Following the success of the Fortieth Birthday Fellowship, we welcome applications for the 2019 ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, which is also worth $10,000.
Like the current Fellowship, held by Beejay Silcox, the new one is unthemed. We are not seeking a single, lengthy essay; rather, we are looking for a sustained contribution to the magazine throughout the year – the kind of nuanced, engaging journalism that Beejay Silcox has brought to ABR. We seek proposals from Australian critics, commentators, and scholars for four substantial contributions to the magazine: review essays, commentaries, and/or interviews. All our ABR Fellows enjoy a special status at the magazine, and this suite of contributions will be a highlight of our publishing year.
Full information about the new Fellowship appears on our website. As always, those interested in applying are encouraged to sound out the Editor, Peter Rose (editor@australianbookreview.com.au) beforehand.
Applications close on 10 December 2018. The Fellow will be named in early 2019.
The Fellowship is funded by the ABR Patrons; all of whom are gratefully acknowledged on page 4.
Meanwhile, on page 29, Beejay Silcox reflects on trauma fiction in her
article titled ‘The Art of Pain: Writing in the Age of Trauma’.
Prime minister’s literary awards
The shortlists for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced. The Awards recognise Australia’s literary talent across six categories: fiction, non-fiction, Aus-
tralian history, young adult literature, children’s literature, and poetry. Shortlisted for the Fiction Award are: Peter Carey (A Long Way from Home), Rich-
ard Flanagan (First Person), Michelle de Kretser (The Life to Come), Gerald Murnane (Border Districts), and Kim Scott (Taboo).
The non-fiction shortlist comprises: Jelena Dokic and Jessica Halloran (Unbreakable), Sheila Fitzpatrick (Mischa’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s), Stuart Kells (The Library: A catalogue of wonders) Richard McGregor (Asia’s Reckoning), and Chris Masters (No Front Line: Australia’s special forces at war in Afghanistan).
The winners in each category will receive $80,000 and the shortlisted writers will each receive $5,000. All prizes are tax-free. The results will be announced later this year.
ColleCted works
The loss of a great bookshop reverberates like the felling of an immense gum tree or the death of a beloved canine. Where will be go on our walks now? Especially along Swanston Street.
Collected Works, which will cease trading at the end of November, is a precious resource for poetry lovers. First based in Collingwood, it moved to the Nicholas Building on Swanston Street many years ago. Kris Hemensley, a noted poet himself, has owned and managed it with his partner, Retta. Together they have subsidised
[Advances continues on page 7]
Kris Hemensley reads at an ABR function at Collected Works in October 2017
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.
November 2018
Paul Strangio
Varun Ghosh
David Garrioch
Maggie MacKellar
Astrid Edwards
Jane Cadzow
Beejay Silcox
Louise Adler
Occupying the void
The mendacity of the Trump White House
Hippos in the Thames
A remarkable history of women’s progress in Australia
Clementine Ford’s new book
A formidable and polarising lawyer
Writing in the age of trauma
A biography of Benjamin Netanyahu
Politics
Gabrielle Chan: Rusted Off Shaun Crowe
Clinton Fernandes: Island off the Coast of Asia David Brophy
Brendan Taylor: The Four Flashpoints Daniel Flitton
Gordon Brown: My Life, Our Times Simon Tormey
Literary & Cultural Studies
Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett: What Matters? Gabriella Coslovich
Ceridwen Dovey: On J.M. Coetzee Felicity Plunkett
Colm Tóibín: Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Simon Caterson
Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell: Half the Perfect World
Brian Matthews
Fiction
James Wood: Upstate Brenda Niall
Kristina Olsson: Shell Susan Wyndham
Bernard Cohen: When I Saw the Animal
Anthony Lynch
Katherine Johnson: Matryoshka Alice Nelson
Marcelo Cohen, translated by Chris Andrews: Melodrome
Alice Whitmore
Peter Cochrane: The Making of Martin Sparrow
David Whish-Wilson
Poems
August Kleinzahler
Judith Bishop
History
Rosina Lozano: An American Language Timothy Verhoeven
Margaret Taft and Andrew Markus: A Second Chance Tali Lavi
Sport
Gideon Haigh: Crossing the Line Kieran Pender
Poetry
Sarah Day: Towards Light & Other Poems
Jennifer Harrison: Anywhy
Jordie Albiston: Warlines
David McCooey
Clive James: The River in the Sky Geoff Page
Open Page
Gideon Haigh
From the ABR Archive
Tim Byrne
Morag Fraser
Gabriella Coslovich et al.
Paul Kildea
Lee Christofis
Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage Arts Highlights of the Year
Stephen Walsh: Debussy
Spartacus
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This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program.
the business for years. Hemensley told Fairfax: ‘The pincers of the internet and real estate affect all small business, even though we don’t have a business imperative.’
Kris and Retta’s legendary goodwill, generosity, and ready welcome are hugely appreciated in the literary community.
homer galore
Doing anything for twelve hours on December 1? If not, drop in to the free reading of Homer’s Odyssey at MPavilion in the Queen Victoria Gardens opposite Arts Centre Melbourne. Melbourne’s Stork Theatre is presenting this marathon, which Helen Madden describes as ‘twelve hours of heroes, gods, ogres, lovers, and a cruel sea’. Twenty-four ‘prominent Melburnians’ will read all 12,000 lines from this inimitable epic poem. They include Sigrid Thornton and Magda Szubanski.
In next month’s issue, Marguerite Johnson – Professor of Classics at the University of Newcastle – reviews two new translations for Homer, including Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, published by Wiley.
JenniFer down
Congratulations to 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize winner Jennifer Down on winning the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction (worth $3,000) for her short story collection Pulse Points. Susan Midalia reviewed Pulse Points, Down’s second work of fiction, in our September 2017 issue; she described it as a ‘wonderful début collection’ and noted that ‘Down’s stories are alive with psychological acuity and technical dexterity’. Down’s Jolley Prizewinning storey, ‘Aokigahara’, appears in Pulse Points
melbourne Prize For literature
The finalists have been announced for the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature. The $60,000 Prize is awarded triennially to a Victorian author whose body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to
Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life. This year’s finalists are Tony Birch, Gideon Haigh, Alison Lester, Christos Tsiolkas, and Alexis Wright.
The finalists for the Readings Residency Award (worth $7,500) and the Best Writing Award (worth $30,000) have also been announced and can be found on the Melbourne Prize website.
The winners of all three prizes will be announced on November 14, while a free public exhibition of the finalists’ work will be held at Melbourne’s Federation Square from 12 to 26 November.
Voting is now open for the Civic Choice Award (worth $4,000). The winner will be announced on November 30. Voting is open to the public. Visit www.melbourneprize.org/vote/ to cast your vote.
arts highlights
We know that our readers, like the ABR editors, love this time of year, when a range of experts nominate their favourite productions and publications, often pointing us to works we have somehow overlooked.
In ABR Arts, twenty-nine critics and arts professionals nominate some of the 2018 plays, films, operas, concerts, television, dance, and exhibitions they found most successful. Our critics include Anwen Crawford, Paul Kildea, and Gabriella Coslovich.
Elsewhere in this issue, Ms Coslovich, in her ABR début, examines a major new book on Australian culture and the tyranny of measurability. What Matters? Talking value in Australian culture (Monash University Publishing) is written by Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett – all at Flinders University. In her review, Gabriella Coslovich asks: ‘What do [numbers] tell us about the exhibition itself? … Its effect on civic well-being? Nothing.’ Her own book, Whiteley on Trial (reviewed by Johanna Leggatt in our November 2017 issue), has won the 2018 Walkley Arts Journalism Award.
Meanwhile, Paul Kildea – musician, conductor, Benjamin Britten’s
biographer, and author of the new book on Chopin’s Piano – reviews Stephen Walsh’s biography of Claude Debussy, a substantial contribution to the Debussy centenary.
Meanwhile, nominations for our ‘Books of the Year’ feature are starting to arrive, with the usual broad range of approbations. Join us in December to find out what people like Andrea Goldsmith, Felicity Plunkett, Glyn Davis, and Frank Bongiorno consider the most successful and enjoyable books of the year.
Prizes galore
Thanks to those early birds who have already entered the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Calibre Essay Prize, our two current literary competitions. The Porter, worth a total of $8,500, closes on December 3. Calibre, worth a total of $7,500, closes on January 14.
Just a reminder, the Calibre judges – J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose – welcome non-fiction essays of all kinds, regardless of subject matter.
Film tiCkets
This month, thanks to Entertainment One, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to Robert Redford’s new film, The Old Man & the Gun (not written by Ernest Hemingway), which will be in cinemas from November 15. Announced as Redford’s final on-screen performance, The Old Man & the Gun was inspired by the true story of career criminal Forrest Tucker who, rather inspiredly, broke out of prison seventeen times. It opens with the now seventy-year-old Tucker’s seventeenth successful escape. The film also stars Sissy Spacek and Casey Affleck.
CorreCtion
How could we misdate Black Saturday, that unforgettable day for anyone living in Victoria at the time? Somehow we did, in Fiona Gruber’s review of Chloe Hooper’s new book on Black Saturday, The Arsonist (ABR, October 2018). The Black Saturday bushfires occurred in February 2009, not September 2009.
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Ringside
An appeal to rethink our expectations of leaders and leadership
Paul Strangio
FOLLOW THE LEADER: DEMOCRACY AND THE RISE OF THE STRONGMAN
(QUARTERLY
ESSAY 71)
by Laura Tingle
Black Inc., $22.99 pb, 139 pp, 9781760640705
As chief political correspondent for the ABC’s 7.30, Laura Tingle was a ringside commentator of the latest knockout bout of leadership pugilism in Canberra. Calling the crazed week-long events in the Liberal Party that climaxed in Malcolm Turnbull’s removal from office in August, Tingle probably felt mildly manic herself at the prospect of lastminute revisions to Follow the Leader, her third Quarterly Essay, to take account of yet another prime-ministerial felling. But Turnbull’s deposal only made her subject more compelling – Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, back to Rudd, Tony Abbott, Turnbull, and, for now at least, Scott Morrison. Why has national leadership become so confounding and insecure?
Tingle, however, has not confined herself to the turmoil in Australia, and nor is she only interested in a reckoning of individual office holders. Her purpose extends to a wider-ranging meditation upon the nature of leadership: ‘It is worth stepping out of the Australian realm for a time to consider what leadership is, and what defines it and confines it.’ It is quite a task. Writers on leadership frequently succumb to the powerful gravitational pull of turning back to individual actors. And neither is it easy to seamlessly navigate between local and international spheres.
The oscillations are evident early as Tingle sketches a troubled picture of contemporary politics and leadership. A core proposition is that there is an unhealthy
preoccupation with individual leaders. In political science, terms like ‘personalisation’ are applied to this trend. Tingle tentatively dates the phenomenon in Australia to John Howard’s prime ministership (1996–2007): ‘maybe it was Howard’s ultimate political dominance over his government – the perception that he alone was the master tactician and author of its fate – that helped shift the way governments were reported towards an obsessive focus on the leader’.
The suggestion is symptomatic of a frustrating feature of the essay, namely, that it bypasses the literature in the field. It is well documented that leadercentralising developments, such as the augmentation of executive resources around prime ministers and the shift to presidential-style election campaigns, began much earlier. Howard’s predominance was built on longestablished trends.
Tingle signals that Australia and other contemporary democracies are also beset by devilish policy problems (for example: climate change, population movement, a geopolitical world order in flux) and political gridlock. They are conditions ripe for the ‘strongman’: a perennial nightmare figure of liberal democracy. Few could disagree with Tingle’s contention that this is what we are currently witnessing with the proliferation of authoritarian populists who seductively preach black-and-white solutions in the face of complexity and uncertainty and who promise to crash through political paralysis.
Circling back to Australia, Tingle suggests that leadership has also become more challenging because of transformations in political parties and the media. With their bases in long-term decline, the established parties have lost philosophical clarity and a sense of common purpose, rendering them vulnerable to outbreaks of self-destructive indulgence. A disrupted media landscape is not only hyper-paced but fractured and fractious. For leaders, this means they have less effective instruments for building and holding together a broad-based constituency for change. In addition, we live in a milieu denigrating traditional institutions and knowledge. Leaders are left to occupy the void: ‘to move into the moral realm … to define the nature of our culture and national values’. It evokes an observation by the late Australian political psychologist Graham Little three decades ago: ‘[it is] as if politics and its leaders have to fill a space left by God and religion’.
Why has national leadership become so confounding and insecure?
Tingle’s essay is most interesting when reflecting on the type of leadership best suited to guide us through these intractable times. She alights upon a quarter-century-old study by US scholar Ronald Heifetz. He distinguishes leadership from formal, authority-based, topdown prescriptive decision-making. Leadership is about coaxing civil society to engage with complex and contentious issues, to acknowledge and work through differences and to create solutions. It is a process of orchestration and capacity building, with the leader performing the role of enabler. Or, as Tingle explains, Heifetz ‘defines leadership as helping a community embrace change … a leader is the facilitator of a group that has to confront an issue’.
Plainly, it is a notion of leadership that is the antithesis of the strongman. Donald Trump is not, it follows, the leader we need for these times: his likely legacy is further division and a weakening of democratic institutions. Yet, Tingle seems to suggest, neither was Barack Obama’s approach the solution, since he ultimately shied away from wrangling change. Instead, Tingle looks to Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron as alternative, if contrasting, leadership types. The former has ‘mastered the art of letting a debate yell itself out until she saw an opportunity, or sensed a need, to intervene’. Macron, on the other hand, tends ‘to lead from the front, the sides and the middle’. He has spoken of a renewal of symbolic politics, of the quest for ‘a new kind of democratic heroism’ and the revival of
‘grand narratives’. Tingle doesn’t quite say it, but perhaps what is required is an elusive harmonisation of Merkel’s unobtrusive, strategic orchestration and Macron’s audacity. The former offers a way to step through complexity and conflict, while the latter may fulfil the yearning of an unsettled public for leadership heroism. It might have been profitable to develop this theme. For instance, can we also find instructive leadership lessons across the Tasman or in our own history? Instead, a section follows headed ‘Middle Power’. Its gist is that prime ministers are confronted with pervasive and difficult issues in an unstable geopolitical environment and when our relationships with the United States and China are in tension. Moreover, they have to cope with maverick strongmen: a point Tingle illustrates by reproducing in entirety the transcript of the discombobulating phone call between the newly inaugurated Trump and (an admirably composed) Turnbull. The essay’s final section is also chiefly Australian-focused. Tingle laments the clichéd endeavours of our leaders to project authenticity. Research shows that it is a quality prized in leaders, but contrived displays of loyalty to a sporting team or addressing journalists as ‘mate’ are not persuasive expressions of it. Establishing authenticity, like leadership as a whole, demands time and space. Yet, Tingle notes, we have a generation of impatient politicians. She benchmarks current and recent leaders against Heifetz’s template to find them mostly wanting. Predictably, the divisive and destructive Abbott comes up worst. But she is too grudging towards Gillard, who, among the prime ministers of the last decade, was the most adept orchestrator of reform.
In her acknowledgments, Tingle declares this ‘the most difficult of my three Quarterly Essays’. One suspects it suffers from a paucity bedevilling politics: a shortage of time and space to address complexity (leadership is a notoriously difficult field). Her appeal for us to rethink our expectations of leaders, and for them, in turn, to recognise that leadership is about empowering others, beginning with opening up the national political conversation, is timely nevertheless. g
Paul Strangio is an associate professor of politics at Monash University. His most recent publication is The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership, 1949–2016, written with Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter (Melbourne University Press, 2017).
‘Go in there and get this stuff. It’s free!’
Idiocy and mendacity in the Trump White House
Varun Ghosh
FEAR: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE by Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster, $45 hb, 448 pp, 9781471181290
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward opens with an astonishing incident. In September 2017, Gary Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, removed a letter from the president’s desk. The letter purported to terminate America’s free trade agreement with South Korea –a vital US ally in the Asia–Pacific. Cohn decided he could not afford to take the risk: ‘I stole it off his desk. I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.’
Woodward is a legend in American political reporting. With Carl Bernstein, he exposed Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in and brought down a president in 1974. In the more than four decades since, he has continued to chronicle the American presidency. His great talent is getting well-placed sources close enough to open up to him, albeit on the condition of anonymity. While Trump may have tweeted ‘so many lies and phony sources’ in response to Fear, it speaks to Woodward’s stature and credibility that his reporting on ‘deep background’ is so widely accepted.
Across policy debates, staff firings, international crises, and presidential temper tantrums, Fear paints a damning picture of the president by meticulously reporting the words and actions of those closest to him. From the outset, Trump’s ignorance startles his advisers. On economic matters, Trump ‘clung to an outdated view of America – locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines’. In the global arena, his outlook was equally simplistic. ‘The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the
value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.’
Trump’s staff struggle to come to grips with the president’s mendacity on issues large and small. ‘He’s a professional liar,’ Cohn observes more than once. When the president ignored legal advice and agreed to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller (investigating collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign), his lawyer John Dowd resigned. ‘Mr. President, I cannot, as a lawyer, as an officer of the court, sit next to you and have you answer these questions when I full well know that you’re not really capable.’
Apparently there is no setting, however serious, in which the current president of the United States can be trusted to speak without lying.
In Trump’s moral universe, weakness is perhaps the only unforgivable sin. In August 2017, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, members of the so-called ‘alt-right’and a number of rightwing militias marched through Charlottesville, Virginia to rally against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. They clashed violently with protestors. The president’s initial response – condemning hatred, bigotry, and violence ‘on many sides’ –appeared to equate those marching with those protesting the march. Prevailed upon by his staff, Trump issued a second statement that explicitly stated ‘racism is evil’ and which singled out hate groups for criticism. When Fox News suggested this was a ‘course correction’, the president was furious. ‘“That was the biggest
[expletive deleted] mistake I’ve made,” the president told [staff secretary Rob] Porter. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”’ A day later, Trump doubled down on his first statement: ‘Not all of those people were neo-Nazis,believe me …you also had people that were very fine people on both sides … there are two sides to every story.’
In Fear, Woodward also exposes the enormous ideological division within the administration over America’s place in the world. Trump ran for president as an isolationist: anti-immigration, antifree trade, and against American military deployment unless for tangible gain. In Trump’s reductionist understanding, trade imbalances were equivalent to countries stealing from the United States, collective defence was ‘a sucker play’, and the United States should ag-
Apparently there is no setting, however serious, in which the current president of the United States can be trusted to speak without lying
gressively pursue its own interests internationally. For example, on discovering that Afghanistan had extensive mineral deposits, the president told his staff, ‘We need to get a company in there … We should just be in there taking it.’ Later, Trump told then national security adviser H.R. McMaster, ‘I don’t need it done through a [expletive deleted] process! … I need you guys to go in there and get this stuff. It’s free!’
Members of the administration manage to block or delay many of the president’s more extreme proposals. Yet Woodward’s reporting suggests that, left to his own devices, Trump would quite happily withdraw the United States from its commitment to a rules-based international order in pursuit of a better deal – a truly terrifying prospect.
Fear is an engrossing book, but a note of caution is required. Woodward presents the accounts of his sources uncritically, and their agendas – personal and political – pervade the book. There
BEETHOVEN SEVEN
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the most thrilling. Revel in the obsessive, hypnotic rhythms and inexorable power of this awesome symphony.
Wednesday 7 November, 6.30pm
Thursday 8 November, 1.30pm
Friday 9 November, 11am*
Sydney Opera House
*Complimentary morning tea from 10am
David Robertson Conducts
PROKOFIEV FIVE
If you love Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music, you’ll recognise the spirit, the sparkle and emotion of his terrific fifth symphony, a modern Russian classic!
Monday 12 November, 7pm
Sydney Opera House
Across three performances (Nov 7, 8 & 12), soloist Claire Edwardes performs an exciting new concerto that has been compared to New York at rush hour – all colour and energy!
VIENNESE ROMANTICS
KORNGOLD & MAHLER
Enjoy wonderful music from the luscious Romantic sound world of Vienna when Renaud Capuçon performs Korngold’s exhilarating Violin Concerto. Then it’s Mahler’s fifth symphony and its famous Adagietto for strings and harp, music straight from the heart!
David Robertson conductor • Renaud Capuçon violin
Friday 16 November, 8pm
Saturday 17 November, 8pm
Sydney Opera House
“…one of today’s outstanding violinists…”
The Guardian
Presented by Premier Partner Credit Suisse
is no analysis of their motives or of the Faustian bargains many have made by working for Trump. Few questions are asked about the legitimacy of staff members actively ‘undermining of the will of the President of the United States and his constitutional authority’.
Further, by relying almost entirely on administration perspectives, the book tends to emphasise the dysfunction in the White House, and obscures some of the administration’s crueller and less defensible actions. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the forced separation of children from their parents, the Muslim travel ban, Trump’s support for accused sexual predator and Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, the half-hearted response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the administration’s ongoing voter-suppression efforts, to name a few, are largely ignored.
Fear is also curiously ahistorical. Trump and his movement represent a political strain with a hardy lineage in US politics. But it has always remained at the fringes. In an essay titled ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1964), American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote:
[T]he modern right wing … feels dispossessed; America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it … The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and Communist schemes; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centres of American power.
That this manner of thinking has metastasised across the Republican Party, largely with the quiescence (and periodic encouragement) of its elected leaders, is a major political development in the United States. That the president traffics in conspiracy theories and retweets Russian propaganda is without modern precedent. Yet, despite his experience, Woodward makes no
effort to place the events he describes, or Trump’s ascension more generally, in any historical context. The effect is to subtly normalise the administration. Fear’s chief attribute is the reporting. Woodward’s sources have dished on the president they serve, and the assessments are brutal. A professional liar. A [expletive deleted] moron. Unhinged. Off the rails. The understanding of a fifth or sixth grader. Zero psychological ability to recognise empathy or pity.
Country life
Shaun Crowe
RUSTED OFF: WHY COUNTRY AUSTRALIA IS FED UP
by Gabrielle Chan
Vintage $34.99 pb, 342 pb, 9780143789284
Ihave only been to Harden-Murrumburrah once, the small town where journalist Gabrielle Chan moved in 1996, leaving the Canberra press gallery to live on a farm with her husband. It was on the way back from a football match in Cootamundra, in the middle of another grim Canberra winter. After a tough win, we all jumped on the team bus and pub-crawled our way through various country towns, arriving in Harden during its Saturday-night peak hour. The evening was magnificent. Although initially suspicious, the locals seemed to enjoy it too. While my memory is hazy, the highlight was watching a local drinker perform the town’s unofficial ballad (I think it was about a dingo). By the third chorus, the entire pub was singing along. My teammates still talk about that night, but, truth be told, we enjoyed it as tourists, in a town that seemed about as distant and novel as outer space. When Chan arrived in 1996, she must have felt similar (when she entered the pub for the first time, the patrons were confused: ‘I might have as well as been an alien from the looks on their faces’). But after two decades of
While Trump’s rages and baser impulses are alarming, the dysfunction Woodward portrays actually comes as something of a relief. It may represent ‘a nervous breakdown of the executive power’ in the United States, but it is hard to imagine that the world would be a better place if the administration was more effective at carrying out Trump’s wishes. g
Varun Ghosh is a Perth barrister.
raising children and working on the town newspaper, of volunteering at the school and dressing up for the annual races, of birthdays and weddings and funerals, she slowly earned the title of local. She also earned the trust of her neighbours, a group usually wary of blow-ins, particularly those with media platforms and questions about politics.
Rusted Off is Chan’s attempt to explain her new country life to Australians living in cities and coastal towns, with its deep romantic appeal and sense of community but also its lingering, often-unspoken divisions. ‘I get sick of my community being portrayed as either rednecks or salt of the earth,’ she writes. It’s a stubborn dichotomy, convenient for both country politicians and lazy, urban critics. ‘But how to change the debate?’
In the book’s opening pages, Chan writes tenderly about the slow beauty of life on the farm. Originally unnerved by it, she comes to appreciate the possibilities of silence. Gradually, she discovers the primal rhythm of seasons, the curious patterns of animals, the dependable company of landscape. According to Chan, these kinds of experiences burrow deep into country people, shaping their social instincts and political commitments. ‘Place is everything,’ she observes. ‘If you can understand that about our communities, if you can understand that place fills a large section in hearts and minds, then you are more likely to understand other projections.’
Chan, a sensitive journalist with close relationships in town, generally allows local people to speak for them-
selves. How do they see the future unfolding? What do they want from politics? While the book is careful to point out the diversity in country towns, these conversations revealed a deep and consistent pessimism, with a number of overlapping fears – from the decline of large industrial employers, to the failure of vocational education, to the outward migration of young people towards cities and regional centres. Beneath this lingered a vicious, often inchoate anger towards politicians, but also the ruthless indifference of modern economics. How could governments look at these places, with their histories and obvious social value, and not invest the resources needed to make them thrive again? (Country residents do not, it must be said, always extend the same generosity to their city counterparts.)
Rusted Off comes just a month after Weatherboard and Iron (2018), Barnaby Joyce’s memoir and occasional manifesto. While Joyce’s book is not without a kind of front-bar political wisdom, Rusted Off is a more thoughtful and honest contribution in almost every way. Where Joyce expresses a familiar brand of country paranoia – and an unsettling aggression towards his imagined city audience – Chan grapples with the many faces of rural communities, even when unpleasant. Importantly, she acknowledges their deep internal fault lines.
As Chan explains, to live in a town like Harden-Murrumburrah is to experience an inescapable social hierarchy, and a keen awareness of one’s place within it. At the top sit landholders, relatively secure in their assets but also influential in their connections to the National Party. A step down are business owners, particularly successful ones, as well as respectable town professionals. At the bottom exists a large group of increasingly precarious workingclass people: those manning checkouts at IGA, hustling for seasonal work as farmhands, cast ashore by closing industries and their stable union jobs.
If there exists a disruptive, even revolutionary impulse in country towns, Chan believes it lies here, in what she calls the ‘neglected class’. Like Menzies’ mythical ‘forgotten people’, they feel squeezed between the numerical dom-
inance of cities and the stranglehold of farmers over the National Party. They want to stay in their home town – it’s often their fiercest wish – but can see work evaporating and their children leaving. They are generally suspicious of progressive social change, especially immigration. Their rage is genuine, if often shapeless.
For Chan, the big political question is ‘whether this vein of discontentment ends in tears for the major parties’. As the recent Wagga Wagga state election showed, the illusion of safe seats can
vanish very quickly – particularly when incumbents are challenged by strong independents or unconstrained minor parties. If National Party politicians are contemplating these threats, and looking for summer reading, they would be wise to seek out Chan and her gentle insights, rather than Joyce’s brash, selfserving vision of country virtue and city corruption. g
Shaun Crowe’s first book is Whitlam’s Children: Labor and the Greens in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018).
Hippos in the Thames
Exploring the prehistory of Europe
David Garrioch
EUROPE: A NATURAL HISTORY by Tim Flannery
Text Publishing, $34.99 pb, 357 pp, 9781925603941
If the past is a foreign country, the distant past is a very foreign one indeed. Tim Flannery’s new book takes us deep into the prehistory of Europe. Climbing aboard the time machine that he repeatedly invites us to use, we glimpse pygmy dinosaurs and terrifying terminator pigs the size of cows. We meet, on the island of Gargano in what is now southern Italy, a giant carnivorous hedgehog. Later, we learn of hippos in the Thames and woolly rhinos in Scotland, encounter a cobra in ancient Hungary and a small ape in what is now Tuscany. For much of the past hundred million years, the climate of the zone we call Europe was tropical or semi-tropical. Huge straight-tusked elephants wandered the continent, their dwarf descendants (only one metre tall) surviving in Cyprus until about 11,000 years ago. Europe’s natural history turns out to be dramatic, yet on timescales that are hard for most of us to absorb.
As in his earlier books, Flannery provides a clear but never condescending synthesis of recent scientific discoveries
and debates. He is a master storyteller, with an eye for the revealing detail. He offers, for example, an arresting narrative of the asteroid strike, around sixtysix million years ago, that scientists now agree killed off the dinosaurs. It was powerful enough, he explains, to shock quartz, something otherwise achieved only by underground nuclear blasts. Yet the impact was two million times more powerful than the largest nuclear explosion and created more shocked quartz than any other event in Earth’s history. The apocalypse extinguished most life on Earth. A tsunami several kilometres high, followed by volcanic eruptions and huge fires, destroyed most of the forests, and the subsequent reduction of sunlight created an endless winter that killed most of the remaining flora and fauna. Even marine algae were destroyed, those whose skeletons formed the chalk under parts of England, Belgium, and France, notably the white cliffs of Dover. Amphibians and some turtles were the main survivors: the midwife toad, widespread in today’s
Europe, is its oldest extant species. Humans – in Europe as elsewhere – have a pretty dismal record, although they of course behaved like other species. They may have hunted mammoths to extinction. They probably eliminated the cave lions, either by competing for food or by displacing them from the caves. Giant hyenas and scimitar-toothed cats disappeared around the same time. Every indigenous creature on the Mediterranean islands, except for the Cypriot mouse, became extinct after the arrival of humans. Remarkably, there was a respite from extinctions from around 7,000 bce, when the muskox disappeared, until the seventeenth century, when aurochs and wild horses vanished. Beavers, wolves, and wisents (a cross between bison and aurochs) were almost wiped out. European bears probably survived (only just) by becoming vegetarian and hence less threatening. In the twentieth century, agricultural chemicals decimated birds and insects, making some species of ants extinct and skylarks rare.
