Australian Book Review, September 2020, no. 424 by Australian Book Review

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The aftermath Peter Tregear on the struggle for survival facing the arts

Clive Hamilton Ben Bland

Julia Gillard

Megan Clement

Kate Grenville

Don Anderson

Amanda Lohrey

Morag Fraser

Thinking in headlines

Peter Rose

Jolley Prize

Advances

In this year of constant barrages and unravelling, nothing is certain. ‘All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born’ – as W.B. Yeats said of modern Ireland in his great poem ‘Easter, 1916’. In a comment on page 21, our Editor ponders the implications of the many changes and concessions that have already been rung during the pandemic – all those ‘polite meaningless words’ that Yeats heard after the Easter Rising in 1916. Yet some good arises, even during the ‘casual comedy’ that is 2020: new voices and resistances; new ways of ensuring that literature, in all its guises, will go on reaching people, despite lockdowns and closures. On August 14, for instance, ABR hosted its first public webinar, to celebrate the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Usually these ceremonies happen in Melbourne or Sydney. This year, of necessity, we retreated to the internet. Hundreds of people from around the world joined us for readings by the three shortlisted authors: C.J. Garrow, Simone Hollander, and Mykaela Saunders. Future prize ceremonies are likely to occur online, befitting the international nature of our three prizes. Following the readings, Mykaela Saunders was named the overall winner of the Jolley Prize for ‘River Story’, a work that ‘illustrates the strong matriarchal bonds between three generations of women and the grief, birth, and death that they share’, to quote the judges. Mykaela Saunders receives $6,000. C.J. Garrow, author of ‘Egg Timer’, was placed second ($4,000); Simone Hollander (‘Hieroglyph’) third ($2,500). After thanking ‘the original storytellers, our old people and ancestors, whose stories nourished our countries and communities since time began’, Mykaela Saunders went on to say: This story is for all mob who are recovering from the long hangover of colonial destruction of our people and our lands, who are healing and strengthening themselves and their families, and who are embodying sovereignty in any which way they can. Yours are the stories that matter to me more than anything. This story is for everyone fighting for the future and for the benefit of all people: all blackfellas who are fighting for land and water and culture and family everywhere, and to everyone else fighting alongside us. And to all of our beautiful rivers and lands that are victims of colonial-capital-corporate desecration: I promise that we will return you to fullness and glory, or we will die trying. Didgerigura – thank you.

Book of the Week

Mykaela Saunders’s evocative and lyrical story appeared in our August issue, along with the other shortlisted works. The author reads ‘River Story’ in its entirety on a recent ABR Podcast – not to be missed.

Stay deadly!

We are delighted to name our third Rising Star: Declan Fry. Declan, who was born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, is an essayist, critic, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. In 2009 he received the Tom Collins Prize in Australian Literature; the Todhunter Literary Award, which he shared, followed in 2013. He currently lives on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land and is a board member of Books ‘n’ Boots, an organisation which distributes football boots and books to remote and regional Aboriginal communities. Declan began publishing with ABR in June 2020. He reviews After Australia on page 25 in this issue. The Rising Stars program is intended to encourage younger writers and critics whose early contributions to ABR have made an impression. We work closely with the Rising Stars: a major investment for writers and the magazine alike. This particular grant is supported by Creative Victoria and the ABR Patrons. On becoming our latest Rising Star, Declan Fry told Advances: One of my earliest memories of local writing publications was seeing ABR nestled in my local public library. In a difficult environment for the arts, ABR’s energetic support for new and emerging talent is vital. ABR’s willingness to build a relationship with a new contributor has been a joy. Having an opportunity like the Rising Stars initiative is a great privilege. It provides a place to hone your writing practice and to develop a long-term investment in the work. It gives me a real sense of confidence, knowing that there is a space for considered, thoughtful analysis. Much love and stay deadly, ABR.

Prizes galore

Thanks to all those poetic early birds who have already entered the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Worth a total of $10,000 (with a first prize of $6,000), the Prize will close on October 1. The Calibre Essay Prize will then open in mid-October. In this issue, on page 48, we publish Kate Middleton’s essay ‘The Dolorimeter’, which was placed second in this year’s Calibre Prize.

A new review every Monday to your inbox, free to read. Sign up on our website. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Australian Book Review September 2020, no. 424

ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces managed studio, Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital Editor Jack Callil digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 *INC GST

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864

The aftermath Peter Tregear on the struggle for survival facing the arts

Clive Hamilton Ben Bland

Julia Gillard

Megan Clement

Kate Grenville

Don Anderson

Amanda Lohrey

Morag Fraser

Thinking in headlines

Peter Rose

Cover Image Red Theater Seat by Yoeml (photograph via iStock) Cover design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au

ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016)

Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website.

ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020)

Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

Monash University Interns Vivian Lai-Tran, Elizabeth Streeter

Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Volunteers Clancy Balen, Alan Haig, John Scully

Image credits and information Page 29: 1960s Dansette record player (photograph by Marc Arundale/Alamy) Page: 28: We are grateful to the Bruce Beaver estate for allowing us to print his poem ‘Sonnet for Dr Michael Kennedy’, the final poem in his collection New and Selected Poems, 1960–1990 (UQP, 1991), 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

ABR September 2020 LETTERS

James Oliver Daly, Rosalind Burns, Peter Heerey, Joost Coté, David Thummler

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

7 11 63

Ben Bland Kieran Pender Gemma Betros

Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg Two books on Papua New Guinea Notre-Dame by Agnès Poirier

POLITICS

8 13 27

Megan Clement Varun Ghosh Cameron Muir

Women and Leadership by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar The Coal Curse (Quarterly Essay 78) by Judith Brett

GAY STUDIES

Dennis Altman

The Pink Line by Mark Gevisser

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

14 16 17 20 61

Heather Roberts Philip Mead Anthony Elliott Kerryn Goldsworthy Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin David Campbell by Jonathan Persse Bauman by Izabela Wagner Paul Kelly by Stuart Coupe Displaced by John Kinsella

COMMENTARY

21 41

Peter Rose Thinking in headlines Peter Tregear Classical music’s struggle for relevance and survival

ESSAYS

23 24 66 67

Tali Lavi Intimations by Zadie Smith Keegan O’Connor Figure It Out by Wayne Koestenbaum Andrew Fuhrmann Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald Laura Elizabeth Woollett The Details by Tegan Bennett Daylight

ANTHOLOGY

Declan Fry

After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

POEMS

26 28 45

Michael Hofmann Bruce Beaver Meredith Wattison

‘Charm for 2020’ ‘Sonnet for Dr Michael Kennedy’ ‘Votive’

FICTION

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Don Anderson Debra Adelaide Morag Fraser James Bradley Mindy Gill Susan Midalia David Whish-Wilson Elizabeth Bryer Nicole Abadee

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville In the Time of Foxes by Jo Lennan The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell We Were Never Friends by Margaret Bearman Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery Three crime novels Nancy by Bruno Lloret, translated by Ellen Jones The Burning Island by Jock Serong

LANGUAGE

39 60

Amanda Laugesen Andrew Connor

From swaggies to snapback A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

INTERVIEWS

40 55

Amanda Lohrey Laurie Duggan

Open Page Poet of the Month

LITERARY STUDIES

44 46

Sue Kossew Susan Sheridan

Gail Jones by Tanya Dalziell Fallen Among Reformers by Janet Lee

ETHICS

47 65

Moira Gatens Ben Brooker

Spinoza’s Ethics, edited by Clare Carlisle, translated by George Eliot Chicken by Paul R. Josephson

CALIBRE PRIZE

Kate Middleton

The Dolorimeter

POETRY

53 54

Tim Wright Cassandra Atherton

Homer Street by Laurie Duggan Inside the Verse Novel by Linda Weste

SHAKESPEARE

56 57

Rayne Allinson David McInnis

The Child in Shakespeare by Charlotte Scott How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok

CLASSICS

Alastair Blanshard

The Spartans by Andrew J. Bayliss

FILM

Nicholas Bugeja

Mysteries of Cinema by Adrian Martin

SCIENCE

Diane Stubbings

Nerve by Eva Holland

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Margaret Jones

The Whitlam Government 1972–75 by Gough Whitlam AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Hooray for Hollywood

Letters

Dear Editor, Jean Baudrillard locates excess, which James Ley stresses is a product of neo-conservative political and economic ‘theory’, in excrement (ABR, August 2020). Baudrillard does this metaphorically, but also literally. We cannot escape from it. What matters is how we deal with it and how we conduct the rest of our lives. The government’s response to the ‘problem’ of artistic performance in the Covid era is to grab a stash of money and offer it to a foreign entity (Hollywood studios basically) – to shoot offshore here – in the same way as it has, though to a lesser extent than its Labor rivals, been happy to sit by and let foreign money (mainly Chinese) prop up cash-starved universities. The mess, the government pretends, can be cleaned up in film, as the medium itself does always with its editing. Not so in unmanageable, excessive, live, gut-churning, look-me-inthe-eyes theatre, which the government dare not approach with any conviction. My hope is that as La Mama, in Melbourne, now embarks on its ‘job-ready’ theatre rebuild, it will leave undisturbed the outside toilet in the courtyard as a reminder that, in the spirit of lockdown, ‘we are all in the shit together’, always. James Oliver Daly (online comment) Dear Editor James Ley’s polemic is eloquent and somewhat depressing, but the very fact that he is able to articulate what is happening so that others can notice too gives me hope for change. Rosalind Burns (online comment)

The White Australia policy

Dear Editor, Chris Wallace’s review of British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the Empire (ABR, August 2020) speaks of ‘the official racism perpetuated by Australian governments of both persuasions until the Whitlam government ended “White Australia”’ in 1973’. In fact, the White

Australia policy disappeared without much fuss under the Coalition government in the late 1960s. Corroboration will be found in A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in politics, written by Graham Freudenberg, who became Whitlam’s press secretary in 1967 and was special adviser to the prime minister from 1972 to 1975. In a work which, as its title suggests, verges on hagiography, the terms ‘White Australia’, let alone ‘abolition thereof ’, do not appear on the index. Peter Heerey AM QC, Melbourne, Vic.

Legacies of British slavery

Dear Editor, Congratulations to Georgina Arnott on a brilliant article that provides a further ‘disturbance’ to the self-satisfied narrative of Australian colonial history (‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery’, ABR August 2020). I am looking forward to the outcome of the larger research project. In the geographically proximate colony of the Dutch East Indies, the anti-slavery movement, which impacted on extensive Dutch involvement in slavery, particularly in relation to its South American colonies, was also creating a diversity of outcomes in colonial Java. This included a recourse to ‘unfree labour’ and justifying the expansion of the ‘civilising influence’ of Western colonisation. Joost Coté (online comment) Dear Editor, Georgina Arnott’s excellent article brings into focus a topic ignored for far too long. It is fascinating to trace the origin of some of the capital that built Australia. While I was aware of the story of black birding, I was quite ignorant of the effect of slave money in the history of our country. I could not believe the amount of money paid to slave owners, and the fact that the British taxpayers only paid off the loan in 2015. I look forward to reading Dr Arnott’s future research on this topic. David Thummler (online comment)

The ABR Podcast On the page, ABR hosts one of the country’s most lively and thoughtful cultural conversations; the new podcast is a warm-hearted invitation to join in. Beejay Silcox 4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

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

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International Studies

Connecting the dots China’s influence on the world Ben Bland

Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world

by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Hardie Grant Books $32.99 pb, 438 pp

of the book’s sources and question its overall tone. Rather than uncovering secret intentions, the authors examine key statements by the CCP and its general secretary, Xi Jinping, better known in the West as China’s president, to demonstrate the scale of the Party’s ambitions to mould the global order in its favour. Then, using a combination of primary and secondary sources, they document how the CCP has sought to advance its interests by ‘using business to pressure government’, ‘using the local to surround the centre’, and ensuring that, in Xi’s words, those who are ‘eating the CCP’s food’ must not be allowed to ‘smash the CCP’s cauldron’. Many of the cases they cite are already well known to academics and journalists, from the promotion of CCP-controlled media overseas to commercial espionage in the United States. But they shine a fresh light on ties between CCP-linked entities and business and political élites in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The real value of Hidden Hand is not in its revelations but in the way the authors have compiled so many examples of the CCP’s ‘United Front’ activity across so many different sectors and countries, albeit all in the Western world. There is something deeply unnerving about how easily influential people can be encouraged to parrot CCP talking points about Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea.

ometime in 2017, one of the world’s largest academic publishers started quietly removing thousands of articles from its websites in China because they covered topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinse Communist Party (CCP). Much of the offending material related to the three Ts: Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time I was a China correspondent for the Financial Times, and an academic who was horrified by this censorship tipped me off. I contacted the publisher, Springer Nature, which admitted that it had begun censoring to comply with ‘local distribution laws’. I naïvely thought that the exposure of such craven behaviour by the owner of Nature, Scientific American, and the Palgrave Macmillan imprint would prompt a huge backlash from academics, universities, and governments. As Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg explain in Hidden Hand, Western publishers and other organisations have only become more attuned to and compliant with the CCP’s expansive definition of political correctness. The problem is less the ‘hidden hand’ of the Party, which is often far more transparent about its intentions than the sinister title of the book implies. It is more the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism, which has driven some universities, companies, and politicians to sell out their principles in the hope of tapping the riches of the Chinese market. As Hamilton and Ohlberg argue, the skill of the CCP lies Xi Jinping and Barack Obama at a White House state dinner during Xi’s 2015 state visit in exploiting this profit motive and other ‘weaknesses of (photograph by Pete Souza/White House via Wikimedia Commons) democratic systems’ in order to curb criticism, win political influence, and advance its global ambitions. Yet, Hamilton and Ohlberg regularly undermine their own Hidden Hand is a follow-up to Hamilton’s most recent book, case by overreaching. While their research on links between Silent Invasion (2018), which detailed the CCP’s efforts to make British businesspeople and the CCP is illuminating, there is no friends and influence people in Australia. Working alongside basis for their sensational claim that ‘Britain has passed the point Ohlberg, a German scholar of China, Hamilton has expanded of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing’s the lens of investigation to the wider Western world, with a orbit would probably fail’. In fact, the United Kingdom is joining focus on Europe. The new book mirrors its precursor. The title is Australia and the United States by belatedly rejecting Huawei overwrought. And the authors deploy a curious mix of unneces- technology and by taking a harder line on Beijing’s encroachsary hyperbole and dry case studies (the glossary and endnotes ments in Hong Kong and elsewhere. comprise one third of the book). But the bulk of the material Similarly, they seem too easily taken in by the rhetoric of Xi’s within is genuinely concerning. Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a lofty but largely unrealised plan For the uninitiated, Hidden Hand provides a broad overview to intensify China’s economic linkages with Europe and Asia. of the CCP’s struggle for influence in the West. For many experts, China’s outward investment drive has had – and will continue it will help to connect the dots, even if they are familiar with many to have – a significant impact on the rest of the world, giving AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Politics the CCP greater political influence and economic power. But the BRI is not ‘the most powerful vehicle by which Beijing is changing the postwar international order’, let alone ‘the ultimate instrument of … economic blackmail’. While the CCP sets out its grand global designs through the BRI and the United Front, its actions tend to be more like a game of whack-a-mole. Hamilton and Ohlberg overlook that improvisational tendency as they give Beijing more credit than it deserves in a bid to highlight the urgency of the CCP challenge. For the most part, Beijing’s diplomats, spies, and supporters are relying on the naïveté, complacency, and greed of their interlocutors in the West. Hamilton and Ohlberg show that there are plenty of takers, from former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But are these politicians really committed to fighting the CCP’s corner, or are they just a cheap date for anyone willing to pay the bill? Hidden Hand reveals as much about the fragilities of Western democracies as it does about the dark arts of the CCP. The authors’ eminently sensible conclusions will disappoint academics and security analysts spoiling for another fight about China policy. They warn that ‘democracies won’t be able to change China, but they can defend their most important institutions’. That will require reforms to bring more transparency to lobbying, as Australia did in 2018, and to political fundraising. It will also require more coordination between Western allies and a willingness to bear some costs if China seeks to punish nations that defend their sovereignty. Above all, there is a need for more research and public debate about how to handle a state whose values are inexorably opposed to ours but whose economy is inextricably linked. Hidden Hand will divide expert opinion along much the same lines as Silent Invasion, and the breathless broader debate between ‘panda huggers’ and ‘dragon slayers’. Those who are calling for a tougher stance against Beijing will welcome Hidden Hand for bringing the CCP’s nefarious intentions and its cast of ‘useful idiots’ in the West to public attention. Those who are calling for a rethink of the current pushback will see the book as unbalanced and providing ready fodder for Sinophobes, despite the authors’ insistence that opposing the CCP is about values and politics, not race and nationality. But a more dispassionate reading of the book will leave most readers with a sense of sad inevitability about the deterioration of relations between China and the West. Unlike the Soviet Union, the CCP does not want to export communist revolution or to ‘shape the world in its own image’, as Hamilton and Ohlberg put it. Rather, it seeks to ‘make the world safe for the CCP’, ensuring that external threats do not undermine the legitimacy of the Party at home. Yet, because of the global nature of China’s power today, the CCP must bring the battle for influence to the far-flung fields portrayed in Hidden Hand. g Ben Bland is a research fellow and the Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute. He is the author of Generation HK: Seeking identity in China’s shadow (Penguin Random House, 2017) and Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the struggle to remake Indonesia (Penguin Random House, 2020). ❖ 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

High fives

A turgid study of women in politics Megan Clement

Women and Leadership: Real lives, real lessons by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Vintage $34.99 pb, 326 pp

o Australian feminist is likely to forget the moment when Germaine Greer appeared on Q&A and declared that our first female prime minister should wear different jackets to hide her ‘big arse’. Greer, of course, has blotted her copybook many times before and since, but if we needed proof that a woman leader could not catch a break in this country, here was Australia’s most celebrated feminist joining in the new national pastime of hurling sexist invective at the prime minister. This nadir of Australian discourse on women’s leadership takes on a new light when considered by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, two-time Nigerian finance minister and Julia Gillard’s co-author of Women and Leadership: Real lives, real lessons. ‘How ridiculous,’ says Okonjo-Iweala. In Africa, she points out, ‘Julia would be seen as skinny’. It’s a witty moment in what is otherwise a turgid treatment of the slippery topic of ‘women’s leadership’, which Gillard is currently investigating via a dedicated global institute at King’s College, London. Okonjo-Iweala and Gillard compare their divergent experiences in politics with those of eight prominent women politicians from around the world: former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former UK prime minister Theresa May, former president of Chile Michelle Bachelet, former Malawian president Joyce Banda, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, Nobel Prize-winner and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. And of course there is Jacinda Ardern, whose steady handling of the coronavirus crisis in New Zealand and compassionate response to the Christchurch massacre have inspired thousands of articles about the value of ‘empathetic leadership’ – often coded explicitly as female. Thankfully, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala warn against the dangers of ‘requiring women leaders to pick up the burden of always being the nicer person’. They note that research shows that, rather than rewarding empathy in women leaders, we expect it and ‘mark them down in our regard if they do not exhibit it’. The authors draw on research throughout the book to explain how people perceive women leaders, from the obsession with their looks evident in Greer’s comments, to the propensity to think of them as ‘a bit of a bitch’. These evidence-based insights run alongside individual testimonies from their interviewees, clubbily dubbed ‘our women leaders’. It’s the interviews with the diverse roster of politicians that provide the real highlights of this book. We hear of Johnson

Sirleaf ’s lifelong battle to serve her country, encompassing jail, prescriptive versus descriptive stereotyping based on the idea of exile, and the difficult decision to leave her children at home while a Chinese woman who does not eat rice. It is desperate stuff. she pursued an education in the United States. Equally impresThe book is also notable for what is left out. One can only sive is Bachelet, who was tortured by the Pinochet regime in the imagine the kinds of fascinating, uncensored conversations there 1970s but went on to become president are to be had between Gillard, who is chair of Chile twice. She is now the UN High of the Global Partnership for Education, Commissioner for Human Rights. and Okonjo-Iweala, who has led negotiaMost striking is the revelation that tions that secured $18 billion in debt relief two of the women – Sirleaf and Banfor her country and is currently gathering da – had to leave abusive marriages on backers for a tilt to become head of the their way to becoming the first female World Trade Organization. But these are leaders of their countries. Not even the not the kinds of insights we are offered in most powerful women are free from Women and Leadership, which is ultimately male violence. For her troubles, Banda an attempt to examine the life of women was described as a cow who should have in the political sphere without grappling been ‘kept at home for milk’. with their actual politics. If Gillard and Clinton come across In a long career, no politician is unas particularly battle-scarred from their touched by accusations of corruption, poor treatment by the media and their political decision-making, or betraying voters. But opponents for the sin of being women there should be no comparison between who sought power, Ardern and Solberg Gillard, who was compelled to appear seem to come from a different planet before a highly dubious royal commission Julia Gillard (photograph by Peter Brew-Bevan/ altogether. Each happily points out that into trade unions headed by Dyson HeyPenguin Random House) her country had multiple female leaders don, of all people, and who was cleared before them, which eased their path. ‘I of any wrongdoing (not before being saw what you went through and that was just brutal,’ Ardern tells accused of being ‘too prepared’ by the now-disgraced judge, in Gillard. ‘I wonder sometimes if our environment was the same a textbook act of stereotyping that would not have been out of as Australia, would I have stuck it out as long.’ place as a case study for this book), and Lagarde, who, despite Moving as these testimonies are, her continued rise in international govthis is not an easy book to read; in parts ernance, was convicted of negligence over it seems like a hastily compiled white the misuse of public funds during her term paper. This is strange, because it is clear as France’s finance minister, (though she from their previous work that both of was not sentenced or fined). its authors know how to write. Fighting It is equally hard to argue for the Corruption Is Dangerous (2018), Okonjoinclusion of Theresa May, who ordered Iweala’s most recent book, about her ‘Go Home’ vans to drive around the second term as finance minister, opens United Kingdom terrorising migrants into with a vivid retelling of the harrowing self-deporting, in a book about whether abduction of her eighty-three-year-old certain groups of people get unfair treatmother at the hands of kidnappers whose ment. Which is probably why the quotaransom demand was that she resign her tion from May that opens the book is an ministry on television. Gillard’s My anecdote about how her leopard-print Story (2014), meanwhile, was a frank, kitten heels got a woman she once met lively account of the tumultuous years in a lift into politics. of her prime ministership (2010–13). With a self-avowed sexual predator So when we must read sentences like the occupying the White House, a man Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala following – ‘How galling, frustrating and who won’t even admit to the number of (Penguin Random House) infuriating is it that, in the contemporary children he has in Downing Street, and a world, gender can matter so much and to the clear disadvantage new-look government containing an accused rapist installed by of women. It makes you want to cry to the heavens, “What is the current resident of the Elysée Palace, there is no doubt that we going on?’’’– the cry to the heavens from the reader is less, ‘What are in need of a book investigating what our other options might is going on?’ and more, ‘Where is your editor?’ be. Unfortunately, one in which May muses on the inspirational Other passages read like a Facebook post from a loved but value of her shoes is probably not it. g overbearing family member: ‘Our message is the exact opposite of beware. Rather, it is GO FOR IT! And yes, we are SHOUT- Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in genING.’ At one point, we are asked to imagine the authors der, human rights, international development, and social policy. high-fiving each other. There is a questionable metaphor about She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Gay Studies

Borderlands

to choose one’s gender identity; on the other, rape, murder, and torture. Of course, the line can run within as well as between countries: Brazil has the largest Gay Pride parades in the world A skilful examination of queer experience as well as perhaps the highest murder rates of trans women. Dennis Altman The pink line, writes Gevisser, ‘is a borderland where queer people try to reconcile the liberation and community they might have experienced online or on TV or in safe spaces, with the constraints of the street and the workplace, the courtroom and the living room’. Like Gevisser, I prefer the term ‘queer’, which allows for the The Pink Line: The world’s queer complexity and nuances of how people understand their sexual frontiers desires and their gender. But ‘LGBT’ has become the dominant by Mark Gevisser international language, and a mark of both modernity and threats of Western imperialism. Indonesian politicians campaign against Profile Books the threat of ‘LGBT’ without necessarily knowing what the $49.99 hb, 536 pp acronym stands for. n 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed Gevisser is a well-established South African journalist who that ‘gay rights are human rights’.This statement, which would has spent much time in the United States, where an Open Society seem uncontroversial to most readers of ABR, was widely at- Fellowship supported research for this book. He has consulted tacked as a symbol of Western neo-colonialism. Combined with widely and read strategically; the book acknowledges a broad the 2015 US Supreme Court recognition of same-sex marriage, range of scholarship. The skilful reporting of The Pink Line is gay rights were seen by many religious and political leaders as strengthened by his understanding of how our concepts of sexa threat to tradition, culture, and religion, even when, as in many uality and gender are shaped by history and politics. parts of Africa and the Pacific, laws proscribing homosexual beThe Pink Line was written over a period of seven years during which Gevisser travelled widely and met people on every continent, except, sadly, ours. He became involved with the stories of perhaps a score of queers struggling with social pressures, ranging from bullying and parental disapproval to fears of imprisonment and exile. Gevisser brings the skills of a novelist to these stories, capturing the constant negotiation through which queers in very different contexts find ways of adjusting to hostile environments. The cast list of The Pink Line is enormous: here are the stories of Malawian refugees in South Africa, lesbian parents in Moscow, Palestinian homosexuals living in Israel. Each could be read as a short story in itself. My favourite revolves around the lesbian women who established a café in Cairo in the brief period of hope ushered in by the Arab Spring. Gevisser is aware of his privilege as an affluent white man able to travel the world, and he recognises that in sharing their stories many of his informants reasonably expect something in return. His own involvement with many of his informants is carefully Protesters wrapped in the LGBT and Brazilan flags during an #EleNão protest against acknowledged. In the last section, where he immerses Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, 2018. ‘Ele nã’o is Portuguese for ‘not him’. himself in the complex world of kothis in Tamil Nadu, (photograph by Sâmia Bomfim via Flickr) he comes to recognise that he, too, has been changed by his encounters with very different assumptions about haviour are the legacy of nineteenth-century colonialism. how we construct our sexual and gendered selves. Debates over sexuality and gender have become central to The very term ‘LGBT’ covers several separate if interglobal culture wars. For Mark Gevisser this has created ‘a pink connected identities, for homosexual desires and unease with line’, a more vivid term than the concept of polarisation which prescribed gender identity are not necessarily the same. Indeed, Jon Symons and I used in our book Queer Wars (2016). As sexual one might argue that coupling the two reinforces simple stereoand gender diversity seems to blossom in some parts of the world types of homosexuals as women who want to be men and men who so too do stigma and repression, usually fostered by religious and want to be women. Most homosexuals are content with their ascribed political authority. From Putin to Bolsonaro, many of today’s gender, and many trans people define themselves as heterosexual. despots have used queers as a convenient scapegoat. Most non-Western societies had room for gender non-conOn one side of the pink line is gay marriage and the right formists, whether hijra in India, waria in Indonesia, or goor-jigeen

10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

in Senegal. With the emergence of global attention to ‘LGBT rights’, these identities are increasingly scrutinised and often repressed, although across South Asia there is legal recognition of a ‘third gender’, even when, as in Pakistan, homosexuality remains criminalised. Today, trans identities range widely between those who reject any assumption of a gender binary and those who adhere to conventional notions of masculinity and femininity and seek to change their bodies to fit what they believe to be their authentic identity. Gevisser’s stories highlight the ways in which traditional pathways for gender non-conformity compete with contemporary notions of human rights and medical transition. The Pink Line says relatively little about HIV/AIDS, although responses to the epidemic have been crucial in creating new assertions among sexual minorities globally. Organisations like Pink Triangle in Malaysia or ABIA in Brazil that have been pivotal in campaigning for queer rights grew out of responses to the epidemic. Gevisser’s focus on ordinary queers largely ignores the professional activists lobbying at meetings of the UN Human

Rights Committee or queer celebrities, like the grandson of Omar Sharif or the Indian Prince of Rajpipla. Over the past two decades, acceptance of sexual and gender diversity has become a central fault line in many countries, as Australia experienced in the vote for marriage equality in 2017. The Australian queer movement is one of the strongest in the world, as noted in Gevisser’s passing comments on Sydney’s Mardi Gras. But it has been less aware than its counterparts in other wealthy countries of the situation of queers outside our borders. How one supports local movements without providing fodder for those who claim queer rights are a new form of Western imperialism is an ongoing challenge. For anyone interested in thinking through this dilemma, The Pink Line is a very good starting point. g Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University. He is the author, with Jon Symons, of Queer Wars (Polity, 2016).

