Australian Book Review October 2022, no. 447

Peter Goldsworthy Salman’s throat Claudio Bozzi Italy’s political future Gillian Russell Northern Irish fiction

Gideon Haigh Daily Dan Clare Monagle King Charles – OK boomer

Australian Book Review

October 2022,

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Image credits and information

Front cover: Gold Male, 2008 from the series OZ OMNIUM REX

ET REGINA by Darren Siwes, photographic print on Kodak

Endura Metallic paper, 90 x 120cm, edition of 10, courtesy of GAGPROJECTS, Adelaide

Page 37: Ian McEwan, 2005 (Horst Friedrichs/Alamy)

Page 59: Lorraine Hansberry, 1959 (Everett Collection Inc/Alamy)

ABR October 2022

COMMENTARY

Clare Monagle Claudio Bozzi Peter Goldsworthy Gillian Russell

To wear the crown too easily Italy’s fragile political system Living with cancer and a fatwa Northern Irish fiction in the age of social media

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

James Walter Gideon Haigh Patrick Mullins Graeme Davison Peter Rose Sam Elkin Declan Fry

Harold Holt by Ross Walker Daniel Andrews by Sumeyya Ilanbey A Sense of Balance by John Howard Emperors in Lilliput by Jim Davidson Childhood by Shannon Burns Between Me and Myself by Sandra Willson His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

POLITICS

ESSAYS

HISTORY SOCIETY

POEMS FICTION

David Jack Jessica Urwin

Anwen Crawford Christina Twomey

Peter Edwards Emma Shortis Georgina Arnott

Christopher Ward Robert Phiddian

Hoa Nguyen John Kinsella

Jennifer Mills Geordie Williamson Andrea Goldsmith Brenda Walker Laura Elizabeth Woollett Katherine Brabon Alex Cothren

Lockdown by Chip Le Grand Fact or Fission by Richard Broinowski

Provocations by Jeff Sparrow The Work of History edited by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski

The War Game by David Horner American Exceptionalism by Ian Tyrrell Black Ghost of Empire by Kris Manjapra

The Penalty Is Death edited by Barry Jones The Idea of Australia by Julianne Schultz

Fortune Cookie No Fortune Imitating Rural Imitation: After Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’

Limberlost by Robbie Arnott Lessons by Ian McEwan Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie The Settlement by Jock Serong Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh Salt and Skin by Eliza Henry-Jones Three new short story collections

INTERVIEWS

POETRY

ARTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Joan Fleming Shannon Burns

Anders Villani Ender Bașkan

Michael Shmith Ian Dickson Jordan Prosser Michael Shmith Jane Sullivan

Poet of the Month Open Page

Mirabilia by Lisa Gorton Four new poetry collections from no more poetry

Elektra

A Raisin in the Sun Three Thousand Years of Longing Australian World Orchestra

Two years, Eight Months and Twenty-One Nights by Salman Rushdie

Advances

Hopelessly addicted

It never occurred to Advances that ABR had anything in common with Queen Elizabeth II. Who did, after all? Yet in the days following her death on 8 September we were touched to read of a shared aversion to a certain word.

Spookily, The New Yorker had chosen to reproduce Martin Amis’s 2002 article ‘Elizabeth II’s Fine-tuned Feelings’ in its archival issue of 29 August. It is one of the best bits of journalism that Amis has ever written. (Will the subject now revisit the subject, we wonder.)

One detail in Amis’s long article struck us. Robert Lacey, in his book Monarch: The life and reign of Elizabeth II (2002), noted that early in her epic reign, Elizabeth was due to visit Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire. She asked a private secretary to draft her speech. Predictably if not memorably, he began thus: ‘I am very pleased to be in Kingston today.’ The young queen excised the word ‘very’, saying: ‘I will be pleased to be in Kingston, but I will not be very pleased.’

Quite! Her Majesty’s stoic example inspires the editors of ABR to intensify their extirpation of the otiose adverb.

The occasion of Martin Amis’s article was the publication of two more biographies of the queen in the lead-up to her Golden Jubilee in 2002. Amis was particularly acute about Dianamania and the public hysteria that followed her death in 1997. ‘It involved mass emotion; it exalted a personage of low cultural level; it was selfflagellatory in tendency; and it was very close to violence. The phenomenon was, then, part of mankind’s cyclical festival irrationality.’ Rightly, Amis noted that only Diana – with her ‘near-Sicilian taste for revenge’ – had the power to bring down The Firm, ‘and that was her semi-subliminal intention’.

In conclusion, he marvelled at this humdrum family’s capacity to inspire such awe:

The Royal Family is just a family, writ inordinately large. They are the glory, not the power; and it would clearly be far more grownup to do without them. But riveted mankind is hopelessly addicted to the irrational, with reliably disastrous results, planetwide. The monarchy allows us to take a holiday from reason; and on that holiday we do no harm.

Indeed, we did get a holiday, to go with the one for that other festival of unreason – the AFL grand final.

Darren Siwes

The ascension of a new monarch (one whose connivance with John Kerr in 1975 should not go unremarked) and the welcome restoration of the republic to the political agenda presents us with an opportunity to reproduce Darren Siwes’s wonderful Gold Male on our October cover. It comes from the Indigenous artist’s series Oz Omnium Rex Et Regina, which Siwes produced in 2008. Darren Siwes is represented by GAGPROJECTs in Adelaide and Nellie Castan Gallery in Melbourne.

Prizes galore

One of the oddities of our three literary prizes is that – despite the fact that they are open for three months – we receive about half the entries in the final week. So it is possible that some poets are still honing their entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which closes on 3 October with total prize money of $10,000.

The Porter Prize out of the way – temporarily, while the judges set about reading the huge field – we now look forward to opening the Calibre Essay Prize on 10 October, with total prize money of $7,500. Essayists will have until 30 December 2022 to enter their non-fiction essays (2,000 to 5,000 words).

Check out our website for more details, terms and conditions, and frequently asked questions, of which there are invariably many. We have been asked many things. One aspirant wondered what names they should use for family members referenced in the essay so that they remained anonymous.

Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey are generous supporters of the Calibre Prize. We thank them warmly.

ABR in Adelaide

Following the success of our sold-out Adelaide Festival tour in March, Australian Book Review is delighted to announce a nine-day tour of Adelaide from 3 to 11 March 2023. Peter Rose and Christopher Menz (Development Consultant and former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia) will lead the tour, with twenty guests.

Presented in association with Academy Travel (a sponsor of the Adelaide Festival), it has been timed to coincide with the best of Adelaide Festival and Writers’ Week. ABR has a long connection with Australia’s premier festival and with many of the writers appearing as guests. Those interested in the tour should visit the Academy Travel website directly.

Four ABR contributors

Four senior contributors to the magazine have died in recent months, and we extend our sympathies to family and friends.

Professor Janna Thompson, who died on 23 June, wrote for ABR fourteen times between 2003 and 2021. In the December 2021 issue she reviewed Michael McGirr’s book Ideas to Save Your Life. Janna was a distinguished philosopher and had a long association with La Trobe University (1975–2012), where she was a professor. She was also a generous teacher. At Monash University she introduced our Editor to existentialism. Though gravely ill, Janna remained active and engaged until the end. She went on the 2022 Adelaide tour, and she completed a crime novel called Lockdown (Clan Destine Press), which will be launched this month.

Evan Jones, who died on 3 August, wrote for ABR nine times between 1981 and 1986. He taught for many years at the University of Melbourne when its English Department was home to some of the country’s most influential poets. His first collection, Inside the Whale, appeared in 1960. There were eight more collections and chapbooks, most recently Selected Poems (Grand Parade Poets, 2014).

Ruth Starke, who died on 5 September, was one of our most frequent contributors, writing for the magazine on fortyeight occasions between 1996 and 2016. For many years she worked at Flinders University. Our Editor remembers sharing an office – and irreverent conversations – with her at Flinders University when he was commuting between Melbourne and Adelaide. Ruth’s speciality was of course children’s and young adult literature, but the subject of her ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

(which she held in 2013) was the charismatic former premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan. Her substantial article, ‘Media Don’, appeared in the March 2013 issue. She also wrote a substantial essay on Isobelle Carmody’s young adult novel The Gathering for Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia project; it appears on our website.

Bruce Grant, who died on 3 August, was the eldest of this impressive quartet. Born in 1925, he went on to become an author, journalist, academic, and diplomat. Gough Whitlam, who once introduced Grant as his Dr Kissinger, made him high commissioner to India in 1973. Grant wrote for the magazine seven times from 1979 to 2012. He was a prolific author; his first book was Indonesia (1964). In his latter years he developed a taste for fiction, but his final publication was a memoir: Subtle Moments: Scenes on a life’s journey (Monash University Publishing, 2017).

The work of all four writers can be found in our digital archive, which subscribers can access.

Mountain Writers Festival

As noted in last month’s Advances, ABR is a sponsor of the inaugural Mountain Writers Festival (4–6 November). This is Australia’s first writers’ festival dedicated to all things environmental – from activism and climate change to outback crime and gardening. Weekend and day passes are now available, along with tickets to individual events including the session that ABR is sponsoring on Sunday, 6 November: ‘Trouble in the Outback’. Visit the festival website for more information about the program and tickets: mountainwritersfestival.com.au g

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Official Historian of Australian Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor

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Arts South Australia

To wear the crown too easily

A bizarre new reign begins by Clare Monagle

Hasanyone else been chuckling upon hearing the words ‘Charles III, king of Australia’? In my household, the movie Anchorman is a sacred text, and its buffoonish 1970s news anchor protagonist Ron Burgundy is our holy fool. So devoted is our fandom that we own the Anchorman out-takes DVD. In one scene that was cut, the ambitious and glamorous television journalist Veronica Corningstone confides to Bur gundy that she dreams of being the first female network news anchor. Incredulous at the idea that a woman could helm the network news, Burgundy declares mockingly to her: ‘And I want to be the king of Australia.’ The joke lands not only because Bur gundy is a moustached American and such crass swagger pre cludes noble dignity, but because the very idea of a king of Aus tralia seems preposterous in the twenty-first century. And that is why my family are in stitches: it has come to pass; there is a king of Australia; underlined by twenty-one gun salutes in Canberra and free public transport in Sydney so that we can witness the proclamation of Charles’s ascension on the steps of the State Parliament House.

Of course, there has been a queen of Australia for a long time: the idea of a king should not surprise us. But almost our entire population has never had to suffer the comedy of this proclama tion stage, with its endless coverage and vice-regal pomposity. Australians who were around when the apple-cheeked Princess Elizabeth was declared the ultimate antipodean avatar did so in the age of the wireless, spared the sight of Karl Stefanovic in his black suit endlessly crossing to the desultory crowds at Balmoral or Buckingham Palace or that of Kevin Rudd recounting his somewhat ribald conversations with the monarch. This time, in the year of our Lord 2022, the notion of a king of Australia arrives as an absurdist and over-reported shock.

If the Queen had a genius, it was her seeming psychic immo bility. Whether opening Parliament or visiting a cheese factory, she inhabited the role with a brilliant banality. She was neither puffed up nor pricked by the pomp and circumstance. She wore a crown bedecked in plundered jewels, lived in palaces with walls hung with Rembrandts, was delivered breakfast in bed every morning on the taxpayer’s dime while for much of her reign being exempt from taxation herself, and we let her get away with it because, by all appearances, it gave her no pleasure. Whether by design or instinct, Elizabeth II secured the monarchy by being a solid sovereign rock, extraordinary in her majestic dullness.

Charles is the unfortunate opposite of his mother. If her

genius was to have no need to be a genius, his fatal flaw may prove to be his desire to be interesting. The queen did not need to be a someone. Being queen was quite enough, thank you. One did not need to display personality, and nor should one. Charles, however, has shown himself time and time again to be an intellectual manqué, an ego in search of acuity. Whether we ponder his devotion to the racist mystic Laurens van der Post, his fulminations about postmodern architecture, or his defence of fox hunting on environmental grounds, we note an earnest but humiliating clutching at philosophical straws. Charles has never understood that no one cares what he thinks and that we feel embarrassed for him when he tries to make us listen.

As a baby boomer, the OK boomer discourse tells us, Charles most likely believes that his generation knows best and that it has earned its wealth. Boomer pontification is irritating enough when it consists of lectures about avocado toast and Woodstock. Should the newly crowned king of Australia insist on communi cating his boomer bombast to his subjects from his mortgage-free palaces, and should he evince any relish at those plundered jewels, Australians’ patience will surely wear thin.

Reflecting on Elizabeth’s reign, it was only her unsentimental sobriety that protected her relatives from justified charges of Eu rotrash. What a strange thing it is to be ruled from afar by a family that has in recent years, at best, had some success at equestrian sports – for which we can thank Princess Anne and her daugh ter – and that at worst has paid a large settlement to the woman who alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Prince Andrew.

‘Uneasy is the head that wears the crown’; to the Queen’s credit, her demeanour indicated that she took the job far more seriously than she did herself. The risk for Charles III would be to wear the crown too easily, conflating the sovereignty he embodies with his own physical human being. If we see any evidence of a puffed-up potentate, I predict the beginning of the end for the monarchy in Australia. g

Clare Monagle is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, with expertise in medieval intellectual history and gender studies. She began her royal watching as an eight-year-old on the occa sion of the engagement of Diana and Charles. ❖

This article is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

Handsome Harold

Mythologising Robert Menzies’ successor James Walter

Holt’s forte (such as Paul Hasluck), or who came and went as they realised that the ‘old man’ would not facilitate their accession (Richard Casey, Percy Spender, Garfield Barwick), ensuring that Holt became the heir apparent, the last man standing.

Harold Holt: Always one step further

by Ross Walker

La Trobe University Press $34.99 pb, 324 pp

IfScott Morrison taught us nothing else, it is that we must pay attention to the behaviour of leaders who can take deci sions that potentially impact us all. That is reason enough to welcome serious political biography. Yet a reader new to the field might be puzzled to find on her bookshop shelves (or in an online search) multiple volumes on, say, Robert Menzies or Bob Hawke and now Harold Holt – even Scott Morrison – and many others. There is no dearth of choice: the question is how to choose?

Authors and their publishers wrestle with this: what is there to say that is not already said; can rigorous (perhaps theoretical) analysis tell us something new; are there distinctive, yet untapped audiences that might be reached by an original approach; and what is the selling point? Readers will have their own preferences and may be hooked by an arresting title, a compelling cover blurb, or a tantalising review, but we can assume they will be curious about politics and political life.

Ross Walker claims originality, explaining that his aim in writing a new biography of Harold Holt has been ‘to strike a mid way point between biography and narrative non-fiction – history told as a story’. Further, he asserts that there is comparatively little written about Holt, and little that ‘has given much idea of the inner life of the man’, despite, he concedes, a ‘fine’ biography by Tom Frame (The Life and Death of Harold Holt, 2005), for which he is especially grateful.

Walker spends considerably more time on Holt’s family circumstances and pre-political life than does Frame. He writes of family instability (the loss of his mother through early sep aration, then divorce and her death when he was a teenager, and the physical and emotional distance of his father), leaving Holt with a predisposition towards strong father figures and a craving for affection and attention. It is a feasible rationale for Holt’s dependent relationships with other significant men, his need for everyone to like him, his serial philandering (a racy undertow that pulls readers in), and the drive for politics – the big stage on which he would gain attention. Walker’s brio carries the reader along, and himself too, as the extent of his admiration becomes apparent.

When Walker turns to politics, the literary momentum is sustained through clever use of illuminating vignettes. But Walk er’s touch is less sure in this domain. Little is said about Holt’s long wait for succession, or about the senior figures with more talent who disdained the party room glad-handing which was

The depiction of Holt as an adept administrator and an ‘out standing parliamentarian and a highly successful minister in the portfolios of Immigration, and Labour and National Service’ is apt. Here, Holt’s charm and talent for negotiation were strengths. But there is insufficient attention to the experienced friends and public servants who provided the means for this success. Roland Wilson at Treasury is acknowledged as a significant mentor. Holt’s ‘mixed record as Treasurer’ stemmed from his subservience to the Treasury line, which led to the public relations disaster of the 1960 ‘credit squeeze’ budget and failed attempts to fix the damage in a subsequent mini budget. This ineptitude was blamed for the Coalition’s near loss of the 1961 election. All is glossed over swiftly, without recognition of departmental politics. Holt bore the cost but continued to rely upon Wilson’s strength, and Menzies decided to stay on longer than he had planned while Holt’s reputation was rehabilitated.

Much the same can be said of Walker’s treatment of Holt’s truncated term as prime minister (1966–67). There were significant initiatives on Holt’s watch: first steps in the reversal of the White Australia policy; improved relations with Asia-Pacific neighbours; more support for the arts; liberalisa tion in Indigenous policy; and the revision of public service rules to remove barriers to women’s employment. But all of these were in preparation before Menzies’ retirement, devel oped by community activists, public servants, and more liberal politicians, waiting for the opportunity Menzies’ departure provided. Again, friends and mentors, such as Nugget Coombs, provided significant tutelage to Holt in such areas. Holt’s commitment and hard work were important, but these were not the bold incursions of an adventurer risking ‘one step further’. It was a collective effort rather than a demonstration of heroic leadership. Walker acknowledges Coombs’s mentorship but ignores Coombs’s perceptive evaluation of his friend: ‘he was not even potentially a great prime minister … too nice a person to exercise power effectively’.

The most laboured of Walker’s vignettes concerns Holt’s relations with President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Their mutual regard, the affection that LBJ developed for his Australian friend, and his genuine distress at Holt’s death are well documented. Yet the attempt to depict them as paired reformist visionaries, with similar attributes of charm and negotiation, rings hollow. Walker goes to great lengths to represent Holt as decent, kindly, and compassionate – and the source of initiatives mentioned above. But he had none of LBJ’s cunning, mendacity, ability to control others, or Machiavellian ruthlessness, let alone the ambition of LBJ’s proposed ‘Great Society’ program, which would have been truly transformational had Johnson’s administration not been cruelled by its disastrous pursuit of the Vietnam War. Holt’s deference to LBJ’s charm and persuasion, and his failure – shared by Menzies – to accept Hasluck’s advice that while Australia’s commitment to the Vietnam engagement was necessary there should be caution about hewing too closely to US policy, began to undermine the Coalition too.

Three tensions in Holt’s actions provide the narrative impetus for Walker’s story: the disparity between a sensible and measured disposition and being unable ‘to leave well enough alone’; an ex trovert who nonetheless ‘savoured the solitude of the underwater world’; and a life-affirming inclination paired with self-destruc tive episodes, ‘as if inwardly compelled to imperil his physical safety’. Hence, always on the edge, ‘always one step further’, argues Walker, in life, personal relationships, and politics.

It is a narrative arc that leads inexora bly to the final tragedy: Holt going too far in risking the surf at Portsea and being lost at sea. Well, we all knew this was coming, but does the trope of a death foretold in the manner that Walker’s literary flourish es imply (on that final drive to Portsea, ‘the tea-trees lining the highway waved in the wind, as if beckoning him on’) help us in understanding Holt’s achievement? It is pertinent to remember, as Ken Inglis once warned, that our past is not the historical subject’s future, that consciousness of an endpoint of which one’s hero cannot be aware, distracts from the quotidian detail of life, work, and survival.

Perhaps it is unfair to suggest that reading back from contradictory ten sions seems like painting by numbers –Walker is a skilful writer and delivers a ‘good read’ – but it does provoke the question: how apt is such a ‘story’ in capturing the specifics of a political life? For me, this attention to the storyline of (ultimately fatal) contradictions trans forms the political nature of Holt’s enter prise into the performative platform for a series of gambles erupting from these inner contradictions. It underplays the sheer contingency of life, and politics, but plays into the myth of the heroic ‘Hand some Harold’.

Some may think conventional biography is too preoccupied with detail, and narrative non-fiction is a way of clearing away the detritus to reveal the essential story (including, in Walker’s case, dispensing with all citations and attributions for sources, save a bibliography and brief acknowledgment of speaking with a handful of those who knew Holt). Walker has done his research; anyone who has read widely about Holt will recognise where the foundations of his spirited retelling can be found. For them, there is nothing new to be discovered in Walker’s selective and writerly synthesis, save for methods.

And here is the problem: Walker cannot escape the mythopoeic closure of the story form. Bernard Crick, political biographer and author of the provocative George Orwell: A life (1981), presciently identified the problem of the story form in his introduction to that book long before ‘narrative non-fiction’ became the mode du jour. Crick accepted the need for selection

and interpretation, but challenged ‘the empathetic fallacy’ that dominated English biography. One could never truly access the inner life, could only go so far with evidence, and the rest was surmise. It fostered a tradition of smoothing out and resolving mysteries and contradictions, then tying up loose ends neatly, implying that the case was closed. The task instead, said Crick,

should be to present all the evidence available and rely on the reader to keep thinking and questioning. He demands an asking approach, rather than (as in stories) the closure of a telling ap proach. There is always another biography to be written.

So, back to the question of choice. Walker’s book is a useful introduction to Harold Holt’s life. It has been lavishly praised as fresh, surprising, original, and beautifully written. It will revive the myth of Harold Holt and appeal to those piqued by curiosity and looking for a good read. But for those seeking deeper understand ing of Holt’s place in political history, Frame’s biography, and the essays, chapters, and articles written by others, will endure. g

James Walter is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash Uni versity. His latest book is The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership 1949–2016 (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart, 2016).

Harold Holt and Lyndon Baines Johnson at a reception, 1966 (photograph by Yoichi Okamoto, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Image Serial Number: A3338-18A, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Daily Dan

A timely political biography

Daniel Andrews: The revealing biography of Australia’s most powerful premier

by Sumeyya Ilanbey Allen & Unwin

312 pp, $26.95 pb

tifies the Daily Dan as ‘propaganda cloaked as accountability’, quoting an unnamed Labor source as wishing Andrews had spent as much time on the hotel quarantine program as he had on press conferences. And young as she is – twenty-eight – Ilanbey has a pleasing fearlessness.

Among the most bizarre features of the last two years in Victoria has been the herd of independent minds on Twitter dedicated to depicting Andrews’s Covid response as one masterstroke after another – despite the state recording the worst health, social, and economic outcomes of any in Australia – with no deeper reasoning than: ‘You’re alive, aren’t you? Be grateful!’

During

his first electoral campaign, Daniel Andrews hung a sign in his office containing a timeless political wisdom from Lyndon Baines Johnson: ‘If you do everything, you will win.’ He has continued taking it literally. Australian poli tics has, it is agreed, few harder workers than Victoria’s premier: he is in the same class as LBJ, who famously said that he seldom thought about politics more than eighteen hours a day.

Andrews also does as close to everything in his government as it is possible to do, dismissive of parliamentary process, indifferent to Cabinet government. His huge personal staff, somewhere in the region of one hundred, is said to be larger than the personal staff of the entire Victorian lower house. He has presided over a politicising of the public service that may never be reversed and will legitimise a tit-for-tat response, and his studied insouciance has been absorbed by others. ‘Don’t admit where you got it wrong and make it all about that,’ he counselled South Australia’s premier, Peter Malinauskas. ‘It feels good today, but they will just beat you over the head with it.’

In this sense, Andrews, who will most certainly stampede to a third term at the polls on 26 November, deserves to be regarded as his generation’s most consequential Labor politician, making Daniel Andrews, by The Age’s state political reporter Sumeyya Ilanbey, one of the timelier political biographies.

One of the more fascinating impacts of Covid-19 on journal ism was to turn state rounds, which had for decades been stripped of prestige and experience in favour of concentrating dwindling resources in Canberra, into a premium posting. In Melbourne, furthermore, one could go nowhere, do nothing – reporters, like everyone else, were for much of the time stuck at home, confined and curfewed.

Victoria’s state rounds-people suddenly found themselves in proximity to what was guaranteed to be the day’s biggest event: the press conferences that became known, over 120 consecutive days, as the Daily Dan, with Andrews live-streaming his Saint Sebastian act, braving the arrows of Ilanbey and her colleagues.

The grinding monotony of their content notwithstanding, livestreams of the Daily Dan commanded huge audiences and generated maelstroms of social media commentary. Their legend continues to grow. ‘That’s a level of resilience and stamina that I find extraordinary,’ Labor jobs minister Martin Pakula tells Ilan bey. ‘It was a tour de force.’ Well, step aside Volodymyr Zelensky.

Oh purlease! Ilanbey has it just about right when she iden

Journalists who have dared report otherwise – on the opaque secrecy around public health advice, on the self-defeating idée fixe with Covid-zero, on the psychological toll of six lockdowns, on shambles like hotel quarantine and the furloughing of staff at St Basil’s, on the punitive cruelty meted out to residents of the Alfred Street housing commission flats and to the tens of thousands indiscriminately penalised for often trivial lockdown breaches – have had to run a gauntlet of jeering whataboutists and other useful idiots.

Ilanbey, refreshingly, has a crack. Journalists have grown too accustomed to trading access for independence – what Paul Keating called ‘the drip feed’, and what the ABC still sneakily acknowledges in the title of Insiders. She may slip a little too readily into the pugilistic vernacular of the political column: there are too many ‘factional warlords’ and ‘factional brawlers’, too many ‘guns blazing’ across too many ‘firing lines’; the health portfolio is twice described as a ‘poisoned chalice’; Victorians will also be surprised to learn that they have ‘never been resource-rich’, given that their colony was built on gold, and that their state has long been powered by abundant coal and gas.

But Ilanbey has a clear sight both of Andrews, ‘a man who thinks highly of himself and his talents’, and the modus operAndrews: ‘When confronted with a crisis, refuse to answer the substantive question, defer to another authority or an investiga tion, even if you’re legally allowed to comment, and when asked about discrepancies in your answers, shrug your shoulders and say you stand by your comments.’

Such is the protective cordon around Victoria’s premier. Andrews the man is bound to elude Ilanbey. She struggles to get behind the scenes of anything terribly much. To be fair, a live government is as difficult to write of as an athlete still competing. She can impart little of Andrews’s emotional make-up or his family background – what are his tastes and relaxations, what makes him laugh and cry. Developments in his personal life are scattered and superficial (‘On the home front, he would welcome his first child, Noah, just a few months after the election’).

Yet there may not be much to say. It feels, after a while, as though there can be scarcely a non-political bone in Andrews’s body. He has allies rather than friends. He has gestures rather than vision. Even his more laudable achievements as a progressive politician – legislation for the decriminalisation of abortion and assisted dying, support for medicinal cannabis, and adoption rights for same-sex couples – have involved calculatedly minimal expenditures of electoral capital.

Despite his huge majority, Andrews has let less tractable issues go, including, ignominiously, the management of his own

Gideon Haigh

party, which he had to cede to the federal ALP, such was its culture of grift and graft. His period as health minister (2007–10) is recalled for the manipulation of figures for hospital waiting times, the subject of a damning report by the auditor-general. His period as gaming minister (2006–7) preluded a royal commis sion into Crown Casino that was, as Ilanbey observes, ‘a lifeline disguised as a punishment’.

Ilanbey’s most useful insights perhaps concern not Andrews but Victoria, where Labor has a decidedly mixed report card for having been in power for nineteen of the last twenty-three years: the state is per capita Australia’s second-poorest, its economic growth having depended overwhelmingly on population increases which reversed during Covid-19; its health services, vulnera bilities revealed by the pandemic, are gravely overstretched; its schools, overmanaged and under resourced, are the lowest funded in Australia.

On housing affordability and social housing availability, the state ranks poorly. Half the inmates in Victorian prisons are on remand, with Indigenous women the fastest-growing demo graphic. Family violence statistics remain little changed despite lots of solemn promises. Infrastructure projects cost multiples of their initial estimates, which Andrews has dismissed airily: ‘These things cost what they cost. Anyone that’s done a kitchen reno, for heaven’s sake, knows that.’ He doesn’t hold the kitchen reno, mate.

A half-competent opposition would be having a field day; Victoria’s hapless Liberal Party, of course, resembles an office of particularly dim estate agents. And, ironically, some of the best of Andrews was seen in the role Matthew Guy has now. Ilanbey lays out well how quickly and effectively Andrews picked up and dusted off Labor during its interregnum of 2010 to 2014. His colleagues were not exactly grateful, squabbling petulantly over Cabinet positions while they were allocated as factional spoils.

Maybe this explains a little. Maybe Andrews is the logi cal outcome of the degeneration of contemporary politics, its reinforcement of an amoral careerism, its effectiveness at filter ing out anyone with half a clue about anything. Whatever one may say of Andrews, he is in his way able, focused, and diligent, where his ministers remind you of that sketch in Spitting Image where Margaret Thatcher is in a restaurant with her Cabinet and ordering raw steak from the maître d’. ‘What about the vegeta bles?’ she is asked. ‘They’ll have the same as me,’ Maggie replies.