One of the great qualities of Flannery’s approach is his weaving of the history of science into his narrative. Palaeontology and its related disciplines are surprisingly full of colourful characters, like the Transylvanian nobleman Franz Nopcsa Felső-Szilvás, flamboyantly homosexual and arrogantly aristocratic, who first identified some of Europe’s oldest dinosaur fossils. Or Sir Richard Owen, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘one of the most dastardly scientists ever to live’ (the ethical reader is inclined to agree with Flannery’s assessment). More engaging was Dorothea Bate, an assistant at the British Museum who learned enough about fossils from her humble work to track down the remains of hippos in Cyprus, in the process surviving near-starvation, as well as sexual harassment by the British vice consul. Singling out unusual characters risks giving the impression that mental illness is an occupational hazard, since a disturbing number of the scientists he includes killed themselves (although not Owen or Bate). And just occasionally these individual stories, entertaining
as they are, hijack the larger narrative. Yet the interweaving of the personal with the scientific is important. While Flannery never doubts that scientific method will eventually triumph, he recognises that science is inseparable from politics and culture. Academic rivalries sometimes prevented discoveries from being recognised, and so did ideology. It was not only the Nazis who suppressed theories they did not agree with. AntiGerman feeling, and the subsequent triumph of neo-Darwinian theory, meant that the important work of Richard Semon and others on non-genetic inheritance was not recognised for a hundred years.
Flannery brings to a wider public many relatively recent shifts in scientific thinking, particularly resulting from advances in genetics. DNA analysis shows that salamanders, newts, and possibly moles evolved in the European zone. It tells us that cows are descended from aurochs (enabling, as Flannery remarks, the creation of a European culture built on milk). And it sheds new light on the complex migratory exchanges between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Perhaps most intriguingly for us, it reveals that dark-skinned Homo sapiens from Africa – arriving in Europe long after they had spread to Asia and Australia –interbred with pale-skinned, blue-eyed Neanderthals, and that all Europeans living between 37,000 and 14,000 years ago were descended from these hybrids. Small percentages of Neanderthal genes survive in many Europeans today. The wider significance of these discoveries, Flannery points out, is to undermine the old theory that species were ‘pure’ and distinct. Hybrids often adapted more quickly to new conditions. These discoveries render old classification systems outdated, and also point to the need to revise legislation, on endangered species for instance. They encourage us to think differently about genetic manipulation. This is a book brimming over with insights and with implications for the present. It nevertheless does not entirely achieve its stated goals: to explain how Europe was formed, how its history was uncovered, and why it came to be so important in the world. The first two questions are admirably answered,
the third less so. Flannery argues that Europe was distinctive because it was a crossroads, and that this produced organisms and a human world that were special because of their hybridity. The continent’s natural history is one of immigration, by species of all kinds, assuredly an important point to make given recurrent notions of European uniqueness and ‘purity’. Yet, on the evidence he presents, areas of today’s Middle East would have a better claim to the title of crossroads of the world, and the argument about the wider implications of European evolution is not developed enough to be convincing.
Flannery’s enthusiasm is infectious, though. Scientific gravity does not prevent him from dubbing the period from about 23 to 5.3 million years ago the ‘Marvellous Miocene’, ‘arguably Europe’s most enchanting epoch’, or from regretting that humans did not manage to see certain ancient frogs and toads. And he remains an optimist. Despite climate change today occurring thirty times faster than at any time in the last 2.6 million years, he still sees a bright future for Europe, believing that its people can create a natural environment in which humans and other creatures (including recreated megafauna) can coexist. I sincerely hope he is right. g
David Garrioch is Professor of History at Monash University. His books include The Making of Revolutionary Paris (2002) and The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom (2014). ❖
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‘Nothing
without a demand’
A remarkable history of women’s progress in Australia
Maggie
MacKellar
YOU DAUGHTERS OF FREEDOM: THE AUSTRALIANS WHO WON THE VOTE AND INSPIRED THE WORLD
by Clare Wright
Text Publishing, $49.99 hb, 432 pp, 9781925603934
When Clare Wright’s new history, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, landed in my mailbox, I opened it with some trepidation. It was big, a fact I now realise I should have expected but nevertheless a somewhat disheartening one – arriving as it did at the beginning of our lambing season on the farm. It sat on the kitchen table, slightly out of place beside tractor catalogues, long-term rainfall predictions (depressing), and pamphlets advertising ram sales.
Among the debris, it screamed ‘Important Book’. The cover is brilliant: glossy black with gold lettering, and that inspired title, a phrase of Emmeline Pankhurst’s to Vida Goldstein on her return to Australia in 1922, underlined in an exultant swoop by a photograph of the famous suffragette sash. It’s emblazoned with praise. Senator Penny Wong endorses You Daughters of Freedom as a ‘clarion call’. It’s given a gold star by Anne Summers, Judith Brett, and Clementine Ford – and, lest we forget, a reminder Wright is a past winner of the Stella Prize. It all feels a bit daunting.
On my Tasmanian sheep farm, I’m a long way from the epicentre of feminist politics. I read it through the blur of lambing – early mornings, long days –in tiny snippets of time away from the grind of bargaining with the brutality of nature. When I finish, I want to sweep the table clean of all farming paraphernalia, stand on it, hold the book aloft and and tell every person I know to read it
Wright starts with an object and a place. She takes us for a walk through the Great Hall, Parliament House,
Canberra. We walk past the tapestry designed by Arthur Boyd and woven by fourteen weavers over two years. It represents the Australian landscape in the fibre that brought wealth to a new nation, and hours and hours of women’s labour, for once enshrined and not washed up and left to dry on the draining board. Then we stand in front of the sixteen-metre embroidery designed by Kay Lawrence and ‘wrought by 500 highly skilled women from all over Australia’ (my grandmother being one of them). Further in we go, past portraits of Australia’s prime ministers, the march of time evident through a history of facial hair. Wright, our tour guide, points out governors-general and monarchs. There are only two women thus far. They are Australia’s first female governor-general, Quentin Bryce and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, is yet to be immortalised in oils. Directly opposite the queen, who is dressed in wattle yellow, are the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions. Already I have a sense of Wright’s ability to see the poetics of politics. Look, there’s Tom Roberts’s The Big Picture (his painting depicting the first sitting of the parliament of the Australian Commonwealth), on permanent loan from the Royal Collection. ‘It’s not easy to own your own history,’ Wright quips. I love it. It’s the ease of commentary, someone comfortable in their own voice. I sign up for wherever we are going.
We are further in and standing before a glass cabinet display. Here, Wright tells us, is a national treasure, an object both functional and beautiful,
one that, until she stood before it in 2014, she had no idea existed. It’s a banner: ‘Trust the Women Mother As I Have Done’. Painted by Dora Meeson Coates (an Australian) in London in 1908, it represents a moment in time when Australian women led the world. I will leave it to Wright to explain Meeson Coate’s radicalism in conceiving and executing such a banner (she does it brilliantly in a stand-alone chapter). But when Wright enquires about the provenance of the banner, she finds little is known beyond the bare facts of its purchase and return. ‘In the thirty years since it “came home”, the banner had become untethered from its remarkable history.’
Wright has her object. In and out we go, swept up by the remarkable connections across time and place. That’s the beauty of this book. It’s an epic told in evocative, readable, triumphant, unflinching snapshots. I tip my hat to Wright’s research network, and she too praises the remarkable gathering of connections. It enables her to cite the particular and to show how it informs an unfolding international drama, with Australian women at its centre. ‘This is the story of how the world’s newest nation became a global exemplar, exporting to the world a model of democracy that was, at once, ahead of its time and perfectly of the moment.’
I almost need a family tree for the first one hundred pages. We meet the five women the history is structured around, and see them in their Australian context. Vida Goldstein, Dora Montefiore, Nellie Martel, Dora Meeson Coates, and (my favourite) the daring
Muriel Matters. The detail at times threatens to overwhelm us. But Wright holds it together. Deep winter, February 1903, the Oval Office: I read the scene where Goldstein, leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Australia, meets Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the United States. It’s dramatic enough on its own, but I’m reading it as American women protest the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. I’m reading as women are arrested for opposing the appointment of a man who threatens to take away women’s rights over their own bodies. I’m reading as two women corner Republican Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator and force him to look at them and to see that a culture of rape and sexual assault exists across all levels of US society.
I flip back to Wright’s epigraph, a quote from Frederick Douglass in 1857: ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.’
I read of Muriel Matters chaining herself to the metal grille separating the Ladies’ Gallery from parliament, her voice, honed by hundreds, if not thousands of concert hall performances, ringing through the stuffy air of the House of Commons: ‘Votes for Women’. The flat Adelaide vowels and courageous defiance are heavy with meaning. Wright draws it out to full effect. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and Australian women, possessing the franchise as few others did then, demanded the same for their international sisters.
What they didn’t demand were votes for Indigenous women. Race matters in this history. It matters because it is simply not there. Wright doesn’t ignore its absence, but its lack of presence is something that makes the last triumphant paragraph of this otherwise marvellous book ring slightly hollow. That’s not Wright’s fault. It’s our history. g
Maggie MacKellar lives on a sheep property on the east coast of Tasmania. She is the author of two books on the history of settlement in Australia and Canada and two memoirs, When It Rains (2010) and How To Get There (2014). ❖
‘Rape is in the room’
Astrid Edwards
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
by Clementine Ford Allen & Unwin
$32.99 pb, 381 pp, 9781760632335
Clementine Ford’s Boys Will Be Boys is a timely contribution to feminist literature. Her central point is clear and confronting, and it represents something of a challenge. Ford writes, ‘everyone’s afraid that their daughters might be hurt. No one seems to be scared that their sons might be the ones to do it.’
The book makes the case for a change in how we raise both boys and girls, since how we are currently going about it – conditioning boys to expect a life of entitlement and privilege over their female and non-binary peers – is harmful to all of our children, regardless of their gender or sexual preference. Ford inverts the phrase ‘boys will be boys’. She explains how such an attitude, nd others like ‘boys don’t cry’, puts emotional straitjackets on boys by prescribing only one version of masculinity, rather than allowing children to develop their own identity. This argument, this call for change, is Ford at her best.
There is no sugar coating in Boys Will Be Boys. Readers will be confronted. The boys she is talking about are not just those in our kindergartens and schools, but those who have grown up, are in positions of power, and abuse that power. This is Ford’s modus operandi, and while not for everyone, it is a powerful approach. Ford writes what others only think, and therein lies her contribution to our public discourse. She makes it clear – and this will make many readers deeply uncomfortable – that ‘rape is in the room. It’s there with the survivors, but it’s also in the room with the people present who’ve perpetrated it. Because make no mistake, they’re there too.’
Ford is at her strongest when she wields the research at her disposal to articulate complex and controversial
arguments. As a reader, I want to hear more about the problem with focusing on consent (it is not as simple as a ‘yes’, unfortunately), as well as the unofficial databases that are springing up around the world on university campuses to track individuals who assault their peers. Both topics are also touched on by Germaine Greer in On Rape (2018), although Ford provides a more detailed exploration.
This is Ford’s second book in three years. Fight Like A Girl (2016) received the ABIA’s Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year in 2017 and was published in the United States in 2018. While not a sequel, Boys Will Be Boys
Ford writes what others only think, and therein lies her contribution to our public discourse
builds on Fight Like a Girl and consolidates Ford’s voice as an important one in Australian public life. However, this work is longer (by around eighty pages), and it could have done without that extra content. Ford’s argument – and let there be no mistake, Boys Will Be Boys is a persuasive argument articulated skilfully – is let down by the work’s length and the structure of the ending.
Ford veers away from her central argument critiquing the way society deals with boys (and men) and onto a sidetrack about Men’s Rights Activists and Milo Yiannopoulos. Followers of Ford on social media will understand the extreme trolling and threats of violence she receives on a daily basis from these groups, and will also be aware of the public feud between Ford and Yiannopoulos. I have no doubt they will be interested in reading more on these matters. However, for readers less familiar with her online presence and more interested in her central argument, these sections are distracting. As a reader invested in Ford’s thesis, I wanted more of her analysis of how we can avoid raising another generation who believes in the phrase ‘boys will be boys’, not information about fringe groups and the disgusting threats levelled against
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a feminist figure in Australian society. This is not to say these are not topics to air in public. But Ford has other platforms, and Boys Will Be Boys would be a stronger feminist text without them.
The ending of Boys Will Be Boys does not engage the reader with more of Ford’s argument. Instead, Ford offers a list of prominent men accused (and in some cases convicted) of sexual assault and rape. The list – which runs to twentyfive pages – includes the likes of Donald Trump, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Harvey Weinstein, as well as Australian men from all industries, including politics, sport, and the media. This is a distressing list, and it should not be taken lightly. However, ending a work that is dedicated to starting a difficult conversation about how we as a society can stop our sons hurting our daughters is let down by twenty-five pages highlighting the sins of men.
Boys Will Be Boys left me wanting more of Ford’s articulate arguments that I can’t find elsewhere, especially her thoughts on consent and how understanding the consequences of how we structure our public debate can provide the drive to change it. Despite veering off track and the depressing ‘hall of fame’ at the end, Boys Will Be Boys, when on track, remains a ferocious, incisive, and effective treatise. g
Astrid Edwards is the cofounder and current host of The Garret: Writers on Writing. She is a Director of Bad Producer Productions, a storytelling company, and teaches professional writing at RMIT University. Astrid is also the former Deputy Chair of Writers Victoria.
Knowing Gillian Triggs
The memoirs of a formidable and polarising lawyer
Jane Cadzow
GSPEAKING UP by Gillian
Triggs
Melbourne University Press, $45 hb, 300 pp, 9780522873511
illian Triggs is a pearls-andperfectly-cut-jacket person these days, so it is thrilling to learn that she was dressed head to toe in motorcycle leathers when she had one of the more instructive experiences of her life. It was 1972, and Triggs, the future president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, was in the United States working as a legal adviser at the Dallas Police Department. She and a colleague took a motorbike trip through rural Wisconsin, twentysix-year-old Triggs riding pillion as they sped through forests and open countryside. When they pulled into a backblocks petrol station, the attendant took one look at them and refused to fill their tank. ‘I remember vividly the shock of realising that we were not welcome and, worse, we could not refuel,’ Triggs writes in Speaking Up. She adds that her colleague was less surprised. ‘He was a black American.’
Triggs was reminded of that incident on a warm night in central Sydney more than forty years later. Leaving the Human Rights Commission office on Pitt Street, she was approached by three Indigenous people who had just attended one of the regular talks held by the Commission. They asked if she would help them get a taxi. Triggs was puzzled: a cab rank, with several taxis lined up, was right in front of them. When the three told her that no driver would take them to their apartment, Triggs said confidently: ‘Come with me.’ As she and the trio settled into the first cab, the driver ordered them to get out. The next driver did the same. Not until the third taxi did they find a driver who was happy to have them as passengers. This book, published a year after Triggs completed her turbulent five-year
term as the Commission president, is in part a lament. Overt racism is on the rise in this country, she says, and that is just one aspect of the blight that afflicts us. Australia was one of the architects of international human rights agreements after World War II and has a history of being a good global citizen. But it seems to Triggs that in the twentyfirst century something has gone terribly wrong. She asks how we lost our collective courage and compassion, becoming a nation willing to accept the imposition of unnecessarily draconian counterterrorism laws, for instance, and prepared to turn a blind eye to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers in cruel conditions.
In February 2015, Triggs released a damning report, The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. It detailed the impact of prolonged imprisonment on asylum seekers’ children. Tony Abbott, then prime minister, called it a ‘transparent stitch-up’. Triggs had become a polarising figure, relentlessly criticised by right-wing politicians and Rupert Murdoch’s stable of columnists, while lauded by others for coolly sticking to her principles and doing her job. She makes clear that she would have preferred to stay out of the headlines. ‘I was not looking for controversy,’ she says on page one. ‘It found me.’
Triggs was born in London in 1945. Her father, Richard, was a tank commander in North Africa during World War II; her mother, Doreen, served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. The family moved to Australia when Triggs was only twelve, but as we know from her frequent media appearances, she has retained more than a trace of a posh English accent. In print, as in
person, she has an air of calm authority and a certain well-bred steeliness. Her sentences are clear and crisp. Her tone is pleasant but firm. She tells us that she inherited her sense of social justice from her parents, who talked of freedom, non-discrimination, and racial equality as the values for which the war had been fought.
After studying law at the University of Melbourne, Triggs won a scholarship to do a postgraduate degree in international law at Southern Meth-
children in less than four years. The youngest, Victoria, had a rare genetic disorder called Edwards’ syndrome. Triggs says she eventually decided that giving adequate attention to two toddlers and a baby with profound disabilities was not possible. Five-monthold Victoria was placed with a foster family who provided her primary care until she died at the age of twenty.
odist University in Texas. The job with the Dallas Police Department helped finance her studies. Before landing it, she worked part-time as a waiter in a seafood restaurant, wearing an abbreviated sailor suit complete with white shorts, white boots, and a jaunty white cap. (Sportingly, she includes a photograph.) Back in Melbourne, she worked on a PhD thesis on territorial sovereignty and married Sandy Clark, then dean of University of Melbourne’s law school. The couple had three
Triggs covers Victoria’s life and death in a couple of subdued paragraphs while devoting an entire chapter to the rancorous public debate over the pros and cons of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (1975). Billed as a memoir, Speaking Up only just qualifies as such: it is more a dissertation on human rights, politics, and the law than it is a study of Triggs herself. Large chunks of the book will seem pretty dry to readers expecting insights into the character of this formidable woman. Triggs includes a few good anecdotes and allows us occasional glimpses of emotion – the tears in her eyes when she visited the Christmas Island immigration detention centre – but on the whole she keeps up her guard, supplying only the bare bones of a biography.
Since 1992, Triggs has been married to Alan Brown, a senior diplomat she accompanied to foreign postings. It is an indication of her grit and ambition that being the ambassador’s wife did not stop her from carving out her own distinguished career. By the time she ac-
cepted the presidency of the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2012, she had written legal textbooks, headed the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, and been dean of University of Sydney’s law school. When people ask how Triggs withstood the abuse she incurred as the nation’s chief defender of human rights, she writes that she tends to refer cheerfully to a gin and tonic and a supportive husband. But I wanted a better explanation than that. I finished the book knowing that Australia is the only democratic nation in the world without a bill or charter of rights to ensure the freedoms of its citizens, and that Triggs strongly believes it is time we got one. I know Triggs’s opinion on many things, in fact. But, to my regret, I don’t really know Gillian Triggs. g
Jane Cadzow writes mainly for Good Weekend, the magazine published on Saturdays with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She studied journalism at the University of Queensland, and started her career at The CourierMail before moving to The Australian. She has won two Walkley Awards for magazine feature writing. She lives in Canberra. ❖
Meeting with Queen Elizabeth in Singapore in 1993 when Alan Brown was High Commissioner
Rules and law
Examining the principles of Australian foreign policy
David
Brophy
ISLAND OFF THE COAST OF ASIA: INSTRUMENTS OF STATECRAFT IN AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN POLICY
by Clinton Fernandes
Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 237 pp, 9781925523799
Marise Payne’s recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly touted Australia’s support for ‘rules’ and ‘international law’ in creating a global order that works ‘for the benefit of all nations and people’. But are these really the guiding principles of Australian foreign policy? Clinton Fernandes’s new book gives us reasons to be sceptical.
According to Fernandes, ‘the core ambition of Australia’s external relations is to advance its economic interests’, which today entails the pursuit of a profitable foreign investment climate for Australia’s banks, mining and energy companies, and agribusiness giants. From the Battle of Trafalgar to Kevin Rudd’s bank deposit guarantees, state actions have been central to securing the interests of these private actors. The ‘national interest’ is a cloaking device that enables politicians to socialise the costs they incur in doing so. ‘The state’, Fernandes believes, ‘is foundational to Australian capitalism’, and intertwined with it. The revolving door between the top echelon of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Woodside Petroleum Limited serves as a concrete example of this, as does DFAT’s staffing profile, heavily weighted towards trade and economics.
This configuration of power engenders an expansive, non-intuitive notion of security: what must be secured is not limited to the Australian mainland but follows economic interests beyond it. Likewise, the ‘fears’ that feature in so many analyses of Australia’s approach to Asia require reinterpretation. Whether or not thoughts of Chinese warships docking in Vanuatu really keep our
country’s top brass awake at night is beside the point: their ‘fears’ serve to justify actions with economic motives.
As a small nation, Australia displays ‘striking independence’ in our Pacific periphery but needs allies elsewhere. ‘[T] he organizing principle of Australian foreign policy,’ therefore, ‘is to stay on the winning side of the global contest.’ Our foundational ‘Empire nationalism’ has evolved since World War II into ‘Alliance nationalism’, requiring Australia to prove its relevance to the United States in the hope of gaining a seat at our powerful ally’s decision-making table. The objective, as Richard Marles said to a Washington audience in May 2018, is to ‘demonstrate to them that we can help share the burden of strategic thought in the Indo-Pacific …’ so as to ‘retain the American presence we need in the East Asian Time Zone’.
Contrary to the mythology of a ‘century of mateship’, this has not always been easy. Douglas MacArthur put it bluntly when he said that the United States ‘had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia’. Fernandes criticises the misperception that the ANZUS treaty was a gesture of gratitude for our involvement in the Korean War. In fact, it was secured as recompense for our commitment of troops to join what Britain and the United States regarded as an impending world war with the Soviets. The defence pact had its origins, that is to say, in an essentially offensive objective.
Staving off social transformation in Asia was a key principle of Australia’s postwar diplomacy, and Fernandes carefully elucidates the economic basis of this policy. It was the need to support
British postwar reconstruction and uphold the sterling bloc that led to our military intervention in Malaysia in the 1950s. Similar motives lay behind US support for French colonialism in Indochina. In the case of Indonesia, Australia first connived in US efforts to fracture the nation’s newfound unity in the 1950s, then shifted to cultivate the Indonesian military, a policy that rendered us complicit in the mass killings of 1965–66 and the invasion of East Ti-
Douglas MacArthur put it bluntly when he said that the United States ‘had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia’
mor. Having seen off more radical forms of Asian nationalism, in the 1980s trade and finance became key fronts on which we resisted the efforts of developing countries to extricate themselves from debt traps and to create a more equitable trading system. Australia exploited its claim to ‘middle zone’ status to blunt the confrontation between rich and poor nations and to undermine efforts to stabilise global commodity prices. Fernandes’s discussion of offshore resources exemplifies Australia’s flexible attitude towards international law and decision-making bodies. In the interests of the petroleum industry, the Australian state has spent massive amounts on surveying activities, as well as horsetrading at international conferences, to secure sovereign rights to a vast stretch of ocean floor. Yet alongside these extensive negotiations we have shown equal willingness to walk away from the table
for the same ends: our withdrawal from dispute resolution mechanisms to impose on East Timor an unjust distribution of the fledgling nation’s oil and gas represents the hard edge of this ‘Law of the Sea diplomacy’.
With hardly a day going by without some new warning of Chinese penetration of our Pacific ‘backyard’, Fernandes’s book has significant implications for Australia’s China debate. Often described as a clash between an economically self-interested ‘China lobby’ and more far-sighted state actors, his analysis shows that the US alliance is equally driven by private profit-making and that it sacrifices the interests of ordinary Australians. On one of the key issues now driving the rivalry between China and the United States – intellectual property rights – Fernandes convincingly demonstrates that the Australian public would benefit from siding with Beijing’s position.
The historical record presented here puts paid to any view that Australia’s status as a liberal democracy renders our foreign policy inherently more benign, or less belligerent, than China’s. Our calls on China to avoid militarising the IndoPacific can only look hypocritical in light of our own track record of resisting such calls from our neighbours. The comparison with China must also grapple with the fact that even in a democracy, foreign affairs is to a large extent a democracy-free zone: ‘In the absence of day-to-day scrutiny from voters or the parliament, the government acts abroad without the pressures and obstacles it faces at home.’
Fernandes’s book is not devoid of concrete policy proposals, and contains an appendix discussing the question of parliamentary approval for military deployments. But structural factors set serious limits on the notion of a more ‘progressive’ foreign policy – one centred, for example, on increased foreign aid. From the Colombo Plan onward, Fernandes insists that the purpose of aid has been ‘to create a permissive regional and international environment for Australian businesses’. Much more than a question of policy choice, Fernandes concludes that ‘reforming foreign policy will require changing the
domestic structure of power’.
We can, I think, take heart from Fernandes’s critique of ‘fear’ as an explanatory tool. Our diplomacy is not driven by an innate, and therefore possibly intractable, xenophobia. At the same time, the close link he identifies between corporate interests and foreign policy renders the task of transformation no less daunting. Endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Island Off the Coast of
Asia borrows his documentary style of analysis, and eschews the more theoretical discussion that serious efforts to change ‘the domestic structure of power’ will require. Nonetheless, the book will leave readers in little doubt as to the pressing need to do so. g
David Brophy is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney.
A strange complacency
The prospects for conflict in Asia
Daniel
Flitton
THE FOUR FLASHPOINTS: HOW ASIA GOES TO WAR by Brendan Taylor La Trobe University Press, $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781760640378
The danger is complacency. Brendan Taylor cautions readers of this timely assessment of the swirling currents of power in Asia – and currents is the right metaphor, given the heavy focus on disputes at sea – not to simply have faith that everything will turn out okay. ‘The risk of major war in Asia is much greater today than most individuals assume,’ Taylor writes. Even among regional leaders and key players, he sees a ‘strange complacency about the prospects for conflict in Asia’, despite knowing just how devastating such a conflict would be.
This is about more than Kim Jongun and his nuclear toys, although North Korea is one of several headline-grabbing regional hotspots Taylor surveys. It is also about more than Xi Jinping’s assertively ambiguous ‘Chinese Dream’ and trouble between Beijing and its neighbours, especially Taiwan, or Japan, or the smaller yet collectively significant nations of Southeast Asia. Nor is this solely a product of doubts about a US commitment to a role in Asia, given Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades and isolationist impulses.
Taylor’s warning is to see each of the region’s foaming disputes as part of a larger whole, connected rather
than separate, each with the potential to cascade into something much more frightening: the prospect of a war between nations, with professional militaries, sophisticated hardware, and, in some cases, nuclear weapons or the potential to quickly develop them. This terrifying confluence makes for a stark contrast to the experience of deadly but relatively ragtag insurgent or terrorist-related conflicts that have been familiar in recent decades. In a sense, this warning against complacency borrows from the well-worn precept to hope for the best and plan for the worst. Taylor sets out a worst-case scenario for Asia that is difficult to refute precisely because it is the worst case.
Amid roiling regional tension, marked by resurgent nationalism, vexed history, and haughty leaders fearing the loss of prestige, the trigger for a wider conflict could be something as foolish as a drunk captain of a Chinese boat colliding with a Japanese coastguard ship, as happened in 2010 near the contested islands of the East China Sea, sparking renewed antagonism. The historical parallels can be easily found. Rewind just over a century, for example, to a Europe that also featured a series of separate yet related crises among emerging powers
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vying with established empires, and the assassination of an Austrian prince that set in motion a crippling conflict. Is it a reasonable fear? Are Asia’s leaders truly so complacent and ignorant of experience? Or to ask the question in a different way, do the imaginings of potential strife offer the best guide to policy? This is always the dilemma. Could anticipating the nightmare, and responding pre-emptively, actually be selffulfilling?
Taylor, mostly, is nimble enough to escape these traps by illustrating the steps taken so far that have led Asia to this point, and chartingthe logic for what
generational attitudes are fascinating. A laudable aspect of the book is Taylor’s effort to define key terminology. The ‘flashpoints’ he sets out to explain as regional disputes is a concept borrowed from the sciences, ‘the lowest temperature at which vapours from a liquid will ignite when exposed to a flame’. He later defines the ‘Mexican stand-off’ on the Korean peninsula with reference to popular film. This might seem semantic, but given the way particular phrases or terms are often pregnant with assumption in discussions of regional affairs, the potential for misunderstanding is great.
might follow. Some features of regional tension are fixed in geography – crucial maritime passages for instance that will be constantly contested. Surprises will occur, and personalities will intrude. Taylor accounts for Trump’s unexpected diplomatic overtures towards North Korea and his break with the past practice of isolation by demonstrating the continued mismatch of goals within the United States and South Korea, as well as the past perfidy of Kim’s regime. The war game scenario he later sets out for a Chinese attack on Taiwan seems less convincing, if only because it is hypothetical and at odds with Taylor’s earlier observation about the inherent uncertainties in war, even if his overarching conclusions about the island’s changing
To demonstrate the point, China’s concept of ‘core’ interests is well covered in the context of Taiwan, as are more lyrical ideas, such as a ‘warm spring of friendship’ between China and Japan, or the ‘Sunshine policy’ between the Koreas (both since abandoned). Ensuring that everyone understands precisely what is at stake and what positions is held is crucial to effective diplomacy. Yet a weakness of much writing about the region is the liberal salt-and-pepper sprinkling of concepts such as ‘strategic partnership’, ‘deepening relations’, or ‘hedge’ that are too often ill defined. Partly, this is a consequence of deliberately opaque stances by the countries involved, leaving others (Taylor refers throughout to ‘some commentators’) to debate true intentions.