International Studies

Out of sight, out of mind

Australia’s moral responsibility to West Papuans Kieran Pender

The Road: Uprising in West Papua by John Martinkus Black Inc. $24.99 pb, 125 pp

Too Close to Ignore

edited by Mark Moran and Jodie Curth-Bibb Melbourne University Press $34.99 pb, 310 pp

t is a damning – if not altogether surprising – indictment on our public discourse that the average Australian knows far more about political and social developments on the other side of the world than about those occurring in our ‘near abroad’. It takes just fifteen minutes to travel in a dinghy from the northernmost island in the Torres Strait to Papua New Guinea. The flight from Darwin to Timor-Leste lasts barely an hour. If visitors were permitted in Indonesian-controlled West Papua, the trip from

Australia to Merauke, by plane from Darwin or boat from the Torres Strait, would not take much longer. Yet judging by the sparse coverage these regions receive in our press and by their minimal prominence in our politics, they might as well be on Mars. For some time now, several journalists and scholars have sought to remedy that knowledge gap. Professor Clinton Fernandes has written extensively on Australia’s relations with the region, including Reluctant Saviour on Timor (Scribe, 2004) and Reluctant Indonesians on West Papua (Scribe, 2006). More recently, ex-diplomat Bruce Hunt published Australia’s Northern Shield? (Monash, 2017), drawing on declassified cabinet documents. Earlier this year came lawyer Bernard Collaery’s Oil Under Troubled Water (MUP, 2020), an exhaustively researched diplomatic history of Australia–Timor relations. Collaery currently awaits trial in the ACT for revealing, together with a whistleblower, that Australia bugged Timor’s cabinet during high-stakes oil and gas negotiations. Now, adding to this growing library comes Too Close to Ignore, a collection edited by academics Mark Moran and Jodie Curth-Bibb, and The Road: Uprising in West Papua by Walkley-nominated reporter John Martinkus. These books are distinct in subject, method, and style. But they find considerable common ground in their policy prescriptions: Australia urgently needs to pay more attention to its near abroad,

The Sydney Open Library Groundbreaking books by leading scholars, free to download or read online. An open access initiative by Sydney University Press https://open.sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

including through diplomatic engagement and development aid. Southern PNG, write Moran and Curth-Bibb, ‘is too close for Australia to ignore the poverty and increasing frustration and consequent tensions prevalent in the region’. Martinkus, meanwhile, ends The Road with a desperate plea: ‘if the Indonesians and the Australians and the UN continue their current policies in [West] Papua, there will never be peace’. Too Close to Ignore is the result of a collaborative research project funded by an Australian Research Council grant. Its eight substantive chapters draw together nine contributors from the academy, consultancies, and the public sector. The result is an impressively interdisciplinary collection, cogently synthesising perspectives across law, governance, health, anthropology, development, and environmental and marine-resource management.

Australia needs to pay attention to its near abroad, through diplomatic engagement and development aid What distinguishes the end product of this collaboration is its empirical basis. Almost every chapter in Too Close to Ignore draws on fieldwork, qualitative interviews, and data collected by the authors. ‘Simply put,’ Moran writes in a preface, ‘we set out to understand a little-known part of the world … to raise awareness of a poorly understood but strategically important borderland’. The central problem highlighted by Too Close to Ignore is underdevelopment. South Fly, the part of PNG closest to Australia, endures poverty comparable to war-torn rural Afghanistan. This would be alarming in the abstract, but its negative consequences are reinforced by South Fly’s proximity to Australia and the fluidity of movement permitted under the Torres Strait Treaty (Papuans from certain areas have special rights to enter Australia for ‘traditional activities’). Several graphics in the collection underscore the severe disparity between South Fly and the Torres Strait: one compares average monthly household income ($199 in South Fly; $2,840 in the Torres Strait); another highlights stark infrastructure inequalities. The envy and resentment are palpable – one Papuan is quoted as observing ‘in Australia, they have everything there’. These feelings are fuelled by a sense that Australia has failed its nearest neighbour, which only gained independence from Australian administration in 1975. Predictably, Australia’s response has been greater border securitisation. This has had a heartbreaking personal impact; one eye-opening passage highlights the barriers faced by cross-border couples. While Too Close to Ignore is well written and accessible, a generalist reader might nonetheless approach the collection with trepidation. Four pages of acronyms in the glossary are an early signal that the book is aimed at academics and policymakers. The only other minor quibble is the slightly optimistic subtitle, Australia’s Borderland with Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, when, in reality, the collection is overwhelmingly focused on PNG.

he Road, on the other hand, is concerned solely with West Papua, the other half of New Guinea. This short book – just over one hundred pages – derives its name

12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

from the Trans-Papua Highway currently under construction from one end of Indonesian Papua to the other. The road has been just the latest flashpoint in tense relations between West Papuans and their Indonesian rulers since the region was effectively annexed in the 1960s. Self-determination is at the heart of the dispute: West Papuans want independence and believe they were promised it by their Dutch colonisers and the United Nations. Instead, they were violently incorporated into Indonesia, under the cover of a democratic façade. The Act of Free Choice in 1969 saw a handpicked group of one thousand West Papuans vote, under duress, to endorse the annexation. It is known locally as the Act of No Choice. In the decades of repression that have followed, hundreds of thousands of West Papuans have been killed. The push for independence persists. In 2017, 1.8 million West Papuans – more than seventy per cent of the population – demanded a referendum on independence in a petition handed to the United Nations. The hand-signed document weighed more than forty kilograms and was smuggled between villages – Indonesia threatened jail time for anyone caught signing it. Papuan militias and Indonesian troops are clashing on an increasingly frequent basis. The Road is a brief summary of the history and contemporary developments in West Papua. Martinkus reported from the region in the 1990s and 2000s, ‘despite regular casual death threats and constant surveillance’, and he draws on this first-hand insight. Martinkus was subsequently banned, and much of the book therefore relies on second-hand reporting (albeit some of the lengthy extracts feel unnecessary). Since 2010, foreign journalists have been restricted from reporting in West Papua, while, more recently, NGOs, international organisations, religious groups, and even foreign diplomats have been prohibited from travelling there. Martinkus, full of fury, rightly damns Australia’s indifference to the Papuan suffering. He recalls newspapers refusing to run his stories; one editor asked him, ‘So what are your plucky brown fellows up to today?’ While Pacific nations including Vanuatu and Tuvalu have taken up the Papuan cause on the international stage, Australia – with all our diplomatic clout – remains silent. Martinkus worries about the endgame; the West Papuans are not going anywhere. ‘The local people have never forgotten or forgiven that take-over,’ he writes. ‘To my mind they never will.’ Both of these books make for grim reading. Not all is well in Australia’s near abroad. For too long, we have looked the other way. One contributor in Too Close to Ignore diagnoses ‘out of sight and out of mind’; a diplomat in The Road suggests ‘hear no evil, see no evil’. Given our proximity, history, and prosperity, Australia has a moral responsibility to do more. The most harrowing passage in The Road comes in the epilogue. Martinkus is a renowned war correspondent – he has covered gruesome conflicts in Timor-Leste, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. ‘But never,’ he insists, ‘have I seen a people more systematically oppressed and isolated than the West Papuans, by the Indonesian military and intelligence services.’ Australians cannot say that we did not know. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer.

Politics

The college of anachronism How US politics thwarts reform Varun Ghosh

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? by Alexander Keyssar

Harvard University Press $49.99 hb, 531 pp

populous states. Yet, despite these obvious flaws, the electoral college has remained in place, and the book sets out to ‘explain the survival, the persistence, of this complicated and much-criticized method of electing presidents’. There has been no shortage of attempts to change the system. Prompted by electoral crises, partisan risk, or social change, reformers have proposed amending the electoral college by dividing states into smaller districts or adopting a proportional allocation of votes. Others have proposed abolishing the electoral college altogether in favour of a national popular vote.

The system entrenches malapportionment by allocating more weight to votes in less populous states

n 2016, Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes for president of the United States than Donald Trump. None of the myriad proposals has succeeded. Two came closer Despite this sizeable margin, Clinton was not elected. The than others. In 1821, a district election model was approved by reason was the electoral college, a method for picking presidents the US Senate but failed to achieve two-thirds support in the that emerged as an ‘eleventh-hour compromise’ at the Consti- House of Representatives, by just six votes. In 1969, a national tutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787 and that has never popular vote model was passed by the House, but was filibustered been abolished. by Southern senators. A motion for cloture narrowly failed to Perhaps contrary to general perception, Americans do not achieve the necessary two-thirds to break the filibuster. As a vote directly for presidential candidates. Instead, the votes go result, the proposal never reached a vote on the Senate floor. towards selecting members of an electoral college (known as Perceived political interest has, time and again, defeated reform. electors). Legislation in each of the states determines precisely As Keyssar observes: how that selection occurs, and it is the members of the electoral college who choose the president. Crises, of course, were not the only moments when partisanship Most states (other than Maine and Nebraska) appoint a slate complicated the path to reform. Although rarely acknowledged in of electors from the party whose candidate has won the popular public, the stances taken by political leaders often reflected their vote in that state – a winner-takes-all approach. The candidate who assessments of the impact of a proposed reform on their party’s wins the most votes in the state receives all of that state’s electoral electoral prospects. votes, which are equal to the number of senators and representatives elected to The onerous requirements for the US Congress from that state. constitutional amendment have also The method is further complicated assisted defenders of the status quo. by the prospect of so-called ‘faithless Under Article V of the US Constituelectors’. While most states compel tion, any proposed amendment must electors to pledge to support the nomifirst obtain a two-thirds vote of both nee of the political party on whose slate houses of Congress (or be proposed at they appear, the electors can still vote a convention called by two-thirds of for whomever they choose. For examstate legislatures) and then be ratified ple, in 2016, three Democratic electors by the legislatures of, or conventions in, in California voted for Colin Powell three-quarters of the states. rather than Hillary Clinton, hoping Keyssar’s examination of the fate to convince Republican electors in ‘red of electoral college reform proposals states’ to vote against Trump. Unsuris thorough, though the pattern of prisingly, the gambit did not succeed. defeat for such reform proposals beWhy Do We Still Have the Electoral comes quickly familiar. Nevertheless, Alexander Keyssar (photograph by Martha Stewart / College? by Alexander Keyssar, is a dethe account is enlivened by fascinating Harvard University Press) tailed history of the electoral college and episodes in US political history, such as the attempts to change it. It is clear from the outset that Keyssar, the bitterly contested election of 1876. In that contest, Democrat a professor of history at Harvard University, is unconvinced of the Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, and a bitter dispute about value of the electoral college. The system is unduly complicated. the qualifications of electoral college members from Florida, It also turns the presidential election into ‘an aggregation of state Louisiana, and South Carolina arose. To secure the presidency, elections’ rather than a truly national election, and entrenches Republican Rutherford B. Hayes reached an informal agreement malapportionment by allocating more weight to votes in less known as the Compromise of 1877: if Congressional Democrats AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Biography supported his election, Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South and end Reconstruction. Other episodes emphasise the dominance of political considerations. In 1972, President Richard Nixon was supportive of proposals to abolish the electoral college in order to neutralise a perceived threat from George Wallace. As Wallace faded, so too did Nixon’s support for change, particularly when that support risked alienating Southern senators, such as Strom Thurmond. More recently, presidential incumbency has also been relevant to parties’ attitudes to reform. When President Barack Obama won the electoral college decisively in 2012, Republicans in states such as Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida began considering replacing winner-takes-all systems with district or proportional elections to counter the perceived benefit to Obama. By 2016, however, when Donald Trump was the clear beneficiary of the electoral college, Democratic hostility to the system was aroused. Republicans, however, interpreted the results ‘as evidence of their wisdom in opposing reform … the Electoral College delivered the presidency to Trump, and popular support for reform [among Republicans] evaporated overnight’. Overall, the history of attempts to reform the electoral college is characterised by failure. Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? is a well-researched account of these failures, but offers little hope for future reform. As a work of scholarship, it is to be commended. However, the book is unlikely to appeal to any but the most avid aficionados of US politics. g Varun Ghosh is a lawyer from Perth.

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www.australianbookreview.com.au 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Getting past Clarence Thomas America’s taciturn and long-serving judge Heather Roberts

The Enigma of Clarence Thomas by Corey Robin

Henry Holt $49.99 hb, 320 pp

n a frosty January morning in 2019, I found myself listening to oral argument at the Supreme Court of the United States. The cases I witnessed were not destined for headlines – no abortion, free speech, or death penalty cases that day – but I was still fortunate to get a seat. Queues snaked around the building, with tightly controlled ticketed entry and heavily armed security. As a scholar of constitutional courts, I was delighted by the public interest (less so by the guns), even if a Trump shutdown of nearby tourist attractions may have augmented the numbers. But none of us attending that day expected to witness something extraordinary: Clarence Thomas speaking. As Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, points out in The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, ‘the only thing most Americans know about [Thomas] is that he was once accused of sexual harassment’ – more on that later – ‘and that he almost never speaks from the bench’. While some Supreme Court judges revel in excoriating cross-examinations of the lawyers appearing before them, Thomas has remained largely mute since his narrow confirmation by the US Senate in 1991. I witnessed Thomas speak in an otherwise non-distinct personal injury matter. Having spent most of the day with his back to the lawyers, the seventy-two-year-old at one point sent his clerk running to retrieve a book of cases. Thomas scoured it for something, rocked precariously on his huge leather chair, and then beckoned neighbouring judge Stephen Breyer for a conversation. The two exchanged words, before Breyer, book in hand, posed a question to the lawyer: ‘It has been drawn to my attention …’ This innocuous phrase belied the fact that it was Thomas who was interested in the case that he had located in the bound tome: that it was the Court’s ‘most extreme’ conservative justice who demanded an answer. Supreme Court proceedings are not filmed; since Thomas had spoken privately to Breyer, his comment was not officially transcribed. It was only by coincidence that I was in the room when it happened. But I could not help ponder what the interaction revealed about the subtle ways Thomas exerts influence on the court. Readers hoping for an exposé of scandal from within the Supreme Court (à la Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s The Brethren [1979]) will not find it in Robin’s book. Rather, it is a thoughtful exploration of the conservative elements in US politics and the legal and judicial levers of power available to

them. Robin approaches his task through three key themes: race, a rare book about Thomas that does not contain a discrete chapcapitalism, and the American Constitution. As he explains, it is ter on the infamous Senate Confirmation proceedings in 1991, no accident that these are central in Thomas’s decision-making: and the sexual harassment allegations made against Thomas by they are ‘totems of [American] culture, the fetishes of our fixity’. Professor Anita Hill. Thomas was ultimately confirmed, as was Robin’s concern is to tackle these totems and for the United Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, despite Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s States to emerge from what he sees as an extreme, disturbing, allegations of sexual assault. The conduct of both proceedings and ugly conservativism. ‘To get past them,’ he argues, ‘we have continues to excite legal and political debate in America. With to go through [Thomas].’ Australia now facing its own judicial #MeToo movement, we can Robin’s fear of Thomas’s influence is very real; one of legacy look to the controversy over Thomas’s appointment for salutary through personal connections and philosophical grooming. In lessons regarding power, privilege, and patronage in legal systems, Donald Trump’s America, a Thomas clerkship (the equivalent of and the structural reforms that are needed to effect changes in Australia’s judicial associateships) provides a de facto stamp of workplace culture, including complaints mechanisms and diverse approval for lower-level court appointments. These judges directly and inclusive legal industries. influence decision-making at the ground level, and gain the essenRobin’s discussion of the pragmatic approach Thomas adopttial judicial service necessary to qualify them for higher judicial ed in the confirmation proceedings (which he summarises thus: appointments. Thomas’s influence is therefore transformational ‘say anything to get on the bench’) is also a salutary reminder that and inter-generational in a way that could not be guaranteed by all judicial appointment models come with risks and benefits. As his single vote on the nine-member bench, even as the Court’s the Dyson Heydon scandal excites debate in the legal profession longest-serving justice. Robin is well placed to make these observations, having previously authored a number of award-winning books examining the origins of the conservative movement in America. His narrative is deeply invested in a careful reading of Thomas’s decisions and writings and speeches off the bench, but The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is not legalistic or inaccessible, nor is it polemical in its treatment of Thomas’s vision. Robin ensures that his subject emerges as multifaceted and nuanced. Indeed, it is the nuances of Clarence Thomas that Robin fears. By defying easy labels, Thomas emerges as a more powerful force, with a coherent underpinning philosophy. One wonders whether, had Robin attempted to survey all of Thomas’s decision-making rather than focusing on his three themes, he would have found such coherence. Robin’s choice Ronald Reagan and Clarence Thomas in the Oval Office, 1986 not to dilute his narrative with a myr(Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons) iad of case references is defensible, however, both for readability and in light of the significance of about judicial appointment processes, these calls must be met with those themes in contemporary US life. rigorous debate about the criteria for judicial appointment – both Robin’s readers gain greater insight into a complex man and legal experience and expertise and personal attributes – and how his mind: the black nationalist judge who favours mandatory sen- and by whom these are to be assessed. With two (out of seven) tencing and imprisonment; who believes that racism is permanent new appointments to the High Court of Australia required in and incurable, and is opposed to affirmative action policies; whose the next twelve months, it is a timely moment to reflect upon commitment to the Second Amendment stems from his belief the attributes Australia needs in its judges, and the influence in the fundamental need for black men to have guns to protect they exert in our community both on and off the bench. Robin’s themselves against white violence, and who believes that violence engaging dissection of Clarence Thomas’s influence and legacy in schools and the community is the major impediment to black has much to offer anyone engaged in those debates. g Americans achieving the transformative benefits of education. Robin’s choice to examine Thomas’s philosophy thematically, Heather Roberts is an Associate Professor and ARC DECRA rather than to chart a chronological course, also means that this is Fellow at the ANU College of Law. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Biography

Life and poetry

temporary idiom. In response to an offer by a predatory squatter to buy her lover’s grey shearing singlet, for example, the speaker of ‘A Grey Singlet’ replies, ‘A semi-trailer load of trade wethers A writer of glass-delicate lyrics would not buy it.’ Philip Mead One of the unpredictable collaborations within the A&R group was Campbell and Rosemary Dobson’s translations of Russian poetry. Campbell had already been interested in translating Russian poetry, but with Dobson’s return from the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and with assistance from Russian scholars at ANU, Natalie Staples and Robert Dessaix, they became David Campbell: A life of the poet absorbed in translating Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. by Jonathan Persse Campbell and Dobson published two volumes of these translations, but perhaps one of the most remarkable results of this work Australian Scholarly Publishing was the Mandelstam translations that appeared in The Man in the $44 pb, 260 pp Honeysuckle, Campbell’s last collection, published after his death o an older generation of Australian poetry readers, David in 1979. It’s hard to imagine anything more remote from CampCampbell (1915–79) was perhaps the best-loved poet of bell’s outdoors Monaro than Mandelstam’s paranoid city of LenDouglas Stewart’s post-World War II ‘Red Page’, ap- ingrad, with its decrepit apartments and threatening telephones. pearing there with what would become iconic poems of the new There is another Venn diagram of Australian cultural history Bulletin school like ‘Windy Gap’, ‘Who Points the Swallow’, and that Campbell belongs to, the generation of twentieth-century ‘Men in Green’. Despite his frequent publication in that heritage writers, including Patrick White, Judith Wright, and John venue, Campbell published his first collection, Speak with the Sun Manifold, who were all descendants of early pastoral settlers. (1949), in England with Chatto & Windus, through the good Campbell’s ancestors went back to the Second Fleet. There is offices of his Cambridge mentor E.M.W. Tillyard. After that, much of comparative interest in the careers and preoccupations he joined the ancien A&R régime of these writers and their works, not least of poets like Rosemary Dobson, their families’ different accommodations of R.D. FitzGerald, Francis Webb, James the inheritance of Indigenous dispossession. McAuley, and Judith Wright, who took Perhaps the best-known instance of this is up much of the middle ground of AusWright’s work for the Aboriginal Treaty tralian poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. Committee in the 1970s and 1980s and, A lifelong friend and supporter of coincident with that activist engagement, Campbell, Stewart was also influential her rewriting of her 1959 family history The in this group’s prominence, along with Generations of Men as The Cry For the Dead Beatrice Davis, his editorial co-adviser (1981). The portent of this great revision at Angus & Robertson. was Wright’s 1954 poem ‘At Cooloola’. The In this company Campbell’s disanalogous gesture in Campbell’s poetry is tinctiveness was his lyric clarity, his apparent in his fascination with Aboriginal adaptation of the rural tradition of rock carvings and paintings spread across his Hesiod, and his repurposing of the last books. Campbell, less explicitly politipopular ballad. Poems like ‘The High cal in this sense than Wright, nevertheless Plains’ revealed his encounter with the intuited what the miraculously surviving natural world of the Snowy, so intense Aboriginal art signified for the settler imit was surreal: ‘On the high plains by aginary, like the sign of Wright’s driftwood Dairyman / If you look up, you’ll see spear. Campbell’s radar sensed what wouldn’t / Peter Quinn and his hollow mare / be far off in the minds of Aboriginal writers Caught in a spider-tree.’ Campbell’s themselves: shut up about ‘the land’, and get delicacy of observation is also part of your invasive poetics off of our country, if David Campbell, c.1950 this: the paper daisies ‘lock the sunlight you don’t mind. (National Library of Australia) in their palm / as they go under snow’. Campbell’s most striking disobedience, The human figures in Campbell’s Monaro landscape, including though, was his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was involved the poet, are often half absorbed into their habitats. In ‘The with the anti-war readings in Sydney from 1968 and with the Monaro’, for instance, Willy Gray sits and stares on One Tree moratorium week readings and rally organised by Michael Hill the whole day long: ‘And green grass-parrots fly in at his Wilding in May 1970. But his most powerful intervention in ear / And lay their eggs of rounded song.’ In ‘Hawk and Hill’, he this cause was the opening poem, ‘My Lai’, of his 1970 volume, writes: ‘all the coloured world I see / And walk upon, are made The Branch of Dodona. This poem takes a Vietnamese peasant’s by me’. The freely admitted influence of W.B. Yeats allowed perspective on the US atrocity of March 1968, but also references Campbell to inflect the Australian rural matter into a more con- some reporting about the massacre. Unusually, Campbell made a

16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Biography point of talking about this poem’s language and form. War is only a relatively minor theme in Campbell’s poetry, but a powerful one nevertheless. Many readers would have read ‘My Lai’, and the smouldering protest that underlies it, with the awareness that it was written by a man who had been decorated twice for his bravery as a reconnaissance pilot with the Australian Air Force in New Guinea. But that’s not the whole story. Jonathan Persse’s useful biography chronicles the ways in which Campbell’s return to farming life after Cambridge University and the war was both a source of inspiration and eventually a constraint. At the source of this trajectory was Campbell’s idyllic boyhood on ‘Ellerslie’ station, near Adelong, which he wrote about in his short story collection Flame and Shadow (1976). After his return from the war, Campbell took over the management of ‘Wells’, the sheep station on the northern edge of Canberra that his father had bought after the sale of ‘Ellerslie’. But his father died suddenly in 1947. Their rows haunted him: ‘At seventy-three / Was it angina or did he die of me?’ Campbell, his wife Bonnie and their three children, John, Raina, and Andrew, lived on ‘Wells’ for fourteen years, a happy and productive time for Campbell. After the encroachment of Canberra, Campbell and family moved, in 1961, to ‘Palerang’, between Bungendore and Braidwood. Here the work of farming and grazing lost some of its attraction for Campbell, not helped by the breakdown of his marriage. And things got worse. During the seven years Campbell spent at ‘Palerang’, he also had spells in Alanbrook Psychiatric Hospital in Mosman, for alcohol dependency. There was other unhappiness: his sister Meg, to whom he was very close, was struck by schizophrenia and died young. No doubt these experiences were reflected in his strong friendship with Francis Webb and his dedication to helping him return to Australia from Norwich in 1960, even though this would mean a much less sympathetic care regime for Webb. After ‘Palerang’, in the last decade of Campbell’s life he lived on a much smaller property, ‘The Run’, on a reach of the Molonglo River out towards Captains Flat, but had given up farming. He was also happily married a second time, to Judy Jones, a lecturer in History at the ANU. But there was unbearable grief here, too: his daughter Raina was killed in an accident early in the year of his own death. Campbell was a man of stonking exuberant physicality: playing rugby union at an international test level, flying Avro Tutor biplanes as a student in Cambridge, piloting a Lockheed Hudson over the Owen Stanley Ranges, ferrying Australian soldiers to and from the Soputa track, droving sheep and farming crops on the Monaro high plains, jumping in and out of trout streams, making pottery, swimming naked in the Molonglo River. He was also a writer of glass-delicate, translucent lyrics, unmatched for their musicality. As Francis Webb wrote to Campbell about his lyrics, they are the ‘most spontaneous and faithful of poetic forms’. g Philip Mead was the inaugural Chair of Australian Literature and at the University of Western Australia. He has co-edited (with John Tranter) The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (2004) and is the author of Networked Language: Culture and history in Australian poetry (2010) and of the Vagabond Press poetry collection Zanzibar Light (2019).

