Australian Book Review, June-July 2019, issue no. 412 by Australian Book Review

Calibre Prize

The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its thirteenth year, has played a major role in the revitalisation and appreciation of the essay form. This year we received a record number of entries – 450 new essays from twenty-two countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose judged the Prize with J.M. Coetzee, author of several volumes of critical essays as well as the novels that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, and Anna Funder, author of the international bestseller Stasiland and the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel All That I Am. This year, our two winning essays could hardly be more different: a remarkable contribution to Aboriginal and colonial history from one of our finest historians; and a highly personal account of an abortion – the body out of control and at sea. Grace Karskens – Professor of History at the University of New South Wales and author of the award-winning The Colony: A history of early Sydney – is the overall winner of the Calibre Prize; she receives $5,000. Her essay, titled ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’, examines the unusually long life of one of the first Aboriginal children who grew up in conquered land. Born around 1800, Nah Doongh lived until 1898. Her losses, her peregrinations, her strong, dignified character are the subjects of this questing essay, in which the au-

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thor states: ‘Biography is not a finite business; it’s a process, a journey. I have been researching, writing, and thinking about Nah Doongh … for over a decade now.’ The discoveries she makes along the way – the portrait she finally tracks down – are very stirring. ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ will appear in our Indigenous issue, to be published in August. Placed second in the Calibre Prize is ‘Floundering’ by Melbourne-based artist, photographer, and fine artist Sarah Walker. It begins on page 20. Sarah Walker told Advances: ‘The Calibre Essay Prize is an essential avenue for new writing to be published with profound care and respect. I am proud to be joining a lineage of extraordinary writing.’ In addition, the judges commended five essays, which will appear online in coming months. They are John Bigelow’s ‘The Song of the Grasshopper’, Andrew Broertjes’s ‘Death and Sandwiches’, Martin Edmond’s ‘The Land of Three Rivers’, Michael McGirr’s ‘Thicker Than Water’, and Melanie Saward’s ‘From Your Own Culture’. ABR gratefully acknowledges generous support from Mr Colin Golvan AM QC and the ABR Patrons.

FAN Poll

Ten years ago, we invited readers to nominate their Favourite Australian Novel of all time, and what an informa小社說會

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tive list it was. Placed first, to no one’s surprise, was Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, followed by The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson and Voss by Patrick White. Now we’re keen to find out your Favourite Australian Novel published since 2000. Is it True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, Breath by Tim Winton (placed fourth in the 2009 FAN poll), Questions of Travel by Michelle de Krester, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, Truth by Peter Temple, Benang by Kim Scott, The True Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas – or one of the myriad novels published here in the past two decades? To vote, all you have to do is complete the FAN poll survey on our website. You’ll then be in the running to win one of three great prizes: a $500 voucher from Readings; Herbert von Karajan’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca (valued at $1,281); or a five-year digital subscription to ABR.

Aural Miracle

While on the subject of seminal works, we’re also curious to learn what some of the country’s finest writers and arts professionals consider the pivotal cultural encounters in their own artistic formation. Was it a poem, an oil, a pas de deux, a film, a novel, a temple, an aria or riff ?

The first Chinese-Australian novel, published in Melbourne in 1909–10 and never before translated into English. ‘an exciting addition to our literary history’—David Walker

sydney.edu.au/sup A D VA N C E S

We invited ABR Laureate Robyn Archer – one of Australia’s most culturally sophisticated and distinguished artists – to inaugurate our new column, Epiphany (page 67). Robyn recalls a day in 1996 when she ventured to Glyndebourne, which she had previously resisted, only to be entranced by Peter Sellars’s production of Handel’s Theodora – ‘some kind of aural miracle’.

Out of paradise

Few people escape from publishing. Most people, once they get a foot in the door, stay put. Mary-Kay Wilmers has been working in the industry for more than fifty years. She began at Faber & Faber when the company was still dominated by ‘GLP’ (the ‘Greatest Living Poet’ himself, T.S. Eliot, much mentioned in Toby Faber’s epistolary history of Faber, reviewed on page 56). Wilmers, co-founder of the London Review of Books in 1979 and sole editor since 1992, occasionally writes ‘pieces’ for ‘the paper’ (LRB-speak). Now, two admiring colleagues of hers, John

Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, have collected some of her occasional writings in a volume called Human Relations and Other Difficulties (Profile Books, $27.99 pb). We meet the warring Connollys: literary critic Cyril Connolly, who ‘famously marked his place in a book he had borrowed with a rasher of bacon’, and his second wife, Barbara Skelton, who bedded many but doesn’t seem to have liked anyone (‘What a terrible waste of time people are,’ she wrote in her diary). Coolly, Wilmers is often deadly: in her essay on Patty Hearst she mentions a pre-kidnap beau called Steven Weed – ‘not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself ’. Wilmers is generally suspicious of aphorisms, but Advances liked this one in her article on seduction: ‘One way or another, a plot had to be devised to get Adam and Eve out of paradise.’ This piece, in true LRB fashion, occasioned a lethal exchange of letters. Christopher Ricks, in acidulous form, rebuked Wilmers for misremembering

one of his pronouncements: ‘I hope that Ms Wilmers the editor of the LRB is more scrupulous than Ms Wilmers the insufficiently edited contributor to her pages.’ (Wilmers, adverbially deft, was sorry that Ricks had ‘taken the lapse so darkly to heart’.) Hacks shouldn’t miss Wilmers’s article ‘The Language of Novel Reviewing’ – that toughest of assignments. Wilmers notes some of the pitfalls, the minor misprisions. Here, on her own turf, she is decidedly epigrammatic: ‘Every liberal and illiberal orthodoxy has its champions’; ‘Sometimes it seems as if novel reviewing were a branch of the welfare state’; and ‘Just as some novels supply their own reviews, so many reviews supply their own novels.’ Wilmers is funny about the triads of adjectives flung at novels: ‘exact, piquant and comical’, ‘rich, mysterious and energetic’, etc. etc.. She might have been thinking of those triadic puffs beloved of trade publishers – usually written, at any one time, by a cohort of six reliable encomiasts.

What is your favourite Australian novel of the twenty-first century? Vote now to be in the running for three great prizes 1. Readings gift voucher ($500) 2. Complete recordings of Herbert von Karajan on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca ($1,281) 3. Five-year digital subscription to ABR ($220)

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To enter the prize, visit australianbookreview.com.au

June–July 2019 Glyn Davis Alan Atkinson Sarah Walker Jack Callil Nicole Abadee Beejay Silcox Zora Simic Felicity Plunkett Jacqueline Kent

The politics of giving something back Bedlam in early New South Wales ‘Floundering’ – the Calibre Essay Prize runner-up The third novel in Ali Smith’s quartet Jeanette Winterson’s new novel ‘Metal Language’ – a story #MeToo – a reckoning Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath An epistolary history of Faber & Faber

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Politics

Young Adult Fiction

Hal Brands and Charles Edel: The Lessons of Tragedy Rémy Davison 11 Richard Cooke: Tired of Winning Varun Ghosh 52 Richard Denniss: Dead Right Rubik Roy 53

Environment

Matthew Warren: Blackout Kate Griffiths 15 Peg Fraser: Black Saturday Daniel May 16 Tom Doig: Hazelwood Alistair Thomson 17

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Cultural Studies Poem

Rowan McNaught 19 Karen Rigby 23

Interviews

Open Page: Chris Womersley 24 Publisher of the Month: Sam Cooney 40

Fiction

Polynesia

Christina Thompson: Sea People Ceridwen Spark

Biography

Ann Blainey: King of the Air Michael McGirr Troy Bramston: Robert Menzies Michael Sexton

History

Eleanor Gordon-Smith: Stop Being Reasonable Alex Tighe 18

Matthew Hooton: Typhoon Kingdom Alison Broinowski Ted Chiang: Exhalation Lisa Bennett Meg Keneally: Fled Kerryn Goldsworthy Susan Hurley: Eight Lives Stephen Dedman Alex Landragin: Crossings Amy Baillieu Fernando Aramburu: Homeland Gabriel García Ochoa Felicity McLean: The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone Dean Biron

Alison Evans: Highway Bodies, Astrid Scholte: Four Dead Queens, Helena Fox: How It Feels To Float, Neil Grant: The Honeyman and the Hunter Emily Gallagher

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Joy Damousi and Judith Smart (eds): Contesting Australian History Christina Twomey

Memoir

James Halford: Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Alice Whitmore

Poetry

Andy Kissane: The Tomb of the Unknown Artist Geoff Page

Art

T.J. Clark: Heaven on Earth Christopher Allen

Theatre

Anne Pender: Seven Big Australians Desley Deacon

From the Archive

Louis Nowra: The Twelfth of Never David McCooey

ABR Arts

Anwen Crawford Alexander Douglas Thom Johanna Leggatt Maxim Boon Robyn Archer Patrick McCaughey Alison Stieven-Taylor Tim Byrne

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Little Woods White Pearl All Is True Così Braving Glyndebourne The Golden Age of Dutch Painting Juno Gemes: The Quiet Activist Cat on a Hot Tin Roof CONTENTS

THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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Australian Book Review | June–July 2019, no. 412 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 | Fax: (03) 9699 8803 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Cover design Judy Green Cover image Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds perform at Open’er Festival on 4 July 2018 in Gdynia, Poland (Ewa Burdynska-Michnam, East News sp. z o.o. Alamy Stock Photo) Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available. www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Advertising Media Kit available from our website Contact Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and website comments. All letters and online comments are edited before publication in the magazine. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification. letters@australianbookreview.com.au Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is the first time that he or she has appeared in the magazine. The June–July issue was lodged with Australia Post on May 29.

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘A giant, sweet-lipped lie’ The politics of giving something back

Glyn Davis

WINNERS TAKE ALL: THE ELITE CHARADE OF CHANGING THE WORLD by Anand Giridharadas Allen Lane, $29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9780241400722

‘I’m a rich man, and wanted to give something back. Not the money, but something.’ The Simpsons Movie (2007)

rom McKinsey analyst to honoured author, New York Times correspondent, familiar face on MSNBC. Awarded a prestigious Henry Crown Fellowship at Aspen, invited onto private planes amid discussion of drinking-water projects in Kenya and improved farm supply chains in India. Not one but two TED talks. Yet all the time, a gnawing sense of something profoundly wrong. Anand Giridharadas, in Winners Take All: The elite charade of changing the world, turns on those who fêted him. At Aspen, he was drawn into a place he calls ‘marketworld’, a distinctive domain of business, philanthropy, and consulting, with celebrity motivational speakers and promises to use market mechanisms for social change. It felt good at first but in time became a ‘giant, sweet-lipped lie’. In 2015 Giridharadas took to the stage at Aspen, not to say thanks but to go on the attack. Some cheered. A private equity guy swore at him. Winners Take All, an extended version of that speech, denounces a world Giridharadas briefly inhabited. Anger his forte, Giridharadas is withering about the conceit that business knows best. Inevitably, vitriol also undermines the text. There is too much repetition of the thesis that corporate ‘do-gooding’ is about entrenching the status quo, not changing the world. In America’s gilded age, huge fortunes were amassed by business tycoons and then turned in part to public benefit. Andrew Carnegie busted unions and suppressed wages in his rail and steel enterprises, before building public libraries and museums. Other magnates endowed hospitals and universities. This, argues Giridharadas, proved to be an enduring American modus operandi: let me get rich now, using whatever means it takes, and I will be generous when I’m sufficiently wealthy. For Giridharadas, this philosophy – one that holds that philanthropy, not labour laws, will best help the poor – institutionalises an avaricious capital-

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ism and undermines social provision through government. Winners Take All argues that this approach dominates our new gilded age of tech firms. Immensely wealthy individuals build their fortunes then use their business acumen to dabble in policy problems that interest them. Around them spins a penumbra of consultants and ‘thought leaders’, former politicians and heads of corporations who praise the founders and repeat the mantra – a fabled land of invitation-only events, meetings with Bill Clinton, celebrity donors, and their ilk. Marketworld has distinctive values – a preference for global trade with minimum regulation, distrust of government, boundless confidence in the ingenuity of business thinking, dislike of language that implies a political agenda. ‘Poverty’ is an acceptable term, since it connotes the deserving poor. ‘Inequality’ is not, because it signals winners and losers and, therefore, the potential for a political response. It is marketworld’s hostility to government that rankles most with Giridharadas. Some of his finest passages ask why marketworld participants seem puzzled by populism and by the election of bombastic leaders. Do they not see their own hand in the problems they now deplore? This blindness, asserts Giridharadas, results from a closed and unchallenged logic: if we allow the rich to accumulate more wealth, they will invest back in the community. How dare people struggling on minimum wages with poor public services beg to differ. Giridharadas believes that a more active democracy should demand alternatives. Philanthropy seems necessary only because social provision is lacking and becomes unimaginable; a state that eliminates estate duties and allows the wealthy to escape taxation while living no longer has the capacity to help. The idea that collective political action has no place in a modern world, suggests Giridharadas, is the lived assumption of marketworld. Instead, techniques and values from private finance recast traditional philanthropy according to the ‘market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government’. This brings its own preferred instruments: it

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

relies on the analytical techniques employed by consultants to break problems into small manageable increments, new social bonds and impact investing rather than traditional gifting, and new entities called B Corporations that mix charity with attractive financial returns for their owners. Philanthropy has been refashioned by ‘one of the reigning ideas of the age: that if you really want to change the world,you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism’. This shift has its dedicated champions, people who ‘groom the rich to be self-appointed leaders of social change’. Thought leaders make policy problems ‘unintimidating, bitesized, digestible’. Opportunities to preach are endless: the Aspen Ideas Festival, Bilderberg, Burning Man, the Consumer Electronics Show, Davos, Dialog, South by Southwest, Sun Valley, TechCrunch Disrupt, and TED. Giridharadas even describes Summit at Sea, a cruise ship of entrepreneurs keen to do good by doing well. Marketworld thrives because it has ‘collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks’. Messages are shaped by speakers with one big idea to sell. Always optimistic and tech-savvy, they crowd out an earlier generation of public intellectuals who questioned society. ‘Susan Sontag, William F. Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal were public intellectuals,’ says Giridharas. ‘Thomas L. Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and Parag Khanna are thought leaders.’ They talk about empowerment but never about the powerful. Such is the message of marketworld – social change is best pursued through business. Technology will make the world better. We no longer need institutions such as unions, social movements, and political parties, nor categories such as class. Marketworld favours individuals, not communities and organisations that seek to mediate the economy through political activity. Workers want better apps, not secure jobs or a rising standard of living. The villains in Winners Take All change shape during the book. Sometimes they appear naïve and idealistic, the college graduates who spend time in finance or consultancy before dedicating themselves to social causes (thus producing a strange uniformity across the philanthropic sector.) Others are portrayed as cynical, gesturing to change-making while removing from the agenda anything distressing to sponsors. At times Giridharadas struggles to sustain a stable account of interests and ideology. He has no doubt that American philanthropy is driven, largely, by self-interest. Donors buy respectability. They also exhibit hubris, an assumption that whatever made them successful in commercial life offers immediately answers to social problems that elude government and established charities. Here, there are some wonderful vignettes, such as a description of a charity ball in New York, where everyone understands the trade involved: The organization raising money helps troubled, vulnerable, and poor New Yorkers find work, housing, skills, companionship, and safety. The whole night is divided into two types of performances from the stage. The young and the helped, mostly black and brown, repeatedly dance for their donors. 10 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

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Then, between performances, older white men are brought up to praise them and to talk about, and be applauded for, their generosity to the program. Most of the men work in finance.

It is a finely wrought picture, yet herein resides a concern. The book is a product of its origin in jeremiad, a burst of moral indignity that demands tough-minded conclusions. Yet, as this quote half-acknowledges, there are hundreds of charities in New York that do important work for the disadvantaged, honest people who give up more lucrative careers for something with purpose, donors who recognise an obligation to share their good fortune. To be angry, to pick targets with such a fine eye, may risk missing the wider picture. Thus many of the business techniques that Giridharadas abhors can be used for good or bad. The best US foundations find out what works through systematic trial and error. They are happy to use new financial instruments if they achieve the end, to view problems through a quantitative lens, to apply commercial incentives or political lobbying depending on circumstances. Thus the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto uses sophisticated data analysis to reduce erroneous diagnosis, and thus improve patient care in hospitals. The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington has for a decade invested in penal reform, working systematically with local politicians to advocate for more humane prison systems and prisoner access to proper medical care. The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York has long funded programs that provide economically disadvantaged children and youth with better child care and schooling. Each of these foundations has its origins in a commercial fortune – from Intel, oil, and Avon products respectively. All can be dismissed as mere camouflage, ignoring the bigger questions about capitalism. Still, these efforts matter, employing innovative techniques to help others. Long before Giridharadas experienced revelation, there have been Americans working hard to ameliorate suffering and to push for social change. They recall the injunction of Martin Luther King Jr. to practise charity but not ignore ‘the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary’. To suggest that Anand Giridharadas should temper his findings would miss the point. Winners Take All does not claim to be objective analysis. It lacks the scholarship that underpins Rob Reich’s Just Giving (Princeton, 2018), a study that offers qualified support for foundations and their charitable work. Rather, Winners Take All is a passionate statement, a song of renouncement. It is provocative, bracing, sweeping in its verdicts. Giridharadas raises uncomfortable questions about a society where Donald Trump can seem plausible to nearly half the population, a plutocrat to chasten all those smug, liberal plutocrats. A more carefully qualified book would lose its rhetorical power. This is anger with style. g Glyn Davis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University and CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

First tragedy, then farce Washington’s retreat from the global order

Rémy Davison THE LESSONS OF TRAGEDY: STATECRAFT AND WORLD ORDER by Hal Brands and Charles Edel

Yale University Press (Footprint), $39.99 hb, 200 pp, 9780300238242

‘H

istory repeats itself,’ Karl Marx wrote presciently in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. ‘The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ The central themes of Hal Brands and Charles Edel’s The Lessons of Tragedy are clear. In the developed world, we are complacent about world order, democracy, and civil society. But the ancient Greeks knew, from endless wars with Sparta to the Hellenic Republic’s annexation by Rome, that empires have feet of clay. It is telling, too, in a work about world order and engagement, that seminal figures such as Bismarck and Kissinger are quoted approvingly. Both men were Machiavellian in their use of power, but they were also sufficiently prudent to know its limits and to exercise restraint. Appeals to classicism have both their vices and virtues. Machiavelli’s The Prince, the first modern work of political science, was influenced profoundly by Virgil, Plutarch, and Cicero. Enoch Powell’s inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 also drew inspiration from Virgil, as he excoriated Britain’s mass immigration policy. It is no surprise that the first widely accepted international relations text, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, tells a tale of tragedy. The Athenians defeated the Melians, slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery. From the Battle of Vienna (1683), to the establishment of the Concert of Europe following Napoleon’s defeat, to the darkness of Auschwitz, the response to tragedy has been the same: nations coalescing to defeat the oppressor and cooperating to reduce the persistence of conflict and to regulate the conduct of warfare. By the mid-

nineteenth century, the grim battlefields of the Austro-Sardinian War led to the formation of the Red Cross. But even the tragedy of the ‘war to end all wars’ was not addressed at Versailles in 1919. As Brands and Edel write, the leaders, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, looked more terrified than victorious. The white knight from the New World, US President Woodrow Wilson, sought to construct a new global architecture based upon rules, norms, free trade, and open seas. His personal legacy was the League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations; of the League’s original institutions, only the International Court of Justice and the International Labour Organisation survive. But it was not the cold-eyed Europeans who killed the League; it was the US Senate’s distaste for both continental imperialism and the prospect of American subjugation to international law that spelled the death knell for Versailles. Washington’s retreat into isolationism, throughout what historian E.H. Carr called the ‘Twenty Years’ Crisis’ (1919–39), commenced in Paris, achieved its nadir following the Wall Street crash, and was bookended by the isolationist ‘America First’ Committee, whose members included aviator Charles Lindbergh and future president Gerald Ford. Pearl Harbor rudely interrupted the dalliances of the noninterventionists. By 1945, both Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had resolved that Wilson’s grand vision would be resurrected, this time under the aegis of Washington’s unrivalled military and financial power. Their instruments were the San Francisco system, a ‘hub-andspokes’ network of alliances, and the

Bretton Woods regime, comprising the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the GATT (now the World Trade Organisation). The Holocaust had been replaced by hope. In ‘The Great Escape’, the chapter on the Cold War, Brands and Edel do rather gloss over the ‘Forty Years’ War’, writing that ‘only a single country – South Vietnam – disappeared from the map due to conquest’. Of course, the nuclear age not only inaugurated a balance of terror, but also bore witness to a new barbarism. Indeed, some historians view the second half of the twentieth century as worse than the first, with the brutality of Vietnam (more ordnance was dropped on that country than during World War II in its entirety), the killing fields of Cambodia, the insanity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the genocide in Bangladesh, and the chemical warfare of the Iran– Iraq War. Irrespective of whether Washington intervened (Vietnam) or not (Bangladesh), a bloodbath took place. But following a four-decade arms race against Moscow, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed meekly. The Cold War system disappeared in 1991, leading President Bush Sr to declare, ‘If we retreat from our obligations to the world into indifference, we will, one day, pay the highest price once again.’ As Brands and Edel note, we have seen this play before. Bush’s rhetoric may have envisaged a ‘New World Order’, but as ethnic cleansing raged in Yugoslavia, his secretary of state, James Baker, declared, ‘We don’t have a dog in this fight.’ Bill Clinton preached ‘democratic enlargement’, but, in reality, he beat a strategic retreat to the comfortable conPOLITICS

fines of domestic politics. Weeks before Clinton took office in January 1993, Bush Sr deployed a US-led humanitarian mission in Somalia. In October 1993, in an assault chronicled in Ridley Scott’s film Black Hawk Down, dead US marines were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, broadcast endlessly on US news channels. Eighteen casualties were enough for Clinton; he withdrew all US forces within months. In 1994, confronted by the million victims of the Rwandan génocidaires, Clinton chose to do precisely nothing. He found support from unlikely sources, including the conservative Samuel Huntington, who argued that it was morally reprehensible that American soldiers died to stop Somalis from killing one another. Fear of intervention re-emerged in the wake of the post-9/11, US-led invasion of Iraq. Unwinnable wars in the Middle East led Barack Obama – too recently burnt by the chaos created by the 2011 Libyan intervention – to baulk at acting militarily against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the wake of the Ghouta chemical attacks. Obama’s reticence only encouraged Assad, his allies, and Vladimir Putin, who freely conducted Russian military operations to destroy Assad’s enemies. Unsurprisingly, Obama rejected the label of appeaser. ‘Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other … Al-Qaeda leaders … whether I engage in appeasement,’ he retorted. Nevertheless, despite his administration’s maintenance of the US-led global order, Washington began to retrench in Iraq and Afghanistan, as Obama sought to address pressing domestic financial problems. He reluctantly participated in the Libyan intervention, but Syria proved to be the red line he refused to cross. Military failure in Iraq and Afghanistan paved the way for the neoisolationist resurgence led by Donald Trump. Whereas Obama understood the centrality of the Bretton Woods and San Francisco systems to international order, the Trump administration questioned the core logic of US global engagement. Trump has either withdrawn, or threatened to withdraw, variously, from NATO, the World

Trade Organisation, the UN Human Rights Committee, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Arms Trade Treaty, and, ominously, the INF Treaty, dealing with nuclear weapons in Europe. Ultimately, the question is whether the United States is still prepared to pay any price and shoulder any burden to maintain the liberal international

economic order. The Lessons of Tragedy counsels the virtues of order, prudence, and patience. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is probably the least likely government to accept such wise advice. g Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University.

Unsettling settlement

Mental disability in early New South Wales

Alan Atkinson BEDLAM AT BOTANY BAY by James Dunk

NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 512 pp, 9781742236179

ames Dunk is not the first Australian historian to notice that mental breakdown was surprisingly common during the first two European generations in New South Wales. Malcolm Ellis linked the ‘Botany Bay disease’ to rheumatic fever, rife on shipboard, which ‘ruined the lives or unbalanced the minds of … many pioneers’. Manning Clark spoke of sanity collapsing ‘under the weight of the vast indifference of nature, of loneliness and mockery’. More recently, Jonathan Lamb has suggested that it was all a result of endemic scurvy. Bedlam at Botany Bay offers the most subtle and suggestive explanation so far by linking mental disability with a type of absolute power that, by his account, went from top to bottom of the settler community. We know, certainly, that unaccountable, unfeeling power can cause madness. It is easy to imagine that the most damaging thing about confinement on Manus Island and Nauru, and a likely cause of mental derangement, is the realisation that freedom – when and how – is entirely unpredictable. There must be something especially bitter in the knowledge that our long suffering is the work of other human beings, who could end it when they like.

In early New South Wales, power was usually less arbitrary than this. It was more obviously governed by law, but, as Dunk’s many stories show, it was typically personalised in some way and dramatically unequal. In telling those stories, he conjures up a hopeless pain, uncovering, as he says, a hitherto altogether too obscure dimension of the settlement project. Settlement could be deeply unsettling. Alternately, a strong hand can sometimes be the only way of dealing effectively with mental disability. Dunk pursues both lines of causation, power producing madness and madness shaping power. He suggests that conditions in early colonial New South Wales were at least one reason why, in some cases, individuals suffered mental impairment, although he admits that inborn susceptibility might have got them there in the first place. Convicts were not just ratbags or rebels, or men and women driven to crime by poverty. In some there was mental weakness, such as exists now in prisons everywhere. Focusing on ‘Bedlam’ itself, Dunk is mainly interested in the use and misuse of power as a concomitant of madness. Maybe he could have looked more closely at the interaction of POLITICS

Calibre Essay Prize

Australian Book Review and the judges congratulate the winner and runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize.

Winner ($5,000)

Grace Karskens ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’

Runner-Up ($2,500)

Sarah Walker ‘Floundering’

‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ will appear in the August issue. ‘Floundering’ can be read on page 20. The Calibre Essay Prize was judged by J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose.

australianbookreview.com.au 14 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

susceptibility and circumstances. Even in twenty-first-century clinical work, he might find it hard to know which matters more as a causal factor and whether they can ever be fully separated. But the records for this early period are scanty. Only later in the nineteenth century did a full-blown bureaucracy emerge from the government’s management of mental disability. Dunk’s argument therefore rides on anecdote. Spectacular cases drew remark, and sometimes the disabled were so violent and/or helpless that the authorities had to step in. He draws the various stories together with real skill. Medical professionals were beginning to be interested in causes and possible cures for madness, but otherwise these records mainly bear on questions of power and freedom, questions that became especially urgent when restraint seemed to involve cruelty and trust arrangements led to theft and waste. By this time, the old understanding of freeborn Britons managing their own lives and property was overlaid with Enlightenment notions of interiority. What was mind? What was personal identity and consciousness? What happened to personhood when individuals came adrift even from the commonsense understanding of such things? Kirsten McKenzie’s work (Scandal in the Colonies [2004] and A Swindler’s Progress [2009]) has shown how they could seem especially uncertain in the outposts of empire, away from the centralised accountability that grounded Britons’ sense of who they were. The unfamiliar, even experimental, forms of authority in New South Wales were especially disorienting. In Bedlam at Botany Bay, the focus on madness, individual liberty, restraint, and authoritarianism is therefore very apt. It involves also the question of the governor’s delegated power and his delegation of power. It involves conflicts between governing authority and medical judgement, another reminder of Nauru and Manus Island, except that in early New South Wales medical men could be tyrannical too. Dunk quotes a doctor telling his patient, ‘If I say you are mad today, you are mad, and if I say you shall be well tomorrow, you shall

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be well, and if I order you to walk upon your head, you shall walk upon it.’ The book’s unfolding logic is unusual, running at last into far-reaching and difficult speculation. The first six chapters tell of a growing complexity over time, from 1788 to the 1830s. Then in chapter seven we go back almost to the beginning to hear the life story of John Macarthur, which by Dunk’s account was threaded through with anxiety and despair, ending in madness, and only in chapter eight are we are given the end of the larger narrative. At this final point, in the 1840s, the big issues – government versus medical expertise, arbitrary power, institutional confinement – take new forms, thanks to better organised politics and better articulated public opinion. But then there is Dunk’s epilogue, where long-term anxiety and despair appear as something embedded within the settlement as a whole, and from the start. ‘Madness,’ he writes, ‘wreaked havoc on the inchoate structures of government.’ More than that, madness was connected somehow with the violence of invasion, because of the way that violence must have ‘wounded’ its perpetrators. So madness belongs to our larger, long-term inheritance. All this needs more careful explanation and another book. So far it works only as a large hypothesis. Historians of early European settlement usually belong to one of two schools, Order or Disorder. The School of Order dwells on the intricacies of habit, custom, and law. Henry Reynolds, for instance, although he chronicled murder and dispossession, is ultimately a denizen of Order. He seems to assume that there was always a better way forward. The School of Disorder makes its contribution by shining light into the darker places of humanity. This book carries the stamp of Disorder. As James Dunk says, whatever theorists and administrators might think, in the minds of the powerless the project of settlement was chaotic. For some, the chaos was too hard to bear. g Alan Atkinson is an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia.