The answer, inevitably, seems to return to wealth. Economics does not feature prominently in Taylor’s analysis, other than as the backdrop of China’s rise. Left aside are the persistent predictions of China’s impending financial collapse, perhaps because, as others have argued, short-term cycles of boom and bust won’t change the trajectory of China’s increasing global importance. The view that economic ties between
countries will help moderate the prospect for conflict is mentioned and might have been further explored, although the manner in which jingoistic outbursts might quickly sweep aside economic links is demonstrated in discussion of Japan and China.
The danger of uncorking the nationalist genie is the strongest theme in the book. Taylor draws in the heady historical context to the disputes covered, and nationalism, stoked by a sense of righting past wrongs, can be a potent way of rallying support for the flag. Yet this sometimes virulent sentiment is difficult to contain, and creates judgement that can rebound quickly and in unexpected way on leaders who fail to live up to expectations.
Whether Taylor’s prescriptions increase the prospect for peace really depends on the view of whether war is inevitable. For all the focus in recent years on China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea, Taylor sees this as the least combustible of the regional tensions, and a dispute the United States should leave alone rather than maintain ‘provocative’ policies. On the Korean peninsula, he wants the United States to preserve its military commitment, as well as to Japan, while allowing Taiwan, central to the dispute he fears most, to better stand alone.
Brendan Taylor has staked a position. Whether the future can truly be divined will be constantly debated, but Asia’s leaders cannot claim not to have been warned. g
Daniel Flitton is one of Australia’s most experienced foreign affairs journalists and is now Managing Editor of the Lowy Institute’s international magazine, The Interpreter
Ri Sol-ju, Kim Jong-un, Moon Jae-in, and Kim Jong-sook during the 2018 summit (Blue House [Republic of Korea], via Wikimedia Commons)
Metric tide
Gabriella Coslovich
WHAT MATTERS? TALKING VALUE IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE
by Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian,
and Tully Barnett Monash University Publishing $24.95 pb, 192 pp, 9781925523805
As I sat down to write this review, a media release popped into my email inbox with the excited news that more than 400,000 people had visited the National Gallery of Victoria’s MoMA exhibition over its four-month duration, making it the NGV’s ‘second most attended ticketed exhibition on record’. This large attendance figure was presumably cited as proof of the exhibition’s success. More numbers followed, in quotes attributable to the Victorian Minister for Creative Industries, Martin Foley, emphasising the importance of the arts to the state’s economy.
‘Exhibitions like this are among the top reasons tourists are flocking to Victoria,’ the minister said. Last year, ‘cultural tourism’ had injected two billion dollars into the state’s economy, an eighty-eight per cent increase from 2013, a trend that was set to continue. The exhibition’s value was framed wholly through the lens of its economic benefit, with the underlying assumption that ever-growing crowds of ‘cultural tourists’ were a good thing. Not that one wishes to smugly condemn the NGV, or the minister, for flaunting the figures. Numbers make headlines. They are easily digested, easily relayed to a busy newsroom editor (they look as straightforward as sporting results), and they appease political masters, making the case for arts funding at a time when neoliberalism degrades life to a dollar sign. But what do they tell us about the exhibition itself? The merits of its thesis? The quality of the art on view? The way it might have changed someone’s life in a quietly significant way? Its effect on civic well-being? Nothing.
The email was a timely illustration
of the tendency to reduce the value of the arts to a set of numbers – an inclination that authors and Flinders University academics Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett rail against in their book What Matters? Talking value in Australian culture. ‘When did culture become a number?’ they ask in their punchy introduction, launching a much-needed public debate. When a cultural landmark such as the Sydney Opera House is vulnerable to the defilement of advertising, this is a discussion we sorely need to have.
The authors aim to ‘change the conversation around the evaluation of culture in all domains, but especially the government one, so that it reflects more context, is more honest, and makes more sense’. Their book addresses those who are ‘seriously interested in the value of arts and culture’, including artists, critics, board members, policy makers, managers of cultural organisations, philanthropists, and government leaders of cultural programs, and urges them to resist ‘the language of government’, or, as it also referred to on several occasions, the language of ‘bullshit’.
Worthy objectives. However, if you set out to write a book proposing a better way to talk about the value of art, it should be well written. You cannot prize the plain-speaking recommended by Don Watson in his marvellous book Death Sentence (2003) and then fail to heed the master’s advice (I doubt Watson would care for the phrase ‘blue skies thinking’).
For the most part, What Matters? is an absorbing – and quirky – read as it challenges the rise of ‘metric power and questions the validity of metaphors such as ‘the marketplace of ideas’, the myth of endless growth, buzz words such as ‘excellence’ and ‘innovation’, and what government budgets refer to as the ‘cultural function’.
It’s a shame that at times the authors shrink from their commitment to plain speaking and engage in precisely the type of ‘anaesthetising writing’ that Watson (via George Orwell) laments. This lapse is particularly evident in the chapter that introduces the (admittedly complex) concepts of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Integrated
Reporting (IR), new styles of corporate reporting that the authors suggest the cultural sector might look to as examples of ‘holistic evaluative systems designed to focus thinking on what matters’, which value more than just financial return. IR, we are told, puts ‘great stress on connectivity between different types of information, and value–generation over time’: ‘Connectivity is a function of simplicity and concision, and this is a pain point for a framework that aims to produce one report that overarches any others an organisation might generate.’ Watson might set the above sentence as an exercise, with the instruction to rewrite it in plain English.
The book’s strength lies in its topicality, in its challenge to the ‘metric tide’, as Meyrick neatly put it during an interview on ABC Radio National recently, that is flooding our lives.
‘At what point,’ the authors ask, ‘do we stop trying to measure something and try to understand it better? What would this involve, exactly, if we were to do it?’ Oddly enough, it’s Christ’s knack for telling parables that is held up as a model. ‘Parables of value’, the authors propose, are meaningful ways of getting the message across about culture’s utility in the broadest sense. They present three examples of their own: a parable about the oscillating popularity of Patrick White’s plays and what box-office figures don’t tell you; another about the threat posed to the arts and culture by global tech giants; and a third about the importance of the humbly resourced Adelaide Festival of Ideas.
If you are looking for a guide on avoiding so-called bullshit language, Death Sentence or Gilda Williams’s How to Write About Contemporary Art (2014) are good options. The value of this book is in its provocative declaration that there is a problem in the way we assess the arts and its ideas for new ways of thinking. g
Gabriella Coslovich is a Melbourne author and freelance journalist, specialising in the arts. Her Walkley-winning book of true crime, Whiteley on Trial (2017), centres on a case of alleged art fraud involving paintings in the style of Australian artist Brett Whiteley. ❖
Entries are now open
2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Australian Book Review seeks entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of $8,500. English-language poets from all countries are eligible. Online entry is available via our website.
First prize: $5,000 and an etching by Arthur Boyd
Second prize: $2,000
Three other shortlisted poems: $500
Judges: Judith Bishop, John Hawke, and Paul Kane
Entry Fee: AU$15 for ABR subscribers or AU$25 for non-subscribers (the latter includes a free four-month subscription to ABR Online)
Closing date: 3 December 2018
‘I’m honoured to be the winner, especially with a poem whose subject matter may seem foreign.’
Nicholas Wong, 2018 winner
Full details and online entry are available on our website
www.australianbookreview.com.au
ABR gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Ms Morag Fraser AM.
‘J.M.’
Felicity Plunkett
WRITERS ON WRITERS: CERIDWEN DOVEY ON J.M. COETZEE
by Ceridwen Dovey Black
Inc.
$17.99 hb, 96 pp, 9781760640613
‘We think back through our mothers,’ writes Virginia Woolf (twice) in A Room of One’s Own. At first, she seems to be suggesting that women artists can only derive inspiration from women who precede them: ‘It is useless to go to the great men writers for help … the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own.’
But Woolf’s bravura rhetorical essay (she calls her writing ‘harliquinade’ for its ‘assortment of patches’) arrives at far more radical ideas about gender and the imagination than this essentialist position foreshadows. The artist’s mind, she argues later, is androgynous, with ‘no single state of being’, and can think back ‘through its mothers or through its fathers’.
On J.M. Coetzee is a bright gem, with similar formal adventurousness. A kind of palimpsest, South Africanborn Ceridwen Dovey’s reading of Coetzee overlays witnessing her mother’s study of his work. It traces abandonment and desire through the relationship between readers and writers. Curiously, beautifully, despite and through its surface subject, it comes like Woolf’s essay to limn ideas of women and fiction – or mothers, reading, and writing – in revealing ways.
Part of Black Inc.’s series in conjunction with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria, Dovey’s work follows Alice Pung on John Marsden, Erik Jensen on Kate Jennings, and Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White, and precedes Nam Le on David Malouf and Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard.
Dovey quips that ‘writer on writer’ is ‘a curious phrase that makes me imagine covering his body with my own’. She
quotes South African scholar Hedley Twidle envisaging his complex feelings about Coetzee – of becoming ‘childishly possessive, stalkerish, reluctant to teach Coetzee because he doesn’t want to share him’ – resolved by, to borrow Dovey’s phrase, ‘seeing Coetzee’s bum in lycra as he heads off on one of his cycling routes’.
To imagine this possessiveness in voyeuristic terms – something I find creepy with its note of control or ridicule – strikes me as a way to manage both the erotic charge of reading and the uncomfortable distance between the work we host in our heads (and hearts, if you imagine words, as poet Paul Celan did, like messages in bottles that may with luck ‘wash up on land, on heartland’) and the person who wrote it. My Coetzee, it insists, who can’t be yours.
The initials ‘J.M.’ are ‘an act of distancing, a warning shot my mother clearly heard: do not come too close, you will not find me here’. Yet for Dovey, quoting Woolf, his novels ‘seemed to issue a sly invitation to join in their “dangerous and exciting game, which it takes two to play”’. What does Coetzee want from readers: ‘For them to back off, or to come closer?’
Besides the vista of the lycra-clad writer, the corporeal is central to Dovey’s work. In 1980, the year Coetzee published his third novel, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Dovey was born, her mother read as she breastfed her newborn. Dovey imagines her mother’s ‘somatic response to the words’ coursing ‘through her into me: elation and despair, trepidation and longing’. She feels ‘marked by that embodied encounter with his writing, via my mother, as a newborn’.
As Dovey thinks back through her mother, motifs of distance and loss recur. The young child wanting ‘to know what was inside the book that kept my mother in thrall’ understands that ‘this book was one of the portals through which I might one day follow her’ to ‘the secret world of her mind’. Although she writes, ‘I felt no bitterness at having a door temporarily closed between my mother’s world and mine, for there was never any doubt that my sister and
I were front and centre of her life’, the ‘mysterious man whom she referred to only as “J.M.’’’ hovers, ‘an unseen but strongly felt presence in our small family drama’.
Dovey situates this within another of Coetzee’s correspondences. In his exchange with psychoanalyst Arabella Kurtz, published as The Good Story: Exchanges on truth, fiction and psychoanalysis (2015), they discuss ‘the third position’, which Kurtz describes as ‘the ability to build a space in one’s own mind for the relationships between others’. While Dovey celebrates her mother’s relationship with Coetzee as a means to learning this step towards a child’s maturation, a shadow lingers. In this flickeringly lit place – beyond the closed door – where the daughter variously understands, admires, and is mystified by the mother’s own intimate imaginative world – individuation and abandonment hover.
This is a work about eroticism, and the other face of abandonment: giving oneself generously and wholly, here, to the life of the imagination and the pleasures of reading. The story of Dovey’s mother, writing the first critical study of Coetzee as her PhD and corresponding with a Coetzee famously ‘allergic to any interlocutor who wants him to make the meaning of his work explicit’, frames Dovey’s reading and her emergence as a celebrated writer whose books Coetzee endorses.
Dovey and her mother exemplify the ‘scholar of one candle’ Wallace Stevens wrote about. They meet Coetzee’s work in different, private ways. Stories of the family’s migration between South Africa and Australia ebb and flow, as does Dovey’s ‘worship’ of Coetzee’s novels and her sense of being unable to ‘interpret them without my mother’s prompts, which in turn makes me feel helpless and resentful’. In this ambivalent, fructive space, Dovey’s reading and writing develop, along with this work, which enfolds an exquisite Künstlerroman, and a celebration as much of Teresa Dovey as of J.M. Coetzee. g
Felicity Plunkett is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press and a widely published reviewer.
Fathers and authors
Simon Caterson
MAD, BAD, DANGEROUS TO KNOW: THE FATHERS OF WILDE, YEATS AND JOYCE
Like so many parents of great authors, the fathers of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce have much to answer for. Certainly, each man had a profound influence on his son’s literary career without for a moment being conscious of the literary consequences of his words and actions.
In addition to the pleasure we anticipate from reading his words on any topic, Colm Tóibín demonstrates in this short, illuminating book a wonderful capacity for empathy, as well as an acute understanding of the creative process. In exploring the extent to which each writer, for better or worse, was his father’s son, this book continues the enquiry into the relationship between writers and their families that began in Tóibín’s essay collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their families (2012). It is a consequence of their canonical status that there has been so much biographical and scholarly interest in the families of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce. In each case, it was by no means predestined that the son would become a famous and influential writer. Just being an Irish writer at that time could be expected to entail provincial obscurity.
With the exception of Sir William Wilde, an eminent surgeon specialis-
ing in the eye and the ear, none of the fathers provided a role model for the attainment of professional success. In the case of Yeats and Joyce, the son had to discover within himself the confidence and industry lacking in the father. Joyce’s father was a medical student who dropped out of his course, while Yeats’s father qualified as a lawyer but didn’t practise. Yeats’s father became a painter prone to procrastination, preferring to talk about the portraits he was working on rather than finish them. John B. Yeats presided over a family that grew at the same time as the income from the property he had inherited shrank. Guilt at the knowledge of the poverty he inflicted on his wife, who ‘had believed she was marrying a man who was likely to become a prominent barrister or judge’, only made things more difficult for John B. Yeats psychologically.
‘While their father’s financial circumstances worsened, all four of the Yeats children worked and made money. From early on in their lives, they were serious, determined and industrious.’ Yeats’s younger brother Jack became a successful painter, his sister Lily a leading embroiderer, and the fourth sibling, Elizabeth, was an educator and publisher. By the age of thirty, W.B. Yeats had generated a long list of publications, including seven books.
Yeats viewed his father critically in terms of personal shortcomings but absorbed his aesthetic ideas. In one letter to his father, Yeats wrote of how he had realised ‘with some surprise how fully my philosophy of Life has been inherited from you in all but its details and applications’.
Yeats’s father was a poor provider, though far from a domestic tyrant. In contrast, Joyce’s father was abusive towards his wife and children, drank excessively, and pretty much failed at everything – though he was a good talker. ‘It would be easy,’ writes Tóibín, ‘to consign John Stanislaus Joyce to the position of one of the worst Irish husbands and worst Irish fathers in recorded history.’ And while James’s younger brother Stanislaus did just that in his family memoir, the older sibling engaged in a less antagonistic way with their father’s dubious legacy. ‘Instead of
actively and opening killing his father, James Joyce sought not only to memorialise his father but also retrace his steps, enter his spirit, use what he needed from his father’s life to nourish his own art.’
In the case of Wilde and his father, at the heart of the matter is the instability of the family’s social position as members of the Anglo-Irish professional élite, ‘a strange, unruly ruling class in Ireland, not accepted as fully Irish and not wealthy landowners either’. Neither English nor Irish, the small social circle to which the Wilde family belonged in Dublin was characterised by scandal and transgression. ‘No one was ever sure what they believed in, where their loyalty lay. It was fragile, wavering, open to suggestion, and open also to pressure.’
‘What is fascinating is how the duality of their position made its way into the sexual realm,’ writes Tóibín, describing how the scandal surrounding the always precarious relationship between Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas was prefigured by Sir William’s infidelities, which resulted in more than one child being born outside marriage and, in a direct parallel with his son’s downfall, in a disastrous legal attempt to stop a younger lover from stalking him and his wife, which resulted in public disgrace. According to Tóibín, the impact that Sir William had on his son is felt most poignantly in the absence of direct references to him in Oscar’s work. The silence seems loudest of all in his prison memoir De Profundis, as Tóibín notes: ‘While Wilde had time to say everything he needed to say, there is one figure missing from the pages of his letter, a figure whose life has a considerable number of similarities with that of Wilde himself.’
Ultimately, the presence of these three Irish fathers was too pervasive to have been fully delineated by their sons. It could be that none of us ever quite comes to terms with our parents, though we may spend a lifetime attempting to do so. g
Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and the author of Hoax Nation: Australian fakes and frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri (Arcade Publications, 2010).
The art of pain
Writing in the age of trauma
by Beejay Silcox
‘Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin spectres.’
Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (1965)
Inspirational Memoirs, Painful Lives, Real Lives – these were the polite terms, the labels you might find on bookshop shelves, but the term that stuck was Misery Literature.
The books had plaintive titles like Tell Me Why, Mummy, and Please, Daddy, No, or single-word gutpunches like Wasted, Fractured, and Damaged. They were first-person accounts of abuse, addiction, and misfortune; of reckonings and redemption. Misery Literature (mis-lit for short) emerged as a furtive literary sub-genre during the great confessional boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s: reality television ascendant; social media new and shiny; best-seller lists heavy with memoir. ‘Volume after volume of leering drug abusers and their fearful victims,’ wrote Guardian journalist Esther Addley, surveying the grim buffet of suffering, ‘coarse, grubby hands probing into tiny pairs of knickers and terrified, saucer-eyed children pleading with them to stop.’
Take Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’ (1995) – the book widely credited as mis-lit’s apotheosis – which recounts a childhood of near-inconceivable torment at the hands of a sadistic, chronically alcoholic mother. Pelzer was starved, burned, and stabbed, his face smashed into mirrors, force-fed the contents of his sibling’s nappies with a spoonful of ammonia. His story was one of the worst cases of child abuse in Californian history. It was also a bestseller. The book and its two sequels spent a combined 448 weeks on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list.
Misery Literature quickly became ‘the book world’s biggest boom sector’, but there was always a whiff of ambulance-chasing about it, the stink of lucrative embarrassment, of voyeurism. It was an embarrassment compounded by the fact that mis-lit sold far more copies in supermarkets than bookshops, shelved next to the gossip magazines and chocolate – dismissed as traumatised chick lit (approximately eighty-five per cent of buyers were women). Publishers spoke of their mis-lit catalogues with thinly veiled disgust; they described entering the market as ‘getting our hands dirty’. Critics wrote, ‘These are things you should tell your therapist, not the whole world.’
When a slew of mis-lit memoirs were exposed as hoaxes and frauds in the mid-noughties, there was a hearty dose of critical Schadenfreude and a tentative sigh of relief – surely this grotty little phase of laundry-airing must be nearing its end.
A decade later, Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life (2015), was nominated for a US National Book Award, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and awarded the Kirkus Prize. Extensively and exultantly praised for its transgressive audacity, its ‘subversive brilliance’, A Little Life is an 800-page immersion into a mind bound – a life irredeemably altered – by extraordinary childhood trauma. ‘You will find it hard to find another mainstream literary fiction that equals the most egregious misery memoir for its plotline,’ wrote one columnist, on her way to praising it as ‘must-read’. ‘In an age in which, we are told, a few clicks of the mouse can bring us face on with visual evidence of this kind of abuse, to be able to evoke nausea and disgust through the written word is remarkable,’ wrote another. It was a best-seller, too; the bookshop kind.
Yanagihara’s novel was released in March 2015; by July it felt as if every reader I knew – at home in Australia and then at my university in the United States – was pressing their copy of it into my hands with the
same exigent spiel: the abuse was beyond horrific, they warned, but there was something about the book that was utterly – bodily – compelling. That was the word I heard again and again: compelling. It’s rare to encounter literary discussion of such dissonant zeal, such enthralled distress. When I finally read the novel, I did feel compelled, but not captivated as much as captive.
Yanagihara’s orphan protagonist, Jude, is abandoned in a skip, raped by monks, pimped out to truck drivers by a rogue priest, bullied and beaten in state care, and eventually imprisoned by a diabolical psychiatrist who runs him over with a car. This catalogue of horrors is psychological prologue to an adulthood in which Jude is mired in cycles of vividly –viscerally – rendered abuse and trauma: a Jekyll-andHyde-like lover who pushes a wheelchair-bound Jude down the stairs, elaborate self-harm, a panoply of debilitatingly painful medical complications, profound personal loss, and the omnipresent spectre of suicide.
his secrets, rhythms, and dangers, and she adores and loathes him for them.
How did we get here?
How did trauma become our literary watchword?
‘I wanted to write her so that the damage we do to women would appear to you, as it appears to me, real and urgent and intolerable,’ Tallent explained in a 2017 interview with the Guardian. As in Yanagihara’s book, Tallent’s approach is one of unflinching excess. A breathlessly rococo suffering; Nabokov by way of Bret Easton Ellis. Turtle’s father holds a Bowie knife to her crotch as she does pull-ups from a ceiling beam; he forces her to shoot a coin from the hand of another child, and then to amputate part of the finger she damages when the stunt goes wrong; things do not end well for the family dog. And every detail of every rape is felt, an uneasy, incestuous braid of terror and yearning.
The suffering of A Little Life is ornate and unremitting. Baroque. I finished the novel on the morning of Halloween. That night I dressed as a skeleton and tried to shake my raw discomfort – an inchoate mix of cultural isolation, ethical queasiness, and vicarious pain – in a suit of glow-in-the-dark bones. That was three years ago, and I’m yet to shake it. Now, I’m trying to give it intellectual shape – to understand how, in the space of a decade, the narrative qualities for which misery literature was widely dismissed and ethically condemned have become the qualities critically lauded at the dark edge of mainstream literary fiction. To try and understand why (or if) it matters.
This summer in London, the window of every Waterstones bookshop – at the airport, on the high street, in the suburban shopping centre next to my Airbnb – seemed to showcase Gabriel Tallent’s début novel, My Absolute Darling, new to paperback and coloured like some kind of stinging insect: an incendiary wasp yellow. There was a hive-like quality to the buzz, too. ‘One of the most important books you’ll pick up this decade,’ exclaimed Harper’s Bazaar. ‘The word “masterpiece” has been cheapened by too many blurbs,’ blurbed Stephen King, ‘but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one.’ Online journal, Electric Literature, asked ‘Does “My Absolute Darling” Deserve the Hype?’ and concluded, ‘this is the kind of book that can change the world, and I sincerely hope it does’.
Tallent’s novel is the story of Turtle, a fourteen-yearold girl who lives with her survivalist father and warveteran grandfather in the relative isolation of Mendocino, on the Californian coast. By day she obsessively cleans a small arsenal of big guns, sharpens her knives, and wanders the headland wilderness – intimate with its secrets and rhythms, ever-wary of its dangers. At night, her father drags her from her bedroom into his. She also understands
I read every word of Tallent’s novel. I kept reading even after I knew I did not need or want to read any more. I stayed because I felt as if I were being dared to stay, that I was in a game of chicken with the narrative, and that to leave would be to admit some sort of emotional or empathetic weakness. I left the novel furious, not at it but at myself. This time I didn’t feel captive; I felt complicit. I was reminded of those rogue psychology experiments from the 1970s – Stanley Milgram’s obedience trials – where participants were convinced to administer ‘fatal’ electric shocks to strangers.
I am far from the first reader or critic to draw the link between My Absolute Darling and A Little Life: two books, both alike in indignity. Yanagihara’s novel, in particular, is emerging as the literary benchmark for a hyper-real aesthetics of immersive, bodily-anchored trauma. It’s an aesthetics we are under increasing cultural pressure to consume, to valorise for its brutal honesty, or, perhaps more accurately, its honest brutality.
As I researched this essay, every person I spoke to –trauma professionals and survivors, cultural historians, literary critics, readers, and writers – began our conversation, unprompted, by pointing me to an example of popular contemporary art (books, film, and peak television) that felt performatively, punitively cruel – stories anchored in what the body can stand. Most often mentioned was the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was universally described in the language of moral obligation: viewers steeling themselves to do their televisual homework, their cultural duty. It’s an aesthetic we have a duty to question. How did we get here? How did trauma become our literary watchword? How did staring down (or at) suffering become synonymous with authorial heroism, and a cultural virtue? And what does it mean to read – to simultaneously consume and bear witness – in an era of beautiful (or beautified) pain? Many of these questions are unanswerable. They should still be asked. They should have been asked a decade ago.
There was never much impetus to look beyond a two-
dollar pop-psychology explanation for why misery literature resonated. It was the purview of bored housewives and masochistic mothers, and – it was widely implied – men who couldn’t be trusted with children (‘Can they be certain there isn’t a degree of uncomfortable prurience, or worse, at the relish with which such tales are whisked off the shelves?’ Addley asked in 2007). It was a pornography of suffering: impure and simple.
But there is nothing simple about pornography.
I talk to Krissy Kneen, whose ethically questing and questioning novel An Uncertain Grace (2017) was nominated for the 2018 Stella Prize. She’s also the author of a heady back catalogue of boundary-pushing erotica: ‘I think pornography is a really problematic word to use because it’s completely culturally dependent,’ Krissy explains. ‘What one person or culture considers pornographic, another doesn’t.’
We discuss how ‘trauma porn’ – the term I initially turned to, fuming away in my phosphorescent skeleton – is a lazy rhetorical shorthand for discomfort and antipathy, a way to deflect a question of value by turning it into a question of values: ‘We close off conversations by calling them pornographic,’ Krissy tells me. ‘It means that we’re not supposed to engage unless it’s underhanded or in secret. That’s a problem because it doesn’t allow us to even question what we consider acceptable, or to face social complexities.’
Yanagihara has been candid about constructing A Little Life to stretch the social borders of acceptability. In an interview with the Guardian, she describes her relationship with excess:
One of the things my editor and I fought about is the idea of how much a reader can take ... I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high. I wanted to feel a little bit vulgar in places. Or to be always walking the line between outand-out sentimentality and the boundaries of good taste. I wanted the reader to really press up against that as much as possible and if I tipped into it in a couple of places, well, I couldn’t really stop it.
It’s an extraordinary statement of artistic intent – one that denies easy purchase for accusations of gratuitousness or narrative preposterousness by reaching for them, luxuriating in them, establishing them as matters of principle. In many ways, it is the logical aesthetic extension of the fiction of ‘radical pessimism’ that emerged alongside mis-lit (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road [2006], Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go [2005], Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin [2003]), a pigeon pair to the rise of the dystopia.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, author Daniel Mendelsohn voiced fierce objection to the abjection of A Little Life and its seemingly wilful authorial punitiveness – a raft of critical dissent in an ocean of adulation. ‘The abuse that Yanagihara heaps on her protagonist is neither
just from a human point of view nor necessary from an artistic one,’ he argued. Yes, Yanagihara would seem to reply. Exactly.
The twin anaesthetising blights of our age of 24-hour media – desensitisation and compassion fatigue – are an obvious starting point in explaining this ‘turn it up to eleven’ approach, but they’re a wholly unsatisfying end point. While they might help explain a general and generalised ratcheting of violence, they fail to address the peculiar quality of that violence in our literature – its immersion in intimate, interpersonal cruelty. For what’s new about this aesthetic isn’t that it includes graphic depictions of suffering, but that it is driven by them. Trauma is not tendered in service of the narrative, it is the narrative.
A Little Life tracks the post-collegiate lives of four men – three of them gay – in New York City through the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s; a shared trajectory from youthful dreaming to professional striving to middle-aged affluence. But they exist in a world that has the ethereal self-containment of a fairy tale. There is no AIDS crisis, no Gulf War, no Clinton impeachment. These are men who live at the epicentre of 9/11, and its era-making cultural and geo-political turmoil leaves them entirely unscathed. What’s left is how the men feel about themselves and each other, played out against a backdrop of high-cultural opulence and social largesse – beautiful spaces, beautiful meals, beautiful things, and beautifully ugly pain. It’s a vacuum-sealed universe, insulated and insular; planets orbiting the pitiless sun of Jude’s trauma.
What’s new isn’t what’s present, it’s what’s missing.
My Absolute Darling creates the same sense of allegorical displacement, a world pulled out of time. But here the consumerist gloss of New York City is replaced by the Thoreauvian poetry of the natural world. Turtle exists in a kind of narrative terrarium – a place of seed-pods, critters, and loam – the crenulations of a leaf described with all the rhetorical grandeur of a cathedral. As in A Little Life, both the engine and edges of the story are the ways in which she is hurt.
