may not have intended this, but the decision seemed quite understandable). Bandits try to rob them, but Benedetta’s faith in the Virgin saves the day. Yet the tone is set when Mary’s instrument proves to be an anonymous feathered friend with unusually good posterior aim. Further episodes explore the divine’s growing presence in Benedetta’s life. She ‘sees’ Jesus as a sexy shepherd, as a smiter of sinister snakes, and as a Zorro-like horseman who lops the head off enemies (complete with gushing blood). A couple of ersatz tributes to The Exorcist and some gratuitously graphic stigmata glaze the whole thing in Grand Guignol. Verhoeven misses a trick

64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

only when he depicts the crucified Christ as an object of Benedetta’s masochistic desire. The absence of his genitalia is notable but inauthentic, and not clearly purposeful (except perhaps for helping placate beady-eyed censors). Benedetta, absorbed into her religious order, leads an unremarkable existence until a new girl, her love interest, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), shows up. Half Lolita, half that kid from Hard Candy, Bartolomea is rough and earthy and decidedly lower class. Incestuous rapes at the hands of her father and brother have toughened her. But she knows just what she wants and shows remarkable self-confidence when it comes to seduction’s delicate arts. Sex scenes ensue. The climax – if that’s le mot juste – arrives when Bartolomea whittles down Benedetta’s childhood statue of the Virgin into something more shaped for pleasure than piety. Alas, the former Mother Superior (Charlotte Rampling), whose office Benedetta has usurped, sees the whole thing through a spyhole. She tells the papal nuncio (Lambert Wilson), who latches onto the investigation as a vehicle for indulging his sadism. He arrives in town just in time to witness plague-induced mass hysteria (a prescient plot device in a film shot pre-pandemic) and the whole affair ends in a sort of godless Götterdämmerung complete with pestilential pustules. Strangely, though, Benedetta herself, rising up from her lovers’ bed in a bucolic hut outside town, doesn’t seem all that fazed by any of it. The actors clearly have great fun; Rampling is the standout as the convent’s wizened, world-weary matriarch. Yet the director never solves some basic dilemmas on which the credibility of his narrative ultimately depends. First problem: the ‘lesbian nuns’ theme feels titillating rather than taboo these days. And, to shock, post The Devils or The Exorcist, you have to go a lot further than basic sacrilegious insertion of foreign objects. Second: Benedetta’s visions must tread a fine line between vividity and ridiculousness. It was always going to be hard to get that right when so few who will see the film are ever likely to entertain thoughts that the visions might be real. Verhoeven seems caught between two strategies for dealing with this. He makes us laugh at the gothic grotesqueness of what Benedetta sees (or claims to see), but also hints that she herself may be slyer and more manipulative than she lets on. That further discourages suspension of disbelief. Certainly, few other characters in this story believe in Benedetta. Not the Mother Superior. Nor the cynical prevôt (Olivier Rabourdin), whose interest in her waxes in proportion to his chances of gaining a bishop’s crozier. Nor the sleazy nuncio, whose gratifying comeuppance is fully deserved. Yet there is no great reveal to the plot’s central mystery, nor to the related question of what motivates our lead character: is she awestruck by Jesus, lovestruck by Bartolomea, or just drunk on the prospect of attaining power in her community? And what exactly is the dynamic between the two lovers? In the end, the film’s most striking feature may simply be Verhoeven’s latent but still disquieting obsession with lacerated and violated female bodies. Par for the course after Elle you might think. But if such thoughts weren’t healthy for concupiscent clergy back then, are they any more wholesome now? g Miles Pattenden is Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at ACU.