Of Andrews, a Labor colleague complains to Ilanbey: ‘He’s always more concerned about looking after his enemies than working with his friends. He holds parliament in contempt. There’s a lot of support internally – you can call that loyalty –but a lot of people who support him don’t really like him.’ This was a depressing comment on the imagined compatibility of the culture of party politics and niceties of the Westminster system. Andrews reminds us, then, of a comment apocryphally attributed to another American president, Harry Truman: that those who wanted a friend in politics should get a dog. g

Gideon Haigh has been a journalist since 1984, and now works mainly for The Australian. His most recent book is The Night Was a Bright Moonlight and I Could See a Man Quite Plain: An Edwardian cricket murder (Scribner, 2022).

Radical policy prescriptions

The paternalism at the heart of lockdowns

David Jack

Lockdown by Chip Le Grand

Monash University Publishing $32.95 pb, 234 pp

For many of us, the long Melbourne lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were emotionally ambiguous affairs. Feelings ranged from anger over the deprival of basic freedoms and hope and despair over daily case numbers, to relief at being forced to stay at home, Zoom into work in our pyjamas and dispense with the daily commute. Some of us discovered our neighbourhoods for the first time or new interests we could cultivate, such as bak ing sourdough bread or gardening. That said, we probably don’t want to revisit the experience anytime soon. But we should, argues Chip Le Grand in his new book, because while Melbourne’s ‘sta tus as the world’s most locked-down city should be cause for nei ther pride nor shame’, it should not be forgotten. Beginning with a vivid account of the ‘unlawful’ lockdown of housing commis sion towers in Melbourne’s inner north, Le Grand asks: ‘How did a city like Melbourne arrive at a place where we would strip peo ple of all agency, and finally, their dignity, in the name of public health?’ This book is an account of how this happened.

Lockdown charts Victoria’s pandemic response, from the first case of Covid-19 in Melbourne’s south-east and the spread of the virus into aged care and out of hotel quarantine, to the so-called border wars, the vaccine mess, and the six lockdowns Melburnians endured because of all this. It takes us right up to our present moment, which some call ‘post-pandemic’, when ‘the massive bureaucracy built to administer and enforce our public health response has been disassembled’. There is a narrative trajectory to the book which Melburnians will be all too familiar with; what is more interesting, however, is the way Le Grand fills the gaps to show just how we ended up where we did and why we were so willing to accept it.

The book blends analysis with anecdote, and personal accounts with expert testimony and post-facto interviews with the decision makers, to give a well-rounded picture of those unprecedented times. The approach is even-handed, if tilted slightly against the Andrews government, never straying too far from the official line that governments did their best in response to an unknown situation, while at the same time acknowledging that their best was far from good enough. Le Grand starts from the premise that in controlling the rates of infection and death, Australia’s approach was a success compared with other countries. Victoria’s approach, however, ‘remains a bitterly contested story’. At best, the decision to lock down a city for months on end was a ‘radical policy prescription’ designed to save lives; at worst, an ill-con

sidered and overreaching quest for the white whale of Covid zero dreamt up by scientists obsessed with modelling and enacted by politicians obsessed with power.

Interestingly, the Victorian government did not plan to use lockdowns as the primary means to control the virus, with pub lic health officials urging caution because of the broader social and ethical implications. Le Grand describes the government’s justification for its use of lockdowns as ‘powerful and simple’. Without the extreme measures taken, many more lives would have been lost. While this may be a ‘fair assessment of Melbourne’s pandemic experience’, the end did not necessarily justify the means. To justify its actions, the government relied heavily on ‘crude’ modelling, meaning that Melburnians would spend months ‘confined by some of the world’s most severe COVID restrictions, for a crisis which never arrived’. Add to this a growing culture of risk aversion among politicians and public health experts and you have a situation where our ‘initial understanding of the disease was skewed by a necessary and unavoidable focus on the critically ill and dying’.

The turning point, according to Le Grand, was the adoption in Victoria of an ‘absurd’ elimination strategy. As he points out, if elim ination ‘was never a possibility, much less seriously contemplated’ in European countries, why did it dictate policy in Victoria, and how did it become the single driving impetus behind our response? Further, why, when lockdowns supposedly bought us time to shore up the public health system, improve contact tracing, and even produce a vaccine locally, were we still in lockdown? For Le Grand, when Victoria ‘set itself on the path to COVID-zero’, it ‘abandoned proportionality’. What he calls ‘a form of publichealth zealotry’ resulted in the ‘banning of activities that carried no practical risk’. Even the World Health Organisation didn’t favour rolling lockdowns as a means of dealing with the virus. Its suggested strategy was ‘test, trace and isolate’. Lockdowns have their place but should not be the sole means of controlling a virus.

These were dark times for many and a low point in governance, which functioned by instilling terror – less of the virus than of the consequences of flouting at times ridiculous and arbitrary embar goes such as curfews and the closure of playgrounds, ‘enforced by an overt police presence and the threat of fines’. What was lacking for Le Grand was agency, something he discovered in a trip to Tokyo to cover the 2020 Olympics. Japan’s constitution prevents governments from compelling the public to follow health directives; it can only encourage them to do so, for the greater good. Initially, Commonwealth and state governments here were split over whether people would willingly comply with control measures or need to be compelled. New South Wales went down the former path, Victoria the latter, although once Covid zero became a political rather than a health goal, New South Wales soon followed Victoria’s lead: ‘when people feel panicked about a potentially lethal virus, there is little political downside for leaders who favour hard-and-fast restrictions’. Le Grand’s experience in Japan revealed to him the ‘paternalism at the heart of our pandemic response’.

What Le Grand calls the ‘trauma of our long COVID winter of 2020’ was ultimately the result of three things: a ‘degraded’ and underfunded public health system, a woefully mismanaged hotel quarantine program, and the ‘basket case’ state of aged care in Australia. If Victorians in general, and Melburnians in particular,

felt as though they were being punished for crimes they didn’t commit, it is because they were. For most of us, the trauma of the lockdowns has faded. The virus ‘isn’t something to be feared anymore’, even though it ‘remains a constant, unwelcome presence in our lives’. Fears of imminent lockdowns have also faded, and it is clear the Andrews government has no plans to resort to them again, at least in the lifetime of the current pandemic. In short, everyone wants to forget, and this is why Le Grand’s book is both timely and important. g

David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Monash University.

Essays

A scandalous insistence

In pursuit of social change

Anwen Crawford

Provocations: New and selected writings by Jeff Sparrow NewSouth $32.99 pb, 399 pp

Inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a num ber of cycling groups in Europe were founded on socialist principles. I had some notion, before reading Jeff Sparrow’s Provocations, of the link between cycling and that era’s feminist politics – the independent, bloomer-clad woman on her bicycle, which Sparrow also sketches – but not of Italy’s Ciclisti Rossi (Red Cyclists) or England’s Clarion Cycling Club. The latter’s anthem celebrated its members’ two-wheeled role in advancing class struggle:

Down to the haunts of the parson and squire Putting opponents to rout; Bestriding his steed with a pneumatic tyre.

But the Clarion Cycling Club, founded in 1894, ended its con stitutional commitment to socialism in 2021, thus severing itself from a long and, by Sparrow’s account, internationalist tradition of cycling activism on the left – just when the need for widespread, environmentally friendly forms of transport has become acute.

Provocations brings together short and shortish essays writ ten by Sparrow over an almost fifteen-year period, on a range of subjects and political questions: the earliest, from 2007, is a sympathetic if ultimately sceptical profile of historical re-enactors, those weekend war enthusiasts, written for Overland. The most recent, which was written for, and closes, the book, examines the contemporary popularity of dachshunds in light of the anti-

German prejudice that marred Australian society during World War I. Sparrow’s project as a writer and critic is a serious one, but he also writes within a tradition of left-wing critics and historians, among them Eric Hobsbawm, Ellen Willis, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall, who have been willing and able to address sub stantial political questions through the prism of popular culture and popular phenomena.

The book is thickly studded with quotations and historical examples, and the pieces are concentrated marvels of research. The display of knowledge is rigorous, its intention generous: these are essays aimed at a general readership, many of them having originated as columns in the Guardian. Unlike the output of many newspaper columnists, Sparrow’s writing is not disfigured by either ahistoricism or con descension towards his readers. ‘Genuine rad icalism provides hope,’ he writes in the book’s introduction. ‘It provokes through a scandalous insistence that life can be otherwise … that we can make our future better than our past.’ Hence the book’s title, ‘not an endorsement of culture war contrarianism’ so much as a call for readers to think with the author through the complications of history, in pursuit of change.

A crucial part of this intellectual inter play lies in Sparrow’s ability to challenge the assumptions of left-wing readers. In a 2012 essay, ‘Gun Control and Rage Massacres’, for instance, Sparrow provides a nuanced reading of gun ownership in the United States. ‘As soon as you move from abstractions to real history,’ he writes, the cartoonish cliché of the gun-toting right-wing militant is complicated by historical evidence showing that gun control measures were directed, for a long time, against Black people in the United States, who have had most reason to want to arm themselves for protection, and who have faced the most severe crackdowns for carrying weapons.

again in an internationalist spirit.

The passage of time has not invalidated Sparrow’s argument, especially since the far right has continued to present itself, as Trump did, as an insurgent force while holding the levers of state power. But another question concerning time nagged at me while I was reading this book, and it’s a question that applies to any collection of previously published pieces where the original purpose of the writing was reactive, and tied to the news cycle. What is the time, after the fact of their original publication, in which these pieces are best read?

Poster from May 1938 to advertise two members of the Clarion Cycling Club who cycled from Glasgow to Barcelona, to raise money to support the victims of the Spanish Civil War (Photo12/Ann Ronan Picture Library/Alamy)

I wonder if the real value of Provocations will be felt by a reader long into the future, when the contemporary events that Sparrow has responded to will have become historical. The book will then constitute a record, both of things that happened in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, particularly in Australia – the specific horrors of our nation’s border policies, the transformation of Anzac Day into a quasi-religious ritual – and of one thoughtful writer’s insistence, in the face of those things, upon the need for a fundamental reorganisation of our society, in line with the socialist principles of those long-ago riders of the Clarion Club.

Sparrow’s essay is by no means an argument in favour of more guns, but he does take care to distinguish between police or government-directed gun control measures, which continue to be strongly resisted in the United States, and a community-led, ‘bottom-up solution to the proliferation of guns’ that does not cede to the far right ‘the mantle of opposition to state power’. The latter is something that the Australian left could agitate for,

For the present-day reader, some of these contemporary events are stranded in that disquieting zone between news and history: we have already forgotten the details that Sparrow might only refer to in passing because they were fresh in the mind of his original readership. There is something poignant in this; public memory is very short. If part of Sparrow’s purpose in these pieces is to counteract our forgetting, then that counteraction is also, at the moment, most effective in the pieces where the subject is already historical: the cycling essay, for instance, or the collection’s opening piece, written for the book itself, on indentured Pacific Island labourers in Australia.

‘The past cannot be altered,’ writes Sparrow, in that essay’s conclusion, ‘but it can, perhaps, inspire a different future.’ g

Anwen Crawford is a Sydney writer. Her most recent book is No Document (Giramondo, 2021).

Speak My Name

Investigating Egyptian Mummies

Edited by James Fraser, Conni Lord and John Magnussen

Under the beach umbrellas

Italy’s fragile political system’s new test by Claudio Bozzi

In1994, Italian photographer Massimo Vitali, seeking to understand the Italy which had swept Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI) comprehensively into power, took his cam era to the beach at Marina di Pietrasanta ‘to see who the Ital ians were … [and] to understand their attitudes … at that pre cise moment in history’. In 2022, Italian politics returns to the beaches for a campagna balneare (a seaside campaign) conducted in a summer atmosphere of crisis when most Italians are taking their annual vacation.

The election was precipitated when the Five Star Movement (M5S) removed its support from the government of national unity led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi. The Italian constitution provides for a government to be elected within seventy days (with a 25 September election date). President Sergio Mattarella was obviously displeased to have to announce the dissolution of the government which he had created, and which had received inter national recognition and restored Italian credibility. In Draghi, Italy had an innovator, a moderniser, and, above all, a capable interpreter of the European Union’s thinking.

The M5S’s actions were absurd and dangerous: it voted against the government of which it formed a majority (and therefore against itself) with no casus belli – leaving, in commedia dell’arte terms, un palazzo confuse, which the right clinically ex ploited. While the media believed that Berlusconi and FI would restrain Matteo Salvini’s (Lega) impulse to force the crisis, Ber lusconi instead did as he always does: he supported the direction in which the forces were already leaning.

The Draghi government, which came to power in February 2021, had always worked in a climate of immanent crisis, only ever sustaining the minimal support required to govern, while centre–right parties sought to destabilise it one issue at a time: with respect, for example, to Ukraine, constitutional reform, justice system reforms, citizenship for migrants, and assisted dying laws.

The election is the strangest imaginable: one in which the parties that had supported and worked with Draghi, and governed together to confront major issues such as energy security and tax reforms, are now at odds and have placed themselves under the leadership of that government’s staunchest opponent, Giorgia Meloni of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI).

The election represents a disquieting moment given that those who caused the fall of the Draghi government avow admiration for and friendship with Vladimir Putin (Salvini and Berlusconi) or have resisted sending arms to Ukraine (M5S). The right is likely to impede or reverse the pro-Atlanticist and pro-Nato policies of the Draghi government. The FdI, Lega, and FI are also part of a staunchly anti-EU alliance of European sovereignist parties which includes President Orbán of Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, and Spain’s far-right VOX party.

After recent administrative elections, the respected leader of the Azione party, Carlo Calenda, announced a normalisation of Italian politics around three poles: the right (represented by the Lega, FI, and FdI), the left (the Partito Democratico [PD] and M5S), and the centre (Azione). The question in this election is how extensive the centre is, and whether the conditions exist to create a significant centre left.

While Italians refer to a centre right and centre left as if they were governing parties and governing systems, they do not exist in government. The search for a unified left has haunted Italian politics since the faltering attempts of Romano Prodi’s Ulivo coalition in the mid-1990s. Prodi was a unifying figure around which a centre left alternative government could be created. As ‘a social progressive who had met a payroll’, he represented the middle way between free market capitalism and the failings of social democratic welfarism.

The frequent calls for the left to ‘do a Bad Godesberg’ (the idi omatic phrase in European socialism for undergoing a fundamen tal alteration in its core doctrinal values to find a third way) and to remake itself as the voice of Italian liberalism have never been an swered. The fear remains that a democratic party would be defeated because it would be easy for the right to portray it as a communist takeover of the centre; and arguably opposition is stronger when conducted as a common effort by distinct parties and movements.

Enrico Berlinguer, the popular leader of the Italian Com munist Party (PCI), said in the 1970s that ‘Italy cannot be governed by fifty-one per cent of the vote’. There are no parties of the masses, and Italian electoral laws – a mixture of first past the post and proportional representation – have given rise to the concept of the campo largo – broad alliances of heterogeneous coalitions. In a Hobbesian state of nature where all are at war

with all, Berlusconi’s exhortation to the right – ‘We must remain united for convenience’ – is transparently true.

The current election campaign is being organised around a number of pacts. While traditionally associated with the politics of the right, the opportunistic pursuit of electoral advantage is not entirely uncharacteristic of the left. The PD and Azione initially entered a patto elettorale (a title redolent of pragmatism) for the purpose of shoring up the centre. It was disbanded within a week when Calenda announced on television his decision not to pro

fight this campaign on its own. If the PD is to enter alliances, it will be on the basis of a political program rather than ideo logical sympathies. Political calculus suggests that a united right is more likely to win the election. However, given that the crisis is identified with the right, the PD may have an opportunity to at least take control of the agenda.

The PD is hampered by being unable to forge a partnership with natural alliance partners such as the M5S. Very few parties have surrendered political capital with such profligacy as the M5S. From a thirty-three per cent share of the vote in 2018, it has since lost 176 parliamentarians and eight million of the twelve million votes it won. The party is being punished for its chaotic and self-contradictory performance, lurching between leftist opposition and irresponsible populism, unable to resolve its own identity. It appeared to provoke the government crisis in a desperate and miscalculated attempt at rele vance and visibility as it collapsed in the polls.

Its leader, Giuseppe Conte, is seen as il quasismo (the almost man) – not quite standing for anything. Although he entered the M5S as a moderate, having split with Salvini over the latter’s extreme positions, his polemics on Ukraine have been radical and incoherent.

He stated that the M5S does not believe that Ukraine needs arms but that Europe needs peace – an evasion of the question of Italy’s military support under Draghi, whom he has called a guerrafondaio (warmonger) – without offering concrete alternatives.

ceed with it. Among the reasons he gave was that he had found in the PD no ‘amore a fare politica’. Calenda has since entered an alliance with former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s Italia viva party, whose appetite for ‘politics with a capital P’ is well known.

Under the leadership of Enrico Letta, the PD has emerged as the second party nationally (closely behind the FdI), and the most supported party in the recent communal elections. Rather than garnering votes from the disaffected margins of the right, Letta is intent on enlarging the PD’s electoral base and recov ering the ‘connessione sentimentale’ by which it had built its base amongst the disenfranchised. In doing so he must overcome the perception that Italian socialism is a movement of eminent professors and élite professionals – the alta borghesia – and the problem that while it has a wealth of institutional expertise, it has lacked a figure able to appeal to the base of the working class and small business in the language of the everyday.

Letta is constructing a position distinctly to the left of the centre – an alternative political project to the sovereignist and neo-liberal one of the Italian right, and a continuation of the work of Berlinguer of ‘putting socialism in the West’. The ques tion is whether the PD will join forces to achieve its political objectives or deny the right its political objectives, or seek to

The centre right had lost its tolerance of Draghi because of his interference in the core business of political parties, and had been in campaign mode for some time, when the gov ernment dissolved. To them, reforming the justice system and undertaking geopolitical diplomacy was one thing, but interfering with the regime of property taxes was a serious matter. The centre right’s progress as a cohesive alliance is likely to be tested, given the recomposition of its constituents, and the potential antago nism among its leading figures. The FdI is now the leading party, and Giorgia Meloni – who brought the party from 1.7 per cent to a twenty-four per cent share, and a lead, in the polls within nine years – is likely to become Italy’s first female prime minister. While the Lega and FI have been reduced to junior partners, the power of Salvini and Berlusconi means that confusion persists as to the shape the alliance will take.

While the FdI presents itself as a modern party of the right, a fascist shadow hangs over it. Its shield incorporates the im age of the flame which lights the crypt of Benito Mussolini at Predappio. After denying that the flame carried those overtones because historical transformation had denuded it of such signif icance, Meloni declared publicly that it would be removed one month before the election. To date it has not. Other zones of contiguity between the party and extreme movements, such as its student arm, which embraces white supremacy and participates in neo-fascist music festivals, also remain.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky walks with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi during a visit to Kyiv, 16 June 2022 (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office/UPI Credit: UPI/Alamy)

The Lega, while it is no longer the leading party in the coun try (plummeting from thirty-four per cent in 2018 to fifteen per cent) remains highly organised and disciplined. The issues have outgrown Salvini’s simplistic responses to the nation’s problems. Formerly, everything from employment to violence could be solved by stopping migration. Asked recently what concrete proposals the Lega has to reform property taxes, Salvini said ‘Peace’ – as if the end of the supply of arms to Ukraine would resolve all of Italy’s economic problems and save Italian jobs. The party’s tax policy (a flat fifteen per cent rate) has subsequently been dubbed a ‘Fiscal Peace’.

History

Negotiating tensions

Examining how Australia has gone to war Peter Edwards

In the groundhog day of Italian public life, Berlusconi has once again entered the arena of a national election, proposing the FI as the true Centre. Earlier indications that the party’s mod erates may have assumed greater prominence have been resisted by its leadership. Mariastella Gelmini, who cried out ‘Questa non e ancora tuo partito’ (This is no longer your party) to Berlusconi at the party conference, has since been largely silenced. Simona Malprezzi, who spoke favourably of a campo largo, and Elio Vito, who supported Draghi’s policies on Ukraine, are lone voices.

As ever, Berlusconi counts on the cultural synthesis between himself and the Italian people. The party convention in Naples bore all the hallmarks of previous Berlusconi spectacles, but was also haunted by the spectre of Ruby Ter, the sex scandal in which Berlusconi has been embroiled for years, and which involves him persistently in personal litigation while not, it seems, diminishing his political viability.

The most likely election outcome is that the centre right will win the Camera with an outright majority, and that it may win the Senate, but with only a slim majority of four to five seats.

An election analysis which removes the M5S from the reckoning even more overwhelmingly favours the centre right, delivering an absolute majority (two-thirds of the Camera), with which it can rewrite the constitution without a mediating referendum, carrying out its intended reform of the structure of the presidency.

As recent events, including the trigger for this election, have shown, the role of a president as crisis broker with the power to dissolve parliament and nominate the prime minister remains relevant.

Recent analysis suggests that Italy’s is a thoroughly demoti vated electorate. A summer election sotto l’ombrellone (under the beach umbrellas) will be another test of Italy’s fragile democratic system. A lack of electoral involvement is a resource of populism, and means that political analysis can only be conducted with great sobriety. As is frequently said in Italian politics ‘vediamo domani’ (‘we will see tomorrow’). g

Claudio Bozzi is a Lecturer at Deakin University.

This article is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The War Game: Australian war leadership from Gallipoli to Iraq

by David Horner

Allen & Unwin

$45 pb, 478 pp

Atfirst sight, the title of David Horner’s new book, The War Game, is an uncharacteristically flippant refer ence by a serious historian to a deadly serious business. Horner has taken the term from writers such as Jonathan Swift and Horace Walpole, who saw war being treated as a game in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The carnage of the indus trial-scale wars of the twentieth century, with their current re verberations in Ukraine, makes the phrase seem almost offensive, as does the frightening prospect of a full-scale war between the United States and China over Taiwan.

The subtitle, ‘Australian war leadership from Gallipoli to Iraq’, is a more accurate guide to the content. On the book’s cover, Peter Stanley says it is ‘essential reading for anyone who wants to un derstand why Australia has made the decision to go to war – over and over again’. That is what Stanley, and no doubt many other Australians, would like Horner to elucidate, but to a much greater extent The War Game is about how, rather than why, Australia has gone to war nine times in about ninety years.

Horner discusses how Australia’s war leaders – the political decision makers and the military leaders who advise them and implement their decisions – have taken the crucial decisions to go to war, but the greater part of the book is about how those polit ical and military leaders have managed Australia’s commitments. A constant theme is the challenge of negotiating the tension between Australia’s national interests and the demands of its membership of a global coalition, from the days when Australia was part of the British Empire to the more recent commitments as part of the US-led Coalition of the Willing.

The interaction of Australian political and military leaders at the highest level of command is a field on which Horner is un questionably the pre-eminent authority. The books that established his reputation include Crisis of Command (1978), High Command (1982), The Commanders (1984), and Australian Higher Command in the Vietnam War (1986). His more than thirty books also include biographies of Thomas Blamey and Frederick Shedden, respec tively Australia’s most senior general and civilian official during World War II, and John Wilton, the most important military leader in the Vietnam War, as well as a study of the 1939–45 War Cabinet. Over more than forty years, Homer has established a reputation for the breadth and depth of his knowledge and for the accuracy and precision of his writing, as well as for a certain level of restraint in the expression of critical judgements.

The election represents a disquieting moment given that those who caused the fall of the Draghi government admire Vladimir Putin

To write The War Game Horner might well have done little more than summarise his own research and writing, but he has demonstrably kept up with what many others have written over several decades. He frequently uses quotations from other historians (including this reviewer) or refers to unnamed ‘critics’ in order to express or to imply more severe judgements than are usually found in his earlier books. In this way, Horner pronounces succinctly but authoritatively on many of the great issues of Aus

He does not, for example, mention any of the Defence White Papers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, despite the fact that, for better or worse, they did much to shape the strategic concepts and capabilities with which the war leaders would have to decide whether to go to war, and if so in what way. Horner’s chapter on the Afghanistan and Iraq commitments, which ended with the debacle of the withdrawal from Kabul on 15 August 2021, covers only the initial commitments in 2001 and 2003. His stated reasons include the lack of a suf ficient documentary record. Nevertheless, Horner clearly thinks that the invasion of Iraq was a stra tegic disaster, albeit one handled with such great dexterity by John Howard that he avoided political repercussions.

tralian war history, from the lack of consultation over the Gallipoli landing, through John Curtin’s alleged ‘surrender of sovereignty’ to Douglas MacArthur, to the role of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction in the planning of the 2003 invasion.

While Horner’s knowledge of Australia’s generals is unri valled, he has relatively little to say about admirals and air mar shals, or the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) and Royal Australian Air Force units they commanded. This reflects the fact that Australia’s way of making war, from the 1880s to the present, has usually been to send troops to fight alongside their imperial or coalition partners, with naval or air assets as subsidiary elements, usually operating under British or US command. The major exception was the 1990–91 Gulf War, in which RAN ships conducted maritime interception operations.

Horner applies his detailed and authoritative analysis of Australian war leadership in three chapters on World War I, four chapters on World War II, another four on the Korean War, Malayan Emergency, Indonesian Confrontation, and Vietnam War, one on the Gulf War, and one on the beginning of the Af ghanistan and Iraq commitments in the early years of this century. He does not, however, address Australia’s decisions and discus sions on strategic and defence policies in the intervening periods.

Horner concludes with ten lessons about war leadership which he hopes will be ‘a guide for developing an understanding of how the nation and its leaders might face future challenges’. The lessons are unexceptionable. They are that the decision to go to war, with its almost inevitable unintended consequences, is the most important a national leader can make; that the leader’s next decision is to determine the level and nature of the commitment; that the prime minister needs advice not only from senior military leaders but also from senior, preferably experienced, ministers; that the government must have con fidence not only in service chiefs at home but in commanders in the field; that the government must ensure that operations are conducted ac cording to its policies, possibly requiring close political supervision of the military; that Aus tralian leaders must gain access to allied strategic decision making; that Australia must have its own diplomatic and intelligence agencies, to whose advice the government must be willing to listen; that the nation’s leaders must handle the domestic politics of the commitment, within their own party as well as with the Opposition; that the government must manage the media; and that all decisions are taken in an atmosphere of uncertainty. These lessons should all be well understood by Australia’s political and military leaders, and Horner has provided a valua ble guide to their historical origins and lasting importance. But perhaps the most immediate relevance of this book is found in his last paragraph where he urges Australians ‘to treat any US plan for war with deep suspicion’, because the US policy process that led to the Iraq invasion was ‘deeply flawed’. This advice can be taken together with his comments on the way in which the skilfully handled involvement in the Gulf War led to the deeply troubling Australian commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Australian policy makers must now absorb this advice, and observe Horner’s other les sons, as they try to deter a major conflict between the United States and China without making another ‘surrender of sovereignty’. g

Peter Edwards has published extensively on Australia’s war commitments, most recently in Australia and the Vietnam War (2014).

General Thomas Blamey with Prime Minister John Curtin and Elsie Curtin, 1944 (National Library of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

Warm and cuddly

Drawing on Robert Menzies to settle old scores

A Sense of Balance

by John Howard HarperCollins $39.99 hb, 304 pp

Sincehis (involuntary) retirement from politics in 2007, John Howard has gone to some lengths to encourage compari sons with Robert Menzies. He authored a lengthy paean to Australia’s longest serving prime minister (2014), appeared in a television series to appraise his leadership and era (2016), and curated an exhibition on him at the Museum of Australian Democracy. And while he does not don the knightly robes that Menzies did on the cover of his volume of essays, The Measure of the Years (1970), Howard does ape Ming’s serene, far-seeing gaze on the dust jacket of this, his third book, A Sense of Balance.

But the serenity of the dust jacket is not matched within. Howard has admitted that he was ‘provoked’ to write these essays by the condescension with which political élites greeted the elec tion of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union (both in 2016). For that reason, one might have expected pages and pages of excoriation of the commentariat and chattering classes. But no. Howard is more troubled about the political parties that presented voters with these choices in the first place. Why, he asks, were the Republicans unable to find a more suitable standard-bearer, and the Tories to understand the mood of their own electorates?

While the United States and United Kingdom provide How ard with his spur, his concern about the state of political parties is domestic. The book’s second essay, on the decline of communitymindedness, is in its latter half a well-aimed arrow at the faction alism and bitter infighting that afflicts the contemporary Liberal Party. Noting that factions did not really exist in the party until the 1980s, Howard traces how a postwar ambivalence toward joining things – whether parties, community organisations, clubs, or more – and the proliferation of political staffing positions since the 1970s have led to the main political parties being dominated by staffers, party officials, and lobbyists with party connections. In the absence of overt ideological objectives, they divide and descend into petty factional squabbles. He argues that this makes the parties inward-looking, less welcoming to newcomers, represented by less talented candidates, and unwilling and unable to engage with and understand the thinking of the community. And while Howard spies this problem in the Labor Party, his comments speak most to the Liberal Party and serve as context for his reflections on the results of the 2022 federal election.