Liquid worlds

A distinguished heir to the Marxist tradition Anthony Elliott

Bauman: A biography by Izabela Wagner

Polity $51.95 hb, 500 pp

ith the possible exception of Jean Baudrillard or Anthony Giddens, it is difficult to think of a contemporary sociologist who has rivalled the international intellectual standing, as well as global fame, of the late Zygmunt Bauman. In his subtle, worldly intelligence, his interdisciplinary engagement, and his poetic cast of mind, Bauman stands out as one of the most influential social thinkers of our time. A distinguished heir to the tradition of radical Marxist criticism, his writings tracked the political contradictions, cultural pressures, and emotional torments of modernity with a uniquely agile understanding. With his scathing critical pen and brilliant sociological investigations, Bauman unearthed major institutional transformations in capitalism, culture, and communication in a language that disdained all academic boundaries, crossing effortlessly from Marx to mobile phones, from Gramsci to globalisation, and from postmodernism to the privatisation of prisons. Culture has never exactly been a strong point of Marxism, and Bauman’s earlier writings were, among other things, an impressive attempt to address anew the interconnections between capitalism, class, and culture. Bauman’s fame, however, rested upon his late writings on modernity and globalisation. Modernity and the Holocaust, his major breakthrough in 1989 just at the point of his retirement from the University of Leeds, is a dark, harrowing study of the deathly consequences of Enlightenment reason. Auschwitz, in Bauman’s eyes, was a result of the civilising mission of modernity; the Final Solution was not a dysfunction of modern rationality but its shocking product. The Holocaust, Bauman argued, was unthinkable outside the twin forces of bureaucracy and technology. In subsequent books, including Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) and Wasted Lives (2003), Bauman moved from a concern with the historical fortunes of the Jews as victims of modernity to an analysis of the disturbing ways in which postmodern culture cultivates all of us as outsiders, strangers, others. But it was Liquid Modernity (2000), published at the dawn of the new century, which changed everything. His argument that the ‘solid world’ of jobs-for-life and marriages till-death-us-do-part had been replaced by a ‘liquid world’ of short-term contracts and relationships until-further-notice won him a global audience, especially among young readers. Izabela Wagner’s biography of Bauman is impressively erudite, exquisitely researched, and brings its subject vividly to life. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

She interviewed Bauman towards the end of his life and draws extensively from various archives, including important papers held at the Polish Academy of Science. The result is a sprawling account in which almost everything one might seek to know about Bauman’s life is documented, along with a little more information than is always exactly necessary.

book a year and – towards the final years – up to three annually. But for Bauman work and life were deeply interwoven, and he made the most of everything. As Wagner writes: ‘He was what the French define as a bon vivant: he liked to cook, drink, watch TV, listen to music, drink, eat, smoke (too much), feed people (enormously), talk (all the time), entertain (as frequently as possible).’ The late Australian political psychologist Alan Davies argued that a search for safety in abstractions – where the world Auschwitz, in Bauman’s eyes, was a result is treated as a spectacle – is the characteristic emotional mark of of the civilising mission of modernity; the theorists. Wagner is not really interested in analysis of personalFinal Solution was not a dysfunction of ity, preferring what happened over the why. But her recounting modern rationality but its shocking product of Bauman’s life gives the attentive reader clues as to his flight from organisational life to the realm of ideas. Bauman eschewed The lives of sociologists, for the most part, tend not to be professional associations. He disdained institutional sociology. wildly eventful. But this was not the case with Bauman. A Polish He was a maverick. What emerges from Wagner’s pages is a certain inscrutability Jew born in Poznań in 1925, he experienced virulent anti-Semitism growing up, the Great Depression (which bankrupted his in Bauman. He didn’t like to talk about his personal life. One father, who tried to commit suicide by jumping into a local river of the most psychologically telling moments of the book comes when Zygmunt was only a young boy), flight from the Nazis, from Keith Tester, Bauman’s former PhD student, collaborator, and friend. Interviewed by Wagner, the life of a refugee in the Soviet UnTester commented: ‘I don’t think I ion, combat with the Polish Red Army, knew Zygmunt – I don’t think there incorporation after the war into military was a “Zygmunt to know”.’ Wagner intelligence to implement communism is oddly uninterested in exploring à la polonaise, the collapse of Stalinism, this, and thus isn’t able to offer any ejection from Poland (again) in the insights into key emotional aspects anti-Semitic purge of 1968, intellectual of her subject’s life. celebrity (speaking to packed audiencThe roots of this isolation are es from Italy to Portugal to Brazil), all but impossible to fathom from the adulation of various anti-globalist Wagner’s biography. But in it you will movements such as Occupy, and, finally, find a painstakingly comprehensive global fame as one of the world’s most account of Bauman’s intellectual celebrated public intellectuals (in his formation and his daring originality, last years, he was summoned by Pope a kind of voyage around the nature Francis to Assisi to advise the Vatican of his sociological enterprise, and a on combating the ills of global capitalcelebration of a truly global public ism). As Wagner wryly notes: ‘Were a intellectual. Wagner altogether fails, Hollywood director to put his hand to however, to probe Bauman’s inner Bauman’s life he would be accused of life. Powerful memories of his father, “overdoing it”.’ Maurycy, appear especially haunting. Wagner provides especially brilliant In the final years of his life, Bauman insights into ‘Comrade Bauman’, the reflected on his father’s bankruptcy postwar period when Bauman worked and attempted suicide thus: ‘my first, in counter-espionage for the pro-Soviet Zygmunt Bauman, 2010 (photograph by Michał Nadolski fully my own, vivid unfading recolgovernment in Poland. Drawing from via Wikimedia Commons) lection: loud knocking at the door ... Polish secret service archives, she traces and my father – unshaven, in a coat with great sensitivity tarnished issues in Bauman’s past. She emphasises that the military hierarchy was soaking and dripping with dirty water, covered with weeds and not always impressed by his performance, failings explained as slime’. There’s something horribly enigmatic in that recollection, due to his ‘Semitic origins’. She also has important things to say which remains for future Bauman biographers to ponder. In the about the witch-hunt of Bauman by various anti-communist meantime, Wagner has written an indispensable book about the historians and right-wing political groups in the Polish press man she rightly calls ‘one of the most read and famous intellectuals of the early twenty-first century’. g throughout the final decades of his life. Wagner is also insightful in tracing Bauman’s rise as a global thinker. This is surely the best account we are likely to get of his Anthony Elliott is Executive Director of the Jean Monnet Cendaily work routine and intellectual habits. Always at his desk tre of Excellence at the University of South Australia, where he before five a.m., Bauman’s post-retirement output was nothing is Research Professor of Sociology and Dean of External Enshort of astonishing. Between 2000 and 2010, he wrote at least a gagement. 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Fiction

‘To live in paradise alone’ Rewriting her-story Don Anderson

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

Text Publishing $39.99 hb, 322 pp

he thought he ought do some homework in order to hold forth about fiction versus fact. In her Acknowledgements, Grenville salutes Michelle Scott Tucker’s ‘excellent book’ Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world (2018), which, she predicts, ‘will remain the standard biography of that remarkable woman for a long time to come’.

Grenville has had disputes with historians about matters of fiction and fact Scott Tucker at her book’s end describes Macarthur as ‘an ordinary English country [Devon] woman who fell in love with a difficult man and, as a result of his decision to sail to New South Wales, she lived an extraordinarily interesting life’. On the evidence of Scott Tucker’s and Grenville’s books, not merely the life but the woman was extraordinary. Indeed, Scott Tucker elsewhere describes Macarthur as the ‘woman who established the Australian wool industry (although her husband received all the credit)’. Grenville’s title may recall Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), wherein it is argued that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. Elizabeth Macarthur, for much of her life, enjoyed the latter but never the former. The eponymous room made of leaves is in fact the harbourside retreat of botanist and astronomer William Dawes (not to be confused with that other eminent early Australian figure, Rufus Dawes), who also features in Ashley Hay’s wonderful Sydney novel The Body in the Clouds (2010). Mr Dawes and Mrs Macarthur scramble down between the harbourside bushes, coming to ‘a halt in a space enclosed on three sides by greenery. The fourth, facing the harbour, was obscured but not closed in by more branches, forming a private space: a room made of leaves.’ Mrs Macarthur thinks of

ate Grenville’s new novel, her first in almost a decade, is dedicated to ‘all those whose stories have been silenced’, for which, as its ‘memoirist’–narrator heroine is Elizabeth Macarthur, we might read ‘women’. Did she – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney – write what Grenville’s publishers call ‘a shockingly frank secret memoir’? In her ‘Editor’s Note’, Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of there being discovered in the ceiling of a historic Parramatta house under renovation a long-hidden box containing that memoir. In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the book’s end, we are assured that ‘No, there was no box of secrets found in the roof of Elizabeth Farm. I didn’t [as she claimed at the beginning, in her Editor’s Note] transcribe and edit what you’ve just read. I wrote it.’ Perhaps those who thought otherwise failed to observe the book’s epigraph from Elizabeth Macarthur – ‘Do not believe too quickly’ – though whether those words were inscribed by the historic Elizabeth or by Grenville’s fictional one may be a matter for discussion. Apropos of previous books, Grenville the novelist has had disputes with historians about matters of fiction and fact. While the life and times of the pleasure of having a small Kate Grenville (via Text Publishing) Elizabeth Macarthur (or the charprivate place where you could acter ‘Elizabeth Macarthur’) are simply be who you were. doubtless central to A Room Made of Leaves, of no less concern is A moi. Mine alone, my own. … I felt my skin go out to meet him, the issue of the rewriting of history as fiction, which is, after all, felt my blood warmed by his nearness. The habit of being Mrs as Ian Watt (in his ground-breaking work The Rise of the Novel, Macarthur – proper, courteous, reserved – had grown around me [1957]) among others has urged, where the novel began back in like a long-worn garment, every stitch familiar. Yet here it was, the mid eighteenth century, a mere few decades before Sydney unravelling to show me what lay beneath. was settled. At least one reader of Kate Grenville’s new novel felt so ignorant about the historical Elizabeth Macarthur that Mrs Macarthur, and we readers, have fallen into something 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Fiction idyllic, perhaps even paradisal. Her room made of leaves may be traced back through Huck Finn’s island (1884) at least to Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’. What wondrous life in this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head; The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine, and curious peach, Into my hands themselves do reach; Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass … Two paradises ’twere in one To live in paradise alone.

But not for Kate Grenville’s ‘Mrs Macarthur’ or ‘Mr Dawes’, it would seem. They would appear to delight in what Henry James and others referred to as ‘criminal conversation’. It is not fanciful here to imagine historians mounting upon their high horses. Neither Ashley Hay nor Michelle Scott Turner considers Elizabeth and William committing adultery, though the fictional and ‘paranoid’ ‘John Macarthur’ does fantasise about the possibility of his wife’s infidelity. It all transpired or did not two hundred years ago, so no one can sue Kate Grenville (unlike Ellen Wren, who sued Frank Hardy for his depiction of her as the adulterous Nellie West in Power Without Glory [1950]). But a question niggles. Is it ethical for a novelist to do what Grenville does and impute such details into the private lives of historical personages? Many of the delights of A Room Made of Leaves fall in the realm of realism. The rigours of childbirth, the facts of menstruation, Sapphic temptations between girls sharing a bed, Elizabeth’s judgement upon her husband: ‘rash, impulsive, changeable, self-deceiving, cold, unreachable, self-regarding … There was worse. My husband was someone whose judgement was dangerously unbalanced.’ On the other hand, would ‘Mrs Macarthur’ realistically have been capable of the following observation? ‘If the surface could hold, like a brimming glass of water kept together by its own density [my italics] perhaps Mr Macarthur would at least leave the idea of a court martial behind, and our fortunes might prosper.’ At least she did not say ‘meniscus’. A minor quibble, doubtless. Mrs Macarthur and her fellow new-chums doubtless felt as cut adrift from everything familiar as did Marvell’s ‘rational amphibia’: But now the salmon-fishers moist Their leathern boats begin to hoist; And, like Antipodes in shoes, Have shod their heads in their canoes.

In colonial America, confronted with a comparable dislocation, military bands played ‘The World Turn’d Upside-Down’. We can but wonder what was played at those gubernatorial balls at Government House to which the Macarthurs were invited. g Don Anderson began writing for ABR in 1982.

Fox business

Jo Lennan’s rich, accomplished stories Debra Adelaide

In the Time of Foxes by Jo Lennan

Scribner $29.99 pb, 293 pp

onderful is not a critical word, but that is where I begin. Now that I have made my peace with foxes, I am full of wonder for them. Doubly receptive to these stories, I am quickly seduced after the first few, in which foxes appear either substantially or marginally. There is much wonderment in these stories, though only one of them is what might strictly be called speculative. Throughout the collection, little hints and details loiter in plain sight but are also hidden from the characters, sometimes from us – a bit like foxes themselves. For example, in ‘Animal Behaviour’ there is a small bomb ticking quietly from the start in the form of just one word – ‘offenders’ – linking the protagonist to her rescue dog; its detonation as the story unfolds is a triumph of structural control. The range of these stunning stories is global, universal: they are set in Tokyo, the Spanish coastline, Oxford, Hong Kong, London, Wollongong. The characters are also diverse: filmmakers, scientists, and students; actors, surfers, and escapees from cults. A journalist on Mars in ‘Day Zero’ takes the reader into unexpected territory in every way. The story is a sobering reminder of the fragility of life and relationships no matter what apparent conquests humans make in their universe. Similarly, in ‘Catch and Release’ a criminal lawyer experiences a frightening violation but is ultimately obliged to confront what he has in common with his drug-crazed assailant, rather than their differences. That story, a tightly paced crime thriller, is also punctuated with a fox, one that pauses, observes, then moves away, choosing not to attack. ‘A world away in London, foxes carried out fox business.’ This is from the quietly compelling title story about cross-generational ties and family responsibilities, one I returned to several times; it is another reminder of our species’ vulnerability and our misguided assumption that we can control nature. Like the protagonist, Nina, I know I should not cheer the fox that survives in her suburban garden, but I do. Raymond Carver famously said of writing stories, ‘No tricks’. Introducing a fox element could have been a trick, a mere gimmick, but the anticipation of the role of that subtle, liminal creature only gives the reader another layer to mine in these rich, clever, accomplished stories. g Debra Adelaide is the author of two short story collections, Letter to George Clooney (2013) and Zebra (2019). Her latest book is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (2019). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Fiction

Seeing the pattern

Amanda Lohrey’s bracing new novel Morag Fraser

The Labyrinth

by Amanda Lohrey

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 246 pp

n a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind. (If you don’t know about labyrinths, my earnest advice is do five minutes’ research and then draw a simple seed-pattern model for yourself. Like the prefatory list of names and patronymics in a Russian novel, this will be an essential tool. Just don’t, like a Lohrey character, become obsessive.) The book’s epigraph is both prophetic and hortatory: ‘The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something.’ Lohrey underscores the point by giving it to us twice, the second time in the maxims of Kenneth Marsden, father of the novel’s narrator, Erica. Marsden, chief medical officer and psychiatrist at Melton Park asylum (‘a manicured madhouse’ where Erica and her brother Axel grew up), held strongly to the therapeutic efficacy of making, of building: ‘A man who does not use his hands is a mind untethered, he would say: when you make something you become a rivet in the fabric of the real.’ Marsden repeats the Jung of the epigraph. And narrator Erica adds a parenthesis: ‘(though he otherwise thought him a charlatan.)’ It is characteristic of this novel that no received ideas slide through. Erica is a sceptic, an interrogator. She is also an avid learner, open and vulnerable in a world where things go awry, or ‘the gods thought otherwise’. Her father coaches her in Latin and encourages her undergraduate Greek: ‘Soon it became clear that I had an aptitude, a gift for entering wholly into another world, whether Melton Park or the gods on Olympus it made no difference.’ I was struck by that sentence (as with many in this taut, deftly edited work): Erica shares with her author a mordant 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

intelligence and an ‘aptitude’ for empathy. I remember a striking essay of Lohrey’s (Voting for Jesus: Christianity and politics in Australia (Quarterly Essay 22), 2006) in which she interviews a group of young evangelical Christians. The temptation to satire was considerable but resisted, without intellectual compromise. The result was revelatory. In The Labyrinth, a related capacity for reserving judgement allows Lohrey to create characters who are vivid, open-ended, never mere types. They surprise, disarm, disappoint, intrigue. And ideas, like a juggler’s orbs, dance in the novel’s air. Dangerous ideas, ideas that must be scrutinised, sieved for worth. The novel’s story is stark, unflinching – gothic without contrivance. Erica Marsden, spurred by a labyrinthine dream, leaves her life of urban fracture – father dead, mother bolted, artist–lover departed and artist–son Daniel in jail – and retreats to the New South Wales coast, a littoral in every sense. There, in between wrenching visits to Daniel in his rural incarceration, Erica tries to piece together a rationale, a way of living. From her undergraduate Greek she retrieves the word kairos, ‘meaning not time, but timeliness … the right or opportune moment for doing’, kairos as distinct from chronos, ‘which is mere arithmetic’. And on the wind and sea-swept fallow ground next to the gemütlich fibro shack she buys, Erica sketches out a labyrinth, and finds another loner, called Jerko, a displaced European stonemason who ‘has the eye’ to help her build it. If you have ever watched a skilled dry-stone waller at work, you’ll know there is nothing magical about having ‘the eye’, rather a focused skill at making – with stone, with paint, with the oil pastels Erica buys for Daniel-in-prison – or with words. And all making carries the potential for destruction as well as creation. But summary does scant justice to the subtlety and power of Lohrey’s writing, just as ‘the main ideas’ (yes, you can find them on the web) of Oedipus Rex read like farce. Every page of this densely populated novel, with its incised landscape, shimmers. A minatory Pacific gull scavenging for chips, ‘its beak pointed with loaded intent’, becomes an event; an old maple tree a welcome lecture in grounded form. Erica’s labyrinthine musings share some of the mad wonder of Melville’s cetalogical chapters in Moby-Dick, and her etymological diggings go deep: The word labyrinth comes from the Greek word labrys, a doubleheaded stone axe said to have been a weapon of the Amazons and to symbolize the early forms of matriarchal society. Said also to have been an early symbol of the act of creation, of techne, and making by hand … In the form of the classical labyrinth, or seed pattern, its opening is said by some to resemble a woman’s labia, its outer rim the cervix, its coils the inner walls of the womb.

And Erica’s note: ‘The womb and the labrys axe. Female and male: mother and father. Except there is no reason why a woman should not wield an axe.’ Or a pen, indeed. The Scots called their poets the Makars. Amanda Lohrey sits well in their dark, wit-laced company. g Morag Fraser is writing a biography of Peter Porter. She was for many years Editor of Eureka Street.

Fiction

Glittering web

David Mitchell’s conjuring trick James Bradley

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell Sceptre $32.99 pb, 564 pp

in misdirection in which the novel’s true concerns are hidden in plain sight. Set against the backdrop of the late 1960s, the novel imagines the rise and fall of the greatest band you’ve never heard of, Utopia Avenue. Unusually for a successful band, Utopia Avenue is not the result of a chance teenage encounter at a church fête or on the platform of Dartford train station. Instead, it is assembled, Frankenstein-style, by manager Levon Frankland out of individuals he believes are wasted in their current bands.

With its freaks and hustlers, the music world seems custom-made for novelists

The main characters form a curious and seemingly incompatiith its cast of freaks and hustlers, damaged souls, and ble quartet. Up front, there’s bassist and singer Dean Moss, a rough self-proclaimed geniuses, the music world seems cus- working-class kid damaged by the loss of his mother and his fatom-made for novelists. Yet while some excellent nov- ther’s descent into alcoholism, and Jasper de Zoet, the band’s stuels catch more than a whiff of that sweaty, drug-fuelled space where pendously gifted lead guitarist, who often seems to exist on anoththe shared exultance of music becomes something transcend- er plane of reality. Alongside them there is Elf Holloway, formerly ent – Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), Jennifer Egan’s one half of a folk duo with womanising Australian bush balladeer A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), Dana Spiotta’s dazzling and Bruce Fletcher and blessed with a voice that can stop time. Behind heartbreaking Stone Arabia (2011), and more recent entries like them all there is drummer Peter ‘Griff ’ Griffin, a Northerner Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six (2019) and Aus- whose no-nonsense manner disguises a surprisingly tender heart. Despite their differences, the four complement one another, tralian author Kirsten Krauth’s excellent Almost a Mirror (2020) – the list of novels that take music seriously is surprisingly short. both personally and musically. After a shaky beginning they begin to find fame, if not fortune, The reasons for this are no moving from the fringes of the doubt complex. Even setting music scene to somewhere a aside Frank Zappa’s apocryphal few spots to the side of the canard about writing about centre. As they do, they are music being like dancing about forced to come to terms with architecture, it’s easy to see how their various demons. In Dean’s the ludicrous self-importance case, these relate mostly to his of rock stars and the excess and compulsive use of sex and drugs absurdity of the music world and to issues with his father might quickly tip into parody that follow. For comfortably in fiction. Likewise, it’s clearly middle-classed Elf, they indifficult to imagine characters volve family expectations, the and music that feel real when ongoing problem of the awful real music is so deeply embedBruce (whose worst crime is ded in our consciousnesses. surely using ‘Wombat’ as a No less importantly, the sorts of term of affection), and, behind stories about the loss of innoit all, the issue of her sexuality. cence, addiction, and doomed Meanwhile Jasper – seemingly brilliance that the music world the most unflappable of the offers often veer into deeply four – is grappling with a maclichéd territory. lefic presence he calls ‘KnockDavid Mitchell’s new novKnock’, which has insinuated el, Utopia Avenue, plays a curiitself into his mind. ous game with many of these Although the band’s perchallenges, simultaneously sonal struggles occupy quite inhabiting and acknowledging David Mitchell (photograph by Paul Stuart/Hachette) a bit of the novel, they never a host of rock and roll clichés, seem particularly urgent. At and casting a warmly amused eye at the lunacy of rock and roll in all its pomp and circum- one level this isn’t surprising: extremity and self-destructiveness stance while retaining a measure of distance. It is also, as is often aren’t really Mitchell’s natural register. But they also provide the the case with Mitchell, essentially a conjuring trick, an exercise framework for a veritable blizzard of references and in-jokes,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Fiction as famous and not-so-famous names from Rick Wakeman and John Martyn to Syd Barrett and John Lennon wander in and out. Hurrying into a lift in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, Elf finds herself beside an impecunious Leonard Cohen, who tries out the line about being Jim Morrison that led to his tryst with Janis Joplin and inspired ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’. David Bowie appears twice: the first time, in a nod to ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and its play on Edward Lear, on a staircase in Soho, where he introduces himself to Jasper as an ‘artiste-at large’ and tells them about the single he is about to release; the second at a party where he laments his failing career (‘My singles got no airplay. My label didn’t promote the album … I’ve been the Next Big Thing since I left school, but I’m still broke’). Even Mick Jagger makes an appearance, pulling Dean out of the way at a protest that has descended into violence. ‘Mick Jagger?’ Dean asks. ‘Nah, I’m an impersonator. Go thataway, this ain’t no place for a street fighting man.’ At their best, these in-jokes are delicious; at other times, as the ‘Street Fighting Man’ gag attests, they are groanworthy. Writing about – or in this case ventriloquising – real people is never easy, and with figures like Bowie and Cohen it’s doubly difficult because not only are their voices intensely familiar but their music also sets up an intimacy that, while illusory, powerfully resists this sort of imitation. This problem is compounded by the fact that, despite its subject and the welter of period detail, the book isn’t particularly interested in either music or the historical moment it inhabits, and so has surprisingly little to say about either. Instead, it is playing a quite different, more metaphysical game. The first indication of this lies in the story of Jasper and his spiritual nemesis, Knock-Knock, whose eventual exorcism reveals not just the connections between Utopia Avenue and Mitchell’s 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but also presents another chapter in the battle between the Anchorites and the Horologists that lay behind his 2014 novel, The Bone Clocks. Of course, it’s no secret that Mitchell’s oeuvre operates not as a sequence of individual novels but as interlocking pieces in a vast metanarrative that stretches into both the deep past and the deep future. Indeed, one of the pleasures for long-time readers is the flash of recognition as characters reappear and connections are revealed. Yet in Utopia Avenue this process of connection is actually the point; it’s no coincidence that when asked to describe the band’s musical style, Jasper says, ‘Pavonine … Magpie-minded. Subterranean.’ For in an echo of critic Greil Marcus’s argument that ‘rock ‘n’ roll may be more than anything a continuum of associations, a drama of direct and spectral connections between songs and performers. It may be a story about the way a song will continue speaking in a radically different setting from the one that, it seemed, gave rise to it, a story in which someone may own the copyright but the voice of the song is under no one’s control’, Mitchell seems to be suggesting that history itself is almost alive, a glittering web that connects us all not just to one another but to time itself. It is a vision at once transcendent and humane, shimmering yet redemptive. Like Mitchell’s imaginative world. Or music. g James Bradley is an author and critic. His new novel, Ghost Species, is published by Hamish Hamilton. 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Muses and acolytes

A nuanced look at art and friendship Mindy Gill

We Were Never Friends by Margaret Bearman

Brio $29.99 pb, 288 pp

argaret Bearman’s We Were Never Friends is a novel that places the myth of the artistic male genius against the critical eye of history. Lotti, the eldest daughter of renowned Australian painter George Coates, narrates from two perspectives: her younger, twelve-year-old self and her present-day one, a trainee surgeon. In 1999 the Coates family abandons Sydney, assured that ‘Canberra would be different’. There, Lotti meets an inscrutable waif, Kyla, widely considered a liar. Kyla comes to embody the novel’s undercurrents of violence, pretence, and deceit. Although Bearman began writing this book long before the #MeToo era, its ethical concerns about whose voices are believed, and whether –as Lotti’s mother wonders, ‘you can profit from something without it being wrong’ – are as germane today as ever. Lotti is oppressed by family life, by the ‘acolytes, friends and strangers’ who appear most evenings in their home, and the concessions her otherwise fiercely resolute mother makes because of her father’s talent. His seminal work, a portrait of his wife as a Madonna, is Lotti’s first source of ambivalence. To Lotti, it represents how he thinks about her, ‘a saintly but flawed icon of a woman’. She notes how father views others as potential subjects only made real – valuable – in his representations of them, not least when Kyla becomes an unshakeable presence in her home life. Kyla’s vulnerability positions her as a mythic, muse-like figure through which Bearman examines, without didacticism, why the genius artist is so often separated from ethical duty. She also questions the responsibility of audiences who believe great art, by nature, cannot be exploitative. Bearman leans heavily on the language of adolescent melodrama, invoking the vicious, fickle nature of pre-teen female friendships. While Lotti desires popularity at any cost, she recognises the gulf between her inner values and outward actions. Like most characters in this novel, she lacks the courage to resolve her two selves. In many ways, this work is about courage, why it is difficult to be morally brave, especially when much is at stake. Margaret Bearman interrogates how history contextualises life and art but refrains from moralising. We Were Never Friends is a work of ambiguity and nuance. g Mindy Gill lives in Brisbane, where she is Peril Magazine’s editor-in-chief. She is the recipient of the Queensland Premier’s Young Writers and Publishers Award. ❖

Fiction

‘Prize motivations’

A surprising new short story collection Susan Midalia

Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 276 pp

aura Elvery’s second short story collection, Ordinary Matter, shows the same talent for precise observation, pathos, and humour as her accomplished début collection, Trick of the Light (2018). It differs in its creation of a greater range of narrators and voices, and in its use of a specific ideological framework through which to unify the collection: each of its twenty stories is prefaced by the name of a Nobel Prize-winning female scientist and the ‘prize motivation’ for her award. This device might be read as subverting the sexist stereotype that, denying women the capacity for rational thought,consigns them to the ‘softer’realms of emotion and artistic endeavour. It also encourages an interesting way of thinking about female desire as it pertains to a range of experiences, including creativity, ambition, motherhood, sexuality, and political activism. A number of stories feature versions of the Nobel Laureates themselves. ‘Growth’ concerns the Italian neurobiologist Rita LeviMontalcini, who, in contrast to the young girls immersed in needlepoint and the composition of affected nature poetry, turns her bedroom into a laboratory and her life into a career that ultimately triumphs over rampant misogyny and anti-Semitism. The story ‘Frost’ reveals both the intellectual strength and creaturely vulnerability of the chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, renowned for her discovery of insulin. The medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow in ‘Stockholm’ refrains from dwelling on past injustices – her treatment by ‘the faceless men … who failed to have faith in [her]’ – as she prepares to receive her prize. More often the links between the work of the female scientists and the stories are indirect; cleverly oblique. The politically charged story ‘You Run Towards Love’, set in Paris in 2003 during ‘the hottest summer for five decades’, is prefaced by Marie Curie’s award for her work on radiation. The story requires readers to make a connection between then and now: one hundred years after Curie’s award for the medical benefits of radiation, France is confronted by the legacy of dangerous carbon emissions from nuclear reactors. Deftly avoiding the didacticism or self-righteousness that can mar overtly political fiction, the story also captures the voice of laconic indifference to rivers full of dead fish and indeed to the fate of the entire planet: ‘Who cared, really, about fish anymore? Who cared about one or two or even three degrees?’ The quirky story ‘Corn Queen’, prefaced by Barbara McClintock’s work on genetics, raises questions about genetically modified corn crops and celebrates gender modification in the form of cross-dressing. The work on

odorant receptors by the biologist Linda B. Buck is used to frame an emotionally powerful story about a foul-smelling plant; ‘Titan Arum’ uses smell to symbolise the toxicity of parental abandonment and a grandfather’s murderous impulses towards his treacherous son-in-law. The intriguing allegory ‘Something Close to Gold’, in which an infertile couple adopts a baby washed up on the beach, can be read as a criticism of Australia’s ethically impoverished refugee policies and/or as undermining Western maternal entitlement. The unsettling story ‘The Fix’, prefaced by Donna Strickland’s work on optical pulses, plays on the concept of vision: while a woman’s laser surgery results in brilliantly clear eyesight, her dream of carnage on the road suggests a disturbing pre-vision of the fate of her marriage. Complementing this refusal to place the complexities of human experience in tidy hermeneutic boxes is the collection’s tonal variety. ‘Garden Bridge’ is a grim representation of contemporary London, in which ‘unlit lanes and whiffy air, the grimy pavements’ mirror the despair of the city’s inhabitants. By contrast, ‘The Town Turns Over’ is a witty account of a defiant group of elderly people escaping from the ironically named Freedom Villas. The poignant story ‘Wing Span’, set in conservative, postwar Hobart, uses a series of artfully designed meanderings and the motif of flight to explore female creativity, sibling love, and repressed homoerotic desire. Like the best work of Alice Munro, it’s a heartbreaking expression of ‘the unsaid’. Ordinary Matter also takes risks within the boundaries of fictional realism. The story ‘Little Fly’, for example, endows a tiny baby with conscious motivation and intent; it’s both conceptually audacious and utterly charming. Other stories use a paratactic structure to encompass the passing of decades, although with varying degrees of aesthetic success. Both ‘The Bodies Are Buried’ and ‘A Brief History of Petroleum’ are inclined to the summation of a character’s life, and as a consequence feel rushed or truncated. A much more satisfying example is the story ‘Hyperobject’, in which ten discrete sections of retrospective narration detail a woman’s work as a secretary on what she will much later come to learn was a deadly scientific project. Early sections reveal the narrator’s youthful naïveté; her description of being ‘pleased’ with her unknown work ‘down to her bones’ is a subtly ironic allusion to the bone marrow radiation sickness caused by one of history’s most egregious acts. The final section comes as a shock to both narrator and reader. The stories are also skilled in the art of imagism. ‘Fruit Flies’, for example, projects a young woman’s sense of dissociation and guilt onto the urban landscape, where she notices ‘orange peel in the gutter and a baby’s nappy, wrapped up tight, pale like a ball of dough’. But here, as elsewhere in the collection, there is hope to be salvaged from the anxieties and degradations of everyday life. Ordinary Matter is, in the best sense, a surprising collection: intellectually ambitious; offering unexpected digressions and deliberately odd conjunctions; its ‘wing span’ traversing the world from Hobart to the Grand Canyon. This engaging and unusual collection will consolidate Elvery’s reputation as a writer of fine short stories, and will surely garner admiration for her willingness to try something new. g Susan Midalia has published four works of fiction. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Fiction