Speaking of electricity Kate Griffiths BLACKOUT: HOW IS ENERGY-RICH AUSTRALIA RUNNING OUT OF ELECTRICITY? by Matthew Warren Affirm Press $30 pb, 304 pp, 9781925870176

ustralia’s energy transition has been hotly debated for a decade, and it doesn’t look set to cool anytime soon. Blackout: How is energyrich Australia running out of electricity? offers readers the chance to be an informed participant in the debate. For more than a century, decisions about our electricity system have been left to the experts – the electrical engineers and policy wonks who knew the grid best. Today the electricity system is a matter of public debate. If decisions about the grid are going to be made by a popularity contest, then energy experts need to engage with the public and help inform the debate. Matthew Warren steps up to this challenge with Blackout. Warren explains why electricity prices have been rising, why heatwaves increase the risk of blackouts, how places like King Island are leading the way in renewables integration, and why rooftop solar requires a rethink of the grid. Part history, part science, and part economics, Blackout explores the early experiments that enabled electricity to be harnessed and the events that shaped the development of Australia’s electricity ‘archipelago’. ‘The real coming of age for Australian electricity was in 1879, when half-a-dozen arc lamps were used to light the Melbourne Cricket Ground for two night games of Australian Rules football,’ Warren writes. Australians immediately saw the potential, and Melbourne, flush with cash from the gold rush, became one of the first cities in the world to build an electricity grid. Fast forward to the twenty-first

century: ‘My name is Australia and I have an electricity problem.’ Warren explains today’s electricity crisis clearly and engagingly. He elegantly traverses the design of the electricity market and the physical limits of the grid, without shying away from the technical nature of many of the issues. ‘At first I didn’t speak Electricity either,’ Warren says, ‘I had to learn it on the job.’ While Blackout gives a great overview of the history of Australia’s electricity system and the current challenges, it is weak on the future risks, particularly climate change. The book recaps the science behind climate change and the international and local political responses. But its discussion is limited to the risks of political intervention in the electricity market. There have certainly been many unhelpful interventions (and there will surely be more), but climate change poses physical, financial, and societal risks for the electricity system that deserve fuller recognition. Blasé lines like ‘so if we can’t save the planet, can we at least save the electricity system?’ revealingly miss the point. Blackout is pitched at the ‘sensible centre’ and tries to explain things from a practical perspective. Those on Team Coal will find the role of coal in the history of Australia’s electricity system celebrated, but also a calm rational explanation of why its expiry date is looming. Those on Team Renewables have already backed the winning horse but may be surprised to learn that renewables targets and subsidies are not the best way to transition the energy system and are particularly unfair on low-income households. After ‘a decade-long political tug of war over climate where the electricity system was the rope’, Warren argues for getting past the politics. It is a surprising argument coming from someone who has spent his career lobbying for first coal then renewables. Politicians have much to answer for in creating and exacerbating Australia’s energy crisis. But who invited them into the fold in the first place? Industries vying for favouritism have encouraged government interventions – where it suits them. Meanwhile, consumers and taxpayers have been left to deal with

the long-term consequences of their narrow, short-sighted interests. Blackout recounts some of these activities but misses the opportunity for sector reflection. Fortunately, Warren offers up an olive branch to help depoliticise the situation. Recognising that the experts closest to politicians and the media are often lobbying for something, Warren argues for an independent, expert body that can inform and respond to media and political concerns.

‘My name is Australia and I have an electricity problem’ The Energy Security Board – born from the Finkel Review – could fill this gap. Warren proposes a range of new powers and responsibilities for the ESB. It is probably too broad a remit to be done well. But Warren is right that the sector needs to be more responsive to media and political interest to ensure that decision makers and the public at large are better informed. Whether you are an energy enthusiast or perplexed by your power bill, Blackout offers a better understanding of the economic, physical, and political issues facing Australia’s electricity system. Australia’s transition to a clean-energy future is already well underway. What’s at stake is the pace and cost of the transition. None of the issues is insurmountable, but overcoming them will require a higher calibre of public debate. g

Kate Griffiths is a scientist and analyst, and currently works as a Senior Associate at the Grattan Institute. ENVIRONMENT

Fire flume Daniel May BLACK SATURDAY: NOT THE END OF THE STORY

by Peg Fraser

Monash University Publishing $29.95 pb, 268 pp, 9781925523683

tories are at the heart of Peg Fraser’s compassionate and thoughtful book about Strathewen and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. The initial impression gained by the subtitle, Not the end of the story, could be one of defiance, a familiar narrative of a community stoically recovering and rebuilding. Yet this book is anything but hackneyed, and the title proves provocative. How could the story of Black Saturday ever end? Is there just one Black Saturday story? Who is making this story, and why? The great American fire historian Stephen J. Pyne has observed that there are three paradigms of academic research on fire – physical, biological, cultural – and that it is the cultural paradigm that is the most neglected. Black Saturday is a ‘story about stories’ and thus represents an important step in the understanding of how Australians live with fire. Fraser challenges the clichés that influence so much public discussion about bushfire tragedies. The legacy of Judge Leonard Stretton’s Royal Commission Report into the 1939 Black Friday bushfires looms over any bushfire writing in Australia, but Fraser respectfully moves away from Stretton’s shadow. Despite his sympathetic tone, Judge Stretton did not place witness testimony at the heart of his 16 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

Commission. Fraser chooses to begin Black Saturday with a loose narrative of selected quotes from her oral interviews with survivors of Black Saturday. Analysis and insights are left for later chapters as readers are encouraged to ‘feel, in some very small degree, what the narrators felt’. This merging of individual stories into a single loose overall narrative is powerful without feeling drawn out. Each chapter starts with an object connected to the small Victorian settlement of Strathewen and the 2009 bushfires. All but one of these objects are now in Museum Victoria’s Bushfires Collection, which the author helped to curate. This literary technique allows Fraser to group her oral interviews and effectively frame her analysis of survivor testimony. Readers are introduced to Strathewen as a liminal place that does not fit easily into the city–country divide. This sets the tone for Fraser’s analysis, which questions many easy binaries and assumptions. The strongest example of this questioning is the third chapter. Fraser tells how the Museum’s decision to exhibit a tree where some survivors posted poems of grief, community, and resilience provoked other survivors to object to the resilience narrative being promoted. Through interviews with the objecting survivors, Fraser demonstrates that the narrative of harmony and recovery concealed divisions and conflict present in Strathewen both before and after Black Saturday, and leads readers to question the implicit assumptions in dominant bushfire narratives. After reading this chapter, readers will find themselves questioning whether the word ‘community’ is a help or a hindrance in understanding disasters. Questioning the very concept of community may have intimidated a lesser writer, but it is a real strength of this book that Fraser does not flinch from uncomfortable truths and conflict. This commitment to truth over narrative simplicity is brave. The sixth chapter uses a knitted cushion to explore how ideas and expectations around gender manifested during and after Black Saturday. When discussing objects, women mourned the loss of heirlooms and photographs,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

while men mourned the loss of their sheds. Actually, Fraser demonstrates that the loss of tools undermined the Australian male self-image as ‘practical, capable, self-reliant’; the loss of the shed meant ‘a failure to defend the home’. A further highlight from this chapter is Fraser’s convincing argument that the much-maligned policy informally known as ‘stay or go’ was implicitly gendered in its framing, and that this had terrible consequences on 7 February 2009. Fraser found that some of her male interviewees who chose to evacuate have since struggled with feelings of inadequacy and of failing to live up to expectations of masculinity. Fraser further argues that the policy may well have led some to stay and attempt to defend their houses rather than ‘retreat’. Some of them may have died as a result. This gendered insight offers a new and insightful perspective. The arguments over ‘stay or go’ have tended to focus upon those who stayed behind, but Fraser reminds us that this policy also profoundly affected those who evacuated. This is a rare foray into policy debates, but it does not feel out of place and is a reminder of the power of good cultural research. Black Saturday is not just for fire researchers, curators, and oral historians, but should also find a place on the shelf of anyone living in the ‘fire flume’ of Victoria. Unlike the impenetrably dense bureaucratic writing of officialdom, this book is easy to read. Better put perhaps, it makes a hard topic (or ‘difficult history’) more bearable. After all, Stretton’s enduring influence on the stories Australians tell about bushfire is at least in part due to his eloquence. Stories help us to make sense of the world in the wake of disaster; they prompt us into action in the face of it. In this story about stories, Fraser complicates assumptions, teases out frameworks, and reminds us that the stories we tell ourselves after tragedies can conceal as much as they reveal. g Daniel May is a PhD Candidate in the School of History, ANU, and an Associate Student in the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre. ❖

‘Don’t be afraid … It won’t hurt you’

The cost of cutting environmental corners

Alistair Thomson HAZELWOOD by Tom Doig

Viking, $34.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780143793342

om Doig’s Hazelwood begins with Scott Morrison proclaiming to Parliament, ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid … It won’t hurt you’, and concludes, 284 riveting pages later, that ‘the Australian coal industry doesn’t just cause disasters – it is a disaster’. In February 2014, during ‘the worst drought and heatwave south-eastern Australia had experienced in over a century’, embers from two bushfires ignited the worked-out northern coalface of the Hazelwood mine. Seven kilometres long, four kilometres wide and forty storeys deep, the steep ‘northern batters’ of the mine were seamed with clay and coal and tangled with unruly undergrowth. There was nothing to stop the fire spreading deep into the coal seams. The fire was out of control for forty-five days, and was not finally extinguished for another seventy-two, on June 6. A few weeks into the fire, David Briggs was employed by a contractor to drive an earth-working bulldozer and help extinguish the fire. He took a compulsory health examination and his lung function was rated at 144 per cent of normal function; his lung capacity was ‘not far off that of a professional cyclist’. He worked long night shifts (they could only see the deep seams of fire at night), with no special protective clothing or gas mask. The money was good but the work was hard, filthy, and terrifying, with his machine often bogged at the perilous edge of a burning, molten drop. ‘The deeper David dug into a burning coal fault with his 35-tonne excavator, the hotter and smokier it got. He sometimes had to dig the equivalent of six storeys deep, scooping out mounds

of pulsing red-orange coal from the darkness.’ When his wife, Penny, said he should complain about the conditions, David responded ‘If I say something, I won’t be working next week.’ After about three months the job was finished and David found another job. By November ‘he didn’t feel quite right’. His head throbbed, his chest ached, a short walk was exhausting. ‘I felt like an old man.’ David’s lung function now tested at forty per cent of normal. A scan showed a ‘white mass’ in David’s lungs and he was diagnosed with extreme ‘pulmonary fibrosis’, an irreversible and incurable build-up of scar tissue in the lungs caused by exposure to tiny ‘PM2.5’ particles in coal smoke. The insurers rejected his WorkCover claim on the grounds that he had not ‘sustained an injury arising out of or in the course of your employment’. Briggs was one of ninety-five Latrobe Valley men and women interviewed by Doig over several years and seventy-two days spent in the Valley (Hazelwood mine company executives refused interviews, and company staff were instructed not to talk about their experiences). These oral history interviews are the heart of Doig’s book, with personal stories woven through the narrative and then backed up by the documentary record of local media, government records and official inquiries. Together, the evidence of testimony and documents confirms a litany of disastrous misjudgements, incompetence, and negligence. Led by Sir John Monash in the 1920s, Victoria’s State Electricity Commission (SEC) began the creation of coal mines and power stations in

the Latrobe Valley. In 1945, when the SEC proposed to demolish and relocate the town of Morwell so that it could dig the gigantic Hazelwood open-cut mine, the state government responded to pressure from Morwell residents and left the town intact just four hundred metres from the mine, ignoring SEC requirements for a minimum one-mile buffer zone. In 1977 and again in 1994, following mine fires, the SEC ignored recommendations for improved fire protection sprinklers. The diversion of the Morwell River, and the construction of a highway between town and mine, undermined the water table and caused cracks and sinkholes at the town’s edge, which was slowly slipping towards the mine. Recommendations to protect worked-out coal-faces with clay capping were ignored; undergrowth was left to spread; forests of fire-prone eucalypts were planted near the mine. Before, and especially after, privatisation of the SEC in 1996, maintenance was neglected. Although the working mine and power station were well guarded, the workedout sections were an ‘accident waiting to happen’ (the company was ‘only interested in protecting the assets that were making them money’). Staff who could see the problem did not want to raise their concerns for fear the mine would be closed. When the mine fire started, during a week of extreme fire danger, senior staff were on holiday, the power for the water-protection systems failed, and there were no maps or signs to help the first responders fight the fire – which got away. As Doig argues, ‘One of the worst industrial disasters Victoria has ever experienced’ should never have happened. Hazelwood is also a story about ‘one of the worst public health disasters in Australia’, and about a community fighting for its rights. As soon as the fire started, people living just across from the mine began to feel the effects of toxic smoke and ash, with throbbing headaches and rasping coughs. Chickens died and chemically burned pet dogs bled from every cavity. Local and state health officials said there ‘wasn’t much to be worried about’, but Tracie Lund from the Morwell Neighbourhood House began to keep a record of ENVIRONMENT

sufferers and symptoms. Wendy Lund, ‘one of the least political people around’, helped set up Voices of the Valley to organise mass protests and media campaigns. Eventually, after nineteen days, the Chief Health Officer relented and recommended that vulnerable people should relocate. By then, for many, the damage was done. When the first Hazelwood Inquiry failed to recognise the extent of health damage, Voices of the Valley gathered death statistics from local papers and persuaded the newly elected Andrews state Labor government to initiate a second Inquiry, which confirmed that at least twenty-three deaths could be attributed to the effects of smoke and ash and set up a long-term study about the effects of the fire. Meanwhile, the French electricity company that owned Hazelwood decided that the costs of making the mine safe were too great, closed the mine and power station, and took their money elsewhere – having made huge profits and without agreeing to pay the full costs of rehabilitation. The Hazelwood cavity is still a huge fire risk and may become a toxic lake. Doig’s book offers an acute critique of how governments cut environmental corners to sponsor mining and industry, about the civic and environmental irresponsibility of multinational mining corporations, and about why workers and communities dependent on such industries are often unwilling or unable to criticise them, until it is too late. Like Doig, I’m thinking Adani. g

Alistair Thomson is Professor of History at Monash University in Australia and President of Oral History Australia. His most recent book is Australian Lives: An intimate history (2017, with Anisa Puri). 18 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

Are you listening? The failure of reason and persuasion

Alex Tighe STOP BEING REASONABLE by Eleanor Gordon-Smith

NewSouth, $27.99 pb, 204 pp, 9781742235875

f you’ve somehow avoided listening to podcasts, you will have missed out on the recent explosion of long-form audio storytelling – and I mean it, you’ve really missed out. The show which pioneered the form, This American Life (TAL), pulls a cool four to five million listeners each week, and you don’t get those numbers for nothing. TAL takes ordinary people, tells their stories, and then – this is their secret sauce – makes a whimsical pivot to the larger idea the story gives us about the world. It’s a simple formula that’s had a subtle but widespread ripple effect on journalism. Narrative is being used to explain, to explore, to interrogate – as an invitation to thought. I’ll return to the notion of storytelling as an invitation to thought. Before that, there’s a more specific reason why I mention TAL here. If you were around Kings Cross in late 2016, you would have seen Eleanor Gordon-Smith, microphone in hand, walking along Darlinghurst Road and recording for the program. The idea for her piece was: woman on street, woman gets catcalled, woman confronts catcallers, convinces them to stop. It’s a great pitch, made more compelling by the fact that Gordon-Smith was (and I assume still is) a weapons-grade arguer – she was a philosophy tutor at the University of Sydney at the time and had previously been a world-class debater. Convincing the men would be easy, no? As Gordon-Smith tells it in her excellent début book, Stop Being Reasonable, that moment was the beginning of a personal unravelling for her, a kind of inverse Eureka for ‘someone who had always been optimistic about our ability to talk each other into better beliefs’. The best outcome of the experiment

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

was when a man agreed not to slap the asses of women on the street; he said he would still catcall. ‘It took 120 minutes of conversation with one man to get him to commit to not literally assaulting women,’ Gordon-Smith says in the radio piece, and you can hear her deflation. She brought better arguments, skewered their fallacies, and still didn’t change their minds. This is not how it’s meant to go. Our collective notion of persuasion is that rational argument will inevitably produce better beliefs in participants and listeners. It’s around this popular notion that we’ve built our current public discourse (think: talkback radio, Q&A, town hall debates, the Facebook comments section), and it’s this ‘rustedon idea of persuasion’ as argumentation that Stop Being Reasonable spends two hundred pages debunking. ‘[I]n our haste to congratulate ourselves for being reasonable,’ Gordon-Smith writes, ‘we accidentally untied the very notion of “rationality” from its rich philosophical ancestry and from the complexity of actual human minds.’ Using her own Kings Cross story and the stories of six other ordinary people, Gordon-Smith identifies the assumptions that underpin the old model of ‘being reasonable’, and introduces contemporary philosophy that gives us reason to rethink those assumptions. In her arguments with catcallers, for example, Gordon-Smith went in assuming that her words would carry just as much weight as those of her interlocutors (wrong). Another story, of a man losing faith in his doomsday cult, probes our notions of when it is okay to rely on the word of others as evidence for our own beliefs. There’s a chapter on doubt, a chapter on the

role of reason in our emotional lives, a chapter on the costs of suspended judgement, and, my personal favourite, a chapter that springboards from the story of a reality-television contestant into a profound discussion of selfhood, with an incredible extended metaphor about the predictability of the plotlines in Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Yes, the Kardashians in a book of philosophy. That’s something to note about Stop Being Reasonable: it is curious and intelligent and deeply researched and genuinely thoughtful, and at the same time consistently entertaining to read. Gordon-Smith has an instinct for entertainment that’s present in her

elsewhere, as long as you’re up to the challenge of confronting rather than asking your audience to abstract away from the complexity.’ This hybrid of journalism and philosophy will benefit both: more thought will make for better journalism, and more specificity for better philosophy. Stories get closest to that bipedal blend of cognition and feeling that is specifically human. I could be wrong, but this new hybrid form feels vital and purposeful, and like it’s only just begun. g Alex Tighe is the 2019 ABC/Kidney Health Australia’s inaugural Mark Colvin Scholar.

Yes, the Kardashians in a book of philosophy previous work but flourishes in Stop Being Reasonable – her rhythmic patter of thoughts and gags reads like someone giving a TED talk at the Comedy Cellar. Not all of her metaphors land, but most do. Her characterisations rate a mention too: one man is memorably described as ‘like a turtle tasked with solving a serious crime’. Two things really excite me about Stop Being Reasonable. It’s a nerd’s dream to see Wittgenstein and Cavell and Manne and Langton and Fricker in a book so pleasurably readable. If you want to introduce someone to philosophy, give them this book. Also thrilling is Gordon-Smith’s commitment to blending narrative techniques with academic philosophy. She has taken the formula of TAL-style storytelling and used it as an invitation, not to the whimsical thoughts of TAL, but to serious philosophical thought. There’s another person making a similar hybrid of philosophy and journalism: Professor Barry Lam, on his podcast Hi-Phi Nation (likewise influenced by TAL). Lam once wrote about the making of his program that, ‘Human stories are not neatly packaged like philosophical thought experiments. They have nuance and complexity precisely of the kind philosophers like to abstract away from to make arguments … I learned that what you lose in tidiness you gain

Honeywell In a hallway with the door open, a Honeywell T87 will attempt to equalise the temperature of the continuous (available) world. It sits between the mirror-dresser and the coat-hook which resembles two of four talons of a lived-in bird, like a Fiji or an Imitator goshawk. The Honeywell has the brain of a bird but no mouth or Nest. In this arrangement and when you’re cold you might catch sight of the consternation of yourself in the mirror-dresser when you run around the corner of the living room to adjust the temperature. At least. Or the top of your head or your apparently open mouth. What you can’t see is the outcasting belly of the change in the air as it flushes through a white flyscreen: the plastic or enamel white an extruded quatrefoil egg which flauntingly comes off in drying and which the Honeywell is doomed to face. If you could see the change in the air, it’d spill like the extra-amniotic puff of the wind in 1362. The thermostat is a lens perplexing the evidence of environmental warmth upside-down and inside-out and dreaming and as percussive as the feet of the continuous (available) world.

Rowan McNaught ❖

Rowan McNaught is a Melbourne-based artist and writer. C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

CALIBRE ESSAY PRIZE

Floundering by Sarah Walker

swim at night, carving through water full of chlorine and tasting of mould, turning lap after lap before the pool closes down, while cells inside me hurry into being like bubbles under a running tap. The lifeguard stalks along beside the pool watching me. I know he’s trying to get me out, but I can’t stop swimming. I have to reach sixty laps, because ending on a non-round number is too terrifying tonight, because everything is too terrifying, because I am pregnant. I tumble-turn at both walls. If I don’t surface, I reason, he can’t stop me. I can keep swimming forever, until my heart lies back down and everything goes back to normal, before today, before it all changed. It is a pool noodle that is finally my undoing. The lifeguard prods me with one like a boy testing roadkill for life, and I can’t pretend to ignore him anymore. I surface, blinking up at him, staring at the blue and white flags stretched across the pool and trying not to cry. Two weeks in, says the internet, the sex of the baby has already been decided. I wake up gasping, a low, sick moan floating into the morning. I shake the body beside me, frowning. He kisses me softly, says, ‘It’s only the chickens’, but to me it still sounds like screaming. In the bathroom mirror I watch how my aching right breast has already changed shape, kicking out, reaching for the mouth my body hasn’t yet grown. It was a girl, I thought. The night it happened was the night we got good at sex – when the anxieties fell away with the thunder roaring and our breath shuddering between lips. After, we panted together and smiled soft, half-embarrassed smiles and said ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘thank you’. I was never a swimmer. My brother was a national

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competitor as a teenager, training before dawn, sleeping through his classes, drooling onto his textbooks. He was powerful, graceful, determined. His hair began to snap off from the chlorine. I was always gentler. Quieter. While he breathed heavy and his body became hard, I turned soft. I read. When the school threw us fully dressed into the cold outdoor pool, for swimming survival classes, I felt the weight of my jeans in the water and I was terrified. As soon as school sport stopped being compulsory, I threw my bathers to the back of my cupboard and felt free. Cramps touch the insides of my belly, sharp and bright as a Tesla coil. I text a friend: ‘It’s a girl. I’m naming her Jon Bon Jovi and her interests are ballet and monster trucks.’ Ten years later, the anxiety that had always licked the edges of my high achievement and over-commitment finally burst its banks. I had panic attacks on freeways. My chest locked up. Defeated, I drove to Collingwood Pool in the dark. I pulled on the crumpled bathers in the fluorescent-lit change rooms. They sagged in the back. I looked like I was wearing a nappy. My goggles were discovered still in the case they came in, pristine, like a souvenir from a visit to the future. I floundered through twenty laps and hated every one of them – hated the unending black line, and the other swimmers, and the profound, insane monotony of the whole event. I emerged, waterlogged and groggy, vowing never to return. Midway through the shower, I realised that my anxiety had broken, cracked apart. My ribcage swung open. I felt as though I’d been unpackaged. It was then that I discovered that swimming made me bored and made me grumpy, but most of all it made me calm. I write, you were conceived during a thunderstorm, and the romance of that was the only reason to keep you, but for just a moment that seemed like reason enough.

(Photograph by Sarah Walker)

I fly to Canberra, watching the sun coat the clouds like a cracked, white tongue. I think, I am in the sky and I am pregnant, and nothing seems real. The fasten seatbelt sign clicks on. When the turbulence begins, I am not even afraid. When I was a child, we would often drive past the Harold Holt pool in Glen Iris. A pool named after a drowned man. Men and women and children turning lap after lap in grim homage to the prime minister who never got out of the water. I wonder whether the lifeguards realise the gravity of their roles. The child has a beating heart twenty-two days after conception. When the lap lanes are busy, I swallow water. No matter how far I turn my head to avoid the agitated waves, they find my lips, throw themselves down my throat. The first time it happened, I choked, retched, trod water until I could breathe again. Now, I’ve learned to just let it happen. To blow air out and feel my stomach distend with my own internal aquarium. Sometimes, if I listen hard, I can hear liquid sloshing inside me when I move. I watch a sweet man’s face fall and panic brighten his eyes. I don’t ask him, I tell him. Between a third and a quarter of Australian women will have an abortion in their lifetime. This floors me.

I stand in the change rooms at the Northcote YMCA, watching glorious, wobbly old women fold their breasts into swimsuits, watching flagging young mothers’ eyes unfocus while their children scream, and I think, which of you? Which of you did it? Which of you had the phone call from your doctor? Where he confirmed, tentatively, the results of the test, and, hesitating, said, ‘For some, this is good news. For others …’ And when you asked, as I did, what the procedures were for having a termination, did your doctor sigh, too, and say, ‘It should be easier. But it’s not’? I watch pubic hair creep past the elastic of my ten-dollar Big W one-piece bathers, spreading onto the soft skin of my thighs. I ponder the phrase ‘letting oneself go’. I wonder exactly where I’m meant to be going. Australian abortion law is not consistent. It varies from state to state. In Victoria it’s legal, no questions asked, up until twenty-four weeks gestation. After that, you need two doctors to agree that it’s ‘appropriate in the circumstances’. We’re lucky. Our laws are kind. In New South Wales there are questions. You can only have a legal abortion if your doctor believes that it’s necessary to avoid a ‘serious danger’ to your life or your physical or mental health. The factors that play into this decision are poorly defined. Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi introduced a law reform bill into the NSW Parliament in May 2017, attempting to have abortion decriminalised. A conscience vote followed. The bill failed to pass. E S S AY

Only one friend asks if I’ve thought about keeping it. I tell her, I have thought about it. That’s why I’m not keeping it. She nods. Years ago she was the cluckiest person I knew. Now she’s wavering. All the clucky young women I knew are wavering. When we were twenty, we never thought we’d be this poor, this tired, this scared before children. We can’t even imagine how we’d be after. Marie Stopes International, the only private provider to perform late-term abortions in Victoria, won’t release the number of women who travel interstate to have them in their clinic. But it’s enough that the phenomenon has its own name: ‘abortion tourism’. I clear my diary. At home, I stack a handful of dishes and my housemate leaps up, snatches them from my grasp, cries, ‘You can’t possibly lift these! Not in your condition!’ The laughter rings through the house. I set an early alarm. There was a swimming pool on the Titanic. It was the first cruise ship to have one. I imagine the water rushing in, filling the pool, rising up over the tiles, and forming a meniscus, a skin over the tops of the lane ropes. And then the ocean roaring in until you could swim forever and never hit land. We park around the corner, even though there’s a space free at the front. I haven’t eaten. Time ebbs and flows. The women in the waiting room don’t meet each other’s eyes. Here and there a man sits alone, gnawing his fingernails, jumping whenever a staff member rustles past. When my name is called, I am relieved. A squeeze of the hand, a nod. A nurse runs jelly between my hips and turns the ultrasound screen towards me. She shows me the pregnancy. I wonder whether they have to do this, to make you look at it. I think of every movie I’ve ever seen where a woman has an ultrasound, where she stares in awe at the unformed blob in her belly and bursts into happy tears. I gaze into the deepest parts of myself and nothing feels quite real. Then the nurse says, ‘I’m so sorry, it’s too soon, it’s too small, you’ll have to wait.’ She wipes the jelly off. It leaves a film on my skin. I sit in the giant sanitised bathroom and cry and cry. That day the morning sickness begins.

I swim with the father of my cramps and my dry-retching. I kick hard, pushing water aside like excuses. Later, standing in front of the pasta section in Coles, my vision goes black. I totter. He lunges to catch me. We both smell of chlorine and fear. I wonder whether my anxiety would constitute ‘serious danger’. I wonder whether my bank account would constitute ‘serious danger’. I wonder whether my career would constitute ‘serious danger’. I do not think so. We are back in the waiting room. The same bad American chat show is playing on a television. We all stare up at it, waiting for benediction, waiting for grace. Waiting for someone to call our name. Different men gnaw different fingernails.The women show no emotion at all. I’m in stirrups and I say I want to be awake, because I was awake when it started and I want to be awake when it ends. The doctor asks if I’m sure; she’s being honest when she says that the local anaesthetic does almost nothing. The anaesthetist loads up a syringe and I say, please, I want to try. A nurse holds my hand. The doctor takes a breath, and then I am torn open and full of horror and I am nothing but pain, no head, no heart, no feet in stirrups, and the doctor sighs. I make a noise like ‘ah’, flat and empty. The anaesthetist says, ‘Come on, it’s time to go to sleep,’ and as I fall under, I say, ‘Sorry to be difficult.’ Every article I’ve read about abortion features a stock image of a woman sitting with her knees up and a hand over her eyes. Every single one. I come across a document titled ‘The Abortion Worldwide Report’. It is cited as a key reference in a densely tabled online projection of abortion data Australia-wide. The report bears the air of legitimacy that comes from the heavy use of graphs and charts. It places the number of known international abortions at 12.5 million per year. And then, to contextualise this figure, it breaks it down into comprehensible chunks: ‘2,800 every 2 hours = September 11, 2011 tragedy’; ‘1,046,000 every 1 month = Korean War’; finally, ‘6,276,000 every 6 months = Holocaust during World War II’. A few pages later, a heading bellows, ‘Abortion is the Greatest Genocide!’

I stand in a bar and nausea fills me up like love.

In the recovery room, a woman walks in, held on both sides by nurses. She’s still half-unconscious, crying before she’s even awake. A nurse squats beside her. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks. The woman sobs. ‘I’m a primary school teacher,’ she says. I eat two dry biscuits behind my tiny curtain and try not to breathe.

Nobody knows how many abortions are performed in Australia every year. The statistics just don’t exist. The best guesses are around 80,000, but those numbers could be off by ten thousand, perhaps more.

When Tony Abbott was the health minister, he described Australia’s abortion figures as a ‘national tragedy’. He spoke of ‘unutterable shame’. He accused women of using abortion as ‘a badge of liberation from old oppressions’.

At least we had a storm. A storm and our hearts racing and half sentences – ‘We shouldn’t’, and ‘this’, and ‘oh’ – and then a rush of breath and a rush of apologies and a rush of crooked smiles, kisses, tangled sleep.