Again, it’s a purposeful aesthetic. In an interview with the National Book Foundation, Yanagihara explains:
I wanted to remove every external event from this book: once you remove historical landmarks from a narrative, you force the reader into a sort of walled space, one in which they have no choice but to focus entirely on the interior lives of these characters. There’s no distraction and no respite and no tether, either: I wanted the world of this book to feel by turns intimate and oppressive –and utterly inescapable.
‘You could have everything in this book the way it is – the descriptions of the self-cutting, the childhood of abuse – that’s not the problem,’ Daniel Mendelsohn argues. This is the problem – this wilful hermeticism, and its underlying assumption that the graphic description of trauma is necessary and sufficient to understand it. ‘The
literature of suffering has a long and honourable history,’ he explains, ‘what’s interesting is for an author to show so little interest in evoking any quality in their characters except their capacity for suffering.’ It takes historical imagination – historical memory – to make sense of suffering, to see it as contingent and explicable rather than simply inevitable.
I called Daniel Mendelsohn in New York to talk about his review of A Little Life (a review so forceful in its ethical opprobrium that – unusually, extraordinarily – the novel’s editor, Gerald Howard, wrote an open letter in the book’s defence). The atomised aesthetic of A Little Life still troubles Mendelsohn. ‘Something very interesting is taking place socio-culturally, and it does need to be unpacked.’
Mendelsohn posits that it was the US television talk shows of the 1970s and 1980s – the living-room confessionals of Phil Donahue, Jerry Springer, and Oprah Winfrey – that prepared the literary ground:
I think it’s not accidental that within five to ten years of these shows becoming popular, memoirs started to emerge as a dominant literary genre. They go back to St Augustine, of course, but they’ve been revived in an interesting way. There’s been a cultural trend toward the valuation of suffering and trauma as a positive element of the life story, because the applause one receives is directly proportional to the amount one has suffered.
The conflation of bravery and openness stands in marked opposition – arguably in backlash – to the postWorld War II culture of buried horrors. That generation’s silence neither negated nor devenomised their traumas. To the contrary: ‘I was brought up in a community where the collective trauma wasn’t the elephant in the room, it was the room,’ explains Bram Presser, author of the multiaward-winning The Book of Dirt (2017), a novel that braids the narrative techniques of memoir and fable to explore his grandparent’s Holocaust survival. ‘Trauma was the structure itself, the surrounds.’
‘The science is in on this,’ Krissy Kneen tells me, emphatically, as she explains the research that underpins her current writing project: a novelistic reckoning with untold family stories and fables. ‘We know that trauma plays out in the body. We know that traumatic events on a body cause epigenetic change which gets passed down generation to generation. We know these things.’
We are certainly learning. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not formalised as a psychological diagnosis until 1980, after lobbying from Vietnam veterans. In 1986 the psychologist Paul-Lees Harvey said ‘if mental disorders were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, PTSD would be a growth stock to watch’.
In the last three decades we have been furnished, not only with a diagnostic framework for trauma, but –vitally – with a lexicon that carries the authoritative heft of medicalisation, a lexicon that has proved so resonant that it has broken free of its pathology and soaked into the cultural Zeitgeist. Trauma now risks explaining everything
and nothing; meaning everything and nothing.
Consider the words that readers on Goodreads use to describe their experience of A Little Life and My Absolute Darling: inescapable, distressing, unsettling, disorienting, destroying, wrenching, dehumanising; this is the experiential language of trauma.
I listen to Bram Presser explain how carefully he penned his novel, ever vigilant to the lure of beautifying, or wallowing in, the horrors of the most monstrous of twentieth-century traumas: ‘It was very much at the forefront of my mind not to become gratuitous,’ he tells me. ‘I wanted to give back dignity and agency to the people in the [concentration] camps. I feel like that gets lost a lot in trauma narratives – people either try and make absolute heroes or absolute victims.’
Trauma now risks explaining everything and nothing; meaning everything and nothing
But Presser acknowledges that – as a third-generation survivor – he was anchored to history, to images that have been burned into our collective consciousness; walking in the storytelling footsteps of those who walked behind Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel: ‘I think if you tell an ordinary life and experience, knowing that people already know what’s going on around it, there’s no need to augment it with atrocity,’ Presser explains. ‘The atrocity is already there, waiting.’
What is emerging is a political climate – a political economy – in which we increasingly understand that trauma is not catastrophe-bound, not limited to wars and massacres and hijacked planes, but a part of everyday life. Perniciously banal and too-often systemic. Trauma isn’t just Port Arthur, it’s #MeToo.
The threat isn’t ‘out there’ anymore, it’s ‘right here’ –in our houses, offices, schools, churches, police stations, and prisons, in the hearts of the people who are meant to care about, and for, us. ‘The idea of institutionalised abuse inflicted ... by figures of trust is very much the nightmarish mythology of our times,’ writes Guardian journalist Tim Adams. Surely it is no accident that one of the most robust early markets for misery memoirs of child abuse was Ireland.
In Mendelsohn’s infamous review, he posited:
Many readers today have reached adulthood in educational institutions where a generalised sense of helplessness and acute anxiety have become the norm; places where, indeed, young people are increasingly encouraged to see themselves not as agents in life but as potential victims: of their dates, their roommates, their professors, institutions and history in general ... confirming the pre-existing view of the world as a site of victimisation and little else.
What Mendelsohn is describing is not a culture of oversensitivity as much as of hypersensitivity: a milieu generations of geopolitical trauma in the making. Parents from the duck-and-cover 1960s raising risk-aware children, who stood at the threshold of adulthood on 9/11
and are now raising their children to save a planet. It is a culture that is not just trauma literate, but traumatised. ‘It’s interesting, in a culture that is endlessly talking about power and empowerment,’ Mendelsohn ponders, ‘that the genre that seems to be rising are fictions of disempowerment.’ It sounds paradoxical, but it makes perfect sense. Fear may have bred hypersensitivity, but its obverse is outrage; both are the products of vigilance. Western culture is tuned to the note of harm: alert to its mechanics, aware of its corrosive impact. Younger generations are also increasingly willing and able to call it by its name and energised to confront its effects. Whether those confrontations will prove productive is up for debate, but it is hard to fault a generation who care so deeply – so openly – about not hurting people.
Consider the new-release shelf of any half-decent Aussie bookstore: there’s Leigh Sales’s Any Ordinary Day (2018), which draws hope from the worst days of our lives; Sarah Krasnostein’s profoundly empathetic The Trauma Cleaner (2017); and Bri Lee’s incendiary Eggshell Skull (2018); there’s When Elephants Fight (2018), Majok Tulba’s visceral new novel of South Sudanese refugees; Kim Scott’s reckoning with Australia’s bloody history in Taboo (2017); and, of course, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018), an account of trauma that’s shamefully Australian-made. Personal, familial, generational, historical, cultural, and political: there is nothing furtive about our literary relationship with trauma in 2018. We’re looking it squarely in the eye. Staring it down.
This is the context in which we must understand the emerging literary aesthetic of A Little Life and My Absolute Darling: they’re not trying to explain or rationalise trauma, but to simulate its sense of suffocation, inhabit its elemental physicality. Trauma: body and soul.
There is an argument to be made that stories like these are profoundly necessary: to challenge taboos; confront and counter damaging social myths and scripts (in particular, the script of stoic redemption and recovery); to seek consolation and insight; to spark empathy and compassionate connection. The quiet dignity of bearing witness. A vital addition to a conversation in which the body – especially the traumatised body – has so often been squeamishly absent.
Ubiquity will diminish the argument for necessity – it will certainly raise the ethical bar. As more of these novels emerge, we must ask what they are asking of us. We increasingly understand the cultural and therapeutic power of narrative – of who tells a story and how. As writer Tom McAllister pithily notes: ‘there is a human cost, not just to the victims, but to our culture in general ... writers have a moral obligation to avoid infecting the universe
with more careless storytelling.’
But while we are in the midst of a passionate cultural conversation about the ethics of authorship (much of which is really a conversation about the difference between good and bad art), we seldom speak of the ethics of readership. We must also ask ourselves what we are seeking in what we read.
Reflecting on the rise of memoir in The New Yorker in 2010, Mendelsohn argued: ‘the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent “a truth” about life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent “the truth” about specific things that have happened.’ Our attraction to novels of baroque suffering is therefore likely to say far more about what we want for ourselves, than about what trauma survivors, and the public discussion about trauma, need.
Those wants bear interrogating, particularly when we compare the widespread critical acclaim My Absolute Darling’s lushly rendered violence against a fictional woman has received, against the reception first-person accounts routinely receive, regardless of their artfulness, the mis-lit taint of unseemly self-exposure.
It is hard to take a clear-eyed look at why we are compelled by pain (frequently the pain of women and children), and what we signal about ourselves and our culture when we champion fiction that performs it. For even if empathy does work exactly the way we wish it to, it does not preclude pleasure. And there’s so little to separate empathy from pity; honesty from fetish. There is power in watching.
Are these novels the literary equivalent of ‘slacktivism’, as Krissy Kneen suggests? ‘The reader isn’t required to do anything except feel outrage and there’s something about that that is similar to the way we now participate in society by just shooting off a Facebook post or a tweet and thinking “okay I’ve done my bit” for the cause.’ Are they a way of avoiding the banal horrors of the everyday: looking at the sun, so as to avoid having to look at the ground? Are they a form of personal benchmarking: a way to find comfort through downward comparison in a world that feels overwhelming and drowned in sorrow? The literary equivalent of poverty tourism? Or are they a modern form of defeatist catharsis in which, in a godless world, suffering is neither proportionate nor earned (as it is in Greek tragedy), but simply inevitable? Cultural self-flagellation.
After a particularly violent encounter in Tallent’s novel, Turtle’s father explains his philosophy of pain:
The idea, so say the philosophers, is that you sit yourself down across from someone, and begin breaking his fingers with a hammer. You see how he reacts. He screams. He clutches his hands to his chest. You infer that he acts this way because he is in pain. But what really happens, when you are faceto-face and someone in pain, what really happens is that the gulf between you and them is made apparent. Their pain is utterly inaccessible to you. It might as well be pantomime.
Emotional pantomime, or engine of empathy? These books are the ultimate stress tests of this question; they pull the focus in tight, break their narrative hammers over their protagonists’ bodies, and ask us what it is we really feel. As readers, this is not a comfortable question to ask or answer. It’s not a comfortable critical space to enter, either, with its lurking potential for moral judgement. But, as a friend wisely said to me, ‘Trauma is pretty fucking uncomfortable.’
As a reader and critic, my fiercest objection to the narrative aesthetic of A Little Life and My Absolute Darling is simply that it demands so little of me, other than my endurance – their walled spaces seem to insulate rather than illuminate. Krissy Kneen concurs: ‘Books come into their own where they’re a conversation between a writer and a reader,’ she explains. ‘These books don’t leave any space for a reader to become an active participant ... it’s really clear what’s wrong, and it’s really clear what’s right, and we don’t have to make the kind of decisions that we really should be making in real life – asking why people behave in particular ways, and looking for complexity in that behaviour.’
That’s my objection to our politics too, its retreat to corners, to the monochromatic didacticism – the historical amnesia – of fairy tales. How the focus on extremes distracts us from the system that breeds them. ‘Sometimes books come along that match the times,’ wrote a critic of A Little Life. That’s so very true.
The complexity these novels do bring is the exquisite pain of beauty – the monstrously sublime and the sublimely monstrous. It’s this aesthetic of aesthetised pain, punitiveness bordering on fetishisation, that prompted Mendelsohn to write: ‘Yanagihara’s novel has duped many into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain.’ And it was the implication of authorial dishonesty that prompted her editor to retort: ‘At bottom Mendelsohn seems to have decided that A Little Life just appeals to the wrong kind of reader.’
'I have strong feelings about this because of my Holocaust writing experience,’ Daniel Mendelsohn explains. ‘You know you are in a very dangerous territory when you are taking the suffering of people and turning it into a narrative which people inevitably are going to take some kind of pleasure from, even just the pleasure of reading a good story.’
It’s hard to disagree. And yet I am haunted by the censorious danger I feel in calling it danger. As far as I’m able to give an intellectual shape to my discomfort, I think this is it.
‘Criticism is an inherently moral undertaking,’ Mendelsohn assures me as we wrap up our call. ‘It starts with creation, with separating light from dark.’
It was hard to tell the difference when my bones were glowing. It’s still hard. g
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic currently living in Egypt. She is the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow.
‘The audacious bite of decision’
Hydra’s cast of characters
Brian Matthews
HALF THE PERFECT WORLD: WRITERS, DREAMERS AND DRIFTERS ON HYDRA, 1955–1964 by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell
Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 438 pp, 9781925523096
In August 1964, Charmian Clift returned to Australia from the Greek island of Hydra after nearly fourteen years abroad. As Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell portray her return – a description based, as always in this book, on solid or at least reasonably persuasive evidence – she ‘was leaving her beloved Hydra forever, with the pain of her departure sharpened by the sting of humiliation and exile’. By the time the return voyage had begun, she later recalled, ‘the audacious bite of decision has long since been blunted … The freshness of the adventure has worn off and uncertainty, alas, is practically all that remains.’
Meanwhile, in 1965, I saw an advertisement in the TLS for a teaching job on the island of Spetsai at the school John Fowles taught at and a version of which appears in his 1965 novel, The Magus. Famous mostly for its flaws (Woody Allen said if he had his life over again he’d do everything the same except read The Magus), this strange novel
nevertheless appealed to me irresistibly. Footloose, bulletproof, powerfully bitten by the lure of audacious decision – I applied for the job and wrote to Charmian Clift – quite possibly the last thing she needed. Her reply, on December 9 from her Cremorne flat, was prompt and generous: ‘I will tell you what I can, although heaven knows how much things have altered in even a year.’ She detailed with great verve what life might be like:
… just wait and see how you fall into Mediterranean habits, and how pleasant it is to be a little bit free to go and look and enjoy and sit around tavernas. [Spetsai] is a lovely island … all the yachts come in in summer and there are thousands of people to meet and be sociable with … the college might drive [you] mad, overrun as it is by spoilt middle-class Athenian youth, who can be odious. But then you have Hydra just next door … and you can escape. I don’t know what else to tell you. Except
don’t miss this experience if it is offering … If you have any specific questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. And good luck – as if you need it – you are so lucky to have this chance. Sincerely, Charmian Clift.
This admittedly somewhat self-indulgent anecdote is interesting because Clift’s ebullience and wholehearted engagement are at odds with Genoni and Dalziell’s undoubtedly accurate evocation of her post-Hydra decline. It was as if an eccentric letter from someone apparently as impetuous as she had been when she and George Johnston resolved to ‘go and live in the sun’ briefly rekindled Clift’s remembered joy in being among Greek people who, as she notes in the letter, ‘are so heartwarmingly friendly on islands’. But this must have been only a brief moment of light in the gloom, as Genoni and Dalziell make clear:
Despite Clift’s success on returning to Sydney, the effect on her was devastating …. she [missed] her island life … struggled constantly with the pressure of newspaper deadlines … suffered protracted depression and eventually took her own life in July 1969, at the age of forty-five.
Half the Perfect World is dominated by Clift as either a volatile presence or an offstage figure of whose brio, élan, and mercurial temperament one is always conscious. Not even Johnston
himself – somehow sepulchral, at times self-absorbed – has comparable mettle. But for all their centrality, Clift and Johnston are part of a large and evolving cast of characters. The authors range through their ranks with assurance, wit, and poise. Leonard Cohen, Rodney Hall, Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, Nancy Mitford, Sue and Mungo MacCallum, Anthony Perkins, and Melina Mercouri are only a few of the immediately recognisable visitors.
movements, liaisons, and enmities.
The book is studded with Burke’s photos, but they are never mere decoration; they are liberally captioned, and the authors refer to them in detail, interpreting them where necessary and placing them in the context of their Hydra story at appropriate points, a manoeuvre which Burke facilitated by taking photos in series, as if they were ‘stills’ in a movie. Wallis’s papers are similarly ubiquitous and are, like
You need a bit of luck as a researcher, and Genoni and Dalziell record their debt to Life photographer James Burke, whose fifteen hundred photos of Hydra and the expatriate community were commissioned but never published, and to the rather hapless New Zealander Redmond Wallis – ‘a key participant in the [Hydra] action’. His manuscript The Unyielding Memory is an ‘unvarnished account of numerous significant incidents and individuals who are only ever thinly disguised’, but whose real identities Wallis makes clear in an accompanying list. The authors didn’t personally discover these hitherto-neglected sources, but they recognised their value, and they use them with tact and imagination to run a binding thread through a narrative otherwise threatened by the implosive force of innumerable names, faces, episodes,
the photos, held to important narrative account. Moreover, each chapter ends with a quoted piece from Wallis, a nice touch that sometimes acts as a ‘dying fall’, sometimes as commentary, sometimes as an elegiac summary or astringent afterword.
Half the Perfect World benefits immeasurably from the authors’ skilled and indefatigable research. As with any broadly biographical/critical enterprise, they have to chance their arm now and then. The word ‘likely’ precedes a number of their suggestions, and sometimes, when the strain tells, the prose falls clunkily back on contemporary conversational cliché: the usually redundant and meaningless ‘in terms of’, for example, gets far too liberal a run. Never-theless, one quickly feels confidence in the integrity of the narrative and its narrators. There are some longueurs, but these
are in a sense intrinsic and unavoidable. The protagonists themselves recognised the threat of tedium and the dictates of unwanted but unavoidable, confined routine. The authors quote Clift’s description of the ‘hours lingering on the agora’: ‘mostly we talk, individually, severally, and at last all together, hurling and snatching at creeds, doctrines, ideas, theories, raging through space and time like erratic meteorites’. The meteorite image is apposite. Burnout seemed always a distinct possibility, made the more likely by the pressure of modern tourism (a topic on which Genoni and Dalziell are interesting and well informed), but especially by the ever more fraught social dynamics as the expatriate core grew, fractured, aged, and was challenged by new blood.
Hydra’s place in the history of Australian literary bohemianism remains tendentious despite Clift and Johnson’s individual contributions, especially Peel Me a Lotus (1959) and My Brother Jack (1964). Genoni and Dalziell may sense this in their conclusion, which, imagining ‘a future free from the strait-jacket of a stale inheritance and … landscapes fit for bold new dreams’, seems to gesture uncertainly back to, rather than beyond, a long-lost bohemian Hydra. But that’s a quibble: Half the Perfect World is a fascinating, impressively researched, well-told story about a place and its moment that time and tourism have since overrun. g
Brian Matthews’s Manning Clark: A life (2008) won the National Biography Award in 2010.
Charmian Clift (second from left), Leonard Cohen (second from right), members of the Katsikas family, and others, c.1960. (Johnston and Clift Collection)
The bowl
Brenda Niall
UPSTATE
by James Wood Jonathan Cape $35 hb, 224 pp, 9781787330627
Forget the author – it’s the book that matters. That’s sound advice, but there are times when it is hard to follow. James Wood’s Upstate is a testing case. A quietly reflective little novel, elegantly written, with four main characters and a minimal plot, Upstate doesn’t look like a literary time bomb. Yet because its author is a renowned literary critic, it is bound to set off disputes about the idea of fiction that his book represents. As one of Wood’s many admirers, I would rejoice if he had written a masterpiece. Others might feel a degree of Schadenfreude in judging that he hasn’t. Wood is not free to write a novel that is merely good; he is called to perform to his own standard of excellence.
For the last two decades, Wood’s columns in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and the London Review of Books have shaped taste and rattled reputations. Often exhilarating, sometimes ferocious, Wood’s reviews consistently enhance the status of the novel. For him, it is ‘the nearest thing to life’. When Wood came to New York from London in 1995, he had a formidable record as chief literary critic of the Guardian and a judge for the Booker Prize. Aged only thirty, he became senior editor for The New Republic. He now writes for The New Yorker and teaches literary criticism at Harvard.
Early on, Wood was described in The New York Times magazine as ‘very smart and very grouchy’. He had questioned the popular acclaim roused by such bulky novels as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Wood’s phrase ‘hysterical realism’ hit home with Zadie Smith, who publicly confessed to some ‘overblown manic prose’. Others whom Wood has found wanting are Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Summing up DeLillo’s Underworld, he wrote that ‘there are no human beings in this novel,
no one who really matters and whose consciousness matters to himself’.
Wood believes that novelists should stop trying to explain the seismic events of the day in look-at-me prose and tell us quietly ‘how somebody felt about something’. His new novel sets out to do just that.
At one level, Upstate is an AngloAmerican story. Its central figure, through whose consciousness most of the novel’s events are refracted, is Alan Querry, a Northumberland property developer in his sixties who knows almost nothing of life in the United States. Summoned to an upstate New York university town, where his forty-yearold daughter, Vanessa, a philosophy lecturer, is believed to have made a suicide attempt, Alan confronts his role as father. He is joined by his second daughter, Helen, and by Vanessa’s boyfriend, Josh. Alan looks back at his failed marriage to Vanessa and Helen’s mother, and weighs the possible effects of his second marriage. In the immediate crisis, the unknown factor is Josh. Younger than Vanessa, not anchored in a career, he may find her recurring depressive episodes too much for him.
Alan and Helen watch Vanessa and Josh. All four of them consider, at differing levels of awareness, the existential questions of living. Josh isn’t interested in finding reasons to live. ‘It should be how and what and if’, he says, ‘not why.’ Cloistered together in Vanessa’s house, the four become irritable. While clearing plates from the dinner table, Vanessa drops a bowl, chipping a small piece from the rim. ‘My favorite bowl!’ she laments, ‘the only one I cared about.’ Alan, Josh, and Helen tell her that it can be repaired. Their common-sense approach angers Vanessa:
‘It’s not the bowl … it’s the idea: everything that is most dear to you will eventually be taken from you.’
‘Then that’s a very important lesson to learn’, said Helen without emotion.
Sisterly aggression is not allowed to get out of control. ‘“All right, I’m going for a little walk”, said Alan, who took his coat and woollen cap and almost ran for the door.’ There is an unmissable
reminder of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, in which another quartet waits and watches. James’s characters are attuned to emotional subtleties. Alan is out of his depth. His bewildered reaction to his daughter’s crisis is movingly shown, but, as the days pass and nothing happens to resolve the situation, the reader has to put up with his platitudes about American culture. Wood is both protective and patronising about Alan’s bad jokes and puns, and his collection of local trade names such as the Scooby Don’t restaurant and an IT business, Only Connect.
The family relationships are finely observed. Alan ponders the mystery of his two daughters. He asks why Helen is (or appears to be) a confident businesswoman, wife, and mother, while for Vanessa the simplest act is fraught with tremulous self-doubt. Is it his duty as a father to stay and support Vanessa if Josh leaves her?
Wood values stillness and silence. In Upstate, there is no external act more violent than the moment in which Vanessa drops her precious bowl. The novel’s free indirect narration works well when it moves between the characters, but too much of it is entrusted to the relentlessly cheerful Alan.
On the last page, Alan’s reverie on the seasonal moods and colours of the English and American landscapes reveals an unlikely poetic sensibility. This is surely Wood’s own voice. The authorial shift may be inconsistent, but it closes the book with the verbal richness that Wood’s quartet has too sparingly provided. g
Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea? My grandmother’s story (Text Publishing, 2018).
Taking sides
Susan Wyndham
SHELL by Kristina Olsson Scribner
$35 hb, 374 pp, 9781925685329
The story of the Sydney Opera House is usually told as the heroic tragedy of its Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, who won the design competition for his breathtaking cluster of white sails but resigned before its completion over conflict about practicalities, costs, and government interference. In her exquisite novel Shell, Kristina Olsson comes at the drama obliquely, from the perspective of Sydney’s working people.
Shell opens in 1960 with Paul Robeson performing on the construction site for sweaty workers: ‘it wasn’t just the building or the place Robeson had sanctified, but the labour’. Observing the scene, Telegraph journalist Pearl Keogh is moved, unable to find words for her notebook. The next page moves ahead to 1965 as tension builds around the scaffolded concrete shells and rumours leak that young men will be conscripted by lottery for national service. Pearl, tough and fragile, thirtytwo and single, has a personal reason to join the rising protest movement against Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Her mother’s early death left her, aged fourteen, to care for her two younger brothers, Jamie and Will, who, as teenagers, ran away from a Catholic orphanage and are now of an age to be conscripted. Pearl, contrite about neglecting them, is desperate to find and save them.
The novel is, in part, a shadowy spy thriller. Pearl meets nameless informants who tip her off about the ballots, she attends campaign meetings in public bars that simmer with latent male violence, and she finds her phone has been tapped. As punishment for compromising her professional ethics with political activism, she is relegated to writing for the women’s pages. She continues her search. In a city bar she
is attracted to a quiet blond figure who is the novel’s other protagonist. Axel Lindquist, a Swedish glass artist, has followed Utzon to Sydney to create a work of art for the foyer of the main hall. He arrives as Utzon is withdrawing from the stalled project, working from his Pittwater home north of the city, and subject to criticism from politicians, media, and some of his own crew.
The artist never actually meets ‘the architect’; nor does the reader, as he remains an abstraction just off-stage. Frustrated and uncertain if his work is still wanted, Axel wanders the bays and beaches of Sydney’s coastal suburbs, seeking inspiration for a glass sculpture that can express both the spirit of the place and Utzon’s vision. There are amusing reminders of his foreignness in his attempts to find decent coffee and to understand the local lingo: ‘Drover’s dog knows what the problem is – bloody architect’s never here.’
Shell is grounded in historical fact, but the narrative is a glinting prism through which Olsson examines questions of ethical, emotional, and creative life. Much credit goes to the author, a resident of Brisbane, for writing a great Sydney novel; with an insider–outsider’s eye, her recreation of both place and time is sensual and believable. She puts us in the streets and workplaces, the conventional lives and brewing social revolutions, with precise detail, startling images, and an artist’s impressionistic strokes.
This is a novel the reader experiences on the skin as well as in the imagination. The writing moves with constant action, thought, and atmosphere: passing days and seasons, flashes and ripples of light, heat, and water – the fluid elements Utzon and his fictional surrogate, Axel, are trying to make solid. Both have to resolve the influences of their cold, dark, white Scandinavian homes with Sydney’s steamy, golden air, turbulent ocean, and the shiny surfaces that conceal its darker heart.
Olsson writes thoughtfully about the creation of art – the architect’s, the glassmaker’s, the writer’s: ‘He was trying for something beyond [perfection]; for disturbance and emotion, the elusive quality of dreams.’ And: ‘He looked at
what was there, but mostly he looked for what was not there. For the missing or the denied, at what might be hidden.’
The novel pulsates with absences: Pearl’s lost brothers, her dead mother, and stroke-silenced father; Axel’s mother, alone on the far side of the world, and his father, who disappeared while helping to rescue Jews during World War II; Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants and young soldiers; and, of course, the architect. There are secrets, lies, and misunderstandings. Like Utzon, who preferred framed views and ‘saw the whole through the partial’, Olsson tells much of her story glancingly, leaving the reader to connect and deduce; on a second reading, lightly buried clues sparkle.
Concepts of commitment and detachment are central but not simple, most obviously in Sweden’s doubleedged wartime neutrality and Australia’s entry to an American war; in Pearl’s skittering sexual encounters and ambivalence towards male-dominated protests. When the nascent feminist sets out to write about Australia’s ‘forgotten’ women writers, she is told by one of them, ‘The artist must take sides.’ But, the novel asks, which is the right side?
Amid all this, Shell celebrates the Opera House, ‘unfurling like one of their waratahs’, ‘a bowl, newly shattered’, ‘a rare and beautiful animal in a stark landscape’. Politicians have regarded the building as a costly white elephant or a profitable billboard, but Olsson and Axel understand its priceless value:
Any structure that aspired to myth and dream would look broken as it was built; all art was like this … Perhaps their leaders had not anticipated that the people would fall in love with beauty, that they would look into the bright mirror of the Opera House shells and see themselves.
Susan Wyndham is the former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. In her career as a journalist she has been editor of Good Weekend magazine, New York correspondent for The Australian, and a deputy editor of the Herald. She is the author of Life In His Hands: The true story of a neurosurgeon and a pianist (2009).
Disruptive creatures
Anthony Lynch
WHEN I SAW THE ANIMAL
by Bernard Cohen
University of Queensland Press
$22.95 pb, 237 pp, 9780702260216
As a boy, I watched with fascination an early sci-fi horror film, The Blob. After a meteorite lands in Pennsylvania, a small, gelatinous blob emerges from the crater. Starting with an inquisitive old man who probes this runaway black pudding with his walking stick, the blob proceeds to consume, literally, everything in its path, growing in girth and bringing greater terrors with each new small-town American engorgement.
While the title story of Bernard Cohen’s short story collection is a very different beast from the schlock 1958 film (I have avoided the 1988 remake), which may have inadvertently provided a metaphor for twentieth-century Western consumerism, it offers a similar portrait of an uninvited animal, or thing, disrupting normalcy. One night, sitting at home after a number of drinks, the narrator of Cohen’s story sees, or thinks he sees, an animal dart across the room. Was it a rat? Did he imagine it? He can’t be sure. Days pass, and he glimpses the animal again. Thereafter, sightings, or half-sightings, become more frequent, and the animal – or is it now animals? – grows in size. The narrator, metaphorically, consumes himself in his attempts to fathom this takeover of his home and his consciousness.