Investigations Three new crime novels David Whish-Wilson

ou wouldn’t envy any writer releasing a novel at the moment, due to the difficulties getting books in front of readers, yet recent UK statistics indicate a surge in crime fiction sales following the relaxing of lockdown restrictions and the reopening of bookshops. It’s hard to say whether the same optimistic reading of the crime fiction market in Australia holds true, though two new crime novels by début authors – Kyle Perry’s The Bluffs (Michael Joseph, $32.99 pb, 432 pp) and Katherine Firkin’s Sticks and Stones (Bantam, $32.99 pb, 392 pp) – appear to have well and truly jumped out of the blocks. And it’s fair to assume that, given the international commercial and critical success of Megan Goldin’s terrific début novel, The Escape Room, her new book, The Night Swim (Michael Joseph, $32.99 pb, 352 pp), will appeal to antipodean readers this winter. Tasmanian counsellor and youth worker Kyle Perry’s The Bluffs is set amid the liminal physical, mythical, and emotional spaces of the foothill town of Limestone Creek, and the looming, brooding, atmospheric but dangerous trails, cliffs, and forests of the Great Western Tiers. The novel, too, straddles a number of forms, functioning largely as a police procedural led by the damaged homicide detective Con Badenhorst, while using a deft multi-vocal braided narrative structure to explore the complexities and challenges of small-town Tasmanian and contemporary teen life. It does this via the characters of Murphy, a dope grower; Murphy’s daughter Jasmine; high-school teacher Eliza Ellis; YouTube celebrity mean-girl Madison; and descriptions of the four missing girls: Jasmine, Cierra, Georgia, and Bree. The background to the story that informs so much of the contemporary plot is the disappearance of five girls in the Great Western Tiers in 1985, and the subsequent suicide of Aboriginal man Theodore Barclay at what became known as the ‘hanging tree’. Barclay had been blamed for the disappearances, only to be hounded to his death, and some still believe him guilty. However, a lingering belief that the murders were the work of a mysterious ‘Hungry Man’, a tall, thin spectre who potentially haunts the sheer uplands to this day, as described by the only surviving victim, endures in the local and popular imaginations. If Perry’s writing is most powerful when describing the highland landscape that he is clearly familiar with, it is his description of the way that the myth of the Hungry Man continues to occupy the minds of each of the characters that references the long narrative tradition associated with a Tasmanian Gothic. The uncanny is ever-present, the unknown 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

is just beyond the boundaries of perception, and people can go missing in the thick Tasmanian bush by merely stepping away from a familiar trail. When four high-school girls are presumed kidnapped, following the assault upon teacher Eliza Ellis while hiking in the Tiers, it is left to Detective Badenhorst to bring together the pieces of a complex puzzle. Fellow student and YouTuber Madison begins immediately to use her platform to promulgate various theories that only complicate Badenhorst’s investigations. Suspicion falls upon Murphy, the drug grower, as a local outsider, even though his daughter is one of the missing. Murphy strives to clear his name while town vigilantes stalk him. Eliza Ellis, whose niece had suicided the previous year on the Hanging Tree, begins her own exploration of the girls’ tangled relationships, and it is here that Perry’s history as a youth worker is cleverly represented. As the plot enthusiastically zips from character to character, beneath the frenetic building of motivation and framing of potential guilt emerges a strong picture of the psychic and existential pain that underlies so many of the teenage characters’ utterances and actions; the sense of invisibility and meaninglessness that Perry so capably explores. The Bluffs is a very promising début, ambitious and well-rounded, with a satisfying twist at the end that emerges organically from the more serious and sensitively rendered concerns of the novel.

nother début novel that skilfully uses multiple perspectives to both deepen characterisation and increase tension in a procedural narrative is journalist Katherine Firkin’s Sticks and Stones. While the spine of the novel is formed by the ongoing investigations of VicPol Missing Persons Unit detective Emmet Corban, the narrative is also woven with the threads of characters such as Emmet’s wife, Cindy; Owen, a Melbourne primary school teacher; Abbie, a young administrative assistant in a finance firm; and several other minor characters. But it’s the voice of the anonymous killer that competes most strongly with Emmet’s own. Starting with a scene just prior to the committing of a murder, the killer’s voice fleshes out his traumatic childhood, detailing his fascinations and frustrations, his warily developed friendships and emerging loyalties, set against the present narrative strand where he is a killer, although his motive is unknown. When Emmet is faced with two missing person’s cases, both women, he is forced to prioritise. The first woman is an avid world traveller, who may or may not have failed to turn up for work due to a forthcoming trip. She isn’t a reliable communicator, but her brother is genuinely worried. The second missing person is a young mother who has failed to pick up her two children from holiday care. Suspicion falls upon her husband, who is something of a brute and, like so many of the characters, has a secret, second life. The stakes are raised for Emmet when a woman’s tortured body is discovered, followed quickly by a second. There are geographical and social similarities and links between the victims and the immediate suspects, though these prove to be baffling. Around the investigations of Emmet and his colleagues swirl the voices of the supplementary characters – each of the potential female victims motivated by dissatisfactions that might place them in peril, and each of the potential killers motivated by narcissism, selfishness, and an abiding misogyny that may or may not lead to

Fiction murder. Sticks and Stones is a cleverly plotted novel peopled with sharply drawn characters that combine to produce a satisfying début.

egan Goldin’s second novel, The Night Swim, uses a deceptively simple structure to create both a gripping story of an alleged tragedy and its aftermath, while sensitively and intelligently exploring the effects of rape. Following the enormous success of her first podcast series, Rachel Krall has decided to investigate the brutal rape of a sixteen-year-old girl, Kelly, in the small town of Neapolis. Kelly was followed home from a party and lured to a park, where she was taken to a beach outside town and violently assaulted. The town is divided, however, following the arrest of a champion swimmer and Olympic hopeful. Some blame Kelly for ‘putting herself ’ in a dangerous position, while others don’t believe her account of what took place, decrying the destruction of the young man’s reputation. Others support Kelly and look forward to the forthcoming trial that Rachel is going to cover for her podcast’s national audience. The pressing concerns of the current case are complicated by a compelling second story that begins to emerge, and which Rachel is drawn to investigate – that of an earlier apparent drowning in Neapolis that has resonances with the contemporary story. The sister of the drowned woman, Hannah, leaves Rachel notes and letters that describe the events that led up to the drowning. It is here that the brilliance of Goldin’s plot comes to the fore. Alternating between episodes of the podcast and Rachel’s investigations in Neapolis are Hannah’s writerly letters to Rachel, which function as tender portraits of her sister but also detail shocking incidents that didn’t make sense to six-year-old Hannah at the time but are suggestive of a misogynistic culture that casts a telling light over the events of the present. This is brave, insightful storytelling, making full use of the generic tropes of crime fiction to tellingly represent the darkest aspects of masculinity enabled by cultures of entitlement and privilege. g David Whish-Wilson is the author of five crime novels and three non-fiction books. His latest novel is True West (2019). He lives in Fremantle and coordinates the creative-writing program at Curtin University.

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Typographical scars

A beguiling addition to the Southern latitudes series Elizabeth Bryer

Nancy

by Bruno Lloret, translated by Ellen Jones

Giramondo $26.95 pb, 134 pp

ear the beginning of Bruno Lloret’s stark, unvarnished first novel, Nancy, the cancer-riddled protagonist discovers that her husband has died in a workplace accident, sucked into the tuna processor while drunk. With no body to bury, she imagines having ‘a moment alone with the 2,500 tins containing [him]’. That unsentimental account issues from a woman habituated to abandonment and plays out in the north of Chile, where the Atacama Desert meets the ocean. In the world of the novel, it is a place where the love of family is circumscribed by the vicissitudes of industry, and where the forces of capitalism, even on its fringes, are as merciless as any Old Testament god. When swine flu breaks out at a pork-processing plant and the townspeople refuse to send representatives to meet with a visiting minister, she ‘laid down her curse: Never again will we remember you in the capital, she said, according to my tío x Then the slow exodus towards the horizon, the sea.’ The bolded x’s that typographically scar the novel accrue a multiplicity of meanings. As well as defamiliarising the text, they guide the reading much as does the blank space around, and line breaks in, a poem – they impel where you place your focus, how many beats a sentence is given to resonate in your mind. This is especially the case for the exquisite opening and closing sections, where time is compressed and the enjambment of the spare prose builds a hypnotic rhythm. If there is a flaw in Nancy, it is that for the most part the reminiscences of childhood and adolescence are neatly chronological, and footnoted; sometimes the fact that the scenes are being evoked by a remembering mind is lost. While a vastly different book, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (2014), likewise narrated by a dying woman, carries out the complex dance between memories and the present with greater finesse. Yet Ellen Jones’s translation is attuned to the asperous beauty of everyday language, and Lloret’s evocations of place, the intensity of his narrative, and his experimentation with form are resplendent. This is a beguiling addition to Southern Latitudes, a series that in a few short years has become the most invigorating across the Australian publishing landscape. g Elizabeth Bryer is a writer and translator. Her first novel, From Here On, Monsters, is out now with Picador. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Fiction

Island wives

A nuanced and protean novel Nicole Abadee

The Burning Island by Jock Serong

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 348 pp

riminal lawyer turned crime/thriller writer Jock Serong has produced five highly successful novels in as many years. His latest, The Burning Island, is probably his most ambitious to date. Set in 1830, it is part revenge tale, part mystery, part historical snapshot of the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait, in particular the relationship between European settlers and Indigenous women, who became their ‘island wives’, or tyereelore. It is also the moving story of a daughter’s devotion to her father, with a cracking denouement reminiscent of an Hercule Poirot mystery. Like Serong’s last novel, Preservation (2018), The Burning Island is historical fiction, based on the true story of the disappearance in 1839 of the Britomart, a ship that departed Melbourne for Hobart carrying thirty passengers and cargo, but never arrived. She was presumed lost in Bass Strait, somewhere around the Furneaux Islands. There were rumours that she had been carrying a large amount of gold coins, to establish the first Tasmanian bank, and that lawless sealers had lured her to her ruin with false lights so that they could plunder her. Serong winds the date back to 1830 and changes the ship’s name to the Howrah. The Howrah is owned by a Bengali timber merchant called Srinivas. He approaches thirty-two-year-old governess Eliza Grayling in a bid to enlist the support of her ageing father, Joshua Grayling, in a sea voyage to the Furneaux Islands to try to find the ship and the man he believes is responsible for her loss, a Mister Figge. Srinivas, Joshua, and Mister Figge last encountered each other thirty-three years ago (that story is the subject of Preservation). Suffice to say, the ‘malevolent Mister Figge’ has committed terrible wrongs against both Srinivas and Joshua. Srinivas believes that there has been foul play involved in the loss of the Howrah. In an echo of the rumours concerning the Britomart, he tells Eliza that the sealers living in the Furneaux Islands, ‘an isolated society of lawless men’, might ‘not be above committing an outrage’ – luring the boat to destruction, then plundering her and killing her passengers. Joshua, formerly an aide to Governor Hunter, has had a massive fall from grace and is now a pathetic figure. Described by Eliza as ‘mad, volatile and unpredictable’, he is blind and an alcoholic. Eliza, through whose eyes the story is told, has given up on the prospect of matrimony to devote herself to her father’s care. Her ‘childhood adoration’ for him is long gone; they are now 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

locked in a ‘corrosive game’ in which he drinks to excess and she cleans up the mess and tries to keep him alive. Joshua leaps at the chance to perform Srinivas’s mission and make the trip, seeing it as an opportunity for revenge against Mister Figge and a chance to give his sad life some meaning. Eliza reluctantly agrees to accompany him on what she sees as a ‘futile and dangerous’ voyage – partly to care for him, partly to relieve the boredom of her own existence. The Furneaux Islands are to her ‘the mythical places I had been told about since childhood’. Srinivas furnishes them with a ship, the Moonbird, an experienced master, Mr Argyle, and two convict crewmen, brothers Angus and Declan Connolly. They are also joined by Dr Henry Gideon, an amateur naturalist interested in collecting specimens from the sea. (As Serong explains in his Author’s Note at the end, all of the characters on the Moonbird are imaginary, unlike some of the real figures who appear later on.) Serong, well known for his considerable skill at evoking a sense of place in his fiction, paints a vivid picture of the ship, the sea voyage, and life on board. As Eliza fights a losing battle to prevent her father from drinking himself into oblivion, the Moonbird sails south to the Furneaux Islands, stopping at various islands to make enquiries about the missing ship. Here the passengers encounter European sealers and their Indigenous wives, the tyereelore, and learn the complex history of their relationships. First, they meet Tarenorerer, a real historical figure – a ‘tall and fierce and beautiful’ Indigenous woman abducted from Van Diemen’s Land as a child and sold to sealers, who made her a slave. She escaped, having learnt to speak English and to fire a gun, ‘that knowledge that placed us above them [the European settlers]’. She returned to her people and taught them how to use a gun, then led guerrilla raids on the settlers. She describes to Eliza and the others the depredations committed upon her by white men. On Gun Carriage Island they encounter a large community of sealers and tyereelore, apparently living happily together. Eliza finds the women ‘garrulous and kind’, good with their children – but ‘hard’. They tell her about their lives and how they help their husbands by doing much of the sealing work. Eliza tries to ask them if they are there of their own free will or if they were abducted, and receives the blunt response – ‘Survival honey, any way you do it’. One woman tells her, ‘you don’t understand it cause you want a simple answer’. Later, Eliza witnesses brutal attempts by white men to round up the women and children and take them away. While The Burning Island starts out as a crime thriller involving a search for a missing ship and a quest for revenge, it turns into something much more, a carefully researched, nuanced exploration of the history of relations between European men and Indigenous women in the Furneaux Islands, just north of Tasmania, in the 1830s. A minor quibble – a glossary of the Indigenous terms would have assisted the reader (this one, anyway). g Nicole Abadee writes about books for Good Weekend. She has a books podcast, Books, Books, Books, where she speaks to writers about their latest books. She is also a literary consultant, helping writers to polish their work before they submit it to publishers.

Language

From swaggies to snapback The language of depression Amanda Laugesen

Detail from The Sundowner postcard, 1904 (State Library of Victoria via Wikimedia Commons)

inancial crises, recessions, and times of high unemployment have periodically affected Australia. They have also shaped our vocabulary. The first recording of the iconic Australian word battler, in the sense of a person who struggles for a livelihood, was in 1896 by Henry Lawson in While the Billy Boils. The ‘swagman, itinerant worker’ se nse of battler was first recorded in 1898. The verb to battle in the sense of ‘to struggle for a livelihood’ was first recorded in the 1880s, and in the sense of ‘to seek to subsist while seeking employment’ from the 1890s. A variety of words for itinerant workers and those in search of employment date to the second half of the nineteenth century: sundowner, swaggie, bagman, and swag carrier are just a few of them. If the swagman travelling on the wallaby track (or the hungry track or the tucker track) was imbued with some romance of life on the road, there were also words that spoke of contempt for the unemployed vagrant: toe-ragger was recorded as a term of abuse for a tramp in 1878, and suburban swagman is recorded in 1899, perhaps reflecting the impact of the 1890s depression on the city worker. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a handful of terms enter Australian English that continued this late nineteenth-century language around itinerancy. The most notable of these perhaps is knight of the road, first recorded in 1904. The Great Depression of the 1930s contributed a whole new vocabulary. Notable is the use of the term dole to refer to unemployment benefits. There is reference to dole tickets, dole rations, dole stations, dole workers, and the dole system from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Someone on the dole could be known as a doleite. While dole has been retained in our lexicon, susso (short for ‘sustenance’ and referring to various forms of unemployment relief or other benefits during the Depression) was in popular use through the 1930s and 1940s. Susso could also refer to a person in receipt of benefits, and one could be on the susso or on the sus. Other terms that entered Australian English during the period of the Great Depression that reflect aspects of its social impact include happy valley for a makeshift camp or shanty town for the

homeless, and suitcase swagman for a person who travels to search for work but isn’t a traditional swagman. The evidence for susso referring to a person reveals that the term was generally one of contempt. It was not until the 1970s that the terms dole bludger and dole bludging entered the lexicon, but bludger, as a generalised term of abuse that refers to someone who lives off the efforts of others, was first recorded in 1899. Bludger originally referred to someone who lived off the earnings of a sex worker and was first recorded in 1882. By the twentieth century, bludger was in widespread use in Australian English in its more general sense. Terms such as susso and dole bludger reflect a broader historical discourse that sees those on any kind of benefit as somehow exploiting a system of welfare and wasting taxpayers’ money. This language has been especially potent on the conservative side of politics since the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, Prime Minister John Howard re-energised the term battler to refer to ‘aspirational’ hard-working Australians, and in the 2010s, Joe Hockey, while federal treasurer, made much of referring to Australians as being lifters or leaners. There is no doubt a separate essay to be written on the transformation of the language of the fair go into that of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s have a go to get a go. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) mainly contributed policy terms such as stimulus payment and stimulus package, but also bequeathed the problematic political baggage, for Labor, of the doomed pink batts scheme. The current financial crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic has also led to some policy-related language. Various government programs – notably JobSeeker and JobKeeper – have rapidly become part of our everyday vocabulary, at least for the moment. There has been discussion of hibernation plans for business, mortgage relief and rate rebates for homeowners, and rent relief for tenants. Most recently, there has been debate around the provision of pandemic leave. As the crisis has unfolded, the prime minister has made various statements about the importance of the economy, making use of such expressions as doing what makes the boat go faster and getting the economy out of the ICU. Initially there was much talk of a snapback to business as usual, but this word has faded from view. Perhaps the most Australian of all was Morrison’s exhortation for Australians to come out from under the doona. Doona is an Australianism, and has generated expressions such as doona day and doona dancing. We have yet to see exactly what the economic story of the pandemic will do to our language. Economist Jim Stanford, writing recently in The New Daily, suggests that at the very least some new business buzzwords are likely to emerge to disguise the diminishing power of the worker in our economy – for example, wage theft being replaced by deferred compensation, or exploitation by entrepreneurial synergy. We have also yet to see if there are going to be particularly Australian lexical innovations in response to all this, beyond the names of individual policies and the occasional rhetorical flourish of the prime minister. The ANDC will continue to monitor the shifts in our language, and we’ll be on the lookout for the ways in which language reflects our experiences of these – to use perhaps the most overused word of the year – unprecedented times. g Amanda Laugesen is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Open Page with Amanda Lohrey Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught politics at the University of Tasmania and writing and textual studies at the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. In November 2012 she received the Patrick White Literary Award. Her latest novel is The Labyrinth (2020).

Where are you happiest? At my laptop, writing.

What’s your idea of hell? Camping in bad weather.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Candour. Sympathetic diplomacy is a great art form.

What is your favourite film?

A toss-up between Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970). Both demonstrate that novels can be successfully adapted to film.

And your favourite book?

Too many to choose from, but I’ll nominate Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life (1955) because it’s chronically underrated. A woman has to decide whether to have an abortion. But A Charmed Life is not about abortion issues as such, more about the nature of fate and whether it’s possible ever to make a truly rational decision.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine Oliver Cromwell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary McCarthy.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Economy: the ability to generate a rich subtext in relatively few words.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Anything by Charles Dickens. In childhood I was given a lot of him to read, and by the age of twelve had acquired a faux Victorian style. I wrote things like: ‘He was affrighted not a little.’

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. I loved Colette when I was young – now I can’t read her. I thought Anita Brookner was tedious and affected: now I think she’s marvellous.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Often what you think is getting in the way of your work can turn out to be good material.

What qualities do you look for in critics and which ones do you enjoy reading? I think the critic’s main role is to help the reader enjoy an enriched reading of the text.

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

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I dislike ‘moving forward’. It’s an unnecessary prop.

I don’t like panels where three writers who have little in common are yoked together.

Who is your favourite author?

Do you read reviews of your own books?

It’s more the case that I’m in awe of individual works, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), for example. The structure is so complex, so subtle and hypnotic, that later in life Ford couldn’t recall how he’d managed it. Writers are like cat burglars trying to crack a safe, twisting the dial first this way and then that, waiting to hear the click. When they’ve busted the safe, they can’t remember the combination they happened upon.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? I don’t have one.

40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

(Photograph via Text Publishing)

Interview

Yes.

Are artists valued in our society? Yes, surprisingly so.

What are you working on now?

A novella. The writing disease is incurable. People say ‘Oh, you must be so disciplined’, but writing is the indulgent bit. Everything else – domesticity, certain social occasions and duties – these are what require discipline. g

Commentary

In defence of lost chords

Classical music’s struggle for relevance and survival Peter Tregear

Detail from Red Theater Seat by Yoeml (photograph via iStock)

It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in its relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

REDISCOVER AN ICONIC AUSTRALIAN CHARACTER From his much loved Funny Picture Books to his wondrous arcade, EW Cole captivated young and old with his sense of the absurd, insatiable curiosity and enduring faith in the essential goodness of humanity.

UNDER THE RAINBOW The Life and Times of EW Cole by Richard Broinowski

AVAILABLE AT ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES mup.com.au

hose of us who work in classical music will be familiar with the accusation that our chosen art form lacks contemporary social relevance. It is one with a long pedigree. ‘Sonata, what do you want of me?’ asked an exasperated Fontenelle in 1751, according to Rousseau. But you will find no widespread or heightened disdain for worldly affairs among classical musicians on the whole. Rather, any apparent reticence they may have describing how their art connects with the world at large stems from the fact that it is notoriously difficult to do. As the well-known quip goes, ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ This is not a love that dare not speak its name so much as one that struggles to be put into words at all. When the music stops, however, finding the right words becomes urgent. Our concert halls and theatres were some of the first public spaces to be closed when Covid-19 reached Australia, and they are likely to be some of the last to reopen. Many of the musicians who work in these spaces also found themselves ineligible for government financial assistance schemes like JobKeeper. Those fortunate enough to hold salaried positions in state-funded ensembles and venues must now watch nervously from the sidelines as their employers’ operational deficits grow. The $250 million arts rescue package that the Morrison government announced in June, small by comparison with those enacted elsewhere, is also still many months away from coming into effect. The cumulative effect may not prove terminal, but it seems increasingly clear that the performing culture we abandoned in March is not one to which we will easily, if ever, return. Understandably, those of us who work in and around this field of music are deeply concerned by this state of affairs. But should

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

the rest of us be? We are after all now able to access such music on platforms like YouTube and Spotify; for anyone with a decent broadband connection a good deal of the world’s musical culture is little more than a click or two away. Local online innovations such as the Melbourne Digital Concert Hall have also helped introduce an element of ticket-purchasing culture into a realm otherwise characterised by free, uncurated content. Indeed, not all of the impacts of Covid-19 on the classical music economy are necessarily bad. Given that international travel will probably be disrupted for some time, our major classical music producers will be much more likely to promote locally sourced programming and performers; this is surely long overdue and to be welcomed (not least for environmental reasons). We also have an opportunity to reconceive otherwise long-established relationships that have tended to distort the mission of publicly funded arts companies and festivals and instead advance the interests of the international arts market and the agencies that support it. One of the broader lessons the public health response to Covid-19 is teaching us is the overriding importance of public institutions being able to understand and articulate the needs of the people they are ultimately meant to serve. The threat now facing Australia’s classical music culture has been magnified, however, by a lack of sustained public advocacy. Long before the impact of Covid-19, the symptoms of a gradual but decisive shift away from any broadly held consensus in its favour were painfully obvious. With only a few exceptions, newspapers right across the Anglosphere have jettisoned specialist classical music critics. Reviews of classical music concerts or opera that still appear in our daily newspapers are now – if we are brutally honest – usually little more than ‘court reports’, given just enough column space to enable the critic to let us know who performed what, where, and how, but no longer able to engage us in the more important question of why. As the public conversation about classical music has faded, so have the audiences. There is a common notion (indeed, it is again doing the rounds on social media) that people generally grow into appreciating classical music; that house-music ravers in their twenties and thirties become connoisseurs of symphonies and string quartets in their fifties and sixties. The hard statistics tell us otherwise. People do not, by and large, ‘convert’ to classical music as they age; our children and grandchildren are only to feel further and further estranged from the sounds of an orchestra or an opera. A frequently proffered reason for this demographic shift is the decrease over the past few decades in public investment in broadly accessible music education and the corresponding listening and performing sensibilities it fosters. This has occurred despite the wealth of empirical evidence that supports the extrinsic (let alone intrinsic) benefits of music education. Separately, our leading tertiary-level conservatories, forced under the so-called ‘Dawkins Reforms’ of the late 1980s into arranged marriages with their local universities, discovered that the trappings of cap and gown were in fact a poor substitute for institutional and educational autonomy. As a result, their wider influence has also declined. Public arts broadcasting, too, is a mere shadow of its former self. Despite the proliferation of available air time, it seems now 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

inconceivable that our national broadcaster might choose to dedicate ten Sunday evenings of prime-time television to broadcast a production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen from Bayreuth, as the ABC did in 1986. For myself, at least, stumbling over those broadcasts as a young teenager proved to be life-changing. While subsequent technological revolutions make access so much easier, I suspect that such moments of cultural discovery are now less, not more, likely to occur. The major music platforms on the internet are driven by business models that require them to push content based on what their repositories of ‘big data’ have already adduced about our musical tastes. Online musical commerce is thus prone to replicate a problem we also now recognise in other types of internet-driven exchange: the self-reinforcing echo chamber. Unlike public broadcasting, such modes of music distribution are largely immune to the possibility that less commercially driven motivations can serve to shape our musical interests. Nevertheless, for all who might mourn the passing of the old established forms of cultural transmission, there are others who find it a cause for celebration. For them, the aesthetic value we might ascribe to all forms of aspirational culture was really just a cover for its true function as marker of class status and power. In our new age of self-consciously ‘decolonised’ curricula, the growing ubiquity of more commercially driven forms of music merely consigns classical music to a fate that we would wish for it anyway. Those of us who would nevertheless wish to claim that classical music’s value transcends social and cultural divides should at least acknowledge that the old canard that ‘music is a universal language’ has always hidden a darker truth. Wrapped up in any such claim to music’s universal value (here underlined by the very fact that we give this music the name ‘classical’) is also an implied lack of concern for local, popular, and – not least in Australia – Indigenous musical traditions. This helps explain why there is now a chorus of well-meaning educators, policy makers, and cultural critics eager to see resources historically dedicated to supporting classical music institutions, such as orchestras and opera houses, redirected towards hitherto marginalised or minority cultural interests. They note, in particular, that federal government funding of the arts is massively biased in favour of an ‘upper tier’ of classical-music-focused Major Performing Arts (MPA) organisations that get guaranteed multi-year funding, with Opera Australia taking the largest share (currently around $18 million per annum). Ideally, in a self-confident pluralist society, any reform of these arrangements would not instantly reduce to an either/or argument, but arts funding is, alas, typically characterised by such centralised, zero-sum-game policy calculations. To the extent that the MPA system continues to insulate this upper tier from any realistic threat of defunding it has also discouraged them from proffering or refreshing a compelling artistic rationale for the support they receive. This only fuels widespread resentment from those musicians and organisations who are currently less fortunate. Without such a rationale, critics of the status quo are understandably continuing to press for reform. We should be careful, however, not to replace one set of unexamined assumptions about classical music with another. If advancing social equity and inclusivity is our aim, what kinds of

music are actually helping to serve entrenched privilege these days? It’s been a long while, for instance, since I have been buttonholed by traditional classical music in my local supermarket, café, or sporting arena. It seems perverse logic to suggest, say, that because our élite private schools often brand themselves with glossy pictures of classical musicians performing in swanky new concert halls we should actively deprive those who are less fortunate of similar educational opportunities. As The Times music critic Richard Morrison recently observed, the idea that classical music somehow embodies class does not stand up to even cursory analysis. ‘Are the symphonies of Elgar, the son of a Worcester shopkeeper, more middle class than the pop songs of Jess Glynne, the daughter of a Muswell Hill estate agent’, he asked. Is it not possible to determine what musical performance cultures we wish to support at least partially in musical terms alone, that is with reference to the music’s actual, material, musical substance? Let us consider one example. This year, but for the pandemic, we would have been celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven. In advancing programs of his music, there was an opportunity to draw wider public attention to the mesmerising intricacy of Beethoven’s musical constructions, his way of building large-scale sonic structures from the obsessive development of curt musical motifs. This is music, surely, that invites us to think musically, to partake of a heightened kind of listening. Instead, our public arts discourse is increasingly characterised by an outright aversion to the promotion of this kind of musical engagement. At its most extreme, we encounter instead a manifestation of our so-called ‘post-truth’ culture where any appeal to personal taste is enough to trump an attempt at pursuing a more objective, reflective, basis for our aesthetic choices. As pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, one of Beethoven’s greatest living interpreters, recently stated in an interview for The Guardian, we are ‘getting further and further away from being societies that recognise the importance of music’. Rather, he concluded, ‘our unfamiliarity seems to breed contempt’. Even in elevated academic arenas, debates about musical value are now routinely deflected from engagements with the inner workings of music and how we might interpret them, and are more commonly redirected towards explorations of how music might help project aspects of our, or another’s, social identity, sexual preference, economic status, educational achievement, and so on. Of course music can – and does – serve such functions, but contemplating music’s own internal logic can also expose us to a separate, sonically inscribed, imaginative realm that is radically removed from the limits of our, or the composer’s, ‘revealed’ self. In the words of Thomas Merton, such art ‘enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time’. To be sure, the fact that the repertoire of classical music is nevertheless dominated by (albeit by no means exclusive to) deceased white European male composers remains a matter of historical interest and concern. Among other reasons, according to Peggy McIntosh’s now-famous 1988 essay on ‘white privilege’, to be able to say ‘that people of my color made it what it is’ when being introduced to civilisation’s supposed greatest achievements is a foundational aspect of ‘white privilege’. But neither should the veracity of such observations become the determining crite-

rion of this music’s value or be used to justify preventing us from providing easy or affordable access to it to anyone who is not also white, European, or male. As the American author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates observed in relation to his own encounters with the European literary canon: When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote – ‘Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?’ – really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a ‘native’ tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte, that ‘ Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus’. That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something ‘native’ was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s ‘own’. If you reject the very premise of racism – the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth – then all of humanity becomes ‘native’ to you. And so empowered, I could – out of my own individual identity – create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to Wharton to Melville to [Robert] Hayden.