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On the way home, I sit in the car and clutch a vomit bag in my left hand and a handmade tote bag in my right. The tote bag says ‘FEMINIST’. A friend texts to see how I’m doing. ‘Feminism won the day again,’ I send. ‘As it bloody well should,’ he replies. I lie in bed and I bleed in a good man’s arms. Outside, a storm gathers. When the thunder roars, I hear the chickens start to cry next door. As the storm dies out, so do the screams. Months pass. I am in the swimming pool, etching red lines around my eyes where my goggles sit too tight and watching the light shatter across my skin as I push through the blue-tiled water. I am breaststroking down the black line, thinking ‘make the pizza, cut the pizza’, a method my brother taught me as a way to remedy my hopeless arm technique. I am repeating the lap number in my head over and over: twenty-seven, twenty-seven, twenty-seven. As I cut the pizza and count the laps and push out the bubbles, the round old lady in the slow lane with the turquoise swimming cap sails by in the opposite

direction. We both make the pizza at the same time, and as we reach out under the lane ropes, our fingers meet and just for a second, we hold hands. My breath catches. I am crushed with a sudden desire to dive under the lane rope, to swim over to the lady and lay my head on her chest. To have her fold me up and hold me tight in the Aqua Play lane, stroking my chlorinegreen hair, whispering kind nothings. My goggles are fogging up. I realise that I am crying. I push my legs out like a frog, like I’m meant to, and I feel my muscles tense and release. I mess up the tumble-turn and I switch over to freestyle. I turn to breathe, and I look up and see the blue and white flags stretched over the pool. And I can’t remember what lap I’m up to. Can’t remember at all. g Sarah Walker is a Melbourne-based writer, photographer, and fine artist. She is also an award-winning theatre designer and director and co-host of the podcast Contact Mic. Her essay ‘Floundering’ was runner-up in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize. ❖

Tangelo Who doesn’t love the portmanteau for tangerine and pomelo, or more like angel, tango, words for wilderness,

of a bleeding vice president – Guillermo Ford in his guayabera, bludgeoned by gangs of the opposition –

how I like planting you (reader) in the thick of it. Also known as honeybell, the peel lifting off

went viral months before the invasion of Panama. In 1989, savagery seeps through what we know.

like a capelet, the poem a long path for getting at the flesh: its obdurate slickness. A tangelo’s not a metaphor

The tangelo’s no ritual, but it’s as good as anything when it comes to hooking the past through the eye of the present. I can let lightning

for anything, which is why I love its simple divisions. The pith a lacework or dragnet. Where I’m from, a photo

stitch my lip or forget a country with dead dictators. It’s not the shape of a world that counts. It’s the weight in my closed palm. Karen Rigby ❖

Karen Rigby, who lives in Arizona, is the author of Chinoiserie (Ahsahta Press, 2012). E S S AY

Open Page

OPEN PAGEwith Chris Womersley Where are you happiest?

Probably swimming in an ocean pool on the New South Wales coast. I love doing a few laps in these amazing spots. For me it’s almost the ultimate pleasure.

What is your favourite film? Two-Lane Blacktop.

And your favourite book?

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

Cleaning out my flat recently I offloaded quite a few books that – after carrying them around for twenty years – I finally admitted I would probably never read again. Among them were quite a few Paul Auster novels. I had a huge crush on his work when I was younger, but feel they have outlived their appeal for me.

This depends on the week or month or year that you ask me. At the moment, it’s Moby-Dick, a book that contains pretty much everything.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

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

It’s a little lean in Australia, but it’s very tough here, on account of the small size of the literary world. There seems to be a lot of people reviewing their friends. Authors are quick to take offence but, really, we probably should be tougher.

I think a dinner party with Charles Baudelaire, Salvador Dalí, and Joan of Arc would be quite a hoot.

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

I hate the word ‘nice’. ‘Nice’ is the worst. But we should bring back ‘palaver’. Yes, more ‘palaver’, please.

Who is your favourite author?

I still love Charles Dickens. His ability to tell a great tale is almost unsurpassed, and I admire his ability to move between registers – from comic to tragic, for example, something that’s very hard to do. His characters are never less than engaging.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes in The Little Friend by Donna Tartt is pretty great. Tough, no-nonsense, smart. Scarily smart, as she is described.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

I love a really florid imagination, a trait that, unfortunately, is not as common as you’d expect – particularly in Australian writing.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Crime and Punishment and The Magic Faraway Tree. 24 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

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The dishes, the internet, and my own insecurity.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

And writers’ festivals?

I don’t tend to go to them a great deal. I’m interested in books – authors not so much.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

Of course. There’s always something to learn from hearing the different ways in which people read your work.

Are artists valued in our society? Ha! No. We’re the worst.

What are you working on now?

Nothing in particular, as yet. I have ideas for around half a dozen novels and stories that I’m fiddling with, waiting for one to really take hold of me. ‘Drift, wait and obey,’ as Rudyard Kipling said.

Chris Womersley is author of the short story collection A Lovely and Terrible Thing and the novels City of Crows, Cairo, Bereft, and The Low Road. His work has been translated into French, German, Polish, Croatian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. He lives in Melbourne.

Fiction

Ali Smith (©Basso CANNARSAOpale, Agence Opale, Alamy Stock Photo)

Jack Callil on Ali Smith Jeanette Winterson

Story

Ted Chiang

Frankissstein

‘Metal Language’

Exhalation

Nicole Abadee

Beejay Silcox

Lisa Bennett

FICTION

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘My face is all about you’

Urgency and fervency in the third novel in Ali Smith’s quartet

Jack Callil SPRING by Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton, $29.99 pb, 352 pp, 9780241207055

ncertainty is the new norm. Nationalist rhetoric is rife. Donald Trump is running for the US presidency. It’s June 2016 and the Brexit referendum has dazed the international community, heralding the start of the United Kingdom’s glacial extraction from the European Union. Amid the turmoil, Scottish novelist Ali Smith releases Autumn, the first, she foreshadows, of a seasonal quartet intended to capture the unstable ‘state of the nation’. A playful yet disquieting story set against a backdrop of xenophobia and heightened security, it is promptly hailed as the ‘first great post-Brexit novel’. Smith begins writing voraciously, hurrying to keep step with reality, and releases Winter (2017) soon after. ‘God was dead’ begins the surreal, Dickens-inspired Christmas tale, one featuring a disembodied floating head and a piece of land suspended above the dining table. And now we have Spring. Richard Lease, an old television and film director based in Scotland, is abandoning his life. He has quit work on a spurious, sexed-up fictionalisation of the meeting of writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke, and is mourning the death of his closest friend, Patricia ‘Paddy’

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Heal. First, though, we meet Paddy, a witty, charismatic, preternaturally intelligent woman. She is also a scriptwriter, a rarity who, in her films, could make ‘something real happen’. Following her death, Richard becomes disillusioned and takes a train as far is it will take him. Next we meet Brittany Hall, a ‘DCO’ at an ‘IRC’ run by the ‘HO’ employed by ‘SA4A’ – or, translated from the Orwellian, a detainee officer at an immigration centre. (The security firm SA4A, i.e. SAFER, is the erector of the mysterious, barbed-wire enclosure in Autumn and the employer of Arthur in Winter.) At the IRC, Brittany monitors the asylum seekers, those interned for ‘years, years and years’ in a place ‘built for 72-hour detention at most’. She is aware that ‘something terrible was happening’, either to herself or to the world at large, but now, as if ‘beyond perspex’, it feels ‘quite far away’. One day a young girl in a school uniform walks into the centre, bypassing security like a ghost. When she leaves, the manager orders all the toilets to be cleaned. No one knows why. Brittany soon meets the girl, a discerning twelve-year-old named Florence Smith, and together they too climb aboard a train. In Spring, Smith asks us to confront some uncomfortable realities. The

novel has a greater political fervency and moral urgency know that our identities are fluid, our self-perception than its predecessors. The writing, while retaining the malleable and unfixed. Brittany, who half-jokingly refers light, spirited Smithian style, is polemic. The first words, to herself as ‘the machine’, is told by Florence not to ‘Now what we don’t want is Facts’, build into a deafen- worry: ‘we’ll oil you and adapt you and upgrade you to ing list of social media’s pervasive demands. ‘SHUT a new way of working’. The characters in Spring, as in its predecessors, hapUP just shut the fUck Up can someone tape her mouth shut’ opens a later chapter, a screed of recognisable hate pen upon different artists and their work. This in turn speech directed at women both online and off. Yet the assists their reconstitution. Smith’s frequent ekphrastic defining focus of the narrative is the global treatment of renderings of art throughout the series exemplify her refugees. Smith’s indignation at indefinite detention and belief in its value amid a climate of uncertainty. Daniel the use of refugees as political fodder is palpable. ‘My Gluck collects the ‘arty art’ of British pop-art painter face is all about you,’ one passage reads, ‘My face trodden Pauline Boty; Sophia Cleves adores the sculptures of in mud. My face bloated by sea. What my face means Barbara Hepworth. In a gallery, Richard happens upon is not your face. By all means. You’re welcome.’ Smith, the vast chalk works of Tacita Dean. He stands before who has partaken in Refugee Tales, where volunteers be- The Montafon Letter, a depiction of an avalanche crashing friend and support immigration detainees, has presum- down a mountain so immense ‘the wall became mountain ably seen and heard some unforgettable things. There and the mountain became a kind of wall’. In response, is little ambiguity in what she is trying to say in Spring. Richard sums up its gravity by stammering ‘Fuck me’. Occasionally, this feels didactic. ‘Being British’ is all about ‘keeping people out’. ‘Strangers are more dangerous than ever.’ ‘Young’ and ‘mixed race people’ are treated as invisible by ‘certain white people’. These jugular jabs won’t appeal to everyone, especially those looking for the subtler tones of Autumn and Winter. Yet, it is difficult to shake the feeling that this fourth-wall-breaking frankness is Smith’s intention. Fiction tends to satisfy once its message is absorbed, decoded, and understood. Florence writes stories in a notebook (which The Montafon Letter, Tacita Dean (photograph courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, appear interspliced throughout London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris) Spring). In one of them, a woman is forced to dance to her death, Spring is a luminous tale, one striving to be the axe sacrificially. Refusing, she upbraids them: ‘I’m not your symbol. Go and lose yourself or find yourself in some with which to crack the frozen, post-Brexit, post-truth other story.’ Maybe Smith doesn’t want to hide a face sea around us. It comes at a pivotal time, when nations, and their peoples, are folding in on themselves. We live bloated by sea in a metaphor. Smith is trying carve out a roadmap for us, a means in the world of Spring. This is no wild fiction for Ausby which to effect real change. As in much of her work – tralians, who are all too familiar with the internment of The Accidental (2005), Girl Meets Boy (2007), How To Be asylum seekers. The direction in which we are steering Both (2014) – such changes begin with characters gradu- ourselves is the crux of this narrative: our choices deterally understanding their own capacity to reinvent them- mine whether we will bring ourselves together or further selves, to escape their situation. Smith’s radiant, near- inure ourselves to division and indifference. In one passage, Richard watches as a train’s wheels angelic figures – her ‘disruptors’, according to Olivia Laing – help facilitate these revelations. In Autumn, come into contact with mud. ‘Even the machine has to the worldly, 101-year-old Daniel Gluck befriends the encounter nature, not even it can escape the earth,’ he young and miserable Elisabeth Demand; in Winter, the reflects. ‘There’s something reassuring in that.’ Perhaps radiant Lux helps thaw Sophia Cleves’s icy Christmas. this is Smith’s lasting question: are we nature, or have In Spring, Paddy is that irreplaceable spirit for Richard, we become the machine? g and Florence is a purifying light to Brittany – as well as to anyone else she happens to meet. Smith wants us to Jack Callil is Assistant Editor at ABR. FICTION

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Victor & Ry Nicole Abadee FRANKISSSTEIN: A LOVE STORY

by Jeanette Winterson

Jonathan Cape $29.99 pb, 352 pp, 9781787331419

hat distinguishes man from machines? What is artificial life, death, progress? These are just some of the questions Jeanette Winterson explores in her brilliant new novel, Frankissstein, a modern take on Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Two warnings: first, the structure is complex, as the narrative segues (at times, unclearly) between the early 1800s and the present; second, readers unfamiliar with Frankenstein will find parts of the novel difficult to follow, especially when Winterson quotes from Frankenstein without explaining that she is doing so. Those riders aside, Frankissstein is a rich, multilayered book that is at once a transgender ‘love story’ (the subtitle), a warning about the perils of unchecked scientific progress, and a frightening look at the potential of artificial intelligence. First, a brief recap of Frankenstein and its context. In 1814 seventeen-yearold Mary Godwin scandalised English society by running away with the married poet Percy Shelley. In 1816 they spent a summer at Lake Geneva, with Lord Byron. There, Mary wrote Frankenstein, about Victor Frankenstein, a doctor who creates an animate creature, only to be filled with remorse when his creation turns into a murdering monster. When the monster argues that he was born good and only became evil after being abandoned by Victor and spurned by other humans, Victor is forced to acknowledge his responsibility as a creator. ‘Learn from me’, he warns, ‘how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.’ Frankenstein, published in 1818, was an instant success, and has long been regarded as a cautionary tale about the dangers inherent in the unfettered advance of science. With the advent of AI, that issue is today more important than ever, so much so that a newly annotated

edition of Frankenstein was recently published especially for ‘scientists, engineers, and creators’. Winterson’s Frankissstein is also concerned with progress for its own sake, without heed to consequences. ‘What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?’, one character asks. Frankissstein consists of two stories told in tandem. One is based on the true story of Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein at Lake Geneva. The other, fictional, is set in the present, in England and the United States. It features Ry Shelley (most of Winterson’s names are a riff on Frankenstein), a transgender doctor studying the impact of robots on human health, Victor Stein, a handsome, charming AI professor on a mission to revive the brains of dead people, and Ron Lord, a sleazy creator of lifelike sexbots. In the Mary Shelley story, Winterson reimagines lively philosophical discussions between Mary and her companions on subjects such as, ‘If a human being ever succeeded in reanimating a body … would the spirit return?’ and ‘if automata had intelligence … would that be sufficient to call it alive?’ As they discuss the Luddites (textile workers) in England who are smashing the looms that are taking their jobs, Mary warns that, ‘The march of the machines is now and forever …What we invent we cannot uninvent.’ The modern story echoes these concerns. It opens with Ry at a Robotics expo to interview Ron about his sexbots. Ron explains that you can rent or buy, and that there are five models (all women), including the top-of-the-line Deluxe, which has a vocabulary of two hundred words (‘some men want more than sex’). She will listen to her man talk endlessly about football without interrupting, and then say something like, ‘Ryan, you’re so clever.’ The ideal woman. Like the monster in Frankenstein, the sexbots are nameless. The potential implications for romantic relationships between men and women are crystal clear. Ry’s next appearance is at a lecture by Victor on the future world of AI. He explains that ‘intelligence will no longer be dependent on a body’ and that humans will co-exist with ‘non-biological life

forms’created by them.The narrative then shifts back to Ry and Victor’s first meeting, at Alcor in Arizona (a real place), the world leader in cryonic technology. Victor explains that he is interested in ‘neuro-preservation’ – the preservation |of brains – and that his dream is to end death by bringing the brain back to consciousness, independent of the (dead) body. Victor and Ry start a relationship, and soon Ry is providing Victor with body parts for his experiments. Before long Victor has shown Ry his secret underground laboratory, where robots experiment on brains to try to work out how to revive them. Frankissstein works on so many levels. Winterson’s portrayal of the love story between Ry and Victor, neither of whom has experienced love before, is deeply moving. Despite Ry’s misgivings about Victor, whom Ry sees as a ‘highfunctioning madman’, Ry finds solace in him – Victor’s bed is ‘Two square metres of safety … where I don’t need to explain …’ Through Ry, Winterson explores sensitively what it means to be transgender – the duality, as well as the sense of liberation in being able to create a body for yourself that reflects who you are. Like Frankenstein, Frankissstein is also a warning about the perils of scientific progress in the absence of careful consideration of the consequences. Do we really want female sex dolls that never say no and don’t answer back? Or brains to be revived and ‘uploaded’ into AI robots or other forms? At one point, Ry asks Victor, ‘Do you really want augmented humans, superhumans, uploaded humans?’ Winterson’s answer is clear. ‘We’re not ready for the future you want.’ g

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

‘This is true’ Alison Broinowski TYPHOON KINGDOM

by Matthew Hooton

UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 282 pp, 9781760800307

n the May 2019 issue of Quadrant, its literary editor, Barry Spurr, inveighed against the ‘inane expansion of creative writing courses’. Professor Spurr’s scholarly accomplishments in the study of poetry and Australian fiction do not include creative writing. (His resignation from the University of Sydney was accepted in December 2014.) While many Australian authors have spectacularly succeeded without degrees in creative writing, such courses have certainly helped others – including Nam Le, Ceridwen Dovey, and Matthew Hooton – to write prize-winning fiction. Before studying creative writing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where he now teaches in the course at Adelaide University, Hooton worked for four years as an editor and teacher in South Korea. Typhoon Kingdom is his second novel about Korea, following Deloume Road, which won the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’ in 2010. The US forces who arrived in Korea in 1945 and fought there in 1951–53 called it ‘the hermit kingdom’, and the label stuck. God created war, Mark Twain proposed, so that Americans would learn geography. History too, perhaps. But Korea was never hermetically sealed. Centuries earlier, Koreans returned from China with foreign knowledge; the Manchu brought more outside influences; Scots, Australians, and 30 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

Americans were there from the late nineteenth century as missionaries; and Japanese invaded and colonised the peninsula. Less well known is the Dutch connection that occurred in 1627 when a ship’s captain, Jan Jansz. Weltevree, was shipwrecked off Korea. He was kept there for the rest of his life as an adviser to the Joseon court, married a Korean, and they had two children. He acted as translator and interlocutor after twenty-two more shipwrecked Dutch sailors, including Hendrick Hamel, arrived. Survivors from the Sparrowhawk who landed at Jeju Island in 1653 were later taken to Seoul. They were kept there for thirteen years, until seven of them escaped to Nagasaki. An epigraph from Hamel’s Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653–1666 opens Hooton’s novel, which, without his saying so, is loosely based on Hamel’s experiences. Two episodes in Korean history, beginning in 1653 and in 1942, revolve and conjoin like yin-yang symbols to construct Hooton’s novel. In the first, van Persie is the only survivor on Jeju, where he is passed to a local shaman who puts him on display in chains along with deformed fish, birds, and animals, for profit. His experiences there, and on the long journey on foot through forests and villages to Seoul, are as traumatic for him as for his guide, Yi Hae-jo, a local fisherman who has never seen the capital, just as most of Seoul’s citizens have never seen a ‘yellow-haired foreigner’. When van Persie meets Weltevree and his six companions from the ship in Seoul, he can scarcely pronounce Dutch words. Van Persie encounters Korea’s language, culture, and the spirit world that is as true for the Jeju people as their material surroundings. He cherishes the memory of a woman in the fishing village who treated his wounds, while his companion on the journey, Hae-jo, communicates with the Jeju Grandmother spirit about his coming fate at the hands of the king. As they pass deserted villages and a leper colony, Hae-jo reflects that evil is a great shaper of fates, this is true, ‘but it also lives in the hearts of men’. Four centuries later, in the second

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

episode, also told in the present tense, ‘the General’ – Douglas MacArthur – is in retreat, Korea is under Japanese rule, and ‘comfort women’ are recruited to service Hirohito’s troops. Men like Kim Won-jae from remote villages join the resistance, eventually hearing that two large bombs have hit Japan. They are not sorry, and MacArthur speculates about using atomic bombs on ‘Communists’ everywhere. Then the Korean War begins, over a line arbitrarily drawn by the Americans just north of Seoul. A Korean woman who can treat the sick survives the Japanese brothels, sustained by communicating with her grandmother’s spirit, and carrying from one war to another the memory of a blue-eyed Korean fighter, Won-jae, for whom she searches in the fog of war. Hooton’s matched tranches of Korean history are leavened with shrewd asides on today’s world. ‘This is true’, the struggling Koreans assure one another, even when they don’t believe their leaders, don’t know what they are fighting for, or what is true. Perhaps, the Korean resisters say, they would be better off with the leader of the north: he at least fought against the Japanese. Are they waiting for death, they ask, on the wrong side of the river? Their Commander tells them the North Korean leader is not a hero but an imposter. Washington tells them the enemy are ‘Commies fighting like savages’, ‘a Mongol horde from the north’, and ‘an evil race hellbent on wiping out freedom’. War without end, thinks MacArthur. This is true. What has changed? The requirements of studying creative writing for a PhD are different from the challenges other novelists face. Hooton has produced results that are informed by research and experience beyond the usual boundaries. Teaching creative writing gives novelists, dramatists, and poets an income while they pursue their craft. In these straitened times of contested truth, if we do not encourage their work and that of their students, we will not share the benefits of their knowledge and imagination. g Alison Broinowski, formerly an Australian diplomat, has lived and worked in Japan and South Korea.

Less is more Lisa Bennett EXHALATION

by Ted Chiang

Picador $29.99 pb, 350 pp, 9781529014518

ainstream science fiction is a genre that thrives on quantity as much as quality. Such narratives pose the deepest questions; as Douglas Adams once famously put it, these are stories about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Why publish stand-alone space operas when storylines, character arcs, worlds, and revenues can be elaborated across trilogies? Why stop at one time-travel trilogy when fans are willing to buy prequels and sequels and sanctioned spin-offs? Why limit yourself to one mindbending book every few years when annual titles will boost author profiles and sales? The motto upheld by much of the publishing industry nowadays seems to be more is more. Except when it comes to Ted Chiang. Since 1990, Chiang’s entire body of work has consisted of seventeen stories. ‘Tower of Babylon’, his first published novelette, won the Nebula Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1991 – two of the most prestigious prizes in the field – and set an extraordinary trend for his fiction that continues unabated. Over the past twenty-nine years, Chiang’s writing has won four Hugos, four Nebulas, four Locus Awards, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Eight of these pieces were reprinted in his début collection, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), which was translated into twenty-one languages, an astounding achievement for a small book released into a market that is generally allergic to sole-author short story collections. Fourteen years later, its titular novella was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film Arrival . The advanced reading copy of his long-awaited second book, Exhalation, proclaims: ‘No living writer is quite like Ted Chiang.’ This smacks of marketing hyperbole, but can also be read as plain truth.

Chiang is remarkable not just for the many accolades mentioned above but because in an age of social media and self-promotion, his work speaks for itself. There is no Ted Chiang author site; no Facebook or Twitter or Instagram accounts. He earns a living as a technical writer in the software industry, which allows him the freedom to be, in his own words, ‘an occasional writer’ of fiction. Unlike those whose livelihoods, identities, reputations, and longevity in the business rely on mass production, Chiang clearly isn’t motivated by excess. Ideas seem more important to Chiang than industry expectations. The nine stories collected in Exhalation – seven (award-winning) reprints and two works original to this book – are essentially thought experiments, pieces that often have the tenor, pacing, and voice of fine philosophical essays. Chiang’s tone has been described as calm and matter of fact, his style as non-existent, brutal, and elegantly minimalist. Every piece in Exhalation is certainly frank, carefully considered both in conception and in expression. There is a brief but palpable pause at the end of each sentence in which the author seems to contemplate the perfect combination of words to follow those he’s just written, assessing them logically, as a computer program might, before writing them down. This impression of objectivity – of cool rationality and narratorial distance – heightens the sense that these are works of intellectual rather than fanciful imagination. ‘Omphalos’, for instance, employs the Copernican principle that humans aren’t at the centre of the universe, not to refute ideas of young-earth creationism, but rather to envision what the natural world would have to look like in order to confirm the hypothesis that our planet is of recent origin. In this hypothetical context, ‘Omphalos’ asks, what if science proves that the God who created Earth exists, but that humanity was merely an afterthought He has abandoned? In barely three pages, ‘What’s Expected of Us’ explores the consequences of discovering, irrefutably, that humans don’t have free will. At greater length, ‘Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom’ flips the script, using the ‘many worlds’

interpretation of quantum mechanics (which imagines our world constantly splitting into infinite versions of itself ) to demonstrate that we do indeed have free will, while dramatising the notion that each choice not only diverts the path of our lives, but creates parallel realities in which our other selves may decide to choose differently. Meanwhile, a time machine that obeys Einstein’s theory of relativity in ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ offers characters the pretense of choice, the semblance of free will – they may walk through a ‘magic’ door in the merchant’s shop basement and walk out that same door in that same basement, but when they do it’s twenty years earlier – yet in this story it’s fate, not free will, that rules their futures no matter what they do in their pasts. All of the concepts explored in Exhalation could have been written as fascinating academic papers – yet they aren’t. They are played out in nine incredibly engaging narratives with conclusions that are often perfect, which no doubt accounts for their enormous appeal. After all, what is the purpose of science fiction but to situate and interrogate the place of humanity in the past, present, and future; to observe the impact our species has made on this world and to extrapolate what, if anything, comes after if it can no longer sustain us; and, most of all, to take us beyond our own narrow realities, beyond our fallible memories and vulnerable bodies, beyond ourselves, in order to ‘Contemplate the marvel that is existence’. Life, the universe, and everything. g

Lisa Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University. FICTION

EIGHT LIVES

by Susan Hurley

Affirm Press $32.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781925712766

ight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death. Tran was the ‘golden boy’: tall, handsome, hailed as a boat person who made good by becoming a brilliant surgeon, then a brilliant immunologist. Having created ‘SuperMab’, a monoclonal antibody wonder-drug he prefers to modestly call ‘Eight’, Tran teams up with wannabe venture capitalist Charlie Cunningham, heir to a business empire, who is trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his family after being conned out of millions by a dodgy software engineer. Seven months after Charlie overhypes SuperMab in a video media release, Tran is dead. Though inspired by a disastrous medical trial in the United Kingdom in 2006, this is an original characterdriven thriller. Hurley’s narrators don’t just tell their own stories and Tran’s, they describe the arcane worlds of Melbourne’s social hierarchies from very different perspectives. Tran’s sister, Natalie, his research assistant Rosa, and his vegan activist girlfriend, Abigail, come from working-class suburbs, while ‘Foxy’ Renard is a publicist for the uber-rich Cunninghams and Tran’s sponsors, the Southcotts. The narrators’ varied educational backgrounds (Miles Southcott is an MD, Rosa a PhD candidate) also allow Hurley to convey the science necessary to the plot with a minimum of jargon, and there are no lectures slowing down the pace – which really takes off about halfway through the novel, as the increasingly suspicious circumstances of Eight’s trial and Tran’s death are revealed. Stephen Dedman 32 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

Truth and fiction Kerryn Goldsworthy FLED

by Meg Keneally

Echo Publishing $29.99, 394 pp, 9781760680275

n 1961 the great Australian poet Judith Wright published an influential essay called ‘The Upside-down Hut’ that would puzzle contemporary readers. The basis of its argument was that Australia felt shame about its convict origins, and that we needed to move on. And we have: since 1961 the representation of the convict era in fiction and on screen has undergone a shift. Having convict ancestry used to be regarded as a cause for shame; now amateur genealogists hunt down convicts among their ancestors and celebrate when they find them. Two 1960s novels in particular, Hal Porter’s The Tilted Cross (1961) and Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, showed the convicts of the earliest Australian colonies in a newly sympathetic light, and were followed in the 1970s by such onscreen treatments as the television series Against the Wind (1978), and in the 1980s by Robert Hughes’s unexpectedly bestselling and highly coloured history The Fatal Shore (1986). Keneally’s daughter Meg is no newcomer, either to fiction writing or to this historical subject matter and its moral and ethical dimensions. She has collaborated with her father on a series of co-written ‘convict crime’ novels: the

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Monsarrat Series features ex-con detective Hugh Monsarrat and his faithful housekeeper, Hannah Mulrooney, who embark on solving crimes in penal colonies, a different place for each book. Meg Keneally has been busy, for she and her father have produced a book a year in this series since 2016, with the latest published at the same time as this novel, her first solo effort. Fled is a fictionalised version of a true convict tale, featuring one of the toughest women in Australian history. Mary Bryant, identified in the records as a ‘forest dweller’ and ‘highwaywoman’, and one of the few women of that era to score her own entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, was convicted of assault and robbery and was originally sentenced to hang, a sentence later commuted to seven years’ transportation. Arriving with the First Fleet, she made the best she could of conditions at Sydney Cove, acquiring a useful husband and a hut, but in 1791 she escaped the starving colony and, with the aid of advice and supplies from a Dutch sea captain, put out to sea in a small boat – audaciously stolen from Governor Arthur Phillip himself – with her husband, her two children, and nine other convicts. They were bound for the Dutch-held port of Kupang in West Timor, where Captain William Bligh and his companions had arrived two years earlier in an open boat, after the mutiny on the Bounty.This is by no means the end of her story; her life continued to be colourful and intermittently tragic. Keneally distances her heroine a little from history, changing her name to Jenny Trelawney, tweaking the real-life plot here and there, and boldly inventing details of conversation and feeling that could only be guessed at. Many true stories sicken and die in the alien atmosphere of fiction, for life does not happen in the same shape as fiction or for the same reasons, but the original story is full of fascinating characters as well as dramatic and startling incidents, and Keneally’s perceptive and empathetic imagining of those characters is the best thing about this book. She colours in and fleshes out the gaps where the stark historical record is silent. So we are given the action-

packed story of how Jenny fell into a life of crime, some detailed backstory about her skill with boats that goes to explain the unlikely success of her escape, and a magnificent portrait of the colourful and eccentric James Boswell, biographer to Samuel Johnson, who, as a rich and influential citizen, really did take up Mary Bryant’s cause. In particular, the treatment of Jenny’s relationships with men is done in a way that’s both realistic and sympathetic. She forges unions for pragmatic reasons, but there are a number of male characters – including Richard Aldred, the character based on Boswell – who like her simply for her intelligence and guts. It is she who pushes for marriage with the fisherman Daniel, a man she genuinely likes but also perceives as an asset. The delicate and intriguing way that Keneally develops the dynamics of this relationship, in all its shifting complexity, makes the plot’s dramatic turning point seem both terrible and inevitable. Keneally also tackles the fraught notion of colonisation as invasion, and again her treatment of this subject is mostly complex and nuanced, though she may from time to time be idealising the relations between the Aboriginal people and the white invaders; in particular, it seems unlikely that relations between the women were as co-operative or as respectful as they are depicted here. Like all good historical novels, this one has a message for the present: disruptive technologies create human tragedies. The reason why the English jails were overflowing in the 1770s was that the Industrial Revolution had put so many out of work, creating an underclass that was literally starving and had to steal to live in a society that offered them no help. In the twenty-first century, we are seeing the results of a technological revolution that has, again, put many out of work, and when such a situation is badly managed, the results are unpredictable and potentially dire. Keneally wisely does not spell this out, but it’s an idea that haunts the book. g Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’.