Howard’s analysis of the government’s loss is stinging. He offers a lukewarm defence of Scott Morrison – lauding his lead

ership during the pandemic, his economic stewardship, and his decisions to take Australia into the AUKUS arrangements and Quad dialogue – but argues that the government mishandled issues around women, did not have the courage to lead any major economic reform, and failed to present a policy agenda for the future. Ministers were faint-hearted and living on legends of the past. The government dilly-dallied and was lily-livered when it should have been lion-hearted. It antagonised its base. Worst of all, it was divided. Factionalism – which Howard wryly dubs ‘the ongoing struggle between what can only be called rival prefer ment co-operatives’ – has left the party destabilised, its appeal damaged, and now consigned it to the opposition benches.

To rectify this situation, Howard explores what he considers a defining characteristic of Australia: a sense of balance. Howard stresses its importance in the Liberal Party, arguing that it should be a ‘broad church’ spanning conservative and liberal thought, with powers that are balanced between the party’s parliamentary wing and its organisation and members: the first elect the leader and make policy; the latter elect candidates to join that parliamenta ry wing. Howard does not esteem those models adopted in the United Kingdom and, in Australia, by Labor, where rank-and-file party members have a direct say in the leadership. As he argues, members of parliamentary parties are uniquely placed to observe,

assess, and judge their colleagues. This would be more persuasive if the begged question – about the fallibility of those MPs whose poll-induced panic and factionalism has seen this country cycle through repeated leadership ballots since 2010 – were answered.

Elsewhere, Howard’s sense of balance sees him put a finger on the scales. One of the most insistent claims he has made in recent years is that the Coalition extended support to the Hawke and Keating Labor governments (1983–96) on significant policy issues and that, when his government came to power in 1996, Labor failed to repay the favour. The float of the dollar, the ad mission to Australia of foreign banks, the abolition of interest rate controls, the introduction of HECS – all, he points out, were Labor decisions supported by himself or the Coalition. But when his government tried to enact big-ticket policies, such as

Patrick Mullins

John Howard and Vladimir Putin in Sydney, 2007 (Kremlin Presidential Press and Information Office via Wikimedia Commons)

the GST and the privatisation of Telstra, Labor refused to lend its support. Thus Howard’s pronouncement that ‘bipartisanship was a one-way street’.

This claim is superficially compelling but spurious on close inspection. The Coalition withheld its support from an array of reforms and policies enacted by Labor under Hawke and Keating, from the introduction of Medicare to that of superannuation. On what Howard declares the biggest economic change of all, the float of the dollar, that support was only extended by Howard himself, then shadow treasurer – not his party, nor his leader. Meanwhile, during the Howard years, the ALP extended biparti sanship on gun control (‘plenty of support’, Howard wrote, in his autobiography), on the treatment of asylum seekers aboard MV Tampa (Labor ‘endorsed’ what the government had done), and more besides. ‘Some commentators,’ Howard writes, ‘nostalgically refer to the 1980s as a golden era when the major parties came together to implement good policy. It was never as warm and

Essays

Ask Stuart!

Essays on the Macintyre effect

Christina Twomey

cuddly as that.’ No, it wasn’t. Nor were the years that followed.

There are sharp insights in this volume – in addition to those noted above, his essay on China is balanced and genuinely inter esting – but also a sense of anecdotal meandering and cursory criticisms, as though Howard, still wearing his knightly armour, is stalking a deserted battlefield and swinging at old foes. Climate change, a republic, a Bill of Rights, critics of the 2003 invasion of Iraq: all receive predictable, glancing blows. Following the more incisive and well-observed cohesion of Howard’s earlier books, this makes for a tired and disjointed read. It is another place where a comparison to Menzies is fitting. Ming’s volumes of memoirs and essays were regarded as puzzling disappointments. Perhaps Howard is now aping his hero a little too closely. g

Patrick Mullins is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU’s Nation al Centre of Biography. His most recent book is Who needs the ABC? (2022), co-authored with Matthew Ricketson.

1970s New Left, a political movement that captivated the young student. An interest in the tension between structure and agency, though, would continue throughout his long career. At heart a political historian who looked for the wellsprings of change outside the mainstream, he sought to explain both innovation and opportunities lost, and to understand the distinctive elements and forces that shaped modern Australia. Anyone wanting to familiarise themselves with Macintyre’s intellectual interests would do well to begin here.

The Work of History: Writing for Stuart Macintyre

edited by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski Melbourne University Press $39.99 pb, 407 pp

was work for Stuart Macintyre (1947–2021), writ ing was his pleasure, and he excelled at both. Peter Beil harz and Sian Supski, scholars from outside Macintyre’s own discipline of history, underscore the breadth of his interests and networks by initiating this collection of twenty-seven essays. They wish to honour Macintyre’s work and interrogate ‘the Mac intyre effect’. That effect stemmed from prodigious scholarly output, intervention in national debates, political connections, service to professional bodies and key cultural institutions, a long career of teaching and leadership at the University of Melbourne, and mentorship. The editors seek to establish Macintyre’s legacy through the reflections of others on the interests and issues that in spired his life’s work. They want contributors to avoid genuflecting before launching off into tangential discussion of their own work, the bane of many a Festschrift. Most of them succeed. Contribu tors were instead asked to ‘add something new, or of themselves’.

History

To read these essays is to be reminded of the breadth, the reach, and the significance of Macintyre’s career. Together they constitute a primer on the scholarly preoccupations of Macintyre. The early interest in Althusserian analysis is the subject of much almost nostalgic critique on the preoccupations of members of the

After doctoral work on Marxism, communism, and work ing-class militancy in inter-war Britain, Macintyre soon turned his attention to similar themes in Australian history and broad ened his temporal focus, scope, and ambition. His volume of the Oxford University Press history of Australia, The Succeeding Age 1901–1942, which appeared in 1986, propelled him onto the national stage. He would remain there for the rest of his career. Conservative commentators never forgave him an early associa tion with communism, but it was his involvement with the formal labour movement that proved more influential in the long term. Studies of Victorian liberalism, the Communist Party of Aus tralia, postwar reconstruction, and a concise general history that ran to five editions after its initial publication in 1999 were just some of his achievements. Macintyre had a remarkable capacity to write elegant books that tackled big topics, and a fearlessness to engage in debate, as evidenced in publications such as The History Wars (2003, with Anna Clark).

The most successful essays in the collection are those that combine context, insightful analysis, anecdote, and an aware ness of the purpose of the exercise. Frank Bongiorno’s study of Macintyre’s work on the Labor Party, Federation, and arbitration between 1890 and the beginning of World War I is one stand-out. Although Macintyre did not address these themes in a booklength study, in Bongiorno’s careful reading we are shown their complex relationship to contemporary political concerns, the way they embody Macintyre’s ambivalence about liberalism and reflect his experience of both politics and leadership within in

stitutions. Sean Scalmer’s reflection on the study of Australian historians, ‘Scrutiny, Context and Power’, is another excellent contribution which traces Macintyre’s own intellectual evolution as a historian and his penetrating analysis of a field that he both inherited and shaped.

Even though the editors explicitly asked contributors to ‘address those in the know but also to be mindful of a general audience’, some leaned a little too much in the direction of the former. The editorial decision to refer to other scholars by their surnames, but to Macintyre as ‘Stuart’ throughout, struck a somewhat clubbish note. A couple of contributors attempted to revive debates with Macintyre that were of limited general interest but may intrigue the specialist. Others provided relatively brief accounts of their interactions with him, which nevertheless allowed us to see him in action as a teacher, colleague, collaborator, and enabler. Several entries, such as the one by Graeme Davison, evoked the contours and rhythms of a pre-digital academic cul ture. The image of Davison, Macintyre, and John Hirst sitting around a dining room table nutting out The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998) is a compelling insight into the era of the great reference works.

There is a distinct lack of biographical framing, a curious absence for a collection about a historian who was both a cele brated biographer and master of the pithy biographical detail. Some contributors referred to telling moments, such as Nicholas Brown’s mention of Macintyre’s subscription to Hansard when he was only fourteen years old. Brown also refers to Macintyre as a baby boomer, the only person in the collection to do so, despite the clear relevance of this generational position. One might also ask about the role of gender. Macintyre was surrounded by feminist colleagues, several of whom contributed to this collection, and his work ultimately incorporated gender as a category of analysis. To what extent masculinist networks facilitated Macintyre’s own career is less clear but worthy of consideration.

The origins of Macintyre’s early radicalism are obscure beyond intellectual appeal. Several contributors consider the ‘oedipal element’ in Macintyre’s writing to be his relationship with the elder statesmen of the Melbourne history department in the late 1960s, such as Max Crawford. This is neat but incomplete. The editors included family photographs, without ever commenting on family of origin, family of choice, or the interplay between intellectual concerns and life experiences.

Macintyre’s capacity for hard work, his almost encyclopedic knowledge (‘Ask Stuart’), and his commitment to institutions despite a robust capacity to critique them, are themes threaded throughout this collection. He was without doubt widely re vered and admired, and the collection itself shows the esteem of colleagues from all generations representing a wide range of disciplines and organisations. The overall result is an intellectual portrait of Macintyre – a clear narrative about his scholarship and eminence, his generosity to students and colleagues – but little sense of him as a man of his time or circumstance. Therein lies the task of his biographer, a moment which will surely come. g

Christina Twomey is Professor of History at Monash University. Her most recent book is The Battle Within: POWs in postwar Australia (NewSouth, 2018).

The fight for abolition

A new edition of the 1968 work Christopher Ward

The Penalty Is Death: State power, law, and justice

edited by Barry Jones

Scribe

$35 pb, 345 pp

In1968, Barry Jones edited, and contributed to, the first edition of The Penalty Is Death. The book was produced in the immediate aftermath of the execution of Ronald Ryan in Victoria in February 1967, and in the context of vigorous debates in Australia and other Western countries as to the re tention of the death penalty. The second edition, published to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in Queensland, arrives in a very different world. A majority of countries are now either abolitionist in law, or have in place an express or de facto moratorium against execution.

Yet the practice of judicially sanctioned killing continues un abated in many countries, sometimes on an unimaginable scale. In places in which a moratorium exists, respite is often fragile and short-lived. Even in abolitionist countries, including Australia, fringe political voices continue to ride a tidal wave of public anger in cases of horrific crimes. The publication of the second edition of this important book is of great significance, ensuring that its collection of essays and research is heard again by a new generation.

The Penalty Is Death draws upon historical essays, thoughtful philosophy, witness accounts, and statistical research to describe the overwhelming futility, administrative pettiness, and utter inhumanity of the practice of capital punishment. It does so by collecting in separate parts the writings of abolitionists, retention ists, and witnesses. It ultimately places all in a moral and practical framework that leads only to the proper conclusion that the death penalty serves no individual nor any societal interests, but rather diminishes all who are involved in its imposition, judicial imprimatur, and ultimate execution. It is a blight upon societies that continue to support or tolerate its existence.

It is extremely difficult to understand the modern scale of the death penalty. The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty has reported at least 2,397 executions in 2021. It is estimated that more than 33,000 people are currently under sentence of death worldwide. As Jones describes in an overview to the book, per capita death rates vary wildly. Although China leads the overall number of reported executions (with more than 2,000 executions recorded in 2021), its recorded per capita death rate is lower than Iran’s. In that far less populous country there were at least 365 executions in 2021. Other states with extremely high execution rates include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. Liberal democ racies now rarely deploy the death penalty, with the United States and, to a lesser extent, Japan, as outliers.

In the United States, it remains to be seen whether President Joe Biden makes any permanent changes to the availability of cap ital punishment in federal cases. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of states in that country are moving towards abolition or at least a moratorium position. As Jones explains, in the United States the death penalty has now been abolished in twenty-three states. Although it is retained in twenty-seven states, there is a mora torium in force in California, Ohio, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. Speaking with his indomitable wit, Jones wryly comments that, despite the religious fundamentalism which underpins much of the death penalty discourse in the southern states of the United States, ‘it is hard to see Jesus, a victim of execution himself, as a hard line retentionist’.

It is in the juxtaposition of the three parts of the book that its power lies. By collating essays written from an abolitionist perspective, including some from historical times, with essays written by retentionists, and concluding with eyewitness accounts of executions, the transparency, fragility, and inhumanity of argu ments said to support capital punishment are exposed. That the death penalty also deeply affects those involved in its bureaucratic administration should not be doubted. It is a recurring theme of the book that the application of the death penalty in a society diminishes us all.

Barry Jones quotes Leo Tolstoy in a powerful exposition:

I understand that under the influence of momentary irritation, hatred, revenge, or loss of consciousness of his humanity, a man may kill another in his own defence or defence of a friend … But that men in full control of their human attributes can quietly and deliberately admit the necessity of killing a fellow man, and oblige others to perform that action so contrary to human nature, I never can understand.

The abolitionist arguments include, among others, essays and extracts written by Cesare Beccaria (1764), Sir Samuel Romilly MP (1810), Charles Dickens (1846), Clarence Darrow (1924), Sir Eugene Gorman (1966), and powerful prefaces by Michael Kirby, Julian McMahon, and Richard Bourke. The concepts of deterrence and revenge are dissected with clinical precision by the authors. The death penalty is often described as a punishment uniquely able to deter acts of lethal violence. It is described as a punishment fitting the crime. As is made clear in The Penalty Is Death, statistics demonstrate the fallacy of the former; rates of murder do not increase in abo litionist states. As to the second proposition, punishments of physical brutality, an eye for an eye, once commonplace, are now rightly abandoned. They breach uniformly accepted international laws protecting human rights. Arguments for death based upon vengeance and revenge have no place in our modern world. A state that engages in sanctioned killing is not a state that is compassionate, nor is it one which discourages societal violence. As Sir John Romilly said in 1810:

I call on you to remember, that cruel punishments have an inevitable tendency to produce cruelty in the people. It is not by the destruction of tenderness, it is not by the exciting of revenge, that we can hope to generate virtuous conduct in those who are confided to our care.

Until recently, many countries in Asia maintained the death penalty in cases of narcotic trafficking. Those countries are rapidly decreasing in number, as the weight of international society turns against them. Widely ratified international treaties only permit the application of the death penalty, if at all, for the most serious crimes, which characterisation does not extend to trafficking in narcotics. The practice of Singapore must be given particular attention, executing as it does large numbers of low-scale drug traffickers, almost always from poor socio-economic and migrant backgrounds. Its courts interpret laws in such a manner as to render almost irrelevant the tenuous possible pathways to escape mandatory capital punishment.

The imposition of mandatory death sentences for trafficking in narcotics is an appalling indictment upon a modern society. As Jones says: ‘One of the sickening aspects of execution for drug offences is that only mules are caught. Those who control the drug syndicates just read about the executions on Facebook.’

The abolition of death as a sanction for trafficking in nar cotics is a global priority. The Philippines, which recently, and unsuccessfully, attempted to reintroduce capital punishment for a range of crimes, including trafficking in narcotics, instead re sorted to extrajudicial killings, a practice which led to systematic breakdown of law and order, and the violation of human rights on such a scale as to potentially amount to crimes against humanity. The Philippines is now under investigation by the International Criminal Court. In other places, LGBTQ people continue, extraordinarily, to face the death penalty.

In such countries, dedicated human rights advocates and brave attorneys continue to speak out in their countries and with in and outside their courts against the application of the death penalty, sometimes at great personal risk. The cases manifestly fail to meet minimum standards of international law. They lead to repeated tragedies at dawn and immeasurable suffering to those families caught in the brutal, state-sanctioned processes.

It is the banal nature of the bureaucracy surrounding the death penalty, and the entirely surreal nature of litigation upon which a life is balanced, that is one of the most powerful argu ments for abolition. No one who has ever participated in capital litigation can be left in any doubt as to the arbitrary nature of its application, nor the reality that all capital punishment is ultimately political. The prerogative of mercy is rarely exercised by those empowered to do so; politics looms large in those decisions.

History, as The Penalty Is Death makes clear, shows that it is in the political space that the fight for abolition must be won. How ever, pressure created by litigation, diplomacy, media accounts of the executions, and public awareness all have significant roles to play. As McMahon writes in the preface: ‘Those engaged in this debate know that perseverance is required.’

The publication of the second edition of The Penalty Is Death is an important step in ensuring that the fight for abolition con tinues, with perseverance and public support. g

Christopher Ward is a Senior Counsel at the New South Wales Bar and Honorary Professor at the Australian National Univer sity. He is an Ambassador of the Capital Punishment Justice Project. ❖

Flares and embers

American Exceptionalism: A new history of an old idea by Ian Tyrrell

University of Chicago Press $57.95 hb, 288 pp

The forty-sixth president of the United States, like most of his predecessors, is an avid student of American his tory. In August 2022, Joe Biden met for the second time with a group of pre-eminent historians to discuss his presidency and the many threats facing American democracy. A month lat er, standing in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he told the American people: ‘I know our history.’ Biden has, from the be ginning of his campaign for the presidency, characterised his own period of American history as a ‘battle for the soul of the nation’, riffing off historian Jon Meacham’s book The Soul of America: The battle for our better angels (2018).

historical analysis of the changing, contested, and slippery set of ideas that underlie exceptionalism. Tyrrell’s analysis of exception alism and its corollaries is absolutely necessary to understanding how it is that a president standing before a people and warning them of the existential threat to their democracy can, in almost the same breath, claim that they live in ‘the greatest nation on the face of the earth’, one that has ‘for more than two centuries … been a beacon to the world.’

As Tyrrell outlines early on in American Exceptionalism, Biden’s invocation of ‘greatness’ is not necessarily synonymous with exceptionalism – in fact, the difference between those two ideas is ‘foundational’. It is this careful parsing of that underlying set of ideas that informs exceptionalism, in all its forms, that is perhaps the greatest strength of the book. Tyrrell offers precise definitions of those ideas, so that a capitalised ‘American Excep tionalism’ is understood as something quite different to lower-case ‘exceptionalism’, which itself has historically contingent and ever-changing relationships with cultural nationalism, Christian republicanism, Anglo-Saxonism, Manifest Destiny, the Ameri can Dream, the American Century, and their subsidiary myths. While this definition and historical explanation of terms has every chance of being dry and stale, this is far from the case – Tyrrell’s claim to offer a ‘new history’ is one that he more than lives up to.

American Exceptionalism has a more or less chronological structure, tracing the ever-changing nature of exceptionalism from the beginning of European colonisation to the present day. In each chapter, through tours of the major touch points in American history, Tyrrell traces the influence of events like the Revolution, the movement to abolish slavery, the Civil War, the New Deal, and the Cold War, and how their memories were and are still made, shaped, and changed, as they themselves changed understandings and makings of exceptionalism. Tyrrell iden tifies the forces that have made, and often strained, exceptionalism over centuries as international, transnational (particularly the transatlantic), domestic, cultural, and reli gious, and notes the impact of communities and individuals. In so doing, Tyrrell shows how ‘Exceptionalism had morphed into an ideology reflecting and shaping a social and political worldview, and through which public policy was refracted.’

Those wishing to understand that ‘battle’, and the role of presidents, historians, and Biden’s audience – the American people themselves – in fighting it out, need look no further than Ian Tyrrell’s meticulous and engaging history of American excep tionalism. Tyrrell’s ‘new history of an old idea’ offers students and followers of American history a richly detailed and compelling

In tracing this change over time, Tyrrell reveals the deep intellectual and cultural origins of Biden’s understanding of the United States as a ‘beacon’ to the rest of the world – an idea that is connected to, but differs in important ways from, Ronald Reagan’s ‘Shining City on a Hill’ in the 1980s, John F. Kennedy’s ‘City upon a Hill’ two decades before that, and John Winthrop’s similar evocation in the seventeenth century. This idea has been made and remade, and interacted in often surprising ways with Americans, their histories, and their environments. That analysis of the complex relationship between individuals, the state, and

A richly detailed analysis of American exceptionalism

Emma Shortis

US President Joe Biden speaking at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, 2022 (Adam Schultz/White House Photo/Alamy Live News

the environment is one that is particularly exciting. Drawing on the discipline of environmental history, Tyrrell shows, for example, how the violence of westward expansion and the ‘end’ of the frontier, slavery, and Manifest Destiny ‘unraveled’ Chris tian republicanism, once again changing the nature of American exceptionalism.

In this ‘new history’, Tyrrell is seeking to disrupt otherwise accepted understandings of the history of American exceptional ism to show ‘how settler colonialism and its denial underpinned U.S. exceptionalism’. In engaging with a narrative around ‘settler colonialism’, Tyrrell hopes to broaden a common and self-rein forcing analytical frame that focuses narrowly on the United States itself. This is not a new argument, but it is a critical one. In many ways, Tyrrell is successful, but in others he undermines the case. Early in the book – much of which deals with questions of race directly – the qualifier ‘white’ is added in brackets, so that a descriptor will become, for example, ‘adult (white) males’. This may seem like a minor point, but such a construction seems to bracket questions of race in the development of early American exceptionalism, when in fact they were fundamental. Just as Biden was recently, and rightly, criticised for inviting only (white) his torians to discuss threats to American democracy, this bracketing has significant implications tied to the violence of exceptionalism. Tyrrell, perhaps unlike his colleagues who received that invitation to the White House, shows that this violence is deeply rooted in the history of Americans’ ideas about themselves, characterising the Civil War as ‘a moral conflict grounded in a dispute over the nature of American exceptionalism’. That conflict has never been resolved; as a result, ‘the United States faced, and still does face, the flares and embers of an inner civil war’.

Tyrrell’s analysis of what the United States faces today, and of the modern iterations of American exceptionalism, is unique precisely because it rests on such solid foundations of historical analysis. While it is possible to detect, here, a historian’s reluctance to diagnose the present, Tyrrell’s argument that the way that ‘the discourse of American decline has grown at the same time that the affirmation of exceptionalism has intensified and become a matter of political and ideological conformity … is a departure from the past’ is utterly convincing.

Much of what Tyrrell writes about – the changing nature of ideas, and how ideas are made and constantly revised – is, as he argues, ‘impossible to measure precisely’. In American Excep tionalism, Tyrrell does the hard work of the historian, untangling threads and rejecting simplistic diagnoses.

A student of different historians, the president told his con stituents in September 2022: ‘Now, America must choose to move forward or to move backwards, to build a future or obsess about the past.’ Ian Tyrrell’s major contribution is to demonstrate how ‘obsessing about the past’ is entirely necessary for understanding the dramatic and historically contingent present of ‘the greatest nation on the face of the earth’. g

Emma Shortis is a Lecturer in the Social and Global Studies Centre at RMIT University. Her first book is Our Exception al Friend: Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States (Hardie Grant Books, 2021). In 2022, her essay ‘American Guns’ was shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize. ❖

History

‘Linger with the voids’

Examining the relationship between past and present Georgina Arnott

Black Ghost of Empire: The long death of slavery and the failure of emancipation

by Kris Manjapra

Allen Lane $45 hb, 253 pp

‘To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended.’ This premise guides the third book of Kris Manjapra, a Bahamian of African and Indian descent and history professor at Massachusetts’s Tufts University. As Manjapra invites us to see, the ‘voids’ in his family’s history reflect the pernicious after life of five hundred years of Atlantic slavery; his loss just one of its manifold legacies.

This book is for those who want clarity on the direct re lationship between the past and the present. Some would say that is what all history should do; many historians would not. Manjapra is particularly concerned with the interesting rela tionship between pre-emancipation and post-emancipation societies. His contention is that Atlantic slavery was a war and that policies of so-called emancipation actually extended it. Was this inadvertent? Not at all, Manjapra argues: emancipatory acts were written and governed by slave-owning castes and their associated beneficiaries in the fields of law, industry, finance, and governance, to prolong their profiting from slavery.

Such claims might appear counter-intuitive. If so, read on, for Manjapra is the first to tell you that there are good reasons why many read ‘emancipation’ as ‘freedom from slavery’, not least because it literally means it. As Manjapra shows, in many slave societies emancipation acted as something like modern-day marketing or greenwashing, maintaining the status quo while professing to do something radically different.

Unlike many historians, Manjapra ranges across European slavery empires. Over six chapters, he provides a chronological, if broad-brushed, account of emancipation in the American North, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and Africa. This leaves, in a relatively short book, little space for localised, contextualising detail. Yet the book’s brevity calls to a general readership, as does its geographical and temporal reach.

It means also that Manjapra can investigate structural and rhetorical patterns in the enslavement of Africans. He is most interested in the common and unique ways European societies ex tended captive labour in the face of sustained and strong African resistance, as well as domestic moral shaming of chattel slavery, particularly by white women. Manjapra’s argument here is that tactics to maintain slavery in the face of such challenges were circu lated among European and American powers in language as mild (gradualism, amelioration) as it was deceptive.

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The original model for pan-Atlantic ‘gradualism’ was the Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery 1780, which stipulated that all those living under slavery would remain so for the rest of their lives. It was only when enslaved children born after 1780 reached adulthood that emancipation in Pennsylvania meant liberty. In the years following this act, strategies to subvert freedom in the name of freedom multiplied across the Atlantic and included periods of ‘apprenticeship’, sometimes more brutal than slavery itself, and laws requiring that the enslaved pay debts of freedom to their enslavers.

Unimaginable, unquantifiable suffering was inflicted on enslaved people by supposed anti-slavery societies, often in the name of acquiring their freedom. Black Ghost of Empire seeks to debunk the notion that the American North was opposed to slav ery. Manjapra details the ways slavery underpinned the economic and territorial growth of the North. After it was outlawed, he goes on to point out, slavery in the American South was sustained by northern merchants, manufacturers, investors, law makers, and law enforcers. How otherwise could Black children in New York be repeatedly stolen from their families and sold to southern slavers?

When, after the Civil War, President Andrew John son sat down with Black male delegates from twelve states, including Frederick Douglass, to explain that reparations would be going to southern planters, not the formerly en slaved, Johnson insisted that their demands for ‘equality before the law’ would not advance the ‘ultimate elevation, not only of the coloured, but of the great masses of the people of the United States’. Decades of lynching and Jim Crow laws followed, practices that Manjapra terms ‘a political tool of war emancipation’.

Manjapra’s explanation of what happened in Haiti also comes within the fold of ‘war emancipation’. The enslaved of Haiti (known as Saint-Domingue to its French colonists) revolted for thirteen years from 1791 to expel their oppressors – the only European slave colony to do so. The Haitian revolution is among the most dramatically operatic histories of the modern world, but Manjapra is particularly interested in its second act: the Frenchled isolation of an independent, Black-led Haiti through global trade blockades. Embargoes from all the major European and American states crippled the Haitian economy and led to Act Three, more than twenty years later.

In 1825, King Charles X of France offered to concede the in dependence of Haiti, giving it access to the international trading community and international law, in exchange for Haiti’s agreeing to the French version of emancipation. It was, in Manjapra’s terms, a patently ‘absurd emancipation professing to retroactively free a people who had freed themselves two decades earlier’. Under this arrangement, Haiti had to pay France an indemnité of 150 million francs, around US$37 billion in today’s money. This they set out to do, with around eighty per cent of Haiti’s revenue going towards the debt in some periods. It was finally paid off 120 years later, in 1949.

Britain enacted something similar under its scheme for emancipation, paying £20 million to slave-owners from 1834. The enslaved were required to labour for a further four years as apprentices, netting slave-owners a further £27 million worth of free labour. Manjapra notes that when the debt to slave-owners

was finally paid off in 2015, the British Treasury tweeted: ‘Did you know? In 1833, Britain used 20 million, 40 percent of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire.’ This cheery missive’s flimsy grasp of history might have been more extensively plumbed by Manjapra (all of those enslaved in India remained enslaved, for instance), but within the arc of his argument there can be no doubting its grotesque glibness. A footnote from this section reveals that Man japra sought comment from the Rothschilds, whose forebears financed the scheme. This is historycum-journalism.

The notion that compensating slave-owners and gradualist emancipation was a requisite of freedom is something Manjapra challenges by pointing to contemporary critics of such schemes. In miniature biographies, Manjapra places indi vidual experience within wider contexts, explain ing what is unique and typical of these lives. He quotes Robert Wed derburn, the son of an enslaved woman and slave-owning man, who lobbied for abolition in London from 1813. He cites Elizabeth Hey rick, a Leicester Quaker abolitionist, whose 1824 book Immediate, not Gradual Abolition called for compensation for the enslaved. He tells the story of Callie House, born into slavery in Tennessee in 1861, who established the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Association, which counted three hundred thousand subscribers and lobbied for reparations for the enslaved.