When I Saw the Animal is Cohen’s first collection of short stories, but he is the author of five novels, the second of which, The Blindman’s Hat, won the 1996 Australian/Vogel Award. The title story is an exemplar of a number of stories in which animals, domestic pets included, are not so much a comfort as disruptors moving in mysterious ways. Who can know what they are thinking? Why are they even present? They appear from nowhere, to stay or depart accord-
ing to unreadable patterns; emblems of the lack of clarity, of perspective, with which Cohen’s characters must deal –characters, in the way of Kafka, absorbed in detail yet unable to penetrate a world with structures blurrily apprehended.
While this blob-meets-Gregor Samsa introduction may suggest a trite and even nostalgic take on modernist angst, Cohen has a marvellous command of the nuances and intricacies of language, its connotations, gaps, and slippery hold on what we might conceive of as reality. His dialogue is packed with sardonic wit and the nonchalant sword-crossings of domestic life. Often impulsive, a typical Cohen protagonist is a male who fixates on an animal, object, or a course of action that brings household disturbance and comic grief. The opening story, ‘Gilberto’, is a prime example. Opposed by family members, usually female, with sharp tongues and acid observations, he blithely pushes on. Cohen himself is not afraid to push stories to the absurd – a dog moves in, family members move out; a man lets himself into the wrong house to find a large and wild member of the feline family behind the bathroom door. Not all end disastrously. Often a kind of new normal asserts itself by the story’s end; other times Cohen is happy to embrace ambiguity, abandoning resolution. Occasionally, stories forgo conventional narrative structure, being playful explorations of language, hermeneutics, and identity. In ‘Fifty Responses to the Ravens Paradox’, figures that include a white shoe, a blind woman, a tree, and a crow make propositions variously supported or contradicted by other voices. Interspersed with longer stories, yet other stories are microfictions or have the force and brevity of prose poems.
These stories were written over approximately two decades. Some very short contributions seem more like occasional experiments than considered contributions to a coherent whole. Arguably all, however, explore how meaning is constituted. ‘Conversations with Robots’, in which a scripted ‘You’ responds as robotically as the robot programmed for empathy, is a hysterical call-and-response going nowhere.
Cohen’s protagonists can lean
towards the solipsistic, yet the author has a clear-eyed, unsentimental view of human frailty. Characters need not, of course, be likeable, but the self-absorption of many, combined with scenarios that, however deliberately, push the limits of credibility, can make emotional investment difficult to muster. The best stories, however, are sardonic portraits of flawed individuals whose self-serving doggedness is coupled with flashes of insight and brilliant wit. In ‘A Chinese Meal, Uneaten’, the self-aware narrator recalls eating bad Australian Chinese food with his then wife in an episode that captures the ruin of their marriage. Its gems include a description of the oily fried rice – ‘one might be confused as to whether the frying process had already taken place or whether the table was a stop-off point on the way to the pan’ – while this same narrator recalls histories of casual racism when he observes: ‘Whenever in an ethnic restaurant, it was our practice to doubt the provenance and more particularly the species of the meat.’ Later in the collection, ‘Orangeade’ is a wry, sympathetic portrait of everyday opportunism. A number of stories have narrators believing they are subject to, or part of, a test or social experiment the nature of which escapes them. The final story, ‘Attributed to Jeremiah’, evokes a postapocalyptic suburbia hinting at the aftermath of failed experimentation. It’s a powerful piece with lines many poets would be proud of. ‘English is a dismemberingly cruel idiom,’ the narrator tells us, ‘and it fits this world too well.’ g
Anthony Lynch is a Victorian writer, editor, and publisher.
Long shadows
Alice Nelson
MATRYOSHKA
by Katherine Johnson Ventura Press
$29.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781925384635
Half a century ago, the Palestinian writer Edward Said described the state of exile as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’. Its essential sadness, he believed, was not surmountable. The crippling sorrows of exile and estrangement, and the disfiguring legacies of intergenerational trauma, pervade Katherine Johnson’s powerful new novel. At its heart, it is also a poignant exploration of our stumbling efforts to seek solace in the world and the ways in which we attempt to overcome dislocation.
The matryoshka of the novel’s title refers to a set of wooden Russian nesting dolls, each one containing a smaller version of itself; a continuous chain of women inextricably linked to each other by destiny and – in the world of the novel – by a complicated love that is often as painful as it is consoling. At the centre of Matryoshka is a compelling familial quartet: the formidable Russian exile Nina, her mysterious daughter Helena, wounded granddaughter Sara, and Sara’s own small daughter, Ellie. Husbands and lovers circle these women, but they remain in the background; the story here belongs mostly to Sara, and it is her unspooling of familial mysteries that drives the narrative. Each character has been menaced by history in a different way, but each is irrevocably bound to the other, and their personal stories refract each other in fascinating and
often unexpected forms.
When the novel opens, Nina has just died and Sara has retreated from her disintegrating marriage to live in her grandmother’s home in Tasmania – the place where she was raised. Sara’s mother, Helena, who abandoned her as a baby and is now a successful paediatric heart surgeon, hovers on the fringes of the story for much of the novel, busy saving other lives. Helena’s desertion of her family and her stubborn refusal to reveal the identity of Sara’s father casts her as a cruel villain until long-withheld truths about her past begin to emerge.
The Russian émigré Nina, such a powerful force in Sara’s life, is never quite rescued from the aspic of memory, but this may be appropriate for a novel preoccupied with lacunae and omissions. Matryoshka’s deep obsessions are dislocation and loss, and there is an unnerving sense of attenuation that shadows the story despite careful craftsmanship and expertly balanced plotting.
Amid this swirl of familial fractures and re-engagements emerges another narrative strand that works in a kind of skilful, contrapuntal motion. Sara befriends an Afghan asylum seeker named Abdhul and soon becomes deeply involved in his life. Johnson renders convincingly and poignantly Abdhul and his compatriots’ attempts to make meaningful contact with their new surroundings, only to find themselves in a place where they are feared, misunderstood, and subjected to all the cruel exclusions of prejudice. In the schoolyard, mothers fret about a new Hazara student, wondering if he poses a danger to their children. There are whispers about polio and tuberculosis, and more amorphous fears about the disturbing history the small boy might contain. Intolerance and ignorance abound, eventually shading into an act of horrifying brutality.
The miseries of Abdhul and his friends are compounded by an official heartlessness that borders on a variety of bureaucratic sadism. The asylum seekers are sentenced to a cruel limbo that seems devised to deny them dignity; one of them, ‘sick with waiting’, takes his own life.
Writing about the encounter
between privileged Westerners and powerless non-white refugees is fraught ethical and representational territory. Matryoshka could so easily have slipped into well-intentioned polemic or mawkish didacticism, or the more insidious trope of objectifying incomprehensible anguish as titillating, literary fodder, but Johnson handles this material deftly and sensitively. Her protagonist is painfully alive to the limits of her own understanding, the complex antinomies of exile, and the odd slippages in the soul it can create are painstakingly limned.
The world of Matryoshka is haunted by fractures and loss. Marriages fail, friendships fragment, new love falters. The past is ever there, slipping stealthily through the membrane of the present and tarnishing the lives of Johnson’s characters. The novel is rife with solitary wanderers and disinherited souls: people staggering from aching and often irremediable losses. And yet, despite all of this, normal life beckons. There are classroom politics, workplace dramas, wildflowers to pick, holidays to the seaside. The Tasmanian landscape is rendered in exquisitely lyrical prose, and the joys and exigencies of everyday existence provide a quickening of life to a novel that may otherwise have submerged itself beneath the heavy freight of all this sorrow.
Sometimes the novel strains faintly under the intensity of such disparate universes of experience and varieties of traumatic inheritance, but this is overcome by Johnson’s restrained and authoritative writing and by her refusal to bestow a facile redemption upon her characters. Matryoshka is essentially about the quest to reassemble a sense of self from the discontinuities of exile and estrangement. Some of the novel’s wanderers find a way home and some rifts are mended, but Johnson is aware that some wounds are too deep to heal fully and that some sorrows are insurmountable. It is this painfully held truth that makes Matryoshka such a fascinating and authentic meditation on the long shadows cast by loss. g
Alice Nelson’s new novel, The Children’s House, was published by Penguin Random House in October 2018. ❖
The everlasting Bibi
The populist politics of Benjamin Netanyahu
Louise Adler
BIBI: THE TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES OF BENJAMIN NETANYAHU
by Anshel Pfeffer
Basic Books, US$32 hb, 432 pp, 9780465097821
In 1901 the cultural Zionist Israel Zangwill, borrowing a phrase from Lord Shaftesbury, declared, ‘Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country.’ That cliché has continued to influence the impasse in the Middle East for almost a century.
Advocates for Israel’s policies seem to relish rehearsing the notion that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. In this version of history, Palestinians were offered statehood in the proposed partition of 1939, by the United Nations in 1947, in 1979 during the Egypt–Israel peace negotiations, the Oslo agreement in the 1990s, by Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, and by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Accordingly, Palestinians have refused the offer to dismantle settlements, the reclamation of East Jerusalem, and sovereignty over religious sites and proposed withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank. For Palestinians, the missed opportunities are the consequence of Israel’s bad faith during a catalogue of failed negotiations.
The calculated development of Jewish settlements in the West Bank certainly makes one doubt Israel’s commitment to peace. So, too, do the checkpoints, constant military presence, and the harassment. Palestinian aspirations to self-determination have evolved from the demand for the right of return to a two-state solution with a return to pre-1967 borders. Agreement in this region is rare, but public opinion polls on the two-state solution suggest that most people support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and an end to the occupation. Anshel Pfeffer’s biography suggests that Israel’s
leadership from Ben Gurion onwards has vacillated between ambivalence and hostility regarding any real progress towards peace. This is a fascinating, albeit deeply depressing account of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarkable political longevity (prime minister since 2009, he also held the position from 1996 to 1999). To understand his staying power, Pfeffer revisits the political leadership that preceded him to discover the themes that shaped his prime ministership.
Netanyahu’s rise to power derived largely from his father, a mediocre academic and devout follower of Jabotinsky (who hoped Israel would be an ‘iron wall of Jewish bayonets’), an education in the United States, and the death of his older brother, Yoni, in the Entebbe raid, in 1976. The Netanyahu family has been particularly adept at inserting itself into political history. Yet the father was never an influential figure in the revisionist movement, Yoni was not a military hero in Entebbe, and Bibi was not an especially talented army officer.
Netanyahu likes to imagine himself as the saviour of the Jewish people. The reality is that his policies have jeopardised the security of Israel’s citizenry, corrupted civil society as only prosecuting an occupation can do, and made Israel an international pariah.
Netanyahu lacks the political will to make peace with the Palestinians. He plays the international community with cynical abandon, and relies on a coalition of religious extremists and right-wing bullies for electoral success. He is the master of spin both at home and abroad, he seduces a devoted American Jewish lobby, he has ‘reached out’ to Christian fanatics (fellow readers of Ayn Rand), and he has cosied
up to right-wing leaders from Putin to Trump and Orbán. Last time he addressed the US congress, he received twenty-six standing ovations – to quote Jon Stewart, ‘by far the longest blowjob a Jewish man has ever received’.
At home, Netanyahu performs as the strong leader who will brook no deal with the Palestinians, while abroad he continues to feign interest in a resolution. He has toyed with a succession of worn-out American emissaries, while encouraging settlements and offering Palestinians the token of highly delimited self-rule. According to Pfeffer, he has never relinquished the conviction that the Middle East conflict is the result of implacable Arab hatred of the West and of Israel as the West’s outpost in the Middle East. The recent Nation-State Law declared Israel the nation state of the Jewish people, that only Jews have the right to self-determination, downgraded the status of Arabic, and continued support for settlements.
From all the evidence, it is hard not to conclude that Netanyahu has zero interest in resolving the conflict. He describes the Palestinian issue as a ‘rabbit hole’, while adopting the diversionary tactic of ramping up the threat Iran poses to the region and international order. Netanyahu’s enemies are the usual suspects: objective journalists, academics, policy analysts, Haaretz, and, of course, The New York Times. Like Donald Trump’s politics, his own are populist; his rhetoric appeals to the polity’s basest instincts. He fosters outsider versus insider resentment, dismisses criticism, and thinks in sound bites. Trump’s support for Israel, his relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem to insist on the city as Israel’s capital, were gifts from one marketing whiz to another.
All four of Israel’s most recent prime ministers have been investigated for corruption and bribery; Netanyahu and his wife are currently under investigation. Netanyahu has been caught with the proverbial in the trough. His wife finds largesse irresistible, bullies staff, and seems to have a touch of the Imelda Marcos. As a quid pro quo for Netanyahu’s indiscretions, his wife now vets all his appointments and has full access to his schedule.
Pfeffer argues that Netanyahu embodies Israel, a ‘hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism’. The former prime minister, Ehud Barak, told Netanyahu ‘your behaviour is living proof that it is easier to take the Jews out of the galut [diaspora] than it is to take the galut out of the Jews’. Netanyahu’s strategy is to tolerate diplomatic entreaties while continuing to ensure that Israel does not have defined borders. Put simplistically, the problem is that Israelis want a homeland for Jewish people and Palestinians want
a state of their own.
Pfeffer’s biographical challenge is to situate Netanyahu in the context of Israel’s political history, to accept the constraints of anonymous sources, and the subject’s refusal to be interviewed. He reportedly said, ‘Pfeffer doesn’t know anything about me, it will be a cartoon.’ Unfortunately, the story of Benjamin Netanyahu is anything but comedic. My only quibble with this superb study is Pfeffer’s suggestion that Netanyahu is an intellectual. Tragically for the citizenry of Israel and Palestine, I can see no evidence of intellectual rigour
and all that entails – evidence-based analysis, transparency, moral decency, and integrity. Instead, I read this brilliant biography as revealing a talent for spin, reading the Zeitgeist, blazing self-belief, raging ambition, and opportunism. How the impasse will be resolved remains unclear – in the era of the populist demagogue, I fear Bibi is not finished yet. g
Louise Adler is the Chief Executive of Melbourne University Publishing and a member of the International Publishers Association’s Executive Committee.
‘Coming On The Hudson’: Weehawken
He seldom spoke, even when well, and when he did it was misterioso, brief, a gnomic shorthand, often only a grunt, but his musicians got it, Nellie, Boo-Boo, and Sphere III too. Nowadays next to nothing comes out his mouth, nothing at all.
– What’s with his head, Woo?
(He insisted on calling all his doctors ‘Ping Pock Woo’, can’t say why) – Dunno, says Woo.
A Steinway, marooned, in a corner of the living room. Him mostly in the bedroom. Nica’s cats pad in and out, licking themselves clean where they’ve collapsed in a puddle of sunshine. Still, he carefully dresses every morning, spiffed up, suit and tie, only to stay lying there in bed, glued to Bob Barker and The Price Is Right: the dinette sets and double-door Amana refrigerators, brought to you by 100% pure Dove Soap and Imperial Margarine. Out the window of the old Von Sternberg house Nica’s brother bought, three Bauhaus cubes midst the frame&brick extravaganzas on Kings Bluff, tugs push garbage scows south to the harbor’s mouth and open sea. He watches the river all the day long. That’s what he does: what the wind and light make of the water, for seasons on end, the shimmer off the river at 9 am, the wakes the ferries and cruise ships make –headed where? Barbados? The Antilles? France? –slowly passing across his field of vision like giant, ocean-going wedding cakes. What is there left to say, anyhow? Or play ? They either got it or not. His world, or what of it that’s stayed with him, lies directly across the way: the tenements of the old San Juan Hill neighborhood, Minton’s, 52nd Street –none of it what it was, everything something else .... He watches as the lights begin to switch on across the river come end of day, the skyline and clouds above going electric with pinks and reds as the sun goes down behind him over the Meadowlands in the west. Sometimes at night, looking across, he feels a twinge, the throb and pull of it. But it don’t pull all that hard, and it’s too damn much of a bother anyhow.
August Kleinzahler’s most recent poetry collection is Before Dawn On Bluff Road / Hollyhocks In The Fog (2017).
Hispandering
Timothy Verhoeven
AN AMERICAN LANGUAGE: THE HISTORY OF SPANISH IN THE UNITED STATES
by Rosina Lozano
University of California Press (Footprint)
$53.99 pb, 376 pp, 9780520297074
Many recent American politicians have believed that they could speak Spanish. Presidential candidate George W. Bush stumbled through a Spanish-language interview and was rewarded with thirty-five per cent of the Latino vote in the 2000 election. His brother Jeb, whose wife is Mexican-born, is a fluent speaker, but when he appealed to Spanish-speakers during the 2016 Republican Party primary, he received a typically brutal slap-down from Donald Trump.‘This is a country,’Trump chided his rival ‘where we speak English, not Spanish.’
At first glance, this statement is absurd. In 2016, no fewer than forty million residents spoke Spanish at home. Yet by signalling that only Englishspeakers counted as true Americans, Trump was appealing to a strain of nativism with deep roots in the past. As Rosina Lozano argues in her fascinating history, there is nothing new in depicting Spanish-speakers as alien intruders. For more than a century, Spanish in the United States has been at times embraced, but more often reviled.
The subtitle of Lozano’s book is somewhat misleading. Readers expecting a detailed analysis of the changing texture and tone of the language as it adapted to an Anglo environment may be disappointed. This is instead a history of Spanish-language politics, beginning with the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the United States took control of formerly Mexican territories in the south-west, and ending with World War II. Focusing on the south-western states and territories, Lozano constructs her narrative at two levels. The swings in official language policies between toleration, hostility, and support is one key theme. But Lozano shows as
well how these policy shifts played out within a community that was constantly pulled between rival language worlds.
The first section places at centre stage the group that Lozano refers to as ‘treaty citizens’, the Mexican nationals who were absorbed into the United States after its victory in the Mexican-American War. The conquering government’s stance towards these peoples was surprisingly tolerant. Rather than imposing a language test, the United States granted them citizenship automatically. Furthermore, the treaty citizens were able to wield Spanish as a language of power in their decadeslong effort to have their land claims recognised by American courts. Yet the exclusion of Spanish from the structures of government soon began to accelerate. In California, translating official texts into Spanish was for decades viewed as an indispensable part of governing. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, English had become the sole acceptable language of rule, and translation was largely dispensed with.
Lozano’s story comes alive when she moves from the public to the private world, showing how individuals and families negotiated their attachment to Spanish with their sudden immersion in an Anglo world of business and politics. As Lozano notes, treaty citizens were adept at ‘codeswitching between both languages or mixing the two’. The Vallejo family lived in northern California, an area where English was dominant, and quickly took a pragmatic stance. The sons were taught in English, the language of social advancement, to the point where the youngest struggled to write letters to his monolingual mother. Female members of the family, however, were expected to maintain their proficiency in Spanish. For both men and women, Spanish remained the language of faith.
One of the strengths of the book is its attention to regional particularities. Again and again, New Mexico stands out as an exception. There, the dominance of Spanish-speakers made any blunt imposition of English-only policies impossible. Anglophone arrivals quickly adapted to the reality that political and social success depended on mastery of Spanish. But the case of New Mexico
threw a spotlight on the informal language barrier to full citizenship of the nation. This became clear when a Congressional committee arrived in the territory in 1902 to assess its demand for statehood. Surveying the prevalence of Spanish, from shop windows to newspapers to daily chatter, the committee members concluded that New Mexico was not fit to enter the nation on full and equal terms. The republic could not digest a territory that sounded so foreign.
The second half of the book sets out the conflicting responses to the influx of Spanish-speaking migrants in the first half of the twentieth century. The fact that Spanish was now cast as a language of immigrants hardened attitudes across the south-west. Schools segregated English and Spanish speakers, while the territory of Arizona passed an Englishliteracy test designed to disenfranchise its Mexican-born population. Soon, however, conflicting impulses came to the fore. Anxious to improve relations with its hemispheric neighbours, the federal government trumpeted the Spanish-language credentials of its citizens. This favourable stance peaked during World War II. In an effort to bind immigrants to the war effort, government agencies adopted policies aimed at bolstering the Spanish language.
Lozano makes a compelling case that Spanish is deeply embedded in America’s past. But she also highlights the great paradox in the relationship between language and citizenship. The United States is one of only eight nations not to have an official language. Yet English has always been the unstated prerequisite for full membership of the political order. Outside of New Mexico, as she writes, ‘Spanish had little staying power as a language of citizenship’. Might this be changing? Candidates will no doubt continue to burnish their Spanish-language credentials as elections draw near, a process that some have labelled ‘Hispandering’. Yet if history is any guide, the United States is still a long way from accepting Spanish as a truly American language. g
Timothy Verhoeven is senior lecturer in the history program at Monash University. ❖
‘There could be something afoot’
A piercing analysis of Australian cricket Kieran Pender
CROSSING THE LINE:
HOW AUSTRALIAN CRICKET LOST ITS WAY by Gideon Haigh Slattery Media Group, $24.95 pb, 176 pp, 97881921778940
‘To me,’ Shane Warne once said, ‘cricket is a simple game.’ Australia’s best-ever bowler may not be a renowned sporting philosopher, but his words echo throughout Gideon Haigh’s latest book. In recent years, governing body Cricket Australia and an army of corporate consultants have sought to complicate the country’s summer game. An alphabet soup of abbreviations – ACPPs, IPPs, PONIs, NPPs, and PPPs – have been developed to re-establish Australia’s position at the pinnacle of world cricket. Yet, as Haigh chronicles in a short book of revealing anecdotes and caustic one-liners, they have instead brought the game to its knees.
Crossing the Line: How Australian cricket lost its way begins and ends at 3 pm, 24 March 2018 in Cape Town. An away series against South Africa was slipping from Australia’s grasp at Newlands Stadium when an incident occurred that sent reverberations around the cricket-playing globe. With Proteas batsman A.B. de Villiers midway through building an imposing advantage, umpires Nigel Llong and Richard Illingworth suddenly beckoned two Australian players. Match-tracking website ESPNcricinfo observed at the time: ‘They are having a chat with Cameron Bancroft, and there could be something afoot here.’
There was indeed. ‘Sandpaper-gate’ brought sporting superstars Steve Smith and David Warner plummeting back to earth. It ended the coaching tenure of Darren Lehmann, and it left Bancroft forever tarnished as a cheat for using a sandpaper scrap to increase the likelihood of reverse swing. Despite cricket’s murky relationship with ball-tampering
– historically the punishment has been a mere five runs – the brazenness of the Australians’ deception drew instant condemnation. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull intervened; English newspapers were gleeful. Hypocrisy may have ‘had a field day’, but that was hardly the point.
With Australian cricket forced into introspection, Haigh decided to conduct his own ‘cultural review’. He began with two simple premises. First, ‘that nobody goes to sleep honest and wakes up a cheat’. Second, that the system which had developed Smith and Warner and had been lauded for their meteoric rise should not now ‘escape scrutiny amid their failings’. Armed with this brief, Haigh interviewed fifty individuals from across the game’s spectrum: ‘players, coaches, officials and observers past and present’, including twelve recent national team representatives.
The result is a piercing analysis of the woes afflicting Cricket Australia, expertly informed by those at the heart of the game. Even the anonymity Haigh accorded each interviewee – necessary because, in a monopolised sport, ‘quoting them directly would hardly improve their job prospects’ – does not lessen the book’s impact. Its publication coincides with the expected conclusion of an official review into Australian cricket by Simon Longstaff of the Ethics Centre. Haigh’s own review is likely to be far more instructive.
There are few writers more qualified to offer an assessment of Australian cricket than Haigh. The London-born Victorian has covered the sport for almost three decades, for The Times and The Australian. He is a prolific author, with notable past works including On Warne
(2012) and The Border Years (1994). But Haigh’s oeuvre is supplemented by books set far away from the grassy oval. The writer has often peered into the corporate world, writing The Battle for BHP (1987) when he was barely twenty. Other works that stand out amid a bountiful collection of cricket tomes are One of a Kind: The story of Bankers Trust Australia (1999), Bad Company: The strange cult of the CEO (2004) and Asbestos House: The secret history of James Hardie Industries (2006).
This background proves helpful as Haigh navigates Cricket Australia’s creeping corporatisation. Consultants, ex-consultants, and ‘beige corporate’ advisers are recurring characters, with their buzzword-heavy strategies and lack of sporting experience; he describes one incoming administrator as possessing ‘knowledge of cricket that would not have covered a postage stamp’. This is as much a book about governance and corporate management as it is about cricket. That says a great deal about the game’s parlous state in 2018.
Despite the book’s brevity and limited temporal scope (just over a decade), Crossing the Line traverses considerable ground: the last embers of the Ponting–Clarke super era, the rise of the Twenty20 format, the Argus Review, ‘homework-gate’, the tragic death of Phillip Hughes, and last year’s bitter pay negotiations. At every turn, Haigh’s prose is crisp, deftly weaving together a compelling narrative with stark quotations: from favoured abbreviation ‘WTBC’ (‘watch the ball, cunt’) to ‘no comment, but you can’t quote me on that’.
If there is one shortcoming in Haigh’s latest work, it is that readers occasionally risk being left behind. The author’s word choice is so wide-ranging, his turn of phrase so rich, that Crossing the Line is bound to expand vocabularies. The influences on Cricket Australia are ‘endogenous and exogenous’, Michael Clarke is ‘kvetching’, first-grade clubs bemoan the ‘high performance suzerainty’, the Big Bash League is a ‘nightly saturnalia’, the national team backroom consists of ‘Lehmann liegemen’, and pay negotiations disturb the ‘equipoise’. Some readers may delight in such prose. Others might look
less favourably on the publisher’s failure to curb these flourishes.
But this is a minor quibble. Crossing the Line is a succinct, pithy, and illuminating examination of cricket in contemporary Australia. Haigh brings the unparalleled insight of someone who has covered this beat for almost thirty years, with a healthy dose of cynicism for Cricket Australia’s spin. It is hard to imagine a better evaluation of recent developments.
Australian cricket fans have reason to fear the future. On the field, ‘for all Australia’s manifold advantages … at the moment we’re actually not that good’. Australia presently ranks third in test and Twenty20 cricket and sixth in the one-day format. Off the field, the independence of the Longstaff review is questionable, and the towering pile of discarded past reviews provides little confidence that this latest investigation will amount to much anyway. Cricket Australia’s fiefdom remains unassailed: ‘there are no regulators to appease, no tax to pay, no government to answer to’. Market research conducted even before Sandpaper-gate suggested that the national team’s sheen was fading among the Australian public.
Yet Haigh concludes on an optimistic note. In 2018, Australian cricket ‘is more inclusive, more open and generally more aware and reflective of the country in which it is played’. In seeking to build on these foundations, the sport’s Jolimont Street administrators would do well to remember Warne’s sage words – and read this book. g
Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and researcher, based in London. He regularly contributes to ABR, the Guardian, and Monocle.
‘Noisy north of the Yarra’
A study of Melbourne’s Yiddish heart Tali Lavi
A SECOND CHANCE:
THE MAKING OF YIDDISH MELBOURNE by Margaret Taft and Andrew Markus Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 363 pp, 9781925495850
In my childhood home, Yiddish prompted a frisson of the suppressed. This was a direct consequence of adults speaking it whenever they did not want us children to understand. Yiddish was the language in which jokes, clever and sometimes ribald, worked. When attempting to translate, inevitably my grandmother would shrug; English was found lacking. Yiddish dimpled our conversations, and the foods that bore Yiddish names dimpled our knees. Its phrases and expressions were expressive, mournful, joyful. Yiddish was as changeable as it was myriad in composition; a melange of German, Hebrew, and other European languages.
Margaret Taft and Andrew Markus’s study of Yiddish Melbourne follows Markus and Danielle Charak’s earlier foray into the subject as editors of the fascinating Yiddish Melbourne: Towards a history (2008). A Second Chance: The making of Yiddish Melbourne is a detailed study of a community of Eastern European Jewish migrants who arrived in two successive waves; the greatest number of them settled in Melbourne. Initial arrivals were in the 1920s and 1930s, a time of white monoculture. The second wave were Holocaust survivors, predominantly Polish. This migrant community is familiar to readers of the stories of Arnold Zable, Jacob G. Rosenberg, and Lily Brett, or to those who lived alongside them in neighbourhoods that encompassed Carlton, Northcote, and St Kilda.