No More Excuses

‘Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling. Sometimes we just simply have to find a way. The moment we decide to fulfil something, we can do anything. And I’m sure that the moment we start behaving as if we were in an emergency, we can avoid climate and ecological catastrophe. Humans are very adaptable: we can still fix this. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We must start today. We have no more excuses.’ From Greta Thunberg’s speech to the House of Commons, published by the Guardian, 23 April 2019 FICTION

STORY

Metal Language by Beejay Silcox

am a girl who knows how to hold a gun. On weekends, Dad drives me out to the pistol club, while Mum pulls white-sapped weeds from the garden. She plants natives that can handle the salt in the air; angular, bristling plants with angular, bristling names: banksia, grevillea, bottlebrush. A line of Geraldton Wax along the verge to replace some mean and blighted rose bushes. She knows we won’t stay long enough to see them tall. We never stay. She plants them anyway. There is always a pistol club, and so I pack my gun box and Dad and I drive out, away from the windchurned coast and deep into the canola. In a converted dairy shed we stand next to each other and shoot at paper targets alongside sharp-eyed farmers and retired cops. They are men with enormous hands and wide, sun-ruddy faces, and they are always watching me. There’s never been a girl in the shed. Wives, sometimes; sons, often. But the men never bring their daughters. A girl is alchemy. I change something, curdle it. ‘First time for everything,’ they say. And there is. ‘Show us what you can do, sweetheart,’ they say. And I do.

34 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

I am still and quick and sharp as a new knife. The men can see it, but I can feel it – an immense, furious stillness. The sons are all bluster and noise. They shoot air-pellets at the blue-tongue lizards basking on tractor skeletons, and at the sunburned fruit on a feral lemon tree. When the match warden isn’t looking, they hold their pistols sideways like American rappers. They lock their elbows and fight the recoil so their shoulders punch backwards and their arms vault up. ‘Boom, motherfuckers!’ I take the recoil into my body. I use its bucking arc to set up my next shot, like dipping under a wave and surfacing. I balance the quiet weight of the gun across my arm and down my spine. I anchor it down, down bone after nested bone and into the floor, down through the concrete, down into the dirt. I speak this metal language. ‘Those boys can’t shoot for shit,’ Dad says as we drive home, his hand on my shoulder. He keeps it there and I shift the gears for him. We come home smelling of brass and wax and old fire. I clean my guns and slip them under my bed. I keep the key to my gun box in the top drawer of my desk, but you can unlock it with a screwdriver, or with the lid of

a cheap ballpoint pen. Port Arthur is still a year away. Mum comes home from her new gardening club with tomato seedlings and a sleepover invitation for me. She always does. It is what I am expected to want, and so I pack my sleeping bag and go. I always do. This time, there are three of them – friends since primary school. I’ve seen them waiting together at the bus stop in the mornings, rolling up their skirts and pulling at their school ties until they hang like striped nooses. They are not unkind to me. We watch a movie they’ve already seen and add our own toppings to frozen pizzas. We feed thin, bloodied ribbons of beef to a pet axolotl and stay up late doing the quizzes from Dolly magazine (Which mythical creature are you? Are you a secret fashion genius? Are you sex-ready?). But I curdle something here, too. At night they wear matching, oversized men’s T-shirts with the necks scissored out so they slip down low over their shoulders. They stand in a row at the bathroom mirror and I can see the suntan lines from their bikini tops – three white bowknots, burned into three golden backs. They look like they could be undone. I wear a purple nightshirt with a picture of a grey rabbit in Buddy Holly glasses. Underneath it reads ‘clever bunny’. Sometimes, during a match, an ejecting shell will catch white-hot against my skin – on the dipped ledge of my collarbone, between my new breasts. I have trained myself not to notice. If the throat of my shirt was cut out, these girls would see blisters and powder burns. Under the gun shed’s corrugated roof, my body is easy to understand – there are parts I must tame, and parts I must forget. I wear a pair of industrial headphones that makes my gun sound like it is spitting a cherry stone from its pursed metal mouth. I wear a pair of clear glasses with the left lens scrubbed foggy with sandpaper, so I won’t squint when I look down the sights with my shooting eye. I stand right side on to the target, left hand hooked into the front of my jeans to hold the weight of my non-shooting arm, to keep my shoulders low and straight. ‘If you don’t wear a belt, you can just stick your digits down your knickers,’ one of the boys joked once, cupping his crotch and wiggling his fingers. ‘But don’t get too carried away or you’ll end up with fish fingers!’ I wonder what this set of smooth-shouldered girls would have said. I wish I knew how to ask them. I don’t sleep. I am tired of new noise. The prowling vigilance of a strange dog, the industrious bubbling of the aquarium. Pair after pair of poster eyes – boys whose names I should probably know by now. And the breathy dreaming of these warm, sleeping girls with their knotted necks. They dream so loud. The best shooters shoot between heartbeats. A heartbeat echoes across the body – a subcutaneous twitch. And a twitch is all it takes to throw off a shot. I push my non-shooting hand down flat and hard against

my belly until I can feel my pulse burrowing its way up. But it’s so fast, too fast. I step over the unvigilant girls. I walk past the feather-gilled walking fish and the glossy, nameless boys, past the dog. I walk home along the beach. My footsteps churn up phosphorescent grains of mineral sand that flicker out before I can catch them. I walk up high into the dunes where the Geraldton Wax is fully grown, with its tight-budded fists of hot pink. It still smells of the sun, a hard, peppery green. And there’s fox musk, too – a loose thread of stink. I roll out my sleeping bag, lie back, and push my hand against my belly again. The ocean is black and slick as patent leather, but I can feel the dark muscle of it, even from up here. I use the sound of the surf to slow myself down. When I get home, I will let myself in by levering the flywire from my bedroom window frame and sliding up the bottom window pane. Mum never locks it, because she knows I’m coming home. My bedroom walls are covered in targets – line after line of black circles the size of bread plates. I’ve saved my best scores since I started shooting, and stuck glow-in-the-dark stars over the bullet holes. With the lights off, you can see the shots pull in tighter and tighter. ‘It’s the story of the universe, chickadee,’ Dad said the first time he saw them all lit green. ‘This is what they reckon is going to happen at the very end. Everything will keep creeping closer and closer for billions of years until all of space is scrunched up in a tiny ball, like a sheet of cosmic newspaper.’ ‘And then what will happen?’ ‘It starts all over again, I guess.’ Soon the men will start calling me Annie Oakley. They always do. They will bring me back issues of mailorder shooting magazines, and equipment they don’t use anymore. A telescope, a set of barrel-cleaning brushes, an air pistol for backyard practice. They will help me mould the grip of my new competition .22 so that holding it feels like slipping into my own handshake. They will stand behind me and help hold my shoulders straight with those big, red hands pocked with skin-cancer scars. Their boys will start to try. And when I still beat them – and I will – their fathers will offer to buy Dad after-match beers in the clubhouse. But we never stay after the match is over. We never stay. You can feel their relief as I pack my guns. The unspoken cold of it shudders through the shed like recoil, and I don’t know how to dip underneath it. Not yet, but I’ll learn. We leave with bags of rind-heavy lemons from that wild tree, lead pellets lodged in their sinewy hearts. g Beejay Silcox was the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow. She is an Australian writer, literary critic and cultural commentator. Her short fiction has been published internationally and recently anthologised in Meanjin A-Z: Fine fiction 1980 to now, and Best Summer Stories 2018. FICTION

Metempsychosis Amy Baillieu CROSSINGS

by Alex Landragin

Picador $32.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781760557256

didn’t write this review. I stole it. Or so a review that echoes the framing conceit of Alex Landragin’s elegant and unusual début might begin. This richly allusive, speculative historical novel opens with a preface from the book’s self-described ‘adopted parent’, the fictionalised ‘Alex Landragin’. Following the sudden death of the ‘Baroness’, an ardent and obsessive bibliophile with a keen interest in Charles Baudelaire, this ‘second-generation Parisian bookbinder’ finds himself in possession of a mysterious loose-leaf manuscript. Despite the Baroness’s strict injunction not to read it, he finally succumbs to curiosity and devours it in ‘one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine’. He discovers three separate stories: ‘The Education of a Monster’, a short work that appears to be by Baudelaire; ‘City of Ghosts’, a noir romance/thriller set in Paris on the eve of the German occupation; and ‘Tales of the Albatross’, the ‘strangest of the three’, an ‘autobiography of a kind of deathless enchantress’. Despite its unlikely contents, the document purports to be the lost manuscript that Walter Benjamin had with him while trying to escape occupied France in 1940. The bookbinder advises that there are ‘at least seven’ ways to interpret the text. It is at this point that the reader must decide how she wishes to proceed: with the book as 36 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

bound, or, by turning to page 150, for the start of the ‘Baroness sequence’, an alternate reading order that follows the ‘jumble of figures scrawled on the first page’ of the manuscript. Inspired by a tale once told to the author by poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe and also by stories written as part of Landragin’s blog, ‘The Daily Fiction Project’, for which he wrote and published a story daily for eight months, Crossings is a nuanced exploration of love, memory, and identity. Central to the puzzle-like narrative is the concept of metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, dubbed ‘crossing’. For a crossing to occur, the two participants must stare into each other’s eyes for several minutes until they experience a feeling of ‘frothy joy’, later described as ‘a most pleasant sensation, as if the inside of [their] body was suddenly no longer flesh and blood but a freshly poured glass of champagne, full of bubbles ascending … into the sky’. Depending on the circumstances, these crossings can be done with both participants remaining aware of the process, or ‘blind’ with only one fully aware of what has transpired. As a narrative device this is mostly successful, and it allows for a compelling overarching narrative to be threaded through the four discrete sections of the text. Crossings is a highly ambitious and inventive work, dense with historical and literary allusion and populated by fictional and historical figures including Baudelaire, Benjamin, Jeanne Duval, and Coco Chanel. Numerous others also make cameo appearances. There is much here to appeal to bibliophiles and literary-minded Francophiles, although the blend of truth and fiction can result in some uncomfortable moments, such as a brutal scene late in the novel involving the violent removal of teeth. By contrast, discovering the potential inspiration behind Chanel’s nauticalinspired clothing is entertaining. Crossing is not only an intriguing narrative device, Landragin also uses it to explore the impact that translating a soul from one body to another can have on identity and the self. After all, ‘the manner in which the soul adheres with the new body is never quite the same’. The well-travelled French-Armenian-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Australian author also explores ideas of exile (from one’s country, culture, and even one’s own body) through his characters’ peregrinations. Questions of privilege are examined through the lenses of gender, race, education, class, and appearance as his two central characters move through the world taking on, and being influenced by, new identities. Crossings is set across multiple locations, from the fictional island of Oaeetee to a plantation in antebellum America, but Paris is at its heart. Landragin describes the City of Light with familiarity and clear-eyed affection and to great atmospheric effect. Moments of beauty and brutality are studded through the narrative as the novel addresses the real and metaphorical horrors of war, slavery, colonisation, and occupation, as well as the solaces of art, literature, love, and knowledge. This remarkable book-loving novel is a celebration of the art and power of storytelling in which stories are variously described as being like ‘pearls on a necklace’ and ‘brightly painted carousel horses’. Crossings is brimming with references and allusions to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the works of Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allen Poe, and other literary and cultural touchstones. Elements of the narrative are also reminiscent of more contemporary works by David Mitchell, Claire North, and Jane Rawson. This is a playful, intricately plotted work with not one but two satisfying endings that still leave some questions tantalisingly unanswered. (Curious readers are encouraged to seek out a bloodthirstier version of the preface published by Catapult, as well as Landragin’s entertainingly parodic ‘Agent Query Letter #127’, in which he pitches his ‘unclassifiable literary mongrel’ to a hypothetical literary agent and alludes to the possibility of a sequel.) At its best, reading fiction offers its own kind of three-way crossing, between author, characters, and reader. At the end of Crossings, readers may find themselves temporarily doubting reality before gazing with a new curiosity, or apprehension, into the eyes of friends and lovers. g Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of ABR.

ETA Gabriel García Ochoa HOMELAND

by Fernando Aramburu, translated by Alfred MacAdam Picador $32.99 pb, 586 pp, 9781509858033

TA, a terrorist group formed in the late 1950s, was predominantly active in the Basque Country. Its name is an acronym in Basque for ‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’, which means ‘Basque Country and Freedom’. Fernando Aramburu’s Homeland is not the first novel to deal with the decades of ETA’s terror. Other works, like Martutene (2012) by Ramón Saizarbitoria, also delved into the car bombs and sporadic gunfire on sunny afternoons, ETA’s separatist aim to create a socialist state independent from Spain, and the psychological carnage that was left behind. Previous novels by Aramburu himself have touched on the subject: Fires with Lemon (1996) and Slow Years (2012). But Homeland is the first Basque novel to garner international attention and to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Part of this has to do with timing. ETA came to a ceasefire in 2011, and the group was finally disbanded in 2018. Aramburu’s novel was published in Spanish in 2016, striking a topical chord in its readers. Homeland unfolds close to San Sebastián, in an unnamed small town that represents everyday life in the Basque Country. Txato, a successful businessman, receives letters from ETA demanding money. At first Txato complies, but when he is no longer able to pay, the demands are followed by threats. Graffiti appears, denouncing Txato as a traitor. Everyone loves Txato, but everyone is petrified to say so publicly for fear of what ETA might do. His closest friend, Joxian, stops talking to him because Joxian’s son, Joxe Mari, has joined ETA. The novel begins with Txato’s assassination, and much of its plot hinges on whether it was Joxe Mari who killed him. Aramburu shows his phenomenal craft in unravelling the plot. The

narrative structure is non-linear; it is an outward-flowing spiral with Txato’s murder at the centre. The story orbits around the killing, sometimes appearing to pull away but always coming back to it. There is a continuous use of flashbacks and flashforwards, almost from chapter to chapter, to delve into the lives of those close to Txato. This is done with virtuosic clarity; in less accomplished hands the storyline would be a baroque mess. Instead, the novel has one hundred and twenty-five chapters that read like short stories of almost Chekhovian intensity. Almost, because one cannot have Chekhovian intensity without strong characters. Even though Homeland is a pageturner, its characters are at best superficially profound; at worst, profoundly superficial. The goodies are good, the baddies are bad. Xabier, Txato’s son, is a stoic surgeon, more stoic after the loss of his father. Bittori, Txato’s widow, is consumed by bitterness and grief. Gorka, Joxe Mari’s brother, finds the town’s militant atmosphere suffocating because he is a closeted gay who likes to read. His mother, Miren, is a devout nationalist, but we never quite fathom why she thinks the way she does. Then there is Joxe Mari, the weakest character in the book. Joxe Mari is a bully and a brute. His nationalism is tautological: he loves the Basque Country because he loves the Basque Country. He is passionate about blowing things up and speaking Basque (even though he does both poorly). He doesn’t seem to understand ETA’s political ideology beyond the notion that the Spanish exploit the Basque and that only violence can lead to the region’s successful independence. There are feeble moments of ambiguity in Joxe Mari, as when he hesitates before his first assassination and feels sick afterwards, but these don’t last. Worse, there is no moral ambivalence to help us spin a thread of empathy toward the character. Joxe Mari is not a psychopath, that much is clear. So why does a ‘normal’ person engage in the horrors of terrorism? What existential motivations drive his actions? This isn’t Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov trying to prove, through his murderous arrogance, that he is not

an insignificant wretch, but exceptional, and good. We are not offered the obscene contradictions of Maximilien Aue, the brilliant, unrepentant SS officer in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, a German nationalist of French heritage, an aesthete of impeccable taste with a PhD in jurisprudence, who is also a sadistic voyeur. What ideology can shine a light bright enough to convince Joxe Mari that the atrocities he commits are, in fact, positive? Aramburu’s answer seems to be that violence is barbaric, futile, and, above all, stupid, and that only those stupid enough to believe otherwise engage in it. Perhaps, so close to ETA’s ceasefire, rather than an aesthetic exploration of terrorism, Homeland is a plot-driven novel that aims to bring closure to the families and friends of ETA’s victims and to hammer the last nail on ETA’s coffin. From a moral point of view, this is laudable; from a literary one, boring. Homeland is Aramburu’s first novel translated into English. Alfred MacAdam’s previous translations include works by Latin American titans of the likes of Carlos Fuentes, Alejo Carpentier, and Mario Vargas Llosa. MacAdam is a brilliant translator and scholar, and his Homeland is generally good, but there are a handful of jarring turns of phrase and malapropisms that seem at odds with the otherwise elegant style of the book. The text is peppered with irritating typographical errors, which, in fairness to MacAdam, are probably editorial faux pas. g

Gabriel García Ochoa was born in Mexico City and teaches Global Studies, Translation, and Comparative Literature at Monash University. FICTION

Crawling with stories Four new Young Adult novels

Emily Gallagher

Grant’s The Honeyman and the Hunter, and Helena Fox’s How It Feels to Float – showcase the continued ingenuity of Australian fiction writers in confronting the social and political issues facing today’s youth. Together these novels dismantle caricatures of queerness, mental illness, and racism, and explore questions of belonging, power, grief, family, and love.

n 20 August 2018 the ABC aired a ‘special literary edition’ of Q&A during the Melbourne Writers Festival. It had a stellar line-up: John Marsden, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Sofie Laguna, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Trent Dalton. Viewers must have been optimistic. Were Q&A’s producers indulging in a long hour of lively literary debate? Unfortunately, they were not. But even though politics overshadowed much of the discussion that evening, the panellists made a considerable effort to draw on their expertise as writers rather than as political commentators when answering questions from the audience. One of the most thought-provoking questions of the night came from Laguna, who wondered about the role of fiction given the issues we are facing as a society. Can fiction help us ‘inch a little closer to the truth’, as Marsden suggested? Can it help us interrogate the politics of fear and racism, or even inject new idealism into politics? Later in the episode, Tony Jones followed up with a question of his own, asking Laguna if it is the role of the writer to be a ‘provocateur’. Nodding thoughtfully, Laguna agreed that it was. While not all novelists have readily embraced the role of provocateur, many have been drawn to the novel’s power to provoke. Four new-release Young Adult novels – Alison Evans’s Highway Bodies, Astrid Scholte’s Four Dead Queens, Neil 38 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

f the four, Highway Bodies (Echo Publishing, $22.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781760685027) is most likely to surprise. This is the fourth book from Alison Evans, an emerging nonbinary author. Set in contemporary Melbourne, it features several queer and gender-non-conforming teenagers in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. In a post-The Walking Dead era, zombies will give some readers cold feet, but these mindless flesh-eating creatures have long held immense symbolic power in popular culture. They have represented all kinds of social anxieties, from fears of voodooism, communism, and nuclear war to the all-consuming force of capitalism. In Highway Bodies, Evans reveals the enduring elasticity of the genre by using it to isolate and represent the queer community. Not just another post-apocalyptic thriller, Highway Bodies reads like an allegory of growing up queer in an often hostile world. Even as zombies ravage Melbourne, darker, more dangerous enemies lurk among the survivors: cars ‘full of white [bogans]’ that will ‘fuckin kill ya jus for lookin at em wrong’ and a hypermasculine, queerphobic cult working to establish a ‘civilised’ safe haven. A well-written novel, Highway Bodies eloquently balances absurdity, obscenity, violence, humour, and emotion. While the plot is sometimes underdeveloped – characters wandering aimlessly in the bush or suburban Mel-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

bourne – the three teen narrators are compelling. They have had the internet to figure out who they are; unlike many teen coming-of-age novels, they are not on a journey of self-discovery, but of survival.

ar from the post-apocalyptic nightmare of Evans’s novel, Neil Grant’s The Honeyman and the Hunter (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781760631871) tells the story of sixteen-year-old Rudra Solace as he struggles to negotiate his Indian and Australian heritage. Born in the small beach town of Patonga on the central coast of New South Wales, Rudra is shaken out of the rhythm of everyday life by the unexpected arrival of his Indian grandmother, Didima. Filling her grandson’s head with Sundarbans folklore about the Dokkhin Rai and the mawalis (honeymen), Didima eventually persuades Rudra to flee from his home in Patonga to India on a quest of self-discovery. The Honeyman and the Hunter is Grant’s fourth Young Adult novel with Allen & Unwin. Chiefly a comingof-age story, it also explores questions of belonging, dispossession, climate change, domestic violence, and racism. Many Australian readers, especially those who grew up on the New South Wales coast, will be familiar with stock characters like surfer boy Maggs and his rival bully Judge Dredd. With dreadlocks and the Southern Cross tattooed on his shoulder in memory of the 2005 Cronulla riots, Judge eggs Maggs and Rudra on with racist insults. When moving away from predictable characters like Maggs and Judge, the third-person narration risks distancing some readers from the main characters. This is especially the case for Rudra’s mother, Nayna. Once an ambitious young scientist who fled her homeland to escape an arranged marriage, she has sacrificed her career only to marry a racist and abusive fisherman. Why is Nayna still married to this man? Although Grant occasionally journeys into Nayna’s past, many questions about her marriage are left unanswered. Most troubling of all, after accompanying Rudra to India, Nayna returns

dutifully to married life, giving readers a bleak picture of women’s ability to subvert traditional power roles.

e get a ver y different representation of women in Astrid Scholte’s first fantasy novel, Four Dead Queens (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 432 pp, 9781760685027). Not unlike Veronica Roth’s factions in Divergent, Quadara is comprised of four distinct cultural districts. Each quadrant has its own queen, but they all rule from the same court. The novel alternates between the perspective of these four powerful women and seventeen-year-old ‘dipper thief ’ Keralie Corrington, who, after stealing a secret message from the palace, becomes embroiled in a mission to solve the queens’ brutal murders. With its thieving, mystery, and romance, Four Dead Queens is ideally placed to explore the complex and often contradictory nature of human morality. Somewhat surprisingly, Scholte is reluctant to consider the moral ambiguity of her characters and exaggerates the virtue of her heroine, Kera. Even though the young thief is responsible for innumerable crimes, she is generally portrayed as a victim who would do ‘anything to keep’ people ‘in the light’. She even finds love with an honest man. As Judith Plant noted in her review, ‘the book has a very Disney-esque feel’ to it, embracing many of the familiar tropes of the fantasy genre. No doubt this is exactly what appealed to Scholte’s publishers: fantasy is not every reader’s kettle of fish, but plenty of avid young fantasy readers will find themselves at home in the mystery and romance of Four Dead Queens.

long friend Grace, Biz’s world slowly begins to unravel around her. Feeling herself ‘floating’ away, she clings to the whispers of the ocean and her polaroid photographs. ‘The photos are talking to me, whispering in my bag’. No one else can hear them ‘[s]o I guess the stories are just mine?’ Eventually, as Biz admits in unspoken words to her mum, the stories become suffocating: ‘I couldn’t breathe, Mum. I couldn’t breathe because my skin was crawling with stories. Just imagine you had bugs under your skin, Mum, just picture that, actually crawling with words I couldn’t get out.’ Fox, in passages like these, finds words and phrases that give feeling to the frightening loneliness that often accompanies mental illness. Elsewhere, she grapples with the anguish of Biz’s mum as she struggles to support her daughter. It’s hard, she admits, ‘to love someone who lives outside your body, and whose life you can’t control. You can’t hold anything still. You can’t be sure anything will be okay.’ A gutwrenchingly beautiful portrait of grief and mental illness, How It Feels to Float is a tribute to the unconditional love between mother and daughter, as well as the power of new rather than old friendships. While there is no denying that these four new books are very different works of Young Adult fiction, they all acquaint readers with marginalised voices and cultures. As the authors suggest in their stories, a ‘normal’ teen experience is the stuff of fairy tales. Life is complicated and full of contradictions on the east coast as much as anywhere else. 

ast of all, Helena Fox’s début novel, How It Feels to Float (Pan Macmillan, $17.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781760783303), heralds the arrival of a talented new voice on the Australian literary scene. The story is told from the perspective of sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Martin Grey (also known as Biz) who is floating through life following the death of her father. After a near-death experience at a Wollongong beach and the departure of her life-

Emily Gallagher is a PhD student in the School of History at the Australian National University. ❖

THE VAN APFEL GIRLS ARE GONE

by Felicity McLean

HarperCollins $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781460755068

rom the ill-fated explorations of Leichhardt and Burke and Wills through to the Beaumont children, Azaria Chamberlain, and the backpacker murders in New South Wales, the history of Australia is peppered with tales and images of people going missing. And, as the First Peoples might well have been able to warn us, few of those stories turn out well. Felicity McLean’s first novel situates this familiar trope in an outerSydney suburb circa 1992. The publisher calls it ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation’, without explaining why Joan Lindsay’s original – or, for that matter, Peter Weir’s definitive film adaptation – shouldn’t suffice for all generations. But the ill-advised television remake of Picnic is already among us, and now McLean attempts to step out of the considerable shadow of Lindsay’s precursor. (Any doubts as to whether she was concerned about the comparison evaporate when the Miranda-like character Cordelia is described as ‘no Botticelli angel’.) And she does: The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a highly efficient and, at times, exceptional piece of storytelling. The clinging summer heat and looming sense of disaster are expertly rendered through the eyes of eleven-year-old narrator Tikka. Her observations are childlike but never childish. There is little cloying precociousness, always a risk when a youthful protagonist is employed. Things get off to an inauspicious start with a two-page prologue in which clumsy images (‘the death rattle of cornflakes in their box’) blunder across the page like a rhinoceros on a jumping castle. The ending is also slightly awkward: as in many mystery novels, the desperation to reach a satisfactory conclusion results in one less than satisfactory. But on this evidence, McLean’s craft is only going to improve. She is most assuredly a writer worth following. Dean Biron FICTION

(Photograph by Alan Weedon)

Publisher of the Month with

Sam Cooney

What was your pathway to publishing?

I completed a writing degree, then was published in Voiceworks magazine, then joined its editorial committee, there discovering that editing is a wonderfully creative and fulfilling act, then commissioned and published some folios of new work in other literary publications, then joined The Lifted Brow magazine as fiction editor, then took over from the founder (Ronnie Scott), then edited and published the magazine for a few years, then handed over editorial reins to others, then launched the Brow Books imprint, and a few years later here we are.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Rather than publish to a quota, we’ve instead put a cap on how many titles we’ll do a year in order to make sure we are fully behind each and every title we do, which allows us to focus on making sure we do the best possible job of publishing those titles/authors. I’m not a fan of the trade publishing model that is ‘let’s throw a bunch of titles at the wall/market each month and see what sticks – and then divert more resources to the titles that stick’. I think it’s unfair to the titles that might not have that immediate ‘sticky’ factor.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

The greatest pleasure is the editorial process – the deep communion that is more akin to an artistic experience than a professional one. The greatest challenge is endeavouring to involve the author as much as possible in every step of the book’s publishing process, to take the time to collaborate with them genuinely and without condescension, and doing so without causing everything to come to a crashing halt.

Do you write yourself ? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher? I don’t write much at the moment, but have a bit in the past. Being a writer has informed my publishing industry work in a bajillion ways – not too dissimilar from the way in which being a lifelong voracious reader has equally and deeply influenced my work.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

Absolutely. This why we started Brow Books, and this is why we are a not-for-profit. The barriers to entry to Australian trade publishing are so high, as is the amount of money a publishing house has to make to keep afloat: these are two of the biggest obstacles to a truly diverse publishing industry in terms of which books are published.

Do you edit the books you commission?

On publication, which is more gratifying: a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?

I’ve spent several minutes trying to pick one title above all others, and I simply can’t. Each book we’ve published at Brow Books is a favourite for a different reason. Some of them!

What qualities do you look for in an author?

Nothing specific across them all. We try to make sure our authors know that they can be exactly themselves, whatever that may be.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire? Deborah Smith, Fiona McCrae, Barbara Epler, Ethan Nosowsky, Di Gribble, Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner, Jacques Testard, Ivor Indyk, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Anne Meadows, Adam Levy, and Ashley Levy.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

Many, many kinds. Any book that makes the world around me different than it was before. 40 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

All of these together would be of course terrific. But first and foremost, a satisfied author. Nothing else matters much if the person whose book it originally and truly is isn’t on board.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

As it has always been, since forever: extremely promising.

Sam Cooney runs the not-for-profit literary

organisation TLB, which includes the independent book press Brow Books and quarterly literary magazine The Lifted Brow. He is Publisher-in-Residence at RMIT, teaches sessionally at universities, and is a freelance writer and literary critic.