In recent decades, historians have found innovative ways of visually communicating Atlantic slavery. Here again, Manjapra does not disappoint, bestowing on the reader a terrific map show ing benefits of emancipation to slave-owners and a centrefold with wonderfully juxtaposed images.

Black Ghost of Empire concludes by arguing for reparations and anniversaries that commemorate freedom. Such undertakings are as much for the present as for the future, Manjapra argues, for they cultivate ‘continued watchfulness and vigilance’ towards acts of oppression. This book, after all, is history for now. It is history that moves from the archive to the reader’s mind. ‘Think of it,’ Manjapra urges us: ‘linger with the voids’. g

Georgina Arnott’s most recent book is Judith Wright: Selected writings (La Trobe University Press, 2022). She recently joined ABR as Assistant Editor.

Frederick Douglass, c.1879 (Frank W. Legg Photographic Collection of Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Notables, 1862-1884, National Archives and Records Administration 558770 via Wikimedia Commons)

The spirit of place

Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland

by Jim Davidson

The Miegunyah Press $59.99 hb, 478 pp

them to the creation of a homegrown literature.

In tracing their careers, Davidson tackles one of the peren nial themes of Australian history: the attempt of a settlement society to make its culture. While Davidson acknowledges ear lier cultural nationalists, such as J.F. Archibald, Joseph Furphy, P.R. Stephensen, and the Jindyworobaks, his subjects were the characteristic product of a new chapter, marked by World War II and the popular front against fascism, when the left reawakened to the mobilising force of national myths and traditions. That impulse persisted beyond the war as left-liberals and radicals, including Christesen and Murray-Smith, sought to erect a bul wark against the effects of American consumerism, pop culture, and McCarthyism.

‘In

Sydney if you have something to say you hold a party; in Melbourne you start a journal,’ quipped the poet and critic Vincent Buckley in 1962. Buckley was an acute, astringent observer of the literary culture of the two cities. An outsider in both, he recognised Melbourne’s characteristic voice – ‘earnest, do-gooding, voluble’ – in the leftish humanism of its leading literary journals, Clem Christesen’s Meanjin and Ste phen Murray-Smith’s Overland. Not for Melbourne the anar chic frenzies of the Bulletin, the Sydney Push and Oz. While Sydney had the best poets, Buckley contended that the southern capital had the most influential opinion makers.

Melbourne’s little magazines enjoyed national influence, especially in their heyday when the openings for new Austral ian writing and big ideas were limited. Despite their tiny circulations – never more than three thousand – they aspired to lead the contest of ideas, and often did. Most of the country’s lead ing poets, novel ists, historians, and social critics wrote for them, and some of the most fertile essays on the na tional culture, such as Arthur Phillips’s ‘The Cultural Cringe’ and Ken Inglis’s ‘The Anzac Tradition’, appeared in their pages.

Emperors in Lilliput is the third of what Jim Davidson sees as a ‘loose trilogy’ of biographies of representative Australian cultural figures. The first two, Lyrebird Rising (1994) and A Three-Cornered Life (2010), approached Australia from the outside, through the lives of long-time expatriates Louise Hansen-Dyer, creator of the Paris-based recording company L’Oiseau-Lyre, and Keith Hancock, a distinguished historian of empire who returned to Australia in his late fifties. Christesen and Murray-Smith, by contrast, lived almost their entire lives in Australia and devoted

Davidson’s two emperors were a familiar presence when I arrived on the University of Melbourne campus in the late 1960s. Murray-Smith, a Falstaffian figure in corduroy trousers and houndstooth jacket, looked and sounded more like an English squire than an ex-communist activist, although, as I found, his manner belied his essential egalitarianism. In my mind’s eye, the dapper, goatee-bearded Christesen, often accompanied by his pret ty Russian wife, Nina, was a less conspicuous figure, often sitting among his congenials – ‘the grey men’, my colleague John Foster called them – in a corner of the University House dining room.

Meanjin and Overland drew on kindred streams of leftliberalism and struggled, at times, to differentiate themselves. The circles of contributors and supporters overlapped – Geoffrey Serle was a key figure in both – and there was a reluctance to admit that they might actually be in competition. Each journal was the peculiar creation of its editor. Christesen, a journalist, had founded Meanjin in Brisbane in 1940 – its name, literally ‘spike in earth’, is the Aboriginal name for the Brisbane region – and he brought it to Melbourne in 1945. There he remained for the next forty years while, according to Davidson, never quite feeling at home. He was probably a better editor than Murray-Smith, with a more critical eye, wider literary sympathies, as well as superior and more fastidious design and production talents. He attracted a more diverse stable of writers and built a slightly larger circulation.

Overland, established in 1954, was a legacy of Murray-Smith’s work on behalf of the Realist Writers’ Group and its journal, Realist Writer. When he left the Communist Party after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the newly formed Overland and its vital circulation list came with him. Even then, Overland only slowly widened its sympathies beyond the explicit Marxism of its original charter. While aspiring to recruit new working-class writers, the magazine’s most regular contributors continued to be communists or ex-communists – among them John Morrison, Judah Waten, Frank Hardy, and David Martin. Compared with Meanjin, it was more collaborative, informal, and improvised in spirit and style. Murray-Smith’s regular column ‘Swag’ was its authentic voice. While Davidson acknowledges Christesen’s as the greater achievement, he clearly finds Murray-Smith the more interesting biographical subject.

What united and sustained both emperors was their dedication to the creation of an authentic, self-conscious national culture. As Davidson demonstrates, this was a heroic, selfless, sometimes quixotic venture. Spurned by the Commonwealth Literary Fund, then under Menzies’ tight control, and only drip-

A timely antidote to cultural amnesia

Graeme Davison

Clem Christesen and Stephen Murray-Smith with Kylie Tennant at Monash University, 1975 (University of Melbourne Archives, Baillieu Library)

fed by their institutional supporters, such as the University of Melbourne (Meanjin) and sympathetic trade unions (Overland), Christesen and Murray-Smith were often forced to dip into their own pockets to keep their publications afloat. By 1972, Davidson estimates, Christesen had invested $40 000 of his own money ($400,000 in today’s money) in the journal. Like Ulysses, the two editors were irrevocably bound to their mastheads. While they might lament their burden – and Christesen’s ‘Clemmiads’ were notorious – neither helmsman could or would easily surrender his command.

As Christesen’s successor, Davidson consciously resists the temptation to allow ‘recently gained perceptions’ to shape his narrative. But at page 307, his voice abruptly shifts from the third to the first person. In 1974, then a young and untenured historian, he accepted the editorship of Meanjin, only to discover that the incumbent effectively refused to relinquish it. ‘I was being cast as cabin boy to Clem on his tempestuous voyage,’ he recalls. His chapter on the affair, ‘Power Struggle in the Clemin’, is a candid, sometimes hilarious, ultimately poignant story.

Emperors in Lilliput is much more, however than a portrait of two imperious editors. Davidson draws on what must surely be the largest literary archive in the country – more than 1,000 boxes of manuscripts and correspondence – to construct an intimate and group portrait of the postwar Australian literary community. With characteristic wit and flair, he captures their personalities and of fers fresh insights into their writing. Well-known figures such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Judith Wright, Vincent Buckley, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Dorothy Hewett appear in a new light. Perhaps the most rewarding passages, however, are Davidson’s touching portraits of lesser-known figures, such as Overland ’s poetry editor Laurence Collinson, Meanjin in-house critic Arthur Phillips, Murray-Smith’s closest friend and ally Ian Turner, and, especially the two women, Nina Christesen and Nita Murray-Smith, without whose emotional, intellectual, and material support surely neither man, nor his magazine, would have survived.

By the late 1960s, the two journals were running out of steam. Their editors were ageing, but so too was their conception of na tional culture. When they looked beyond Australia, it was always to London rather than New York and Paris, and to high culture rather than the new forms of popular culture that were to flourish during the 1970s. It was another war, the Vietnam War, which effectively killed off the radical nationalism that had sustained the two magazines for more than three decades. In charting their history, Davidson illuminates not only the circumstances that made and unmade them, but what they gave us and what would have been lost without them.

‘The important determinant of any culture is the spirit of place,’ Christesen once wrote. The little magazines, and the cul tural nationalism they espoused, were a product of that spirit of place. Localism is not dead, but as Davidson perceives, is every where under threat from a pervasive and debilitating globalism: ‘The country is in danger of losing its memory, if not its mind,’ he concludes bleakly. Yes, but his book is a powerful and timely antidote to that amnesia. g

Graeme Davison is Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University.

Memoir

Unconditional refusal

A stark and uncompromising memoir Peter Rose

Childhood

by Shannon Burns

Text Publishing

$34.99 pb, 257 pp

Thatthe boy depicted in Shannon Burns’s nightmarish memoir survived to write it at the age of forty reflects no credit on society or on those around him. His persistence seems remarkable, given the world he entered.

The boy is always referred to thus. Page after page, we learn the extent of his grievous upbringing. His parents – mismatched and poorly educated – stay together for the first two years of his life, then he is alone with his erratic Greek mother, who drinks too much and becomes addicted to prescription pills. One of the boy’s earliest memories is of waking on a concrete floor, blood dripping from his nose, having been beaten by his mother. He is four or five years old. ‘I don’t resent the slaps or scratches. It’s ordinary, untroubling. It is what mothers do to their sons whom they love.’ Meanwhile, his Greek grandfather endures him ‘without too much distaste’ (everything is qualified in this world). No one in the boy’s family has a job. Most of them are on social security and live in public housing.

His mother often leaves him alone in the house overnight. He is told that his mother ‘sleeps with men for money’. ‘I’m jealous of those men, of the comfort she brings them.’ He is ‘unusually familiar’ with the sound of their fornication.

While she remains ‘a mother-in-waiting, a promise yet to be realised’, there is no doubting his love for her. Such is the livelong mystery of mothers.

The boy is shunted from one disadvantaged north-western suburb in Adelaide to another, from his parents, his maternal grandparents and uncles, then back to his father and stepmother, an aunt, some Mormons, then foster parents, strangers even –then back again when people can’t bear it any more. At times we forget the boy’s chronology and think of him as thirty or forty.

The boy is always famished, especially when he lives with his father and stepmother. ‘Hunger is the foundation of his life, something that never goes away ...’

He often witnesses appalling scenes. After one fracas an aunt takes him and his mother in, only to send them on their way because of the mother’s lying and screaming and general hopelessness. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what to do,’ the aunt tells the boy. ‘You can’t stay here with me forever. You are your mother’s problem.’ After one terrible argument, his grandparents and uncles evict them both. Then the mother returns the boy to his father. Eventually, he distances himself from the whole idea of family. ‘I’ve discovered an important truth and it’s all I care

about ... No one can be trusted.’

Never is the tone self-pitying or sentimental. The boy is too anxious, too contemptuous because of what is being done to him, or not being done. From the age of five the boy knows he is on his own. Yet somehow he does survive. ‘Nothing is unthinkable for us and everything is survivable. The stakes are always lower.’ The boy withdraws into silence. ‘He only speaks when he wants to. That is his skill: unconditional refusal.’

We marvel at the boy’s repeated exposure. Time and time again his plight should have been recognised. On a few occasions, when something grotesque happens or the boy flees, authorities of one kind or another (police, social workers, teachers) ques tion him about his home life. ‘He knows that they don’t want to hear anything that would complicate matters for them, that no one ever really wants to hear the truth, even if they pretend to, because the truth would make demands of them that they are not prepared for.’

That no one does care – that no one intervenes – should dis quiet the reader. The boy is surely but one of tens of thousands of infants and children living with brutes and sadists, deprived of food, clothing, books, affection, education. The suffering of children, outcasts, and refugees escaping not unrelated horrors or indecencies have long been accommodated by ‘middle Australia’, with its labile conscience. The toll is over there, across the river, in another part of the city. Seldom do the shaming reports reach us.

Violence is pathological in the boy’s world. Rape is not uncommon. One night, in a house full of drunks, a step-uncle bashes his wheelchair-bound wife in front of the boy and other children. When he lives with his stepmother, barely a day goes by without her hitting him. Occasionally she bites him.

There are many appalling scenes in this book, but one stands out. The stepmother – a heavy smoker herself, enraged by his refusal to smoke – accuses the boy of illicitly smoking and, when he denies it, forces him to smoke a whole packet, the very thing he is determined not to do, disgusted as he is by the smoking and drug-taking of his elders.

Yet the boy is stoic, philosophical. ‘As far I can tell, adults are compelled to do the most improbable and destructive things imaginable, and it’s their children’s job to come to terms with this however they can.’ His is the bleak blessing of endurance.

The boy, too, learns to be brutish. He knows how to men ace the meek; he does so ruthlessly. One teacher he delights in humiliating, only to be introduced to Shakespeare by the same teacher, who notes the effect it has on the boy. ‘I saw it ... I saw you come alive.’ Later, the boy discovers Lawrence and Hardy, loves their characters’ ‘transgressive loves and tragic fates’. Dostoevsky changes his life. His beloved Russians will never abandon him. ‘Literature, and only literature, can be relied on. Literature, only literature, can be trusted.’

He dreams of becoming a poet, an activist, a Buddhist monk, a university lecturer (‘whatever that means’).

By then, though, school has become untenable. At fifteen the boy–man abandons his family and lives in an unfurnished flat in Semaphore without gas or electricity. There is just enough light from the nearby train station for him to read at night. By day he works in a recycling centre, sorting through broken glass and drink containers. Most of the other workers – older, morose – take

drugs during and after work. ‘He is becoming white trash buried in trash, dreaming about trash, merging with it.’

Worse can’t be inflicted on him, but it is, serially.

The narrative is admirably cool. So much happens to the boy, so much is done to him, that he is wary, defensive: ‘[My] true talent is evasion, withdrawal, redirection, perhaps even misdirection – like any good trickster.’ The prose is blunt, diaristic. Any embellishment would be like, well, creative writing. There is humour, of a deadly kind (‘None of his sister’s friends are very bright, but neither is she’).

Just when we’re not sure we can take much more of this, there is an epilogue. Now forty, the author addresses us in the first person. He no longer sees his family, and he would never let his parents anywhere near his two children, of whom he is the primary carer. He has not seen his mother in thirty years. He holds no grudge against her but fears her ‘more than anyone, or anything’.

Reflecting on his undergraduate years at a sandstone university, the author admits to having felt a ‘murderous impulse’ on listening to his polished classmates. Later, tutoring them, he noted that the best of them were the children of judges, academics, and architects – ‘private-schooled and private-tutored’.

It would be impertinent to analyse or patronise the boy so compellingly memorialised in this uncompromising book. Any vindication or overcoming was all his own work. Perhaps, on squeamishly delving into such worlds, we should simply quote the children, the victims of our collective indifference:

What can we do with rage, disillusionment and desperation? Is it possible to hate, justly, without poisoning your own soul? How can we believe in a god, or a society, that permits a single child to suffer?

So the boy asks himself and his discomfited reader. g

Peter Rose’s family memoir is titled Rose Boys (2001).

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Tit for tat

Between Me and Myself: A memoir of murder, desire and the struggle to be free

by Sandra Willson, edited by Rebecca Jennings Text Publishing

$34.99 pb, 326 pp

What could compel a woman to murder a complete stranger? This is the obvious question posed by Sandra Willson’s execution-style murder of Sydney taxi driver Rodney Woodgate in 1959 following the traumatic end of her lesbian relationship with a fellow trainee psychiatric nurse. It is something that Willson grapples with in her searing mem oir, which she wrote over several decades. Posthumously edited by historian Rebecca Jennings, it joins one of a small group of books that provide a first-hand account of the crimi nalisation and institutional repression of lesbianism and gender non-conformity in mid-twentieth-century Australia.

When Willson died in 1999, her memoir was thought lost. Luckily, a friend of hers bequeathed it to Jennings after she gave a paper on Willson’s legacy at an academic conference in Sydney. Jennings describes the arduous task of turning Willson’s 150,000word manuscript, written at different periods of her life, into a highly readable book.

The result is a compelling account of the devastating impact of institutional homophobia, family violence, sexual assault, and the incarceration of women in New South Wales. As to the question of why she killed, Willson herself posits a somewhat strange explanation, saying:

[t]he only choice that was left to me was to pick out a single member of society, as it was society itself that would bear the blame for the way that it had taken from me all that I had ever loved. Barbara, and now Norma! I had lost, and now society was to lose. Tit for tat.

Her broader life story gives the reader some extra clues. Will son begins with an account of her early life as a masculine, gender non-conforming woman in a British-Australian, working-class family plagued by conflict and profound emotional avoidance. A tomboyish loner, Willson was sexually assaulted by predatory adults and then ostracised and bullied by other children because of her gender presentation. At the age of fourteen, she was brought before the Children’s Court and detained at Parramatta Girls Training school after attempting to initiate a relationship with an adult woman.

Willson’s story presents, in vivid detail, an account of the many ways that Sydney girls reformatories sought to control young women’s bodies, including forced gynaecological examinations to detect pregnancies and venereal diseases, and the widespread use

of the powerful anti-psychotic drug Largactil to suppress unruly behaviour in troubled adolescents.

Upon Willson’s release, she meets other lesbians and briefly finds work at a metal workshop, ‘passing’ as a young male by wearing a suit and deepening her voice. She falls in love with another woman and they begin living together as ‘man and wife’ in Bondi. The romance comes to a disastrous end when the police are tipped off, and she is sentenced again for ‘Being Exposed to Moral Danger’. After harming herself, she is sent to a psychiatric hospital in Gladesville. Aged eighteen, Willson then trains to become a psychiatric nurse herself, and begins a relationship with a fellow trainee. The end of that relationship was the precursor to the murder.

Willson is arrested and ultimately found not guilty on the grounds of insanity, for which she is detained indefinitely, known at the time as being held ‘at the Governor’s pleasure’. During this time, she begins writing her memoir. Willson writes about grappling with the ethics of even writing a memoir at all due the pain it would likely cause her victim’s family. Although the writing process caused her immense anguish, her desire to tell her story was so powerful that at one point she even escaped from the psychiatric hospital to post her manuscript to Penguin.

Willson’s insights into her own behaviour are fascinating. From her reflections on her possessive, demanding behaviour towards her first live-in partner to her grappling with the shifting psychiatric diagnoses she receives over the years, Willson depicts a wilful, lively individual who is prepared to interrogate her own values and behaviour in order to heal and to live a life free from violence. The final chapters provide an account of Willson’s efforts to set up the first halfway house for women leaving prison in New South Wales in conjunction with ‘Women Behind Bars’.

Editing and publishing a memoir about complex and con tested topics is not straightforward. Jennings, a historian, under standably footnotes a number of moments throughout Willson’s text where her version of events strays from the official account held in her official prison and psychiatric files. While these foot notes give the book an interesting alternative perspective, they also destabilise Willson’s authority as a reliable narrator of her own life. One wonders how Willson would have felt about the incorporation of these official records into the final text, had she lived to see her memoir published.

An intriguing question about Willson’s gender expression is not addressed by Jennings in her introduction or afterward. Will son describes herself as ‘looking like a man in drag’ in women’s clothes and prefers to wear suits, even gaining employment as a male at a metal workshop. These scenes are reminiscent of Leslie Feinberg’s trailblazing semi-autobiographical transgender novel Stone Butch Blues, first published by Firebrand Books in 1993. Might Willson have experienced her gender differently had she been born in an era of trans and non-binary identities?

So much in Willson’s memoir will fascinate those interested in the history of homosexuality, gender studies, criminology, and psychiatry. It reveals the deep psychological impact of sexism and homophobia, and how quickly a vulnerable person’s life can unravel. As one of the few first-person accounts of the systematic social exclusion of lesbians in twentieth-century Australia, Sandra Willson’s memoir is precious. g

The conflicted life of Sandra Willson

Sam Elkin

The figure in the carpet

The stories we tell ourselves

Robert Phiddian

The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation

by Julianne Schultz Allen & Unwin

$34.99 pb, 472 pp

Anewmonarch succeeded the day I sat down to write this review about the idea of Australia. Prime Minister Albanese, in a blessedly unpoliticised speech about Elizabeth II’s death, was direct in announcing that he and the governor-general would be heading to London, ‘where we will meet the king’.

Ours is an independent nation that was federated under a British imperial monarch in 1901; a European nation in South east Asia; a nation of migrants from many lands, dominated by the institutions and concerns of the Anglosphere; oh, and the land where the oldest continuous cultures persist after 60,000 years. It can be a bit confusing.

No single idea of Australia can weave a golden thread through this mess, and Julianne Schultz knows it. In this generous-minded book, she thinks more historically than analytically about who we are in the light of the X-ray of the nation provided by the pandemic. Her Australia is the overlapping and inconsistent stories that we tell of ourselves, rather than some integrated identity that can be distilled. ‘The idea of Australia, like the idea of a life, is as much shaped by the silence as the stories we tell our selves and the institutions we create.’

This is wise and leads to a capa cious book where each chapter fugues on a consistent set of themes carried through particular stories of conflict and belonging. You could read any chapter in isolation, but the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts. A persistent motif is the rise and fall of hope – hope that we can as a nation live up to the egalitarian and cosmopolitan ideals implicit in Federation and the nationalism of the post-Whitlam era, modulated with fear that we will lapse again into another phase of thin instrumentalism as the ‘Lucky Country’. Too often, we dodge the big issues to dig another mine, reap another windfall, ignore a bunch of injustices, and let tomorrow look after itself.

The Idea of Australia appeared in March, in that period of jittery uncertainty when some hoped and others feared that Paul Keating’s prophecy – ‘When you change the government,

you change the country’ – would be re-enacted. The government has indeed changed, and we seem finally to recognise that the answers of the 1990s no longer fit the pressing questions of the 2020s. Public health, it appears, can outrank economic activity. The market cannot provide affordable housing for all. Workers have woken from the long post-Oil Shock nightmare to discover that they are now the scarce commodity, with serious bargaining power. That whispering in our hearts about the land – who owned it before European invasion; how it will not abide the endless environmental degradation we visit on it – will not be silenced.

Schultz wants a big Australia morally, not just economically, one that recognises the damage of white invasion both culturally and environmentally, one that fosters talent in everyone, not just the traditional pool of ‘bright young men’. Though she resists the ground game of political biffo, it is clear that the most cunning villain in her story is John Howard, whose genius idea that a majority of Australians would choose comfortable and relaxed over cosmopolitan and striving lies at the root of the new mil lennium’s missed opportunities. ‘As prime minister, he would claim the old myths, strip them of their collectivist ethos, contest uncomfortable history and turn red voters blue.’ Stripped back to the marketing minimalism of ‘How good is Australia?’, this line of individualism of the fittest expired in the May federal election. What will take its place?

If Schultz is our guide, it will not be a rootless cosmopolitan ism or a black armband view that denies any real achievements since Arthur Phillip landed at Sydney Cove. No book I have read understands the regionalism of this country’s cultural life so instinctively. She writes luminously of Stradbroke Island, Western Victoria, and Sydney’s inner east as places with layered histories of human endeavour. The different media worlds of 1980s Brisbane and Melbourne come alive with a compelling sense that only in these places can normal business practice look quite as odd as they did. We have attachments to beaches, suburbs, country towns; to religious traditions and football codes; to homelands as distant as Galway and Guangzhou, or as nearby as the Kaurna lands on which I write.

We are, like other nations, shaped by many shared experiences and concerns, and separated by many differences of region, class, race, and gender. Only knaves, fools, and mar keting gurus try to tell us that we are one. Schultz thinks we are ready for a richer and more complex idea of Australia than that.

Near the end, she quotes Nick Ca ter in The Australian, who condemns ‘woke’ as ‘the biggest threat to liberalism, Australia’s riding philos ophy since European settlement’. As a diagnosis, it is ridiculous; ‘woke’ is a noise in the culture wars which thrive as an alternative to making serious material decisions about scarce resources on a finite planet. But the assumption about liberalism as bedrock is worth dwelling on. It reminds me of Mahatma Gandhi’s re

The queen and the duke of Edinburgh watching stockmen round up cattle near Alice Springs, 1963 (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy).

sponse when asked about Western civilisation: ‘I think it would be a good idea.’ A properly liberal Australia, with opportunity, respect, responsibility, and protection spread equally among the twenty-five million inhabitants of the big and little islands – how good would that be?

For Schultz, a liberalism like this is not so much a utopian dream as a historical one. It would be the consequence of the best bits of our past: the constant task for making a fairer, kinder, wiser, and more genuinely prosperous country. But to reach this goal we have to unpick the figure in the carpet of settler Aus tralian culture. In its bluntest form, this is the idea of ‘Australia for the White Man’, a prolific motto in the decades either side of Federation, only removed from the banner of the Bulletin as late as 1961. Less a figure in the weave, that attitude is more like the stench of stale beer in the carpet of a country pub. Renovations and deep cleaning can banish it for a time, but it always returns. The real Australian is an Anglo bloke who reckons everyone like

him deserves a fair go, while others should wait in an orderly and allegedly meritocratic queue – to get into the country, to get the senior jobs, to regain rights to their land.

Around the time of Federation, Australia did become some thing of a working man’s paradise, as long as you were a man, and white, and working. This real and liberal achievement was not then extended to women, or First Nations people, or migrant men unless they were from the right place and assimilated nicely. Schultz, as a woman who has often butted her head against the glass ceiling, reckons it is time to break the grip of paternalistic she’ll-be-rightism and ‘address the structural factors that as a nation and as individuals, prevent us from realising our potential’.

Let us mark the reign of Charles III, the embodiment of mediocre white patriarchy, by giving that one a red-hot go. g

Robert Phiddian is Professor of English at Flinders University and was thrice chair of the Adelaide Festival of Ideas.

Fortune Cookie No Fortune

not quite meandering chi luck more like vermillion songbirds than orange figure maybe nine months postpartum

a Kodachrome print  in a ‘standard’ square-ish size a size no longer a size

a floating island

She learned English from The Young and the Restless a basement waterfall lights up leaning

clay-colored flower pots we grew in the way she sewed  language silent months

back then in Vietnam

‘a mixed child was as good as dead remember the small wrapped cakes  they open to see a flower

‘wet eyelashes’

Hoa Nguyen ❖

Hoa Nguyen’s most recent poetry collection is A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (2021).

Salman’s throat

Living with cancer and a fatwa by Peter Goldsworthy

Restricted to phone consultations due to the Covid lock down and my chemo-blasted immune system, I rely increasingly on the selfies of body parts that patients text me to help diagnosis. My iPhone library of lumps, bruis es, wounds, rashes, boils, red eyes, and even vaginal discharges, grows rapidly, a luminous pathology museum that often reminds me of Dr Azov in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), who examines his future wife through a hole in a sheet and, over the course of many house calls, assembles a jigsaw picture of the complete woman with whom he will slowly fall in love.

I read Joseph Anton (2012), Rushdie’s memoir of his years in hiding, during lockdown, wondering if there might be some lessons to be learned. Not so much for me – after a year of living chemotherapeutically, and months of forced medical detention, I feel like a world authority on quarantine – but for everyone else.

Not that I believe for one moment that our predicaments are comparable: Rushdie was under protective custody for years, in constant danger of being assassinated whenever he ven tured out; my assassin, cancer, is seemingly at bay; when it returns, I will see it coming from a long way off. But the Covid stakes are high, uncertainly high, a viral jihad, with the death rate climbing.

A small personal surprise as I read Rush die’s defence of The Satanic Verses (1988) in his memoir: I hadn’t taken much notice when I first read the novel decades ago that the character Changez is suffering from myeloma, now my illness. The Satanic Verses was the most famous book in the world for a long time, if for all the wrong reasons. Was it Chekhov who said that abuse is the sister of advertisement? Almost everyone at least flipped through the book in the years that followed the fatwa in 1989 – except, clearly, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the murderous tyrant of Iran. He had no idea about it at all. His malevolent stupidity, and the calculated fatwa, added millions to the book’s sales, although this wasn’t much consolation to Rushdie in the terrible years of isolation that followed – or to those murdered by association.

I read this part of Joseph Anton with personal investment. Changez is a fictionalised version of Rushdie’s father, who also died of myeloma, despite being on palliative mustard gas

(aka melphalan, still the first up drug of choice for a stem cell transplant) up to the end. The passages about his father are both difficult and moving.

I had the good fortune to meet Rushdie, briefly, at the 1984 Adelaide Writers’ Week, chaired his session, and even peered down his throat with a torch and tongue depressor, at a time when the only thing he had to worry about in the world was tonsillitis. A few years later he might as well have had cancer; he was under a death sentence. One darkly humorous story from his book: at the funeral of his friend Bruce Chatwin, a few days after the fatwa was announced, another friend, the novelist Paul Theroux, sitting in the pew behind him, leant forward and murmured: ‘I suppose we’ll be back here next week for yours, Salman.’