The answer, then, to the question (were we to ask it) ‘Who is the Beethoven of Australia?’ is, of course, ‘Beethoven’. Such music can, and should, be properly understood, as Edward Said once wrote, as ‘part of the possession of all … humankind’. It is rare, however, to hear a director of one of our classical music institutions, let alone an arts minister (in those government arenas where such a portfolio still exists) stake out such a naked claim for this music’s value. Such figures of influence are more likely to be focused principally on not upsetting either their many critics-in-waiting or the layers of sedimented institutional privilege that inevitably congregate on either side of government grant systems (as exemplified by the lack of substantive reform to the MPA system that has followed last year’s federal review). But narrowly self-interested, institution-focused approaches to public advocacy are simply not going to cut it in the difficult months and years that now lie ahead for us all. The case for classical music’s ongoing relevance to Australia, and thus the argument for ongoing support, must now be made, first and foremost, as a proposition of musical value. The Covid-19 crisis gives us both the opportunity, and necessity, to do so. The underlying argument we should all be pressing is that great music in all its forms, in all its genres, wherever it is found, and however it is ultimately labelled by us, should be understood as belonging to, speaking for, and challenging each and every one of us. g Peter Tregear has recently been appointed the inaugural Director of Little Hall at the University of Melbourne. His published works include Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013). This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Literary Studies

Meteorological thinking The ethical hesitations of Gail Jones Sue Kossew

Gail Jones: Word, image, ethics by Tanya Dalziell

Sydney University Press $45 pb, 196 pp

ail Jones’s beautifully crafted narratives invite and reward careful reading. All her work bears the mark of her formidable intellect. Yet her texts don’t show off: they assert the primacy of embodied experience and interpersonal relationships as much as the inner life of the mind. They provoke you to attend to their many layers of meaning, often requiring at least two readings (and some research) to fully grasp their complexity. But the reader’s reward is in the ‘ah’ moments when, for example, an image takes on particular resonance or an idea emerges from the text’s depths. It is to these intricacies that Tanya Dalziell’s monograph, Gail Jones: Word, image, ethics, turns its attention. Jones’s importance to the field of Australian literature – justifying her inclusion in the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series of which this book is a part – is validated not just by the quality of her work and its translation into numerous languages but also by her many literary accolades, including being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times, winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2019 for The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and being longlisted for the Man Booker and Orange prizes. Dalziell’s academic study brings together other critics’ writing on Jones, Jones’s own non-fiction writing, interview material, theoretical sources, and intertextual references in conversation with detailed readings of her fictional texts, thereby providing an especially useful resource for researchers or students seeking in-depth analysis of her work and its influences. A number of themes, tropes, and formal qualities reappear across Jones’s oeuvre – her two short story collections, her novels (six to date, with another soon to be published), her non-fiction essays, and her 2007 monograph (on the film The Piano). By choosing to structure her book in terms of such aspects and motifs that form its five chapters – weather, time, reading and writing, image, and modernity – rather than chronologically text by text, Dalziell is able to highlight particular works that seem most appropriate to each topic and to return to them again in different contexts. This enables productive comparative insights across Jones’s body of work, although there are times when this approach becomes somewhat pedestrian: for example, the rather flat statement, ‘Alice Black in Dreams of Speaking (2006) also experiences snow.’ Overall, though, Dalziell is a savvy and sensitive reader who is alert to the poetic rhythms and cadences of Jones’s work as well as to its overarching ideas. The introduction offers a chronological overview and plot 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

summary of Jones’s work, including a summary of the critical field. I was, at first glance, rather sceptical about Dalziell’s decision to begin this full-length study with the topic of ‘weather’, not seemingly the works’ most striking feature. However, I was won over by the rich analysis offered by this angle on Sorry (2007) and A Guide to Berlin (2015). Dalziell’s discussion of the snow globe as a trope, linked to the philosophical works of Benjamin and Adorno, illuminates the ‘meteorological thinking’ of Jones’s characters as well as the ethical and allegorically charged implications of snow as image. While Dalziell draws attention throughout to Jones’s strongly ethical and philosophical thought, she is careful to demonstrate Jones’s reluctance to oversimplify or provide neat solutions. Jones herself refers to this as ‘ethical hesitation’; Dalziell uses the term ‘ethical hesitancy’. As Dalziell makes clear throughout, all of Jones’s work engages in some way with an ethical awareness of acts of reading and writing, including her own. Her characters are themselves often writers, artists, philosophers, or would-be creatives whose inner and outer lives are staged within the narratives and who are grappling with issues of representation, as is Jones herself. Perhaps because Jones’s work is so intimately caught up in an ethical awareness of its own writing and reading practices, particularly in relation to communities of writers across time and place, I especially enjoyed the chapter entitled ‘Reading and Writing’. Dalziell helpfully suggests that the literariness of Jones’s novels is not just self-reflexive but an ethical act, ‘tested in the imaginative worlds’ of the books. She provides a convincing argument for the way Jones uses fragments from and references to other writers and genres as a way of ‘thinking through literary ethics’ and of reflecting on her own reading. A good example of this is Jones’s deployment of Vladimir Nabokov’s speak-memory technique (taken from his autobiographical memoir of that name) in A Guide to Berlin, which is used both as theme and form. While the characters’ desire for Nabokovian ‘literary fellowship’ is shown to end in disappointment and betrayal – particularly for one of the characters, Cass – Dalziell suggests that the narrative itself counterbalances this loss of faith in books and reading by its incantation of Berlin S-Bahn station names (in Jones’s words, ‘So like a poem’) that performs an aesthetic transformation of the quotidian into poetry. In this way, Jones’s narrator asserts a certain belief in literary art contra her character’s own disenchantment with it. While reading may be represented as transformative, Dalziell points out that Jones’s texts consider both ‘the pleasures and perils of writing’. This is particularly well illustrated in Dalziell’s commentary on Black Mirror (2002), where the biographer, Anna, comes up against the unknowability of the life of another and the ethical challenges this genre poses. Dalziell’s analysis is finely tuned to Jones’s refusal to settle for easy answers either in narrative form or in representing her characters’ inner lives. Likewise, Dalziell is alert to Jones’s questioning of the ‘representational possibilities and limitations’ of images. She quotes Jones here: ‘I began as a painter: in everything I’ve written, there are images and words in contention.’ While images in Jones’s writing – particularly in the form of photography and art – can form ‘connective ties’ between characters, there are, Dalziell suggests, ‘limits to the ethics they may be asked to enact’. In her final thematic chapter, Dalziell illustrates Jones’s representation

of modernity across her novels as demonstrating its contradictory engagement with the senses. Dalziell’s conclusion cannily analyses the ‘inconclusive’ and ‘reluctant’ endings of Jones’s texts, allowing her to similarly refuse a ‘definitive account’ or ‘final word’ on the writer. It is a mark of a readerly text that one critic’s analysis is never quite enough to account for one’s own reading or the text’s complexities. And so it is with Jones’s richly layered writing, as Dalziell anticipates. But Dalziell’s insights made me want to

return to the less-familiar texts and reread them with her key concepts in mind, and the imminent publication (in October 2020) of Jones’s next novel, Our Shadows, will provide a welcome new opportunity to do just this. g Sue Kossew holds degrees from the Universities of Cape Town, East Anglia, and New South Wales. She is Emeritus Professor at Monash University, having been Chair of English and Literary Studies there since 2009, and is Honorary Professor at UNSW.

Votive The ritual begins by filling a plastic basin with warm water. It is carried from the bathroom to the bedroom. It is placed firstly on a stool, then on to the floor. Soap and a flannel cloud the water. My hands bathe the woman who has removed her nightie. She sits with a sense of calm and pained skin’s need for pleasure. It is like bathing a tired child. I lift her arms, we speak quietly of shared things. This true intimacy is purifying. We have forgotten the things that have strained and estranged us. These mornings our bond is primitive. These days are bordered by routine. I am preparing her for death. I am pleasing her prickling skin. I dry her. I treat her skin with lotions and oils. Liver cancer has swollen her body into a state of pregnancy, distension, emaciation. Life is bursting from the dark soil of March. I have travelled from Autumn to Spring, from Sydney to Northern Scotland to bathe her. The liver was once thought to exude love and courage. The ritual ends with a fresh nightie, accommodating pillows, a flowered quilt. She rests. Other mornings we, a nurse and I, walk her to the bathroom. She removes her nightie and walks naked through the house, we are fully clothed, unholy. Her physical weakness rushes her. We battle to steady her, keep the syringe driver (morphine) untangled, unstrained, and keep up with her, our reaching hands and arms taking her weight. Her swollen legs and feet grip her. I have prepared the bath for her, run warm water beneath her bath seat. We shift her across it until she is centred. We turn her, lift and lower her feet into the pleasure of the warm water. She visibly relaxes. I push my hand between her thigh and the hinge that lifts as the seat is lowered, to spare her a pinch or a bruise. She can stand the sinking until it forces her to sit upright. We stop its descent. She sits, this morphed woman, alabaster grace perched on vinyl with her fingers in her ears, as I reverently wash her hair. I tip water over her head, down her back like a bowed-head statue. She is the praying figure in a fountain; a Gothic ideal, a Medieval Eve. The nurse and I are two of the Danaides, we perpetually pour water over this veiled woman. We are myth personified. We are trying to fill a sieve with water.

Meredith Wattison ❖

Meredith Wattison’s poem ‘Votive’appears in her new collection, The Munchian O (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Literary Studies

Miles among the Merkans Miles Franklin in the Windy City Susan Sheridan

Fallen Among Reformers: Miles Franklin, modernity and the New Woman by Janet Lee

Sydney University Press $45 pb, 196 pp

fter My Brilliant Career appeared in 1901, Miles Franklin spent a few years living in Sydney, where she enjoyed being fêted as a new literary sensation. Her attempt to earn a living by writing fiction and journalism about women’s issues was less than successful; even the timely and witty suffrage novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), was knocked back at first. In 1906, at the age of twenty-six, she left Australia for the United States. She spent the next nine years living in Chicago and working for the Women’s Trade Union League, secretary to its wealthy patron, Margaret Dreier Robins, and editing its journal, Life and Labour, with her compatriot Alice Henry. The two Australians enjoyed recognition as enfranchised women, a status that American women were still fighting for. The title of this book about Franklin’s Chicago years, Fallen Among Reformers, sounds as if it will confirm the heroine’s complaint, in Cockatoos (1954), that ‘for an artist to fall among reformers is more fatal than for a merchant to fall among bandits’, robbed of the means to pursue her art. Such a split was the main theme of Verna Coleman’s book, Miles Franklin in America: Her unknown (brilliant) career (1981). But Janet Lee’s study of the writing that Franklin did during those years confirms the judgement of her biographer, Jill Roe, that for Miles Franklin Chicago was her university. Lee shows that these new experiences fed into her writing and extended its scope. Chicago was America’s second city, with a population of some two million and a reputation for expanding industries exploiting immigrant labour. Franklin’s work ranged from supporting the notorious Chicago garment workers strike in 1910–11 to attending labour and feminist conventions in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. She made a wide circle of friends in progressive politics. Along with philanthropists like Robins and Jane Addams, founder of the famous social settlement at Hull House, and the Lloyd brothers (with both of whom she had major flirtations), she met eminent international feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Pankhursts, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollontai, as well as unionists and social scientists and Christian Scientists. The Windy City was also famed for its progressive literature and theatre – think Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Willa Cather, among others. Despite her busy work and social life in Chicago, Franklin wrote a great deal – not only the journalism that appeared in Life and Labour and in various Australian papers but also five 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

novels and a number of unpublished plays and short stories, all set in America. Only two of the novels were published: The Net of Circumstance appeared in 1915 under the bizarre pseudonym of ‘Mr and Mrs Ogniblat l’Artsau’ (Austral Talbingo) from the then-new house of Mills & Boon, and disappeared with scarcely a trace; On Dearborn Street, rejected by Mills & Boon in 1915, did not see the light of day until 1981, when UQP rescued it. Lee describes all this material, arranging it by three themes: work, marriage, and men. It is a labour of love, especially as there is little chance of building critical conversations about work that has never been published. She uses the biographical context meticulously, giving due credit to Roe’s groundbreaking work. As for the context of ideas, there is discussion of early twentieth-century feminist debates on how marriage should be transformed (noting Franklin’s disapproval of free love as a solution) and of the importance of Gilman’s Women and Economics for Franklin’s approach to reforming women’s work. As well as the context of contemporary feminist ideas, there is the matter of the literary contexts within which Franklin was writing. Lee claims that her book ‘highlights Franklin as a sociallyengaged fictional polemicist who took the modern world of urban Chicago as her subject and employed the romance tradition to dramatize the effects of sexism and misogyny on women’s lives’. This aspect of her study is less convincing. She has virtually nothing to say about American New Woman stories of the period, of which there were many, including male-authored classics like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), as well as novels by Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Edna Ferber and others. As for the claim that ‘Franklin’s feminist realist approach’ managed to ‘bridge’ the romantic conventions of Victorian women’s fiction and modern critical realism, there is insufficient literary analysis to demonstrate this, despite a plethora of footnote references to the critical literature on (British) New Woman fiction. In Laughter, Not for a Cage (1956), Franklin unjustly dismissed her Australian predecessors like Rosa Praed and Ada Cambridge for writing mere ‘lending-library romances’. Her own idiosyncratic mix of the romantic and the satirical was probably her undoing when it came to finding publishers – that, and her weird and wonderful pseudonyms. If the style of On Dearborn Street is any indication – and that is the only one of these Chicago works I have been able to read – it seems that Franklin allowed herself to run riot, revelling in American (‘Merkan’) idioms and satirising the romantic ideas of the male narrator, the ‘hero’ who writes his ‘memoirs of an infatuate, satirically and gleefully offered … running amok in the vernacular’. Perhaps Franklin did not try very hard to get the Chicago stories published, or the plays produced. But it would be great to have access now to The Net of Circumstance, the story of a modern independent woman, which sounds like the best of them. Perhaps Text Classics would do the honours and rescue it from ‘Mr and Mrs Ogniblat l’Artsau’ and Mills & Boon? g Susan Sheridan FAHA is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016). Earlier books include: Nine Lives: Postwar women writers making their mark (2011) and Christina Stead (1988).

Ethics

‘A sedative for my passions’ George Eliot’s affinity with Spinoza Moira Gatens

Spinoza’s Ethics

translated by George Eliot edited by Clare Carlisle

Princeton University Press $58.99 pb, 381 pp

ecoming better acquainted with an author may give rise to a surprise, or two. For example, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and William Godwin (author of Political Justice) is the author of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley met her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, through his devotion to her father’s anarchist political philosophy. Gaining an awareness of the surprisingly complex threads that link one thinker to the next in dynamic webs of influence is one of the deep pleasures of scholarship. The publication of George Eliot’s translation of a major philosophical work, Ethics by Benedict Spinoza (1632–77), opens a cornucopia of such pleasures. Although the publication of this work (reputedly the first English translation from the Latin original) has been delayed by over one hundred and sixty years, it still reads as fresh and lively as any contemporary translation. George Eliot is the nom de plume of Marian Evans (1819–80), author of Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. She is regarded by many as the finest English novelist of the Victorian period. Before donning the mask of George Eliot, Evans was engaged in other impressive achievements, including editing the influential Westminster Review (1851–54) and translating (from German to English) Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854). She came to the task of translating Ethics through her life partner, George Henry Lewes. Lewes (married but estranged from his legal wife) and Evans made, and kept, a lifelong commitment to each other to live as husband and wife. Lewes was a naturalist, journalist, and philosopher who made his living from writing. It was he who made the ill-fated agreement with the publisher Bohn to translate Ethics (a disagreement over the amount to be paid for the translation resulted in Lewes’s angry withdrawal of Evans’s finished manuscript). It was partly to take refuge from Mrs Grundy, and partly to conduct research for Lewes’s biography of J.W. Goethe, that Evans and Lewes travelled to Weimar and Berlin during 1854, where they could enjoy a peaceful cohabitation. In addition to helping Lewes with his research for Goethe’s biography, Evans translated a major portion of Ethics during this time. It is hard to imagine a more conducive context in which to undertake this work given the strong influence of Spinoza’s philosophy on nineteenth-century German thought. Goethe himself referred to Spinoza’s Ethics as ‘a sedative for my passions’ and said that the study of it had opened for him novel perspectives on nature and morality.

Spinoza scholars have remarked on the puzzle presented by the infatuation of many literary figures with the notoriously intellectually challenging philosophy of Spinoza. In addition to Goethe, the Shelleys, and Coleridge, we can list W. Somerset Maugham, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. George Eliot sits at the centre of a dense web of Spinoza-influenced literary work. How might this be explained given the incredibly demanding nature of the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological arguments presented in Ethics? Returning to my earlier point about the pleasant surprises of scholarship, how might we map the guest list of the surprise party that unfolds once one notices the multiple ties between Spinoza and Eliot? Clare Carlisle’s detailed introduction to Eliot’s translation is a learned and engaging guide through the relevant historical, intellectual, philosophical, and literary terrains. The volume also includes some useful appendices. A philosopher herself, Carlisle offers a concise and accessible exegesis of the main arguments of the five parts of Ethics, along with some speculative ideas concerning the likely influence of Spinoza on the fiction writing of George Eliot. Eliot was no one’s disciple. She was a voracious reader and an exceptional scholar in her own right. Her world view was deeply influenced by Feuerbach, J.S. Mill, Spinoza, and Herbert Spencer, among others, yet that world view is uniquely her own. She shared with Spinoza a conception of ethics that amounts to an endeavour to understand the ways in which beings constituted like us are determined to act by external forces. Many of Eliot’s novels may be read as demonstrations of the inexorable logic that underlies the only apparently chaotic randomness of our lives. Our emotions may lead to foolish behaviour, but they are not, for all that, beyond our ken. As Spinoza observed, our passions are as natural as the weather and, like rain, storms, and thunder, they too have fixed causes. Our passions or emotions may be understood and reformed, and Eliot’s most admirable characters are those who try to regulate their impulses by understanding their causes, or what Carlisle explains in terms of ethology. Carlisle deftly draws out the central issue for both Spinoza and Eliot, namely, how to live the most ethical life possible given the difficulties of gaining knowledge of one’s self, others, and the broader causal system of nature in which all inheres. For both thinkers, an anthropomorphic god who rewards and punishes is a childish illusion. Fully part of nature, we must learn to accept our cosmically insignificant status without disavowing the powers that we do have to together increase our freedom to endure and even to thrive. Eliot’s novels have sometimes attracted accusations of peddling a harsh moralism, as well as pessimism about our ability to accept moral agency and bear responsibility. I prefer to see both Eliot and Spinoza as realists who are clear but non-judgemental about human moral frailty, a frailty captured in the final words of Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘if salvation were close at hand and could be obtained without great labour, how were it possible that it should be neglected by almost all? But everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.’ g Moira Gatens is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her most recent publications include the co-editorship (with Anthony Uhlmann) of two special issue journals devoted to essays on Spinoza and Art: Textual Practice 2019, 33 (5) and Intellectual History Review 2020, 30 (3). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Calibre Essay Prize

The Dolorimeter by Kate Middleton

ometime late morning it begins, a root of something that only as it grows do you recognise as pain. You have had coffee, as you do every morning, and now you feel the kind of heaviness that sends you to lie down. At home, the friend who is staying with you, whom you half invited and who may have misinterpreted your keenness for company, notes your early return and approves of your plan to retreat. For both of you it has been a year frantic with change and learning and emotion, and even if it is likely indulgent – so what, you’ve earned the right to call a morning off the books and instead take a heat pack and wish it were night all over again. She even microwaves the heat pack for you. You take it to bed where you think you will read or watch television or luxuriate in some way. The feeling continues to grow, though, and turns from an elusive shadow in your abdomen into something more clawing, with a definite shape, even though you’ve never much liked admitting to physical pain, having been told stories of your grandfather walking into the doctor’s office on a broken foot, and having been praised by brothers for not crying when grazes brought blood to the surface. But it’s pain, this time, with a beat all its own, a pulse that echoes your heart. You find some Ibuprofen, take the recommended dose. For a while this offers relief – until the fuzzy, muffled feeling is insufficient. The drug forms a thin sheet over the top of the pain, as when, noise-cancelling headphones on, two people seated next to you insist on having a noisy, unignorable conversation. You take another dose of Ibuprofen, and then, moments later, think to look up what this could be, this feeling that’s growing in intensity. By this time – grateful now that she was so keen to take you up on your offer of a place to stay that she didn’t quite notice the hint of reluctance in your voice – you’ve asked your friend and she’s told you that, yes, she can get the car and take you to the hospital. No, no, surely it can’t be that, you think for now, though the idea has occurred to you that it could be appendicitis; this feels, for some reason, vaguely pleasing, perhaps because it is an illness of the kind characters on television get. Perhaps, in your mind, this makes it more of an American disease, and the possibility that you have it means that perhaps you are now a little less foreign. This doesn’t make any kind of sense, but you are glad to have found something to be pleased by. 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Five or six hours after the pain first rose to consciousness, with a diagnosis already in mind, you agree with your friend that it is time to seek medical help. You’re glad that a requirement of your visa is health insurance, though you don’t know how much it will cover. By this time you are having trouble standing. Friend by your side for support, you walk down to the street doubled over and then wait, leaning against a brick wall, sweating and hearing some kind of shimmery echo of something inside your head. Before your friend brings the car, the new surge of pain has made you vomit, right here on the pavement, in the street you have always felt was too fancy for you, outside the Venezuelan Embassy, which you somehow live next to. Someone emerges from the embassy as you keel over. She stops to help you, which is embarrassing. You suspect from her willingness to help, from her practical clothes, her youth, that she is an administrative worker, not some diplomat, and that as you hop into your friend’s car she will have to clean the sidewalk so it won’t look so undignified. It is different, being admitted in this state, than it is arriving for a scheduled procedure – you’ve had a few scheduled procedures before, nothing serious, but there was an order to them. You don’t like not knowing what will happen. At the desk you are sweating and having trouble standing and you are answering their questions – accurately, you think – but you are really only half-hearing them because nothing about this sensation of pain is muffled anymore. It isn’t long before they give you a wheelchair, then take you through the doors that signify you are being taken seriously. You have made the right decision, not just because this pain makes you feel that everything but it is nulled, but because now there are no more decisions to make. They are someone else’s responsibility: you are an emergency. You vomit again, and someone gives you a kidney-shaped vessel to hold in case you need to vomit a third time. They have been reluctant to give you painkillers until the tests are finished, in case surgery is required right away, and the painkillers make anaesthesia more complicated. Eventually, they do give you something, something stronger, because the machines they need are busy. A doctor asks questions, presses on your abdomen until you screech. This is when you first learn that it is unlikely to be appendicitis, because the appendix is on the other side of the body, though apparently it can ‘wander’. When the CT scan

happens, they rule out appendicitis. Rather, there is a large mass sitting in your ovary, a part of your body that you, childless, don’t much think about. Now they are happy enough to give you something to manage the pain while waiting for more tests. These are humiliating ‒ you’ve had so little wrong with you until now that you don’t even know that for some things an internal ultrasound is required. For the first time, you open your legs, though you are not alert enough to look curiously at the screen at which the technician is carefully staring. But you note it when she shows you the mass – a thing about the size of a baseball that has been growing inside you, somehow, without you knowing it. As for the pain, there are two possible causes: the thing that is growing inside you might have started to rupture, or else the organ has torsed, and in flipping over itself has cut off its own blood supply. Ischemic, it may even have started dying. The team that looks after this sort of thing is busy now. You’ve been here maybe seven hours and now it is midnight, but they want you to wait, to find out if there will be surgery tonight or not. Meanwhile they give you morphine and it’s the most wonderful, liquid sensation you can remember, pain being doused in its ooze like a candle snuffed out with honey. You sleep, on a cot in the corridor – there are no rooms available – and are ecstatic in the moments you wake to the light, the noise, for the feeling of no feeling. Eventually they come and tell you to go home. This is confusing. How can you go home when they have done nothing but temporarily take the pain away? They tell you to schedule an immediate appointment with their clinic in the morning, and to take this script – Vicodin. Your friend takes you home again – imagine, she has waited all this time! – and you sleep until there is someone to call. • Once upon a time in Hanoi (this is how you think of it now), you had your palm read by a friend. She told you she had learned this skill from her mother, before her mother died. This fact, her mother’s death, made her diagnosis seem even more forceful. Your friend, heavily pregnant, spent something like ten hours a day by herself in the shop she ran on this street in the old quarter now full of hotels. You are not sure what wares this street traditionally sold. You came to her shop each day to drink tea with her and talk. When she reached for your palm you were curious – you’d always wanted to have your palm read. You do not remember the things that most people care about – if she told you anything about love, marriage. Instead, you remember these words: ‘You will live a long time. Mostly in pain.’ • What follows your visit to the emergency room is unpleasant. The clinic you’ve been told to call tells you that their first available appointment is in a month. You tell them that their own emergency department sent you and told you that you must have an appointment in the next week. You cry. You don’t know what to do. Eventually someone gives you a name of another clinic to

try, and later you are glad for it, but for now you are angry. You’ve been sent home with nothing fixed, just a packet of opioids that could fetch quite a price on the streets. Still, you call the second clinic, make an appointment for a few days’ time, and then it is time to wait. It is a week of being placid – for a few days, so deep into Vicodin, you have no idea what questions to ask. You have another ultrasound, two, three. The thing inside you has grown larger each time – and it hasn’t ruptured. Sometimes you don’t need the painkillers, then you do. In between the appointments you watch four seasons of Beverly Hills 90210. The first gynaecological surgeon suggests you see a second surgeon at the same clinic – her books are fuller, but the surgery will be necessary, and she can do it with laparoscopy, which will make recovery easier. Before you can see her, though, you keel over again with the same pain, and the pills are gone, and so you end up back in the ER. This time the hospital promises the surgery – promises that you won’t need to wait beyond the time when the team is finished with an ectopic pregnancy. You ask for the morphine, you tell them what you’ve learned. Again, you are on a cot in the hallway, but this time you are comfortable enough that you tell your friend to go home and get some sleep. At five am you’re woken and told you’re being discharged. You are confused and therefore compliant, and you gather the small number of things that you brought. You are aware that your friend will still be asleep, so you call a taxi to collect you. Later you’re told this wasn’t legal – the hospital should not have discharged you, with morphine still in your system, to any old cab driver – but you don’t know if this is true; you are aware in the moment that the cab driver is lying to you when he says there is a surcharge for being picked up at the hospital in addition to the surcharge for the ungodly hour, but you have no energy to argue the fact – you just hand over the notes, and feel a mixture of pity and contempt for someone who would rip you off when you are so clearly unwell. You slide into bed until you’re awoken at 7:38 am by your phone. It is the hospital calling – they have only just realised you were discharged. It was an accident, this being sent home, but you’re really so close to asleep that you put on a brave voice, or a voice that means to convey leave me alone, because you still have morphine’s last honey trailing in your numb body, and though the doctor on the other end of the phone sounds like she doubts herself, she just lets it go rather than insisting on your returning (like many other emergency rooms, this one is too busy, doesn’t have enough beds; besides, you’ve got an appointment with another specialist, so why not let it go, and solve the next difficult case, get ahead of the curve), and having to face the fact that there has been a serious mistake somewhere, that someone could be in real trouble for this. When you go to see the specialist again, he scolds you: the hospital should have called him the moment you were admitted. You should have called him. The specialist indicates that you should have had surgery already, you should have known what to do amid pain and drugs and foreignness. He is not really angry at you (he sees you are distressed) but is exasperated in the way you will come to be exasperated later, when bills arrive that seem excessive for help that was never given. Still, you feel defeated now, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

and later you will feel defeated again, but will write, nonetheless, at the urging of a psychiatrist who believes the hospital treated you badly. Years later, in conversation with another doctor, at another hospital, the head of something important, you will be told that if you had sent this letter to him, to his hospital, you would not just have had fees waived but would have been given $10,000, the kind of apology that signals a dread that something worse could have happened, and anyway, perhaps there is still some liability in the ordeal. You never know how to feel about the first hospital waiving its fees, the second hospital informing you that you would have had a claim. It is true that later you will become depressed for a time, will find the next semester of study and work incredibly difficult, will turn away from your peers, but will remain uneasy at the idea of compensation. • It happens that this all comes as your parents arrive to see you, having flown across the globe, and you show up at their hotel holding your stomach. The plans you initially had – to finally see cities you have longed to visit – is on hold as the question of surgery, recovery, comes. By the time they arrive there is not much waiting left: your mother piles into the taxi with you as you head to the clinic, meet the younger surgeon who will perform the procedure, have the thing growing in you measured again to confirm that, yes, it has once again grown. The new surgeon doesn’t scold. She is beyond this – discussing outcomes, risks. You ask her, the first person who has seemed remotely warm, unhurried enough, unharried enough, to answer this question: ‘What would have happened to Anne of Green Gables, if she had had this illness?’ This question is a stand-in, of course, for all the women of the past. The real women suffered more, but you’ve read the fiction. You recall the heroine in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda who fears she has breast cancer and alludes to the need for a mastectomy, 1801, no anaesthetic – the horror. She is wrong, she learns, and is glad, but you too have learned: that the remedy of cutting was always there. Now that you have felt the pain that made you vomit, you try to imagine how one could endure such a thing. Your surgeon says that women in the past would have endured nights of agony before it ceased. You imagine yourself standing outside the Venezuelan embassy not for three or four minutes, but for days, sweating and vomiting, unable to do anything but release anguish into air in the form of bile and howls. Your surgeon-to-be tells you that if there has been torsion, part of the ovary might have died; that in cutting part of the wall the ovary will probably be removed. She tells you that with luck