A movement, a moment, a reckoning An essential compilation about #MeToo

Zora Simic #METOO: STORIES FROM THE AUSTRALIAN MOVEMENT edited by Natalie Kon-yu et al. Picador, $32.99 pb, 352 pp, 978176078500

ow do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or antisex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns. Others distinguish between a ‘good’ #MeToo (focused on eradicating sexual harassment from the workplace) versus a more capacious #MeToo (aimed at destroying the patriarchy). That #MeToo originated from the activism of African-American civil rights campaigner Tarana Burke in 2006 has not negated representations of #MeToo as White Feminism, but nor have the privileged white women who have been its most high-profile faces been delivered justice either. #MeToo is perhaps best described as a work in progress, as the new edited collection #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement vividly illustrates. Consisting of thirty-four contributions, including from the editors – Natalie Kon-yu, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, and Miriam Sved – #MeToo productively resists an overarching thesis or message about the hashtag that inspired its title. In this sense, the subtitle that identifies ‘an Australian movement’ is somewhat misleading. There are no mission statements, manifestos, or selfproclaimed movement leaders within. Instead, readers are treated to a rich assortment of perspectives and genres, including personal essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and an endearingly didactic graphic essay by comic artist Sarah Firth titled ‘Start Where You Are’.

The editors make no special plea as to why their collection is necessary, though there is a strong case to be made for a substantial text that counters the seemingly endless clickbait that continue to roll out with each new controversy. The value of stepping outside the news cycle to reflect on the deeper dimensions of #MeToo is potently demonstrated by the kaleidoscopic range of contributions. Apart from a couple of pieces by well-known journalists that, while engaging enough, largely rehash ideas published elsewhere, the selection of material manages to meet the challenge of genuine diversity of representation and views, as well as making for compelling reading. Some of the most powerful contributions make no, or barely, any mention of #MeToo at all. Eugenia Flynn’s incantatory ‘This Place’ condemns ‘the white patriarchy that permeates all of the institutions of Australia’ from her particular vantage point as an Aboriginal woman. Given the ongoing history of ‘Black women speaking their truth as survivors of sexual assault, violence and abuse [and] … never being taken seriously’, she doubts #MeToo can carry or comprehend this weight. Instead, she draws strength from the ‘resistance of strong Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women’. In an essay written in jaunty prose and with good humour, Maggie Scott shares some confronting family history about her much-missed maternal grandmother, who was affectionately known as Mammans. What Scott discovers deepens her understanding of Mammans, but also of herself and other women in her family. The experience

and aftermath of abuse shapes a person and a family, but it’s a complicated legacy not easily reducible to tragedy – or a hashtag. The younger Scott women, she writes, have inherited ‘a bold look in the eye; a cutting sense of humour; a critical disposition towards men; and sororities of lifelong female friends’. A similar spirit of resilience and reinvention animates Sylvie Leber’s extraordinary account of her own life since she was raped as a young woman in the early 1970s. Noting that she was possibly the first Australian woman to speak out in the media about having been raped, Leber’s contribution adds historical heft to the collection and is genuinely inspiring. Leber, unhappy with the way the mainstream media sensationalised her story, dedicated herself to remedying the problem of the lack of representation of women in Australian culture. She was a founder of the Melbourne Women’s Theatre Group, a member of the all-woman band Toxic Shock, and hosted a radio program called Give-Men-A-Pause. If she’s not already writing a memoir, I hope Leber is at least giving it some thought. Leber’s life story testifies to the healing potential of speaking out about sexual violence, but other contributors are understandably more ambivalent. In her ruminative opening essay, Kath Kenny cites results from the last Global Media Monitoring Project which show that women make up less than a quarter of subjects interviewed or reported on, and that, when women do feature, they are most likely to be portrayed as victims or eyewitnesses rather than as experts. The implications for #MeToo are that, in this media environment, ‘speaking out as a victim makes it next to impossible to speak out as an expert’. To counter the reductive stereotypes and lack of complexity in media coverage, Kenny turns to feminist thinkers alert to the grey areas, including of course – given this is an Australian collection – Helen Garner. For Eleanor Jackson, an invitation to have a public conversation with Germaine Greer about her treatise On Rape invites reflection on the value of such an exchange. Jackson ultimately declined the invitation. In writing C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

about why she did, she offers a more nuanced and memorable discussion of the issues at hand than such an event would have permitted. As does Shakira Hussein’s perceptive analysis of what she calls the ‘uneven distribution of trauma’ borne by women from the most vulnerable and marginalised communities. #MeToo, she writes, was ‘supposed to be the revolution I was waiting for – yet I was left feeling isolated rather than connected, helpless rather than empowered’. Reflecting on the tragic case of Afghani teenager Ziba Haji Zada, who was found with fatal burns in her in-law’s Melbourne backyard in early 2018, soon after #MeToo went viral, Hussein persuasively argues that ‘much more is needed than obligatory storytelling and the downfall of a cluster of high-profile offenders’. Along with Hussein, several other contributors draw necessary attention to under-resourced services, deficient policing, and a hostile legal system. The music, theatre, and sports industries each come under scrutiny. Cultural and institutional change is a hard slog; we know this, and for this reason I’ll end with hopeful suggestions and developments raised by spokespeople from female-dominated professions in which sexual harassment and abuse is endemic. Victorian MP and sex worker advocate Fiona Patten encourages more talk about sexual pleasure and would welcome, in her Twitter feed, a tweet reading ‘I had great sex last night. #MeToo’. Meanwhile, nurse educator Simone Sheridan celebrates #MeToo as a genuine catalyst for nurses to speak out about what was previously brushed aside or left unspoken. She says plainly, ‘Australian nurses are being sexually harassed by our patients. And it’s not part of our job.’ That this needs iterating is but one of many examples why #MeToo does matter, and why #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement should be essential reading for anyone with an interest in positively transforming our workplaces, relationships, and wider culture. g Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales. 42 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

Letter to Seven

Exploring the remarkable history of Polynesian migration

Ceridwen Spark SEA PEOPLE: THE PUZZLE OF POLYNESIA by Christina Thompson

HarperCollins, $34.99 pb, 384 pp, 9780008339029

hen asked to review Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia, I thought it might be hard work – improving, but not necessarily fun. I could not have been more wrong. The book is a triumph. Exploring the remarkable history of Polynesian migration to the ‘vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island’, it is magnificently researched, assured, and elegant in both structure and style. Marrying careful, probing scholarship with masterful storytelling, Sea People deserves a wide audience, one well beyond those who are from, or conduct research, in the region. Christina Thompson, born and raised in the United States, is best known in Australia as a former editor of Meanjin (1994–98). After fifteen years in Australia, Thompson holds dual citizenship here and in the United States, where she lives outside Boston with her family. Now editing Harvard Review, Thompson is an award-winning writer, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. In her youth, Thompson was fascinated by Australia, the region, and southern colonial encounters. Crossing the seas in her twenties to complete a PhD in English at the University of Melbourne turned out to be a boundarybreaking experience in more ways than one. To write her doctorate, Thompson drew on anthropology and history as much as literature, thus bringing together insights from the diverse disciplines she continues to interweave in her writing. Thompson has authored many essays and much literary criticism, but her

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

only other book is Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand story (2008). Described as a mixture of ‘history and memoir’, Come on Shore was much lauded on release. In it, Thompson tells of meeting her husband, Seven, a Māori whom she first encountered in a pub in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. We meet Seven again, albeit briefly, in the prologue of Sea People. While the book ultimately tells us almost nothing about him or the couple’s three sons, the author’s desire to understand the people who made the Polynesian Triangle their home is clearly personal. She writes: Seven … is descended from a voyager named Puhi, who sailed to New Zealand from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki in one of a fleet of eight great canoes. … his ancestors came to Aotearoa (the Polynesian name for New Zealand) from an island in Eastern Polynesia and … their ancestors came to that island from another island before that. The simplicity of this genealogy is stunning. … For centuries Polynesians were the only people in this region of the world, and thus the only people Seven can be descended from are the ones who figured out how to cross thousands of miles of open ocean in double-hulled voyaging canoes.

Embodying Thompson’s ‘quest to understand who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know’, Sea People thus constitutes a kind of love letter to Thompson’s husband and children and the places from which they come. It is an accomplished and authoritative missive. After the prologue, Sea People is

chronological in structure. It commences with the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, relates some of the story of James Cook (who was killed by locals on his third voyage to Hawai’i, in 1779), examines various attempts (indigenous and otherwise) to account for the unlikely arrival of Polynesians in this vast expanse, and into the present-day understanding of the region as informed by ‘the latest science’, including DNA studies of Polynesian remains. In this fascinating journey through time and space, Thompson displays an enviable command of her material, both the details and the big picture. Turning over an incredible array of ‘evidence’, anthropological, archaeological, geographical, and otherwise, she displays a keen eye for what each body of knowledge reveals about the puzzle of Polynesian migration. But, in her capable hands, we are never lost or overwhelmed. With short chapters and a great deal of command, she layers knowledge seamlessly, communicating her own intrigue and thereby keeping ours alive. At the same time and without ever hitting us over the head with it, Thompson exposes the politics of knowledge, the way it is formed and by whom. It was fascinating to learn, for instance, about Māori anthropologist Te Rangi Hīroa’s resistance to the idea that his forebears came through Melanesia and were mingled with them genetically. As Thompson writes, in the ‘racially charged climate of the early twentieth century’, Te Rangi Hīroa was aware that the term ‘Melanesian’ had ‘long served in European discourse as a marker for otherness and inferiority … you can see him struggling with the problem’. Similarly, she tells us about the repercussions of the iconoclastic historian Andrew Sharp’s claim that Polynesian oral traditions were essentially of no use in determining their history of arrival, and his argument that they sailed into the region more by accident than design. While not quite launching a thousand ships, Sharp’s latter claim gave rise to multiple sea journeys designed to test Polynesian navigation. Proving once and for all that traditional navigational techniques not only worked but were based on a rich and different way of knowing,

Richard Owen and a moa skeleton, c.1879

this series of adventures was as much political and anti-colonial as oceanic. The most memorable aspect of Sea People arises from Thompson’s affection for and interest in her ‘characters’. We meet some amazing people, while learning details about some more familiar ones, including Cook and Joseph Banks. In the former vein, one stands out even among an impressive cast: Tupaia, a Tahitian who decided to join Captain Cook on his voyage merely days after meeting him and without any real idea of where the journey would lead. Arriving in New Zealand, Tupaia communicated with the locals, thereby enabling the British visitors to avoid the fate of their predecessors who had been chased away with a haka. His ability to do so also revealed, for the first time, the remarkable linguistic links across this vast region. Thompson’s fondness for Tupaia and the many others from whom she has learned about ‘the puzzle

of Polynesia’ is infectious. Infused with curiosity and respect, Sea People is everything historical nonfiction should be. g

Ceridwen Spark is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University. Most of her research is about gender and social change, with a particular emphasis on Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. P O LY N E S I A

ESSAY

‘A mutinous and ferocious grace’ Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath

by Felicity Plunkett

t begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multiinstrumentalist Warren Ellis’s hands unpicking tranquillity’s fabric, each piano note a loosened stitch. The machinery of the Bad Seeds emerges: scarred midriffs of violins and guitars, a shimmer of pinstripes and a flourish of the pocket squares favoured by the rock dandy, fingers heavily ringed. The stage is set with percussion, keyboards, flute, a grand piano: jangle and spark itching to launch. Deep concentration: the glance among colleagues who have worked together for decades, in the moment between rehearsal and performance when everything is scripted but anything can happen. Nick Cave steps onstage, slim, suited, singing: The things we love, we love, we love, we lose, the last word snuffing itself out, almost inaudible. There’s a sob edging the note and sky-raised eyes: there are powers at play more forceful than we. Austere instrumentation drops into silence as he continues: I’m begging you please to come home now, come home now. He is right on the edge, singing convalesce into palpable empathy, mask of twigs and clay, hands reaching towards him: with my voice, I am calling you. Deep within this mood of aftermath, something is stirring. In the echo of witness – the audience, still, holding each syllable – a stretch and wrench of sung words and an eerie swoop of synth and harmonies signal the crossing to a new part of Cave’s creative life. On 12 April 2018, Distant Sky, a live concert film of

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Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds screened once in cinemas around the world. Made in October 2017 at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen and directed by David Barnard, it captured Australian-born musician and writer Nick Cave and his band The Bad Seeds playing to an audience of sixteen thousand people. The concert was part of a tour following the 2016 release of the band’s sixteenth studio album. Skeleton Tree was recorded over eighteen months. During this time, in July 2015, Arthur Cave, the fifteen-year-old son of Cave and his wife, Susie Bick, died after an accidental fall at Ovingdean Gap near their home in Brighton, England. To avoid promotional interviews, Cave commissioned Australian director Andrew Dominik to make a documentary. Dominik describes One More Time With Feeling as ‘a practical solution to a practical problem’. The thought of interviews ‘made [Cave] feel sick, because he was going to have to discuss the context of the record with a whole bunch of journalists. That prospect was very alarming to him. His instinct in making the film was one of self-preservation: it was a way to talk about what happened, but there was a certain safety in doing it with someone he knew.’ Cave found himself caught between the need for silence and the need to speak: the human instinct for privacy and the artist’s sense of a responsibility to say something. ‘The idea of a traditional interview,’ writes Dominik, ‘was simply unfeasible but … he felt a need to let the people who cared about his music understand the basic state of things.’ Dominik describes Cave as ‘trapped’ and need-

ing ‘to do something – anything – to at least give the impression of forward movement’. In the process, an unexpected kernel appeared. The resulting film is more than a holding bay, and more than a way out of a trap. It grows from self-preservation into documenting Cave’s crafting, from elegy and empathy, a new creative mode. The film explores the final stages of Skeleton Tree’s production, capturing the band’s work that continues through, and comes to embody, Cave’s mourning. Dominik shot the film in 3D and black and white using a specially made camera: a ‘massive, lumbering piece of equipment that’s almost comic lack of mobility added to the eerie drift of the film itself ’. Cumbersome, awkward machinery that doesn’t always work seems apt for capturing the impact of trauma and the lurching dynamics of resilience. The angles are often askew, shots out of focus. Cave is split and mirrored – in the sheen of a grand piano or in a bathroom mirror, itself reflecting a line from Skeleton Tree’s ‘Magneto’: And in the bathroom mirror I see me vomit in the sink / And all through the house we hear the hyena’s hymns. ‘Magneto’, the song that gives the film its name, is about intimacy: In love, in love, I love, you love, I laugh, you laugh / I move, you move / And one more time with feeling. It evokes the way pain is necessarily shared to some extent by those in love: I’m sawn in half becomes we saw each other in half. The plan was that Dominik would shoot the film

but that Cave could veto anything. Dominik asked him to record his thoughts on relevant subjects to form a voice-over. As Cave watched the footage and recorded responses on his iPhone, he escaped the restriction of enforced or inspired public words on one side and silence on the other. Poetry and reflection opened the path to a more intuitive approach. In a review in the Guardian, Andrew Pulver, who admits to never having been a massive Cave fan, sees the film as a moving collage, but also as a ‘spectacle’. His description of some writing on Cave as ‘hagiographical’ sets the tone for the review. It seems, especially bizarrely under the circumstances, sniffy or sneering, though sniffing and sneering recur in critical work on Cave. But then, so does a hagiographical tone. The trouble is that neither the demonising mode nor the hagiographical captures the paradoxical transparency an artist can find when afforded privacy and spaciousness. In Rolling Stone, Dominik expresses the fear he felt when, not long after Arthur’s death, Cave contacted him to say he wanted to talk: ‘I was terrified at the thought of receiving that phone call … I just didn’t know whether I would be equipped to deal with somebody who I knew was going to be in state that was unimaginable to me.’ How we might imagine or witness something we have not experienced is a central human question. The film bears witness to mourning. It studies both Susie Bick and Nick Cave, the former reserved and private, the

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latter used to working in public and with words. Cave’s meta-commentary contains tones familiar from his decades of songwriting. It is allusive, wry, self-deprecating, risky, intelligent, tender, and darkly comedic. New, though, is the ruminative lens through which he tries to convey some of grief ’s impact. At one point, he has to overdub a vocal, something he describes as ‘some kind of torture’ because it’s disconnected from the music’s original energy and has to be grafted back on. His commentary does something similar, stitching itself back through the film. This mirrors trauma’s aftermath, when finding ways to reattach the self cut loose from life-as-we-know-it is part of a solitary labour. Cave explores ‘what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic … that you just change. You change from the known person to an unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognise the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.’ One More Time With Feeling is about the conjunction of mourning and creativity. In his study of elegy, Poetry of Mourning: The modern elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), Jahan Ramazani discusses the sublimation of mourning and elegy’s increasing role as ‘refuge from the social denial of grief ’. Elegiac, One More Time With Feeling openly places grief in the contexts of work and love. It documents collaboration and friendship, especially between Cave and Warren Ellis, part of The Bad Seeds since 1994 (a decade after its formation in 1983) and Cave’s collaborator on projects including the band Grinderman and numerous film scores. Ellis’s uneasy comment that he won’t discuss other people’s private lives prefaces the film. Extreme close-ups of Ellis watching Cave struggle with his singing or tacking a song to the music’s fabric are just as telling as this protective remark. ‘What would I do without Warren?’ reflects Cave. The sense of Ellis’s vigilance shapes Dominik’s work. It was Ellis who watched the film and assured Cave and Bick it worked. One More Time With Feeling shows slivers and flashes of how ineptly many people relate to trauma (Cave’s word). Ramazani charts the rise of ‘an increasing neglect of the dead and mourning’ that comes to look ‘more and more like active denial’. He quotes social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer that ‘it would seem to be believed, quite sincerely, that sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will or character so that it need be given no public expression’. This suppression of mourning has endangered consolation. Sydney writer Mark Mordue describes how people faced with other people’s grief feel ‘shamed by inadequate condolences’. Shame and clumsy gestures on one hand – flowers, cards, casseroles – and shame and evasion on the other. Early on, Cave gently corrects Dominik’s comment that lives have a similar arc. Of course, broadly, they do. But there are extreme experiences many people don’t have. Cave is quietly emphatic. Sure, our lives have a 46 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

broad common outline, but ‘the arc can be very different’. Cave describes being in a bakery, and someone approaching ‘with his kind eyes’, saying: ‘We are all with you.’ Now, ‘all the bakery is looking at you with kind eyes’. This is both beautiful and repugnant: ‘When,’ Cave asks himself, ‘did you become an object of pity?’ Part of the artistic and personal triumph of Cave’s work on Skeleton Tree and beyond is about bracing for and embracing the stumbling kindness of other people’s consolation. Cave has a way of turning the film’s vignettes into something larger. When he struggles vocally, he worries ‘I think I’m losing my voice’, a moment critics have noted for its metaphoric resonance. In the figurative, where Cave is very much at home, he stretches it into an improvised poem about losing things: ‘My voice. My iPhone. My judgement. My memory, maybe.’ This catalogue, with its twist from the arch into the dark, the self-admonishing shove at the end, recalls Elizabeth Bishop’s acute villanelle ‘One Art’, which begins ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’. It works through losses – tuning up from ‘lost door keys’, past ‘places and names’ and ‘my mother’s watch’ – until it reaches its final stanza: – Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Cave doubtless knows Bishop’s famous poem, and his is ghosted by hers. He has articulated poetry’s place in his creative life in a series of online letters The Red Hand Files: ‘I try to read, at the very least, a half-hour of poetry a day, before I begin to do my own writing’, adding: ‘It jimmies open the imagination, making the mind more receptive to metaphor and abstraction and serves as a bridge from the reasoned mind to a stranger state of alertness, in case that precious idea decides to drop by.’ Cave has written about lost love many times. Now, though, when he evokes ‘the lost things that have so much mass and so much weight’, he’s well beyond the terrain that Bishop conjures. Yet a similar jagged barked command to the self – Write it! – runs through the documentary, and this phase of Cave’s career. The film documents two people – Cave and his wife (Arthur’s twin, Earl, appears at several delicate moments, but is shielded by his parents, even as he shields them) – faced with suffering on a catastrophic scale. It would be naïve to suggest that trauma’s gifts include creative renewal. Trauma is a stingy benefactor and if pain is the exchange for its benefits, anyone sane would go without. Cave is clear that trauma is ‘extremely damaging to the creative process’. In his interview with Mark Mordue, he speaks of how trauma ‘fills up all the space. It fills up your body. It’s like a physical thing. You can feel it pressing against the insides of your

Cave’s talent is undimmed and this exhilarating fingers. There’s just no room for the luxury of creation.’ staged ‘I’ is evident in Distant Skies. But in the dark, In one of the letters, he describes ‘the uncontainable and by the light of that single candle, he has found something merciless dimensions of grief ’. And yet, in a poem he recites in the film, Cave says: else – something urgent, vulnerable, and profoundly kind. He uses the word ‘need’ several times in the letters, ‘There is more paradise in hell than we’ve been told.’ In writing about audiences and artists’ need for connection, spite of its ironic undertones, this highlights the posan uncertainty that ‘propels us forward’. sibility of renewal through a process of transmutation In January 2019, Cave replies to a father raising a almost as unimaginable as other people’s trauma. Poetry small daughter after his wife’s death. A shared undermight jimmy the imagination open. Trauma’s less delicate approach can achieve the same result. Sometimes, standing of the house haunted by hyena hymns allows together, trauma and poetry can produce a radical openness. Cave is now undertaking a series of ‘In Conversation’ events, opening up a fearless dialogue with his audiences. The Red Hand Files respond to fans’ questions: ‘You can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens.’ This is a version of the ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) sessions hosted in various forums, made close and intimate by the epistolary form and the use of a website rather than social media. Cave writes about creativity, love songs (‘maybe songs are the parlance of love’, maybe they are ‘small unassuming love bombs’), and the letters themselves: ‘When I started the Files I had a small idea that people were in need of a more thoughtful discourse. I felt a similar Susie Bick, Nick and Earl Cave, Rick Woollard, and Andrew Dominik need. I felt that social media was by its in One More Time with Feeling (photograph by Kerry Brown) nature undermining both nuance and connectivity. I thought that, for my fans at least, The Red Cave to speak in this new way, consoling and empathetic. Hand Files could go some way to remedy that.’ He has described actively living our lives ‘in the service The letters return to loss. In response to a question of others’ and using ‘what power we have to reduce each about sensing the presence of his son, he writes that other’s suffering’ as the ‘remedy to our own suffering’ whatever this presence is, its basis is ideas, which might and ‘the essential antidote for loneliness’. He depicts be the bridge to new ways of being in the world: ‘It is his wife: ‘defiant and scoured clean by grief; a woman their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back with a mutinous and ferocious grace, now more open, to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now daring and creative than ever; a woman who has simply and unimaginably changed.’ defied the cosmic odds and bloomed’. Everywhere in these responses, and Cave’s new work, are the currents of his own mutinous and ferocious grace: he next letter can arrive at any time. When it does, it will have weight and light. This time, the echo comes back full. Skeleton Tree approaches We are alone but we are also connected in a personhood a tentative conclusion – a very quiet one, its final song of suffering. We have reached out to each other, with threaded with the refrain it’s alright now and the image nothing to offer, but an acceptance of our mutual despair. of a candle in a window – maybe you can see? Cave is like We must understand that the depths of our anguish Wallace Steven’s ‘scholar of one candle’, effulgence and signal the heights we can, in time, attain. This is an exfear his companions as he works. traordinary faith. It makes demands on the vast reserves Almost prophetically, The Bad Seeds’ previous of inner-strength that you may not even be aware of. album, Push the Sky Away, expresses the hope that Cave’s But they are there. new work limns. The title song quietly urges us to keep on pushing the sky away, while the wild, wired surrealism Felicity Plunkett is the 2019 ABR Patrons’ Fellow. of ‘Jubilee Street’ has Cave singing: I’m transforming. This is the first of several features she will contribute I’m vibrating. I’m glowing. I’m flying. Look at me now. over the next twelve months.

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Bring a new story home with you today Wet Hands and Ginger Hair Zoë Hickerson Wet Hands and Ginger Hair is a selection of creative writings. They contain a raw and realistic perspective of what it means to have depression. It consists of Zoë Hickerson’s thoughts from the darkness of burn out and depression, through her journey into the light. Everyday is another chance to change your life. Each and everyone of us are fighting our own battles. $38.95 paperback 978-1-5144-6659-9 also available in hardcover & ebook

Zoë Hickerson’s Other Books

$43.95 paperback 978-1-4990-9958-4 also available in hardcover & ebook

$43.95 paperback 978-1-4990-9985-0 also available in hardcover & ebook

$38.95 paperback 978-1-5434-9511-9 also available in hardcover & ebook

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Meet the Fokker

The tempests and evasions of Charles Kingsford Smith

Michael McGirr KING OF THE AIR: THE TURBULENT LIFE OF CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH by Ann Blainey Black Inc., $49.99 hb, 384 pp, 9781760641078

eople spent a lot of time looking for the pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith. When he disappeared for the final time in 1935 just south of Myanmar, then known as Burma, he was just thirty-eight but felt ancient. Hopeful rescuers came from far and wide, but their efforts were not rewarded. Ann Blainey remarks wryly that one day the Andaman Sea may ‘give up its secret’, but, until then, Smithy’s final resting place is as mysterious as that of MH 370. This was far from being the first occasion on which he had vanished. He had piloted many aircraft whose positions became unknown for a time. On one awkward occasion in 1929, he was accused of faking his disappearance in a remote part of Australia. Two of his friends, Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock, died in the search and Smith was blamed for recklessly creating this catastrophe. Smithy was often immature, but a deception of this magnitude was unlikely. Ann Blainey is the latest in a significant list of writers who have joined another type of search for Kingsford Smith, a man whose epic flights brought thousands of enthusiasts to aerodromes to wish him well. He was fêted with ticker-tape parades and a knighthood. Along with Bradman, he was one of those who supported a myth that people clung to in the Depression years: that the most unlikely things were possible. He flew across the Pacific, the Atlantic, and broke countless speed records. In an understated and careful way, Blainey wants to find more than

the myth. She is a calm and measured historian who, unlike her subject, is not given to flights of fancy. Her search is absorbing. Yet what she charts is often uncomfortable. Smith was the product of the protestant upper-middle class. His father was a banker with a blemished record, he was a member of the cathedral choir

Charles Kingsford Smith and Mary Powell in 1930

at St Andrew’s in Sydney, and his family lived in respectable houses in places such as Neutral Bay and Longueville. He narrowly escaped drowning at Bondi when he was nine. As with so many in his generation, it is interesting to ponder what might have happened if the Great War had not sunk its tal-

ons into him. Smith was a motorcycle dispatch rider at Gallipoli and on the Western Front before joining the Royal Flying Corps. Blainey never uses a term such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it is hard to resist the thought that his subsequent restlessness, frenetic approach to relationships and bouts of deep depression had their roots in what he witnessed. The tone of some of Smithy’s letters home provides a clue. He uses the ‘boys’ own’ adventure language of the time to disguise an ordeal. For example, he describes an air battle as a ‘dickens of a fight’ in which ‘I had bad luck just after bagging my bird. My gun jammed and I had to leave the scrap and tootle off home.’ He landed with a bullet hole in his collar. Later, he lost part of a leg and was lucky to survive. He received a Military Cross which made him feel ‘frightfully bucked.’ Blainey is not fooled by the chipper language he used to keep up the spirits of both his parents and himself. When he returned from war, she notes: ‘Sometimes Smithy was angry and resentful, and sometimes he was depressed. Sometimes he thought about the war and many incidents he would rather have forgotten rose to the surface of his mind.’ In particular, he was haunted by the ‘unearthly joy’ he felt after a slaughter of enemy soldiers. Smithy self-medicated with alcohol and sex. After a string of hapless affairs, he married Thelma Corboy at short notice. The couple spent little time together, and, when they did, Smithy seemed to be never far from the bottle. BIOGRAPHY

For Thelma, it was lonely experience. His second marriage, to Mary Powell, was buoyed by media adulation and the trappings of fame. But there was never any question that Smithy would settle down or accommodate the interests of his wife, whatever they may have been. He persisted with what he disparagingly called ‘harmless little flirtations’. He was a largely absent father. Blainey lays out the facts unapologetically, observing the haphazard emotional life of her subject in compelling detail. She is not inclined to move further back to write about the enduring trauma of those who returned from war. Or is it possible that Smithy was just a lad with very limited sense of emotional responsibility? He compulsively kept returning to the air to attempt challenges that left him with panic attacks and miseries of various kinds. Was celebrity another drug to ease the pain? In some ways, it appears that the closest relationship that Charles Kingsford Smith ever had was with his legendary plane, The Southern Cross, a three-engined Fokker that Smithy referred to with great affection as ‘the old bus’. Indeed, this became the title of his memoir. Blainey does a fine job in describing the proclivities of this fragile piece of machinery. On its famous crossing of the Pacific Ocean in 1928, with Charles Ulm as co-pilot, the crew sat in wicker chairs that were not even fastened to the floor. There were no seatbelts. The airmen were tossed around, unable to speak above the noise. A friend wrote that the plane ‘responds to his touch like a horse to its master’. He described Smith as ‘literally holding her in the air with his hands and feet, juggling, coaxing her to do it, and getting the extra response nobody else could get from the machine’. There is no doubt that Smithy’s skill saved lives. Ann Blainey is a pleasure to read and this biography is superbly researched and substantiated. It ends at the moment of Smithy’s death, unwilling to venture into the decades that turned the man into a legend. Unlike her subject, Blainey works within clear boundaries. g Michael McGirr’s latest book is BooksThat Saved My Life (Text Publishing, 2018). 50 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

‘Considering the company I keep’ A lucky and resilient prime minister

Michael Sexton ROBERT MENZIES: THE ART OF POLITICS by Troy Bramston Scribe, $49.99 hb, 374 pp, 9781925713671

here have been at least half a dozen previous biographies of Robert Menzies, but Troy Bramston’s new life of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister is arguably the most attractive combination of research and readability. Menzies was born in 1894 in the Victorian country town of Jeparit. Its population was then only two hundred, but Menzies did not have a deprived childhood. His father ran the general store and was later a member of the Victorian parliament. Menzies finished his school years at one of Melbourne’s élite institutions and then attended law school at Melbourne University where he won many academic prizes and headed a wide range of student bodies. His university years largely coincided with those of the Great War. His two elder brothers enlisted but, under family pressure, Menzies did not. This was a far-reaching decision, given the fact that in the 1920s and 1930s there was a real gulf in Australian society between those males who had fought in the war and those who had not. Menzies started at the Victorian Bar in 1918, reading with Owen Dixon who would later become the High Court’s Chief Justice, and taking silk in 1929 as the youngest King’s Counsel in the country. He combined this extremely successful legal career with the world of politics, entering the Victorian parliament in 1928 and in 1932 becoming attorney-general and deputy premier in the United Australia Party state government. Not all of his political colleagues appreciated his wit. When accused in a parliamentary debate of having a superiority complex, Menzies replied: ‘Considering the company I keep in this place, it is hardly surprising.’