Art

Style and bounce

Consider the photograph that introduces the book’s first chapter, ‘Resilience and Defiance’. Documenting a 2019 work in the Unbound Collective’s Sovereign Acts trilogy, it shows Examining the history of AGNSW Antikirinya/Yankunytjatjara academic Simone Ulalka Tur David Hansen walking in ceremonial processional through the neoclassical architecture of Walter Vernon’s hexastyle stoa at the Gallery’s entrance (designed 1896, completed 1902), with, in the background, British artist Gilbert Bayes’s wartime The Offerings of Peace (commissioned 1915, completed 1923). On AGNSW’s The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery Facebook page, the appropriate description of ‘relationship status’ – with First Nations, with the Enlightenment-classical tradition, of New South Wales or with British heritage – would have to be: ‘It’s complicated.’ by Steven Miller That said, the history of the AGNSW – in all its copiousArt Gallery of New South Wales ness and complexity, its confusion and occasional (okay, regular) $65 hb, 295 pp conflicts – is told here with style and bounce and intelligence. he Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having erod- Across nineteen discrete and manageably brief chapters, Steven ed somewhat in recent years, the purposes and meth- Miller traces the lives of the institution in roughly chronological ods of art and of museum management and curatorship sequence, though several of his sections have a thematic emphasis are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged which permits a certain amount of illuminating time travel. In keeping with the spirit of the times, attention is given Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of throughout to previously marginalised constituencies. ‘Resildigital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in ethnicity ience and Defiance’ acknowledges that ‘wherever there has been and nation, gender and sexuality. The art museum is being trans- settlement … there has also often been an erasure or, if not, a formed from a locus of the national, the classificatory, the educa- forgetting. The Gallery … wants to remember.’ Miller’s account tional and the aesthetic to a platform or vehicle for personal and po- not only describes First Nations–settler cultural disconnection but litical positioning. More recently, conventional programming has also how it has manifested itself in various acquisition decisions. In the ‘know my name’ present, women, too, receive long been overturned by the impact of Covid closures and restructuring, while the climate crisis looms threateningly over everything. overdue attention, from the illiterate, ‘no-nonsense’, nepotistic The two key questions for the contemporary art museum are caretaker Margaret Casey, appointed as the Gallery’s first member how to continue to assess, translate, and understand the art of the of staff in 1875, to the sensitive and delicate Adelaide Ironside, whose The Marriage at Cana past while re-examining and rewas first loaned to the Gallery defining it in relation to contemin 1877. We meet New Zeaporary concerns, and how best to land-born, Melbourne-trained participate in creating, presenting, Grace Joel, whose work was and interpreting the object- and never purchased by the Gallery, image-worlds of the present. although it accepted portraits Something of the challenges of two male artists – Arthur of the present moment for muStreeton and G.P. Nerli – that seums can be gleaned from the she bequeathed on her death in title of this volume. According 1924, as well as the redoubtable to the acknowledgments, The Dora Ohlfsen, whose 1913 Exhibitionists was suggested by commission for a bronze panel AGNSW’s Creative and Content above the Gallery’s front doors Co-ordinator, Marketing. Not was unaccountably cancelled in only was such a role virtually 1919. At the time, Trustee John unheard of twenty years ago, but Sulman warned Director ‘Vic’ the implied emphasis of the text Mann that ‘Miss Ohlfsen is a on exhibition programming conwoman, and although she has no tradicts both former Director Hal case, can cause mischief.’ Other Missingham’s belief that ‘a true necessary mentions include history of the Gallery would be, Banner made for the Operative Stonemasons Society by Althouse the artistically and politically above all, a history of its collec& Geiger, Sydney 1904 (Sydney Trades Hall Collection, Unions NSW) progressive Mary Alice Evatt, tions’, and the stated ambition of first female Trustee (appointed the author to track the ‘people and events that have shaped the Gallery’. Less significantly, but peculiarly, the subtitle is A history of 1943), a raft of eminent recent curators – Renee Free, Frances Sydney’s (my emphasis) Art Gallery of New South Wales, a redundant McCarthy, Jackie Menzies, Bernice Murphy, Gael Newton, Hetti Perkins, and Deborah Edwards – and, of course, the gallery’s great formulation with odd echoes of tourism destination promotion.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Opera artist–benefactor Margaret Olley. As such references (and a comprehensive scholarly apparatus) attest, Miller, head of the Gallery’s National Art Archive and its Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library, has a sharp eye for the telling incident, object, or manuscript. He clearly relishes the newspaper description of the 1904 marble staircase to the basement gallery as having been ‘executed under the shade of the gallows’, using prison labour from Bathurst Gaol. Apropos of mortality, we also learn that the marble top of the painting conservators’ canvas-lining table came from the Sydney Hospital morgue. We encounter the perils of research – Director’s secretary Gwen Sherwood complaining formally to Trustees that the press-cutting books were ‘being depleted by Mr Bernard Smith’ (the young Education Officer being then engaged in writing Place, Taste and Tradition) – and of commercial activity in the Gallery, notably the damage caused by the thousands who attended the 1972 International Congress of Accountants conference party. Closer to our own time, we are told of the charismatic Edmund Capon (whose thirty-three-year directorial tenure earns him two chapters) facilitating tourist visits by organising a free after-hours preview of the 1984 Picasso exhibition for taxi drivers and their families, and ordering the Gallery’s Australian flag lowered in protest at Australia’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war. There is little discretion in Miller’s quotations: Curator of Prints and Drawings Nicky Draffin characterises Van Gogh’s Head of a Peasant as ‘finger painting in shit’, while Capon describes advocates of admission fees as ‘arseholes and dickheads’. Of course, words are only for those who can’t read the pictures, and The Exhibitionists is copiously illustrated, not only with the predictable vintage photographs, architects’ plans, and works of art from the collection, but with surprising, delightful reproductions: a decorative header for an 1888 Illustrated Sydney News article on the Gallery (surely by Charles Conder); Kubota Baizen’s rendering of Julian Ashton’s The Prospector, from the Japanese catalogue of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago; a 1904 Operative Stonemasons’ Society union banner featuring an image of the Gallery façade; and Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s signature in the Visitors’ Book. From later in the twentieth century we see interiors of the caretaker’s cottage, a Captain Cook Bi-Centenary Foundation Appeal commemorative plate; Tim Burns’s 1972 poster Fuck Laverty and the Trustees; LBJ arriving at AGNSW surrounded by security personnel; and Capon mugging for the press from the bucket of Ange Leccia’s wheel loader installation Komatsu, arrangement at the 1990 Sydney Biennale. In our anxious, pre-post-colonial, global-digital age, the importance of the visible and the material – of archival encounter, of first-hand, authentic experience, of what the German novelist Siegfried Lenz called in his 1978 novel The Heritage ‘the unimpeachable testimony of objects’ – cannot be overstated. Miller gives us this in spades. And he demonstrates that for all the diversion and distraction of the Archibald Prize, for all the years of edifice complex, for all the occasional conservatism, for all the missed acquisition opportunities and misguided deaccessions, so too, does the Art Gallery of New South Wales. g David Hansen is Associate Professor of Art History and Art Theory at the ANU. 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