Funny at the time, but not for many long years afterwards. The cancer of that fatwa, and the cancer of radical Islam – contra Susan Son tag, the metaphor seems appropriate for this malignancy – was spreading and multiplying at a fast rate. Metastasising, in a word. It still is, which is why Joseph Anton remains a crucial read for our times – a lens through which events can be seen more clearly. At times the book feels too long, overburdened with side-detail, and even a little self-indulgent, but that might just be my mustard-gassed attention span. Rushdie has surely earned our infinite indulgence by dint of his courage under fire, and the exemplary courage of those who stood by him. Of course, there are passages of despair, of betrayal by socalled friends, and of the expected cowardice of governments – but the book is a testament to Rushdie’s stoic resilience, black humour, and the loyalty of true friends, of whom he has many.

There are plenty of lessons for me, after all. And for a world under the fatwa of Covid? At the very least, it’s a lesson in the relativity of hardship, a 600-page reminder of one key mantra of stoicism: What have I got to complain about? There are others worse off than me. g

Peter Goldsworthy divides his time equally between writing and medicine. He has won literary awards across many genres –poetry, the short story, the novel, and in theatre. This is an extract from his coming book The Cancer Finishing School

Salman Rushdie, 2019 (Christoph Kockelmann via Wikimedia Commons)

A distant leviathan

Robbie Arnott’s realist new novel Jennifer Mills

Limberlost

by Robbie Arnott Text Publishing

$32.99 pb, 240 pp

Chapters slip forward by decades, slip back again, so that the story filters through time like light through a dense forest. As with Arnott’s two previous books, Limberlost is an immersive experience, a story that is deeply embedded in the language of its environment, drawing much of its power from the places that surround and inform its characters. Ned experiences a version of the problem of scale that plagues us all in the climate crisis: he is buffeted by forces much greater than himself, and cannot make himself immune to loss.

Limberlost

opens with an image of nature as dangerous: a whale, reportedly driven mad or feral by a harpoon in its side, is alleged to be destroying fishing boats in a vengeful spree. Ned is five, and the whale stories haunt him so much that his father takes him out to see for himself. The frightened child waits in a small boat for the animal’s power to show itself.

Though Ned is at the centre of this book’s pared-down nar rative, this is a novel about the encounters between human and non-human lives and the way they intersect with myth, emotion, meaning, and identity. As an adolescent, Ned remembers the whale when his brothers are away at war, itself ‘a distant leviathan’. He remains behind on the family orchard with his father, ‘a quiet, strange man who remained out of reach and unknowable’. Like many a lonely child, he seeks the company of animals, but that company is rarely simple.

Ned’s relationships with animals range from the pragmatic – he kills and skins endless rabbits in the hope that selling their pelts will raise funds to buy a boat – to the more complicated experi ences of attachment, curiosity, and awe. Impulses of care, respon sibility, vengeance, and fear overlap, sometimes in a single page.

Throughout these encounters, Arnott avoid reducing animal lives to a human scale. As in the work of Eva Hornung, the an imal other is always held in deep respect; the non-human world is not subservient to our own, and the lives of animals cannot be completely bent to our will. Limberlost belongs to a wave of contemporary fiction, including work from Laura Jean McKay, Jane Rawson, and Ceridwen Dovey, that attempts to navigate or renegotiate human stories in the context of the non-human.

Ned’s life is lonely, flecked with shame and self-doubt. He has low expectations, hardly dares to dream. The world doesn’t seem to value his empathy for animals, and yet the people around him encourage his silent determination in subtle ways. His desire for a boat gives the simple narrative its motive force, but we glide along as much on the current of Arnott’s lyricism as anything else.

There is a vivid, sensory physicality in the texture of timber, apples, or pesticide spray on the skin, and a few of the grotesque infections that remind us of his characters’ vulnerability to rot. In an otherwise elegiac and plaintive novel, there are also colourful descriptions, like that of a man ‘made mostly of lint, capillaries and brandy vapour’, that artfully sketch whole characters and provide some levity.

Readers who recall the almost manic imaginative daring of Flames (2018) or the otherworldly mysteries of The Rain Heron (2021) might be disappointed by this more realist effort at first. However, though Arnott has cast fabulism aside, he cannot help writing fables. Limberlost retains a mythic quality, partly because of its nostalgic temporality, partly because it is also a comingof-age story.

On the cusp of adulthood, Ned changes along with the land scape. The magical object of the boat provides the kind of tests and transformations that magical objects provide in adolescence and in fairy tales, but the deeper character study here refuses to become a tidy lesson.

Ned’s dominant trait is humility: he ‘wasn’t shaped to be impressed by himself’. His pleasures are a furtive, fugitive affair. He finds solace in nature, in a private, barely articulated wonder, and though he also finds love and family, a part of him remains closed.

There is something interesting about these representations of Australian masculinity: the sensitive hero bruised by a rough world, all hurt feelings and poor communication skills, has a kind of cowboy romanticism, and it would be easy to dismiss Limberlost as another Sad Man in Landscape affair, treading a path well worn by Winton’s characters. But Arnott’s attention to the agency of the non-human gives more depth to the theme. Ned is not decentred, but his feelings aren’t the only event, his life far from the only one that matters.

The deeper wound in these novels of men in nature has always been colonisation; the mythology of wilderness is a prominent complication, particularly in Tasmanian stories. Arnott tries to deal with it by naming the country and its people, a kind of for mal acknowledgment. In one scene, Ned’s daughters try to hold him accountable for his participation in this history. Nothing is resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, but of course it can’t be. For Ned, the problem exceeds the scaler of his life.

Limberlost is a book of difficult small choices: about what to care for, and what to hang on to, and what it’s like to love things and people and animals and places you are powerless to save. Even as it looks back over the twentieth century, there is an Anthropocene tilt to this book’s sense of a world slipping away, its appreciation of human inadequacy.

Stories can put us in our place sometimes. Though scaled right down to a single, humble life, Limberlost is lit up by the energy of that life’s relationships. It serves as a reminder of the complicated position humans occupy, tangled as we are in the webs of interdependence, of pain and responsibility and care, that bind us to a world much greater than ourselves. g

Jennifer Mills’s most recent novel is The Airways (2021).

Years of doldrum

Ian McEwan’s chordal new novel Geordie Williamson

Lessons

by Ian McEwan Jonathan Cape $32.99 hb, 496 pp

John Updike said of his most enduring creation, Harry ‘Rab bit’ Angstrom, that he was a version of the author who nev er went to college. Roland Baine, protagonist of Lessons, is something similar: a McEwan that failed. He’s a man whose early gifts aren’t brought to fruition. His closest brush with literary fame is brief: early marriage to a woman who becomes the kind of artist he could never be. Roland does not possess the requisite ruthless ambition; he lacks the splinter of ice in the heart. He’s a sensualist by inclination and passive by nature – a born helpmeet and second stringer who cobbles together a working life as a lounge-bar pianist and part-time tennis instructor.

That Roland is an apparent declination from his eminent creator is the first virtue of McEwan’s new novel, his longest and most formally ambitious since Atonement (2001). Too often, especially in recent years, McEwan’s works have been stocked with grand figures – scientists of genius, brain surgeons, standard issue éminences grises. But such men of mark (and they were primarily men) were too proximate to McEwan’s own high standing in Anglosphere Letters. They felt like self-aggrandisement by proxy.

Roland is different: he’s rendered porous by his flaws. The long history of the United Kingdom and Europe in the postwar era and early twenty-first century explored by Lessons (a period which, not coincidentally, tracks McEwan’s life) would bounce off those characters who come encased in the solipsism and certitude that can accompany worldly success. Instead we see those years of doldrum, punctuated by convulsive event – periods during which the structures of feeling that shape society buckle and shift – seep into Roland’s bones.

Roland, then, is less an active human agent than an accu mulation of geological strata laid down over time: a man who can stand for the mediocre many. From a core sample of his life, we might, as with Updike’s Rabbit, deduce a ‘report on the state of [the] hero and his nation’.

If the existence rendered in these pages is remarkable mostly for its ordinariness, the novelistic structure containing it is anything but. Lessons’ sole epigraph comes from Finnegans Wake Readers soon sense the strenuous efforts made by the author to honour James Joyce’s circular sense of history, that riverine progress which ultimately returns us to our point of origin.

Roland Baine’s origins closely accord with those of McEwan: early years in Libya where his working-class Scottish father was stationed, a meticulous, rule-bound Captain with the British

army; then a return to England and boarding school in his early teens. Where biography and imagination part company lies in the author’s account of an affair, beginning when Roland is just four teen, with a female piano teacher a dozen years older than him.

Roland is a gifted young pianist, Miriam Cornell an attrac tive, tightly wound woman whose gender has thwarted greater achievement as a musician. Spotting something in her student, she is both jealous and attracted; she doesn’t know whether to punish or coddle him. The result is a sentimental education straight out of Flaubert – or would be, if this were not an Ian McEwan novel. The author instead paints a picture of a preda tory, sadistic, and perhaps deranged woman seeking to entrap an innocent and live vampirically through his talent.

Lessons, then, is a word whose sense shifts from the plainly instructive to the ominously punitive as the chapters pass. These ‘lessons’, hours of passion stolen from schooldays at Miriam’s village cottage, at first feel like a premature coming into manhood for Roland. Only later can we see them as the baseline trauma of his life. The affair and its abrupt conclusion retard his emerg ing talent as a musician, and they waken in him an addiction to physical passion which will deform his life in years to come.

McEwan uses the full breadth of the keyboard in giving account of these childhood events. The novel opens in early mid dle life, at the moment when Roland’s first wife, half-German Alissa, abandons him and their infant son, Lawrence. It returns to those early lessons intermittently as the years pass and Roland ages along with the century.

The novel’s chronological structure is almost chordal. Har mony links Roland’s present with his past. This is not so much Proust’s involuntary memory – accidental recall evoked by a madeleine dipped in tea or uneven cobblestones – but a series of echoes that live on in the sound world of the here and now, as well as pointing towards the future.

If these virtuosic runs back and forth in time elevate Lessons over the usual state-of-the-nation novel, McEwan’s urge to edito rialise remains. The book’s weakest moments occur when Roland is shoved by his creator into proximity with grand events of the era. By chance, for example, he finds himself in the city hours after the fall of the Berlin Wall – and there, among the milling crowds, happens across the wife who abandoned him and their son years before. Such coincidence allows McEwan to opine on the significance of the moment – that triumphal false dawn at the End of History – but it’s one he over-employs. Roland turns up, Zelig-like, at too many other hinge moments. As a schoolboy, his boarding house is adjacent to a US base that is a potential nuclear target during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Much later in life, he marries a woman whose former husband becomes a minister in the Brexit-era Tory government – a screaming caricature of neoliberal hooliganism. The list goes on.

Stronger are moments resolutely private and domestic in scope: for example, the awful interlude after Roland’s wife Alissa

If the existence rendered is remarkable for its ordinariness, the novelistic structure containing it is anything but

leaves Roland and Lawrence, claiming in a farewell note that her talent as a writer is threatened by family life. That Alissa fulfils her promise and becomes a giant of European literature – an Ingeborg Bachmann-like scourge of the established order who eventually succumbs to alcoholism – only drives the point home.

society, culture over time and across space to a single human life lends a subjective focus and emotional anchor to the project. But where Joyce was unabashed in his use of all the stages of human history – Giambattista Vico’s triad of the divine, the heroic, and the human – McEwan seems trapped in the last phase alone. He’s too much the atheist, the rationalist, the intellectual child of Bentham and Mill to entertain truly radical possibilities. He regards politics the same way Philip Larkin regards death: with implacable narrowness.

McEwan also allows surprising tenderness in his depiction of family relations, albeit with a sharp eye for the fractures and torsions that nuclear families exhibit. If Roland’s drifting ex istence is shaped, in part, by reaction to his father’s constricted life, McEwan allows moments of connection between the two to supersede generational differences. Here the author offers forgiveness rather than instruction.

As the decades pass and Roland feels the inevitable intima tions of mortality, the chordal structure of Lessons achieves its fullest effects. ‘What a strange thing to happen to a little boy,’ said then-elderly poet George Oppen, referring to the surprise of ageing. McEwan’s approach means we see how closely boy and older man are connected. They almost co-exist in these pages, playing a four-hander across the decades on the piano in Miriam’s sitting room.

The formal patterning and historical scope of Lessons are impressive. McEwan’s ability to tie Western modernity’s politics,

Lessons reminds us that an essential feature of McEwan’s fiction over time has been the toggle between dark unreason and sunny rationality. So it is that the nightmares depicted in his works have mostly been placed between brackets, either as stand-alone short stories or novellas embedded in longer works. Darkness must not be allowed to contaminate the whole.

For all the effort and talent brought to bear in these pages –the capacious, ironic intelligence synthesising historical material of seven decades and more – McEwan reiterates here a kind of superb, technocratic third-way-ism: a stubborn belief in the secular magic of capitalism with a human face – in progress as ineluctable law.

‘History,’ thought Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, ‘was a tale like any other too often heard.’ What Joyce knew, and what McEwan does not, is that even the most brilliant exposition of long-entrenched ideological positions ultimately leaves readers cold. We must trust, instead, that the artist can remake the world with her art, not just paint the deckchairs and arrange them more efficiently. g

Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011).

Readers soon sense the strenuous efforts made by the author to honour James Joyce’s circular sense of history

Vivid worlds

A new novel from Kamila Shamsie Andrea Goldsmith

Best of Friends

by Kamila Shamsie Bloomsbury Circus $29.99 pb, 315 pp

business family. Khan Leather is run by Maryam’s beloved grandfather. Despite being a girl, Maryam expects to inherit the business from her grandfather, while Zahra, a top student, has her sights set on Oxbridge.

Shamsie creates their world so vividly, swapping the point of view from one to the other. At fourteen, the girls have reached the age when prohibitions against women in Pakistan’s society have gained traction. At the same time as they relish the election of a female president and all the hopes and possibilities this presages, they find themselves subject to increasingly repressive forces in daily life. In their innocence and their budding sexuality, they are vulnerable to the worst that can happen to a Karachi girl of good family, namely, a spoiled reputation. In that culture it takes little to wreck a girl’s future.

During

the pandemic lockdowns in the world’s most locked-down city, I made a survey of the reading habits of friends and acquaintances. While nineteenth-century classics were popular – Austen and Dickens were favourites, Tolstoy too, and Middlemarch – realist fiction, in general, dominat ed the reading choices. Among Australian writers were Christina Stead, Jessica Anderson, and Heather Rose. Other contemporary writers included Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Patrick Gale. One friend read umpteen novels from the Indian subcontinent; it was, she said, her best travel option given the circumstances. Another friend decided to read all of Bellow; he wanted, he said, to discover what everyone had been raving about. At a time when our own life stories were severely curtailed, there was a surge towards the big stories of others.

The primary source for realist fiction is people and their life and times, thus ensuring plentiful and ever-changing raw mate rial. Realist fiction can transport a reader to foreign environments and, at the same time, clarify the reader’s own life circumstances. The best of realist fiction is propelled by creative characterisation, rich ideas, compelling language, authentic settings, and narrative muscle. With realist fiction, you enter a world that appears as if real, and so complete and engaging you do not want to leave. These are exactly the characteristics of Kamila Shamsie’s novels. Since 1998 and the publication of her first novel, In the City by the Sea, through to her eighth novel, Best of Friends, she has shown herself to be a writer for these complex and uncertain times.

Shamsie was born and raised in Karachi. She attended univer sity in the United States, and in 2007 she made London her pri mary home. Her work has received many prizes and shortlistings, most particularly her seventh novel, Home Fire (2017). This novel, drawing inspiration from Antigone, tells an unforgettable story of belief, family ties, identity, and Islamic fundamentalism. The lives of her characters, the ideas she explores, her creative and effective use of narrative structure, and her deft and evocative language make her one of the most absorbing of contemporary authors.

Best of Friends opens in 1988 Karachi, at the time of the death of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and the democratic election of Benazir Bhutto. The best friends of the title are fourteen-year-old Zahra and Maryam. Zahra’s mother is a teacher, and her father is a renowned cricket journalist, giving Shamsie, a cricket devotee, the opportunity to air one of her great passions. In contrast to Zahra’s middle-class background, Maryam comes from a wealthy

A crucial event occurs that will shadow the girls for decades to come. Shamsie’s portrayal of this pivotal incident is sharp and tense, and so authoritatively paced that the fear and confusion ex perienced by the girls, and the tension of their situation is, literally for this reader, breath-stopping. The immediate fallout of the event involves a test of friendship where the blame is shouldered by one of the girls in order to protect the other.

The second half of the novel shifts to London, 2019, and opens with two newspaper articles. The first focuses on Zahra, a barrister turned prominent human rights figure, who heads the Centre for Civil Liberties; the other is an interview with Maryam, now a leading venture capitalist. In a few short pages we learn about the public life and achievements of the two friends, now in their mid-forties. It is a nifty device with irresistible narrative momentum.

The women have chosen such different paths – not surprising given that they were such different girls. Zahra works against the government of the day, while Maryam is happy to work with the government if it means her various financial ventures are more likely to succeed. Zahra lives and breathes social justice, Maryam seems untouched by the various injustices that abound at home and abroad. Zahra, single after a short-lived marriage, is partial to short-and-sharp, no-ties sex, while Maryam lives in a family situation with her partner and child.

Without warning, the crucial event of their childhood gatecrashes their London lives, and the friendship that has withstood so many differences finds itself on perilous ground.

The ending to Best of Friends, a mere twenty pages, does not gel with me. The reader has been immersed in a friendship that has weathered fundamental political and social differences, as well as diametrically opposed personal choices. The ruction that occurs would not – given how well Shamsie has portrayed this complex friendship in the rest of the novel – be so profound. But the ending aside, Shamsie illuminates the fascinating messiness of human relations in this powerful and engrossing novel. Through out her work, Shamsie has created characters who reveal what it is to be different. With wisdom and fictional flair she has shown how the dominant group in society need never reflect on their power and privilege, while those who are oppressed can never forget it. g

Andrea Goldsmith’s most recent novel is Invented Lives (Scribe, 2019).

‘How will it end?’

The terrible ironies of colonial ambition

Brenda Walker

The Settlement

by Jock Serong Text Publishing

$32.99 pb, 302 pp

Athirdof the way through Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, a woman asks her new husband a point ed question about Wybalenna, the desolate Tasmanian community in which she finds herself, a community of duplici tous, expedient, and brutally deranged white men and the First Nations Tasmanians they seek to subjugate. ‘How will it end? His wife had asked him when she first arrived. Will the paddock fill and the people empty? Will there be another paddock after this one, if there are more people coming?’ Her husband, the storekeeper of the settlement, is witness to the grim activities of the governing group. He sees terrible cruelties he is largely powerless to pre vent. The paddock she asks about is a cemetery. She is describing genocide, not through the widespread slaughter of Tasmanian Aboriginal people on their traditional lands, which has been the pretext for persuading them to join the community, but through deaths caused by disease and displacement. Paddocks imply farming. Her question highlights the morbid and seemingly per petual industry of death and colonisation, and its horror. This is the subject of Serong’s confronting novel.

Serong’s previous novels include crime and historical fiction, and his influences are very literary. Traces of Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, and Patrick White thread through his prose, which is often genre-based – the agile plotting and unexpected metaphor of Raymond Chandler is apparent here. By imagina tively revisiting the history of George Augustus Robinson, who played an active part in the removal from traditional lands and attempted cultural suppression of Aboriginal Tasmanians, Serong joins many other Australian writers, including Robert Drewe and Richard Flanagan. The Settlement is deeply connected to history and prior literature through style and subject matter, but its emphatic concern with miscommunication as an instrument of resistance and evasion, and its use of canonical literature at points of crisis and of soundscapes to represent country, are distinctive.

The novel has three parts. The first, set in October 1831, de scribes Robinson’s attempt to locate the Lairmairermener people and persuade them to abandon their land. There can be no trust between Robinson, or ‘the Man’ as he is called at this point, and his so-called emissary to these people, Mannalargenna, who has been trying to resist directives. Mannalargenna’s strategic disen gagement is partly linguistic: ‘He would seem puzzled ... The chief would play at confusion, and it would make the Man even more bellicose’; partly defiant: ‘The chief would either glare at him or

ignore him altogether’; and partly theological – he is guided by a ‘devil’, which certainly distinguishes him from the evangelising Robinson. As one member of the group observes, ‘There wasn’t room for some people to have devils and for everyone to have Jesus.’ These are obvious points of resistance and difference, but there are more subtle disconnections between members of the search party: thoughts are ‘concealed’, experience is ‘hidden’, the understanding of events is ‘private’; perhaps the most significant conversation, where representatives of two First Nations peoples meet, occurs out of earshot. Wordsworth’s poetry, read by campfire light, seems to evaporate into darkness. English literature is out of place here. Direct communication, such as the Man’s statement that ‘We – Englishmen – pursue a duty to bring light to darkness. Civilisation’, is bizarre, especially under these circumstances. This is an oblique story, and the deliberate obliquity is political.

The second part of the novel, set between 1833 and 1835, acts as a bridge between the Man’s contact with the Lairmairermener people and his version of civilisation – a settlement where children are cowed, brutalised, and even killed, and the body parts and arte facts of dead First Nations people are shipped off to buyers in the northern hemisphere. In this section, historical portraits of Aboriginal people – Truganini, Woorady, and Mannalargenna – are accompanied by brief monologues, ostensibly voiced by the artist, speaking directly to his sitter. It’s a one-sided record of conversation in which Aboriginal people are occasionally quoted, but their con tribution is indirect and largely opaque. The text does not pretend to represent them, implicitly pointing to the limitations of such portraiture.

The final and most powerful part of the novel is set at the end of 1835, in the settlement that Robinson, now styled ‘the Commandant’, recognises as ‘a warehouse for the natives’, a place of strange noises and words that mean nothing to him. There is a desolate soundscape in this settlement – ‘[wind] flowed through the tough fronds of the she-oaks, and each frond made a tiny thrum over its fluted surface as it whipped the air and all of them, collectively, built the moaning’. Mannalargenna will not relin quish his distinguishing ochre or his language, and as he dies, less than two months after his arrival, he engages the Commandant in a formal dialogue about the keeping of faith, about trust and protection. This is the core of the matter, the time of reckoning for the Commandant, and Mannalargenna’s blunt appraisal of his actions is an act of direct communication that contrasts with his earlier evasions. It is especially potent because the dying man is aware that his adversary plans to render and sell his remains, and to lie about his salvation.

The Settlement is about the terrible ironies of ambition, an am bition which is founded on the destructive project of colonisation. The Commandant is convinced that his legacy will be literary: his writing will consolidate his version of history and bring him fame. Like the historical Robinson, he documents everything that he can comprehend in his journal. Serong makes the limits of this comprehension clear. The Commandant’s confidence in the endurance of his writing is ironically correct, in that in Jock Serong’s hands it inspires such an accomplished and imaginative refutation of his actions and his faith. g

Brenda Walker is Emeritus Professor of English at UWA.

Survival of the spitefullest

An idiosyncratic allegory Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Lapvona

by Ottessa Moshfegh Jonathan Cape $32.99 hb, 304 pp

‘Lapvona dirt is good dirt,’ say the inhabitants of the titular medieval fiefdom in which Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth novel, Lapvona, takes place. While the descrip tion refers to Lapvona’s rich soil, it could easily be an artistic statement. Moshfegh has long been an author concerned with physical and existential waste, and a vector for protagonists who alternately wallow in and renounce their own muck – from the virginal twenty-four-year-old narrator of Eileen (2015), who abuses laxatives and can’t bear to contemplate her own genitals, to the acerbic sleeping beauty at the heart of her most renowned work, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), to Vesta Gul of Death in Her Hands (2020), a hermetic widow obsessively in vestigating an imaginary murder. The post-plague abjection of Lapvona is therefore fertile ground for Moshfegh to explore the horrors of embodiment that have previously defined her work.

Moshfegh’s settings have always been imaginative landscapes, first and foremost. ‘I just want to see the edge of the building, and then I want to go build it myself,’ she stated in a 2018 interview with The New Yorker, explaining her distaste for in-depth historical research. Accordingly, Lapvona is both idiosyncratic and allegorically vague. There are pastures where shepherd Jude and his son Marek graze their ‘babes’. There are dark woods, home to ancient wetnurse, Ina. There is a lake, which transforms into a Boschian hellscape come summer’s drought. There is a moated manor uphill, where overlord Villiam shuns his subjects’ suffering. There are incestuous bandits. There are tall, fair ‘Northerners’ from rival fiefdom, Kaprov. Vegetarianism is godly. Cannabis grows. Milk springs from wizened breasts. Humans see through horses’ eyes. Perversion is quotidian. Death is a release. So far, so Moshfegh.

Where Lapvona differs most from Moshfegh’s other books isn’t its quasi-historical setting (her 2014 novella McGlue dealt with a murder aboard a nineteenth-century ship), nor its forays into the surreal (she is best known for a book about a woman sleeping for a year). Lapvona’s greatest deviation lies in its eschewal of the entrenched first-person storytelling mode that has become synonymous with Moshfegh since the mainstream success of Eileen. Here, she trades the solipsism of her (primarily disaffected and female) narrators for a roving perspective, reminiscent in scope of Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2021). The plot is the oretically grounded by thirteen-year-old shepherd-boy Marek – a disfigured child of rape, incest, and paedophilia – and the

impulsive crime that leads to his replacing golden boy Jacob as Lord Villiam’s son and heir. Yet this plot feels secondary to Moshfegh’s experimental head-hopping, and Marek is (beyond his initial rebellion) a phlegmatic character, given too little space or charisma to be a compelling anti-hero.

Of course, Marek’s lack of charisma is significant: power doesn’t necessarily belong to the charismatic, nor does the poverty into which Marek is born render him more capable of benevolent leadership than his princely rival Jacob, or Villiam himself – a limp, giddy, eternally bored degenerate, so detached from reality that his own son’s corpse seems to him like a work of theatre, ‘staged for his private amusement’. Power and who wields it, in Lapvona, is mostly a genetic lottery. Those like Marek who snatch at life above their station, or who like Jude and Ina survive in spite of famine, do so out of pent-up ressentiment or blind hunger. Nobody is particularly intelligent, caring, or attached to existence, and the few who are motivated by passion – Jacob, with his penchant for adventure, or his mother, Dibra, in love with horseman, Luka – appear doomed. Survival of the spitefullest is Lapvona’s natural law.

For all the horrors that Moshfegh inflicts on her characters, and they on each other, she is evidently fond of them. She has fun untangling their faiths, foibles, and perversions, and finds humani ty where others may not. Take Villiam’s eventual slide into depres sion, when he is unable to withstand his own bottomless need for stimulation. Or self-flagellating abuser Jude, so lacking in insight that he ponders over his abjection: ‘Hadn’t he been a good man? Hadn’t he prayed enough? Hadn’t he lashed himself correctly? It never occurred to Jude that the capture and detention of Agata … was anything but his rightful duty as a man.’

However, Moshfegh’s enjoyment of her characters only amounts to so much. It is difficult to read Lapvona without think ing of what’s come before, and what might have been. Lapvona’s conceit recalls the Marquis de Sade’s unfinished opus The 120 Days of Sodom, which follows the months-long orgy of four lib ertines and their harem of victims in a secluded castle. As in 120 Days, violence and boredom are bonded in Lapvona; characters are flattened by their overarching damnation, and readers are likely to become desensitised by the sheer excess of human waste. Yet the incompleteness of 120 Days ultimately resensitises, as Sade’s storytelling gives way to lists of victims’ names, methods of torture and murder, leaving a lasting impression of violence without form and of vanity of giving form to violence. Lapvona, by contrast, is controlled. Moshfegh’s elegant, droll prose seems removed from the universal chaos she’s depicting. There is no culmination to the action, no catharsis, no great spiritual growth or death – just a frieze of well-drawn weirdos, loosely connected by setting and lineage. For all its bloodshed, Lapvona can feel bloodless.

If Moshfegh wanted to write another My Year of Rest and Relaxation, centred on the psychology of a single Lapvonian, she could have done so; it might have been a more engaging novel. That Moshfegh attempts something broader here is ambitious. That Lapvona is less than the sum of its parts shows that Mosh fegh is still learning the lay of the land. Good dirt is good dirt, but it doesn’t always yield. g

Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s latest novel is The Newcomer (2021).