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In 1934 he moved to the federal political scene where he at once became the Commonwealth attorney-general and soon afterwards deputy to UAP Prime Minister Joseph Lyons. Despite this meteoric rise, not everyone was an admirer. Victorian Premier Stanley Argyle said to one of Menzies’ new federal colleagues: ‘Thank god we have got rid of him. You’re welcome to him.’ Menzies resigned from the federal cabinet in March 1939, ostensibly over a policy dispute about national insurance, although some saw it as an attempt to undermine his leader. In any event, Lyons died a few weeks later and Menzies returned as prime minister. As the book notes, when war broke out in September 1939, Menzies still favoured negotiations with Hitler’s Germany, as did many British politicians. Menzies was certainly blunt in a letter to Australia’s high commissioner in London, saying that ‘nobody really cares a damn about Poland’. Britain suspended elections during the war years, but political conflict in Australia continued largely unabated. The 1940 federal election did not produce a majority for any party. Menzies continued as prime minister, although he spent considerable amounts of time in London and seemed anxious to swap his Australian role for one in the British war cabinet. This was not to be, and in August 1941 he was deposed by his own party. A few months later, Labor took office under John Curtin. This was certainly the low point of Menzies’ career, but, as the book explains in some detail, he worked tirelessly over the next few years to create the Liberal party from the ashes of the UAP. This culminated in a decision to form the new party at a conference of community

organisations in Canberra in October 1944. Labor, under Curtin’s successor, Ben Chifley, won the 1946 federal election comfortably but lost office in 1949. Menzies was prime minister from 1949 until 1966. Bramston makes the often overlooked point that, like almost all successful politicians, Menzies had some exceedingly good luck. The 1954 election was very close, and the 1961 poll was decided by one seat. If those results had gone the other way, Menzies’ career would have been quite different. Moreover, after the Labor split of 1955, the Liberals were able to rely on the preferences of the Democratic Labor Party that affectively kept them in office until 1972. After Chifley’s death in 1951, he faced opposition leaders in H.V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell, neither of whom possessed much electoral appeal. It needs to be remembered that Menzies never led a conservative government. There was no notion of small government, but a continuing increase in federal legislation and expenditure, symbolised by the rapid growth of Canberra and its bureaucracy. Nor was there any focus on economic reform with tariffs remaining substantial and industrial relations highly centralised. On the international stage, Menzies was not as sure-footed as he was at home. When Egypt, under the leadership of Colonel Nasser, nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Menzies led a delegation to try to persuade Nasser to compromise. It is true that the Americans effectively torpedoed these negotiations, but it was always a dangerous diplomatic exercise. His support for the British and French position also appeared to be misjudged when they invaded the Canal zone, but were soon forced into an ignominious withdrawal. During the Menzies period, Australian troops were sent overseas to fight in four conflicts: the Korean War in the early 1950s; the suppression of communist guerrillas in Malaya throughout the 1950s; Indonesian incursions into Borneo in the mid-1960s; and Vietnam from the early 1960s. The last of these was far and away the most controversial decision in retrospect, although it was largely supported by the Austral-

ian community until it became clear was struggling in this role when he towards the end of the 1960s that the drowned in late 1967. John Gorton war could not be won. The first signifi- succeeded Holt, only to be deposed by cant commitment of Australian ground his party three years later, and William troops to Vietnam was made in April McMahon was defeated at the 1972 1965. Although the book is critical of election. this decision, it does not quite explain the full cynicism of Menzies and his cabinet colleagues. It was obvious that they had no concern for South Vietnam or its people, but it is now clear that they had no concern for the longterm interests of the United States either. The Australian commitment was designed to be an insurance policy with the Americans and Canberra was indifferent to the consequences for them if the war could not be prosecuted successfully. As it turned out, the war caused serious divisions within the American community and significantly Robert Menzies and Winston Churchill after a ceremony damaged the international at Bristol University on 12 April 1941 standing of the United States, (via Wikimedia Commons/Imperial War Museum) in a way that, to some extent, has never been repaired. Menzies health deteriorated in reIt was once conventional wisdom that Menzies dispatched his rivals, tirement and he died in 1978. This book such as Percy Spender, Richard Casey, details his remarkable career and is a very and Garfield Barwick, to posts outside welcome addition to Australian political politics. As the book makes clear, these biography. I would, however, have omitwere not really his rivals in the first ted the entire chapter containing Menplace. He did, however, leave something zies’ – extremely bad – efforts at poetry. g of a vacuum behind when he retired in early 1966. Harold Holt, his long-term Michael Sexton SC is the author of several deputy, became prime minister, but he books on Australian history and politics.

Small Bites

‘Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man. But more often, the proximity to an amoral leader reveals something depressing … Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like Mr Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr Trump eats your soul in small bites.’ James Comey, from ‘How Trump Co-opts Leaders like Bill Barr’, The New York Times, 1 May 2019

BIOGRAPHY

Trumped Varun Ghosh TIRED OF WINNING: A CHRONICLE OF AMERICAN DECLINE

by Richard Cooke Black Inc.

$27.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781760641146

ired of Winning: A chronicle of American decline by journalist and essayist Richard Cooke begins with the shock of Donald Trump’s election on 8 November 2016. In New York’s Lincoln Square, thousands of Clinton supporters were ‘stunned into silence’ while ‘a posse of drunk frat boys in MAGA caps announced themselves loudly’. Yet, as the author soon realised: ‘This was not the moment “everything changed” at all. It was a culmination, rather than a beginning, and the change had started months – maybe even years – before. It was the product of other people, and other places.’ That realisation led Cooke to return to the United States in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, ‘determined to experience as much of the present state of the United States as [he] could, and to capture that experience on behalf of those similarly perplexed’. The result is a series of sketches, ranging across present-day America and observing life under President Trump. One of the threads that runs through Cooke’s account is the social consequences of economic decay and inequality. In Appalachia, Cooke visits communities trapped in cycles of opioid addiction. He writes movingly, ‘opioids have hit hardest in the parts of the United States that are spare and wooded, and the country does not speak to itself in the voices of these places’. As a pastor in West Virginia tells the author: ‘The coal and steel was taken away and, to some extent, the ease to sell dope was introduced around the same time.’ Cooke also reveals a heartbreaking correlation: a psychological test called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study ‘predicts addiction and chronic disease 52 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

with a subtlety and precision that seems almost cruel’. One of its questions: ‘Did you often or very often feel that … you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you?’ Cooke catalogues other signs of rot, such as the poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Michigan, and the bane of mass shootings. These problems predate the forty-fifth president. They have their roots in geography and history; in ignorance and economic insecurity; in vested interest and political corruption. Implicit in the author’s focus on these matters, however, is that they somehow help to explain why the country voted for Trump. Trumpism itself forms another thread of Cooke’s narrative. While the legislative achievements of the Trump administration are modest and the president has not yet made a catastrophic blunder of the magnitude of George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, Trump has changed the country at a visceral level, weaponising bigotry and devaluing truth itself. In both of these endeavours, the internet and social media have proved valuable tools. Trump’s impact on the Republican Party has been even more significant. Once the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the GOP is now dominated by ‘the cult of Trump’, its voter base idolising a president who publicly equivocated when asked to condemn a neo-Nazi march in Virginia and, who has, in the words of late Republican Senator John McCain, ‘abased himself ’ before Russian president Vladimir Putin. Yet, underestimating Donald Trump is a dangerous political course. While Tired of Winning is critical of Trump throughout, some of Cooke’s more insightful observations arise from his contemplation of the president’s appeal. Trump, more than any other candidate in 2016, understood the importance of American exceptionalism to the national psyche. He said in 2016: ‘We’re going to win so much. You’re going to get tired of winning, you’re going to say, “Please, Mr President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.”’ The quote is

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

seemingly inane, but the sentiment spoke to widely held insecurities about America’s future. As Cooke observes: This is a country providential in its founding and prodigious in its conception. Until now, it has believed itself exceptional in theory and practice. When Trump voters angrily repudiated free-trade deals and wars in the Middle-East they had voted for previously, at first it seemed like a paradox. After all, hadn’t they voted for these things in the first place? But it’s not really so inexplicable: they had entered these conflagrations expecting to win. We are now bearing witness to America’s enraged and sometimes dangerous reconciliation with these failures.

Cooke also writes of the appeal of Trump’s language and style as a politician: ‘When the knowledge economy and its adjuncts take the spoils and the dignity of labour disappears, it makes sense that a revolt against this state of affairs is an unlettered one, the linguistic equivalent of a dirty protest, crass and deliberately offensive, wilfully ignorant …’ Trump’s ability to invoke and amplify this sense of frustration and resentment is beyond doubt. While Trump looms large in Tired of Winning, the book also traverses other ground. However, Cooke’s essays describing the experience of attending a college football game or shooting at a gun range feel time-worn, and his observations about gun violence bring little new to the subject. Further, as an aggregation of essays on disparate topics, the book is inevitably superficial and, at times, lacks coherence. Digressions into the work of Philip Roth and Patricia Lockwood seem distinctly out of place. In spite of these limitations, Tired of Winning is worth reading. Cooke’s writing is fluent and engaging throughout – at turns humorous, poignant, and censorious. The book also contains thought-provoking social observations and political insights, though its place in the chronicles of the Trump administration is likely to be fleeting. g Varun Ghosh is a Perth-based barrister.

Rightio Rubik Roy DEAD RIGHT: HOW NEOLIBERALISM ATE ITSELF AND WHAT COMES NEXT

by Richard Denniss

Black Inc. $24.99 pb, 192 pp, 9781760641306

spectre is haunting Australia, that of neo-liberalism. For the last thirty years, both major parties have subscribed to its tenets in order to propitiate big business. It is an ideology (and language) that dare not speak its name. Instead, from London, from Berlin, from Washington, DC, politicians beat the gongs of ‘efficiency’, ‘productivity’, ‘competitiveness’, and ‘incentive’. These are duly echoed in Canberra, causing banks to be deregulated and public assets to be privatised. All this is contended in Richard Denniss’s Dead Right: How neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next, which is an updated and expanded version of his 2018 Quarterly Essay. Denniss, chief economist at the Australia Institute (a public policy institute in Canberra), makes a powerful argument for state intervention in the economy. Denniss is in favour of free markets but argues that even free markets need rules. In his view, the rich and powerful end up controlling markets, without regulation, denying equality and freedom of access for everyone else. The economic pendulum has swung over the last four hundred or so years between state intervention and laissezfaire capitalism, but Denniss focuses on events in the twenty-first century, with occasional forays into the twentieth. He defines neo-liberalism as ‘the catchall term for all things small government’ and describes it as the antithesis of democracy. However, its intellectual origins were more egalitarian. In the seventeenth century, European monarchs dominated economic policies; mercantilism was the norm. Classical liberalism emerged, alongside the Enlightenment, as a response when philosophers such as John Locke argued

that certain individual rights could not be abrogated by anyone; furthermore, the state should serve the people and protect their rights. Economists such as Adam Smith advocated unfettered commercial transactions; supply and demand would control prices of goods and services. By the eighteenth century, classical liberal ideas led to democratic stirrings, culminating in the American and French Revolutions and the separation of church and state. Denniss does not explore how neoliberalism diverged so far from its liberal roots, or how classical liberal ideas were reinvented by Friedrich August von Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, as a response to Keynesianism. Nor does he address the spread of neo-liberalism under Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and the Washington Consensus. Giving a history lesson is not Denniss’s aim. He focuses, instead, on Australia, where no politician publicly avows neo-liberalism, whose footprints are everywhere. Denniss explains how the deregulation of banks, the privatisation of the aged care sector and the electricity industry, and the outsourcing ‘of finding suitable homes for vulnerable children’ have allowed illegal and immoral corporate behaviour, death, malnourishment, and soaring electricity prices, all while making huge profits for corporations. Denniss notes that one of neoliberalism’s keywords is ‘competitiveness’, which is used to argue for lower corporate taxes, lower wages, and job cuts. According to Denniss, the undue stress on competitiveness seems to ignore one of the core tenets of classical liberalism: ‘that all countries have a “comparative advantage” in the production of some goods, even if the absolute cost of producing those goods is lower in another country’. The application of neo-liberal policies has been piecemeal because, as Denniss points out, politics in Australia is based on interests rather than ideology. Politicians lack the discipline or simply the conviction to pursue real market fundamentalism. He finds evidence of this selective application in government subsidies for coal mines, new regulation of the electricity industry, and even calls by some politicians, such as Tony Abbott and Gladys

Berejiklian, to nationalise coal-fired power stations and sports stadiums respectively. Denniss claims that neoliberalism gives the rich and powerful a convenient doublespeak to package their interests as the national interest, and ‘[w]ithout such a cloak, policies to slash income support for those most in need while giving tax cuts to those with the most money would just look nasty’. Denniss is not the first economist to declare that neo-liberalism is dead (Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz did so in 2016), by which he means that ‘the right no longer places neo-liberal ideas at the centre of its rhetoric and policies’. Perhaps it does not have to. As Denniss himself asserts, neo-liberal language, ideas, and policy not only permeate the economy but also Australian culture and identity, from weapons manufacturers such as BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Thales sponsoring the Australian War Memorial, to McDonald’s patronising children’s hospitals, to Westpac owning the naming rights of the Rescue Helicopter Service. Even a sports stadium is named after Suncorp, the finance company. These sponsors, Denniss claims, pay a fraction of the costs, yet they, and not taxpayers, get most of the recognition. Neo-liberalism, he implies, has transformed ‘the heart and soul of the nation’. While Dennis sees conservatives’ calls for state intervention as the death knell for neo-liberalism, and understands the selective application of neo-liberalism as interests driven, is it possible that neo-liberalism is not simply the obverse of state intervention but can also use the state for its own purposes? Can the symbiotic relationship between the state and big businesses, and the inseparability of political and economic spheres, mean that the state and its institutions embody neo-liberalism? Having read his arguments, the reader may agree with Denniss that neo-liberalism has been a harmful and undemocratic influence, but if it is dead, its spectre is yet to be exorcised. g Rubik Roy is a casual academic and PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He has worked in the banking sector and as a public servant. ❖ POLITICS

‘SIGN.US.UP’ Christina Twomey CONTESTING AUSTRALIAN HISTORY: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF MARILYN LAKE

edited by Joy Damousi and Judith Smart

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 264 pp, 9781925835069

arilyn Lake is without doubt one of the most influential historians in and of Australia in the last thirty years. ‘SIGN. US. UP’ writes Clare Corbould, one of the contributors to this festschrift, when describing the reaction of her postgraduate self and friends to seeing Lake sweep through the crowd at a history conference in the late 1990s. Backing up astute critique of others with innovative and field-shaping work of her own, Lake’s scholarship demonstrated the power of feminist analysis in the study of war, culture, and politics, then broke its early national boundaries to explore how the settler colonial world, especially Australia and North America, responded to the challenges of increasingly mobile and articulate people of Asian, Pacific, and African origin.The historian who began with Tasmania ended up taking on the world. A festschrift works on a number of levels. Designed to honour the significance of an eminent scholar upon retirement, the essays therein also identify their authors as esteemed peers and anoint the coming generation. So it is with this collection. The senior men in the field of history in Australia are well represented. True to their disciplinary training, several of them look to Lake’s place and family of origin, and her undergraduate milieu, to locate the wellsprings of her early intellectual interests. The essays by Graeme Davison and Stephen Garton sketch Lake’s biography and the formative influences on her work, while also identifying both her points of departure and their lingering traces. Reading some of the essays inspired a certain nostalgia for the heady days of the 1970s and 1980s, when women’s, 54 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

gender, and feminist history captured the interest of a generation of scholars, Lake included. She was a central figure shaping this emerging field in Australia. The essays by Patricia Grimshaw and Judith Smart at once elucidate Lake’s influence and provide a more general history of that exciting moment in activism and scholarship. Liz Conor’s contribution captures the inspiration of Lake’s work in the women’s studies program at La Trobe University. The volume includes essays that cover the breadth of Lake’s scholarly interests. There are studies of Australian women’s lives and activism (Roland Bourke, Joy Damousi, Kate Laing, and Mark McKenna), Aboriginal policy and protest (Henry Reynolds, Tim Rowse, John Maynard, and Victoria Haskins), and the moments when Australian and American history intersect (Ian Tyrrell and Clare Corbould). The standout contributions, which address Lake’s scholarship most seriously, are the essays by Sophie Loy-Wilson and Warwick Anderson. These essays track Lake’s change of direction, away from topics with a specific national focus to projects of transnational history, especially of white men’s subjectivity, reform movements, and legislative innovations. They demonstrate how these moves kept Lake in sync with tectonic historiographical shifts elsewhere, her work often inserting Australia and the AsiaPacific into the very heart of scholarly debates. Lake’s work also reflected the move towards decolonising the epistemologies that had long structured national historiography by seeking to stretch the archival basis of Australian history beyond white men’s views. Samia Khatun’s essay nicely demonstrates the possibilities of taking such an approach further. Anderson is the only contributor who veers remotely near to a critique. Acknowledging the innovation of Lake’s intervention to train the transnational lens on the Pacific world and settler colonies in general, and on white masculinity in particular, Anderson worries about her more recent focus on élite Anglo-Saxonism. He is concerned that such a move reifies the hegemony of the United States without paying diligence to its imbrication with

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imperial expansion and the erosion of mutuality in exchange with countries such as Australia. Moreover, he asks, does a focus on connection mask the very real processes of, and potential for, domination and appropriation? Less experienced, or expansive, contributors pay quick deference to the work of Lake then proceed to discuss a detailed example from their own latest research. While such contributions certainly demonstrate the heterogeneity of Lake’s agenda, and could be interesting in and of themselves, their inclusion in such a volume makes its coherence somewhat elusive at times. Several contributors point out Lake’s acuity and her command of the art of asking the penetrating question. In her scholarly life, Lake commanded gravitas and expected it of others. One of the strengths of the collection is that readers get a sense of Lake’s persona, her self-presentation, and her networks. The ‘tributes from afar’, short statements from colleagues around the world included after the main action is over, deliver a quality unusual in the festschrift genre: invoking the scholar behind the scholarship, and the kind of activities that make the academic world turn. In much the same way that many of us rush to the acknowledgments section of a book to find the backstory behind the product, the inclusion of such intimacy is compelling. There should be more of it. As I prepared this review, I picked up the March issue of ABR. The lead essay was Ian Tyrrell’s review of Lake’s most recent book, Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press). The review of this festschrift’s subject by one of its contributors suggests that, while Lake might have formally retired from the academy, her influence can and will continue. g Christina Twomey is Professor of History, and Head of School for the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash Univerity. Her most recent book is The Battle Within: POWs in postwar Australia (NewSouth, 2018). ❖

Sliding vistas Alice Whitmore REQUIEM WITH YELLOW BUTTERFLIES

by James Halford

UWA Publishing $26.99 pb, 264 pp, 9781760800130

equiem with Yellow Butterflies begins, aptly, with a death. Sitting at his office in Brisbane, the author receives news that Gabriel García Márquez has died at his home in Mexico. Across the world, there is a mushrooming of obituaries. Garlands of yellow butterflies are draped from trees and buildings; outside Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, paper butterflies rain down like confetti. From Madrid, Elena Poniatowska eulogises: Gabo ‘gave wings to Latin America. And it is this great flight that surrounds us today and makes flowers grow in our heads.’ Gabo’s death is a catalyst for James Halford, in many ways. ‘As I read the memorials from around the world,’ he writes, ‘a spark of curiosity kindled.’ Halford, a diligent reader of García Márquez, begins to unpick the tightly wound threads of ‘mythomania’ that envelop the writer and his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), ‘the great twentieth-century Latin American novel’. The result is the first of fifteen deft chapters that drift seamlessly across the genres of literary essay, travelogue, and personal memoir, opening up new dialogues between Latin America (haunted Mexico; abandoned Paraguay; the humid midriff of Venezuela and Brazil; umbilical Cuzco; ‘eternal’ Buenos Aires), the coastlines and ‘unknown towns’ of Queensland, and the red desert of Australia’s interior. This first incendiary death also reignites the dormant love story folded inside Halford’s book. It was John Steinbeck, in his own travelogue Travels with Charley: In search of America (1962), who wrote that ‘a journey is like a marriage’. A book can be like a marriage, too, and Halford’s episodic piecing-together of thoughts and recollections feels like a fitting analogy for

the disordering nature of love, partnership, and child rearing. Told as a series of unchronological essay-vignettes, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies collapses the distance between reader/writer, traveller/tourist, and husband/father. Despite his youthful candour, Halford is no naïf. His flair for dispelling the persistent magical-realist aura projected onto Latin America goes hand in hand with an honest interrogation of his own role in diminishing or trespassing upon something that does not belong to him. Passing through towns and ruins ‘almost wholly colonised by tourism’, he wonders if what we encounter when we travel (even when we travel in search of authenticity, with the earnest goodwill of seekers) is, inevitably, a kind of fantasy: ‘the West’s collective hallucination’. Snippets of displaced music – Brahms’s German Requiem in a Michoacán cathedral; Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries deep in the ‘jungle metropolis’ of Manaus – act as gentle reminders of the strangeness of European presence in what remains, in many parts, a wild and indomitable continent. Many of Halford’s observations are written from the interstitial sites – the ‘neutral spaces’ of Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing (2016) – that comprise so much of the experience of travel. The sense of movement and displacement is suggested, rather than forcefully impressed, by a recurrence of sliding vistas: riverbanks glimpsed from the deck of a ferry; the cloud-wreathed ascent to Monte Roraima; landscapes snatched from the windows of buses, trains, hire cars – an endless stream of vehicles inching from or towards the coastlines and heartlands of Australia and America, those two immense sister continents. Halford has a talent for understated imagery. Graceful lines emerge like mirages along the way: the road to Teotihuacán is hemmed by ‘dense green knots of cactus’; crossing the Argentine pampa, the plains scroll past ‘treeless and unrippling,’ with ‘the flatness of the sea on a still day’. Back in Australia, conference attendees leaving the Red Centre in a convoy of rented city cars are ‘a procession of identical white insects crawling across the desert’. Halford’s

descriptions often invoke a sense of intrusion: his arrival at Machu Picchu feels like ‘wandering onto an abandoned film set’; on Anangu country, outsiders resemble an infestation of white ants. Just as he questions the aimless odysseys of his twenties, Halford begins to doubt his claim to the continent he grew up on. Returning to Brisbane from Uluru, he confesses: ‘I felt less confident in my use of the possessive pronoun. That smouldering, red-black plain didn’t feel like my country.’ The sensation will be unsettlingly familiar to anyone born and raised on stolen land. There are other funerals scattered throughout the book: Halford’s grandfather, a World War II veteran, is buried at Redcliffe, north of Brisbane; Jorge Luis Borges, much to Argentina’s chagrin, is laid to rest ‘a few plots from John Calvin in Geneva’s Plainpalais cemetery’. Death, here, is not a heavy pall so much as a counterpoise to the agitation of life – death asks us to remember, to return to our roots, to our sacred sites. It brings the butterflies to rest. The sensation we are left with, at the end of Halford’s roaming, is one of homecoming. Having survived the vicissitudes of an ‘unmoored’ youth, the challenge now is to master the art of arriving. The book opens with an epigraph taken from Nietzsche’s Nachlaß: ‘To rediscover the South in oneself ’ – and Halford’s South-South wanderings, his East-coast youth spent ‘gazing East’ – not to the Orient, as our Eurocentric language would have it, but towards the Pacific, and the American exotica that lies beyond it – is also an attempt to reframe his relationship with the difficult geographies of the home and the heart. In a book premised on wanderlust, the message that lingers is an unexpected one: ‘It’s good to be still.’ g

Alice Whitmore is a Melbourne-based translator and editor. MEMOIR

Off they go Jacqueline Kent FABER & FABER: THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF A GREAT PUBLISHING HOUSE

by Toby Faber

Faber & Faber $28 pb, 422 pp, 9780571339044

he ‘untold history’ of Faber & Faber should be a cause for celebration. For so many of us, possessing the unadorned, severe paperbacks with the lower-case ‘ff ’ on the spine meant graduation to serious reading: coming of literary age by absorbing the words and thoughts of Beckett, Eliot, Larkin, Stoppard, Hughes, Plath, Miłosz, Golding, Ishiguro, Heaney, Carey, Golding, Barnes – Djuna, not Julian – and dozens of others. (Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, too, even for those of us who didn’t get past the middle of Justine.) Toby Faber, grandson of the founder, Geoffrey Faber, tells the story of his family firm from its beginnings in the 1920s to 1990, encompassing what he evidently considers Faber’s glory years. He has put together his history more or less chronologically from correspondence, memos, and diary entries, interleaved with shortish paragraphs of commentary and background. At first glance this seems promising, especially 56 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

for readers who – like me – enjoy reading other people’s mail in print. But it doesn’t take long to realise that this approach has significant and rather puzzling problems. The most obvious of these is the lack of a strong narrative line; there is no clear indication of the company’s development, no tracing of the means by which Faber became the multifaceted publisher it now is. Who, for instance, decided that Faber should publish musical texts as well as words? How well did that work? Toby Faber’s commentaries are neither pungent nor particularly informative. And the lack of an index doesn’t help either. The author has also chosen to limit discussion mostly to books and writers that Faber discovered and continue to publish. This is also frustrating: the books that got away are always interesting, and often significant. It also seems to me a mistake to give no space to books and authors with relatively short shelf lives. Books whose fortunes rise and fall rapidly are often excellent indicators of popular culture and part of social history. What Toby Faber has done, to a dismaying extent, is present a thorough, even exhaustive, financial and corporate history of Faber & Faber. There is a lot of information about shareholdings, changes of directors, who was on the board, and so on. Especially at the beginning of the story, this is irksome. Instead of ponderous memos about share portfolios, the book would have benefited from a quick initial chapter enumerating the company’s development in its first five years, describing the wrangles between the owners of the science press from which it sprang, and how Geoffrey Faber shepherded its growth into a general publisher. The story is certainly interesting, but, presented in this bitsand-pieces way, the financial machinations are given far too much emphasis, and the character of the original Faber (there was only one, Geoffrey added the ‘& Faber’ presumably for euphony) does not come across as clearly as it should. And it is irritating that one of the few pieces of financial information that might really be worth knowing – to what extent the Eliot estate’s royalties from the musical Cats have

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kept Faber & Faber afloat – is more or less glossed over. The author who emerges most clearly from this book is T.S. Eliot himself. This is inevitable, I suppose, given that he was not only a Faber author but the poetry editor for many years and was largely responsible for the wonderful list that was built up under his aegis. He was also a good friend and adviser to Geoffrey Faber, helping him smooth over difficulties in the running of the company. As mentioned, the royalties of Eliot’s estate were crucial in keeping Faber & Faber going in the 1980s and beyond. None of the other authors fares nearly as well. Their letters just turn up in the text, are quoted a few times, usually about their best-known books, and then off they go. While it is interesting enough to read letters from the likes of Samuel Beckett and Kazuo Ishiguro, the book’s lack of context raises many frustrating questions. Whose idea was it to approach Beckett, for instance? What was the literary relationship between the brothers Durrell? If William Golding was as crabby a customer as his letter extracts indicate, how difficult was the editing of Lord of the Flies? It’s also impossible to ignore the absence of women writers: there are fewer than ten in the whole book. It’s always unfair to castigate an author for not writing the book you think he should – but really, this untold history is very much an opportunity missed. Many readers, I suspect, will pick it up to learn more about Faber’s famous authors, their working practices, and their relationships with their publisher. They will be disappointed. Indeed, it’s disheartening to report that this is pretty much just another corporate history of a publishing company. There are dozens of these now, and the question must be asked: given the often lunatic and eccentric nature of book publishing generally, and the wonderful cast of characters – authors and publishers alike – why are so many of these histories, including this one, so dull? g Jacqueline Kent’s most recent book is Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (2019).