50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

it will grow back, like the arm of a starfish growing back. You will come to think of this experience as submarine, as your jellyfish – the slimy, gelatinous thing that has lived inside you and stung. The surgery itself is nothing. Not just the blank of anaesthesia, but also the blank of painkillers arriving, painkillers leaving, the blank of no food for however long, the blank of sleep in your own bed, then in a hospital bed, then once again in your own bed. The cyst is benign. There are photographs, too, new reports for later doctors – endometriomas, primarily, the thing that will allow the doctors at your Catholic university’s medical clinic to prescribe birth control – and then there is recovery. A process that seems meant to make you feel that none of this ever happened, though that is never quite what recovery does. Instead, recovery’s scars – four points in your stomach that the instruments penetrated, over years become pale pink dots not unlike mosquito bites – act as reminder that your body can betray you, can fail to do what it is meant to do, and that parts of it can die inside you. • ‘You will live a long time. Mostly in pain.’ You were twenty-three when you heard these words. You dwell on them over and over again. These words echo not the mere pain of the so-called human condition, but something darker, more specific. Whenever something painful has happened since you heard those words – almost half a lifetime ago as you write this – you have thought, at some point, ‘Maybe it has begun.’ • It will happen again. It will happen again when you are living in another American state, studying at another university. You experience the rising pain in the same manner and feel almost prepared for it. In the morning, Ibuprofen having done nothing, you go first to your friend to give her the biscuits you have made for the class and then to your teacher to explain calmly that you think you might miss class because you will need surgery. He says you do not – not because he doesn’t believe your pain, but because the idea causes him pain, and because your self-diagnosis is so unsettling, so specific. You go to the university’s medical clinic and over the hours in which they move you between doctors, nurses, rooms full of equipment, it will worsen in the same way – the way your memory cannot reproduce but can instantly recognise – and at last the clinic pays for a taxi to take you direct to Emergency. Friends meet you there. When you are under, you later hear, your teacher

comes and waits to hear if the surgery was okay. He does not remain till you awake, but you understand he feels in some way guilty, worrying that his words, surely not, have been interpreted as a denial of seriousness. Your friends collect you at five am, drive you across town to a pharmacy, take care of prescriptions and everything else. They bring you to a couch, kitted out as a sick bed, in their home, and offer you everything you need. Later, they take you home, and you wish you had bought a bed frame before now, rather than having to crawl onto a mattress on the floor. They do not want to leave you there, but you feel in this moment that not being any trouble means being invisible, and you sink into the floor and sleep a narcotic sleep. • Your pain threshold is tested. After your first surgery, you were diagnosed with endometriosis when the doctor sighted, and photographed, endometriomas. You mention this to the doctors who perform your second surgery. In a follow-up after the surgery, the doctor asks about your symptoms. The symptoms of endometriosis are usually variations on pain: painful periods, pain during sex, pain with bowel movements and urination; you are considered asymptomatic. Finding subjects with confirmed endometriosis and no significant pain symptoms is difficult. A study taking place at the university needs you. You are curious and agree. The study involves pain. Each thumb is placed under a pressure valve; varying pressures are applied to induce pain. Twice, over the course of seventy-five minutes – first in an office, with your left thumb, and then in an MRI machine, with your right thumb – they crush your thumb in the middle of a nail bed, where it will do no lasting damage, at random intervals of severity. On a scale of one to twenty, you will report how much it has hurt you. Every time you have been asked to report on a pain scale in the past, the scale has been one to ten. This elongation of pain, the possibility of twenty, is unfathomable at first. With your left thumb, they produce a baseline. When they hurt your right thumb, they watch your brain. The fact that this study is not about thumbs, or about brains, but about endometriosis is what has drawn you – but after it is finished all you will talk of is thumbs and the MRI, which was louder than you had expected, and the fact that you agreed to be paid to endure this pain. The volume of the MRI is something you can almost fully relive, while, when you try to imagine the pain, especially the moments of nineteen, of twenty (which you reported with something like pride crushed), you can only imagine a kind of pressure that doesn’t hurt, one that just lingers over your nail bed the same way the weight of your cat lying on your stomach lingers on your stomach. You look up the device they used. You land on an instrument called a dolorimeter. The word pain comes from the Latin poena, for penalty; it is a price paid, a punishment. Dolor, in English, means a great sadness; it arrived from the Latin via Old French, where it also meant pain. You think of the dolorimeter that was applied to your thumb: think that the thumb has been infected with grief.

The researchers conclude that you have a high pain threshold. This is what you tell future doctors, to let them know that whatever is happening internally, as yet unseen, may be more serious than they suspect from your demeanour. The doctors don’t believe you, even when you describe the dolorimeter, the MRI, the scale of one to twenty. When your calm demeanour crumbles it is not necessarily the fact of living in pain for however much longer, but the mental distress of dismissal. • It happens again when you are back in Australia. The first pangs come when you are staying in the mountains. In the evening you tell your friends that if the pain worsens you may need to go to hospital. That night the pain teeters, then backs off. Home again from the mountains, you go to your regular doctor and she says, It’s not likely, seeming to ignore the way you’ve lived in your body, seeming to tell you that what is now familiar to you is a figment that fear has placed into your mind. But she sends for the tests, to set your mind at ease, and the next time you see her the first words she says are, You were right. It is the first time she has said this to you. That’s when you start thinking about finding a new doctor. With your referral you get an appointment, a wait. The surgeon says things that you will only fully comprehend later. Such as, Why are you studying there, not hiding his scorn at your current endeavour, interpreting a return home as failure. Such as, You will need to get an ultrasound, while looking at the ultrasound, and then saying it must be done at another place, more expensive, slower. After you have returned with the new images, My first appointment is 15 January – a month away. You tell him things he openly doubts: you tell him you have a high pain threshold. You tell him this has been tested. He smirks, as if this information is somehow cute. You tell him that if you are feeling like you do now, there has been torsion again. He will tell you this is not possible, that you would not be sitting so calmly opposite him if this were the case. • You have read the famous study ‘The Girl Who Cried Pain’ – perhaps only famous to you. You have read in its concluding notes that, ‘Women’s pain tends to be viewed as more emotionally based and thus less credible – or, likewise, less credible if indeed it is emotionally based.’ That where men are offered painkillers, women are more often offered sedatives. You remember the moment in The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jimmy Stewart giving Doris Day a sedative before telling her that her child has been kidnapped. You remember her face that says this is unforgiveable. You were not offered sedatives – instead were sent away with the strongest codeine and instructions to line your stomach with food. But you were scolded, and this is something you find hard to forgive. Probably because the research estimates only one in 100,000 women experiences ovarian torsion and the danger of ischemia it brings, you imagine your doctor doesn’t think of this as a likely worry; that, ironically, when you talk about pain in a AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

coherent way, he thinks of it as emotionally based. That when, after surgery, he tells you of the torsion you had told him you knew was happening, he blamed you for not exhibiting more pain, more urgent pain – for only crying instead of, in that moment, once again vomiting in the agony that told him it was an emergency. He does not believe that you know your body well enough to know torsion, when it has happened before, because how could you know your body so well when you have unknowingly had this giant thing growing inside you for who knows how long? You did not tell him that you have always assumed you have some such thing growing inside you – because this is what you feared would be read as fatalistic, as emotionally based. You feel that your female body is betraying you: you recall, of all things, an episode of the television show Grey’s Anatomy in which a woman undergoes surgery that removes the parts of her body that have betrayed the women in her family with cancers: breasts, ovaries, uterus. In planning the surgery, she meets with all kinds of pushback, people who question her judgment regarding her own body, her future. In turn, you think about Erin Brockovich, the moment when one of the Hinkley residents receives her diagnosis and she says to Erin, ‘You think if you’ve got no uterus, and no breasts, you’re still technically, a woman?’ You think about your missing parts, now they have removed the ovary, the fallopian tube, and wonder if you are a little less ‘female’, even as the other, female, afflictions – polycystic ovarian syndrome; endometriosis – remain. It has begun. • The American writer Leslie Jamison once wrote, as if for you: ‘I find myself in a bind. I’m tired of female pain and also tired of

people who are tired of it. I know the hurting woman is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt. I don’t like the proposition that female wounds have gotten old; I feel wounded by it.’ You dwell in her question, briefly, ‘How do we talk about these wounds without glamorising them?’ You used to glamorise the wounds. At five, you played Snow White after eating the poison apple. The image of her in a glass coffin, undead, her body wounded by a poison unleashed on her for being young, female, beautiful. Her glass coffin makes her a relic, like the saints you have seen, their corpses supposedly fresh for centuries. Your brothers watched you playing at this story of female suffering. Concentrating on stillness, on feeling like death, you lay on the grass. They ran through the door to protect you. You were frustrated, near tears – you wanted to be left alone with your imagination of this romance of death and deathlessness and beauty. Once you have been there, have vomited and screamed for dullness, there’s no glamour left in pain. Yes, you are tired of this pain – it has a whack-a-mole quality now. A part of yourself has been removed, and so now another part pulls focus with a new ache. Or an absence in your body, now permanent, continues to shriek. g Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Fire Season (Giramondo, 2009), awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009 and Ephemeral Waters (Giramondo, 2013), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s award in 2014. From September 2011 to September 2012 she was the inaugural Sydney City Poet. ‘The Dolorimeter’ came second in the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize.

Australian Book Review congratulates Mykaela Saunders on winning the 2020 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for her story ‘River Story’. Mykaela Saunders, who receives $6,000, is a Koori writer, teacher, and community researcher. Of Dharug and Lebanese ancestry, she belongs to the Tweed Aboriginal community and has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003. We also wish to congratulate Declan Fry on being selected as the new Victorian ABR Rising Star. In addition to his previous contributions to ABR, Declan will receive a number of paid commissions to advance his journalism. Declan Fry is an essayist, critic, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, he has received both the Tom Collins Prize in Australian Literature the Todhunter Literary Award. 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Poetry

‘The effect of atmosphere’ More miniatures from an anti-bardic poet Tim Wright

Homer Street

by Laurie Duggan

Giramondo Publishing $24 pb, 128 pp

n all of his books, Laurie Duggan has tended to avoid the ‘well-formed poem’. His poems are not of the kind that unroll like carpets: replete with interconnected images, sonic patterning, argument. A large part of his poetic approach emerges from an attempt to not speak over what is already there, or, as he writes in one poem, to ‘not neutralise / the effect of atmosphere’. This might be described as permitting the incidental, letting things in, but it’s also – Duggan being a self-described minimalist – much to do with omission. The model his oeuvre provides is one that prioritises listening (and looking) over speaking, and in that sense it is anti-bardic. ‘The poem’ as a discrete object is often, and almost entirely within this collection, given over to the series, allowing Duggan to retain qualities of the short lyric while building long-form structures whose rhythms become apparent over years or, in the case of ‘Blue Hills’, over decades. Homer Street is Duggan’s first collection since his return to Australia after twelve years living in England. The book’s three sections reflect this chronology, concerned as they are with England, Australia, and visual art. The first sequence, ‘A Closing Album’, is a series of fragments named for (excluding Dublin) English towns and cities. The title makes its intention clear, to close off that part of his life. Being an album, there is both light and shade. While more than one fragment does not give the impression that Duggan misses a particular place (‘Rotund, pink / and pissed // the English sing / their football songs’ is ‘Gillingham’), others are warmer (‘fresh hops above the bar’ begins ‘East Kent’). The album is followed by another section of ‘Allotments’, the English counterpart to the ‘Blue Hills’ series – the only constraint of the latter being that its poems are written in Australia. The ‘Allotments’ poems would likely have been written when Duggan knew he was leaving England; with that knowledge they read as valedictory, albeit in an understated way. ‘Dogs’, a scrappier, ratbaggy series of puns and fragments, follows. From it, this is (in its entirety) ‘A further misreading’: ‘Philip Larkin / the librarian from Hell.’ Which should give the reader unfamiliar with Duggan’s poetry a sense of his ability to not waste words, as well as his position with regard to the Movement poets. ‘Dogs’ represents the other side to Duggan’s observational mode: that of the satirist, the pricker of pretensions. This tendency runs back to his series of anagrams of poets’ names in his first book, East (1976), and his versions of the poet Martial adapted to the Australian literary scene (1989).

In the first of the thirty-five ‘Blue Hills’ poems included here, the word ‘perception’ appears (‘a perception of red lakes’) and resonates, leading to the idea that the series will increasingly be about winnowing sense data down to spare registrations of heat, light, and sound. As it proceeds, memory and comment begin to find their way into the poems, and the details observed become, often, smaller and closer: a list of different eucalypt surfaces, a cockatoo cracking a seedpod, ‘its eye a black dot’. In ‘Blue Hills 85’, there appears one of the few notes in the series that touches on that poverty of reference characteristic of non-Aboriginal Australia: ‘what was the name of this place? / (what is the name) / and whom to ask?’ Names of people and places are important for Duggan, and there are plenty of them in his poetry. But rather than simply stating this fact (which has been remarked on enough, as if it were extraordinary), what is of interest is the sensitivity of his attunement to the worlds of reference that are his ambit – primarily visual art, music, and poetry – and by which the poems move. The title sequence, ‘Homer Street’ (a very Duggan title in its referencing of both high and low), serves as a set of ‘atmospheric attunements’ (to borrow a phrase from Kathleen Stewart) to a place both new and returned to. Place for Duggan is understood as something one is continually ‘reading’, continually re-orienting oneself to, via personal associations as well as cultural signs (which could be an architectural motif as well as a speech style), though as the reference to ‘suburban topographies’ on the back cover note suggests, he evidently also makes use of maps in his writing. The ‘Afterimages’ sequence closes out the book, and leaves us with something quite different: forty-four poems, each titled with the name of an artist. Arranged alphabetically and presumably not an open-ended series, it is for this reason less vertiginous than ‘Blue Hills’, the poems more self-contained in the sense that the focus of each is trained wholly on the aesthetic of its particular artist. We leave it feeling as if we have spent a few hours in an eclectic (and well-funded) gallery. Many of the poems are built around a question (‘Godfrey Miller’, ‘Gustave Courbet’, ‘Ian Fairweather’) or a speculation (‘Peter Lanyon’, ‘Paul Nash’). Others are more descriptive, capturing, in miniature, details of particular works (‘Mona Hatoum’), or an essential quality of an artist’s oeuvre (‘Georges Seurat’). In the latter mode, ‘Grace Cossington Smith’ evokes for this reader the shimmering effect of that painter’s brush work; it reads in full: it is best to knit things together to see part of yourself in the door of a mirrored robe as a shadow against bright furniture

These names-as-titles do a lot of work in the series, rousing what is for the reader associated with that name. Even when a name is unfamiliar, it still evokes. Notice what happens when the names above are placed in quotation marks. They become notional, an idea; the strictures of the referential are relaxed. And it’s within that more propositional space that these poems work. g Tim Wright did his PhD on Laurie Duggan and other poets. His latest poetry collection is Suns (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Poetry

Awkward child The irrepressible verse novel Cassandra Atherton

Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on writing by Linda Weste

Australian Scholarly Publishing $39.95 pb, 182 pp

n his description of the verse novel as ‘the awkward child of successful parents, destined to disappoint both of them’, Michael Symmons Roberts emphasises the form’s sometimes disjunctive use of literary techniques commonly associated with poetry and prose fiction. While the verse novel has gained popularity since the 1980s, many of its features may be traced to epic poems such The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Iliad, and the long narrative poems of the Romantic and Victorian periods. The form was established by Alexander Pushkin’s nineteenth-century verse novel Eugene Onegin, which was divided into stanzas; however, the definition and key features of the verse novel are still hotly debated. Linda Weste’s book of interviews, Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on writing, is an important contribution to the growing, but often conflicted, field of studies on the verse novel. Most importantly, it is the first book of interviews to give priority to practitioners’ views of the form and issues associated with the verse novel’s composition and craft. Weste’s aim is to ‘expand knowledge of the diverse ways … authors [of verse novels] combine narrative and poetic techniques to compose their distinctive works’. The book is full of glistering moments that capture what David Mason identifies as the form’s ‘tension and frisson’. Weste’s book comprises twenty-two interviews with Anglophone verse novelists from the ‘prospering verse novel markets’ of the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada. She notes, ‘the interviewed authors do not necessarily identify as verse novelists’, and statements about the breadth of their oeuvres, which conveniently precede the interviews, attest to this. The interviews range from two and a half pages (Lesley Wheeler) to twelve pages (Alan Wearne), from writers who have published one verse novel (Sarah Corbett), to multiple (George Elliott Clarke), and many who have won prizes for this form (Ros Barber). While Weste is a verse novelist, and while her pithy questions demonstrate her passion for the form, it seems odd that she ‘interviews’ herself. While her insights into the verse novel are valuable, it may have been better to incorporate these into her introduction, rather than place herself alongside the other interviewees. In a bold move, Weste’s book consolidates Australia as the nation at the forefront of the publication of Anglophone verse novels. She notes Les Murray’s prize-winning verse novels, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral and Fredy Neptune, and pays homage to Dorothy Porter as a major proponent of the form in Australia, 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

whose influence has endured posthumously. Seven of the twentytwo interviewees are Australian (Brian Castro, Christine Evans, Judy Jack, Paul Hetherington, Geoff Page, Alan Wearne, and Linda Weste), and Pandanus Press emerges as progressive in its decision to publish many early Australian verse novels. The Australians provide some of the best discussion of the versatility of the verse novel. Hetherington argues that verse novels ‘remind us that we can speak about anything we like in poetry; and that poetry remains a viable way of addressing the quotidian and expansive, as well as the lyrical’. Page supports the form’s flexibility: ‘It’s as if I want to prove that there’s no genre that can’t also be done in verse.’ This is one of the most powerful features of Weste’s interviews cumulatively, they testify to the diversity and uniqueness of the form. Moreover, Weste’s interviews are more expansive than they might first appear, offering commentary on poetry and its readership in general. The most enlightening discussions are those concerning ‘the idea of poetry’. Where a form, such as prose poetry, may be said to benefit from being composed in sentences and paragraphs, the verse novel’s use of lineation can look challenging to readers expecting more attributes of the prose novel. Christine Evans encourages the reader of the verse novel to read not only ‘between the lines’ but to ‘dance between the line, the verse and the page’. David Mason captures this in pithy terms: Some audiences are afraid of verse novels, perhaps, because they are afraid of poetry. Too much modern poetry has taught them to be bored when they see things typed up in lines. Yet, verse novels are often read by people who claim not to like poetry at all, while certain poets and critics look down upon them as a capitulation to narrative. Obviously, I think those poets and critics are idiots.

The interviews are, for the most part, compelling. While Weste’s introduction brings together some important threads from the interviews, it would have benefited from giving more details about the interview process and structure of the book. It remains unclear if the interviews were conducted in real time or over email, and there is no information about how the writers were chosen or approached. Importantly, Weste provides each writer with the same nine questions, which allows the responses to be easily juxtaposed. Together, they provide powerful commentary on questions of form and mode. Occasionally, this choice of format means that the repetition of something that doesn’t quite work plays out in successive interviews. This is true of one of Weste’s questions about ‘influential verse novels’, which occurs after many writers have already addressed the issue. It seems like a missed opportunity to ask something else. Weste’s book is a major achievement in a growing field of scholarship on the verse novel. As Fred D’Aguiar states, ‘the world needs more verse novels as the world becomes more needy of stillness, reflection’. Weste’s interviews demonstrate that the verse novel is not a Frankensteinian monster sewn together from disparate features of the poetry and prose novel forms. Instead, in its attempt to reconcile the poetic and prosaic, it celebrates many of the productive tensions between poetry and narrative fiction. g Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar. She is writing a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb.

Poet of the Month with Laurie Duggan Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne and was involved in the poetry worlds of that city and Sydney from the 1970s to the late 1990s. After six years in Brisbane he moved to England, living in Faversham, Kent until 2018 when he returned to Sydney. He has published some twenty books of poems together with Ghost Nation, a work about imagined space. His most recent books are Homer Street (Giramondo, 2020), Selected Poems 1971–2017 (Shearsman, 2018), and No Particular Place To Go (Shearsman, 2017).

Which poets have most influenced you?

Thomas Wyatt, Walter Raleigh, Lord Rochester, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Robert Browning, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Jean Follain, Francis Ponge, George Oppen, Louis MacNeice, Charles Olson, Gwen Harwood, Hilda Morley, Philip Whalen, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gael Turnbull, Paul Blackburn, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Joanne Kyger, Lee Harwood, Alan Wearne, John Scott, Pam Brown, Ken Bolton, John Forbes, Gig Ryan. It goes on …

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Crafted definitely, though how they originate is another matter. Craft is essential. But it can be a subtle thing. I grew up in the shadow of poets who were fixated on forms like the pentameter. Despite their talk about regular forms, I found many of them to be clunky versifiers (there are of course exceptions, like, say, James Merrill). One young Australian poet wrote very ‘formal’ work that rattled and ‘informal’ work that just seemed shapeless. He was tone deaf. Inspiration? See below.

(Photograph by Angela Gardner)

Interview

itations I’ve been not entirely aware of (in other words, these poems have already been ‘drafted’, albeit unconsciously).

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why? I’ve been fortunate enough to talk to a number of older poets, many of whom are no longer with us. I count myself fortunate to have met poets such as Carl Rakosi, Gael Turnbull, Ed Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Lee Harwood, and Tom Raworth. If I could use a time machine, I’d like to talk to William Carlos Williams, especially about the radical work he produced in the 1920s.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection? John Forbes’s Collected Poems (2001).

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Probably both. A coterie is great when you’re young, but you need to be able to escape it eventually. You will always need companions, but it’s good if their poetics differs from your own.

What prompts a new poem?

What have you learned from reviews of your work?

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

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

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

Often enough scattered jottings in a notebook where, at a certain point, I sense something is going on. These notes may also relate to pieces written much earlier so I will often go back over the notebook to find them. It is important not to get too precious about the process. It is never ‘now I’m going to write a poem’. Time, but not too much of it. New experiences, but nothing too novel.

In an age of word processing, it has become impossible to tell since minor changes can be made (and are) at any time. At a guess I’d say that most of my work takes between one and seven drafts. More than that usually means it’s never going to work, while at the lesser end the poems are often the result of cog-

Some years back I would have said, as William Carlos Williams did, ‘There’s a lot of bastards out there.’ Reviews, good or bad, often miss the mark, but occasionally someone will say something that’s worth finding out.

Paul Blackburn’s In, On, or About the Premises (1968). But then, I wouldn’t want to be in Plato’s Republic. Unfortunately, I have to be in ScoMo’s Republic. ‘A dazed disc jockey fingers an epaulette.’

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

Some of the time. And by the rest of the public on often unpredictable occasions. That’s my guess. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Shakespeare

‘Mewling and puking’

The symbolic power of Shakespeare’s children Rayne Allinson

The Child in Shakespeare by Charlotte Scott

Oxford University Press $100 hb, 192 pp

he figure of the child stands at both ends of human experience in Shakespeare’s plays. The span between our ‘mewling and puking’ infancy and our ‘second childishness’ of old age runs to little more than a dozen lines in Jacques’s famous ‘seven ages of man’ speech in As You Like It, before we slip into ‘mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’ In the intervening years, our identity as children might shift as we undergo rites of passage into adulthood, as our relationships with our own parents evolve or as we become parents ourselves. But the child – the archetype of our essential nature – waits patiently for our return. Even Lear, the grand patriarch who disowns the truth-speaking child of his heart, must be racked on the fiery wheel of experience before he can become the ‘child-changed father’ Cordelia recognises in the end. Charlotte Scott’s The Child in Shakespeare surveys more than two hundred references to children in the plays to argue that ‘the child represents the single most powerful relationship in Shakespeare’s drama’. Yet as Scott is quick to concede, Shakespeare wrote only a handful of roles for child-aged actors, the most notable being Henry VI (historically aged five) in Henry VI Part I, Mamillius (about seven) in A Winter’s Tale, Arthur (twelve) in King John, Princes Edward and Richard (twelve and eight) in Richard III, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and Miranda in The Tempest (both thirteen). Only two of these children survive the final act of their respective plays. Indeed, the first child Scott discusses in depth, the phantom infant invoked by Lady Macbeth to rouse her husband’s blood-lust, is dead before the play even begins: ‘I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me; / I would while it was smiling in my face / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums / And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you / Have done to this.’ Although Scott draws on a fascinating array of contemporary religious handbooks, pedagogic texts, and household manuals to flesh out their thin bones, Shakespeare’s children tell us little about the lived experience of early modern childhood, except that it was often nasty, brutish, and short. Yet there were more children hidden on the Elizabethan stage than these few roles suggest. Female characters of all ages were typically played by prepubescent boys drawn from the popular children’s companies, the ‘eyrie of children’ mocked by Rosencrantz in Hamlet. The children’s companies emerged out of medieval mystery plays where children performed allegorical roles embodying Christian values such as Truth, Faith, and Justice. 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Thus, Scott argues, the true power of Shakespeare’s children is symbolic. They stand as moral mirrors to ‘the values, agonies, pleasures, and conflicts of the play-worlds they inhabit’. This is particularly true in history plays such as Richard III, where the credulous princes fall victim to the subtle gestures and slant meanings of a corrupt adult world they are unable to interpret. ‘Sweet prince,’ smiles Richard at his nephew, ‘the untainted virtue of your years / Hath not yet dived into the world’s deceit.’ In King Lear, Cordelia is rendered mute by the obsequious rhetoric of her elder sisters, whose hollow words of love undo the bonds of family they profess to cherish. Romeo and Juliet dramatises the death of childhood and the perilous vulnerability of adolescence. Children are notably absent from Shakespeare’s comedies, a genre that revolves around marriage, a process of socialisation that marks the transition to adulthood. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest exists as a dream of childhood, a place the lovers look back on with nostalgia but must leave in order to become husbands and wives.