A Second Chance charts the growth of this community while identifying shifts in Australia. The changing landscape of immigration legislation and public attitudes toward the migrants
is explored alongside international developments, with close reference to the rising tides of anti-Semitism in Europe, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. It observes most extensively the decades fron the 1920s through to the 1960s, with its closing chapter contemplating whether Yiddish is in its death throes, as suggested by UNESCO’s categorisation of it as a ‘definitely endangered’ global language. The state of the language’s usage, while relevant, is not at the heart of this work. As Taft and Markus convincingly argue, Yiddish was not merely a language but a way of life, a means of expressing a robust, vibrant cultural identity. Carlton was its beating heart and the Kadimah (Hebrew for ‘Forward’), a library and cultural centre, was its pumping chambers. While nostalgia held currency, charismatic leaders embraced ‘progressive think[ing]’ and are described as ‘disruptors’ and ‘radicals’. On arrival, these migrants embarrassed the established Jewish community. Unlike their English and Australian-accented counterparts who embraced the idea of ‘blending in’, the newcomers – who ‘had lived full cultural Yiddish lives in large cities in which high visibility was not only the social norm but a badge of honour’ – were ‘noisy north of the Yarra’ Jews. Chutzpah was a distinctly un-Anglo quality. While reading A Second Chance, identifiable echoes and patterns in contemporary immigration debates appear. Anti-Semitism surfaced with the immigrants’ arrivals, and vile tropes appeared in the media and in politics. However, Australian anti-Semitism did not amount to pogroms or attempts at mass extermination, and migrants often
experienced a friendliness in personal encounters with Australians. Insert any successive migrant community into this formula and the pattern is clear; Australia isn’t in the habit of extending a warm embrace to foreigners, particularly if they can’t speak English. The current migrant population experiencing this disfavour are the Sudanese, who don’t have the liberty of ‘blending in’. One of this book’s contentions is that the establishment of Yiddish-speaking enclaves fostered a thriving community and made fertile ground for a dynamic culture that further infused the wider Australian community. Detractors of multiculturalism might do well to reflect on this.
Successful integration and support were orchestrated by Jewish organisations. Skilful self-governance was born from persecution in Europe. The Jewish Welcome Society, established in 1922, was extraordinary. ‘[Its] task was to meet every ship, to find work and accommodation for the new arrivals (a course for learning basic English was also organised) and in general to make the new immigrant who has no one to look after him a little more at home.’ It would be a fine contemporary model for other immigrant and refugee communities given that the national record is not one of magnanimity. While the intake of Jewish refugees increased after the Holocaust, they did not receive any assistance from the Australian government, instead relying on Jewish organisations and the munificence of exceptional individuals.
Because the subjects are Jewish, this is a story marked by argument. Yiddishists, with their love of language and intellectual engagement, held varying philosophical positions regarding religion and Zionism, although dissent about the latter reduced after the
Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. The Bund, a political secular socialist organisation, was active and often clashed with those who were Zionists.
In its heyday, this community supported two Yiddish schools, two Yiddish newspapers, and numerous publications. Notes of wistfulness appear: ‘Literature and theatre were not just superficial indulgences or optional extras, but the life-blood of their existence.’ Cases abound to support this declaration. The Australian première of the Yiddish play The Dybbuk was performed in 1938 in front of a capacity audience of fifteen hundred at the Princess Theatre in Spring Street. This was not provincial amateurism; modernism and cutting-edge theatre techniques like the Stanislavsky Method were employed. Practitioners shaping the theatrical landscape included Yankev Waislitz, founder of the modernist Vilna Troupe, and Rachel Holzer, an internationally renowned Yiddish actress who toured her one-woman shows. This radical spirit lasted until the Holocaust. Thereafter, the taste changed; theatregoing was a bittersweet way to re-experience a former home and family that was no more.
Given the book’s interest in the arts, there is surprisingly no mention of Gilgul Theatre. Founded by Barrie Kosky, this ground-breaking company operated in the 1990s and won Kosky two Victorian Green Room awards for The Dybbuk . Theatre academic and former member Yoni Prior has written about its position as ‘ghetto theatre’, its use of Yiddish songs, and its blend of historical tropes. Gilgul was a return to the days of a revolutionary Yiddish theatre of breathtaking chutzpah.
A Second Chance’s closing depicts the dwindling energy of the Yiddish com-
munity. Its final chapter covers an extensive timeframe, stretching from 1967 to the present day. An additional section might have acknowledged home-grown developments. The Bashevis Singers –their name a homage to Nobel Prizewinning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer – sing gorgeous melodies, both old and new, in Yiddish. The musicians Evie and Husky Gawenda and Gideon Preiss are relations of Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, who mentions them in the book’s preface. The unabashedly and exuberantly named YID! (‘Jew’ in Yiddish) is another music sensation which recently played at WOMADelaide and toured internationally. Gloriously carnivalesque, this twenty-two-piece band incorporates Yiddish spoken word, shtetl sounds foregrounding those of jazz and big band. Yiddish Melbourne might require a new instalment. g
Tali Lavi is a writer, reviewer and public interviewer. Tali worked on the original Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival and is now co-programmer of Melbourne Jewish Book Week.
WRITTEN WORD
Sightlines and warlines
Three poets at the height of their powers
David McCooey
Sarah Day’s début collection, A Hunger to Be Less Serious (1987), married lightness of touch with depth of insight. In Towards Light & Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp, 9781925780024), Day continues this project in poems concerned with light, a thing presented as both transformative and transformable. In ‘Reservoir’, for instance, the glass of a porthole can bend light with ‘its oblique know-how’.
As this image suggests, a key feature of Day’s poetry is its interest in mutability. The world is a source of both joy and anxiety because things are so changeable. Even things that appear fixed can be disconcertingly fluid. The sonnet ‘Fe’, which takes its title from the periodic table’s symbol for iron, notes that ‘Magnetic north is always on the move’, ‘gliding now at forty k per year from Canada / towards Siberia like a planchette on a Ouija’. Miraculously, the poem explains, such changeability does not confuse migrating animals.
Non-human animals occupy an important place in Day’s light-filled world. It is perhaps evidence of Day’s great openness to the otherness of animals that the poem that most moved me was about the death of a chicken. Such attention to the natural world also extends to plant life. ‘First There, First Serve’, a description of time-lapse footage, shows how dramatic – in a literal life-and-death sense – the world of plants can be.
This collection, so concerned with mobility, change, and struggle, comes to a profoundly moving end with the sequence of poems ‘The Grammar of Undoing’ on the poet’s mother and her experience with Parkinson’s disease. In these poems, the dialectic between light and dark – praise and elegy – is rendered with tremendous power and sensitivity. They show Day to be a quietly original poet, worthy of readers’ deepest consideration.
Like Day’s latest book, Jennifer Har-
rison’s new collection, Anywhy (Black Pepper, $24 pb, 78 pp, 9781876044190), is concerned with the dynamic between light and dark, self and other. Like Day, Harrison has a deep concern for non-human animals. ‘The Animals’, about the burning of the Warsaw Zoo during World War II, is a particularly harrowing example of this concern. Also like Day, Harrison illustrates a post-Romantic interest in the natural world, but here there is a more explicit acknowledgment of the Anthropocene that we have brought into being. Harrison, who is also a psychologist, habitually incorporates putatively nonpoetic registers – especially scientific discourse – in her poetry. She is notably wide-ranging in her interests. Poems in Anywhy cover ancient history and archeology, war, photography, suburbia, birdlife, and so on. A number of poems are ekphrastic in nature, which is to say they respond to other works of art, such as a famous photograph by Walker Evans.
This is not to say that Harrison’s poetry is merely random in its concerns. It has a number of unifying features. The neologistic title of Anywhy illustrates Harrison’s love of linguistic play. There are, for instance, two ‘Air Variations’ that employ words with particular initial letters (C and D, and L and M, respectively) to produce a rich musicality, even as they cast a characteristically cool eye over the world. In ‘DNA’, various versions of that famous abbreviation illustrate Harrison’s serio-comic inventiveness: ‘Developmental Needs Analysis / Digital Network Architecture / Do Not Abbreviate’. As these poems illustrate, Harrison can allow the comic and the elegiac to occupy the same poetic space. In the apparently self-elegiac poem ‘The Exchange, Blackwood Village’, the poet meditates on life after cancer: ‘Death found my measure in its pill of greed / and I carry the taste inside like a baby, never to birth.’
Ultimately, with its emphasis on different types of media and discourses, Harrison seems to be concerned with representation itself, and with representation as something that takes in both sympathy and violence. When she quotes the Hungarian war photographer Robert Capa – ‘if the photograph is not good enough / you aren’t close enough’ – one gets the sense that she is offering a description of her own poetics. Harrison is a poet of close-up photography, anatomy, and intensity, and this latest collection shows her to be at the height of her powers.
Jordie Albiston’s Warlines (Hybrid, $25 pb, 160 pp, 9781925736090) is, as its author notes, a collection of found poems. Using the letters and postcards of Australian soldiers from World War I, Albiston has produced a work that brings together prose poetry, documentary, history, and curatorial art. Each poem uses the correspondence (often producing a mosaic from multiple letters or postcards) of an individual soldier. The soldiers have names like Rupert Stanley Lawford and Phillip Murray Portsmouth Knight. They are names from a different (and considerably more monocultural) age, and the merging of proper name and poem is integral to the effect of this extraordinary work.
Each poem ends with a note containing the essential biographical details of these men: their age, the year they enlisted, where they were deployed, and so on. Each piece ends with an abbreviation, most commonly ‘DOW’ (died of wounds), ‘KIA’ (killed in action), and ‘RTA’ (returned to Australia). After being so present in Albiston’s rendering of their words, then, we discover the fate, if one can use such a word, of each soldier. It is impossible to describe the intensity of this as a reading experience. Each discovery is profoundly moving. If this book is almost ‘too much’, it does its job in helping us imagine the inconceivable ‘too much’ that was the mass slaughter of World War I.
Albiston reworks her source material into highly formal and stylised linguistic works. Warlines is – like her other collections – a technical tour de force. As the book’s blurb tells us, the poems
contain hidden forms such as the sestina and the villanelle. These are, I would guess, completely hidden for most readers, but more basic elements of stylisation – repetition, rhyme, acrostic and palindromic organisation – are more apparent. And even if those elements aren’t recognisable, the profound exchange between Albiston and the source texts she transforms is eminently clear. Albiston has produced a work that is by turns strange, funny, dramatic, and deeply sad.
The tonic note of this collection, inevitably, is that of pathos – the pathos of needless loss and unspeakable suffering. To choose just one instance, there is George Cummings’s account of being with the parents of a recently killed friend: ‘they took their lot bravely & I wanted to [?] so they would not feel their loss so keenly they treated me like their own boy’. The question mark denotes an illegible word, but it is also aesthetically appropriate, given the unspeakability of the event.
As this suggests, each man/poem has his/its own individuality. Whether the epistolary language used is religious, sentimental, romantic, comic, or documentary, no one man or poem is like the other. Albiston allows each soldier’s individuality to manifest itself. In using their words to produce works of art, she gives them a dignity that few writers (and almost no politicians) offer them. She shows their words to have real worth, both in themselves and as part of the greater project of humanity we call creativity. Most importantly, Albiston transforms these men’s words into art, while resolutely avoiding myth and mystification.
One rarely wants to evoke the term ‘masterpiece’. It seems either debased or too reliant on subjectivity. I don’t deny its subjective nature, but I can’t think of a better term to describe this book. In our war-obsessed culture, one in which the ‘Anzac legend’ is used for increasingly dubious ends, Warlines should be required reading. Albiston wrote Warlines with the assistance of a State Library Victoria Fellowship. I can think of few better arguments for public assistance of the arts. g
David McCooey’s latest collection of poems is Star Struck (UWAP, 2016).
Coming true
Geoff Page
THE RIVER IN THE SKY
by Clive James Picador
$32.99 hb, 122 pp, 9781509887231
For admirers of Clive James’s poetry written since he became terminally ill in 2011 (and this reviewer is certainly one), The River in the Sky will pose something of a quandary. In collections like Sentenced to Life (2015) and Injury Time (2017), the poems were generally tough, vulnerable, well-turned and, given the circumstances, stoic. The River in the Sky has some of these qualities but is very different in nature and in its cumulative impact. Comprising scores of unnumbered verse paragraphs in various line lengths (iambic dimeter through to iambic pentameter), The River in the Sky is a kind of phantasmagoria presenting many key moments and visual episodes in James’s long, peripatetic life.
The book is dedicated to James’s wife, Prue Shaw, but is hardly a verse letter. There are several touching reminiscences of their early life together –made more poignant by James’s often penitential tone, the cause of which remains unmentioned. The poet’s two daughters, however, are ‘Like commandos from a rubber boat / On a secret mission / To murder me with guilt.’
For some readers, James’s associa-
tive, non-linear strategy here will be disconcerting; for others it will be a vivid evocation of what may pass before the eyes of a drowning man, as the cliché has it. As befits the polymath that James is, the subjects range from ‘high’ to ‘low’ culture and evoke many of the key moments in twentieth-century art, especially in opera, ballet, cinema, symphonic music, and, occasionally, jazz.
A few elements are poignantly recurrent. One is his childhood in Kogarah, New South Wales, minus his father, who was killed in an aircrash on the way home after being held as a POW in Japan. Many poets have a loss in their early lives from which they never fully recover. His father’s death is James’s. It’s been at the centre of a number of his poems, most notably ‘In Town for the March’. By page eight of The River in the Sky,it has reappeared. A ‘roulette wheel in Las Vegas’ make James think that ‘The B24’s propellers / Churning sunlight on Okinawa / For the flight meant to bring / My father home / Are like the collars of the priests / Heads threaded through the sun’s disc / Or that tambourine the moon.’
This fiercely visual dimension in The River in the Sky is at times almost surreal. ‘Gliding is what I do / Here at the finish, in the final hour,’ James says. ‘It will be this way between the star clusters, / In the gulf between the galaxies.’ The lyrical reach here is a long way from the Larkinesque restraint that has distinguished James’s previous latelife poems. Some readers may see this as a loss of control; others as the genuine flights of a man in extremis. Both could be right.
Certainly there are times, however, when James is not particularly lyrical. He has always been a discursive poet –and an entertaining one. At least one of his anecdotes – about the singer Lotte Lenya – spins off into an unsupported attack on another major artist. He declares Bertolt Brecht, for instance, to be ‘As phony as a two-bob watch’ and claims he was ‘an utter bastard to his women’. Admittedly, poetry is hardly the medium for exhaustive proofs, but neither is it the place for cut-and-run jibes. Brecht was far from an ideal human being, but he came up with a
deal of memorable work (especially his poetry – which is often overlooked).
Naturally, all memoirs by celebrities will risk name-dropping. James remembers his friendship with the conductor Georg Solti, for instance, and offhandedly comments: ‘He was a lovely man though. Last time I saw him / Was at Buck House for a Royal Birthday.’ It does sound a little inflated, especially for the ‘Boy from Kogarah’. An encounter with another sort of royalty sets off a comparable echo: ‘On the flight from Singapore / Straight down to Perth / When Elle Macpherson / Crossed the aisle to sit beside me / The impact of her beauty / Was exactly like / A mugging from a naiad.’
Of course, there are other times when James’s encyclopedic memory is more directly entertaining. It’s hard, for instance, not to be amused by James’s account (via Alberto Manguel) of the Grand Vizier of Persia who ‘Travelled with all his books / (He had 117 thousand of them) / They were carried by a caravan / Of 400 camels trained to walk / In alphabetical order.’ It’s the dinnerparty side of the Jamesian persona.
It’s worth noting, however, that much of The River in the Sky is set within extensive mythological frameworks, including those of classical Greece, Pharaonic Egypt, various parts of the Middle East and the pre-Columbian Americas, among others. This all helps to reinforce the poem’s cosmological reach and perhaps to make it more convincing as a variety of hallucinatory experience.
For all its asides, wisecracks, jokes, and self-serving reminiscences, The River in the Sky is indeed what its underlying metaphor claims. Its last five lines, which may well be the last to be published in a book while the author is alive, display a convincing and affecting equanimity: ‘I thought that I was vanishing, but instead / I was only coming true: / Turning to what, in seeming to end here, / Must soon continue / As the rain does the moment that it falls.’ g
Geoff Page’s Elegy for Emily: A verse biography is due out shortly from Puncher & Wattmann.
Gordon Brown’s days
Simon Tormey
MY LIFE, OUR TIMES
by Gordon Brown Vintage
$22.99 pb, 512 pp, 9781784707460
It is a cliché to note that Gordon Brown is an enigma as far as contemporary British politics is concerned. A fundamentally decent man of high moral standing, Brown forged with Tony Blair arguably the most successful political partnership the United Kingdom has known. Between them they won three elections (two of them landslides) on a platform of ‘modernising’ Britain, deploying a mantra of fiscal prudence combined with social justice aimed at improving the position of the least well off. More generally, Brown and Blair presented an intelligent, humane, and competent common front that makes the efforts of many of today’s politicians seem, by degrees, naïve, irritating, or supercilious. Blair’s reputation took a dive with the reckless decision to back George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, but Brown had little to do with that decision. On the contrary, many of the positives of Labour’s new tenure in office can be directly attributed to Brown’s determination to improve welfare conditions. Yet his stocks seem just as low as Blair’s. Why?
Everyone looks first at the nature of the relationship between Blair and Brown. That it was tetchy and marked by suspicion of each other’s motives, personality clashes as well as substantive differences over the direction of policy, is already well documented. Less evident, until now, is the degree of divergence on strategy. Brown’s instincts were to build credibility with the right-wing media, international finance, and key élites. This meant keeping a tight rein on spending to ensure that the public finances were primed for investment. Blair, clearly a more intuitive politician, craved the big headline,
the new initiative that would show him in the best possible light. A large part of the narrative here is given over to deconstructing the impression that the struggle between the two related to issues concerning what they wished to do, when often it was a matter of how and when they would do it – whether it be finding extra funding for the National Health Service or increasing support for those in need. As becomes clear, Blair’s instincts were political and based on expediency. Brown’s were technocratic and based on considerations of utility. While this combination served them well for a decade, it was also combustible, making for frequent headlines concerning the poisonous relationship between numbers Ten and Eleven Downing Street. History records the trials and tribulations but not, unfortunately, the triumphs.
Secondly, Brown was to fall victim to one of the laws of modern politics: electorates have low boredom thresholds. Again, this is an item touched on throughout the book. Knowing that Labour would have two and at best three terms in office, Brown thought he had agreed to a deal with Blair to take over mid-term in the second government (2001–5). Clearly, Blair thought otherwise, consigning Brown to the butt end of the third term (2005–10), when the electorate began to tire of Labour. In addition, Blair’s folly at following Bush into Iraq meant the third term would always be overshadowed by accusations of imperialism and misadventure. Add in the effects of the global financial crisis in 2008, the implosion of UK banks, and a contagion that consumed much of the available public cash, and it is clear that no matter what Brown was intending, events made his tenure as demanding as it is possible to imagine. Even so, his account makes apparent that he showed remarkable leadership, internationally as well as domestically. Seeing the liquidity issue sooner than many of his counterparts, Brown argued forcibly for the immediate injection of credit into the system, which in turn prevented it from collapsing entirely. Brown’s name might be tarnished as far as the broader electorate is concerned, but clearly his élite peers have a great deal to thank him for.
Brown does a fine job defending himself and his legacy against the charge of dullness on the one hand and ineffectuality on the other. Yet the book does little to help us locate the elephant in the room: the collapse of social democracy and the kind of élitedriven, ameliorative politics that Blair and Brown stood for. Ultimately, if we want to understand why the stock of social democratic figures such as Brown is so low, we need to go further.
The nub of the issue is surely the Faustian nature of the bargain between a species of social democracy and the market and ‘globalisation’. Social democracy was built on the credo that capitalism would not collapse of its own accord, and thus that progressive politicians had to embrace the market and develop growth-friendly policies that would in turn underpin generous welfare provision ‘from cradle to grave’. That worked under conditions of limited capital flows and strong national economies. It still does as the examples of various European economies, not least Germany, shows.
Under the aegis of Nigel Lawson and then Brown, the United Kingdom took a different path. It outsourced its manufacturing base, redesigning itself as a haven for unlimited capital flows, deregulated derivatives, over-leveraged banks, and financialised capitalism (the current phase of capitalism that seeks to generate profit based on financial innovation rather than innovation in production). This was all heralded by Brown as a new ‘golden age’ for the City of London, a mere matter of months before the bubble burst. Given London’s dominance in terms of exports and earnings, the United Kingdom was hit particularly hard. The public finances were trashed with bailouts worth billions given to failing banks. This led to the double whammy of a serious recession coupled with the imposition of austerity policies by David Cameron’s government off the back of Labour’s humiliating defeat in the 2010 election. From here it is but a short step to the rise of anti-EU, anti-foreigners nativism, and, ultimately, the ‘leave’ result in the Brexit referendum of 2016. It would no doubt be harsh to lay all the mess at the feet of Brown, but given
the valedictory nature of the book, it would also be remiss not to query a narrative that sees Brown as more sinned against than sinning.The point is that had Brown shared the same scepticism towards the direction of travel of financialised capitalism as did many of his peers on the European mainland,had he invested more in industrial policy and in encouraging native manufacturing, as opposed to lauding the miracle of derivatives and speculative investment, the outcome might have been different – for him and for social democracy in the United Kingdom. Brown seems a reasonable,
Recital
indeed likeable character on the basis of this book. But he is also a proud one, too proud perhaps to recognise that his own ideology – ‘third way’ financialised social democracy – was complicit in the chaos and uncertainty that has led to the collapse in confidence in technocratic politicians and the resort to protectionism and nativism as answers to globalisation. g
Simon Tormey is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. His new book, Populism: A beginner’s guide (Oneworld), will appear in 2019.
Watching others love is something many do, I guess –not so much a pastime as a mode of grasping gentleness the present time withholds –bending with our feeling to stroke some tired cheek, unseen, as the other bends truly, and receives. Here begins our concert, in the hush of restraint. Love embarrasses. It is hard to know why. It shows itself in fits like a cough blurted out to trouble others as they wrestle to listen when required, love aside. Gesture is the accident of love –its naked speech. I can’t think what other language would have a word for it –this child pulling closed the lapels of her father’s suit.
Judith Bishop is a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award.
Judith Bishop
Balada
Alice Whitmore
MELODROME by Marcelo Cohen, translated by Chris Andrews Giramondo
$24.95 pb, 142 pp, 9781925336771
‘Ididn’t realise I was becoming untranslatable,’ Marcelo Cohen confessed after the publication of his eleventh novel, in an interview with Argentine newspaper Clarín. ‘And when I did realise, it was already too late.’ Given that Cohen is himself a renowned translator – the list of authors he has translated into Spanish reads like an index of literary influences: J.G. Ballard, T.S. Eliot, William S. Burroughs, Clarice Lispector – the fact that his writing is considered ‘untranslatable’ seems, in the words of his interviewer, like something of a ‘Karmic paradox’. And the badge of untranslatability casts a powerful spell: Cohen boasts a decades-long career and more than a dozen critically acclaimed works of fiction, yet Melodrome is the first of his novels to be published in English. It took the deft hand of translatorwizard Chris Andrews to break the trance. Andrews, who is best known as the Australian translator of Roberto Bolaño and César Aira, is a poet as well as a translator, and his poetry chops stand him in good stead here: from the very first page, the language of Melodrome is strange and thrilling, thick with onomatopoeia and neologisms. The novel, originally published in 2011 under the title Balada, was the winner of Argentina’s Premio de la Crítica, and constitutes the third title in Giramondo’s Southern Latitudes series. The genre-bending weirdness of Melodrome entirely befits a marginal project like Giramondo’s. This is a short, fast-paced novel that fears no boundaries, drawing from a number of madly intersecting influences to create something alarmingly original: a wildfire of a tale that is part redemptive road trip, part romantic comedy, part oneiric psychodrama, all couched in the vivid
and unsettling language of speculative fiction.
Melodrome tells the story of Lerena Dost, a ‘bold’ and ‘inflexible’ career woman, and Suano Botilecue, a disgraced psychoanalyst living a life of repentant asceticism. We meet Suano in the courtyard of the Deluxin guesthouse, where he provides free therapeutic counselling to the homeless. Enter Lerena, who (we soon learn) is Suano’s much-maligned ex-patient-slash-exlover. Having suffered a professional downfall of her own, Lerena visits Suano with an unusual proposition: after a chance (or fated?) encounter with a mesmerising woman in a lift, Lerena bought a lottery ticket and won a hefty sum of money; now she wants Suano to help her track down the woman, who just so happens to be the leader of an enigmatic spiritual cult secreted away in the Felinezo Hills. From this improbable starting point, Lerena and Suano embark on a journey riddled with interferences and impasses, which reads at times like the bizarre love child of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Cohen’s language, inventively and beautifully reconstructed by Andrews, is by turns rollicking and arresting. At times, the imagery is almost painfully superb: Suano is ‘thin and tall [...] bowed, flexing like a liquorice stick’; two lovers wake up ‘attached to one another like a petal clinging to the fingertip of the hand that has cut a rose’. Lerena and Suano’s sweeping car trips provide some of the novel’s most memorable passages: drifting through a strange rural landscape blemished by industry, they pass factories ‘pissing residual liquids’, small villages ‘like the stools of a constipated state’; elsewhere, ‘crinkled vapours and flimsy clouds pull away from the sky’s grey clay, as if someone were modelling it’.
The story takes place within a fictional universe called the Panoramic Delta, a dimly futuristic milieu that Cohen has crafted and explored in intricate detail over the course of many years. Conceived as a constellation of interconnected islands, each possessing a distinct culture and way of life, the Panoramic Delta is as fantastical as
it is unnervingly familiar. The setting first appeared in Cohen’s short story collection Los acuáticos (2001), and has since taken on a life of its own, gradually swelling in size and complexity. Not quite dystopian, the Panoramic Delta feels almost mundanely escapist, a space for Cohen to conduct gentle experiments of the imagination. Cohen himself has described his writing as ‘sociología fantástica’ – fantastic sociology – and this feels like a fitting term for a genre that bobs somewhere in the waters between fantasy and realism.
As Cohen tells it, he came up with the concept of the Panoramic Delta after reading Christopher Priest’s 1981 science fiction novel The Affirmation. In it, Priest evokes a place called the Dream Archipelago, a fictional setting that reappears in two of his later works. Though Melodrome is unlike The Affirmation in many ways – stylistically, Cohen’s work is unique – the parallels with Priest’s novel feel almost like an homage. Aside from the fact that both are impressive feats of world-building, the plots of both feature catalytic professional and romantic crises, a lottery win, a road trip, and the slow unravelling of a hallucinatory (even schizophrenic?) warping of reality. There are hints, in Melodrome, that the protagonists are enveloped in some kind of fantasy version of reality, some surreality induced by dreaming or madness, and, just like Priest before him, Cohen wields this sense of ambiguity to great effect.
At its heart, though, Melodrome is a tale of love, obsession, and desire. Brief in length but epic in scope, this unusual story is propelled by timeless themes: human failure; metamorphosis; the corrupting and redemptive power of love. These are the poetic anchors that bring Cohen’s novel closest to the ballad – or balada – of its title. g
Alice Whitmore is the Pushcart Prize-nominated translator of Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes and Guillermo Fadanelli’s See You at Breakfast? She is the translations editor for Cordite Poetry Review and an assistant editor for The AALITRA Review, and lectures in Spanish and Literary Studies at Monash University. ❖
Ripples
David Whish-Wilson
THE MAKING OF MARTIN SPARROW: AFTER THE FLOOD COMES THE RECKONING
by Peter Cochrane Viking
$32.99 pb, 453 pp, 9780670074068
‘Just one thing can shape your whole life’ is one line in a novel of four hundred and fifty pages, but it is telling in its application toward the characters of this brilliant début novel. Set on the Hawkesbury River in 1806, the cast of characters is large and yet we find each of them living with the consequences of an earlier choice or misdemeanour that ripples beyond the singular lifeand into the nascent river community.
The harsh realities of life for the various settlers, soldiers, First Nations people, prostitutes, ticket-of-leave expirees, and administrators are brilliantly explored in the context of what one character, the estimable Thomas Woody, calls the ways and means of ‘the whole empire, like Rome, generous to the faithful servants of Caesar, pitiless toward enemies’. It is the yearning of one man in particular, the eponymous Martin Sparrow, which provides the narrative impetus that determines the fate of many of the novel’s characters, set against the recurring incidence of seasonal storms, flooding, and the quotidian tides. As an expiree suffering from jaundice and without the energy to work his land, Sparrow has a low opinion of himself: ‘He, Marty Sparrow, expiree, failed farmer, sad sack, yellowy man with no panache.’ Sparrow is a terrific fictional creation: he has a gentle heart plus a subtle aesthetic sensibility that usually finds expression when staring helplessly into space. In his misery and squalor, Sparrow is an easy mark for those spruiking dreams of the freedom to be had across the mountains. As put to him by game hunter and brute Griffin Pinney, the proposition is one of pure binary, where ‘there can be no middle
state – it’s the misery of the mercantile tyranny or by God it’s the other side, the sovereignty o’ the commonweal, free of the brutish parties that govern us here’.
For all of the muck and brutality in The Making of Martin Sparrow, the cycles of atrocity and counter-atrocity, the novel strikes a perfect balance between the motivations and desires of the various characters vis-à-vis the institutional and historical forces that have brought them to this juncture. This is achieved largely through the subtle application of a roving point of view that allows the author to explore a great range of voice, and therefore social complexity, in a manner which feels authentic and never heavy-handed. On the topic of the new arrivals’ opinions and attitudes toward the area’s Aboriginal custodians, for example, the representation is varied and true to character. It is a real strength of this book that the novel’s Aboriginal characters – Old Wongan, Caleb, Napoleon, and others – acquire a strong sense of character.