Witch marks

Eliza Henry-Jones’s fifth novel Katherine Brabon

Salt and Skin

by Eliza Henry-Jones Ultimo Press

$32.99 pb, 320 pp

Salt and Skin is the fifth novel by Victorian-based writer Eliza Henry-Jones. Following the death of her husband, Luda moves with her two teenage children, Darcy and Min, from Australia to the remote Scottish islands. Luda, a photographer, is employed by the local council to document the effects of climate change on the islands and to raise funds for related activism. They will live on Seannay, a small tidal island off the main Big Island, in the isolated and ramshackle ‘ghost house’ that bears centuries-old markings on the ceilings, ‘witch marks’ thought to ward off evil.

While photographing cliff erosion during her first weeks on the island, Luda inadvertently captures images of a cliff collapsing and killing a local child. Seeing an opportunity for an immediate reckoning with climate devastation, Luda sends the images to media outlets. This ostracises her from the grieving community. The impact of climate change across diverse landscapes is un derscored early in the novel: Min’s memories of waterless dams in Australia, where ‘dried up and strange things emerged from their cracked, curved beds’ contrast with the cliff landslide and viscerally drawn scenes of beached orca whales in the Scottish isles. Henry-Jones, who lives in regional Victoria on a small farm, has spoken about witnessing the impact of climate change in small yet telling ways on her property.

Henry-Jones made her début at twenty-five with the novel In the Quiet (2015). In that remarkable work the narrator, Cate, has recently died. The narrative follows Kate observing her husband and three teenage children as they grieve and move on after her death. A striking ability to represent grief on the page resonates across Henry-Jones’s work. The grief of In the Quiet was acutely personal. In one of many memorable vignettes, the narrator’s sister looks for ways to help her dead sister’s children: ‘Beatrice, unmoving in the children’s clothing aisle at Target. She has two T-shirts in her hands. One is blue with sequins, the other pink with a bow. Her hair is falling out of its clasp and she blows it out of her face.’

The grief in Salt and Skin is individual and collective. In Henry-Jones’s second novel, Ache (2017), told in the aftermath of devastating Australian bushfires, loss is also personal and community-wide in a town partially destroyed by fire. In Salt and Skin there is climate grief, with consequent anger and despair. There is grief over history and lost stories, as Luda researches women murdered on the islands after so-called witch trials in the

seventeenth century. Each is remembered in the archive merely as an ‘unknown woman, accused of charming whales and children, and summoning storms.’ And there is the lost identity of young Theo, who washed up on the shores of the islands as a child with webbed hands and no idea who he was. ‘You know exactly where you’ve come from,’ Theo says to Darcy and Min as he pores over their childhood photo albums, feeling ‘[t]he absence of his own knowing, suddenly present like a fresh bruise.’

Henry-Jones has also published two novels for young adults, P is for Pearl (2018) and How to Grow a Family Tree (2020). This is instructive when we see how Henry-Jones centres young people, particularly teenagers, in her three novels for adults. In the Quiet’s poignantly focused attention mostly centres on the deceased narrator’s three teenage children. In Ache, the protagonist Annie and her young daughter Pip grapple with trauma after moving back to the fire-ravaged town they narrowly escaped.

In Salt and Skin, Luda’s children, as well as the ‘wild found ling’ Theo, are given close third-person perspectives. Darcy and Min’s grief and adaptation on the islands, over the course of the narrative’s three years, make for endearing characters. Theo and Min share a sibling-like friendship, while Theo and Darcy struggle with their mutual attraction. Theo’s alcohol addiction and self-harm as he tears at his webbed hands are devastating: ‘Pissed, he’s just like everyone else. Even with his goddamn hands.’ The multi-perspective narrative creates rich authenticity. We also hear snatches of conversation at the local pub in midwinter, and witness seasonal brushstrokes: ‘Summer comes. The star-dashed evenings disappear … The nights are short. They taste of salt.’

Theo the foundling is the subject of rumour and myth. A writer named Carter snoops around the isles, researching a book about Theo. Carter shows some discomfort on learning that Theo cannot read or write: ‘What are the ethics of writing a book about somebody who can’t read what you’ve written?’ Moral questions about storytelling recur in Luda’s insistence on the greater good of her cliff erosion photos, and in her attempts to investigate the women accused of witchcraft. While this last storyline is less developed, this was perhaps the author’s inten tion, signalled here in Carter’s moment of questioning the right to write about others.

Theo’s potentially mythical identity and other supernatural elements are invoked in a similar way to the deceased narrator of Henry-Jones’s first novel. Grounded in realism, these aspects occur without laboured explanation. On the island, one’s body becomes covered in silvery ghost scars – signs of every old in jury or blemish. This eerie reification gestures to past violence. Looking at the witch marks on the walls and her own scars, Luda reflects: ‘scattered like stars, like stories across the walls and waves of the house, those witch marks’ sit alongside ‘her own history, netted in the scars on her skin’. This style prepares the reader before a major event later in the novel, after which grief and the supernatural overlap more overtly. Aptly on theme with long-erased histories and collective grief, there is no resolution but rather a resonant haunting. g

Katherine Brabon’s most recent novel is The Shut Ins (Allen & Unwin, 2021).

Raking the past

Northern Irish fiction in the age of social media

by Gillian Russell

A‘rake’ of fiction by women from Northern Ireland was published in the first months of 2022, much of which takes the Troubles as its focus, both directly and indirectly. ‘Rake’, a dialect word which crops up across these books, means a significant quantity or gathering of something. ‘Rake’ can also mean to drive a car hard, like ‘hoon’ in Australian English.

The use of such terms in this ‘rake’ of books – Jan Carson’s The Raptures, Wendy Erskine’s Dance Move, Lucy Caldwell’s These Days, and Trespasses by Louise Kennedy – reflects an ease and confidence in incorporating Northern Irish idiom into standard literary English, even if there’s occasional uncertainty as to how these words should be spelled. In her acknowledgments for The Raptures, for instance, Carson thanks her ‘Twitter friends’ for advice about the spelling of ‘boke’, drawing attention to the word’s onomatopoeic, projectile force, in contrast to the Latinate decorum of ‘vomit’. The cognate of boke in Ulster speech, ‘poke’, meaning an ice cream in a cone, occurs in Kennedy’s Trespasses, when the teacher–heroine buys ‘pokes’ for her primary school pupils when out on a daytrip (too many pokes leading to boke).

Carson and Kennedy reject the choice that Seamus Heaney made in his early poem ‘Follower’, when he changed the word ‘wrought’, in a line he’d first written as ‘My father wrought with a horse-plough’, to ‘worked’. ‘Once you think twice about a local usage you have been displaced from it’, Heaney wrote in an essay entitled ‘John Clare’s Prog’, ‘and your right to it has been contested by the official linguistic censor with whom another part of you is secretly in league’.

The title of Heaney’s essay, based on one of his Oxford Lec tures on Poetry given in 1992, refers to John Clare’s use of ‘prog’ in his sonnet known as ‘The Mouse’s Nest’, which begins: ‘I found a ball of grass among the hay / & proged it as I passed & went away’. Though Heaney doesn’t mention it, ‘prog’, like ‘wrought’, is part of Ulster vernacular, meaning to poach or steal. As children in rural Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s, my brothers would ‘prog’ bramley apples from a nearby farmer’s orchard. Clare’s use of ‘prog’ signals an act of incursion into someone or something else’s property, in this case that of a mouse or bird. When I read Clare for the first time I was pleasantly surprised to see familiar words such as ‘prog’, or ‘hirple’, meaning to limp, words that migrated along with the men and women from the English east midlands who colonised the north of Ireland in the early seventeenth century. ‘Wrought’, ‘boke’, ‘prog’, ‘rake’, and ‘bake’ (the latter meaning mouth or beak, as in ‘shut your

bake’) are the flinty residues of Anglo-Saxon English that have combined with Scottish and Irish influences to form the Ulster vernacular. It’s a rich hybrid or mongrel idiom, so it is.

Carson and Kennedy are apparently more comfortable with the vernacular than Heaney was when he changed ‘wrought’ to ‘worked’. They think twice and then carry on with little or no regard for the ‘linguistic censor’, making literary capital out of what Kennedy has described as her ‘inner northern voice’. Born in Northern Ireland in 1967, Kennedy has lived in the south since 1979 after her Catholic family moved to escape the Troubles. Her grandmother owned a pub that was blown up twice in Holywood in North Down, a predominantly Protestant area. She has de scribed leaving the North at this time as a kind of deracination, the most obvious sign of which was quickly losing her accent in order to fit in ‘down south’. Kennedy’s experience curiously parallels that of the actor and director Kenneth Branagh, whose family left Northern Ireland in 1969 for Reading in England, and who also found it necessary to lose his accent. The shock of the Troubles for Branagh and his family was the subject of his Oscar-winning film Belfast (2021), shown in British cinemas at the same time as the ‘rake’ of fiction by women was appearing in bookshops.

Both Trespasses and Belfast are memory pieces, reimagining personal histories and recreating lost worlds. In Branagh’s case, this projection takes the form of the child Buddy who, as per formed by Jude Hill, dazzles in this luminous black-and-white film, signifying the possibility of transcending circumstance and history (to become a knight of British theatre, perhaps). In the posters for the film, Buddy, wielding a wooden sword, seems to be flying. He belongs to a long line of ‘wee muckers’, cheeky swarming children whose presence in Northern Irish cinema goes back to Carol Reed’s IRA film noir Odd Man Out (1947), partly filmed in Belfast, which features actual street kids of the time.

The main character in Kennedy’s Trespasses is another pro jection, the young adult she never was in the 1970s, a Catholic twenty-four-year-old primary school teacher called Cushla Lavery. She has an affair with a much older married barrister, Michael Agnew, a Protestant with progressive, liberal leanings who has named his son Dermot and defends ‘terrorists’ of both sides in the courts. Agnew introduces Cushla to his friends by inviting her to teach Irish to them, Kennedy evoking a milieu of scrubbed dining tables, Aga stoves, and French tureens. The rituals of dining and sociability in the upper-middle-class Prot estant professional classes of the 1970s, who were in many ways

insulated from the Troubles, are contrasted with the meagre meals that Cushla vainly prepares for her alcoholic mother, immersed in grief for Cushla’s dead father.

Works such as Branagh’s Belfast and Trespasses can be seen as symptomatic of a long-delayed response to the Troubles. As well as being ‘expats’, Branagh and Kennedy are of a certain age – sixty-two and fifty-four – when past experience is at sufficient distance to enable ‘safe’ reflection on it. Branagh has said that his screenplay for Belfast was produced during lockdown in 2020, a time of constraint but also of crisis, the unfolding, quotidian urgency of which was analogous to that of wartime, or of the early days of the Troubles. Sometimes wars can take a long time to be processed in the literary imagination, such is the struggle between remembering and forgetting. The literature of World War I occurred in waves, from the ‘war books’ boom of the late 1920s and 1930s, to the canonisation of the war poets in the 1960s, to Pat Barker’s revisionary Regeneration trilogy of novels beginning in the 1990s. In Northern Ireland, the shock of the Troubles was initially marked in poetry, most notably Heaney’s

Belfast, has to minister to a man who is convinced that he killed someone in the Troubles but can’t remember whom, where, or how he did it. Patterson adapts the conspiracy thriller to convey the strange zeitgeist of the immediate post-1998 period, in a way resembling the first moments of returning to consciousness after a nightmare. ‘That which was still had questions to ask of that which is to be’, as he said at the time. That Which Was is a historical novel struggling desperately to be historical, which is what makes it so memorable.

The success of Anna Burns’s Milkman, winner of the Booker Prize in 2018, suggested that there was perhaps sufficient distance from the Troubles, especially for readership outside Northern Ireland, for the topic to sell books and make reputations. The publication of Milkman coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the conflict and marked twenty years since the Good Friday Agreement, an occasion darkened by the murder in 2019 of the journalist Lyra McKee, a self-declared ‘ceasefire baby’. Milkman drew attention to work by Northern women writers such as Carson and Erskine, whose début short story collection, Sweet Home, widely acclaimed, was published in 2018. Stories by Erskine, Carson, and Caldwell appeared in the 2019 anthology Belfast Stories, edited by Paul McVeigh and Lisa Frank. In defining a collective literary response to Northern Ireland’s situation in the second decade of the twenty-first century, especially to a more ethnically diverse city, Belfast Stories deserves to be compared with Fiacc’s The Wearing of the Black.

This ‘rake’ of fiction in 2022 began with The Raptures by Car son published on 6 January 2022, followed in quick succession by Erskine’s Dance Move on 17 February, Caldwell’s These Days on 3 March, and Kennedy’s Trespasses on 14 April. (As I was writing this article, another novel ‘about a shitty wee town in Northern Ireland’, Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen, appeared in bookshops). Whereas in the 1970s the cultural event that was the publication of Heaney’s North was publicised in local and national newspapers such as The Observer and in literary journals such as the Times Literary Supplement or The Honest Ulsterman, book trade publicity is now dominated by the quotidian rhythms of social media and the more immediate presence of writers on the internet.

North (1975) and the less well-known anthology The Wearing of the Black (1974), edited by Padraic Fiacc. The cover of this im passioned anthology wore a simple, even crude, image of heart of green and orange, fractured in two.

There was no commensurate body of prose fiction to compare with the urgency of poetry in the early years of the Troubles, though the 1990s the work of male writers such as Robert McLiam Wilson, Eoin McNamee, and Glenn Patterson be came prominent, linked with a thriving market for thrillers and crime fiction, later made famous as ‘Belfast Noir’. The fiction and journalism of Glenn Patterson has engaged in many varied ways with the historicity of the Troubles – its prologue in the murders of Catholic barmen by the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1966 in The International (1999), the surrealism of the DeLorean experiment in Gull (2016), and (in his essays and journalism) Belfast’s emergence as a party city to rival Prague or Tallinn in the 2010s. His best book, That Which Was, was published in 2004 in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The novel’s main character, a ‘trendy’ Presbyterian clergyman in East

Twitter is these writers’ preferred platform for announcing their publications, book tours, and festival appearances, and also for disclosing aspects of their personal lives such as the fact that Carson is a fan of the hospital soap Holby City or that Kennedy is currently suffering from cancerous melanoma. Readers will comment on these writers’ Twitter feeds, usually to say how much they have liked the books, and the authors usually respond. Erskine is unfailingly gracious; Kennedy’s posts sometimes resort to Irish demotic to make their point, as on 22 June when she indicated that she would be ‘telling youse why youse need to wear sunscreen’ in an interview for Radio Ulster. On the same day, she commended Mick Lynch, the newly famous leader of the railworkers’ union in the UK, as a ‘fkn legend to watch’.

My involvement in these actual and virtual reading communities, which I suspect are mainly female, began with pre-or dering Dance Move, which I bought on the day it was published from an independent bookshop. To mark this (exactly for whom I wonder?), I tweeted a photo of the book in my flat, next to a bunch of flowers. I’ve also attended online book talks by both

Jan Carson (Jonathan Ryder/Penguin Random House)

Carson and Kennedy. Soon, I’ll probably listen to what Kennedy has to say about sunscreen on Radio Ulster, though having lived in Australia for many years I don’t need to be convinced of the need to use it.

As an academic in an English department, studying texts mainly from the past, I cultivate a professional detachment that includes maintaining a separation between reading for work and reading for leisure. Though the latter kind of reading is tremen dously important to me, probably more important than what I study, I have never gone so far as to pre-order a book or follow a writer on social media. My normal prac tice is relaxed enough to locate books by browsing in a bookshop or by following up a review in a newspaper. Now I know much more about these writers than I probably want or need to know such as Carson’s culinary adventures on a book tour to the Dominican Republic or her views on Lidl’s sharp vintage cheddar. I am seriously concerned though about how Kennedy is faring.

The particular one-sided relation ship I have developed with these writers is due not only to the faux intimacy of Twitter, but also to the curious historical coincidence of the publication of their books, sometimes within days of each other – a mini-tsunami of fiction I felt I needed to read. As with London buses, you wait for ages for a novel like Milkman, then four, five, or six come along in the space of a few months. Being there at the bus stop when they arrived, so to speak, has been important in adding another dimension to reading these books – an awareness of how they resonate with the sense of grief and isolation of the pandemic in which they were largely written, the continuing fragility of the Northern Ireland settlement, and also the war in Ukraine. Before ‘recovery’ could even begin to be contemplated in 2022, it seemed further away than ever.

Like Patterson’s That Which Was, these novels are historical fictions, more securely grounded in the ‘past’ than Patterson’s book because of ever-increasing distance from the immediacy of the Troubles. Caldwell’s These Days is set during the Belfast Blitz in April and May 1941. With echoes of Sarah Waters and Virginia Woolf, the novel spans the geography of Belfast, from Sydenham near Belfast Lough and the shipyards to the legend ary Floral Hall, an Art Deco dance hall close to the Belfast Zoo looking down on the city from where the protagonists can see the German bombers coming in on their path of destruction. These Days digs beneath the layer of the Troubles to excavate a different but no less painful historical trauma, one not self-inflicted but visited upon Belfast by a foreign enemy. The Raptures begins in 1993 on the eve of the first IRA ceasefire and taps into the sense of the 1990s as a between times, bracketed by the ceasefire and

the Good Friday agreement of 1998, a decade now indelibly associated with the fantasy of Northern Irish girl power that is the Derry Girls television comedy series.

Hannah, the eleven-year-old heroine of Carson’s novel, belongs to an evangelical Protestant family living in the small rural town of Ballylack in east Antrim, an area and a religious community that has been largely ignored by writers. Hannah is the opposite of the in-your-face Derry girls, a quiet ‘good girl’ whose world is shaken to its core when, one by one, her classmates fall sick and die of a mysterious illness. Her classmates visit her as ghosts to tell her of the otherworld they now experience, a Ballylack in which there are no adults and they can do what they like but which they can never leave. Hell is being stuck forever young in a boring Ulster village. The Raptures, like Caldwell’s novel, deals with the sudden visitation of suffering upon a community (relevant to both the Troubles and the pandemic). What happens to Hannah when she succumbs to the disease resembles the fiction of Marilynne Robinson in seeking, am bitiously, to explore explanations for human experience in religious terms, particularly the possibility of a miracu lous transcendence of pain and suffering. Hannah’s fate is an allegory of a possible future for Northern Ireland at the end of the 1990s, the confidence of the murdered Lyra McKee, whom Carson invokes in her acknowledgments, that ‘it won’t always be like this. It’s going to get better’. However, any optimism that the novel might suggest is undermined by the historical fact of McKee’s murder, as well as the fate of Hannah’s teacher who echoes McKee’s words at the beginning of The Raptures and later succumbs to the disease and dies. In Northern Ireland hope is always hard to hold on to, always precarious.

Trespasses is more conventional than Carson’s novel in nar rative terms, having no ghosts except for the real-life ‘living dead’ of the paramilitaries or Cushla’s grieving mother. As in The Raptures, the heroine of Kennedy’s novel survives. We encounter her in the ‘present’ when she meets the grown-up Davy McGe own and we learn that she is married with children and has had a ‘normal’ life. The darkly glittering 1970s Belfast of the novel, the roadblocks, the no-go areas, is only partially seen as Cushla moves across the city at night, often driven by Agnew. The locus and heart of Trespasses is Cushla’s parents’ bar, depicted in sensory detail, never more so than when Cushla arrives after the bar is bombed:

The carpet squelching beneath her feet, the high stools at the counter tossed aside, as if there had been a brawl. Shards of plasterboard dangling from the ceiling. The jade-green upholstery brackish

Louise Kennedy (Steven May/Alamy)

from the firehoses, pieces of coloured glass scattered on the tables like boiled sweets. Behind the counter, bottles fizzling on the lino, oozing beer and ginger ale and stout. The shelves had collapsed. She began to lift pieces of debris, moving them aside with her hands and feet. She found the small plinth on which the whiskey dogs had sat; the Scottish border terrier was intact, a pair of chalky paws all that remained of the Westie. The bottle of green chartreuse. The Babycham fawn, which had under-eye circles of smoke.

A bar features in another episode of the book when Cushla goes with a work colleague to the Lyric Theatre to see a pro duction of Brian Friel’s Philadelpha Here I Come! (1964) and encounters Agnew when they have a drink at the interval. Then, as now, the Lyric Theatre is situated in the Stranmillis area of Belfast, close to the uni versity and the upper middle-class Malone Road. The main character of the play is played by ‘a big man with a north Antrim accent’, with ‘terrible anguish in his lines, in his delivery’. Kennedy does not make it explicit (perhaps anticipating a future scholarly note or some internet sleuthing) that the actor was a young Liam Neeson, then twenty-four years old.

I didn’t need to check this detail be cause I knew that the novel was referring to an actual event and specifically to Neeson, as I was there too. I was taken to see the play by a teacher and his wife, since I was studying a special subject on Friel for my A-levels. This was the first time I had been to the theatre, and the Lyric bar features significantly in my memory of the occasion as during the interval my teacher asked me what I would like to drink (I was old enough to have alcohol) and I nervously requested a Babycham. (Babycham, I discover from Wikipedia, was invented as a low-alcohol drink in the 1950s especially for women. It was marketed in television advertisements featuring the Bambi-like fawn that, besmirched, survives the bombing of the Lavery pub).

Kennedy was nine years old when Neeson appeared at the Lyric Theatre so it is unlikely that she saw him herself. She may be using the memory of a relative or friend, or she has thoroughly researched the cultural life of the liberal middle classes in Belfast in the mid-1970s. In a curious reversal of my following of Kennedy on Twitter, when I came across the Lyric Theatre episode I felt that she was uncannily following me. Going to see Philadel phia Here I Come! in 1976 was one of the stories of my growing up that I have told to myself and others over the years – seeing the then unknown Liam Neeson and my embarrassing choice of a Babycham because it was the only brand of alcohol I knew. The Lyric Theatre episode in Trespasses is important for how it explores the boundaries of class, confessional identity, and cultural knowledge that Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew have to navigate. In 1976, I was taking my first baby steps in using education as a way of getting out of my equivalent of Ballylack (or Ballybeg in

Friel’s play), inevitably entailing a scouring away of what Heaney called ‘local usage’, words such as ‘prog’ or ‘hirple’, phrases such as ‘I laughed into myself’.

Literary Twitter, as with many other aspects of social media, has intensified and amplified the affective investments we make in reading, especially prose fiction. We feel we ‘know’ the writers in very different ways than, for example, Heaney was known as a public figure in the 1970s. Via their Twitter posts, we get momentary glimpses into what these women are doing, thinking, feeling, or suffering, in ways that can make you feel like a voyeur, even of your own life, as Kennedy’s Trespasses did to me. The latter is freakishly accidental of course, but the coincidence renders it impossible for me to view the novel with the critical distance in which I was trained.

This ‘rake’ of books suggests how social media and the internet are transforming relationships between writers and their readers, especially in circumstances where, for some readers, history is still directly personal, still not safely confined to ‘the past’. Fiction can penetrate daily lives and experiences in unpredictable and unknow able ways that ramify the potential of the literary, for example in the way Lyra Mc Kee is a de facto presence or ghost in The Raptures (as possibly I am in Trespasses). Historicity can assume a dizzying, vertig inous momentum, accessing the experience of the Blitz in These Days, for example, in ways that metamorphose the layers of Belfast’s many pasts and presents, making them indistinguishable.

Most importantly, social media re configures the temporality of the reading experience and ultimately what the book is, situating the ‘life’ of a book more em phatically within daily experience, with its white noise and profoundly meaningful but evanescent contingencies, thereby making the novel form itself more ephemeral. How will the literary scholar of the future be able to write a history of fiction by Northern Irish women in 2022 in these terms (if she wants to do so?). What will ‘the archive’ consist of? Inevitably the timeliness of these fictions will wane, but at this point I want that timeliness to keep going, to ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ the extended ‘book’ that Jan Carson and especially Louise Kennedy, for the meantime, keep writing. g

Gillian Russell is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. Her most recent book is The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, sociability, and the cultures of collecting (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She was born and educated in Northern Ireland and has taught at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. ❖

This commentary is generously supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Lucy Caldwell, 2007 (David Sandison/Independent/Alamy))

Experimental flair

Three new short story collections Alex Cothren

Unexpected Turn’. And when the airplane seat in ‘22F’ complains about office politics, it worries most about colleagues ‘twisting a knife in your tray table’.

Flynn is a consistently amusing writer – Mammoth won the Russell Prize for Humour – but his search for laughs ends up blending too many of these disparate creatures into a single, unmistakably human voice. When Flynn does experiment with voice, the stories get a notable lift. See, for example, the unpunc tuated rush of the rifle in ‘Shot Down in Flames’: ‘humans are simply tools you need one to get the job done they’re little more than a necessary inconvenience’. Or – trigger-warning here – the chilling arrogance of the virus spreading throughout the world in ‘Straits of Magellan’: ‘Once we know them all, there will be no wants, no needs, no fear.’

There’s

a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for ex posing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’

Rawson’s logic might bode ill for three new Australian short story collections, all of which exhibit an experimental flair liable to scare off the trilogy crowd. For example, Chris Flynn’s Here Be Leviathans (University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 240 pp) doesn’t even extend the courtesy of allowing its readers a human guide. Instead, all but one of the stories are narrated by either an animal (bear, fox, platypus, sabretooth tiger) or object (airplane seat, gun, hotel room). The collection is part of a wave of Australian works giving voice to the non-human, including Flynn’s own Mammoth (2020), which featured a Greek chorus of prehistoric fossils chatting in a museum.

The potential for communicating with non-humans is raised in the opening story, ‘Inheritance’, where a grizzly bear achieves rudimentary dialogue with his hunter and asks, ‘what wonders might our species achieve together if further discussion were possible?’ Flynn’s answer: dad jokes. ‘Our kind prefer not to employ the term “bearer of bad news”,’ says that same bear earlier in the story. ‘Diane and Hector’s marriage was wearing as thin as my carpet,’ quips the hotel room in ‘A Beautiful and

The latter story, which Flynn swears he wrote before the real pandemic, also stands out for containing a sense of danger for its characters. There is plenty of action elsewhere – crocodile attacks, crash landings, and deadly traps – but nothing a cheeky pun can’t fix. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: stories like ‘A Beautiful and Unexpected Turn’, with its nuanced exploration of polyamory, are welcome rays of positivity in 2022. But for all Flynn’s interspecies curiosity, his human heart proves difficult to hide.

There

is no doubting the stakes in Else Fitzgerald’s début collection, Everything Feels Like the End of the World (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 252 pp) Across thirty-seven stories, the collection traverses a scarily feasible arc of climate change apocalypse, beginning in the near present and ending thousands of years in the future. This approach of skipping across generations has been used effectively before in works about cli mate change, including Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015). But Fitzger ald’s attempt stands out because of the vast temporal span it tackles, and the sheer variety of epochs it stops at along the way. With many stories only a few paragraphs long, the structure’s effect is akin to watching humanity quickly dissolve via flipbook.

The collection is essentially divided in two, with the first half mostly focusing on young people struggling to find meaning against a backdrop of rampant bushfires, drastic water shortages, and violent civil unrest. There is a potent ache to these stories, powered by Fitzgerald’s ability to allude to global collapse through small, domestic details, such as an ‘hourglass shower timer’ or withering tomato plants ‘tied against the stakes like something crucified’. Her attempts to crowbar the imagery of climate change into unwieldly metaphors are less welcome –‘My want sheared off into your mouth like those icebergs calving into the sea’ – but these early stories are otherwise perfect jewels of quiet devastation.

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The collection changes halfway through after the story ‘How Dark the Nights’, a flash piece sketching an abandoned Melbourne ‘quiet with no more trams’. From there, the everyday details of the first half are replaced by science-fiction novums: virtual reality, solar shields, memory emulation, and human-ani mal hybrids. The heavy exposition required for these stories means they rub awkwardly against the earlier semi-realist fare and stories such as ‘Feed’ and ‘Final Broadcast’ are little more than plotless information dumps. In contrast, other stories, like ‘Fibians’, with its Asian-infused canal-city of Yarratown, offer glimpses of fascinating worlds that deserve to be explored in longer works.

These two distinct halves are linked by the theme of children, in particular the question of whether the human instinct to pro create remains ethical in the face of the climate crisis. In the early stories, characters debate whether it is cruel to have children when ‘there’s nothing here to leave them’, or if it is in fact a hopeful act of ‘defiance, not surrender’. This contemporary dilemma then shapes an entire society in the latter half’s most powerful future vision, ‘The Gift’, where the birth of a child requires the sacrifice of an older family member. When a character explains that law’s necessity via reference to the ‘Great Dying’ of a past civilisation, it’s hard not to turn back to the start of the book and pray that it all takes a different path.