Sleepless night Geoff Page THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN ARTIST

by Andy Kissane

Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 88 pp, 9781925780376

ndy Kissane, who (with Belle Ling) shared the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, is one of Australia’s most moving poets. He is unfailingly empathetic, a master of poetic narrative – and of the ‘middle style’ where language is not an end in itself but an unobtrusive vehicle for poignancy (or, occasionally, humour or irony). The Tomb of the Unknown Artist, Kissane’s fifth collection, is divided into four thematic sections, all of which contain powerful and memorable poems. Of these, Part Three, a series of monologues from the Vietnam War, is the most disturbing. Part One comprises mainly personal and family poems, some autobiographical. Others (such as ‘Marriage Material’, a monologue by an Edwardian bride on her wedding day) are examples of extreme empathy – ‘metempsychosis’, as Kenneth Slessor would have said. (‘When I imagined walking down the aisle / I did not know that it would feel like this: / as if I’d been blessed with much more // than I deserved, more than I could grasp: as if / the scent of gardenias and orchids would cling / to my skin for the rest of my days ...’) Other poems in this section also embody this feeling of unapologetic joy, a hard thing to achieve without sentimentality. They include the book’s opening poem, ‘Alone Again’, and several others such as ‘Domestic Dreaming’ and ‘A Personal History of Joy’. The latter ends with how the ‘two-thumbed salute’ of a childhood VFL boundary umpire on a muddy pitch can be ‘a perfect accompaniment to the endorphin light that swamps / your mind as you rise again in the shining world’. It’s not hard to hear an echo of the early Bruce Dawe here. A few of the poems in Part Two, such as ‘Getting Away With It’ (about

how much one poet must inevitably owe so many others), are light-hearted, but several others are what one might loosely call ‘protest poems’. They include ‘Modern Whaling’, ‘A Wall of Eyes’ (a child’s monologue about Dr Josef Mengele, set in Auschwitz), ‘After the Deluge’ (set in post-‘Shock and Awe’ Iraq), and ‘Shooting Footage’, about a father in a primary school who initially ‘films [his] daughter // and her friends playing hopscotch’ and then films the boys who are ‘dragging Joshua towards the Disabled Toilet’, carrying him ‘like a trussed pig’. It’s a sickening exposé of the bullying that continues in our schools. The only occasion where Kissane’s touch is less than certain occurs in this section, namely in ‘Beached Dreams’, based on Slessor’s ‘Beach Burial’. It’s an ironic and strongly felt pastiche that attempts to come to address a major national shame, i.e. the continuing incarceration of innocent asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. Even its best stanza, however, has an awkwardness that never troubled Slessor. ‘Between the fob and mincing of the sound bite, / no one, it seems, has time for this – / to pluck them from a watery grave, wrap them in blankets / and raise a glass to honour // their remarkable courage ...’ Slessor’s subtle half-rhymes are not the only thing missing here. Part Three, by contrast, is the most powerful of The Tomb of the Unknown Artist. It’s a series of monologues spoken by an infantryman in the Vietnam War. Kissane himself is too young to have served in that war himself. Unfortunately perhaps, he doesn’t acknowledge the accounts that must have underpinned his unbearably graphic recreation of it. All ten poems are of the same high quality, and most detail episodes that would almost certainly have caused their narrator, not to mention the Vietnamese soldiers, villagers, and children he encountered, some kind of PTSD later. One poem, ‘The Firefight’, addressing the PTSD issue directly, ends with: ‘in your dream / you are stricken, petrified, legless – / unable to run or crawl or do anything / to escape the barrage raining down / on you, night after sleepless night’.

The most affecting poem would have to be ‘Searching the Dead’ (which won the Porter Prize), though ‘The Book of Screams’ is even more horrifying. In ‘Searching the Dead’, the narrator is sent out ‘to search the pockets of the dead’ for ‘intelligence’ and finds only things that remind him of the humanity of his enemy. Items such as: ‘A cowrie shell bringing news of the South China Sea. / In one man’s pockets a pair of lacy black knickers. / And photos wrapped in plastic to preserve them – a girlfriend leaning against a motorbike, a couple posing / near a lake, a family in front of a shimmering pagoda.’ After all this intensity, Part Four risks being anti-climactic but nevertheless remains a convincing meditation on various aesthetic issues – often, but not always, through the eyes of an unnamed painter. Among them is the bitterly satirical title poem. Even more memorable is the group monologue ‘Degas’s Women’. Each of its stanzas starts with a new assertion: ‘There are so many / of us and we are beautiful.’ ‘We are Degas’s nudes / and we are washing.’ ‘We are rarely identified, / seldom named.’ ‘We are turned away / so you may never glimpse / our faces.’ The poem is both a critique and a celebration. It avoids dismissing the artist’s ‘male gaze’ as being merely exploitative while, at the same time, conceding implicitly that the fact of the women speaking collectively (and anonymously) is a statement in itself. It’s an entirely typical Kissanean subtlety. g

Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-three collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. POETRY

‘Turning over in the mind’ An art historian slackens the reins of his prose

Christopher Allen HEAVEN ON EARTH: PAINTING AND THE LIFE TO COME by T.J. Clark

Thames & Hudson, $49.99 hb, 288 pp, 9780500021385

iotto’s frescoes invite us to ponder the nature of what we instinctively, conveniently, but not very satisfactorily call realism. Compared to the work of his predecessors, these images have a new kind of material presence. Bodies become solid, take on mass and volume, and occupy space. Those in front overlap with and partly occlude our view of those behind, for Giotto wants to set them in the same kind of space that we ourselves dwell in, rather than the immaterial space in which Duccio’s rows of angels can hover one above the other. There is nothing literally illusionistic in this, nothing that tries to trick us into believing that we are seeing the real world instead of a picture. There is instead an artifice of illusion, a play of conscious reference to natural experience; indeed even in the most overtly naturalistic images, like those of Caravaggio, the effect and the intention are entirely different from the beguiling but superficial conceits of trompe-l’œil. The purpose of this ‘realism’ is inherently double, or even ambivalent. On the one hand, it is an attempt to give new substance and cogency to the sacred stories. Giotto brings images of faith down from what Yeats called ‘God’s holy fire’ and into the world of human experience. But this is also to accord a new importance to physical and sensorial apprehension; to give the sacred stories new reality by setting them in our world is, implicitly, to modify the standard of reality itself. These appear at first to be the issues that T.J. Clark is setting out to consider in Heaven on Earth. As an art historian who has devoted most of his work to the study of the art-historical period known 58 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

as ‘Realism’ – and to painters such as Courbet and Manet – he seems, on the face of it, well qualified for the task. Unfortunately, it soon becomes apparent that the author has not really thought through the question in any depth, nor does he seek clarity and economy in the writing. The style has a kind of indulgent looseness, as though Clark believes that by slackening the reins of his prose he will allow it to run with greater freedom and spontaneity. Instead, we encounter flaccid free association, replete with qualifications and parentheses; what presumably started as a quest for the ineffable becomes vagueness, and a willingness to entertain alternative or contrary explanations becomes a tiresome mannerism: The square is an abstraction, we might say: meaning abduction from the world of objects and events; the appeal of the absolute; ongoing distrust of ‘appearances’ whatever their earthly or heavenly guarantee; a power of generalization in human affairs that does not (cannot) know when to stop – to stop ‘turning over in the mind’.

This passage is unfortunately typical: poorly grounded in the work itself, in spite of endless inconclusive ruminations and copious illustrations, it ends up doing exactly what the author ostensibly wants to avoid, which is replacing the immediacy of experience with theoretical or ideological verbiage. It is an obstacle rather than an aid to understanding the image. Or consider this on Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne: Cockaigne is a picture of gravity – the

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pull of a gravitational field, of pleasure as a planetary system with cooked food as its sun. Cockaigne celebrates the cooked as opposed to the raw, we could say; or, rather, the cooked replacing the raw altogether. It is a place where the founding distinction of Lévi-Strauss’ or Detienne’s ‘civilization’ has been permanently left behind. The last unconscious residues of the palaeolithic have vanished from the cultural bloodstream.

This bizarre regurgitation of cultural references sounds like something composed aloud for a dictating machine, or the excited rambling of a lecturer exhilarated by the sound of his own voice and the impression he is making on an undergraduate audience. However much pleasure it may give its author, such writing casts no light on the works it purports to discuss. This stylistic incoherence reflects a lack of orientation in its whole conception. The theme of ‘heaven on earth’, in Clark’s hands, is far more nebulous than the outline I offered above, and it does not get any clearer as the book progresses. The substance of Giotto’s work dissolves in largely inept over-interpretation. Bruegel’s Land of Cockaigne is wrongly conceived from the outset as an example of ‘heaven on earth’, for it has nothing to do with making the transcendent concrete, and if anything it represents the weight and inertia of the body that inhibit transcendence. Clark’s attempt at interpreting Poussin’s second Sacrament of Marriage falls foul of the obstacle that defeats so many commentators, and will always defeat those who seek to understand any one of his pictures in isolation. Poussin was a peintre-philosophe whose whole

work is the record of an evolving reflection, especially on themes related to Stoic ethics and cosmology. His vision of religion, as numerous analogies make clear, is syncretistic, so that pictures on Christian subjects cannot be understood in isolation from those drawn from the Old Testament, classical mythology, and even history. But the Sacrament of Marriage is not even truly a single and independent picture. It is part of a series of seven paintings, which itself is the second iteration of an unusual subject: the Seven Sacraments. So any interpretation of this particular painting must begin with some idea of the meaning of the theme for Poussin, the differences between his two series – painted for two close friends and patrons – and the rea-

The style has a kind of indulgent looseness sons for these differences. Ultimately, we must return to the question of how this set of quintessentially Christian subjects fits into Poussin’s oeuvre as a whole. Instead, we are faced with the same drift of impressionistic musings that is all the more disappointing because the author clearly likes Poussin’s paintings. He looks closely at details, but he doesn’t see their significance. It is the same problem we encounter in the other chapters, of attempting to interpret as mimetic or psychological phenomena what are really instances of coded and iconographic meaning, in the same way that those who don’t understand a foreign language take metaphors and idioms literally. The book feels like a veteran art historian’s attempt to cut loose from scholarship and his field of specialisation, and to venture into a broader and more speculative, even philosophical kind of reflection. Unfortunately, the approach is mismatched with the material, and the result is a book that not only fails to illuminate but actually obfuscates its subject. g Christopher Allen is currently Senior Master in Academic Extension at Sydney Grammar School. He is the national art critic for The Australian.

‘No one even said bum’ A study of seven originals

Desley Deacon SEVEN BIG AUSTRALIANS: ADVENTURES WITH COMIC ACTORS by Anne Pender

Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 292 pp, 9781925835212

owadays every second young Here, the pathos is underlined by person seems to want to be a photos showing them looking hapless, stand-up comic, an occupa- usually in fancy dress. Although these are individual portion that perfectly represents the ‘gig’ economy in its precariousness and oc- traits, one of the pleasures of the book casional nature. Anne Pender gives us is the collective picture that emerges of mini-biographies of seven Australians a glorious time in television and theatre, who succeeded, often spectacularly, when programs like The Mavis Bramston in the risky business of being a comic Show introduced adult entertainment long before the idea of a ‘gig’ economy with a capital A at a time (1964) when, entered the collective mind. Beginning to quote its creator, Carol Raye, ‘No one with Carol Raye, Pender relates, in even said bum on TV.’ These are people forty or so pages each, the life stories whose careers overlapped in Melbourne, of Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Sydney, and London in the Pocket PlayMax Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Shel- house, the Phillip Street Theatre, the don, and Denise Scott – in other words, Pram Factory, La Mama Theatre, and in members of the two cohorts who rode the Barry McKenzie movies Number 96, the national theatre and television wave The Naked Vicar Show, Don’s Party, and from the 1960s to the recent past. Squirts. The names of Barry Creyton, Pender, a professor of English and Graeme Blundell, Phillip Adams, Clive Theatre Studies at the University of New James, John Bell, Bruce Beresford, HelEngland, is the author of One Man Show en Garner, David Williamson, Patrick (2010), a biography of Barry Humphries. The essays in Seven Big Australians, based on in-depth inter views with her subjects and careful research, demonstrate an empathy that makes them quite engrossing. A good part of their charm comes from the details that Pender elicits from her subjects about the upbringing. The men especially suffered. Their lack of interest in sport and ‘manly’ occupations made them outsiders (Humphries’ headmaster farewelled him with the words, ‘I hope you’re not turning pansy’); in some Noeline Brown making up for Bell, Book and Candle at the cases their parents regarded Pocket Playhouse, Sydenham, Sydney, 1963 (photograph them as ‘no-hopers’ (Clarke). courtesy of Noeline Brown, from the book under review) ART

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Cook, Don Watson, Jeffrey Smart, and Robert Hughes dot the pages in all sorts of permutations and combinations. (Be warned: there is no index to help you find these personalities.) These stories also provide a revealing social history of the period. An important theme is the introduction of trauma into the life of families as a result of the war. Parents’ marriages were troubled and often ended in bitter divorces where the father disappeared from their children’s lives – by banishment or even suicide. The horrors of the divorce court in 1960s New Zealand were particularly appalling in Clarke’s account. With one thing and another, as Clarke put it, not much parenting was done. For these boys, life-changing mentors save them from directionless drifting – a sympathetic teacher or an enthusiastic amateur director who recognises their potential. None of these seven went to NIDA, though Max Gillies gives a particularly chilling account of his (unsuccessful) audition with Robert Quentin. As usual with talented outsiders, once launched on their trajectory peers were their most important influence and support. Patrick Cook, Don Watson, and John Clarke were central for Gillies. As for John Clarke, it was Phillip Adams, Paul Cox, and Max Gillies who encouraged him to play himself. The women among these seven had different trajectories. Carol Raye, born in 1923, began her career just before the war. She had a happy childhood and seemed to sail confidently through marriage, childrearing, and looking after ageing parents, constantly refreshing a career through periods in Kenya, Australia, England, and back again in Australia. Noeline Brown, born in 1938, also had a happy childhood and fell accidentally into amateur theatre and eventually television, where The Mavis Bramston Show gave her an opportunity to shine. Denise Scott, born in 1955, had a darker childhood, not because it was an unhappy family but because of her own anxiety and self-doubt. Unlike the men, she does not seem to have found a mentor, and her story is one of perseverance in the face of imminent disaster. She did her first stand-up at the age of thirty-four

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in 1989, fighting against extreme stage fright, and her accounts of aggressive hecklers and unresponsive audiences are agonising. With Judith Lucy, she pioneered a new sort of feminist comedy where nothing – childbirth, menstruation, bad sex – was taboo, attracting in the process a new audience of older women. These stories provide some delightful, revealing, and surprising bits of information. Raye’s style in the 1940s is described evocatively as ‘frisky demureness’. Brown’s boyfriend in the early 1960s was Robert Hughes, and her character, ‘Possum,’ in My Name’s McGooley, What’s Yours? was the inspiration for Humphries’ famous greeting ‘Hello Possums’. Humphries’ 1977 attempt to storm the United States was an abysmal failure. Bob Hawke showed his ambivalence about Gillies’ portrayal of him by giving him a ‘friendly but not painless’ bop on the nose when they appeared together at the North Melbourne Football Club. Seven Big Australians has much to amuse and much to teach. But be warned: it induces intense nostalgia and longing in those over sixty. It made me want to write to the ABC and the various commercial channels: please set up a channel that replays Mavis Bramston and its like, and screens landmark films such as Don’s Party and Travelling North. And how about a series of interviews with key people of this era before, like John Clarke? They are gone from us forever. g

Desley Deacon is a former academic and writer living in Sydney. Her biography of actress Judith Anderson is currently in press.

Arts

Daisy Walkabout wins Billycan Races (1985), photograph by Juno Gemes

Alison Stieven-Taylor on Juno Gemes: The Quiet Activist Film

Little Woods

Anwen Crawford

Reflection

The Golden Age on St Kilda Road Patrick McCaughey

Epiphany

Braving Glyndebourne Robyn Archer

ABR Arts is generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons. Visit our website to read the full range of ABR Arts reviews. ARTS

Little Woods

‘I

Anwen Crawford

’m starting to see why Canada is so appealing,’ says Deb (Lily James) to her older sister Ollie (Tessa Thompson). Their mother has died after an unspecified, difficult illness; Ollie was her live-in carer and still sleeps on the sofa, out of habit and grief. But now the bank is about to foreclose and the modest house at the edge of a North Dakota wood will be repossessed unless the sisters can scrape together $3,000. Deb, who lives with her young son Johnny (Charlie Ray Reid) in an illegally parked caravan outside of the local supermarket, is newly pregnant and can’t afford to be. Ollie is counting down her final week of probation, after having been caught and charged for smuggling prescription opiates. The odds are heavily stacked against the characters in Little Woods, the début feature by writer–director Nia DaCosta. ‘I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the frontier,’ DaCosta told New York magazine recently, and her film transplants various characteristics of the western to the wintry northern badlands of the United States. Little Woods is named after the fictional town in which it is set, though DaCosta based her script upon research she did in the real North Dakotan town of Williston, which underwent a rapid population boom in the first half of this decade due to oil fracking. Little Woods sketches in the consequences of an economic boom. Oil rigs scar the land, and encampments of shipping containers house workers who struggle to keep up with punishing shift schedules. Ollie moves through this environment with practised wariness. She both belongs and is made to feel she doesn’t belong, an adopted daughter, a woman in a town that now skews heavily male, and a black citizen in a very white part of the country. Her local reputation as a drug dealer precedes her, and tired workers struggling with illness and injury keep nagging her to resume selling them painkillers. Despite her burdens, Ollie has the restless, and sometimes reckless, energy of youth, and throughout the film Thompson keeps open the question of whether her character will succumb to do-or-die nihilism or make a clean break for the future. Like so many American stories, Little Woods is a drama about personal agency, but it’s also a dramatisation of what it means, in material terms, to have very little agency to exercise. An increasing

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amount of contemporary, independent North American cinema is addressing this dilemma, and the best of these films – Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017), Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018), and Bing Lui’s Minding the Gap (2018) – use one town or state as a synecdoche for the nation. Details might vary from place to place, but the causes of poverty are systemic, and so patterns of living – and dying – repeat themselves. The best of this North American new wave is also distinctly cinematic. The Florida Project unfolds in long, static shots that provide a formal counterbalance to the film’s narrative chaos; Minding the Gap, which is partly about skateboarding, is characterised by marvellously fluid action sequences, shot on a skateboard. As a piece of cinema, Little Woods is less striking. Scenes are constructed out of orthodox mid-shots and medium close-ups that frame the characters more or less squarely, which lends emphasis to the dialogue but doesn’t allow the camera much of a role in storytelling. The viewer may wish for a more expressive visual sensibility to show itself, one that is better matched to the complex weave of emotions – hope, cynicism, anger, tenderness, dread – that the characters feel. This is mostly Ollie’s story, and Thompson’s nuanced performance makes the film. Less realised is Deb, despite James’s best efforts in the role. Deb’s struggle to obtain an abortion helps motor the plot, but her character remains somewhat diminished, in comparison to Ollie, and her narrative matters less within the scheme of the film. Deb loves her son, needs her sister, and can’t quite separate herself from an intermittent, deadbeat boyfriend. ‘I can do better,’ her boyfriend Ian ( James Badge Dale) pleads. ‘You can’t’ is her reply; this flat acceptance might signal either her emancipation from the hopelessness of the relationship or her submission to it. Through the prism of these character studies, Little Woods strives to be a film about North America’s housing, opiate, and health care crises all at once. DaCosta’s ambition can’t be faulted, even though one sometimes has the feeling that, especially as a writer, she can’t quite decide where the emphasis should be, and is trying to cover everything in a script that won’t stretch to fit. Her film is most effective when it lingers, quietly, on scenes that reveal the characters’ circumstances without having to explicitly address them: when Deb spends nights hunched over textbooks in her caravan, for instance, with one eye on her sleeping child, trying to study for a college entrance exam; or when a shot of the Canadian border demonstrates, wordlessly, the physical mundanity and the arbitrariness of the division between countries, and therefore between fortunes. This border is only a bollard in a field, but it makes all the difference in the world. g Little Woods (Limelight Distribution), 105 minutes is written and directed by Nia DaCosta. (Longer version online)

Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based writer and critic.

White Pearl

Alexander Douglas Thom

n explicitly racist advertisement for a skin-whitening treatment, the eponymous White Pearl cream, has gone viral. The pastel offices of ClearDay – the Singaporean cosmetics company behind the ad – become the backdrop for a disastrous attempt at damage control. Presided over by manager Priya Singh (a vigorous performance by Farzana Dua Elahe), ClearDay’s publicity crisis becomes the crucible for the team’s disintegration, to horribly humorous effect. This new piece by Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King is a meticulously constructed black comedy. In a peppy eighty-five minutes, White Pearl carves through the major political concerns of today. Disputes about ethnicity, nation, and gender boil over among the ClearDay team, especially regarding the endemic problems of international cosmetics. This is unabashedly political theatre, an accounting of some of the sunk costs of modern society. With the dark glee that animates the best satires, King skewers her subject, peeling back the carapace to reveal something complex and repulsive. But White Pearl is also unabashedly entertaining. The combination of globalisation-era themes with the archetypal genre of workplace black comedy is confidently handled. King’s dialogue is taut, witty, and rhythmic; the dynamics between her characters are sophisticated and dependable. This robust grasp of the form is presumably what some reviewers have in mind when they comment on the strength of King’s voice. But what is striking about White Pearl is the plurality of voices. The ClearDay team is panAsian, constituted by staff from India, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and America. Much of the drama rests on this heterogeneity of perspectives, particularly with regards to identity. One memorable instance arises when some of the staff deride the British-educated Singh and the Thai-Californian Built Suttikul (Kae Alexander) for not being ‘real’ Asians, objecting that their Westernised values have impeded them from understanding their market. Likewise, Singh later reveals her own contempt for the staff members who are unable to speak English with at least ‘some degree of fucking finesse’. These discriminatory battles coil through King’s brisk plot, which is well buoyed by this production’s formidable ensemble and skilfully directed by Nana Dakin. A coup of the production is Katie Leung’s riotous performance as the Chinese-Singaporean Sunny Lee. Leung handles Sunny’s ‘dudebro’ manner with flair – ‘Wah lau eh. Why they say the fuckin’ brand?’ – winning many of the biggest laughs of the night. Beyond the comic payoffs, Sunny also holds the heartbeat of the show. She subtly foils many of the appalling extremes that the ClearDay team careers into. In a moment of great artistic courage, from actor and playwright alike, the South Korean chemist

Soo-Jin Park (played with dexterity by Minhee Yeo) embarks on a racist tirade against black communities in Asia. It is a car crash of a monologue. A roiling argument ensues that burns through the rest of the play. But both Park’s appalling speech, and the furious retaliations by Singh, are tempered by Sunny Lee’s all-too-human, ‘Shit, son. I’m out.’ It’s a remark that rings out in tune with the audience. The dramatic handling of Park before and after her monologue is worth watching closely. It reveals some of the scorching intelligence in King’s writing. Park has moments of real generosity, especially in a magnificent bathroom scene with her bullied Chinese colleague Xiao Shen (Momo Yeung). Likewise, the South Korean herself suffers through a prejudiced outburst concerning North Korea, at the hands of Singh. Projections of the internet comments on the viral video – ranging from racist to outraged – pepper the scene changes, putting Park’s racism into a provocative context. These choices all participate in a sophisticated dramatic strategy. As the complications add up, our moral compasses start to spin, and the play becomes a veritable rollercoaster. But there are deep critiques at stake in these reversals also. In a flashback sequence, the ClearDay team debate how to market their skin-whitening products. The new hire, Ruki Minami (flawlessly played by Kanako Nakano), proposes a cynical strategy: alluding to the product’s bleaching properties but emphasising other selling points, like its organic ingredients. The rationale is made explicit: the consumer can give themselves every excuse to ‘ethically’ buy the whitening product without purchasing it for its actual purpose. This dramatisation of the unspoken emotional logic of consumption is perspicuous, and it gives weight to King’s own wry description of the play as ‘capitalist realism’. But the master stroke arrives a few scenes later, when Ruki confesses that she still used the product herself, despite fully understanding its numerous faults. It is true that those working within exploitative ideologies are often those most invested in them and most vulnerable to their discursive power. That this is drawn out in such clear and personal terms is just one example of the careful counterpoising that underpins White Pearl. King has a keen sense of the conditions in which her characters operate. Yet, White Pearl never loses sight of the irreducible complexity and chaos of life either. Theatre here resolves the ancient tension between theory – Marxist, feminist, postcolonial – and reality. While so much can become intelligible through these structural models, life ceaselessly overflows their bounds. The staging of that moral and political paradox with brisk humour, fresh voices, and clarity is a roaring achievement. In short, White Pearl is urgent, in every sense of the word. g White Pearl, written by Anchuli Felicia King and directed by Nana Dakin, is being performed at the Royal Court, London, until 15 June 2019.

Alexander Douglas Thom is a doctoral student at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. ❖ ARTS

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Maria Krechowec uncovers painful memories amid the death and famine that made up much of her life in Through Fire and Over Water. Maria was born in a small village in Ukraine. She recounts the hunger she suffered in the Holodomor in 1933, a man-made famine authorized by Stalin which killed millions. From there, Maria chronicles her enslavement by and escape from a Nazi ammunition factory, her liberation by America that landed her in Soviet Russia, and how through sheer determination she made her final escape back to the West where she would meet her future husband and begin a free life at long last.

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All Is True

Johanna Leggatt

here is a scene in Kenneth Branagh’s British film, All Is True, where the earl of Southampton (Ian McKellen) tells William Shakespeare (Branagh) that the Bard has lived ‘a small life’. As the Southampton points out snidely, there have been no scandals in Shakespeare’s backstory, no drunken gallivanting on the Continent or tempers flaring in taverns over misconstrued sonnets. Yet, as uncontroversial as Shakespeare’s life may have been – first as a hard-working actor, playwright, and theatre proprietor in London, and later as a retiree in Stratford-upon-Avon – his life after death has been positively eventful. Under Branagh’s direction, Shakespeare’s rather unremarkable domestic set-up – a dutiful wife and two daughters – has been freighted with dramatic tension and subjected to great embellishment on screen. All Is True is a rather melancholy and indulgent imagining of Shakespeare’s preoccupations during his superannuated years (circa 1613 until his death in 1616). Taking aspects we know to be true of Shakespeare’s life – that he had a son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven; that he wrote sonnets to a mysterious young boy; that he bequeathed his ‘second-best bed’ to his wife – Branagh and writer Ben Elton have attempted to draft a compelling fictional denouement to a series of facts that seem more happenstance than portentous or connected. We learn, for example, in the opening titles of the film, that the Globe burned down in 1613 and that Shakespeare did not produce another play, which overstates a link between the cannon shot that ignited a thatched roof and a playwright’s retirement. What the audience is not told is that the Globe was rebuilt a year later and that, as scholar Stephen Greenblatt makes clear in his book Will in the World (2004), Shakespeare had begun to ‘brood about retirement’ as early as 1604. This is, of course, somewhat expected in a film that leans heavily on imagination for its one hundred minutes of dramatic action, but the problem is it is unlikely to please anybody. Shakespearean scholars – indeed, anyone with a passing knowledge of his life and plays – will bristle at the tabloid dramatisation and soapy dialogue, while those seeking a little more heft in their plots will find the humdrum circumstances of Shakespeare’s later years quotidian and dull.