There is wit and wisdom to be had in the book, too, particularly in the exchanges between Chief Constable Alistair Mackie and his subordinate Thaddeus Cuff. The former is a pragmatic Scotsman who has quietly amassed wealth and influence, and for whom ‘My good fortune began when I stepped off that transport.’ Cuff, on the other hand, is a capable American with a rover’s happy-go-lucky attitude and a matter-of-factness that sees potential in the new land, beyond the ledgers and accounts that occupy the rule-bound but generally humane Mackie’s thoughts.
In the context of Peter Cochrane’s career as an esteemed historian, and some of the discourse over the past decades relating to the capacities of fiction and history to capture the complexity of the past, it is both Mackie and Cuff who speak on the subject during some of their many entertaining passages of dialogue. Mackie goes first when he says that ‘History’s naught but gossip well told’, whereas Cuff chimes in later with the pointed observation that ‘history and the drizzles is close cousins … There’s a great deal of fluid prejudice in both of them.’ It is Cuff, however, as a man whose experiences have taught him
to believe that humans are little better than snakes, who speaks most forcefully to the present, and the writing of history along national myths, when he sadly observes that ‘It’s the first settlers do the brutal work. Them that come later, they get to sport about in polished boots and frockcoats, kidskin gloves … revel in polite conversation, deplore the folly of ill-manners, forget the past, invent some bullshit fable … You want to see men at their worst, you follow the frontier.’
Following the frontier, and beyond, is precisely the direction the novel takes as each of the main characters set out from their respective homes along the river into the hinterland, triggering a chain of events both terrible in consequence but also potentially redemptive. It is here, too, that Cochrane employs some of his finest writing, embarking upon perfectly modulated descriptive riffs that betray an appropriate sense of awe and developing understanding for what is a vast, ancient, storied landscape – a terrific accompaniment to the pitchperfect dialogue and deep characterisation found in this fine novel. ‘They heard the sound of frogmouths and boobooks and night-birds unknown to them, and they heard the whoosh and smack of fish jumping in the shallows and the constant sound of the tide chafing the banks and far off howling, and they saw river-rats scurrying for cover and myriad shapes in the dark recesses of the forest and higher up they saw great bands of ancient sandstone, moonlit, cracked and fissured by the chisel work of ages.’ g
David Whish-Wilson , whose new novel is The Coves (Fremantle Press, 2018), teaches creative writing at Curtin University.
Why do you write?
Because you have to do something, and I’m no great shakes at anything else.
Are you a vivid dreamer? No. A poor sleeper.
Where are you happiest?
With my eight-year-old daughter.
What is your favourite film?
Sweet Smell of Success. ‘My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand in thirty years.’
And your favourite book?
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. ‘Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time – like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.’
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Bernie Madoff, Ivar Kreuger, Charles Ponzi. I would love to see them splitting the bill, each trying to cheat the others.
Which word do you most dislike, and which would you like to see back in public usage?
I most dislike ‘like’, in its modern role as ersatz punctuation. ‘Risible’, however, seems to have a lot of potential, especially in politics.
Who is your favourite author?
Tony Judt, especially for Postwar and The Memory Chalet
And your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Richard Yates’s April Wheeler. I’d also happily have read Edward Casaubon’s The Key to All Mythologies. I think he’s unfairly maligned.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Self-sufficiency. I love that line of Sinclair Lewis’s when asked if he had any advice for a young writer. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Learn to type.’
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
When young, I was smitten with the cricket writing of Neville Cardus. I’m bound to say that his sickly sentimentality and special pleading have not aged well.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
I’m a journalist. I don’t muck around. There’s no point.
How do you regard publishers?
I’ve had a dozen in Australia, so maybe the right word is interchangeable.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
In Australia, timid and uninspiring. It’s as though the arts feel so embattled that anything other than celebration is letting the side down.
Do you read reviews of your own books?
Sure. Seldom with the expectation of learning much, but I sometimes do about the reviewer.
And writers’ festivals?
Can be a bit of a circle jerk, but better than nothing. Regional festivals are fun, and the efforts to mount them often uplifting.
Are artists valued in our society?
By themselves, quite highly.
What are you working on now?
This questionnaire. After that, my tax return. That will be enough glamour for the day.
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for thirtyfour years, and now works mainly for The Australian and The Times. His most recent book is Crossing the Line: How Australian cricket lost its way (2018).
ABR Arts
Lee Christofis on Spartacus
Arts Highlights
Gabriella Coslovich et al.
Kevin Jackson and Jake Mangakahia rehearsing for The Australian Ballet’s production of Spartacus
Watt
Tim Byrne
While the bulk of Samuel Beckett’s monumental reputation rests on plays like Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1955–57), and Happy Days (1961), it is the novels that afford the most prolonged, immersive access to his enduring concerns and preoccupations. While Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) – all published originally in French – are considered his most significant novels, earlier works such as Murphy (1938) and Watt (started in 1941, when Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo in Roussillon, but not completed until 1945) offer a fascinating glimpse into the initial stirrings of his genius. The latter is perhaps the first solid glimpse of this genius in action, one that arguably lay the foundations of what was to come.
Nothing, and its great devouring of meaning, is one of the central tenets of Beckett’s output, and its creeping presence is everywhere felt in Watt. Then there is the master–servant dynamic that morphs into increasingly complex power plays, one that crops up in Godot and Endgame. Vitally, there is the idea of language as a tenuous bridge to reality and even to existence itself. In Beckett, to speak is to grasp desperately at life even as the silence encroaches. Of course, as any fan of Beckett knows, it’s also achingly funny.
Actor Barry McGovern – one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Beckett’s work – has adapted the novel for the stage. He opens with a line that could be seen as an overarching principle: ‘The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something.’ This is a paradox, and in McGovern’s droll delivery it is very funny, but it also speaks to a key concept in this, and in all of Beckett’s writing: negation is as much a creative as a destructive act, and what looks on one viewing like profound pessimism can just as easily be interpreted as proof and affirmation of life.
The plot concerns itself with Watt and his service to a gentleman named Mr Knott. How Watt comes to work for Knott, and why he stops, are never explained; it seems that the formation of master–servant relationships is intrinsically unknowable in Beckett, as we see in the Hamm/ Clov and the Pozzo/Lucky pairings in Endgame and Godot, respectively. In this case, Watt just comes and then he goes.
The accumulation of useless detail fails to mask the lack of purpose or meaning in Watt’s working life. Beckett takes pains to assure us that Watt is replacing a former servant and is replaced in turn, but the never-ending cycle of service makes no quantifiable sense. This is echoed in an hilarious sequence when Knott rants about ancestors and their meaningless iterations: their ‘mothers’ fathers’ mothers and their fathers’ mothers’ fathers and their mothers’ mothers’ fathers and their fathers’ fathers’ mothers’.
The play avoids the rickety dramatic structure of the novel by excising large parts of the text – notably Watt’s increasing detachment from reality and subsequent convalescence in an asylum – in favour of a simpler but more lucid narrative arc. In the novel, language itself breaks down; sentences fall into ellipses, words lose their bearings, and the final line is ‘no symbol where none intended’. Of course, words are symbols, and in the play every symbol is intended; language is still the primary source of meaning, even if it is full of pointless details and existential non sequiturs. Where the novel plays semiotic games with time and memory, the play embraces its own dying fall. The sheer presence of the actor seems to tip the scales towards hope, but it’s a line call. Meaning and non-meaning; something and nothing.
McGovern seems to have an almost symbiotic affinity with the material. His physicality is taut and considered, with a raised eyebrow that conveys a kind of sardonic weariness. But it his sonorous and supple voice, lighting on the humour without ever losing the sadness and perplexity of the character, that best conveys Beckett’s world view. The language – with its increasingly complex and labyrinthine structures, its seemingly endless but perfectly balanced subjunctive clauses – is so flawlessly articulated that it sounds almost like natural speech.
Director Tom Creed is in total control. Beckett is so stripped back, so naked, that every gesture is amplified, and Creed makes of the strictures something freeing and honest. The props are minimal, peripheral; the staging is nondescript. Sinéad McKenna’s lighting – with its gloriously responsive transitions and bold, memorable shifts –elevates the final moments of the play in ways that are truly instructive: the Beckett estate might insist on impossible restrictions, but great artists will always find new ways to illuminate his genius.
Anyone arguing that Watt represents the pinnacle of Beckett’s talent would find few adherents, but this adaptation proves that even his densest writing can yield dramatic wonders. McGovern stands alone as the voice of Samuel Beckett now that Billie Whitelaw is gone, and the privilege of hearing the man speak these words is difficult to quantify. Perhaps it’s best to leave it to Harold Pinter, who said this of Beckett: ‘The further he goes, the more good it does me … and the more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I’m grateful to him’. g
Watt was performed at the Playhouse, Arts Centre from 4 to 13 October 2018 as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival.
Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.
Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage
Morag Fraser
On 6 March 1948 – a mere seventy years ago – the paintings that comprise this stellar exhibition of ‘Modern Art’ from St Petersburg’s great cultural repository, the State Hermitage Museum, were condemned in a decree by the Council of Ministers of the USSR as ‘the bourgeois art of Western Europe, bereft of ideas, antinational, formalist, and of no interest for the progressive education of the Soviet public’ (as quoted in the newly published The Collector: The story of Sergei Shchukin and his lost masterpieces by Natalya Semenova with André Delocque [Yale University Press/Footprint, $59 hb]).
The ministers who issued decree number 672 are long forgotten. Not so the canvases of Cézanne, Monet, Sisley, Vuillard, Vlaminck, Matisse, Derain, Rousseau, Redon, Picasso, and Kandinsky, or of the other twenty-five artists whose works make this exhibition so compelling. Bereft of ideas? The sixty-five paintings in the Hermitage exhibition are a visual embodiment of the great flux of ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – that pivotal time we still call ‘modern’.
The exhibition itself is a sensuous delight. Turn the corner of one of its rooms and you come face to face with the jewel-like vibrancy of Odilon Redon’s Woman asleep beneath a tree (1900–1). No reproduction could do justice to its pulsating red, mauve, orange, and blue juxtapositions. It is a small painting, but unforgettable. As are the Cézannes in the room before – his still life Fruit (1879–80), with its faceted mountain of a white napkin playing foil to the sprawl of orange citrus, and the monumental energy of his Large pine near Aix-en-Provence (1895–97). The third Cézanne, The Banks of the River Marne (1888) is complemented by AGNSW’s own Banks of the Marne, painted in the same year (not in the exhibition catalogue, but a welcome adjunct). These early rooms of the exhibition – which also show Sisley’s gently vigorous (in the horizontal brushstrokes) Windy day at Veneux (1882), Monet’s Poppy Field (1890–91), and Waterloo Bridge, effect of fog (1903) – would be riches enough for one visit. But this exhibition is not a blockbuster cavalcade of famous paintings. It is a thought-provoking window into European art
and socio-political history, encapsulated in the story of two extraordinary Russian entrepreneurs, the textile importer Sergei Shchukin and manufacturer Ivan Morozov, and the spectacular collections of the art of their times that they gathered around them.
Two-thirds of the paintings in Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage were acquired in France and brought to Russia to be displayed in the grand Moscow houses (palaces) of Shchukin and Morozov. Both astute businessmen (‘Muscovite capitalists’, in the words of decree 672), they had the support and often the active collaboration of their respective siblings. But the two were the prime movers, and it is through their collections, put together over little more than a pressured decade, that one can read the temper of their revolutionary times.
The local critical climate was sometimes receptive, more often vitriolic: Shchukin was deemed mad when he displayed Matisse and dangerous when he took up Picasso. But collecting is a risky enterprise, and Shchukin and Morozov faced more than market fluctuation: they were building their troves of art before and during the 1905 revolution and through family tragedies – deaths, suicides, and separations. Both made arrangements to leave their collections, which they had already turned into museums, to the state, but the precise details of their philanthropy, and their wishes regarding the housing and management of their treasures, were lost in the winds of revolution. The collections were nationalised. Fortunately, the Council of People’s Commissars, in a decree signed by Lenin in 1918, understood rather better than their 1948 counterparts the value of the art they had requisitioned. It was deemed ‘an exceptional collection of European masters, mostly French’ and ‘of major artistic value … for the education of the people’. (Abandon irony all ye who toy with ideologies …)
In the harsh years that followed, the paintings in the collections were variously parcelled out or stored. Their sale was mooted – revolutions prove expensive in the aftermath. Yet they survived and remained in Russia. In our time, when the blowing up of ancient monuments or the burning down of museums have become barbaric habits, this survival looks almost miraculous. It does attest, however, to the complexity of the twentiethcentury Russian experience and to the folly of historical stereotyping and generalisation. The very existence of those works in Moscow in the early 1900s animated the Russian avant-garde. And when, after the ‘thaw’ that followed the 1956 Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, they began to be displayed again, they were as potent an influence
as they had been in 1905, even if few of the artists and enthusiasts who gathered to argue about or take inspiration from them could remember their provenance, or the adventurous Moscow merchants who had poured not just their riches but wholehearted passion into the business of collecting – for themselves and for posterity.
Ivan Morozov’s collection, particularly as represented in this exhibition, focuses on the earlier works of the tumultuous turn-of-the-century period. It seems odd, now, to think of Cézanne as revolutionary, although his influence on the compositional elements of art that followed him are evident in the sublime landscapes: his Large pine near Aixen-Provence blends block brushstrokes with the linearity of branches. An obsession with the geometry of form is evident even in the graphite and watercolour study of the same subject helpfully included in the catalogue. Picasso and Cubism sound in the wings, and Cézanne’s influence is like a ground bass in the exhibition. The Fauvist exuberance of Maurice de Vlaminck’s View of the Seine (1906), given to Morozov by his Paris dealer in 1908, has transmuted into a stately Cézanne-inflected landscape (Small town on the Seine, 1909), acquired by Shchukin in 1910. Sergei Shchukin was an unlikely patron of the arts. He was a third son and a stutterer, at least until his merchant father, with an eye for his most likely successor, had him educated out of his affliction. Shchukin’s awkward demeanour and hesitant speech disguised formidable business acumen, and he was a shrewd negotiator. But he was also, in the face of art, a Russian Romantic, completely immersed in the sensory experience. Colour had a profound effect on him. Little wonder Matisse moved him to eloquence: ‘For me Matisse is above all the rest … closest to my heart … His work is a festival of exultant colour.’ There is a poignancy about the one portrait of Shchukin shown in the exhibition. Matisse had been working on a portrait, but all that remains of it is a beautiful sketch – the sittings were broken off when his patron had to rush back to Moscow upon the death of his brother. Shchukin later commissioned the young Norwegian Christian Krohn to paint two portraits. They are both stark and restrained, their roots in Cubism evident. Only the colour – a vibrant pink glowing behind the merchant’s head – hints at Shchukin’s passion and commitment to the art of his time. In this exhibition, shown as the one explosion of colour in a black-and-white photo mock-up
of a room in Shchukin’s mansion, it is profoundly moving. Shchukin’s bravest Matisse commissions, Dance (1909–10) and Music (1910) (nudes, explosive colour), are not shown in this exhibition, but large projections of them get an outing in the accompanying multimedia installation by Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway.
This is, strictly, a Hermitage show, not a retrospective of the Shchukin and Morozov collections, though there is thematic unity in that all the art on show had to run the gauntlet of the twentieth century’s ideological strictures. Kandinsky, who completes the exhibition in a grand symphony of colour, had to have his paintings kept safely out of sight for years. It is a pity that none of his one-time partner Gabriele Münter’s work is not on show as well. The one work by a woman in the exhibition is the splendid Sonia Delaunay-Terk’s Prose of the Trans-Siberian Express (1913).
There are many other treasures: Edouard Vuillard’s intimate depictions of children, men, and women in domestic interiors; André Derain’s various experiments, first with Fauvist colour and then restrained landscapes; Georges Roualt’s uncompromisingly dark portraits of two prostitutes, Girls (1907), and a peerless Nude boy (1906) by Picasso, among the more Cubists works that the far-sighted Shchukin dared to bring into his home. And there are some dull paintings and some surprises – a Morandi that has been strained through de Chirico, and two Bonnards that only hint at what else he would achieve.
While international politics might make one despair, it is heartening to know that Michael Brand, Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is a member of the Hermitage’s international advisory committee and, with the Hermitage, is committed to bringing the intellectual influence as well as the aesthetic pleasures of art to city and regional communities in both countries. Soft diplomacy at its best.
The exhibition catalogue ($39.95 hb, 200 pp) is an education in itself, as well as a visual delight. If you want a Cook’s tour of twentieth-century political history as reflected in art, or in Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, the Nabis, the Symbolists, Cubism, or in any of the other subdivisions of Modernism, this Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage exhibition is an exhilarating place to start. g
Masters
Morag Fraser is a Melbourne-based critic and writer.
of Modern Art from the Hermitage continues at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 3 March 2019.
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, concerts, operas, ballets, and exhibitions, we invited twenty-nine critics and arts professionals to nominate some personal favourites. We indicate which works were reviewed in ABR Arts on our website, and when.
Gabriella Coslovich
‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,’ Franz Kafka famously wrote. Film is equally capable of slashing through the ice – or, in this case, the frozen sea of ‘compassion fatigue’ – as Irish artist Richard Mosse shows with his harrowing video work Incoming (2015–16), the standout, for me, of the National Gallery of Victoria’s inaugural Triennial. Mosse flips the intended use of an enemy-seeking, thermal-imaging military camera and uses it to track the perilous flight of refugees in ghostly black and white. The result is a mesmerising work about the crisis of our times.
Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius’s adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company, was equally pertinent. It is a superbly cast and chilling reimagining of Lorca’s tragic tale about gender and power, set in the oppressive heat of outback Western Australia, with a mining fortune at stake.
Humphrey Bower
My theatrical highlight of 2018 was Ivo van Hove’s epic multimedia adaptation of Shakespeare’s Kings of War at the Adelaide Festival (ABR Arts, 3/18), featuring Hans Kesting’s deadpan, Keaton-like Richard III. Also at the Festival was the musical performance that moved me most: Jochen Sandig and Sascha Waltz’s immersive staging of Brahms’s (aptly retitled) Human Requiem (ABR Arts, 3/18?).
My dance highlight was at Perth Festival: Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa’s mysterious, chthonic Vessel. The visual art installation that most absorbed me was also at the Festival: Lisa Reihana’s vast scrolling panoramic video work Emissaries. My opera highlight was WASO’s concert performance of Tristan und Isolde with Stuart Skelton and Gun-Brit Barkmin, conducted by Asher Fisch (ABR Arts, 8/18), closely followed by Lost and Found’s playful, provocative staging of Charpentier’s Actéon at the UWA Aquatic Centre. Finally, the film that most affected me was BPM
(Beats Per Minute), Robin Campillo’s visceral account of AIDS activism in 1990s Paris (ABR Arts, 5/18).
Anwen Crawford
Kamila Andini’s The Seen and Unseen, which screened in competition at Sydney Film Festival, is a tonally mysterious, formally assured drama set in Bali. It explores choreography, animism, and dreams in its depiction of twin siblings. Andini, who has completed two feature films, is a director to watch; she elicits terrific performances from her two child leads, Ni Kadek Thaly Titi Kasih and Ida Bagus Putu Radithya Mahijasena – this in a year of outstanding turns by young actors. Thomasin McKenzie, in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, was preternaturally wise as the daughter of a traumatised US army veteran. Thomas Gloria, in Xavier Legrand’s Custody, vividly embodied the anxiety, fear, and grief of a young child living in the shadow of a physically abusive parent. On a lighter note, the young cast members of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird – including Saoirse Ronan, Lucas Hedges, and Beanie Feldstein – were, by turns, comic and poignant in their ensemble evocation of suburban teenage life (ABR Arts, 2/18).
Michael Shmith
At the end of 2017, and too late for last year’s highlights, I marvelled at Opera: Passion, Power and Politics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ABR Arts, 11/17). This extraordinary collaboration between the V&A and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was brilliantly achieved and a miracle of compression: just seven operas by seven composers, each work premièred in a major European city, from 1642 to 1934. Not only did this immersive retrospective display operatic history, it ensured it was heard. The catalogue was just as great. In Melbourne, I particularly liked Victorian Opera’s pioneering production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (the French version) in its first staging in Australia since 1876
(ABR Arts, 7/18). Bravo to VO’s artistic director and conductor, Richard Mills.
The NGV’s exhibition of works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was exhaustive and exhausting, but I wouldn’t have missed it for quids.
Zoltán Szabó
It seems incredible that The Nose, a major opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (his first, in fact), only received its Australian première in 2018 (ABR Arts, 2/18). This production marked the first return of Barrie Kosky to Opera Australia in almost twenty years. Are we so rich in talent, one wonders? This was a celebration of boundless artistic imagination; the delights of this grotesque and quirky story and music splendidly brought to the fore by an outrageously grotesque and quirky production.
A very different artistic and truly cathartic experience was on offer in the latest opus by Hungarian film director, Ildikó Enyedi, On Body and Soul (ABR Arts, 5/18). The metaphorically rich, stunning images of a doe and a stag in the snowy forest were an integral part of a tender love story placed in the unlikely and brutal background of a slaughterhouse.
Diana Simmonds
It’s impossible to go past Sydney Theatre Company’s The Harp in the South as the outstanding theatre production of 2018 (ABR Arts, 8/18). Adapted by Kate Mulvany from Ruth Park’s novels, the two-part epic ran to six hours. The published play calls for a ‘large cast’. Nineteen fine actors portrayed the Irish Catholic family and a muddledom of neighbours across the generations. After the success of The Seed, Medea, and Jasper Jones, Mulvany demonstrates astonishing maturity and confidence with The Harp, capturing its intimacy and sprawl, the colour and shape of characters, and the all-important humour. Assembling a top creative team, STC boss Kip Williams cemented his place as one of the best directors with a production that satisfied in every way.
John Allison
hearing the inaugural International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments in Warsaw, to finally visiting Katowice’s recently built new concert hall, a stunning addition to Europe’s musical landscape. As Poland celebrates the centenary of regaining statehood, it has been revelatory to hear so much of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the virtuoso pianist–composer who was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and an early prime minister of the country. And to see him: Warsaw’s National Museum put on a magnificent show about a figure who will no longer be quite so undervalued.
Leo Schofield
The STC’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South trilogy was one of the ensemble’s most ambitious projects to date and a showcase for some of the country’s finest acting talent, a kind of Cloudstreet redux. At the other end of the theatrical scale, the exuberant Calamity Jane, vaulting from the pocket handkerchief-sized stage of the hundred-seater Hayes Theatre Company to Belvoir St Theatre and beyond, was a blast, proving that there is much to be said for unchallenging entertainment and evenings of pure fun. Virginia Gay’s wildcat performance in the title role was one to treasure forever, alongside another great Aussie star Gloria Dawn in Annie Get Your Gun in a big top on Brookvale Oval.
An initiative of cellist James Beck, the fledgling Sydney Art Quartet performs in the Yellow House, an art gallery in Potts Point. Always original and fresh, their programming hit new heights in September when they gave a joyful recital with guest soloist Erin Helyard. Playing first on harpsichord and later on fortepiano. Helyard is not only a noted musicologist and conductor but also a performer with the rare talent of engaging fully with his audience and charming the socks off ’em.
Peter Craven
‘Must the winter come so soon?’ is something nagging at us all in the northern hemisphere right now, but such thoughts are eased slightly by memories of this aria – the most celebrated music in Samuel Barber’s 1958 opera Vanessa – being sung on a summer evening at Glyndebourne. The first professional British staging of Barber’s wonderful opera was a highlight of the year, thanks not least to Keith Warner’s psychologically probing production.
Many of my other revelations came in Poland, from
The best piece of theatre I saw this year and the greatest feat of acting was, by a long shot, Barry McGovern’s adaptation and one-man dramatisation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (ABR Arts, 10/18). It had an absolutely unshowy precision through every wry desolation of a joke, a comical brilliance that was also poignant.
In music, what could touch the great Anne-Sophie Mutter, that transcendent violinist, doing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Andrew Davis and the MSO (ABR Arts, 6/18)? It was also marvellous to see Thomas Hampson, a baritone where musicianship and a sense of drama meet and fuse, performing Mahler’s Song of the
Jack Ruwald, Anita Hegh, and Jack Finsterer in The Harp in the South (photograph by Daniel Boud)
Wayfarer: a princely performance in every sense. And my film? Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, and featuring Saoirse Ronan. Such freshness and sap and that rare apparitional thing of recognising something you had never quite seen on a screen before.
Tali Lavi
In the ABC’s Mystery Road, the East Kimberley was revealed as a glorious embodiment of Country. Much of the power of this mesmerising television series, directed by Rachel Perkins, resides in what is repressed or unsaid. Aaron Pedersen’s masterful portrait of a flawed hero –enigmatic, wry, seething – and his nuanced interplay with Judy Davis make for unmissable viewing.
A revival of Thyestes (The Hayloft Project/Adelaide Festival) left me feeling cowed by its roar of violence and misogyny (ABR Arts, 3/18). Part of its disturbing nature was the sense of audience complicity as its humour plumbed the depths and laughter could still be heard.
Samuel Maoz’s masterpiece Foxtrot (ABR Arts, 6/18) was a sublime portrait of grief with elements of comic surrealism. Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler were luminous as grieving parents. The question it poses – how does one live in the face of so much pain? – was encountered with a pulsating humanity.
Paul Kildea
Five works dating from 1996 to 2014 and performed in a Portrait Concert at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music put the unrestrained imagination of Liza Lim on stage. My favourite – The Alchemical Wedding – brings together different musical and philosophical traditions amid much whirring and clanking and sheer virtuosity.
I could not attend the performance, but the final rehearsal of Siobhan Stagg singing Strauss with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (at the Melbourne Recital Centre) under Johannes Fritz was exquisite. The orchestral playing was superb, Fritz an inspiring leader, Stagg simply radiant. A similar radiance is to be experienced at The Brunswick Green in Melbourne where each Thursday night Michelle Nicolle performs with her band. She really is an astonishing artist, fielding jazz requests with grace and an impossibly good memory. And what a voice!
David Greco and Erin Helyard launched their brilliant new recording of Schubert’s Winterreise with an inspiring presentation in which they discussed their many startling departures from the received traditions associated with this cycle.
Patrick McCaughey
Three exhibitions changed the landscape in their respective fields. The National Museum’s Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters was the most exhilarating and instructive exhibition of Aboriginal art I have ever seen. The exhibition conveyed in nuce the journey across the landscape and the cosmogony that shaped it. The Metropolitan’s bold experiment to show and talk about modern art dif-
ferently in Met Breuer (the old Whitney building) has given us profound exhibitions, none more than Like Life: Sculpture, Colour and the Body, 1300–Now. The excitement comes from the shock of juxtaposing ancient and modern. Jeff Koons’s sad Buster Keaton on a pony next to a fifteenth-century German polychrome carving of Christ on a Donkey was beyond riveting: it was piercing. Delacroix has taken over the Met this fall. Never have I seen him portrayed in such impassioned terms. André Breton’s ‘beauty must be convulsive’ could be the exhibition’s epigraph.
Susan Lever
The year began with sell-out performances of the marvellous musical version of Muriel’s Wedding (ABR Arts, 11/17). The Hayes Theatre Company’s delightful revival of Katherine Thomson and Max Lambert’s Darlinghurst Nights in January reminds us that there are other good Australian musicals in the repertoire, if we could only keep them in production. For Opera Australia, Barrie Kosky’s production of The Nose pushed Shostakovich’s absurd and wayward material to its hilarious theatrical limits. Later in the year, two art exhibitions were thoughtfully curated and full of beautiful work. The retrospective of John Mawurndjul’s work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (I Am the Old and the New) was a revelation, full of masterpieces from this modest and prolific artist. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the John Russell retrospective displayed his rarely seen work with companion pieces from his more famous friends (ABR Arts, 7/18). A complementary pleasure was a trip across the harbour to see Luke Sciberras and Ewan Macleod’s paintings of Belle Isle, organised as a tribute to Russell by the Manly Art Gallery.
Peter Tregear
One standout for me was Melbourne Opera’s Tristan und Isolde (ABR Arts, 2/18). A supreme creative achievement of Western culture, Wagner’s opera is exceedingly difficult to perform. The fact that a local company was able to do so without drawing on any public subsidy belies those who might otherwise wish to claim that this art form neither comes from, nor addresses, modern Australia.
Ladies in Black – Bruce Beresford’s cinematic adaptation of Madeleine St John’s novel – evokes a late-1950s Australia where a profound lack of aesthetic experiences and imagination was the expected norm. Nominally a film about women and dresses, it is in fact as much about men and music and food and drink and sex, and the liberating impact made by a group of Hungarian wartime immigrants who knew about them all.
Ben Brooker
It’s often the shows I don’t have to write about that I enjoy the most – coincidence perhaps, or the result of being ‘off duty’. There were two such productions for me this year: MTC’s searing The House of Bernarda Alba,
adapted by Patricia Cornelius from Federico García Lorca’s classic tragedy; and Chamber Made Opera’s unsettling theatrical exorcism Dybbuks at Theatre Works. With exceptional casts and creative teams dominated by women, both were spooky, fiercely political evocations of patriarchy and its spectres. Also of note were two musical experiences: Melbourne Film Festival’s stunning 4K presentation of Prince’s 1987 concert film Sign o’ the Times – a reminder of the Purple One’s much-missed genius – and famed choral ensemble Rundfunkchor Berlin’s immersive and deeply affecting Human Requiem, a ‘broadening’ of Brahms’s German Requiem that proved revelatory in its democratising intermingling of choristers and audience.