Shakespeare’s children tell us little about the lived experience of early modern childhood, except it was often nasty, brutish, and short The parent–child relationship is central to many of Shakespeare’s plays, and Scott is especially interested in the dynamic between fathers and daughters. For Scott, what resonates throughout these texts is ‘an almost obsessive anxiety about forms of obedience’. This is hardly surprising in the context of early modern England, where the patriarchal structure of the family was commonly used as a metaphor for the state. For Scott, ‘Prospero’s role as a father cannot be separated from his role as a magus and the idea of power, paternal, princely, or magic, at its most potent, comes to involve all three.’ One text that is conspicuously absent from Scott’s analysis is Hamlet, a play overwhelmed by fatherless children. Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes, and Fortinbras are all haunted by the ghosts of their lost fathers, trapped in a deadly cycle of grief, rage, and revenge. Although Hamlet is thirty years old, he is preoccupied with adolescent anxieties about sex and death, and mired in Oedipal obsessions. ‘You go not,’ Hamlet tells Gertrude in her bedchamber, ‘till I set up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.’ For Scott, Shakespeare’s plays continually affirm that the role of the parent is ultimately to let go; in Hamlet it is the child’s inability to relinquish the primal bonds with his parents that leads to disaster. The Child in Shakespeare examines only fourteen of the thirty-seven plays in detail, leaving significant room for further exploration. In the rigidly hierarchical context of early modern England, age was as important as gender or class in determining one’s place in society and relationships with others, yet it remains an understudied category of historical analysis. If childhood represents the first stage on our lifelong journey from innocence to experience, the figure of the child is central to all stories. g Rayne Allinson is a writer based in southern Tasmania. She is the author of A Monarchy of Letters: Royal correspondence and English diplomacy in the reign of Elizabeth I (2012).

Shakespeare

Minds in motion

William Shakespeare’s education David McInnis

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance education by Scott Newstok

Princeton University Press $49.99 hb, 203 pp

n an early episode of the cult Canadian television series Slings & Arrows (2003), the director of the ‘Burbage Festival’ finds himself addressing a corporate audience, forced to teach management strategy through Shakespeare: ‘Do any of you seriously believe that you’re going to sell more plastics products to the construction industry by studying, say, the crisis management techniques of Claudius?’ Fortunately, Scott Newstok wouldn’t be answering that question in the affirmative. His How to Think Like Shakespeare doesn’t strain analogies or instrumentalise Shakespeare’s plays and characters to make Shakespeare seem relevant to patently unrelated contexts; rather, it explores both Shakespeare’s thinking and the ‘educational assumptions that shaped Shakespeare’ (since these frequently differ from our own system of education). At the heart of this book is Newstok’s conviction that ‘education must be about thinking – not training a set of specific skills’. After all, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Each of the fourteen deliberately short chapters follows the logic of a Montaignean essay (e.g. ‘Of Technology’; ‘Of Conversation’; ‘Of Freedom’), using a concept that was central to the education of Shakespeare’s contemporaries in order to reconsider modern pedagogical approaches. To think like Shakespeare, we need to ‘reconsider the habits that shaped his mind’. Newstok ponders the goal of education and decries ‘our fixation on test as target, as the end of education itself ’, suggesting that conceiving of thinking as a ‘craft’ rather than as something utilitarian and oriented towards an external goal is a helpful way to revalue education. (The very concept of a ‘playwright’ entails the act of fashioning and crafting: a play is wrought, like iron; not written.) For example, tracing the practice of ‘bi-vocal argumentation’ from Erasmus through Shakespeare (and Hamlet in particular), Newstok treats characters conversing in a Shakespeare play as analogous to a ‘mind in motion’, and demonstrates the value of such techniques for rhetorical prowess but also for engendering sympathy and empathy. But instead of thinking through Shakespeare – taking the dramatic situations and responses he creates and repurposing them as heuristics for navigating dilemmas of our own – Newstok’s focus is more sensibly on the education system that contributed to the development of Shakespeare’s mind: ‘A Shakespearean education gives us the chance to build these habits of mind that individuals (and cultures) need if they’re to flourish.’ Of course, our own time is markedly different from Shakespeare’s: most notably in the

fact that the great thinkers of the English Renaissance thought they were rebirthing the classics. For them, ‘originality’ meant a return to origins, not a break with the past. Imitatio, the art and practice of imitation, was an essential element of Shakespeare’s education and his work. Grammar school students were famously required to translate classical literature into English and back again into Latin in order to master not simply vocabulary but rhetoric and expression. Such ‘creative imitation’ (as Newstok dubs it) is actually ‘the hallmark of art and industry’, though it has not been celebrated thus since Romanticism’s emphasis on the bard-like imagination of the individual genius. When he does turn to originality in the modern sense, Newstok draws out the concept of inventio, and the seemingly opposite senses of ‘invention’ and ‘inventory’ (of stock ideas) that the term generates, to make a simple but effective point: ‘You cannot transform tradition (a creative ideal) without first knowing it (a conserving ideal). Making an inventory must precede making an invention.’ You need to know the rules before you can break them. Constraints can be enabling: they foster versatility and creativity. We would do well to remember this. Particularly pertinent at present, as we turn to Zoom and other platforms to teach remotely, is Newstok’s chapter ‘Of Technology’ and the note of caution that he sounds: ‘Too often we mistake the instrument for a method’ where really we ought to regard thought itself as not just a craft but as ‘techne – the art of fitting things together, as a carpenter, or joiner’. Technology that distracts from (rather than enabling) apprehension and comprehension is a failure. In this book, which is about Shakespeare’s education rather than his thinking, Newstok is able to provide us with innumerable examples of how other great thinkers (Erasmus, Lyly, Montaigne) grappled with the challenges of reading, learning, and creating. By focusing on their pedagogical and cogitative insights, Newstok can extend his pool of examples to thinkers that followed Shakespeare (Hemingway, Lincoln, Woolf, Arendt). Somewhat puzzlingly for a book that is so clearly designed to have wide appeal rather than an academic audience, the style can at times become an impediment to its own success. An assemblage of quotations from drastically different sources, periods, and contexts has the unhappy side effect of being distracting (‘That’s from Victorian poet William Brighty Rands’s “Topsyturvey-World”, set to music by Natalie Merchant on Leave Your Sleep (2010)’). This tissue of quotations is weaved into the syntax of Newstok’s sentences seemingly to naturalise it, yet it is marked typographically through ostentatious italics: the borrowed text is thus both subsumed by the prose of the book and overtly marked as other. Of course, thousands of Englishmen were the recipients of the same education as Shakespeare without going on to become Shakespeare; likewise, plenty of remarkable intellects have flourished in later ages under different educational regimes. But Newstok isn’t offering to turn us all into Shakespeares or even to replicate his views or values. The eminently sensible premise here is ‘how we might reclaim some of the best aspects of his education’, and the pay-off is an emphatic appreciation of just how valuable the pedagogical insights of four centuries ago remain today. g David McInnis is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Classics

Take Two!

The Spartan way

A succinct, measured history of Sparta Alastair Blanshard

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www.australianbookreview.com.au 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

The Spartans

by Andrew J. Bayliss

Oxford University Press $22.95 hb, 192 pp

hen the Abbé Michel Fourmont travelled to Sparta in the 1730s, he thought he was going to make his fortune and academic reputation. The depths of Ottoman Greece were largely unknown territory to European travellers at this time. What fabulous discoveries lay in store for him, wondered the Abbé. What treasures had been left behind by this one of the greatest powers that the Greek world had ever known? One can imagine his anguish when, after braving numerous perils to reach Sparta, he discovered that barely anything remained of this great city-state. Indeed, the paucity of material was such that it seems to have driven Fourmont slightly mad. Rather than admit that nothing existed, he invented in his account of Sparta a series of fabulous, non-existent monuments – altars for human sacrifice, elaborate records of treaties between Sparta and Jerusalem, lists of priestesses and kings that stretched back to antiquity. To disguise his act of forgery, lest any later traveller try to find these monuments, he even pretended to have destroyed them, protesting that as a decent Christian he couldn’t allow such pagan works to survive. It would take scholars decades before they could unravel the extent of Fourmont’s deceit. Many centuries earlier, the Greek historian Thucydides had anticipated Fourmont’s predicament. In a famous thoughtexperiment in the first book of his History of the Peloponnesian War, the great war between Athens and Sparta that occupied the final third of the fifth century bce, he invited his reader to travel forward in time a number of centuries. What will the future make of Sparta, he asked, if they have only its physical remains to judge it by? How could a viewer imagine that Athens and Sparta were such great rivals based on the huge disparity in ruins? How could a group of such poor foundations compare to the majesty of the Parthenon? Thucydides realised what the Abbé Fourmont did not: namely, that the greatness of Sparta rested not in the fabulous buildings that it constructed but in the stories that it generated. Its unique way of life and its egalitarian military ethos were the secrets of its strength. In The Spartans, Andrew J. Bayliss assiduously gathers all the various stories told about Sparta and weaves them together to produce an introduction to the various communities that made up the State. We are presented in turn to the male citizens, the youths, the women, and the helot slaves; the last group particularly important because it was their labour that made Spartan society possible. Along the way, Bayliss provides

evidence to support a number of myths, and shatters quite a few of them. The Spartans, famously men of few words (hence the term ‘laconic’ from Laconia), would admire the brevity of this book. The prose is lean and utilitarian. No room for poetry here. It provides a most accessible summary of the current state of scholarship on Sparta. The book opens its analysis with a description of the Spartan government. The form of governance that developed in Sparta was unique. Far earlier than almost any other place in the Greek world, Sparta systematically addressed the challenges of the gap between rich and poor, mass and élite. Spartans placed restrictions on the power of their kings, created an assembly for citizens, and put in place checks and balances to stop the creep of élite power.

The Spartans, famously men of few words (hence the term ‘laconic’), would admire the brevity of this book

identical fashion. Bayliss takes us through the various stages of schooling at Sparta, beginning at the age of seven when young men were removed from their families and placed into groups, possibly called ‘herds’. The account does not shy away from the violence and brutal privations that attended much of this educational system. (It is easy to allow these elements to overly colour the picture.) The educational system also allowed plenty of time for athletics, singing, dancing, and complex ball games. A number of foreigners outside Sparta were so impressed by the system that they even sent their children to be educated in the ‘Spartan Way’. All of the evidence suggests they did this out of love rather than as a unique form of child punishment. The other area in which attitudes and behaviour in Sparta differed markedly from the rest of Greece was in relation to women. Bayliss’s chapter on women is a great read. Aristotle declared that Sparta was effectively a gynaecocracy, a state ruled by women. While Bayliss shows that this was a gross exaggeration, he also points out the tremendous influence that women enjoyed and the way in which they were not afraid to call out men for their bad behaviour. No mother could embarrass their son like a Spartan mother. The image of the woman who hitched up her skirts and asked her cowardly son if he wanted to crawl back into her womb is particularly memorable. The tremendous success of Zack Snyder’s film 300 (2006) about the Spartan King Leonidas and his heroic stand at Thermopylae shows that interest in Sparta never wanes. The film is a travesty of history, a hyper-masculine example of Spartan myth-making in action. Leonidas strides through the film barking orders and checking off Spartan stereotypes. Throughout this book, Bayliss never shouts. Yet, in his quiet, succinct way, he has produced a book that can with some justice claim, ‘This is Sparta.’ g

One term for Spartan citizens was ‘homoioi’ (‘the equals’). Athens may have perfected democracy, but Sparta wins the prize for being the earliest adopter. These early constitutional reforms spared Sparta the internal revolutions and coups and counter-coups that tore apart so many other Greek city-states. They also ensured that there has been no end of admirers of the Spartan constitution. Bayliss cites Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s disparaging remarks about Sparta as ‘military monks’ and ‘little better than a well-regulated camp’, but fails to point out that there were also enthusiastic fans of Sparta and its system of government among the Founding Fathers. Another reason for the lack of political discord in Sparta was its highly organised educational system, which was designed to produce welltrained, obedient citizens. Again, the same egalitarian spirit is at play. Aristotle praised Sparta Portrait head of a woman, first century ce. Sparta, Magoula. because the sons of rich Archaeological Museum of Sparta. Sparta, Greece, 2019 and poor were raised in an (Photograph by George E. Koronaios via Wikimedia Commons)

Alastair Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. His book, Hercules: A heroic life, about our fascination with the figure of Hercules, has been translated into four languages.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Language

Afferbeck Lauder Ascent of the alphabet Andrew Connor

A Place for Everything: The curious history of alphabetical order by Judith Flanders

Picador $34.99 hb, 368 pp

n the early nineteenth century, Sequoyah, a Cherokee man living in Alabama, developed a fundamentally new system of writing Cherokee, which had until then not been a written language. Sequoyah’s system – properly a syllabary rather than an alphabet, in that it represents the eighty-five syllables used in Cherokee – is fascinating, innovative, and remains in use today. But in what order did those fabulous syllables go? Sequoyah provided a chart, but the missionary Samuel Worcester quickly rearranged it to suit English alphabetic order. Language was power, and ‘alphabetic order’ proved not to be neutral. These thoughts come to mind while reading social historian Judith Flanders’ new book, A Place for Everything, in which she explores the development and dominance of alphabetic order in western Europe and the United States from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. Flanders organises her book alphabetically (A is for …, B is for …, and so on), but jumps from I (index cards) to Y (Y2K) for a sort of epilogue on the twilight of the alphabet. This book is, in large part, the engaging story of northern and western Europe coming to embrace a new organisation – alphabetic order, commonplace books, and card catalogues – in the Enlightenment. The treatises they wrote, the furniture they designed to accommodate their ideas, and the libraries they arranged are all covered in loving detail. What receives less comment, however, are the assumptions underlying the operation. It is a whiggish sort of history: alphabetic order is ‘truly modern’, and the movement of ‘civilization’ (viz., librarians, scientists, and cabinetmakers) towards achievement is a one-way climb. These are the ideas lurking beneath this work, but they require engagement and critique. Flanders’ style comes laden with examples, and the reader will want to know even more, not least about the Latin alphabet itself, which underpins the work, and its tumultuous convulsions. Alphabets are, after all, a tricky business. The Latin alphabet, which we Anglophones purport to use, is not quite our own. As Indiana Jones demonstrates, I and J were once interchangeable, as were U and V. W, meanwhile, is a hideously modern innovation. Other letters, like thorn (þ) or yogh (ȝ) were our own only for a time. And how should one cram the kindly yogh into alphabetic order? And what of cases like the Dutch ij, which may or may not even be a letter (depending on whom you ask), or the Roman emperor Claudius, who invented three extra, short-lived letters? 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

It may be clear by now that I have some reservations. Part of this has to do with the narrative Flanders presents. By training and inclination, I study the ancient world, and so am better placed to judge Flanders’ work by its details, rather than its discussions of Enlightenment encyclopedism. Now, those who set out to write a history across centuries or millennia expose themselves to a particular peril. After the author has set their narrative in place, the specialists come loping over from their disciplinary lairs to snipe and nitpick over minutiae. This is certainly possible with Flanders’ effort – the references to Egyptian ‘hieroglyphics’, for instance. Beneath that, though, a more serious issue lurks and merits attention. A quick survey of the problem will have to suffice – the use of alphabetic order for administration is known in Greek from the second century bce, where it is attested on a papyrus from Egypt. But what put the idea in the head of that anonymous Ptolemaic official? It is likely that he got it from the Egyptians themselves, who had already developed and put into use an alphabetic order for their language before Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt. In other words, this intellectual breakthrough, which Flanders presents as essentially medieval or even early modern, and rigorously European, may well have been taught to the Greeks by Egyptian priests. All this for a people whom Flanders assures us had ‘no possibility, or need, to learn an alphabet in any order’. It is 2020, and it should no longer surprise us that certain ideas attributed to Europeans may have originated elsewhere, as Joseph Needham’s work on China has amply demonstrated. Alphabetic order was in use in Africa and likely spread thence across the Mediterranean to Europe. This means that the smooth ascent of the alphabet charted by Flanders must be roughened considerably. Many of the conditions she suggests as critical to the triumph of the alphabet in the early modern period were present in antiquity: mass availability of relatively cheap writing material (papyri), full-word alphabetisation (not just first-letter), and even the awareness that words could be separated into their component letters. Flanders’ suggestion seems to be that medieval scholars first unlinked the letters of a word from the meaning of its name (deus, ‘god’, being composed of the letters d-e-u-s, for instance, and not simply a divine whole). The use of alphabetisation therefore would represent a smashing of social and religious hierarchies which put gods and kings before the plucky aardvark. But what if Egyptians and Romans got there first? One can scarcely imagine a more hierarchical society than ancient Egypt, where the pyramids were not just social. Even if I disagree with the interpretation, it remains the case that Flanders tells an interesting story, and marshals a vast cast of characters to do so. For those interested in language or the history of ideas, this work will set the mind racing. That the reader’s thoughts will likely outrun the book itself may not be surprising. Every place and time has its own relationship with the alphabet, as the Jackson 5 can attest. After all, we can thank ‘Afferbeck Lauder’ for discovering the Strine spoken on these shores. Whether Cherokee or Strine, writing shapes us. g Andrew Connor is a historian and papyrologist. He is currently Lecturer in Ancient History in the Centre for Ancient Cultures at Monash University, and the head of Orion College. ❖

Memoir

Vicissitudes and unbelonging A penitential memoir from a prolific poet Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Displaced: A rural life by John Kinsella

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 329 pp

ohn Kinsella tends to be a polarising figure, but his work has won many admirers both in Australia and across the world, and I find myself among these. The main knocks on Kinsella are that he writes too much, that what he does write is sprawling and ungainly, and that he tends to editorialise and evangelise. One might concede all of these criticisms, but then still be faced with what by any estimation is a remarkable body of work, one that is dazzling both in its extent and its amplitude, in the boldness of its conceptions and in the lyrical complexity of its moments. An element that tends to be overlooked in Kinsella, both as a writer and as a public figure, is his compassion. What it means to be compassionate, rather than simply passionate, is a question that underpins Kinsella’s memoir Displaced: A rural life. Displaced is the third memoir that Kinsella has written, following Auto (2001) and Fast, Loose Beginnings (2006). The gap since the previous memoir is substantial in Kinsella years, during which volumes of work come out sometimes on a monthly basis. Kinsella is now in his late fifties, and the latest memoir is powered by deeper wheels of rumination than his earlier autobiographical writings. What stands out in this new work is the candour and clarity with which he speaks about his troubled early years, years which were marked by addiction and personal torment. He has touched upon his addictions before, so this is not a revelation particular to this memoir, but in this work there is a steadier view of the person he was and the person he now is. He sources his difficulties in life to the social vicissitudes of his childhood, where he experienced repeated and vicious bullying: ‘When you’re ostracised as a child, you don’t align with the social group that expects you to be part of it. I did not belong with other kids – I didn’t belong anywhere.’ The book itself is jagged in ways that might offend certain readers seeking quietist consolations. Kinsella is neither Wendell Berry nor Annie Dillard. The tone of this memoir varies considerably, the narrative skips from place to place and time to time, and various documents are interpolated holus-bolus, including earlier poems and emails from his partner, Tracy Ryan. Yet, somehow I found myself captivated by this kaleidoscopic world. Once you surrender to its demands, the book has its own associative logic and elegance. The idea of displacement is foundational to the mode of thought the book enacts, where Kinsella feels a powerful connection to places but a powerful inhibition about belonging to them. This is the key antinomy the book wrestles with: ‘I feel a

connection though I know I unbelong.’ The wanderings through time and space are linked to the purgatory of his addiction years, which he now understands as a process of desperate undoing: ‘I wandered, displaced as an addict, as someone trying to undo my own identity.’ The wandering through the rural nodes of the south-west, particularly the wheatbelt of Western Australia, is powered by addictions, which in turn drive the wandering: ‘Alcoholism and rural labouring became a strange kind of synthesis for me. From the age of twenty till thirty, I wandered, working to pay for booze and for a place to crash out.’ There is a distinctly penitential quality in Kinsella’s memoir, but I admired the way that this was turned from feelings of selfrecrimination into acts of reparation. The book is in many ways a love song to the home that he and Ryan have made in the hills outside Toodyay in the Ballardong Noongar country of the greater Avon Valley, an hour or so from Perth. The place where they live, which they have dubbed Jam Tree Gully, is both a home and an ethical project: ‘For me, Jam Tree Gully is the off-centre out of which I write uneasily – a point in my conception of being, almost lost but constantly rewarded (which I probably don’t deserve) by healing of the natural world against the odds, the battering ram of “progress” around us here.’ One of the agonising things about reading this book is the extent to which Kinsella still finds a part of himself unforgivable. Indeed, it is this reconciliation with himself that has been the biggest challenge to his compassion. Being in the world, for Kinsella as for everyone, is about living with contradictions, and Jam Tree Gully offers them up without much apology. The land is bleeding with the depredations of past and present agricultural demands, and to repair the land requires intervention. But which interventions will not make matters worse, and how can these be something other than mere gesture? Who is qualified to make judgements about acts in the natural world? What is an act, after all, in the eyes of nature? Does an animal act? Does a plant? These kinds of questions, which run through and beneath Kinsella’s reveries, sketch out the broader ecoethical terrain of this memoir. In a similar vein, the book is quite clear that the land at Jam Tree Gully is the land of the Ballardong Noongar people.The narrative loops back through his own ancestors and the conversion of his Irish forebears from the abject colonised to ruthless colonisers. I caught up with John recently on the banks of the Avon in Northam. His trademark shock of silvery hair had grown a little wild during the lockdown, yet he seemed in good spirits and was glad for some company, an emissary from the world below. He confessed he was feeling a little stir-crazy. His lines of flight, to Cambridge, to Ireland, have been closed down by the pandemic, but he was not taking it as hard as I had feared. There seems to have been, in more recent years, a hard-won process of adjustment in both him and his writing. With Displaced, Kinsella lets us in more fully to the contradictions and compassion that define one of the nation’s most significant living writers. g Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia and the Director of the Westerly Centre. His book Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (UWA Publishing, 2018) won the Walter McRae Russell Prize in 2019. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Film

The seventh art A love letter to cinema Nicholas Bugeja

Mysteries of Cinema: Reflections on film theory, history and culture by Adrian Martin

UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 432 pp

drian Martin’s Mysteries of Cinema is, above all, an impassioned love letter to film, a written record of a life defined and driven by the pleasures, ambiguities, and indeed mysteries inherent in what André Bazin, co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, called the ‘seventh art’. In the author’s own words, the book ‘covers 34 years of a writing life’. It charts both his ephemeral and enduring fixations and obsessions, many of which converge on cinema, film form, the role of the critic, pockets of film culture, and the psychological, emotional, and intellectual responses that cinema elicits. Mirroring much of Martin’s oeuvre, Mysteries of Cinema is not easily classifiable; it cuts across different strands of film theory and thought by employing ‘a mode of synthetic film analysis attuned to … the mysteries of cinema’. Martin’s devotees will devour Mysteries of Cinema, savouring its details, imagery, and linguistic flourishes. At more than 430 pages in length, it might prove a formidable undertaking for the more casual reader. Mysteries of Cinema comprises twenty-six essays of varying length and subject matter, written between 1982 and 2016. These essays are not chronological; rather, they are divided into parts that revolve around a particular cinematic idea, theme, phenomenon, or experience, such as lyricism in film and the parameters of film genres. In the first chapter, ‘Retying the Threads’ – a de facto introduction – Martin stresses that the book is not an exhaustive collection of his essays. Nor is it representative of his wide-ranging corpus of writing, unlike Sanford Schwartz’s edited compilation of American film critic Pauline Kael’s reviews and essays, The Age of Movies: Selected writings of Pauline Kael (2011). Martin remarks that many of the essays in Mysteries of Cinema are ‘obscure, hard-to-access texts’; for they were published in magazines and journals long since discontinued. In this regard, the book serves a sort of archival purpose, presenting to his public work that Martin holds dear. Martin’s aspirations for Mysteries of Cinema exceed that relatively prosaic object. For him, the book embodies something more romantic, profound. Mysteries of Cinema is ‘a book of threads’, of ‘transversal reflections – clusters of associations’. He writes: ‘there are threads that accompany all of us as we make our way through time’. A substantial number of these threads are perceptible within and between essays, especially as Martin quotes and borrows from a recurring cast of writers, critics, and artists – Raymond Bellour, Raúl Ruiz, Serge Daney, Manny Farber, 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

Chantal Akerman, Raymond Durgnat, Roland Barthes, JeanLuc Godard – pulling together disparate essays on the condition of cinephilia, the scourge of screenwriting manuals, the tension between narrative and the cinematic ‘art of showing, spectacle’. Nevertheless, one intuits that the depths of these links are only truly known by its author. Martin recounts in the book’s third essay – on his precocious taking to cinema – that he began reading Film as Film (1972) and Theory of Film Practice (1973), reasonably dense books, in his mid-teens. That Martin refers to these books as his ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ illustrates their lasting impact. Aged seventeen, he had delved into the film-philosophy writing of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At twenty-one, Martin ‘wrote and sang a song dedicated to Deleuze’ with his band in Melbourne, a curious and possibly unprecedented tribute to the muchrevered intellectual figure. Decades on, Martin still writes of these formative moments with the instinctual fervour of youth. Indeed, much of Mysteries of Cinema is written in this mode; one conjures the visual image of Martin leaning over his desk, frantically scribbling (or typing), as the sparks of thought and films, and scenes from films, capture him. Martin’s hunger for the films, writers, and questions he engages with can be infectious. ‘This is what all the discontinuities, fluxes and quiverings of style serve: a particular kind of lyricism,’ Martin writes of Anne-Marie Miéville’s short film Le Livre de Marie (1985). Some passages in these essays are so personal, so tethered to his subjective experience, that it is difficult to share his irrepressible fascination in the material, particularly when he embarks on extended discursive discussions or heavy, page-long descriptions of film scenes. A tenor of self-regard, of great self-assurance, permeates Martin’s writing. It is entrenched in the few introductory essays, colouring the rest of the book. ‘I plan for a Volume 2 in 2050,’ he writes, almost satirically, in the first paragraph of the opening essay (by then, he will be in his nineties). In that same essay, without a hint of reservation, Martin compares himself to filmmakers Terrence Malick and George Miller, both of whom shelved projects ‘until the capabilities of digital technology had caught up with their imaginations’. He remarks, ‘I, too, as it turned out, had to wait for a machine’ to create audiovisual essays with his frequent collaborator Cristina Álvarez López. This is likely a product of Martin’s lack of distance from the cherished contents of his book. Such musings belong, more appropriately, in a private journal. The final essay, co-authored by Álvarez López, contains thirteen separate texts ‘written to accompany the online audiovisual essays’ they have made together, which are described as ‘poeticcritical fragments’. This coda gestures towards the emergent possibilities of film analysis and ‘speculative criticism’, of projecting ‘one film into another, through another’. Working within the constraints of writing, Mysteries of Cinema seeks to perform a similar task: to uncover what makes the cinematic form special, by comparing, juxtaposing, and refracting films as diverse as Stan Brakhage’s Murder Psalm (1980) and George Miller’s Mad Max series. All of this is, of course, filtered through the eyes and ears of Martin himself. g Nicholas Bugeja is a writer and editor based in Melbourne.