Kinder, schafft Neues!

A triumphant performance from Melbourne Opera Michael Shmith

Warwick Fyfe as Wotan

ichard Wagner’s famous pronouncement, ‘Kinder, schafft Neues!’ (‘Children, create something new!’), has often been the inspiration to take daring creative risks, particularly (but not exclusively) with productions of his works. Using The Ring as a starting point, directorial licence has been extended in all sorts of intriguing ways that have, over the years, seen Valkyries roaring around on motorcycles, Rhinemaidens as strutting Victorian doxies, the dragon Fafner at the turret of an army tank, Wotan as a Texan oligarch, Siegfried as a hippie, and Gunther and the Gibichungs as Nazis. How refreshing – how unusual – then to see Suzanne Chaundy’s new production of Die Walküre. No cycles, other than the one usually attached to the word ‘Ring’, and no confusing ad libitum subplots or backstories. In a word: traditional. But not completely so. Gustav Mahler’s equally famous statement, ‘Tradition ist Schlamperei!’ (‘Tradition is sloppiness’) certainly does not apply to Chaundy’s staging, which, although a straightforward storytelling, has an edginess and quirkiness all of its own. It is also energetic and enthralling. Chaundy achieved as much a year ago with Das Rheingold (ABR, March 2021), the Vorabend to The Ring. But in the vast reaches of the Regent Theatre, not a natural place for opera, there was a lack of intimacy between stage and audience. The Walküre was a different story from a different, more preferable venue: the smaller, more intimate Her Majesty’s, which holds its own distinguished operatic history. Any fears the theatre might prove too compact were banished immediately. If anything, the production fitted the stage perfectly, with Andrew Bailey’s ingenious and stylish set blending, as if by design (so to speak), with the warm décor of the auditorium and embracing the audience. Betwixt stage and auditorium, the Melbourne Opera Orchestra (all ninety musicians, including four harps) were snugly accommodated in the pit. In the event, the result, in visual and sonic terms, was a faithful realisation of Wagner’s vision of Gesamtkunstwerk: to meld music, text, and production values into a seamless entity. At the heart of this was conductor Anthony Negus, whose fluid and sensitive