AnneCasey-Hardy’s début collection, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls (Scribner,$29.99 pb, 240 pp), also weaves together many of its otherwise diverse stories with the thread of children. In the Peter Carey Award-winning story, ‘Literally Beside Myself’, the borders of reality become hazy for a sleep-deprived mother, her nightmares of crumbling ba bies melding with Viking sex fantasies and ABC Kids. It feels as though Casey-Hardy wrote the collection in such a dream-like state herself, as she frequently melds the bizarre and the everyday in the manner of that great American surrealist, Joy Williams.

As the title suggests, Casey-Hardy’s narrators are exclusively female. Stories such as ‘New Years Eve’ and ‘The Wailey Willow’ are written from the vantage point of pre-teen girls, mining horror from an age in which the rich imagination of childhood fuses with the fever of onrushing puberty. Meanwhile, the worst horror of all – the loss of child – is explored obliquely in stories such as ‘I’ve Been Waiting So Long’, where a grieving nanny wanders a mansion straight out of The Turn of the Screw, hoping that ‘within this secretive house lies a chance for transformation’.

Readers might get a little lost themselves within these stories, where hidden themes are buried deep beneath layers of lush detail. For Casey-Hardy, every canyon is ‘shale pink and russet gold’, and every plant in sight deserves a mention: ‘Blurred sage green brush with straggling gum trees, she-oaks shrank into their spider-grey feathers.’ Occasionally, there is a hollowness at the core of this extravagant decoration, or a sense of being weird for weird’s sake. Mostly, however, stories like ‘Familia Sangre’ use their flurries of near-psychedelic description to show us the world through the tilted lens of grief. It is just the sort of perspective shift that makes a daily fiction-booster so important. g

Alex Cothren holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Flinders University.

Killing in the name

A familiar story Declan Fry

His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa Bantam Press

$35 pb, 432 pp

no intention of reviewing this book. What is there to review? The story it tells is one we are told every day. It does not need telling. You know it already – a story that is not a story at all.

Ihave

So let’s begin somewhere else. Let’s begin at the beginning.

Sharecropping was ripe for abuse, and many Black families were stuck in an economic sand trap that left them hardly better off than their enslaved ancestors. At the end of harvest season, White landowners often told their tenants that, after tallying up the expenses and the crops, they had come out even – or, worse, that they were further in debt.

America is always trying to tell a story it has already decided upon, after the pilgrims left Plymouth, after the word New began to be appended to the world, and to those parts of it that were never ‘Old’ nor ‘New’ but sovereign, standing in another timeline – then stolen, then erased, just as the pilgrims erased their own histories and belongings to set sail – the part that was left out as slave ships sailed, carrying Black cargo as if it was any ordinary thing. sailing ships freighted with human CARGO, ships sailing halfway across the globe humans held captive inside – another theft –

Floyd never stole anything and, born in 1973, grew up listen ing to Public Enemy and how, in a Malcolm X speech excerpted in the intro to their song ‘Can’t Truss It’, we are told ‘It seems inconceivable,’ and that it seems inconceivable because ‘There are more records of slave ships than one would dream’ – until you reflect that for two hundred years ships carried cargoes of slaves. But George Floyd did not need the reminder. For him it was both and neither. Inconceivable, and also irrelevant: that timeline was over. The ship had sailed.

Born enslaved in 1857, George Floyd’s great-great-grandfather Hillery Thomas Stewart spent his childhood working without pay in the sizzling fields of Harnett County, North Carolina. But by the end of the nineteenth century, after more than thirty years working as a free man, he had managed to amass five hundred acres of his own farmland.

Over the course of Hillery Thomas Stewart’s lifetime, North

Carolina legislators sought to prove that a free Black man, having ownership of their labour, could never achieve self-sufficiency in the American South. Laws were enacted to strip Thomas Stewart of his land and his possessions. He died penniless. Nothing per sonal. Just structural. City leaders in Wilmington were selected from the ranks of white supremacists, and laws were enacted to protect poor whites who could not read, a ‘grandfather clause’ for those whose lineal ancestors were eligible to vote as of 1 January 1867, the year Congress legalised suffrage for Black America.

In 1901, George Henry White, the sole Black member of the House, spoke of a phoenix-like return for his people. It would be seventy-two years – 1973 – before a Black person from the South would again serve.

‘I used to think it was nice in Minnesota,’ Philonise said. ‘But they’re killing Blacks.’

I used to think it was nice in Minneso ta, but then George Floyd’s brother Phil onise said what some of us struggle to say. I used to think it was nice in Minnesota, but then George Floyd’s daughter Gianna said what none of us want to say – although never as much as Black America does not want to feel it: ‘Daddy had trouble breathing.’

George Floyd suffered from claustrophobia throughout his life; Gianna’s mother told her daughter her father had died because of breath ing difficulties. The benign complications of inhabiting a body.

Philonise had trouble breathing, not only in the courtroom where a prosecutor instructs you, ‘Dear Honorable Member of the Jury, try touch ing your Adam’s apple’ – and then you place your hand above your Adam’s apple – the part of the neck where Derek Chauvin placed his knee, far more vulnerable than the rest of the organ – and for a moment you realise: the truer story takes into account what the simpler one does not.

Because one story takes into account the life, not just the mur der. Because in White America, ‘Daddy had trouble breathing’.

Genevieve Hansen, the EMT who urged officers to check Floyd’s pulse, told prosecutors she would be unwilling to watch the video of him dying. When they insisted and played it for her one day, Hansen plugged her ears with her fingers and closed her eyes and started to scream.

Like many, to this day I still have not seen the full video of Floyd’s murder. I refuse. I am Donald Hooker Jr, activist and chess coach, staring at Floyd’s neck ‘cranked under the weight of Derek Chauvin’s knee’ before bursting into tears. ‘He stopped watching’, we are told, ‘after forty seconds.’

And if I hold up my hand and say It is my hand and you say It is my hand and then you see that it is my hand, know it is my hand, you will say: that is my hand. My neck is your neck.

You can take it.

‘This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress,’ White declared on January 29, 1901, a few weeks before he left office. ‘But let me say, phoenixlike he will rise up someday and come again.’

I began reading His Name Is George Floyd at its final chapter. It is the one I keep returning to – not because I wish to, but because it is the one that keeps happening. The chapter is called: ‘American Hope’. The ending, the finality, and then the promise. Messianism with – or without – recourse to the messianic.

As I read the last chapter, I thought But it’s all over anyway. And then I thought: But because it is all over we can still make space. For what has ended. We can honour conclusions. And also: But because it is all over we allow it to keep on happening. Not because we are Americans – we aren’t – here, it’s First Nations

we kill, in ways both similar and different from the settler co lonialism of Turtle Island – but because we live with too many foregone conclusions and because, for some of us, life seems to be already foregone anyway.

I had no intention of reviewing this book. What was there to review? The story it told is one we were told every day. It was a story that did not need telling.

You know it already. It is a story that is not a story at all. If you want to see it, put down this review – this review that is not a review – and not a refusal, either, by the way, just an admission – go, and look out of the window. It is all there.

Now begin. g

Declan Fry is a writer, poet, and essayist. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, in 2020 he was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and awarded the 2021 Peter Blazey Fel lowship for the Meanjin essay ‘Justice for Elijah or a Spiritual Dialogue With Ziggy Ramo, Dancing’.

George Floyd mural in Manchester, 2020 (Sam Pollitt/Alamy)

Poet of the Month with Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming is the author of the collections Failed Love Poems (2015) and The Same as Yes (2011) from Te Herenga Waka University Press, and the chapbooks Two Dreams in Which Things Are Taken (Duets, 2010) and Some People’s Favourites (Desperate Literature, 2019). Her post-collapse verse novel Song of Less was published by Cordite Books in 2021. She holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University, and lives in Melbourne.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Homer, Sappho, Hopkins, Dickinson, Yeats, Lorca, Stein, Rilke, Rimbaud, Francis Ponge, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch (and the poems by the kids he taught in New York public schools), Sylvia Plath, Zbigniew Herbert, Hone Tūwhare, Donald Justice, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Alice Oswald, Maggie Nelson, Natalie Diaz, C.D. Wright, Bill Manhire, Dinah Hawken, and Eileen Myles – to name a few.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, if a poem doesn’t originate in the body, in the gut, it’s usually a plotting of the forebrain, an attempt to ‘say something’, and should be ignored.

What prompts a new poem? Misunderstanding, miscommunication, misalignment. A tension in memory that asks to be worked out on the page. A pretty and itchy thread of words that rises up from nothing. Other people’s extraordinary poems.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry? An absence of personal turmoil helps. I can’t write in the midst of grief or in the electrified shower of giddiness or love. Life events have to compost before I can make language out of them. Space to oneself, a room of one’s own, ideally, though I’ve almost never had that. Also, an almost embarrassing amount of free time.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

As a younger writer I used to fill notebooks with screeds of automatic writing, a process of ‘clearing the mud from the hose’ before the clean water could flow. Nowadays, the notebooks are usually filled with quotations and notes towards an idea. I tend to wait, now, until the language is pretty well formed in the body before I put it on the page. Then, endless tinkering drafts.

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why? I would like to break bread with Emily Dickinson, to ask her

who she was addressing in her ‘Master’ letters. She was an exceptional baker.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

I hate being asked about favourites. It feels like being asked to commit to a first tattoo. But let’s go with Jordie Albiston’s The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998) – a masterwork of history, empathy, music, and tone.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? Friendship and conversation are among the pillars of my life. They hold up my roof. Without them, I could never make a poem or any good thing. That said, when in the midst of writing work, please leave me the hell alone.

What have you learned from reviews of your work? I have to say that I’ve learned less from reviews than from my writing friends, and from my editors, who are smart enough and generous enough to point out my acts of blindness.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be? I’d say Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’, but that would already be allowed under the rubric of ‘hymns to the gods’, and besides, that’s one of the ones I have memorised, and not even Plato could take it from me.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)? Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck trying to recite ‘The boy stood on the burning deck.’

(Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Casabianca’)

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public? We’re living in inattentive and shouty times, and poetry asks us to slow up a bit, reread, pay attention, quieten down. My bookseller friends, however, tell me poetry is selling well, selling better every year, so maybe in these times of compounding crises the reading public is craving a slowdown. g

(Limbo Agency)

Imitating Rural Imitation: After Robert Browning’s ‘Two in the Campagna’

I

This place we live is termed ‘rural’ or ‘countryside’ by arrangement with or of the planters of grains, the breeders of animals for slaughter, by conservative vote.

II

But we’re entangled among stalks of wild oats, amidst firebreaks, trying to coax that native bush back to have its say, to undo the rural we are entrenched in.

III

I always think of you when I’m troubled by my presence – the rocks that affect me but can’t know me, the marks of weather in the soil, a honeyeater’s heritage.

IV

I spend so much time both outdoors and in studying those insects which ‘no one’ seems to be very familiar with, or rather feel lost because they can’t pin a name.

V

In this niche, this valley backed by vast plains now made bare by yellow De Stijl modified canola framed as science meets edibles; trials to boost outcomes ghost those genes.

VI

And I don’t forget each day as it runs into night, as each leaf floats or is tossed onto the roof, as the possum rearranges to suit its own intensities.

VII

Can it be said that we have known ourselves beneath the ghostly trees, a fertility in the dry sclerophyll forest? With such mixed experience, interlaced thoughts?

VIII

There is a politics to our presence; there is repetition in how we interpret that first welcome and what was done in its name by those who made the rural.

IX

I so easily enjoy food you make, so readily ‘partake’. The interjections of labour. The less than synchronous bodies that we arrange in this setting.

X

Inexorably, but often joyfully, said once then again –that reassurance we locate in greenness rising from that dirt –tautology and paradox.

XI

The first lashes of a spider flower, planted in specks of fool’s gold, a glitter that pierces cloud to send sun back, overheating. We are within that red assay.

XII

What did we learn in Rome that we can’t learn here? The ruins of farms, the ruination of ideas fusing ‘agrarian’ with ‘song’? That was already here.

John Kinsella

John Kinsella’s recent books include Collected Poems: Volume One (1980–2005) – The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022).

Nuclear Australia

Uranium diplomacy in a changing world

Jessica Urwin

Fact or Fission: The truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions

by Richard Broinowski Scribe $35 pb, 352 pp

On 15 September 2021, Scott Morrison announced his government’s commitment to a defence pact and nuclear submarine deal with the United Kingdom and United States. Abbreviated to AUKUS, this collaboration sent shock waves through ranks of diplomats, security analysts, anti-nuclear advocates, and members of the Australian public. In signing the AUKUS pact, Morrison signalled Australia’s termination of a $90 billion submarine deal with the French government and reignited concern over Australia’s role in fuelling nuclear proliferation and potential conflict. Drawing upon ‘insider’ knowledge as a former diplomat, Richard Broinowski has con tributed to the discussion by placing AUKUS in its historical context in an updated edition of his book Fact or Fission? The truth about Australia’s nuclear ambitions, originally published in 2003

Like its first edition, the updated iteration of Fact or Fission? takes its reader on a journey through Australia’s nuclear policy his tory from the 1940s to today, beginning with the eminent careers of Professor Mark Oliphant and H.V. (‘Doc’) Evatt and ending with AUKUS. Taking a policy focus, Broinowski demonstrates the role of diplomats and experts in shaping Australia’s early nuclear ambitions by exploring Australia’s postwar interest in contributing to a Com monwealth nuclear posture. This focus early in the book foreshadows the role Australia would come to play as a middle power in global nuclear diplomacy through the later twentieth century. In developing this narrative, Broinowski discusses at length Australian diplomats’ debates over, and involvement in formulating, international nuclear safeguards, guided by Australia’s alliance with the United States.

Entwined with Broinowski’s discussion of nuclear safeguards are the history and politics of uranium. Describing Australia as ‘the Saudi Arabia of uranium’, Broinowski reveals how various prime ministers – from Robert Menzies through Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and John Howard –have approached the issue of uranium mining while remaining amenable to their ‘great and powerful friends’. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Australia failed to make the most of potential uranium profits due to concerns that exporting the mineral to France and Japan would undermine Australia’s relationship with the United States. Despite this, by the late 1970s uranium mining and exportation were a major part of the government’s agenda.

Australia’s exportation of uranium has been historically justi fied, at least by Fraser, as contributing to the global non-prolifera tion agenda by controlling who receives Australian uranium. This

is an illusion Broinowski demystifies. He demonstrates that the tracing of Australian nuclear material has always been impossible. Ultimately, the mining and exportation of Australian uranium has not been bound by the global non-proliferation regime, but driven by a desire to appease the Australian mining lobby and to safe guard Australia’s defence alliance with the United States. Such priorities, Broinowski posits, have degraded Australia’s nonproliferation credentials over time. AUKUS may be the final blow.

In this context, among others, Australia’s commitment to its defence alliance with its ‘great and powerful friend’, the United States, is a topic of contention throughout Fact or Fission?. We can certainly count Broinowski among its critics. He dwells for some time on Howard’s approach to the nuclear between 1996 and 2003. Howard’s policies, Broinowski argues, reflected his blind subser vience to President George W. Bush. Due to post-9/11 instability, Australia’s deference to the United States on all matters relating to Australia’s defence appeared especially dangerous to Broinowski at the time Fact or Fission? was originally published. Morrison’s comparable obsequiousness forms part of the book’s update.

To bring the story up to date, Broinowski has added a final chapter on Morrison’s commitment to AUKUS. In doing so, Broinowski has had to grapple with the eighteen-year gap be tween the first edition’s publication and the current period of considerable change in Australian – indeed global – nuclear diplo macy. Arguably, it is Broinowski’s conclusion, not his discussion of AUKUS, that demonstrates most acutely the developments in nuclear diplomacy since 2003.

Notably, fears of nuclear terrorism have given way to fears over China’s rise. In the introduction to Fact or Fission? –unchanged since 2003 – Broinowski argues that the 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrate the potentially devastating consequences of nuclear terrorism in the early 2000s. In 2022, the mention of Al Qaeda seems out of place. So too do overt fears of nuclear terror ism; the issue fails to prompt headlines as it used to. As Broinowski explores in the final pages, concerns over rising tensions between China and the United States have led contemporary experts to instead speculate about the renewed threat of nuclear war.

As this suggests, the international normative landscape has changed. In 2017, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was adopted. During negotiations, Aboriginal nuclear survivors provided moving testimonies to the United Nation’s General Assembly. The Australian-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its campaign in support of the treaty. Commentators argue that the TPNW marks a significant normative shift away from nuclear weapons by many of the world’s non-nuclear-weapons states. But, Broinowski points out, Australia’s inability to sign or ratify that same treaty reflects its continued subservience to the United States.

In offering his readers an updated ending to a largely un changed book, Broinowski demonstrates the stark differences between contemporary nuclear diplomacy and that which existed in 2003. At the very least, nuclear terrorism is no longer at the top of Australia’s list of nuclear concerns. Nor can any of the nuclear powers now honestly maintain that their nuclear weapons aren’t widely condemned. Only time will tell whether the recent election of the Albanese government will assist in restoring Australia’s shattered non-proliferation credentials. g

Mordant marvels

A wondrous, disquieting poetry collection Anders Villani

Mirabilia: New poems by Lisa Gorton Giramondo $25 pb, 85 pp

Mirabilia is the plural form of the Latin mirabile: wonderful thing, marvel. Since the publication of her first book, Press Release, in 2007, Lisa Gorton has cultivated such a voice in Australian poetry. Mordant political wit, formal and thematic bricolage, a liquid control of the line, and the ability to trace patterns across the strata of history and society – to rove between time and the timeless – have long char acterised Gorton’s oeuvre. She showcases the full complement of her gifts in this wondrous and disquieting new collection.

The title poem begins with an epigraph from Marianne Moore’s ‘The Pangolin’: ‘if that which is at all were not forever’. Like Moore’s poem, ‘Mirabilia’ can be read as an ode to what the blurb calls ‘the world’s most-trafficked mammal’, a symbol of endurance amid subjugation, replete with thorough physical and behavioural descrip tions. Yet Gorton’s phrasing opens alternate readings: ‘[i]ts tail its counterweight it holds / with hoop-skirt-like up- / rightness’; ‘its armour is not put on—the / snake’s head helmet be- / tween its eyes at its nape out spreads’. What these details intimate is a feminising of the pangolin (later, Gorton will return to ‘the / snake’s head’ as a woman in ‘Medusa’s Mask’). It makes sense, then, that Gorton twice repeats the line ‘its only pred ator is man’ – not humans, but man. What is more, this reading of ‘Mirabilia’ as a conceit for the treatment of women casts into new light the poem’s cryptic first sentence: ‘It is its / own order.’ In par ticular, the first line proves both a fragment and a powerful assertion of bodily autonomy, of self-ownership.

If Mirabilia has a central thesis, it is that the patriarchal exploitation of women entails, and precedes, the exploitation of the earth. As a counter-measure, the book embarks on its own wry revisionism, setting the historical record straight on a few key topics. Chief among them is the treatment of women by artists. ‘On the Characterisation of Male Poets’ Mothers’ uses Wikipe dia entries to expose the misogyny inherent in the attitudes of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, and Larkin towards their mothers, on whom the men were dependent. Consider the parenthetical clarifications in the following quatrain, quoting Rilke:

‘If in my father’s house’ (his father had left)

‘love was shown me with both care and concern only by my father’ (he lived with his mother)

Here, as elsewhere, Rilke overlooks his father’s immense faults yet sees nothing but faults in his mother. Rimbaud’s father, similarly, is ‘good-natured, easy-going, generous’, while he calls his mother ‘his “Mouth of Darkness”’. But it is Rimbaud’s father who abandons him, and Rimbaud’s mother who writes him let ters and pays for A Season in Hell to be published. Throughout the poem, Gorton returns to phrases such as ‘it is said’, ‘they say’, and ‘according to reports’ to highlight the impersonal and almost sanctified status of the popular accounts she is calling into question. The result is sardonic and devastating. Here are hypocrisies, mischaracterisations, distortions of history, in the open, yet unseen.

‘The Book of Revelations’ is an ekphrastic poem based on Sidney Nolan’s 1952 photograph Untitled (Cynthia Nolan with Parasol Mounted on Dead Horse). Another withering juxtaposition, the poem interpolates a description of the photograph (google it) with quotations from Nolan and the Book of Revelations, in which four horsemen herald the end of the world. ‘She has clam bered onto a dead thing / propped in its litter of bones—’, Gor ton writes. ‘She smiles.’ This smile becomes the poem’s fulcrum: ‘I think I know that smile. / A cypher on the face of semi-illiterate rage. / Ashamed of what they’ve asked. Accom modating. / Speech of the dust.’ That the model bears her indignity with a smile, a ‘speech of the dust’, likens her to ‘the dead horse on its hind legs with its / mouth in the dust’. But the day of judgement, Gorton implies, is imminent. This smiling woman is both passive, ascribed the ‘grim elegance’ of a corpse, and the agent of seismic change.

The most challenging of Mirabilia’s three sections is ‘Tongue’, which revolves around the Pazzi conspiracy in Renaissance Florence. In her ‘Notes’, Gorton lists near ly twenty sources for the section’s seven poems. This scholarly density slows the reading experience, pushing one beyond the text for information. Gorton’s use of the em dash, similarly, can make following the syntax difficult, as in the following lines: ‘the one they called Fioretta— / ‘little flower’— / her child one month old / and the child’s father— / they called him ‘Prince of Youth’— / was stabbed at Mass’ (‘Madonna of the Flowers’). Who was stabbed at Mass? In any case, what binds the section is Gorton’s ‘surmise’ that this Fioretta is the model for Leonar do’s Benoit Madonna, painted in the same year as the conspiracy.

Political turmoil simmers, empires fissure, great art enters the world, all on the whims of men, while women – the muses, the mothers – find themselves written out of the record. Lorenzo de’ Medici takes Fioretta’s child from her (his murdered brother’s illegitimate child) to spare his family dishonour. The child, Giulio

Lisa Gorton (Giramondo)

de’ Medici, Gorton tells us, ‘became Pope Clement VII’. In the child’s baptismal register, the mother goes ‘unnamed’. Like the ‘speech of dust’, for another woman, ‘[t]he tongue / in its dark laps air’.

One consequence of this attitude towards women, which erases them from history through silence and artistic idealisa tion, is the despoiling of nature. The final section of Mirabilia is ‘Great World Atlas’, originally published in the artist Izabela Pluta’s book Figures of Slippage and Isolation. In prose poems named after editions of the Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas, Gorton catalogues historical nuclear testing. This disjunction, between the imperative to map and depict the world and the imperative to render those maps obsolete, proves a ripe subject for Gorton’s distant distancing poetic lens. That lens registers both horror and wonder - an apt awe for our current moment:

‘Floating in nutrients’

Poetry as an engine of community Ender Başkan

Thepoetry section is growing at the bookshop where I work. Younger readers huddle together to discuss poems.

A science student buys five poetry books to read over semester break. When a retired teacher from out of town comes looking for a Judith Wright book, we get talking, I make sug gestions, and he ends up dropping almost $300 on poetry titles. Customers ask for First Nations, Middle Eastern, and queer po ets, and they want the canon too, they want to try anything staff find exciting. Readers are seeking ways into poetry. Is it having a(nother) renaissance? The results of this year’s Stella Prize cor roborate what I’m seeing on the shop floor.

And so the arrival of the Melbourne-based press no more poetry is worth examining. To date, no more poetry has pub lished twelve books in small print runs and developed a robust local following. I am struck by the cover designs of the four publications before me. Each is a beautiful visual and tactile object: pastel-coloured, matte-finished, hand-friendly. Publishers of poetry in Australia should take note. My two grievances are the minuscule text size inside, a nightmare for anyone with visual impairment, and the unnecessary use of double line spacing.

The emphasis on aesthetics is traceable to the characteristics of the milieu; a strong presence of artists run through no more

‘Between the time of its publication and fourth revise they / ex ploded the bomb they called Vanya over Novaya Zemlya— / its fireball five miles wide hung a second sun over the / island’ (‘The Readers Digest Great World Atlas 1961 (1962)’). We think, in this extraordinary sequence, to the book’s first epigraph, by Marianne Moore: ‘if that which is at all were not forever’. What if the future were ‘not forever’, yet the past were equally finite, mutable: what alterations to one could improve the other? The preceding sentence in the Moore poem is ‘[t]o explain grace requires / a curious hand’. She might have been thinking of Gorton’s. g

Anders Villani is a PhD student at Monash University and an ABR Rising Star. His new poetry collection is Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022).

poetry’s contributor list. My feeling is that, increasingly, young, talented creators, many of them visual artists, are taking up poetry right now. A democratic form, it doesn’t require the materials needed for art or music, and can offer an immediacy prose can lack, both in its production and its consumption – I’m referring to the demands of narrative, logic, stretches of time, attention, and so on. Poetry is also a social machine, an engine of community more like music than prose, more naturally performed before a public. As Australia’s housing and cost-of-living crises hits young creators hard, we are reminded at core that we just want to be able to make things and share them with our friends. So we write poems when we can, where we can. Getting together to hear them read is just as important as reading them alone.

Bath Songs (no more poetry, $29.75 pb, 127 pp) charts Lia Dewey Morgan’s transition into femininity as they undergo hormone replacement therapy, become hermetic, encounter and recount lovers, and endure lockdowns. These are poems of a self striving, longing, and toying with language, lovers, and their own body. There’s a lengthy introduction where the poet lays out the biographical context for the tonal, formal, and conceptual bases of its three parts. Likely a holdover from their art practice, and while illuminating, it serves to undercut the poems, which should need no justification, no hedging. Yet we are compelled to come along with Morgan as she comes to revel in language. ‘Good god I’m empty,’ Morgan repeats in anguish during the first section. In part two, she embraces Japanese tanka poetry, ‘trembling in and out of form’. In part three, out of the early stages of transition and now ‘shaking off’ prior form the poet unfurls an incantatory poetics embracing repetition: ‘Remembering time // stretching and breaking? // Barking! // The sound slowing down // ripping tone into pulse.’ ‘Remember marching // in your words // setting worlds // in the chassis // of a letterpress?’ The arc of the book renders their transition vivid in a playful, resonant poetics of emergence.

Bridget

Gilmartin’s Strange Animals (no more poetry, $25 pb, 69 pp) asks us to consider the implications of judge ment. While tangled in enigmas of identity, the self, and

the texture of relationships, these poems show a deep desire for understanding, for compassion. Usually with a friend or a lover, Gilmartin is at the beach, the cafe, the bed, the pool, the super market, the restaurant, the park, the couch, the motor inn et al. It’s telling that, despite feeling judged, Gilmartin rarely judges others. There’s a rugged ease to these poems, they’re built simply and they work. They’re intimate, they accumulate, nudging us towards pathos. It’s my favourite of the bunch.

lying on my back at Northcote pool

I imagine the chlorine is embryonic fluid my limbs floating in nutrients from somewhere in my periphery

a kid says mum, is that a boy or a girl?

honey, it’s a girl

I open my eye squint the sun like a hospital light.

DanielWard is the editor of no more poetry, and eternal delight paralysis (no more poetry, $35 pb, 148 pp) is their second book of poems. Oscillating between apathy, the pursuit of pleasure and broader philosophical concerns, Ward writes with a cleverness and self-assuredness that hums when in the second person, often addressing the lover, or the first-person plural, invoking a collectivity that elevates the work above the hot take:

when we are open we welcome more and more but we are suspended and here we are more malleable and to be malleable maybe is not to be cool which is to be stoic or sure or stubborn, but in this room it pays to be open and this feels disorientating

ShannonMay Powell’s Can we rest tonight in the amnesia of pleasure (no more poetry, $45 pb, 98 pp) is a book of poems ex ploring sex, the body, and gender. It is bound by two Chicago screws and features thirteen fold-out colour photographs taken by the poet. The book is a sumptuous object that struggles to generate in its poems the eroticism promised in the printed images and title. The language here is too often stilted and glossy, lacking in the gris tle and frisson conjured by the collision of real bodies.

Stuck in the shared trance of love we created whole imaginary worlds Each lingering gesture a sacred prop in the theatre of our home

Performing my gender like a magician or mime

Me with my painted smile and heavy eyes drawing back the curtains of our invisible arrangement to take a final bow.

When Can we rest tonight in the amnesia of pleasure was launched in May, I was there at the Collingwood Arts Precinct amid a sizeable crowd. It was cosy, almost decadent, and we were all a little cagey, waiting for the occasion to crack open, for someone or something to set fire to the night, to delight us. The moment teetered but was elusive. Ward’s sentiment from above, ‘in this room it pays to be open and this feels disorientating’, feels apt. Poetry is dizzying, poetry is the articulation of difference, and that’s risky business. People are coming to poetry, and the minds, bodies, organs, rooms, and poems themselves should open up to this, should relish this, should get dizzy with the implications. Yet openness demands courage, vulnerability, faith in one another – a certain hospitality. I think no more poetry represents a wave of coming to poetry, and this is exciting. I’m eager to see what’s next from these poets and this press, and how they’ll continue to articulate their difference. g

Ender Başkan is a poet, bookseller, and co-founder of Vre Books. He is the winner of the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2021 and the author of A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man (Vre Books, 2019). ❖

Open Page with Shannon Burns

Shannon Burns is a writer, critic and academic from Adelaide. His work has appeared in the Monthly, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, and the Sydney Review of Books. His memoir, Childhood, was released in October by Text Publishing.