Tim
Byrne
This year saw a resurgent Victorian Opera stage two superb productions – one a concert performance of Bellini’s The Capulets and the Montagues, with a predictably virtuosic Jessica Pratt and a stunning Caitlin Hulcup, and the other a fully realised triumph in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell These works’ rarity only increased their appeal.
Two towering solo performances stuck in the memory: Colin Friels at his most exposed and generous in Scaramouche Jones (ABR Arts, 8/18) and Barry McGovern in complete control of the Beckett world view in Watt.
The finest, most surprising work of the year was Stephanie Lake’s Colossus for the Melbourne Fringe. With a cast of fifty dancers on the tiny Fairfax stage, this surging, multifarious piece managed to be both expansively political and almost microscopically intimate. With this sumptuous and thorny masterpiece, Lake has cemented herself at the heart of Australian dance.
Fiona Gruber
The Sydney White Rabbit Gallery mounts impeccably produced shows of contemporary Chinese artists. I relished The Sleeper Awakes in March. Taking its title from the H.G. Wells novel, this group show imagines waking in China forty years after the death of Mao Zedong to find his vision strangely distorted. It was deliciously witty, subversive, and lyrical, with immaculately realised works. In May, I visited Manifesta, Europe’s roving biennale; this year it is in Palermo, with work centred on the three hot topics of our times: migration, the environment, and digital surveillance. Sicily has been at the crossroads of Africa and Europe for millennia. With Manifesta, life, history, and urgent contemporary art combined brilliantly. Finally, at this year’s Melbourne Festival, it was a treat to see the Belarus Free Theatre work with local actors to create a searing show about cultural identity. Trustees was exhilaratingly daring. Bravo!
Barney Zwartz
Shostakovich provided my finest musical moments of 2018. Opera Australia gave us his satirical opera, The Nose. Wildly inventive and anarchic, it has been de-
scribed as an operatic Monty Python; Barrie Kosky’s production, conducted by Andrea Molino, realised this ingeniously. In September, I was lucky to be in Chicago for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert of the 2018–19 season: Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar. Built around five Yevgeny Yevtushenko poems with basso profundo (Alexey Tikhomirov) and male chorus, it is one of the great masterpieces of political protest. Riccardo Muti drew an anguished, tender performance.
Close behind was Victorian Opera’s sublime account of Debussy’s haunting Pelléas et Mélisande, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of Act One of Wagner’s Die Walküre (ABR Arts, 8/18), while Melbourne Opera punched wildly above its weight with a fine Tristan und Isolde. Honourable mentions: OA’s Don Quichotte, starring Ferrucio Furlanetto (ABR Arts, 3/18) and the MSO’s The Dream of Gerontius, with Stuart Skelton (ABR Arts, 3/18)
Peter Rose
In a year of debased politics around the world, galleries and theatre of all kinds remained a refuge for illumination, brio, and liberal values. Three operas stood out: the Met’s revival of Mary Zimmerman’s stylish production of Lucia di Lammermoor (ABR Arts, 5/18), with Pretty Yende and Michael Fabiano as Donizetti’s demented lovers; WASO’s concert version of Tristan und Isolde, with the phenomenal Stuart Skelton and a sensational standin, Gun-Brit Barkmin; and the Australian première of Brett Dean’s Hamlet, even better than the 2017 Glyndebourne performance. Paul Lewis, that most probing and elegant of pianists, continued his revelatory series of Haydn and Brahms recitals. Anne-Sophie Mutter, in her Melbourne début, gave one of the great performances of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.
Theatrically, Barry McGovern was hilarious and tragic and suave in his adaptation of Beckett’s Watt. But the performance that stirred me most was the revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (ABR Arts, 4/18), with the incomparable Glenda Jackson.
Ron Radford
It was pleasing to see no fewer than four Australian colonial exhibitions in 2018, given that there have only been fifteen such shows in the thirty years since the Bicentenary. The Art Gallery of Ballarat showed the brilliant Eugene von Guérard as a great travelling artist and displayed, for the first time, his lively on-the-spot drawings with his oils. Next, an exhibition of convict portraitist Thomas Bock opened in his birthplace, Birmingham, then Hobart. It excluded his oils, concentrating on his uniquely individual Aboriginal portraits. The third show, opening at the National Gallery of Australia, displayed Aboriginal images by Bock and other artists. It centred on Benjamin Duterrau’s The Conciliation, which he called ‘the national picture’. The fourth and
most ambitious was the National Gallery of Victoria’s huge survey Colony: Australia 1770–1861 (ABR Arts 4/18). Incomprehensively displayed, it was a noble but cluttered failure compared with the more focused shows. It is to be hoped these exhibitions herald a trend in honouring our visual arts heritage.
Will Yeoman
It was a rich year for West Australian art lovers. There were the chthonic, textured evocations of the Pilbara and Kimberley landscapes encapsulated by trios of quasianthropomorphic vessels in Fragment, Stewart Scambler’s superb exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery; but also the Renaissance and Baroque splendours of Caravaggio, Guercino, Pontormo et al. in A Window on Italy – The Corsini Collection: Masterpieces from Florence at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (ABR Arts, 2/18).
Musically, the highlight was undoubtedly WASO’s concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Asher Fisch and featuring the incomparable Stuart Skelton. I also enjoyed Black Swan State Theatre Company’s productions of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (ABR Arts, 5/18) and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (ABR Arts, 6/18), while Perth Festival’s presentations of Evgeny Grishkovets’s Farewell to Paper and Yeung Fai’s Hand Stories offered contrasting yet similarly elegiac views on culture, history, tradition, and innovation. Joe Stephenson’s wonderful documentary on Ian McKellen, Playing the Part, was the icing on the cake.
Gillian Wills
belted with infectious authority. Southern Cross Soloists’ stunning August concert, Star of the Concertgebouw, featured Principal Trumpeter Miroslav Petkov.
Ian Dickson
Opera Australia has often been accused of playing safe and rehashing the same repertoire, but with its co-production of Dmitri Shostakovitch’s The Nose it not only struck out, it struck gold. Barrie Kosky’s wildly inventive, hilarious production was matched by Andrea Molino’s incisive conducting and a superb cast led by Martin Winkler.
The STC is developing a rapport with the ambitious and challenging British playwright Lucy Kirkwood. Sarah Goodes’s production of Kirkwood’s post-apocalyptic play The Children (ABR Arts, 4/18) cleverly balanced the humour and horror of the piece, ably abetted by her magnificent trio of actors, Pamela Rabe, William Zappa, and Sarah Peirse. Can we hope for Kirkwood’s latest play, Mosquitoes, in the future?
In April, the twenty-five-year-old Alexander Prior conducted the Queensland Symphony Orchestra as if it were a massive piano, in a brilliant concert of music by Brahms, Debussy, and Ginastera. Prior’s gift for shaping the micro was balanced by an unusually luxurious overarching coherence. Also in April, as part of the Wave Festival, Gordon Hamilton’s arrangements of Horrorshow hits from albums Bardo State and The Grey Place celebrated the versatility of Queensland Symphony Orchestra instrumentalists and the Hip-Hop collective. In this blend of Hip Hop and Classical, bassist Paul O’Brien mapped out jazzy grooves as skilfully as he underpins QSO’s classical works. Esther Hannaford was riveting as Carole King in Beautiful, presented by QPAC in July. Polished, authentic, funny, with stylised dance routines recalling The Shirelles. Beautiful, delighted the audience. King and Gerry Goffin’s chart-toppers were
Small in scale and light in touch it may be, but Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black is an absolute delight. The cast is perfect: unfair though it is to single out anyone, the gorgeous Angourie Rice as the protagonist, Leslie, who blossoms into Lisa, must be mentioned.
Kim Williams
The highlights of the past year have been two Adelaide Festival productions: Neil Armfield’s gripping production of Brett Dean’s magical opera Hamlet (ABR Arts, 3/18), with a stunning performance by Allan Clayton as the Prince. Also at the Festival was Belgian genius Ivo van Hove’s breathtaking Kings of War, his Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s melding of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III into a play that went to the heart of leadership and the polarities and venalities attaching to it. This memorable, singular piece of theatre integrated video and live action perfectly with impeccable theatrical purpose. Another wondrous night was at the National Theatre in London with another Ivo van Hove piece – his recreation of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, with Bryan Cranston in the central role as Howard (‘I’m mad as hell’) Beale. In a year of theatrical marvels, Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South trilogy was a theatrical highlight that touched the heart and mind indelibly.
Mary Finsterer’s The Lost: Missed Tales No. 3, for the MSO (self-confession: I commissioned it), the Canadian baroque ensemble Tafelmusik, and Ross Edwards’s various seventy-fifth anniversary performances rounded out the year with some wonderful music.
Julia Ormond as Magda Szombatheli in Ladies in Black
Lee Christofis
Three timely and absorbing dance dramas exploring invasion, colonisation, and the dragooning of Indigenous peoples into indentured labour or wars were this year’s dance highlights. Starry nights at Perth’s Quarry were perfect for Milky Way: Ballet at the Quarry (ABR Arts, 2/18), a meditation on the apotheosis of restless souls. Gary Lang. Deborah Cheetham, a Yorta Yorta woman, superbly enhanced Milky Way’s mystery, singing Henryk Gørecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs to a WASO recording. Xenos, a haunting critique of the British Raj and the conscription of native men into wars they could never comprehend, was exquisitely crafted by Bangladeshi-British choreographer Akram Khan to mark his retirement from the stage (ABR Arts, 3/18). More contemporary, and pressing, was Marrugeku Dance Theatre’s Le Dernier Appel (The Last Cry), a multiracial, cross-art-form psychodrama, which explored New Caledonia’s Kanak people’s current yearning for liberation from around 180 years of French colonialism (ABR Arts, 8/18).
Brian McFarlane
Perhaps the film that lingers most painfully in the memory is the Russian drama Loveless (ABR Arts, 4/18). Few films maintain such a steely grip on the viewer’s involvement as it traces the disappearance of a child of divorcing – and solipsistic – parents. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s rigorous direction of a tragic story at odds with the luminous beauty of the landscape asks a great deal of audiences, and offers a great deal in return. There is pain of a different kind to respond to in Dominic Cooke’s version of On Chesil Beach, scripted by its author, Ian McEwan, evoking a period of sexual inhibition, but convincingly arriving at a muted yet affecting outcome (ABR Arts, 10/17). Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black, a witty, humane version of Madeleine St John’s novel, captures the time and place and interweaves several personal stories with larger social changes. The result is a kindly but never sentimental piece of recreation.
Michael Halliwell
landmark event, not so much for the production or overall performance, but for the outstanding role début of rising Australian star Nicole Car in the challenging title role (ABR Arts, 3/18). Finally, a welcome revival of Brian Howard’s Metamorphosis (ABR Arts, 9/18) suggested that Opera Australia are looking at reviving neglected Australian operas in exciting venues – in this case in the Surry Hills Workshops of the company.
Sophie Knezic
The ascendancy of sound art as a medium of urgent exploration by contemporary artists was evident in several Melbourne exhibitions. Sensitively curated and politically astute was Joel Stern and James Parker’s Eavesdropping: a purview into the legislative complexities of listening and overhearing, whose highlights included works by artists associated with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture. The potency of sound was also probed by David Chesworth and Sonia Leber in their mid-career survey show Architecture Makes Us, now interwoven with the nature of time and obsolescence. A suite of alluring works included Myriad Falls (2017), a slick pseudo-corporate video exposing the mechanisms of analogue wristwatch maintenance filmed inside a horologist’s workshop. Both exhibitions scrutinised the ways in which – mostly beneath our threshold of general awareness – sounds, especially private ones, can be extracted, co-opted, and surveilled.
Michael Morley
Three very different operas were my highlights of the year. Firstly, a musically ravishing Parsifal as part of the Bavarian State Opera Festival (ABR Arts, 7/18). While the production was inconsistent, it was probably the most complete musical performance of this monumental work I have experienced, with the dream casting of Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal and Nina Stemme as Kundry. Another standard repertoire opera, La Traviata, was a
Nothing has left as haunting an impact as Jochen Sandig and Sascha Waltz’s reimagining, with Rundfunkchor Berlin, of Brahms’s German Requiem as Human Requiem. At the other end of the musical and theatrical scale was the Hayes Theatre’s exhilarating, knockabout production of Calamity Jane, as if Peter Brook’s ideas on ‘rough theatre’ had been applied to the Hollywood musical. Acting performances of the year were all on television. With Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous anti-hero, the final episode of Patrick Melrose spoke of ‘contempt, pity, rage, terror, tenderness’. Cumberbatch’s performance had all these and more. In A Very English Scandal (BBC First) we had Hugh Grant’s brilliant turn as the UK politician Jeremy Thorpe, matched by Ben Whishaw as his erstwhile lover and nemesis, Norman Scott. This series was television at its best. Perhaps the ABC could divert funds from Gulfstream or Jetboat for a repeat screening? g
John Tomlinson as Ivan Iakolevitchin in The Nose
The long shadow of ‘everything’
Zigzagging between Debussy’s life and work
Paul Kildea
DEBUSSY: A PAINTER IN SOUND by
Stephen Walsh
Faber & Faber, $39.99 hb, 358 pp, 9780571330164
‘Chopin is the greatest of them all,’ Claude Debussy told his pupil Marguerite Long, ‘for through the piano alone he discovered everything.’ This ‘everything’ had a long shadow, for Long described Debussy as ‘impregnated, almost inhabited, by [Chopin’s] pianism’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the young Debussy composed a Mazurka and some Nocturnes, and then later, between 1909 and 1913, twenty-four Preludes, scribbling an epigraph under each to acknowledge inspiration or program, a nod to the epigraphs that clung with grim persistence to Chopin’s Preludes in the late nineteenth century. At the Exposition Universelle in 1889, Debussy encountered the scales and modes and gongs and bells of Javanese gamelan, and his music thereafter occupied a new landscape. Yet even then, as pianist and scholar Roy Howat has written, with his own voice secure and the sound world he evoked so foreign to French audiences, Debussy still managed to tip his cap in Chopin’s direction.
Debussy couldn’t quite understand how Chopin could be so consistently and outstandingly original without recourse to a much larger palette. Debussy’s own Preludes were his attempt to find this musical ‘everything’ in a single instrument, yet he was too good at conjuring up the most magical sonorities in an orchestra, or the most beautiful melody from a line of poetry, to constrain himself as Chopin did. (Neither were Chopin’s strong suits.) So he wrote one of the most important operas of the twentieth century – Pelléas et Mélisande (1893–1902) – and orchestral works such as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894), which set the scene for that ma-
gician Stravinsky and his enormous bag of tricks. Solo piano works remained with him until the very end, however – with their wonderful improvisatory feel and implicit disdain for some of the formal arguments of nineteenthcentury music – as though he was showing that Debussy could have lived up to Chopin’s great example if he had just put his mind to it.
It is hardly inevitable that Stephen Walsh would tackle Debussy after writing so comprehensively and authoritatively on Stravinsky, though it makes perfect sense. It’s not simply that each composer revolutionised the shape and sound of music written for orchestra, or that each blossomed in the hothouse climate of Paris in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first ones of the next. It’s also that Debussy’s death in 1918 at age fifty-five deprived us of a slew of works – and not only those such as the operatic adaptation of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, which remained unrealised on his death. Stravinsky partly makes up for our loss while simultaneously taking the story (perhaps a story is more accurate) of twentieth-century musical modernism that much farther down the road.
It was Pierre Boulez who declared that Debussy was at the core of this story. ‘Should we then set up a Debussy–Cézanne–Mallarmé axis as the root of all modernism?’ he asked after World War II. This is Walsh’s argument, that Debussy saw it as his duty to break with the expectations and conventions of nineteenth-century music-making. And so the Debussy who emerges from these pages is smart, witty, innovative, largely unfussed by social mores – at least as they touch on his messy private life – and
mistrustful of authority, especially the censorious and self-important Paris Conservatoire, to my ear an over-egged villain in this particular pudding. He is thoughtful, too, writing to Stravinsky during the Great War that the Germans were attempting to destroy French art alongside their land. In counterpoint, Debussy the critic gets welcome attention: Berlioz was ‘always the favourite musician of those who knew little about music’; Richard Strauss is ‘a great figure [with] the frank and decisive appeal of those great explorers who walk among savage tribes with a smile on their lips’; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is ‘savage music with all modern conveniences’.
Walsh skilfully zigzags between life and work, in prose that is both vibrant and stylish, though not free of cliché: lyrics fit Debussy’s musical requirements ‘like a glove’; Debussy could write particular types of accompaniments ‘till the cows came home’; certain works ‘cut a great deal more ice’ than others. These clichés are a by-product of Walsh’s determination to ensnare a broader readership than that of a typical musicological monograph, and he is admirably free of jargon as a consequence. ‘A classical piece is like a well-told story,’ he writes of Ariettes oubliées , Debussy’s still, exquisite cycle of 1887, ‘with a number of narrative threads, locations and characters that must all be tied up and reconciled in a coherent way. These Debussy songs are more like pictures, images drawn in notes and intensified by the repetition of brief, self-contained units . . .’ Nice. He writes well of the ‘rogue overtones’ of the bells
in ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ and the ‘swell of the ocean as seen and heard, the boom of waves on rock’ buttressing the Prelude, though strangely he does not reference Howat’s pioneering study of the piece and his conclusion that for a hundred years or so we’ve all been playing it at half speed. He writes convincingly about rhetorical stresses on the wrong syllables in French conversation and Debussy’s incorporation of this technique into his word setting for dramatic effect. And he tersely explains the difference between Impressionism and Symbolism – the first relating subject to technique, the second subject to meaning.
Yet Paris is largely missing in action: Haussmann’s magnificent boulevards and his wholesale construction of the most bourgeois capital city in Europe do not really emerge. There are some odd repetitions, too, which survived the editing: Mme Wilson-Pelouze attends the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 and does so again twenty pages later; Debussy enters the Prix de Rome for the first time in 1882 without progressing beyond the first round, and does so again pretty smartly with the same result. Occasionally, Walsh is just wrong: equal temperament is not ‘the compromise tuning demonstrated in the Well-Tempered Clavier’ (the clue is
Spartacus
Lee Christofis
An impassioned ovation greeted the exceptional dancers of The Australian Ballet and musicians of Orchestra Victoria at the packed première of the company’s new production of Spartacus. The familiar story of oppressed slaves and gladiators fighting the Roman Republic for freedom during the Third Servile War (73–71 bce) – popularised by Howard Fast’s 1951 novel and Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie starring Kirk Douglas – guaranteed considerable excitement in the State Theatre. For many, there were vivid reminders of the company’s previous Spartacus, created by Lázló Seregi for the Hungarian State Ballet in 1968. That production came into The Australian Ballet’s repertoire in 1978; the première starred Gary Norman as the gladiators’ leader, Spartacus, and Marilyn Rowe as his wife, the priestess Flavia.
Choreographed by Lucas Jervies, a former AB company member, this Spartacus is only the seventh
in Bach’s title). Yet mostly Walsh corrals his angels and monsters – Gabriele D’Annuzio, Wagner, Diaghilev, Debussy himself among them – with skill and affection. If, Walsh concludes, a hundred years after his death, we end up judging Debussy harshly for the way he treated the people in his life, – ‘the teachers he mocked, the women he ruined, the friends he lied to and sponged off’ – we at least have the music as an explanation for his behaviour, which is no small compensation after all. g
Paul Kildea’s most recent publication is Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (2018).
created since Leonid Yakobson’s was made for the Kirov Theatre, St Petersburg, in 1956. The most famous is Yuri Grigoriev’s 1968 version for the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow. Perhaps, in the affluent 1980s, revolutionary ballets were unfashionable, but, as Jervies reminds us in a program note, the original score was created in the often lethal context of Stalin’s cultural-political purges and draconian Soviet censorship of artistic works. Spartacus suffered greatly, as did Shostakovich and Prokofiev’s earlier ballets, despite Aram Khachaturian’s winning both renewed fame and the 1959 Lenin Prize for Spartacus after being blacklisted for several years.
French-born designer Jérôme Kaplan places the new Spartacus on a grand, Italian fascist stage enclosed by a semi-circular grey wall, with a monumental staircase and a statue of a closed fist and pointing finger as the symbol of Roman power. The wall opens and closes to form a gladiator’s gymnasium, the coliseum arena, and bare fields. Dropped-in elements form the slave market and the colonnaded salon of the powerful Consul Crassus’s palace. White plinths, dragged on by the captured Spartacus and his fellow blooddrenched rebels, represent the six thousand crucified along the Appian Way by Roman legions. Overall, the design is neutral, reflecting Jervies and Kaplan’s cool, postmodern aesthetic, mixing 1930s and 1960s fashion under Benjamin Cisterne’s still-evolving lighting.
Central to plot resolution, much more so at the second performance than at the première, was a third score that Khachaturian wrote in 1969–70, one never before performed in Australia; the company’s music director, Nicolette Fraillon, found it during early production research. Sumptuously scored, it gives the players opportunities to shine in all kinds of sonorities and rhythms, most evocatively in the soaring love duet telecast worldwide as the theme music of The Onedin Line series. The players also reveal the ironies of Khachatu-
rian’s shifting moods and attitudes. So clever was he that many Russians believed that his Spartacus represented Stalin in the ballet.
Choreographically, the score demands a strong grip on the way Khachaturian turns a slow tango into a sombre waltz; how marches and folk themes give way to oriental percussion or jazz; or how the triumphal opening fanfare, which seems to praise the Republic or Stalin, is actually satirical. Jervies seems to avoid responding to such musical games; this stultifies innovation in his work. Even his staging of a palace party with steam baths and faux nudity feels unfinished, effete – it should be erotically charged.
Jervies shapes his ideas minimalistically, giving most dancers little room to act into the material. Here are two contrasting examples. After Spartacus is captured and forced to fight his best friend, Hermes, to the death (gutwrenching performances by Kevin Jackson and Jake Mangakahia on the first night, Jarryd Madden and Callum Linnane on the second), he has three or four poses to express suffering, rage, and anguish. The result is vicariously painful, but repetitions dissipate the impact. In contrast, at the palace of Crassus (Ty King-Wall, Adam Bull), his wife, Tertulla (the gleaming Amy Harris on both nights), dances a smart, jazzy solo that dots the space with quicksilver glides, turns, and jumps, her flashing legs calling up fashion poses. The vulnerability of her position transcends such glamour, as Crassus cruises around and manhandles Flavia (Robyn Hendricks, Ako Kondo), now his bath servant. Another duet for Crassus and Tertulla is more like an Apache – a sly, often violent tango from a 1950s Parisian dive or cabaret – compellingly danced by the sinister Bull and Harris at the second performance. Most disappointing are Flavia’s dances, all balletically pedestrian until Act Three, when the love duet reveals the tenderness of Spartacus – he cannot kill Crassus when the consul’s children run to Crassus, lying bashed on the palace floor – and delivers the ballet’s only moment
of a palpable love. As for Spartacus, he seems trapped inside clichéd gestures and posturing, which become more burdensome than expressive, although both Kevin Jackson and Jarryd Madden at the first and second performances, respectively, invested their very souls in the work – Jackson almost destroyed, Madden wracked with tears. Heroic is the only word for their interpretations. Finally, the curtain comes down on Flavia staring at the bloodied men on their plinths, not knocked over by grief
but flailing about against loud, sonorous music, which intrinsically demands an earthy, expressionist transformation. Reimagining this coda is imperative. Ironically, the muscular gladiatorial episodes were meticulously developed under fight director, Nigel Fulton.
This Spartacus is a work in progress. To achieve something wholly new, and to critique the world’s rising persecutions, slavery, populism, and oligarchy, Jervies needs to eradicate the predictable classical flourishes from all the dances to liberate his creativity. Khachaturian wrote his score three times; Jervies has a good basic platform on which to reimagine and recharge his Spartacus g
Spartacus was presented by The Australian Ballet at the State Theatre, Arts Centre, Melbourne until 29 September 2018. It moves to the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, from 9 to 24 November 2018.
Lee Christofis is a Melbourne-based writer on dance and associated arts.
Kevin Jackson and Jake Mangakahia in Spartacus (photograph by Jeff Busby)
DFrom the ABR Archive
Morag Fraser reviewed David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s book Dark Victory (Allen & Unwin) in the April 2003 issue. Here is an extract. The full version, which also covered Patrick Weller’s Don’t Tell the Prime Minister (Scribe), appears online.
ark Victory opens with a coup: in a deep-etched narrative, joint – and seamless – authors David Marr and Marian Wilkinson make human beings out of the anonymous acronyms of John Howard’s border protection strategy. Explicitly rejecting the gulag language of numbers, of SUNCs in SIEVs (Suspected Unauthorised Non-Citizens in Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels), they begin with people. These are men and women with names, professions, histories, family: ‘[Khodadad] Sarwari, a teacher, sat jammed between his wife, their three children and his brother on the boat’s flimsy upper deck. The family was fleeing the Taliban. So were most of the people on the Palapa.’
The effect is sudden and bracing. Here are names, contexts, explanations. These were the kind of people Australians feared so much that they would endorse – even applaud – sending them back out to sea. These were John Howard’s ‘people like that’. In a dramatic and deliberate way, Marr and Wilkinson put flesh on shadows. They make asylum seekers responsive players, not passive victims or malign invaders. ‘Rajab Ali Merzaee, an Afghan medical student, watched two sailors come down to the foot of the stairs. “They were two very strong men. Very lovely, very good persons.”’
It is a powerful tactic, one that prompts a ‘there but for the grace of God’ response in any open-minded reader. But it goes further: it throws into relief the shabby manoeuvres of a ruthless election campaign and one of the most shameful episodes in Australia’s political history.
Ross Hampton, media adviser to Defence Minister Peter Reith, had expressly prohibited naval personnel from giving out ‘personalising or humanising images’ of asylum seekers. Marr and Wilkinson supply them. They also supply humanising and personalising images of just about every other character involved in the 2001 election campaign, in Operation Relex (the military exercise devised to repel refugee arrivals and deter people smugglers), and in Australia’s expedient and expensive ‘Pacific Solution’. In the process, they floodlight the bad faith of that campaign and the deadly consequences of the border protection strategy.
This is investigative journalism at its finest. Marr and Wilkinson travel to Indonesia, to Oslo, to Auckland and all around Australia. They interview Arne Rinnan, captain of the Tampa, and some of the 478 refugees now rebuilding their lives in New Zealand, with permanent visas and family reunion rights (their fellows
in Australia languish on temporary protection visas). They talk to shipowners, admirals, defence personnel, public servants, federal police, and Indonesian officials. They quiz the prime minister and his departmental head, Max Moore-Wilton (who ‘in the end, answered a couple of questions’). The thirty-three pages of notes and glossary, plus the six pages of acknowledgments, are a primer in investigative journalism. The index reads like a tart novella. Instance three items under ‘Barrie, Chris’ (Admiral, then chief of Australia’s defence forces): ‘gagged over Operation Relex, 135; considers whether he is a dill, 291; contradicted by Houston, 291.’
Importantly, Marr and Wilkinson do not turn this tale into a contest between goodies and baddies. For them, ‘humanising and personalising’ doesn’t mean letting off the hook. It means journalism’s business as usual: finding out who, what, when, where, and what on earth made them do it. The asylum seekers are sometimes violent, very often aggressive. Tampa Captain Arne Rinnan reads more like the man of his own estimation – a simple seaman doing what he had to do – than the international hero he was to become. Defence personnel and public servants are shown making mistakes in their haste to provide required information. Culpable, but not necessarily conspiratorial. Dark Victory has a few rhetorical indulgences. Philip Ruddock, for example, is ‘whey faced and stubborn’, Peter Reith, ‘a skirmisher of daring’. Vivid, but unnecessary. This tale needs no varnish.
So, no crude polarising – no ‘them and us’. Individual rationales, motivation, cause and effect are all shrewdly analysed. Players get their dues. Humans make mistakes. But, that said, what Marr and Wilkinson uncover, step by step in an inexorable narrative, is a scandal. Dark victory, indeed.
For sailors, once justifiably proud of Australia’s record of saving people in danger at sea, Captain Arne Rinnan has a message as ominous as a foghorn: ‘It’s a terrible thing to be out there in a broken down boat. I’m afraid now there might be fewer rescues.’ But Rinnan’s coda to Dark Victory and to the whole Tampa and asylumseeker episode also sounds another note, one anticipated by Marr and Wilkinson in their opening chapters. The unwritten laws of the sea, they observe, ‘operate not by force of law but by good sense and civilised expectation’. Arne Rinnan understood civilised expectation: ‘It’s the unwritten law of the sea to rescue people in distress. I would do it again and I hope all my seafaring colleagues would do the same.’ Amen to that. g