account of the score emerged with distinction and clarity; never bombastic or prosaic, but always attentive to the balance between individual instruments and the performers on stage. Although Negus, a disciple of the great Reginald Goodall, shares that legendary Wagnerian’s knowledge and scrupulous attention to detail, achieved through long rehearsals. Negus does not (thank heavens) share Goodall’s famous predilection for slow tempi. Instead, it was clear, right from the first jagged, stormy bars of the Act I prelude, that the music would indeed draw one into each act, as if into a vortex, and maintain its elasticity and power. The orchestra’s playing was simply superb, with an inner strength to the strings and remarkable breath control from wind, brass, horns, and (of course) Wagner tubas. Die Walküre is, in essence, a series of encounters and conversations that determines the subsequent operas in The Ring. The momentum towards the twilight of the gods is driven by a combination of contradictions: between love and hate, life and death, morality and immorality, invincibility and vulnerability. Sometimes, though, there is so much going on in Walküre that it is hard for an audience to grasp the dramatic significance of what is happening in the music. Chaundy’s particular skill is in depicting the directness of the human relationships from which the tale develops. For example, the key narrations of Siegmund and Sieglinde in Act I; Wotan’s long unravelling in Act II; the Brünnhilde–Wotan excoriations of Act III. Also, quite often, Chaundy goes back to the source, by observing Wagner’s own detailed stage directions, as noted in his scores. Chaundy also adds a few supernumeraries (two henchmen for Hunding; two extra Valkyries on sway poles; a few deceased warriors destined for Valhalla), but these are more helpful than gratuitous. Bailey’s set is almost another character in itself, and is hardly inanimate. A huge platform with a Ring-like hole in the middle, centres the action, as well as serving as a sort of drawbridge between the darkness of Hunding’s hut, the wild and rocky place of Act II, and the mountain summit of Act III. Rob Sowinski’s lighting, underwriting the action, was respectful, telling, and vivid. The costumes, by Harriet Oxley, were inspiring and fetching – especially Wotan’s impasto cloak, which could easily be framed and hung on a wall, and Brünnhilde’s slinky, art-deco dress. The cast could barely be faulted in terms of musicianship and dramatic qualities. Warwick Fyfe, long an acclaimed Alberich, was equally compelling as the dwarf ’s nemesis. Fyfe, a strongvoiced, tireless, magnificent Wotan, adroitly portrayed a god at the end of his tether, but whose own human frailties are just

below the surface of his grandeur. Zara Barrett’s lithe and lyrical Brünnhilde, a little underpowered at the beginning, gained in power as the evening went on. She is a performer to watch. Likewise, Sarah Sweeting’s Fricka, embodied all her character’s hauteur and chilly sense of self-righteousness. The excellent Siegmund of Bradley Daley, already a significant Siegfried in international opera houses, was lustrous and powerful. His equally matched Sieglinde, Lee Abrahmsen, should, I hope, in time consider Brünnhilde. Steven Gallop, a saturnine Hunding, was expertly portrayed.