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

Greece. My grandparents emigrated from there in the 1950s, but I’ve never been, sadly.

What’s your idea of hell?

Hell is predictable. Nothing changes. You are always the same, and the people around you are always the same. They say the same things, have the same thoughts, repeat the same gestures, stage the same hostilities or enthusiasms, over and over without end. Not really. Hell is watching your children suffer, helplessly.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Chastity or purity. I want the promiscuous mess, especially in art.

What’s your favourite film?

Modern Times, Ulysses’ Gaze, The Bicycle Thief.

And your favourite book?

It must be The Brothers Karamazov

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

I’ll stick to the living: Cardi B, Michael Jordan, Werner Herzog.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage? ‘Toxic’ sends me to sleep, but any word that is habitually used for rhetorical effect (usually exaggeration) is similarly annoying. I have a nostalgic feeling for ‘pluralism’.

Who is your favourite author?

It’s got to be Shakespeare. Sorry. But who goes more than six months without a strong dose? Not me.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Achilles or Odysseus. Both are probably now registered as anti-heroes instead of heroes, which makes them even more compelling.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? A complex and protean individuality, expressed in both style and content.

Which book influenced you most in your youth? Far too many. My youth (I’m thinking of fifteen to eighteen, in particular) was made of books. A collection of Greek Lyric Poetry, translated by Richard Lattimore, had a lasting impact,

alongside a Collected Keats. I seemed to live inside Great Expectations, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Wuthering Heights, Les Misérables, Anna Karenina, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, collections of plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The influence wasn’t always good.

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

I was irritated by Madame Bovary as a teenager, and Kafka left me cold. Now they are among my favourites.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I mostly listen to sport podcasts. I know exactly what is happening in the world of soccer each week, though I never watch a game.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Aside from financial constraints and family obligations? Fear of losing control, of being transformed by the moods and passions driving whatever I’m trying to create, in a bad way. I’m never willing to give myself fully to writing – to risk becoming another kind of person in the process – which I suspect you must do if you want to write as well as you can and create something truly compelling.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

I admire close reading and stylish prose. I want attention to language and form, analysis that draws from a rich store of conceptual knowledge and a solid understanding of literary history. From there, firm opinions or fine judgements are a bonus, but I want that bonus too, because I’m greedy. I also appreciate unconventional or ‘experimental’ criticism, which is hard to pull off but rewarding when it works. Among Australians, Melinda Harvey and James Ley are particularly impressive.

How do you find working with editors? I’d be an idiot without them.

What do you think of writers’ festivals? I’ve grown to appreciate them, or the parts of them that deal with literature instead of journalism or politics. It’s pleasant to sit among people who are attached to fiction and poetry, people who are invested in something marginal, for just a little while.

Are artists valued in our society?

Some are. Most serious writers aren’t. What are you working on now? A profile of Brian Castro. g

‘Night and light, black and bright’

were ninety-four players on this occasion: Orchestra Victoria, led by Sulki Yu, augmented with twenty-two musicians from the Australian National Academy of Music. Richard Mills, Victo rian Opera’s artistic director, was the auspicious conductor. His account, while necessarily focused and driven, maintained the utmost respect for this gargantuan score, which unfolded with natural grace and a clarity in which even the smallest, but most significant, references could be heard.

The performance was billed as ‘a semi-staged concert’, which essentially it was. It helped greatly that the cast sang from memory. No heads buried in music stands here; instead, an instant dramatic rapport with the audience. It also helped having the singers ranged in front of the orchestra – with merely a narrow alleyway in which to perform. As distinct from a conventional staged performance, and having to hurl their voices through the orchestra, they could project straight into the auditorium, to maximum effect.

Catherine Foster as Elektra (Charlie Kinross/Victorian Opera)

Thereare not too many parallels to be drawn between the House of Atreus and the House of Windsor, especially in these mournful times. But I could not help noticing one (admittedly tenuous) connection of memory and circumstance triggered by Victorian Opera’s powerful, almost magisterial oneoff performance of Elektra and, later on, watching the procession of the Queen’s coffin to Westminster Hall. The music, played by the bands of the Scots Guards and the Grenadier Guards, unwa vering in tempo and doleful mood, featured Beethoven, Mendels sohn, and Chopin. Richard Strauss did not get a look-in. Maybe historical royal sensitivities were being observed.

In 1910, at the same time as Elektra received its UK première at Covent Garden, the band of the Grenadier Guards played a pot-pourri of music from the opera in the courtyard of Buck ingham Palace. A note was dispatched, via George V’s equerry, to the Bandmaster: ‘His Majesty does not know what the Band has just played, but it is never to be played again.’

One hundred and twenty-two years later, Elektra, undeniably a masterpiece, belongs in any opera company’s repertoire, along with its earlier stablemate, Salome (1905). Although it is tempting to place these two one-acters into the same chalice – both have mad heroines who die at the end – they are markedly different in style and execution. Strauss himself, one of the great painters of music, defined Salome as ‘purple and violet’, and Elektra as ‘night and light, or black and bright’.

For Strauss, Elektra represented the furthest he would go, or was willing to go, in terms of modernism (his next project, with his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, would be Der Rosen kavalier). Although Elektra ends in a tutti blaze of good old C major, it contains more than its share of harmonic dissonances, jagged, unnerving rhythms, and mood shifts. Also ambitiously, Strauss deployed an enormous orchestra of around 110 players, specifying multiple clarinets and horns, swaths of strings and percussion – and let’s not forget the heckelphone.

Crammed onto the Hamer Hall platform on 14 September

The English dramatic soprano Catherine Foster was exactly in her element as Elektra. Her strong, never-tiring voice coped magnificently with this long, almost impossible role. While Fos ter does not have the icy clarity of a Birgit Nilsson (who does?), she is just as deeply involved with the part, not merely in the monologues, but in her relationship with the other performers.

Just as compelling was the exemplary Chrysothemis of Anna-Louise Cole, in a fearless, white-heat performance that made so much more of this often-underrated character. Cole, who sings Brünnhilde in Opera Australia’s Ring next year in Bris bane, is well on the way to tackling Chrysothemis’s elder sister.

Deborah Humble’s Klytemnästra, clothed in deepest red to match the blood she would soon enough be shedding, was mar vellously neurasthenic, yet never a caricature. She is, after all, a queen, if a murderous one. Klytemnästra’s long scene with Elektra is the pivotal point of the opera, and Humble and Foster made their confrontation as gripping as a Wimbledon final.

Elektra is dominated by its three key women performers. Indeed, we don’t hear a male voice until more than halfway through, when a young servant and an old servant (well sung by Paul Biencourt and Stephen Marsh) have a brief exchange. Apart from the absent Agamemnon, whose theme permeates the score, the main male performer is Orest, Elektra’s missing-pre sumed-dead brother, who returns to exact revenge. Derek Welton was physically and vocally tremendous in the part, his heroic voice shaking the very walls of Mycaenae. The Recognition Scene was as profoundly moving as I have ever heard it. James Egglestone was excellent as the hapless, doomed Aegisth. Simon Meadows was notable as the Guardian of Orest.

The Five Maids and their Overseer – Dimity Shepherd, Shakira Dugan, Sally-Anne Russell, Olivia Cranwell, Rebecca Rashleigh and Kathryn Radcliffe – made the most of their brief but fiend ishly difficult exchanges. Cranwell doubled as Queen’s Confidante, and Radcliffe also sang the Trainbearer (Schlepperträge). It has to be said that all servants dressed well above their pay grades.

By the end, as, in the upper reaches of the hall, twenty-five members of the Victorian Opera Chorus dutifully acclaimed ‘Orest!’ the specified twenty-seven times, Elektra went into her dancing spasm, and died. Before we knew it, and as happens with any great performance of Elektra, it was all over. A justifiably huge ovation ensued. I suspect even George V might have approved. g

An almost magisterial performance of Elektra Michael Shmith

Dreams and reality

An American classic finally reaches Australia

and the family receives an unsolicited visit from a representative of the ‘welcoming committee’. When Lena finally relents and agrees to Walter’s plans, disaster strikes. The play’s ending, which Black radicals such as Harold Cruse at the time of its première saw as a sentimental, happy one, is far from that. The Younger family have many trials ahead of them.

Were A Raisin in the Sun simply another slice-of-life play, it would merely have relevance in historical terms. But Hansberry skilfully and with remarkable prescience juggles an extensive number of themes. Racism, sexism, capitalism (Walter, in his blind belief that money equals success, has been often compared to Willy Loman), questions of black assimilation versus a reclaim ing of African heritage, and anti-colonialism are woven into the Younger’s story. In an extraordinary speech, Joseph Asagai, a Nigerian suitor of Beneatha, foretells the complex future of postcolonial Africa, which he accepts as an inevitable part of history.

For the first main-stage Australian production of this classic play, the Sydney Theatre Company has assembled a strong cast. Wesley Enoch has, as he did with Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate (STC, 2021) turned a disparate group of actors into a tight ensemble.

Inthe annals of theatre history, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (which had its première in 1959, when she was only twenty-eight) will go down as the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman and directed by an Af rican-American man. It would have been beaten a couple of sea sons earlier by Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind if the redoubt able Childress had not refused to allow her would-be producers to water down her work, which portrayed the demeaning and frustrating position of Black actors forced into endless ‘yes’m, no sir’ shuck and jive roles. As one of Childress’s aggrieved charac ters complains: ‘All I did was shout “Lord have mercy” for almost two hours.’

It was Hansberry, taking her lead from Sean O’Casey’s por traits of Irish life, who freed Black actors from Broadway stereo types. In his review of that first performance, Kenneth Tynan was partly right when he described the play as having ‘proud, joyous proximity to its source, which is life as the dramatist has lived it’. Proximity to life, yes, but not precisely as Hansberry had lived it.

Unlike her characters, the Younger family, Hansberry’s up bringing was middle class. Her father, Carl, was a developer who split large houses in run-down Chicago areas into tiny apartments called kitchenettes, precisely the sort of roach-infested place from which the Youngers are trying to extricate themselves.

The family consists of Walter Lee Younger, a chauffeur; his wife, Ruth, who works as a maid; his mother, Lena; his son, Travis; and his student sister, Beneatha – all crammed into three rooms and sharing a bathroom with their neighbours. The forced proximity and relentless grind of poverty have caused tensions within the family which the arrival of a cheque for ten thousand dollars – a life insurance payout on the death of Lena’s husband –appears to alleviate. All of them have their own dream: Lena and Ruth to find a house they can own; Beneatha to pay for medical school; and Walter Lee to go into partnership in a liquor store, a project his mother rejects. But dreams have a habit of turning sour. Lena puts down a deposit on a house in a white neighbourhood

In a powerhouse performance, Bert LaBonté’s Walter is a man of manic energy and barely controlled rage. An impractical dreamer, he uses drink and fantasy to soften harsh reality. He is moving in a speech to Travis, in which he conjures an alternative reality where he is able to send his son to any university he desires: ‘Just tell me what you want to be – and you’ll be it … You just name it son … and I hand you the world!’ As his dreams implode and he crawls towards his mother in abasement, LaBonté’s per formance reaches a shattering emotional climax.

Zahra Newman’s Ruth is a strong woman reaching breaking point. Newman is especially touching as Ruth tries to work out what has fractured her relationship with Walter. The tone of voice she uses when talking on the phone to Walter’s employer tells us all we need to know about the humiliating roles that must be played in order to survive.

Beneatha has not yet been ground down by life, and in Angela Mahlatjie’s hands she is a lively, argumentative presence. The contrast between her two suitors – the African Joseph and the bourgeois African-American George – could have seemed a bit schematic were they not as well acted by Adolphus Waylee and Leinad Walker, respectively.

As chairman of the welcoming committee, Jacob Warner has the mixture of mild reasonableness and underlying threat exactly right.

The one miscalculation is the way in which Enoch has di rected Nancy Denis to play the nosy neighbour, Mrs Johnson. In a scene that makes an important point about the dangers of attempted assimilation, Denis plays Mrs Johnson in exactly the broad stereotypical style Childress was condemning.

Mel Page’s set captures the seediness of the apartment, and her costumes firmly anchor the play in the time of its writing.

It has taken more than sixty years for A Raisin in the Sun to arrive in Australia, but this production has done it proud. g

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.

Ian Dickson

Zahra Newman in Sydney Theatre Company’s A Raisin in the Sun (photograph by Joseph Mayers)

Fable and fact

A storyteller first and foremost

Forthe casual moviegoer unconcerned by matters of auteur ship, it can still come as something of a shock to learn that the person behind the original Mad Max trilogy (1979–85), as well as its decade-defining follow-up, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), also brought us the madcap animal antics of Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and the all-singing, all-dancing penguin colony of Happy Feet (2006) and Happy Feet 2 (2011). George Miller has one of the most eclectic oeuvres in modern cinema, but all his films are defined by a rich, seemingly limitless vein of imagina tion, as well as by the technical and aesthetic mastery necessary to mine it. Whether dabbling in live-action or 3D animation – whether wrangling penguins, pigs, or eighteen wheeler ‘War Rigs’ – Miller is a storyteller first and foremost. It stands to reason that his latest film is a story about stories themselves: where they come from, what they mean to us, and what their place is (if any) in the modern world.

Based on a short story by A.S. Byatt and co-written with Augusta Gore, Three Thousand Years of Longing (Roadshow En tertainment) stars Tilda Swinton as Professor Alithea Binney, a scholarly ‘narratologist’ (which this film taught me is indeed a real job) on the lecture circuit in Istanbul. In the backstreets of the Grand Bazaar, she purchases a curious glass bottle as a keepsake, and then later, while attempting to clean it with an electric toothbrush in her hotel bathroom, unleashes a towering, pointy-eared, scaly-legged, heat-emitting Djinn played by Idris Elba.

He gives her the spiel we all know so well (three wishes, and no wishing for more wishes), but Alithea, a dedicated anthro pologist of such fairy tales, has heard this one before; she knows the rules of the game before he even explains them, and what’s more, she claims to have nothing to wish for. She considers her solitary existence perfectly fulfilling and doesn’t want to risk it all on some greedy indulgence. She suspects the Djinn of being an ancient trickster, reminding him (and us) that ‘there’s no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale’.

This puts the Djinn in a tight spot, as he requires all three wishes to be made in order to secure his freedom. To explain his predicament and earn her trust, he shares the three-millen nia-long account of his incarceration. As they sit on the end of the bed in Alithea’s hotel room in fluffy white bathrobes, he recounts – and Miller shows us – extracts from this sprawling, fantastical tale, starting with the Queen of Sheba and King Solo mon, spanning the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the treachery of Suleiman the Magnificent, right up to a knowledge-hungry woman in nineteenth-century Turkey who forms a special con nection with the Djinn.

For someone who stars in another film released this week in which he punches a lion in the head, Elba gives a beautifully gentle and measured performance as the Djinn – just as well, given that three-quarters of the film’s narration falls to him. In that sense, the superb Tilda Swinton feels curiously underutilised in her leading role, and her third-act character decisions landed with a notable hum of uncertainty from my audience. Meanwhile, behind the camera, the great John Seale (in supposedly his final assignment before retiring) captures the ancient vistas and ba roque palaces of the Djinn’s tale in crisp and stylish detail – as sisted by the rare and remarkable kind of CGI effects that actually enrich the live imagery, rather than distract from it. Miller has always surrounded himself with master craftspeople and artists, and this film is no exception: from Margaret Sixel’s editing to Roger Ford’s production design and Kym Barrett’s costuming, the film is confidently constructed and boldly shot. Experientially, though, Three Thousand Years of Longing never reaches the ecstatic heights that its fairy tale characters proclaim to live and die for.

Once the Djinn’s tale is told, the film’s third act cobbles together an uneven thesis suggesting that these grand fables –the sorts of stories Alithea studies for a living – are just that: artefacts to be examined and classified. After leaving the hotel, the Djinn appears highly vulnerable, even fatally allergic, to the electromagnetic frequencies, televisual signals, and general invisible informational clutter of the twenty-first century; if he represents storytelling as a tradition, then he, and it, are shown to be fundamentally incompatible with modern civilisation. Perhaps this is what Miller intended his film to be – not a grand fairy tale itself, but rather an elegy for that ancient mode of communication. If that was his intention, the film’s mood is fitting; Three Thousand Years of Longing, for all its bursts of colour and visual invention, is a deeply sombre piece – hushed, staid, and unexpectedly serious.

The film’s central conceit remains its most compelling: a literal embodiment of stories dropped into a room with a woman who studies them for a living, thus allowing the discourse between mythos and science, between fable and fact, between the old world and the new, to play out. It’s a shame that Three Thousand Years of Longing appears to identify more with the academic than the storyteller in this scenario, holding itself at arm’s length and approaching even its most intoxicating fantasies with a rueful, intellectual eye. George Miller has smuggled a great deal of meaning into his multiplex fare before; even Mad Max: Fury Road touched on a bevy of hot-button issues without once com promising on spectacle or enjoyment. But here, ironically, it’s the other way around; a film about storytelling which puts its thesis first and its own story second. g

Jordan Prosser

Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing

AWO’s sense of adventure

A combination of telepathy, instinct, and love

Shortlybefore the Australian World Orchestra’s Melbourne concert on 31 August, the orchestra and its conductor, the great Zubin Mehta, were in Britain. On 19 August, they played at the Edinburgh Festival with a challenging program: Webern’s Passacaglia and Six Pieces; Debussy’s Ariettes Oubliées, (orchestrated by Brett Dean, who, viola to hand, was also on the platform), with Australian soprano Siobhan Stagg; and Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7. Four days later, they were in London, at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall, repeating the Webern and Debussy, but substituting Brahms’s Symphony No. 2. Reviewing the Prom, The Observer’s critic, Fiona Maddocks, said this ‘dias pora’ orchestra has ‘the energy of a festival ensemble. That they will only have come together to rehearse last week added to the sense of adventure.’

Adventurous was exactly the right word. So, too, was another recent description of the AWO as a grown-up youth orchestra – an appropriate remark, since many of the AWO are alumni of the Australian Youth Orchestra. There is always something irresistibly fresh about the AWO’s playing – scholarship allied with experience and derring-do. I always feel that it is at once looking inward, to the music it is playing, as well as outward, in its brilliance of attack and extraordinary cohesion, as if all 105 players are actually listening to one another.

In Melbourne we heard an all-new program of three of Richard Strauss’s tone poems: Don Juan (1888–89); Till Eulen spiegels lustige Streiche (1895); and Ein Heldenleben (1899). Any one of these works on its own would be fiendish enough, as befits Strauss’s ambitious orchestral requirements. But to have all three? Surely this could have been indigestible: the symphonic equivalent of La Grande Bouffe.

It is a joy and a privilege to report that this was nothing of the sort. Before even a note was sounded, from the moment the orchestra made its way on to the platform, acclaimed by the capacity audience, you just knew this was going to be something special and treasurable. The already thunderous reception only increased as Zubin Mehta, hesitantly and with the aid of two sticks (one for walking; the other for conducting), made his way to the podium. He eased himself on to his stool, gave a downbeat, and the years fell away.

Strauss’s Don Juan, written when he was twenty-four, was described by the critic Eduard Hanslick as ‘sound effect’ in which ‘colour is everything, musical thought nothing’. How wrong can you be? This orchestral showpiece may be boisterous at times, but at heart it is also tender, almost romantic. Mehta exercised restraint, ensuring grace, clarity, and even mellowness in the work’s subdued ending.

Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, a more substantial and in tricate work, is the most programmatic of the three on display. Strauss famously derided the need for ‘a kind of handhold for the listener’, adding that ‘anyone who really knows how to listen to music probably doesn’t need it anyway’. This conveniently

ignores the fact that Strauss’s deployment of programmatic structure was second-to-none, especially with Till Eulenspiegel Its roguish central character is portrayed by a famous horn call, which consistently appears in ever-changing forms, and on an array of instruments. Eulenspiegel, a beloved impish character of German storybook tradition, manages to prod and provoke his perplexing way through just on twenty minutes of music, until finally (mercifully, to some) being tried and executed.

Here, Mehta and orchestra again prove that the more the music is left to speak for itself, the greater the overall benefits. It had a transparency, too, through which one could discern every change of mood and every last inflexion – right down to Till’s impudent raspberry blurting forth from the bass clarinet (here played by Alexander Morris).

The triumph of the night, however, was Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). This utterly heroic piece, in creation and per formance, not only deploys enormous forces but contains a long, sustained, and elaborate role for solo violin, played by the second-half concertmaster, Daniel Dodds. This is worth special mention, as Dodds’s fluent and glorious playing followed to the letter all of Strauss’s precise instructions, set down in his score: ‘Flippant, tender, a little sentimental, exuberantly playful, gracious, emotional, angry, nagging, loving’. The part, of course, was modelled on Strauss’s wife, the notoriously peppery Pauline. Dodds well deserved the rapturous reception from the audience and the embrace from Zubin Mehta.

The AWO, among whose ranks are at least twelve concert masters, plus an assortment of orchestral players, served to make this one of the most musically beautiful and burnished perfor mances of Heldenleben you could hope to hear. Even in the more bellicose sections (‘The Hero’s deeds of war’), you never lost sight of the dignity that imbues the work as a whole. Underlying this was the masterly playing of Strauss’s opulent and plangent horn settings and the warmly subterranean rumbles from the nine double basses, placed behind the cellos to the left of the platform.

The final section, ‘The Hero’s retirement from the world’, was mellow and tranquil, but never lingering. Occasionally, in more indulgent performances, there can be the feeling that the hero has outstayed his welcome. Not in this case. Instead, Mehta, with his now restricted but always clear beat, was persuasive rather than commanding, bringing the work to a close with gentle strength and then a few seconds of precious silence before an eruption from the audience.

Mehta’s association with the AWO has been as exemplary as it is profound. The orchestra has been lucky to have also worked with the likes of Riccardo Muti, Simon Rattle, and, of course, its own artistic director and visionary, Alexander Briger. But its association with Mehta is something which, like the art of con ducting, is a mystical combination of telepathy, instinct, and love. All these qualities were evident on Wednesday. It was a concert I will long hold in my head and my heart. g

Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His latest book, Merlyn (Hardie Grant, 2021) is a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer.

A longer version of this review appears online.

Michael Shmith

ARTS HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YEAR

From the Archive

On 13 August, Salman Rushdie was stabbed many times while delivering a lecture. Rushdie has endured threats on his life ever since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a notorious fatwa in response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988). In this issue, Peter Goldsworthy tells us that Joseph Anton (2012), Rushdie’s account of his years in hiding, remains ‘a crucial read for our times’ given that radical Islam continues to ‘metastasise’. In the November 2015 issue of ABR, Jane Sullivan reviewed Rushdie’s novel Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-One Nights, and considered the literary row that had erupted after Kazuo Ishiguro insisted that his latest novel, The Buried Giant (2015), was not fantasy.

Kazuo Ishiguro recently sparked off a literary row about whether ‘serious’ writers should dabble in fantasy when he insisted rather too strongly that he was not writing fan tasy in his latest novel: The Buried Giant (2015). All those giants and pixies, knights and dragons, were but a means to an end.

A strange controversy, considering a galaxy of ‘serious’ stars has been liberally using fantasy for decades. No one more than Salman Rushdie, who gave us a batch of Indian babies born with superpowers in Midnight’s Children (1981), a subcontinental banshee of destruction in Shame (1983), angels and demons in 1988’s The Satanic Verses (for which, as we all know, he paid a terrible price), and now a world of roistering jinn.

It is interesting to contrast Ishiguro’s toe in the water of fan tasy with Rushdie’s triple somersault dive. On one side, Ingmar Bergman; on the other, Bollywood. Whereas Ishiguro offers an anaemic landscape with a feeble dragon and battles decided with one swing of a sword, Rushdie gives us colossal technicolour jinn riding on flying urns; giant snakes coiling round the Chrysler Building; fire, smoke, and lightning; and a global war that endures for one thousand and one nights.

The latter phrase (referenced in the novel’s title) is one of the names for Rushdie’s principal inspiration, the collection of antique tales known as the Arabian Nights. He has clearly had enormous fun raiding these stories, picking up on the Schehereza de spirit of anarchy and amorality, conflict and betrayal, stories within stories and dazzling magic: all to spellbind the listener and ward off the death of the storyteller.

The breathless narrative is told from a point of view in the far future, looking back first to the year 1195 and then to New York in our own age, when a time of ‘strangenesses’ precedes a titanic war between two clans of jinn. Yes, these are the familiar creatures that whoosh out of bottles and grant you three wishes, but Rushdie recreates their cosmos, including their insatiable lust for one another, and allows them to enter our world. One group is on humanity’s side, the other aims at humanity’s subjugation and destruction (although it is never so cleanly divided into goodies and baddies). A gardener finds that his feet will no longer touch the ground. A baby causes boils to break out on the skin of any deceitful person who comes near it. A mighty jinnia (female jinn), the Lightning Princess, who once loved a mortal man and gave birth to a tribe of descendants, returns to earth to seek out her progeny and to enlist them in the fight against her evil brethren.

If this sounds like a blockbuster coming to a cinema near

you, it is deliberate. Rushdie revels in the ancient origins of his tales, but also in their echoes in contemporary popular culture, and he chucks in nods to The Producers, Ghostbusters, DC comic books, and adolescent crowd-pleasers. There are also ‘grabs’ from the news: the jinn possess humans and force them to shoot down passenger planes.

Rushdie is a dab hand at literary allusions: hands up all those who recognise the peeping Tom who spies on a lingerie goddess, is turned into a stag and pursued by phantom hounds? Or Irish people living in rubbish bins? Or the character called Caster bridge who sells his wife? This gives the story a bristling density, a Nabokovian exuberance and a chance for the canny reader to feel smug. All of which makes the book a witty and stimulating read, whether it is the intellectual or the popcorn part of the cerebellum that’s being prodded.

Still, I didn’t always warm to this novel, perhaps because there are no human-scale characters; the principal humans all have jinn ancestry. Larger than life is fun for a while, but then you just want life. Here they come again, like so many Pokémon: Zumurrud the Great, Zabardast the Sorcerer, and Ra’im Blood-Drinker. So much flash, bang, wallop, but not very much quiet or intimacy or real feeling; the moment when, as Rushdie often tells us in his appropriation of Voltaire, it is necessary to cultivate one’s garden.

So, if this novel were just a demonstration of the joys and compulsions of storytelling, I would be disappointed. But there is more. The jinn are hugely magnified versions of our own impulses and desires, but what also interests Rushdie is ideas, and the beginning of his story, in particular, crackles with them (pick a philosopher: Voltaire, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, etc.). They come in convenient bite-sized helpings. He sets the tone with Goya’s famous etching Los Caprichos, with a sleeping man beset by nightmarish creatures, and its caption: ‘Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.’ As far as I can work out, this is Rushdie’s view. Possibly in a post-fatwa spirit of caution, his story is relentlessly secular – no god is invoked, there is nothing divine or diabolical going on. The hostile jinn break in on us because we are living in an age of incoherence. We need a return to reason, but reason alone can’t stand up against religion: we need fantasy too.

‘Writing broke away from the gods and in that rupture much of its power was lost,’ Rushdie once said. I think he is trying to get that power back, and good luck to him. g

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1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp

1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair

1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs

1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite

1982 Graham Burns reviews Peter Carey’s Bliss

1983 Don Watson reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s The Blainey View

1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach

1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker

1986 Mark Rubbo’s regular column on the book trade

1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance

1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

1989 David McCooey at the Perth Writers’ Week

1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins

1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism

1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley

1993 Adam Shoemaker’s obituary for Oodgeroo Noonuccal

1994 Cathrine Harboe-Ree reviews Helen Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper

1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage

1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting

1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks

1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour

1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems

2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net

2001 Martin Duwell reviews Robert Adamson’s Mulberry Leaves

2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon

2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers

2004 Daniel Thomas on the reopening of the National Gallery of Victoria

2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith

2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

2008 Gay Bilson on the year’s best essays

2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands

2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard

2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead

2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel

2013 Helen Ellis on Olive Cotton

2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour

2015 Tom Griffiths reviews Tim Flannery’s Atmosphere of Hope

2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience

2017 Michael Adams’s Calibre Prize winner ‘Salt Blood’

2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains

2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

2021 Declan Fry on Stan Grant

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