Shakespeare’s return to Stratford is received rather indifferently by his local community, an incredible notion considering his stature in London at the time. There is a snobbish MP, Sir Thomas Lucy (Alex Macqueen), to contend with at church, as well as a grasping puritan son-in-law who covets Shakespeare’s fortune. But our protagonist has bigger concerns. He remains haunted by the memory of his son, who died seventeen years prior from the bubonic plague while Shakespeare was in London writing The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare is convinced that his son was a burgeoning poetic genius, that his pre-teen work showed acres of promise. While he ruminates on the lost potential of Hamnet and gazes at the middle-distance of the Warwickshire countryside, the women in his life watch on gloomily from the sidelines. A frustrated Anne Hathaway is played wonderfully by Judi Dench, who has that rare on-screen skill of displaying more than one emotion at the same time, in this case both an enduring affection for her husband and frustration at his prolonged absences over the years. Their two daughters, the unhappily married Susanna (Lydia Wilson) and the petulant Judith (Kathryn Wilder), offer assured performances, although it is Judith, the twenty-eight-year-old spinster and twin of Hamnet, who shines as the frustrated poet hemmed in by Elizabethan mores. Branagh is remarkably restrained in the role of Shakespeare, bringing some much-needed verisimilitude to the role of the Bard. His performance is matched by McKellen’s wonderful Southampton. Indeed, the senior cast members are so adept, so at home wandering through Shakespeare’s England, that some viewers may conclude the film is essentially a late-life employment vehicle for Britain’s ageing thespians. The cinematography is ambitious and discerning, with wide angles trained on a bucolic England, the lighting so spectacular and artful that the domestic scenes resemble a series of tableaux from a lush Chardin or a Dutch still life. Ben Elton is undoubtedly a talented writer, but the script fails to strike a coherent tone. There are lines so clichéd, so plodding, that one wonders whether we are missing a hidden joke. For example, Shakespeare struggles to keep his garden alive and tells Anne, with po-faced seriousness, that he finds ‘it easier to create things with words’. Elton’s previous foray into Shakespearean drama with BBC’s Upstart Crow was much more successful, allowing him to combine his fine wit with the taut humour and delightful play of Shakespeare’s language. Although Shakespeare knew his Ovid and Cicero, he never lost touch with the trivial pursuits of ordinary people, and, indeed, one would have preferred Elton to loosen the Elizabethan collar somewhat and have some more fun with this project. g All Is True (Sony), 101 minutes, is directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist. ARTS

Così

Sarah Goodes, the director, has at least wrestled with this conundrum, if not resolved it. As if to defuse the notion that these asylum oddballs might be drawn with any responsibility to clinical realism, she sets the action in a stylised, theatrically heightened world. Five doors around ouis Nowra’s much-loved play Così is often held up this abstracted setting, designed by Dale Ferguson, open to as the archetypal great Australian comedy, a larrikin brightly lit spaces that at once nod to the antiseptic wards farce in the vein of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (1982). the patients belong to while also hinting at the hope of But as the years roll by and the play’s sensitivities diverge an escape to brighter futures. Equally unreal are the caricatural performances of from contemporary standards, it increasingly seems to share more in common with Shakespeare’s ‘problem plays’. some of the patients, which, in their own way, summon Since its première at Belvoir St Theatre in 1992, Così a surprising degree of pathos as well as humour. As the has earned an affectionate fascination for many, comple- infatuated and easily riled Cherry, Bessie Holland is the mented by the 1996 film, with its extraordinary before- life and soul of the party. Rahel Romahn, as the lecherous they-were-famous, all-star cast. And yet, Così clings to pyromaniac Doug, adopts a similar tack with the OTT several woefully dated ideals, particularly in its handling boganness of his characterisation. As the insufferable thespian fantasist whose dream it is to stage Mozart’s ‘music of mental health. Set in 1977, Nowra’s semi-autobiographical story sees of the spheres’, Robert Menzies is masterful as Roy. The Lewis, a recent university graduate with little experience, emotional anchor of this production, Menzies can turn tasked with directing a show with a ragtag collection of from overbearing hilarity to the frailest vulnerability on mental patients. Lewis must somehow mount a produc- a dime. His desperate yearning to escape both the misery tion of Così fan tutte, regardless of the sheer impossibility of the asylum and the prison of his own mind is deeply, of success. If that weren’t enough, Lewis is beset by peer profoundly touching. But there is also a sense of self-conscious restraint pressure to embrace all the political and social uprisings of the era, from free love to the Vietnam War moratoriums. present that perhaps speaks to the issue of expecting these The most abrasive issue is also one of the most complex. actors to portray such trivialised ideas about complex Nowra’s comedy hinges on hamming up the delusions of psychologies. Katherine Tonkin’s Ruth exchanges her mentally ill people, counterpointed against the appar- autistic-spectrum OCD for a more non-specific social ently infallible sanity of the central hero. This is not only awkwardness, while Esther Hannaford, as the free-spirited problematic but also hugely reductive, not to mention junkie Julie, confuses the mania of addiction for a teenage self-serving for Nowra and his protagonist proxy. The moodiness. By contrast, Sean Keenan’s Lewis is so ‘sane’ he seems play does little to offer any meaningful window on mental disability. Nor does it do much, except perhaps in passing, virtually monotone next to such a lumpy range of perforto explore the institutional pressures or emotional truths mances; this makes his character difficult to connect with or to care about. And yet, as an ensemble, this wild variety affecting these characters. By any contemporary yardstick, penning such exploit- almost works, particularly when the culmination of their ative depictions today would be considered outrageous. efforts is presented in the strangely moving spoken-word But is Così ring-fenced from these higher standards as Franken-opera. Goodes’s vision does much to paper over the cracks a historical artefact? Can we forgive its point-and-laugh in this dated play, but the highs of this production don’t attitude to mental health because of its era? There is a corroborating pedigree to be found in other quite cancel out its lows. There will, of course, be those who Australian pop-culture touchstones of the 1990s. Very dismiss concerns about the psychological inaccuracies as similar in tonality to the film adaptation of Così, enduringly unnecessarily PC and who might argue that the groundpopular cult classics Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of swell of social outrage we now feel in our political arenas Priscilla, Queen of the Desert skip lightly over riper social rot shouldn’t come to bear on Nowra’s harmless comedy. There while buddying up to characters on the fringes of society. is something ironic about this defence, given the synergy Not unlike Così, they trade in damaging stereotypes and of Così’s political undercurrent: a young generation rejecting the rusted-on attitudes of an out-of-touch status quo. oversimplifications of culture and experience. Another irony springs to mind. Despite the myriad As part of a broader cultural vernacular, perhaps Nowra’s seeming insensitivities make more sense, but thoughts Così provokes about its relevance for today’s this cannot totally excuse them. Much like the social and audiences, perhaps the best way to engage with this play cultural schisms in Shakespeare’s problem plays, be it the is to not overthink it. g anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice or the misogyny Così, produced by Melbourne Theatre Company and showing in The Taming of the Shrew, navigating the offensive social at the Southbank Theatre, The Sumner, continues until 8 June 2019. mores of the past so that they are accessible to audiences (Longer version online) of the present is the true measure of whether a work like Maxim Boon is an arts and culture writer and editor. Così is still relevant.

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Maxim Boon

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

EPIPHANY

Braving Glyndebourne Robyn Archer

t was during the still relatively tentative explorations I was making into the world of international arts festival direction that I swallowed hard and made my first visit to Glyndebourne. I had lived in London throughout the 1980s, had performed there many times in various venues from the National to the Drill Hall to Wyndham’s in the West End, and had sung in Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam. I’d been to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, but never to Glyndebourne. The cost had probably kept me away initially, but its apparent veneer of privilege made me feel uneasy even on that first visit. It was 26 May 1996. As Artistic Director Elect, I’d just experienced Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide Festival and was now on the hunt for performances that would populate my 1998 edition. As lush lawns and tidy grounds, expensive wheels and elegant attire confirmed the status of the greater swathe of patrons, I thought of my own adage ‘your show is only as good as your worst usherette’. As an artist you might have spent years on the concept, pitching, developing, creating, rehearsing, and, ultimately, presenting a new work, but it would only take one bad experience as an audience member entered the venue to destroy all of that. This wasn’t a bad experience by any means, just a bit daunting to see the ‘no expense spared’ ethos of the famous destination for serious opera goers. I had come particularly to hear and see Dawn Upshaw in Handel’s Theodora. I’d been listening to her recordings for some time, but had never found an opportunity to hear her live. Having met Peter Sellars briefly in Vienna the year before, I became aware of the intended production and the equal attractions of William Christie and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as the marvellous mezzo soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Peter welcomed me into the box with a customary hug and was already effusing about the artists as ‘these wonderful people’ when the excitement was momentarily dulled by an announcement from the stage that Miss Upshaw was ill and that the role of Theodora would be sung by Lisa Milne, a young Scottish soprano. What emerged for me was some kind of aural miracle. Of course the music of Handel had come to my ears before, albeit in the random way I had accessed all formal musical repertoire since the first recognisable introduction by a lover at university. But at the end of this production I realised I had never actually ‘heard’ Handel before. Part

of that is surely attributable to William Christie and that extraordinary band with those exceptional singers. The air was electric in only the way it can be when the stand-in steps up. I experienced the same thing a decade later in a matinee of The Color Purple on Broadway (the experience heightened even more by the fact that Eartha Kitt was sitting two seats away and that I got to meet her afterwards). In this Glyndebourne matinee, Lisa Milne’s performance as Theodora was terrific, while seeing/hearing Hunt Lieberson live for the first time was deeply affecting. The sheer artistry in this ensemble was outstanding. That rare skill of the performing artist to be a selfless conduit between composer/lyricist and audience was fully deployed. Nothing got in the way of my chance to ‘hear’ Handel. But of course something else was at play. Misjudged, lazy, or egotistically driven direction or design can often get in the way of that transaction. In this production, Peter Sellars had kept performative ornament out, and George Tsypin’s set of glass on white provided the minimalist canvas. Although Peter’s interpretation was thoroughly contemporary, there was nothing forced about a scenario of brutal regime and punitive persecution. There was nothing histrionic about the subtle and thus convincing performances. And the final aria, with the persecuted lovers strapped to guerneys tilted towards the audience, and the lethal injections applied by two choreographed medical executioners, was unbearably moving. I have been ‘hearing’ Handel ever since and have probably continued to judge all contemporary performance and interpretation with this production as my benchmark: in the re-presentation of any work from any canon, in any genre, it should feel as if it is brand new, and as if one had never really ‘heard’ it before. Some of the subsequent choices for my festivals, such as Cesc Gelabert’s Im Goldenen Schnitt (to Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach), Anne Teresa De Keersmeker’s Once (to the recording of Joan Baez in concert), or Trisha Brown’s Winterreisse (with Simon Keenlyside) are testament. Luckily, that production of Theodora (with Dawn Upshaw in the lead) was recorded. While it won’t be quite the same experience as my epiphany in situ some twenty-three years ago, you might see what I mean. g Robyn Archer – singer, writer, artistic director – is an ABR Laureate. ARTS

The Golden Age on St Kilda Road by Patrick McCaughey

shift in the European mind is taking hold. The stable democracies of Germany and the Netherlands contrast sharply with an unstable France and a demagogic Italy. The northern tier has an increasing authority, politically and culturally. Art historically, the Amsterdam–Berlin axis challenges the hegemony of the Paris–Rome accord. The reopening of the Rijksmuseum in 2013 after ten years of closure brought Amsterdam back as a major centre of the European imagination. The ‘new’ Rijks, restored by the Spanish architects Cruz y Ortiz, is a miracle of coherence and has placed the Golden Age of Dutch Painting of the seventeenth century primus inter pares with the national schools of the period. The Dutch changed and reordered the categories of painting. Landscape and still life took their independent paths; genre painting and cityscapes became widely practised; interiors, domestic, and ecclesiastical, as well as marine painting, won new practitioners and collectors; the double or paired portrait added new life to portraiture, as did the group portrait of merchants and militia. All became part of the body politic of Western art. Last year I had another revelation, humbler but no less telling. I revisited the Kröller-Müller for the first time in thirty years. It looked tired curatorially – too many minor pictures undercut the major works. What transfixed me this time, however, was the Hoge Veluwe National Park, fifty-five square kilometres of it surrounding the museum. An historically preserved landscape, sparingly logged and cultivated, the sandy dunes, scruffy woodlands, and open heath instantly recall the landscapes of Hobbema. His rutted roads are gone, but the tangled waterways and gnarled oaks are still in situ. As the light falls on an autumn afternoon, you pass through a seventeenth-century landscape. Good Dutch collections abound outside the Netherlands – Paris, London, Berlin, Washington, and New York to finger only the most obvious. They are largely taken for granted; a pleasant blur surrounding the peaks of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals. A similar fate has overtaken the remarkable collection of seventeenthcentury Dutch (and Flemish) painting in the National Gallery of Victoria on St Kilda Road, quite the best in Australia, unlikely ever to be surpassed. To my shame, I too had fallen into ‘taking the Dutch collection for granted’. So, on a Monday morning in February 2019, with Jan Senbergs, a leading Melbourne painter, 68 J U N E – J U LY 2 0 1 9

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I set out to look again, more intently this time, at the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish collections. The Rembrandt Cabinet housing them is spacious enough, if a tad gloomy. Maybe that’s appropriate enough if you start as we did with David Teniers II ‘s sullen The skittle players, with its lowering skies. Oppressiveness seeps into the picture despite its breadth – twice as long as it is high. The tavern yard where the skittle players while away their hours of idleness is cramped and sunless. Across the stream which divides the work suggestively, the industrious housewife bends to her laundry. No comfort here: the outhouse is propped up, and the bank is muddy and unattractive. Everyone who writes on Dutch art starts with the realism of the school. You can count the nine skittles clearly and not fail to mark the earthenware flask of wine accented with a gleam of light. Admiring the realism only takes you so far: it is the present-day quality of the scene which holds our attention. It takes time to read Dutch genre paintings properly. They are discursive fictions, none more so than Jan Steen’s The wedding party, a munificent gift from James Fairfax. Nothing embodies so well the crowded world of seventeenth-century Holland. Men and women, young and old, partygoers and sceptics, jostle uncomfortably together. Steen catches out the viewer, placing an old woman between the aged husband and youthful bride. She stares balefully out at us, a counterweight to the fiddler who also turns and leers suggestively. The portraits come as a welcome relief from this claustrophobic world. Thomas de Keyser’s Frederick van Velthuysen and his wife, Josina, a gift from Melbourne financiers Lynton and Nigel Morgan, bears the polish, confidence, and worldliness of Amsterdam at the height of its mercantile power. The shimmering blacks of the satin and embroidered costumes, the finesse of lace collars and cuffs, and the imperturbable gaze of the wealthy couple make this a potent sleeper in the collection, a civilisation mirrored in a single image. Small wonder Rembrandt took note of this accomplished master, ten years older than himself, when he first moved to Amsterdam. We enjoy slowing down and reading the pictures carefully. ‘The satisfaction of getting closer to the work and hear it speak,’ as Jan later remarked. None more so than with the Jacob Jordaens, Mercury and Argus, another major gift from James Fairfax. The Jordaens,

an autograph replica of a famous earlier work of his for last – what an extraordinary ensemble they make! (now in Lyon), has the high polish, luminous colour, A masterpiece from the outset of his long career, Two and Ovidian subject of a courtly art, painted under old men disputing, with its wordless disputation of finthe compelling aegis of Peter Paul Rubens, markedly gers and hands right in the centre of the panel, matches Flemish. It is a most sinister work. The youthful, athletic the confident portrait of the ‘blond man’ from his final Mercury, messenger and henchman of Zeus, reaches for period. Between them is the vivid Self-Portrait, not auhis well-hidden sword preparing to behead the sleep- tograph but fascinating. Thanks to some astute curatorial ing Argus (‘old man with wrinkled dugs’). It upends and conservational research by Ted Gott and John Payne, the pastoral convention of placid heifers, seated dog, we now know that the support came from a bolt of canand verdant resting place with its incipient violence. But you have to look carefully: Mercury draws his sword stealthily, never taking his eyes off the snoring herdsman. His intent gaze and sun-dappled body distract the viewer from looking at his right hand which grasps the hilt of the sword. The other holds the scabbard so that he will draw the blade noiselessly … a goosebump moment. Jan and I turn to the marvellous group of landscapes almost in relief. In Hobbema’s The old oak, you could indeed be driving through the Hoge Veluwe National Park. The sandy road runs around the pond and leads the eye through the landscape, passing the solitary horseman and the couple on the far side with their cart. Jan, a powerful and expressive painter of trees, seizes on the old oak and its evocative combination of live and dead branches. Mercury and Argus (c.1635–40) by Jacob Jordaens (National Gallery of Victoria, presented through It is a monumental presence in the The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mr James Fairfax AO, Honorary Life Benefactor, 1996) landscape combating the overcast sky, shadowing the pool. Jan, alert to Hobbema’s poetry, vas used in Rembrandt’s studio for other (autograph) notes that we look from a shaded foreground to a perfectly works.That is to say, the Self-Portrait was painted by a gifted assistant under the demanding eye of the master himself. lit middle ground. John Poynter, in his masterly history of the Felton Salomon van Ruysdael’s River landscape with boats, one of the Gallery’s aces, hangs adjacent to the Bequest, tells the teeth-grinding story of Frank Rinder, Hobbema. Ruysdael’s decision to use a vertical format the London-based adviser in the 1920s who was offered for a landscape, at once extensive and intimate, guar- Vermeer’s Girl with a red hat (National Gallery of Art, antees its originality. Jan is immediately drawn to the Washington, DC) and reluctantly turned it down. Why? stand of trees on the left. Their green-gold tonality Rinder had recently taken a beating over the acquisition – light passing through foliage – creates the palpable of the putative Jan van Eyck Ince Hall Madonna – too atmosphere. The quartet of voices – sky and water, dis- much money for such a small painting, and was it even tance and light – elevate the painting to the first rank in genuine? Rinder dared not risk the good name of the Dutch landscape. Eugene Fromentin in his classic text Felton Bequest again on the tiny Vermeer in excess of The Old Masters of Belgium and Holland (1882) records £20,000. Imagine the NGV’s Dutch collection if it ‘the visible movement of air through space’ as a central showed both Rembrandt and Vermeer at the height attribute of the school. Nowhere better can this subtle of their powers. It would be that much harder to take observation be seen than in the Melbourne Ruysdael. it for granted. g Its ever-changing sky looks forward to Constable and his belief that ‘the sky is the chief organ of feeling’. Patrick McCaughey is a former Director of the National Jan and I have left the Melbourne Rembrandts Gallery of Victoria. ARTS

Juno Gemes: The Quiet Activist

Alison Stieven-Taylor

n some ways, the title of this forty-year survey is at odds with Juno Gemes herself. There is nothing quiet about Gemes’s vision or her passion for telling stories that challenge preconceptions and cultural norms. The Quiet Activist: A Survey Exhibition 1979–2019 features nine bodies of work, the majority of which deal with the struggle of Aboriginal peoples to be seen and heard, but the survey is no more one-dimensional than the artist. Over a career spanning more than forty years, Gemes’s work has ranged wide, from experimental filmmaking and theatre in the 1960s, to protest work sustained for the best part of three decades. In 1949, Gemes came to Australia from Hungary as a child of postwar Europe. As an adult she became curious as to why Australian history seemed to begin with the arrival of the First Fleet. Mindful how ‘Aboriginal peoples were invisible and ignored’, Gemes determined to play her role in bringing to light a forgotten people. Not that hers was a straightforward journey: the oeuvre reveals the twists and turns that have resulted in a complex archive. Gemes’s first encounter with photography came in 1964 with Nothing Personal by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon. Later, she photographed Baldwin in London. One of the treasures in the survey is Gemes’s personal memorabilia, including a scrapbook documenting her portrait session with Baldwin. In the late 1970s, Gemes had her first real encounter with Aboriginal Australia, working on the film Uluru as a researcher. Immersing herself in a ‘fringe camp on the outskirts of then racist Alice Springs’, Gemes says it was ‘the steepest learning curve of my life’, a profound experience that led her to embrace photography as a vital conduit. More so than the moving image, photographs for Gemes became a way to break through what she saw as ‘this barrier of invisibility’. One of the most compelling aspects of Gemes’s documentation of the Aboriginal communities in which she worked is the sense of longevity and continuity. She hasn’t parachuted in, taken a few snaps, and left to move on to the next thing. She’s stayed, investigated, explored, returned, commiserated, raged, and celebrated with those who have trusted her with their story. Gemes’s pictures of the Uluru handback in 1985 provide a solemn yet mystical commentary on the cultural traditions and the significance of the occasion. Her photographs of the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations are images of joy. They express the power of the women elders while also capturing their playfulness. The photograph of Daisy Walkabout winning the Billycan Race is priceless. Gemes’s work is not only about activism, though this

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is a central theme. It also captures a side of Aboriginal culture that is rarely seen. Consider the photograph taken in 1977 in Redfern during NADOC celebrations where a young couple are wearing KISS make-up. No one ever talks about young Aboriginal people loving rock n’ roll. ‘That’s so true,’ says Gemes in conversation. ‘There was a house band on Galiwin’ku [Elcho Island] too and they used to play Patti Smith!’ It is these human connections that resonate in Gemes’s work. A feature of the survey is a collection from Proof: Portraits from the movement 1978–2003, an exhibition for which she has received international acclaim. This toured for five years and gave Gemes her first solo show at the National Portrait Gallery in 2003. The series comprises portraits of extraordinary Aboriginal people: academics, political activists, artists, poets, and dancers. Included are two striking portraits of Marcia Langton, one taken in 1982 in Brisbane at the National Land Rights Action March, and a contemporary portrait photographed in 2003. These portraits of Langton convey both the strength of individual character and of a resolute people. Another engaging series is the conceptual Terra Ancien/Terra Nova (2003–7), where Gemes’s training as a theatre director (she is a NIDA graduate) is evident. In highly stylised tableaux, Gemes creates a narrative of white settlement from the perspective of a young English couple who are thrown into this wild, unfamiliar country. One of the most provocative and powerful images in this collection is that of a young woman, pregnant, naked, and squatting as if to give birth, the backdrop a dramatic desert landscape. ‘I may cop a bit a flak for this one,’ says Gemes, her eyes twinkling at the prospect. Also on show is The Language of Oysters, a meditative, lyrical commentary on life on the Hawkesbury River, where Gemes lives. Her most recent work is included, a collaborative multimedia piece called Love Cancer, which combines performance art with still photography. Here, Detroit-born dancer and academic Aku Kadogo performs in bush settings that Gemes has photographed and over which the actual cells of cancer have been layered. It is visually exciting, challenging work. At seventyfive years of age, Gemes shows no signs of slowing down. The Quiet Activist, A Survey Exhibition 1979–2019 reveals the diversity of Gemes’s practice. More than this, the collection resounds with the rhythm of creative exploration undertaken with an open mind, a journey that has positioned Gemes as one of our most important historical chroniclers. We are fortunate to see through her eyes. g Juno Gemes: The Quiet Activist, A Survey Exhibition 1979–2019, curated by Rhonda Davis and Kate Hargraves, is at the Macquarie University Gallery until 28 June 2019. (Longer version online, with several illustrations)

Alison Stieven-Taylor is an international commentator and journalist specialising in photography and specifically social documentary.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tim Byrne

lizabeth Taylor played Maggie to Paul Newman’s Brick in Richard Brooks’s 1958 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. A more perfect sexual promise left unfulfilled was never committed to celluloid. But if you want truly pyrotechnical sexual chemistry, it’s hard to look past Taylor’s onscreen work with her real-life husband Richard Burton. There was something prurient, sure, but also undeniably erotic about that glimpse into a real marriage that lent their performances an enduring electrical charge. Kip William’s production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for Sydney Theatre Company attempts something a little different: a real-life father and son, Hugo Weaving and Harry Greenwood, cast in the roles of Big Daddy and Brick, presumably in the hope that some familial sparks might fly. The result couldn’t be further from the Taylor–Burton template: not so much a power blackout as a total failure in the design of the circuitry systems. The problems stem, almost exclusively, from Williams the director’s complete lack of faith in Williams the playwright. It manifests immediately as Maggie (Zahra Newman) opens the play singing ‘Cry Me a River’ while Brick (Harry Greenwood) showers in a transparent glass box. The production has to signal that Maggie has been crying a river over her drunkard husband, because nothing in Newman’s performance indicates it. She has the toughest gig of the night, in many ways: she has to set the atmospheric tenor, find the vocal rhythms, and establish the character dynamics of a very long play with several exhausting monologues, all while her husband watches on with studied indifference. Newman’s approach intends to underline the character’s firecracker determination, to illustrate physically the play’s titular metaphor, but it comes across as merely desperate. She isn’t aided by Greenwood’s Brick, a character that heaves with the self-annihilation and soul-crushing ennui of the playwright at his most destructive, but who presents here as simply sullen and charmless. He seems to have taken his character’s name as a personality descriptor, and while it’s unfair to say that an actual brick would have made a better sparring partner for the jittery impetuosity of Newman’s Maggie, it’s clear after a few minutes watching them argue that the chemistry, both sexual and psychological, is never going to catch alight. Curiously, at least in the first act, Maggie drinks more than the nominally alcoholic Brick; it’s another directorial decision that wilfully rejects the playwright’s stated intention, for a result that is more bemusing than insightful. The play’s second act is almost entirely taken up with an exhaustive and penetrating conversation between father and son, the thematic and dramaturgical nexus of the work. But those promised sparks don’t fly here, either. Greenwood tilts his characterisation from the impassive

to the maudlin, his voice sliding from husky to whining, and Weaving dominates the stage in a way that seems, from a meta-theatrical perspective, almost perverse. It’s enough to wish the director had cast total strangers in the roles. In general, the older generation of actors fare better than the younger in this play about the ambivalence of heredity, which serves to accentuate their grip on power even while the structures shift beneath them. Weaving is a towering, monstrous presence as Big Daddy, bellowing his way around the cavernous space like a wounded bear. In a play where everyone is nicknamed Big Mama, Sister Woman, or Brother Man, it’s significant that Big Daddy’s real name is the only one never mentioned. He is the paterfamilias from hell, a blustering bully whose occasional flickers of compassion only serve to highlight his otherwise consuming egomania. Pamela Rabe’s Big Mama is initially almost as monstrous as her husband – at least in her scraping obsequiousness – but she grows, if not in gravitas then in grit. Both performances skirt the bounds of taste and both trip into outright melodrama in key moments, but they have a kind of epic grandeur, an operatic quality that lifts the often leaden mood. The greatest monstrosities of the evening, however, belong not to the actors but to the designers. David Fleischer’s set might photograph well but is in reality a deadening, impractical blight. Random pieces of furniture in shades of charcoal and dark grey lie strewn across the stage as if they have fallen off the back of a removalist’s van, and a hideous funnel towers over the space like a misplaced ship metaphor. Nick Schlieper’s lighting design is, for the most part, cold and clinical – the kind of light Blanche recoils from in A Streetcar Named Desire – but then the fireworks of Act Two start up, and all restraint is forsaken. A massive wall of gold searchlights blinds the audience intermittently, accompanied by the dying fall of a party trumpet, as if the piercing revelations of the play required their own audiovisual signposts. Again, it reveals nothing but a lack of faith. Kip Williams is a talented and often exciting director, unafraid to challenge a play in order to unlock its untapped secrets, but something has gone horribly wrong here. There’s a sense that this endeavour looked so sound on paper that nobody thought to ask the fundamental questions: namely, why this play, and why now? The program notes twist the paper they’re written on to explain the directorial decisions, but they come to nothing when the actors step onto the Roslyn Packer stage. For a play that skewers the lies and half-truths families tell one another, it’s painful to watch a production so avoidant and contrived. When Big Daddy asks Brick what the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof might be, he answers, ‘Well, just staying on it, I guess.’ You could apply the metaphor to everyone involved in this misguided production, and still not get to the bone-wearying disappointment at its heart. g Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is being produced by Sydney Theatre Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre from 29 April to 8 June 2019.

Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic. ARTS

From the ABR Archive

Louis Nowra’s book The Twelfth of Never: A memoir was published by Picador. David McCooey reviewed it in the April 2000 issue of ABR.

ouis Nowra was born in 1950 and is – as he presents himself in this memoir – that very mid-century thing, an outsider. An outsider in terms of class, mental constitution, and sexuality (for a time), Nowra suffers a worse, and originary, alienation from his mother. Being born on the fifth anniversary of his mother’s shooting of her father, Nowra’s existence is caught between dysfunctional expressions of daughterhood and motherhood: ‘I was born a memory of my mother killing her father.’ Such is the dramatic opening chapter of The Twelfth of Never, a tableau worthy of this skilled playwright and screenwriter. But what follows is more leisured, less self conscious about effect and pacing. Memoirs, we often feel, should not be too self-consciously literary. They should allow for any amount of digression, rocking of hobby-horses, and grinding of at least one axe. The discovery of character should be through indirection, and surprises most effectively come from wide vistas of otherwise-conventional selfhood. But like many interesting autobiographies, The Twelfth of Never confounds these notions by being both too original and too conventional. Despite bookending his narrative with his mother’s traumatic story, Nowra is little interested in formal novelty. Tracing his development from the extended family, through parents, school self, and postuniversity, differentiated self is utterly conventional. But many of the stories and characters within this template are decidedly odd. This is partly because so much of the story is concerned with violence and madness. The mother in The Twelfth of Never is frankly brutal. An intelligent, almost pathologically angry woman, she causes her son to retreat emotionally in a way that prefigures Nowra’s greater alienation: the alienation of the self from the self. Narrated in a more or less neutral tone, The Twelfth of Never suggests that the apparent normality of Nowra’s world was one of its oddest aspects. Perhaps it’s not surprising that as a boy he should have believed that aliens from outer space could inhabit human bodies. The evidence of the oddity of this world is not only in the madness (in grandparents, and a strange habit of living near asylums), but also Nowra’ s own experiences: his erotic attraction to the amputated arm of a schoolgirl from Holland; his boyhood admiration for Adam Clayton Powell (an African-American, slightly dodgy politician); the neurological complications from a nasty head injury; his transvestite lover; and his simultaneously scholarly and reckless interest in natural hallucinogens (we’ve reached the 1970s by now). It seems hardly surprising that this outsider figure

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

should partly respond to the more violent episodes of his life through psychic disassociation. Again and again, Nowra describes moments of extreme psychic pressure – usually to do with violence – in which he becomes a spectator to himself. This reaches a climax when he engages a young male friend in sexual activity, ‘not even aware I was going to ask the question until I heard myself saying it’. The self-alienated self is also seen in Nowra’s mimicry of his friends’ gestures, accents, and even walks, making him a kind of antipodean Peter Sellers in short pants. Certainly, the link between alienation and theatricality is explicit. The importance of the theatre, however, is not overplayed. Indeed, while Nowra narrates some important incidents in his move toward becoming a playwright, and while he makes some connections with his plays and other writings, he almost never mentions his works by name. We are left to make the connections for ourselves: between his first experience of directing, in an asylum, with Così; his interest in the exotic with many of his plays’ locations; the interest in powerful women with The Precious Woman and so on. Estrangement, of course, is a key source of theatrical power, but much of the theatricality here is cast in a questionable light, especially in the way that it emanates from a dysfunctional family. Nowra’s mother is a classic ageing diva, raging against time and her romantic disappointments. Nowra’s misanthropic, hotelier grandfather is Dickensian in his amused, cynical viewing of his drunken patrons being entertained by fighting (also drunken) dwarfs. The Twelfth of Never is good on sex, anxiety, obsession, and the need for escape, all central tropes of the autobiography of childhood and youth (and outsider narratives generally). At times, Nowra’s humorous tone is reminiscent of Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs or Robin Wallace-Crabbe’s A Man’s Childhood (both classics in their own way), but, unlike these works, The Twelfth of Never suffers from a lack of artfulness, at least the artfulness of brevity. Too many incidents are narrated with tiring copiousness. This autobiography, then, might seem either too contrived or not contrived enough. This might be said of much of Nowra’s work. Does the work’s mix of extremity and ordinariness make it unreal? In Inside the Island, Nowra observes that, ‘It is always a mistake to believe that just because behaviour is extreme it is unreal.’ This is a good rubric to keep in mind when reading The Twelfth of Never, a book that stays with you long after you thought you had finished with it. This itself is a marker of a strange power, perhaps the unsettling, ambiguous power of the outsider. g

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