Warwick Fyfe as Wotan and Zara Barrett as Brünnhilde

The eight spear-waving Walküren (Rosamund Illing, Eleanor Greenwood, Jordan Kahler, Olivia Cranwell, Naomi Flatman, Caroline Vercoe, Sally-Anne Russell, and Dimity Shepherd) sang with gusto, penetrating accuracy, and more than proved themselves worthy members of the closest Wagner ever got to a chorus line. By the end, as Brünnhilde lay in her ring of fire and Wotan ruefully trudged off the stage, it seemed to me that the performance encapsulated all the magical qualities of Die Walküre. It is a hard opera to bring off, and Wagner’s Curse (whatever goes wrong, will go wrong in spades), thankfully, was not invoked. Instead, this was one of those rare nights when everything seemed right with the world. This triumphant performance must be regarded as a glory for Melbourne Opera. It augurs well for the rest of its Ring. g Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His latest book, Merlyn (Hardie Grant, 2021) is a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW MARCH 2022

Poetry

From the Archive

In addition to being an accomplished poet (his Collected Prose Poems are reviewed in this issue), Gary Catalano (1947–2002) was a formidable art critic. In 2001, Catalano published a book-length study of the artist Rick Amor, which was reviewed in the September 2001 issue of ABR by another art-critical eminence, Bernard Smith. Catalano’s book had positioned Amor as an heir of the Antipodeans, the group of Australian painters who challenged the orthodoxy of American abstract expressionism by reasserting the value of figurative art. As author of the Antipodeans’ manifesto, Smith was perfectly placed to assess Catalano’s portrait of an artist the latter had dubbed ‘the solitary watcher’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

his is one of the most satisfying and fascinating monographs on an Australian artist that I have read. Only Franz Philipp’s monograph on Arthur Boyd can be compared to it, and for quite other reasons. Catalano, lucidly and meticulously, unravels the complex physical and intellectual life of Rick Amor from the time of his boyhood. He discloses how Amor’s paintings depend on his ability to make his past the vehicle and inspiration of his creative achievements. It is a reflexive art embodying the omnipresent power of a memory touched with a redolent melancholy. His past is revealed as a strange presence that is not to be found in the work, in my experience, of any other Australian artist. Catalano patiently reveals the influence of Amor’s boyhood environment in Frankston, in the ambience of his aunt, the writer Myra Morris, and her circle of friends; then that of his teachers John Brack and Ian Armstrong; his deep involvement in left politics during the 1970s; the power of the poetry of Eliot and Auden, the metaphysical pessimism of Kafka, and his admiration for Edward Hopper, that superb American painter, who also painted against the grain of his time. At bottom, Amor’s art might be viewed as flotsam from the Enlightenment washed onto an Antipodean beachhead. But there is more to it than that. Mercifully, it does not re-enact the universalising fantasies of that abstract art so ardently promoted by theosophical thought during the early years of last century. It seeks its own place and its own time. What emerges, among other things, is a more historic, more eerie, and profound image of the city of Melbourne. For the boy from Frankston, the city held the lure of mystery. He entered it as a stranger seeking to probe its pretentious grandeur through the eyes of his solitude. A painting such as The End of the Arcade reminds me of one of those famous prison etchings by Piranesi stripped of its Baroque excesses. Amor is a disenchanted flâneur in search of Melbourne’s voids and menacing silences. It is not everyone’s Melbourne, but it’s his, and I am sure that it will endure. Yosyl Bergner and Albert Tucker were probably the first painters to provide us with this darker Melbourne, and Amor draws it again to our notice. It is a vision of the urban uncanny not present, so far as I know, in the imagery of any other Australian city, entrapped as they are in the subtropical heat and sun that white-outs menace from the popular imagery promoted by the media. Sydney, for them, is all Max Dupain. The dust jacket to Catalano’s book tells us that Amor ‘in his commitment to figurative art’ is ‘heir to the Antipodeans’. This is true enough in an obvious sense. He has always admitted his 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW M A RC H 2022