International Studies

The aged queen

An outdated paean to Notre-Dame Gemma Betros

Notre-Dame: The soul of France by Agnès Poirier

Oneworld $36.25 pb, 240 pp

rench journalist Agnès Poirier has a flair for relating the saving of France’s artistic treasures. One of the most gripping chapters of her previous book, Left Bank: Art, passion and the rebirth of Paris, 1940–50 (2018), told the story of Jacques Jaujard, who skilfully evacuated the Louvre’s greatest works mere days before the outbreak of World War II. In Poirier’s brief volume on Paris’s cathedral of Notre-Dame, devastated by fire on 15 April 2019, it is the turn of curator Marie-Hélène Didier and Notre-Dame’s operational director, Laurent Prades. As Poirier tracks the fire from outbreak to containment, we watch them battle Paris’s traffic-locked streets by car, RER, Vélib’, and foot to reach the cathedral and rescue what they can. Prades’s sudden (and entirely understandable) inability to remember the code for the safe in which the Crown of Thorns is kept makes for tense reading. However you might feel about religious relics, the media attention and the donations that poured in after the fire suggested that, for many, Notre-Dame is part of a shared global heritage. For Poirier, ‘The tragedy revealed that a staunchly secular country had its roots firmly grounded in history, a history that was Christian.’ Some found this a shock, she argues, as ‘Notre-Dame, a place where the sacred met the secular, reminded us all of where we came from in an unexpected and powerful way.’ Poirier walks us through this history at the pace of an enthusiastic local. ‘To dive into Notre-Dame’s past is to immerse oneself in the soul of France,’ she begins. Constructed from 1163 on the site of an existing cathedral, its vast interior space marked a new, pared-back style of Gothic architecture, while its twin bell towers made it, for a time, Paris’s tallest building. NotreDame’s location in France’s most populous city meanwhile saw it co-opted whenever a political point needed to be made: there, Henri IV prayed for national reconciliation after converting to Catholicism, the French Revolution celebrated its early achievements with a Te Deum before redesignating it a ‘Temple of Reason’, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s efforts to mend relations with the Catholic Church brought together sacred and secular in an elaborate ceremony for his consecration as emperor of France. Jacques-Louis David’s massive painting of the ceremony visually cemented the cathedral’s central role in French history, as, in a different way, would Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, featuring Notre-Dame’s towers topped with the tricolour. Much of the cathedral’s nineteenth-century history is one of preservation and renovation. Victor Hugo, concerned about

the demise of France’s historical monuments, revived enthusiasm for its medieval past with his 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, arguing that before the printing press, it was architecture that recorded much of human history. Among those inspired by the novel was the young, self-trained architect Eugène Viollet-leDuc. Working for the new Commission for Historic Monuments, he sought to restore rather than refurbish Notre-Dame, undoing the ‘improvements’ of previous centuries and designing a new spire – the former having all but disintegrated by the late eighteenth century – in sympathy with the cathedral’s original design. As part of the effort to renovate Paris under Napoleon’s nephew, Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann razed the remaining medieval buildings surrounding the cathedral and dislodged their 10,000-odd residents to ensure an uninterrupted view of the cathedral from as many angles as possible. Poirier brings us into the twentieth century with Charles de Gaulle, who remained calm as snipers shot at him during a service giving thanks for the liberation of Paris. A brief chapter on the cathedral’s bells, out of tune since the eighteenth century, examines the casting and naming of nine new bells for NotreDame’s 850th anniversary, their music providing for Poirier both a daily delight and ‘the soundtrack to our national sorrow and our triumphant joy’. But such blithe declarations are not true for all of France. While Poirier acknowledges the concerns of the Gilets jaunes movement and those angered by donations made so quickly for the care of a church but never for people in need, there is, throughout the book, an unwillingness to recognise that her references to ‘our history’ or to a particular characteristic of ‘the French’ exclude many of those actually living in France. Poirier’s adulation and personification of Notre-Dame – to which she refers as ‘she’ and ‘her’, as well as ‘our lady’ – seem similarly outdated. It will be interesting to see how the forthcoming French edition of the book is received. Where to from here? The cathedral was already in a bad way before the renovations of 2018 began, a situation Poirier (unconvincingly) blames on France’s 1905 separation of church and state for allowing the church to sit back and wait to benefit from state assistance for buildings it no longer owned. That assistance is now forthcoming with a vengeance, and not always to the cathedral’s benefit. Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe’s competition for the design of a new spire provoked, along with some fairly ludicrous suggestions, impassioned debate on how Notre-Dame should be reconstructed, while President Emmanuel Macron’s hasty announcement that the cathedral would be rebuilt within five years has been thankfully stalled by more recent events. As chief architect Philippe Villeneuve informed Poirier, ‘in five years we can rebuild the vaults and the roof and reopen the church […] But nothing much more.’ As with the Catholic Church itself, if the cathedral has survived this long it is because of adaptation, albeit adaptation that is often long overdue and frequently forced by circumstance. Hugo warned in his novel that on the face of this ‘aged queen’ of a cathedral a scar could be found alongside each wrinkle. With much of France’s history written in those wrinkles, a few more architectural scars are unlikely to make a difference. g Gemma Betros is Lecturer in European History at the ANU. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Science

A package tour An incomplete journey Diane Stubbings

Nerve: A personal journey through the science of fear

by Eva Holland Pantera Press $32.99 pb, 272 pp

hile climbing in British Columbia, Canadian writer and journalist Eva Holland becomes paralysed by fear. She has long been troubled by exposed heights, but this is different. What she experiences is an ‘irrational force’ that prevents her from moving. It is only the dogged encouragement of friends that allows her to make her tentative way back down the mountain. The terror Holland confronts over those long hours marks a turning point. She resolves to renegotiate her relationship with fear by studying what science has to tell us about its development and treatment. Drawing on her own experience, she identifies three principal manifestations of fear: phobia (her aversion to heights), trauma (her response to a series of car accidents), and existential fear (her dread of her mother’s death). The prospect of losing her mother is, Holland emphasises, her ‘worst fear … there was nothing I feared more’, and when her mother dies suddenly, Holland is devastated. It is surprising, therefore, that so little of Nerve is given over to its consideration. By far the bulk of Holland’s book deals with her phobia and trauma. Her journey through the science of these fears is more package tour than sustained exploration. Holland delves briefly into select accounts of the neurology and physiology of fear, but neglects crucial aspects of its biochemistry, in particular the impact of adrenalin and cortisol on the fear response. She surveys some of the seminal research in the field – for example, the work of Pavlov, Darwin, Freud, and John B. Watson’s infamous Little Albert experiments – and cites some fascinating case studies: rock climber Alex Honnold of Free Solo fame, whose fMRI scans suggest his amygdala (that part of the brain which plays a pivotal role in the processing of fear responses) has a higher than normal activation threshold; and Patient S.M., who, due to a genetic disorder, lacks an amygdala and, therefore, a standard fear response. Of particular interest to anyone reading this book in order to find a remedy for their own fears are the two treatments Holland undergoes. Both, she claims, offer her significant relief (she even goes so far as to call them cures). To ameliorate her trauma, she undertakes EMDR, a therapy which uses regulated eye movements to more constructively process traumatic memories (in the scientific literature its efficacy is still debated); and to quell her fear of heights, she travels to Amsterdam, where she takes part in a research trial looking at the effectiveness of propranolol, a common 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

blood-pressure medication, in reconstituting the dysfunctional neural connections underpinning her fear. Holland’s engagement with the science of fear barely moves beyond the level of high school psychology, and her evaluation of the relevant research depends more on her own gut instincts (‘an answer that, while provocative, ultimately feels right to me’) than on rigorous analysis. It is indicative, therefore, that Holland’s appraisal of these treatments extends only so far as their effect on her. Despite the contentious nature of both therapies, she neither examines the relevant counter-arguments nor questions the degree to which the contextual elements of the treatments (for example: the long hours talking about her experience of trauma; the directive that, after taking propranolol, she must not ‘think, talk or write about’ the simulated process by which her fear response is triggered) might be effecting her ‘cure’.

Her journey through the science of these fears is more package tour than sustained exploration While she captures in sharp detail the ‘what’ of her experience, she never really tackles the ‘why’. She manages to work for a month with a mining company, ‘side-hilling across steep scree slopes like mountain sheep’, without being frozen by fear, yet she fails to interrogate why this particular experience of heights did not especially trouble her. Curiously, Holland never questions the veracity of her own memories, nor the degree to which the narratives she constructs around her fears might be their own (often futile) defence against them. Holland is on more certain ground in the memoir-like passages of the book: a mishap at the top of an escalator when she was a small child; being frozen halfway up the mast of a tall ship; her car overturning on an icy road; the journey across three time zones to be by the side of her dying mother. Each experience is vividly written, if occasionally repetitive, and her rendering of the Canadian landscape is particularly evocative: ‘we paddled across the lake to the steep face of the Great Glacier and craned our necks to stare up at its blue-and-white corduroy folds’. There are allusions to social and political issues: the proliferation of fear and anxiety in the modern world; the impact on army recruitment; and policing of an (in)ability to read threats correctly – but they are fleeting. Where other writers working in a similar mode (for example, Olivia Laing and Anne Boyer) might have used such insights to initiate broader considerations of fear in contemporary society, Holland seems unable to move beyond the particularities of her own distress. It might be a therapeutic strategy for her as a writer, but it necessarily restricts what’s on offer to the reader. It is telling that, despite being the nominal catalyst for Holland’s investigation of fear, the psychological repercussions of her relationship with her mother – particularly the impact of her mother’s ongoing depression on Holland’s own engagement with the world – remain largely unexplored. This omission only adds to the sense that the journey Nerve chronicles is a long way from complete. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

Ethics

Nasty, brutish, and short The high cost of carnivorism Ben Brooker

Chicken: A history from farmyard to factory by Paul R. Josephson

Polity $41.95 hb, 252 pp

orrowing a term coined by the late Jewish Nobel laureate and vegetarian Isaac Bashevis Singer, Charles Patterson (in)famously likened humanity’s treatment of animals to an ‘eternal Treblinka’. In his 2001 book of the same name, Patterson set the mass murder of Europe’s Jews and industrialised animal slaughter side by side, drawing a line between the production methods of Chicago’s early twentieth-century slaughterhouses, the assembly-line technology pioneered by Henry Ford – an avowed anti-Semite and Hitler supporter – and the death camps of Nazi Germany. Another Jewish writer, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, is said to have observed that ‘Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.’ In his timely, important, and forensically researched Chicken: A history from farmyard to factory, Paul R. Josephson invokes two similarly grim historical spectres in his discussion of the industrial slaughter of chickens, ones befitting his specialism in Soviet history: the gulags and the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. In the book’s final chapter, titled ‘Broiler Chernobyl’ after the name given to chickens raised for meat, Josephson writes: ‘The chicken you eat is almost certainly not a chicken in the traditional sense. It is a genetically formed meat machine, likely one of three models distributed by a bird genetics company, then produced in massive sheds by a large corporation.’ He goes on to describe the nasty, brutish, and short lives of such ‘technobirds’: raised for six or seven weeks in an area the size of a piece of A4 paper, fattened on specially constituted feeds and growth-promoting additives, and finally shovelled into a processing facility to be ‘hung upside down by the legs, strung to a conveyor, stunned in a variety of ways, their necks slit to bleed out’. By his own admission, Josephson has not been moved to adopt a vegan or even vegetarian diet by these facts. But Chicken is not, or at least not only, an animal rights screed. It is also a cultural history of gallus gallus, the red jungle fowl that originated in Southeast Asia around 8,000 years ago and evolved, through increasingly sophisticated human intervention, from a ‘religious and ritual creature into an economic one’. In sometimes dense but surprisingly humorous prose – Josephson loves a galline pun – the author charts the rise of the chicken as a monocultural ‘industrial object’ through its emergence as America’s favourite meat, packaged as wings, breasts, and that defining symbol of the modern era, the nugget, following the post-World War II

supermarket boom. Worldwide, a staggering fifty-three billion broilers are now slaughtered annually. Josephson doesn’t mention Australia, a small net exporter of chicken meat, but it’s worth examining our own ledger. To use a Josephsonian pun, we’re a long way down the pecking order of chicken-producing countries at 1.22 million tonnes per year (the leading country, the United States, produces more than eighteen million tonnes). Yet chicken is by far our preferred meat: per capita, we rank fourth highest in the world in consumption, ahead even of the United States, a country with which we share a predilection for (artificially) cheap, white meat. No doubt the abhorrent live-export trade, in the headlines again recently after the discovery of ship crews infected with coronavirus, remains a black mark against our name, but so too should our record on meat production for the domestic market. Despite the increasing public awareness of ‘high welfare’ meat products, around ninety-five per cent of Australian broilers – some 450 million per year – are raised and slaughtered in factory farms, the conditions in which are scarcely an improvement on their North American and European counterparts that Josephson describes. There, as here, where food animals are denied the same legal protections as pets, even the most progressive farms reflect a bare minimum of welfare. The annual factory farming of a further thirteen million layer hens completes a grim local picture made worse by the inchoate threat of US-style ‘Ag-gag’ laws designed to criminalise the exposure of animal rights abuses. While we may, with some justification, lead international criticism of Japan’s whaling industry and the live-animal trade in China, it behoves us to acknowledge that our treatment of industrially farmed animals is largely different in degree rather than in kind. Ultimately, Josephson is a pragmatist, not a moralist. We may in the end, he believes, be swayed to curb our carnivorism more by self-interest than concern for animal welfare. As he points out, in the century since Upton Sinclair wrote his incendiary slaughterhouse exposé The Jungle (1906), conditions for meatpacking workers – still, for the most part, poorly paid immigrants forced to work in dangerous and disgusting processing facilities – have changed little. And while Sinclair’s book, despite its author’s intentions, galvanised public sentiment less around workers’ rights than the unsanitary nature of industrially killed meat, the risks to human health remain serious. We know that both red and white meat are implicated in maladies ranging from obesity and erectile dysfunction to diabetes and cancer. Equally well established is the link between animals raised for food and the emergence of zoonotic diseases and, finally, pandemics. H1N1 (swine flu) and H5N1 (bird flu) evolved in pig and chicken factory farms. Covid-19, which has so far, despite a relatively low death rate, killed almost half a million people worldwide, almost certainly originated in a Chinese wet market. The next pandemic could be far worse. It’s no exaggeration to say that a complete reassessment of our ruthless commodification of chickens and other animals is not only a moral proposition but one that may be necessary for our own survival as a species. g Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and bookseller. His work has been featured by Overland, New Matilda, New Internationalist, RealTime, Witness, and Daily Review. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Essays

Swan upping

Helen Macdonald’s new essays Andrew Fuhrmann

Vesper Flights: New and collected essays by Helen Macdonald

Jonathan Cape $35 hb, 272 pp

he world evoked by British nature writer and historian Helen Macdonald in her new collection of essays is haunted by no end of unsettling and shrouded presences. The sight of a flock of starlings gives her a shiver of fear. Why? Because in her imagination the flock connects with a mass of refugees. The sight of falcon eggs in an incubator makes her unaccountably upset. Then she remembers that she, too, as a very premature baby, was once kept alive in just such a box. And on it goes. According to Macdonald, we never see the natural world as it really is. What we see is ravelled up with reflected fragments of our humanity: our personal histories, our politics and prejudices, and the culture we inhabit. Animals are particularly vulnerable to this confusion of meanings. The stories we tell about them always say more about ourselves – our attitudes and assumptions, our habits of thinking – than about the beasts as they really are. And yet it’s curious that Macdonald should be disquieted or discomposed by what she perceives hovering like a revelation behind the birds and animals and the other natural phenomena she describes. Vesper Flights, her first book since the immensely popular and critically acclaimed H Is for Hawk (2014), compiles more than forty short, magazine-style articles, including profiles, cultural analysis, colour pieces, humorous sketches, and piecemeal snatches of memoir. The subjects are diverse, but what unites the collection is a distinctly gothic tendency and fascination with sensations of strangeness. Consider, for example, the essays recalling her solitary and unconventional youth. As a girl, she tells us, she had the instincts of an amateur naturalist and delighted in collecting interesting bits of dead things. She roamed through woods and meadows, chasing grass snakes, hunting newts, listening to birds, and watching insects. She prepared skeletons of small creatures by folding them in little cages of wire mesh. Glass aquaria and vivaria and old bird nests lined her bookshelves. And she adopted an orphaned crow and a lost badger cub. Was the loss of her twin brother at birth, she wonders, the source of this childish compulsion to seek out wild creatures, alive or dead? In any case, it all sounds like a darkly romantic fairytale of a childhood: all it needs is a secret, high-walled garden overgrown with roses. But there is romance and oddity and nostalgia and suggestions of the macabre everywhere in this book and its many mediations on encounters with the non-human world. Even its title sounds like a sequel to Northanger Abbey. 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

One of the more intriguing pieces – which also happens to be a keen bit of cultural analysis – is the feature she wrote for the New York Times in response to the Brexit vote. Macdonald says that in the days after the vote she became ‘haunted’ by memories of a painting called Swan Upping at Cookham (1915–19) by Stanley Spencer. It’s a picture in two halves: the top is sunlit and colourful; the bottom is lifeless and murky. One can see precisely the point at which World War I interrupted Spencer’s work as well as the change it made to his sense of the world.

The stories we tell say more about ourselves than about the beasts as they really are Brexit, says Macdonald, has created just such a schism in her own world. Everything now seems more ominous and bleak. She then turns to a reflection on ‘swan upping’ itself, the annual census of swans on the River Thames. It’s precisely the sort of quaintly English tradition – messing about in boats, no less – that those in the Leave campaign imagined they were defending. Such colourful heritage events, she says, are useful for nationalists because they offer a clear connection with the past and promote an image of unchanging Englishness. The essay is an interesting response to Brexit, but it also throws a light on Macdonald’s own H Is for Hawk, that exquisite memoir of grief and falconry. After her father died, Macdonald bought a young goshawk to help her through the pain. But what, the book asks, did she find so necessary in the hawk? What obscured desires were behind her obsession? What did the hawk show her about herself, in the midst of her misery? Reading her essay on swan upping, I wonder if H Is for Hawk can be reread not only as a revelation of personal significances and desires but of a more general national anxiety. There is something about the mood of the book that, in retrospect, seems to foreshadow Brexit. Macdonald’s reflections on grief and her profound attraction to the ancient art of falconry now seem somehow consonant with a dream of sacrosanct Englishness deep-rooted in an imagined past. Eventually Macdonald decides that the modern practice of swan upping is more than just an exclusionist fantasy. It is also a ‘beautiful display of expert animal handling and river knowledge’. Such craft skills, she suggests, are universal precisely by virtue of their specificity; they have the potential to undermine rather than reinforce grand political narratives. For this reason, she believes it is possible to see in such quaint practices a different, more inclusive England. No doubt she would say the same thing about falconry and its traditions. But I wonder if behind this rather delicate reasoning there lurks an unacknowledged point of sympathy with those who think that leaving the European Union is the best thing for England and its traditions. Vesper Flights, however, with all its pensive contemporary romanticism, is an engaging collection. The articles are slim, but it’s perfect as one of those delicious bedside books you can dip into as the shadows draw round. g Andrew Fuhrmann is an arts reviewer and a former ABR Fellow.

Essays

Precious details

The author as adaptable observer Laura Elizabeth Woollett

The Details: On love, death and reading by Tegan Bennett Daylight

Simon & Schuster $26.99 pb, 208 pp

hen William Blake wrote of seeing ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’, he meant the details: their ability to evoke entire universes. So did Aldous Huxley when, experimenting with mescaline, he discovered ‘the miracle … of naked existence’ in a vase of flowers. More recently, Jenny Odell’s bestseller How To Do Nothing: Resisting the attention economy (2019) made a case for rejecting productivity in favour of active attention to the world around us. Tegan Bennett Daylight’s The Details: On love, death and reading follows in this tradition, with a focus on reading and how it has enhanced the author’s perceptions and interpretations of life’s events. While The Details is her first essay collection, Daylight is an experienced critic and essayist, as well as the author of several volumes of fiction. Daylight is also a teacher, a role that she confidently inhabits in conjunction with other identities: daughter, mother, friend, writer, and, above all, reader. Early on, we are introduced to Daylight as reader, learning about her mother’s habit of sharing books as a cure for childhood boredom and as a form of intergenerational communication. Daylight’s mother, Deborah, is a lofty presence throughout The Details. It is Deborah who introduces the author, as a teenager, to the works of Helen Garner (a writer with whom Daylight finds herself in ‘lifelong conversation’). The essay dealing with Deborah’s death, ‘Details II’, is a standout of the collection. Motherhood is likewise central to ‘Vagina’, a confronting account of Daylight’s two childbirths and their aftermath. Earlier published in The Best Australian Essays 2016, this essay generously sheds light on physical realities that women have historically suffered in silence. In the context of a collection about detail, the central thesis of ‘Vagina’ is particularly poignant: namely, that broad terms like ‘suffering’, in denying detail, deny the dignity of human experience. ‘The detail is missing,’ Daylight laments, ‘and detail is all there is.’ Daylight’s attention to literary absences – from women dying offstage in childbirth to what she terms ‘tumbleweeds’ in her students’ writing – is matched by her celebration of beloved details. At its most accessible, Daylight’s passion for textual detail has an anecdotal quality; one does not need to have read Helen Garner to appreciate the impact of Garner’s writing on the author, rendering her ‘somehow present, alert to shifts in light or weather’. Nor does one need to be a fan of Harry Potter to understand what Daylight is getting at when she challenges

her students to identify what they love most about the series: the overarching battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, or the sensory delights of butterbeer and Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavour Beans? Longer forays into the writings of George Saunders, S.J. Perelman, Brian Dillon, and others may prove less engaging for readers unfamiliar with their work. In these sections, Daylight’s enthusiasm for the details borders on academic analysis, rather than fuelling her own storytelling, as her best references do. Though some of Daylight’s strongest writing is personal in nature, the author seldom places herself at the centre. Instead, we meet her in various roles, an adaptable and conscientious observer. Aside from a few pages on the ‘dream of pleasure’ in which her first novel, Bombora (1996), was written (sentiments that fellow authors will recognise), Daylight refrains from dwelling on the ambitions or decisions that led to her writing career. The effect of this is significant. Rather than mythologising the writerly ego, Daylight presents writing as a side effect of her love of reading and an outlet for life’s accumulated details. It is not only readers and writers who honour detail, however. Throughout the collection, Daylight pays tribute to attention to detail, wherever she encounters it: from the gynaecologist who examines her with ‘the writer’s middle-distance look’, to the doctor who ‘reads’ her dying mother by gently touching her arm, to her mother scrutinising an unfinished painting from her deathbed. One of the greatest joys of friendship, for Daylight, is the ‘exchange of detail’, an act of mutual witnessing that makes the messiness of life – and women’s lives, in particular – more liveable. That said, Daylight is critical of what she sees as a decline of literacy among younger generations. This criticism is most successful when framed within a broader critique of for-profit universities, which facilitate admission and passing at the expense of intellectual engagement. The essay ‘The Detail Is the Point’ will no doubt appeal to teachers for its insight into classroom dynamics, yet is also noteworthy for its exploration of reading – and language, more generally – as a form of resistance against the systems that confine us. Elsewhere, such as when lamenting her students’ preference for The Hunger Games over The Catcher in the Rye, there is a whiff of élitism and generational misunderstanding about Daylight’s criticism. ‘Inventing the Teenager’, in particular, seemed like a missed opportunity to explore changing expectations and experiences of adolescence, suffering from its focus on literature over the social realities that may explain the preferences of her millennial and Gen Z students. The brevity of The Details is not always to its benefit; some essays seem undercooked compared with stronger selections. The collection is thematically consistent, however, with Daylight regularly circling back to the notion of ‘the details’ in a way that feels like a natural demonstration of her philosophy rather than a forced attempt to draw comparisons. Overall, The Details is a graceful depiction of a life well lived and well observed; it will appeal to book lovers, and fans of Garner in particular. It will also inspire readers to look at their own lives more attentively, in search of precious details. g Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s most recent novel is Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2020

Politics

From the Archive

Ten years after his infamous dismissal by Sir John Kerr, Gough Whitlam published the history of his short-lived but momentous government, a ‘curiously impersonal book’, Margaret Jones wrote in her review for ABR, which appeared in the December 1985–January 1986 issue. This is one of thousands of reviews in our digital archive, all accessible by ABR subscribers – a unique critical resource.

his is a massive book, as large in scale as the author himself, running to over 700 pages and – at a rough estimate – to something like 300,000 words of text, lightened only by a few photographs, all of them of Gough Whitlam with friends and enemies. It is not a book for anybody who expects revelations, or even for more light to be shed on the events of 11 November 1975, when a single decision by the governor-general split the nation in a way it has seldom been split politically before. The full story of that day has probably yet to be told, despite all the millions of words and hours of air time which have already been devoted to it. The Whitlam Government 1972–75 is also, in some ways, a curiously impersonal book. What is one to think of an account of the Loans Affair that does not even mention the name of Tirath Khemlani, or of a resumé of the political rise and fall of Dr Jim Cairns that omits any reference to Junie Morosi? Whitlam allows himself only a sidelong look at the ‘conversion’ of Cairns to the values of the alternative society when he says ‘by now espousing “the economics of love”. He [Cairns] was hardly able to speak a common language with the hardnosed men in his Department [Treasury] whose concern with human values was such that they were quite willing to use unemployment as a tool against inflation.’ On the other hand, Whitlam avoids personalities mainly where they lead him onto dangerous ground. Where he can, with safety, exercise the famous Whitlam wit, and the equally famous Whitlam malice, he does so with great style and verve, hiding his bons mots, like plums, in the dense body of the text, as treats for the persevering reader. The book is largely what its title suggests, a detailed account of the Whitlam government (‘my government’, as the author invariably says) during its three tempestuous years in power. The theme is justification: Whitlam sets out to demonstrate – and does so very effectively – that whatever its weaknesses, and whatever criticisms have since been levelled against it, the first Labor government for twenty-three years left behind it a legacy of reform in both the domestic and the foreign fields for which it can never be forgotten. A sub-theme, not unexpectedly, is the betrayal of a great leader by fools and knaves, though to be fair this is hinted at rather than laboured. Whitlam seems to see the main villains as the conservative Establishment, the Canberra bureaucrats 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2020

(especially the ‘hardnosed’ men of Treasury), and the media. A quote from Machiavelli at the beginning summarises the text from which Gough is preaching: And one has to reflect that there is nothing more difficult to handle nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to conduct than to make oneself the leader in introducing a new order of things. For the man who introduces ·it has for enemies all those who do well out of the old order and has lukewarm supporters in all those who will do well out of the new order.

There are some small surprises in the book’s format. It is not, as might have been expected, a chronological account of the years 1972 to 1975, but instead Whitlam has chosen to examine his government’s achievements almost portfolio by portfolio. There are chapters on foreign affairs, the economy, national resources, industrial relations, education, health, social security, transport, housing, Aborigines, migrants, women, the environment, arts, the media, and law reform. By far the longest section is on foreign affairs, the area in which Whitlam was most at home, and in which he can list with pride his government’s recognition of China, and the granting of independence to Papua New Guinea. ‘If history were to obliterate the whole of my public career save my contribution to the independence of a democratic PNG, I should rest content,’ he writes. Whitlam takes a few hard swipes at the Hawke government for putting pragmatism ahead of idealism and for shying away from radical reforms. One senses that he may not care much personally for Bob Hawke, as he tells, apropos of nothing at all, a malicious story of Bob and Hazel disporting themselves on the carpet in the best bedroom of The Lodge, then coming downstairs to complain about the fleas. Apart from Sir John Kerr, for whom his detestation has never weakened, the main villain for Whitlam, as far as Labor history is concerned, is Arthur Calwell, whose conservatism, racism, and sheer bloody-mindedness he mercilessly exposes. The Whitlam Government 1972–75 clearly reflects the paradox of Gough: a reforming idealist with a high view of the human condition, who is at the same time a bad hater with an almost feline maliciousness, and who has a view of his own greatness that sometimes comes close to monomania. We have not seen his like in politics since. g

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