debt to John Brack, and Clifton Pugh was a close friend. But there is a deeper sense in which Amor sustains the Antipodean tradition. For the Antipodeans were essentially Melburnians, but they were not, of course, the pioneers of Melbourne’s own distinctive modernism. That was the achievement of the small circle of artists who snugly nested in Heide during the early 1940s, now known as ‘The Angry Penguins’. They promoted a figural expressionist tradition, in the broadest sense of the word, that evoked a Melbourne psyche in the visual arts that has endured. The Angry Penguins were, in other words, the precursors of the Antipodeans – that is what the word in the title of that famous book, Rebels and Precursors, by Richard Haese, really means, although this is rarely if ever recognised. Between them, the Angry Penguins and Antipodeans established an enduring Melbourne tradition from which Amor’s art now emerges as a revenant. Andrew Sayers, in his Australian Art (OUP, 2001), an ambitious revisionary attempt to write our indigenous and settler art as one continuous narrative, says that ‘the Antipodean Manifesto had little appreciable effect upon Australian art’. That may be an over-hasty judgement. Had he been present at the Niagara Galleries when John Button launched Gary Catalano’s book, the occasion packed with the young and old all the way down the stairs, he might have been given pause for thought. Something was happening. This was more than a media event. Amor produces the kind of art that is capable of penetrating into our culture rather than twisting on the eternal merry-go-round of avant-garde art. In 1959, the Antipodean Manifesto theorised a position that was already in practice since the 1940s. But, in Australia, most art historians (and those Nescafé historians known as curators) have convinced themselves that all art theory proceeds from Europe (or occasionally America). It is an area of our culture that continues to suffer from chronic (if not endemic) cultural cringe. I have no interest to disclose. I have only met Amor four times in my life, all brief encounters – once in the mid-1980s when he called in unannounced at lunchtime to seek payment for a large linocut of his I had bought shortly before. He was then obviously strapped for cash. Again at a Clif Pugh retrospective at Monash University shortly after Clif ’s death. Then, quite by accident, I ran into him in Canberra at the War Memorial Museum when he arrived to be vetted as our Official War Artist for East Timor. And, most recently, at the launching of Catalano’s book, looking somewhat harassed among a dense pack of admirers. I don’t think he recognised me. Book launchings and art-show openings stimulate amnesia. Not places for solitary watchers. g

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1978 Mungo MacCallum on Don Whitington’s autobiography 1979 Gary Catalano on Nourma Abbott-Smith’s profile of Ian Fairweather 1980 Rosemary Creswell reviews Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus 1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite 1982 John McLaren reviews Rodney Hall’s Just Relations 1983 John Hanrahan reviews Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark 1984 Hilary McPhee reviews Eric Rolls’ Celebration of the Senses 1985 Margaret Jones reviews Gough Whitlam’s The Whitlam Government 1986 Colin Talbot on the origins of the Melbourne Writers Festival 1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance 1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History 1989 Dennis Altman reviews Peter Conrad’s Down Home 1990 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Gwen Harwood’s Blessed City 1991 David Malouf reviews David Marr’s biography of Patrick White 1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley 1993 Adam Shoemaker’s obituary for Oodgeroo Noonuccal 1994 Jenny Digby reviews Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask 1995 John Tranter on bourgeois taste 1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting 1997 Terri-ann White reviews Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds 1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour 1999 John Donnelly reviews Kim Scott’s Benang 2000 Morag Fraser reviews Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Bernard Smith on Gary Catalano’s The Solitary Watcher 2002 Neal Blewett reviews Don Watson’s biography of Paul Keating 2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers 2004 Raimond Gaita reviews Peter Singer on George W. Bush 2005 Gail Jones reviews The Best Australian Stories 2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria 2007 Ian Donaldson reviews Edward Said’s On Late Style 2008 Louise Swinn on Name Le’s The Boat 2009 Nicholas Jose on Australian literary anthologies 2010 Peter Rose’s essay ‘The Peculiar Charms of E.M. Forster’ 2011 Gig Ryan reviews Jaya Savige’s Surface to Air 2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel 2013 Martin Thomas’s Calibre Essay: ‘Because It’s Your Country’ 2014 Lisa Gorton on Ian Donaldson’s Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson 2015 Jessica Au reviews Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought 2016 Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Nicolas Rothwell’s Quicksilver 2017 Catherine Noske reviews Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race 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 R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0 2021 Sara M. Saleh wins the Peter Porter Poetry Prize

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