Australian Book Review - September 2024, no. 468

*INC

Dominic Kelly Blinkered laments for the Voice

Joel Deane The Manichaean Candidate

Gabriella Coslovich Planet Art

Kevin Bell On our moral watch

Kirsten Tranter Yves Rees

A web of music

James Ley on Rodney Hall’s new novel

E XITS

GOLD MEDAL for POETRY

2023 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards

SILVER MEDAL for POETRY

2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards

“Pollock’s poetry is brilliant”

― Kristiana Reed, Free Verse Revolution

“Exits has profoundly impacted the literary world”

― Midwest Book Review

“Dedicated to the beauty and frailty of life, Exits exemplifies the musicality of language”

― Camille-Yvette Welsch

“Full of wit, insight and provocative imagery”

― IndieReader 

Advances

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

On 15 August, Advances and about one hundred lovers of short fiction descended on Gleebooks in Sydney for the announcement of the winner of the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Not since January 2020 had ABR presented a prize ceremony in public. Since then, because of the exigencies of Covid-19 and pesky lockdowns, all our celebrations have happened online, and goodness knows the popularity of online events of this kind has begun to wane, like those Zoom soirées and cocktail parties we endured.

Gleebooks, recently refurbished, has never looked better; the upstairs function room, groaning with enticing backlist and antiquarian books, is ideal for literary events of all kinds: we recommend it highly.

Longtime ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM makes the Jolley Prize possible in its lucrative form, so it was very fitting that Ian should name the overall winner: Jill Van Epps, author of ‘Pornwald’. Jill, who lives in New York City, could not be present, but she joined us via video. A recording is available on our website.

Jill Van Epps, who receives $6,000 from ABR, had this comment for Advances:

The Jolley Prize has brought my work out of the solitary writer’s cocoon where it’s been encased for so long. How thrilling for the strange little characters I dreamed up to find an audience. This means everything to me. Thank you to Australian Book Review for serving as a meeting place for writers and readers around the world.

Our three judges – Patrick Flanery (who has a wonderful review of the Brent Harris retrospective currently showing in Adelaide on page 36), Melinda Harvey, and Susan Midalia – chose ‘Pornwald’ from an international field of about 1,300 stories. Here is what they had to say about the story in their report:

through a world that is superficially familiar, but as the story progresses, all may not be as it initially appears: this is an unpredictable place, wilder than the characters themselves realise. What would it mean, the story asks us to consider, if we were to wake up one day to our own unreality?

Perth-based writer Kerry Greer was placed second ($4,000) for her story ‘First Snow’; and Shelley Stenhouse, another New Yorker, was placed third ($2,500) for ‘M.’. All three shortlisted stories appeared in the August issue of ABR (in case you missed it). They also feature in separate ABR Podcasts, read by the authors.

More information about the 2024 Jolley Prize, including a list of the longlisted authors and the entire judges’ report, can be found on our website.

The Jolley Prize will be back in 2025 – bigger than ever.

ABR Inglis Fellowship

In June, following representations from friends and colleagues of the late Ken and Amirah Inglis, we announced the creation of the ABR Inglis Fellowship to commemorate the Inglises’ life and work, and to continue their active support for young writers and scholars.

‘Pornwald’ is a puzzle that tests the limits of realism with an often riotously deadpan sense of humour. Characters move

Donations from twenty individuals have enabled us to offer a fellowship worth $5,000, and will indeed support a second fellowship in 2025 – and beyond that, we hope. (Inglis Patrons are listed with our other Patrons on page 4.)

Writers and scholars aged thirty-five and under were invited to apply, with a view to contributing three review essays or commentaries in the field of Australian history and culture over the course of twelve months.

We were impressed by the calibre and thoughtfulness of the applications. It was not an easy choice. In the end, ABR Editor Peter Rose and Professor Rae Frances (former Dean of Arts at ANU and Monash University, and a past member of the ABR Board) chose Dr Ruby Lowe to be the first Inglis Fellow.

[Advances continues on page 7]

CULTIVATING COMMUNITY

How discourse shapes the philosophy, practice and policy of water management in the Murray–Darling Basin

AMANDA SHANKLAND

SEPTEMBER 2024

Ruby Lowe

Australian Book Review

September 2024, no. 468

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ABR September 2024

Subhash Jaireth, Sandra McComb, Patrick Hockey, J.M. Green

Joel Deane

Kevin Bell

Ian Hall

Patrick Mullins

Dominic Kelly

Sarah Day

Kevin Hart

Joan Beaumont

Michael McKernan

Gabriella Coslovich

Beth Kearney

Shannon Burns

Kate McFadyen

Richard Freadman

Robyn Arianrhod

George Williams

A. Frances Johnson

Geordie Williamson

James Ley

Rose Lucas

Anthony Lynch

Malcolm Gillies

Clare Monagle

Patrick Flanery

John Rickard

J. Taylor Bell

BIOGRAPHY UNITED

Jane Sullivan

Gordon Pentland

Glyn Davis

Kirsten Tranter

Jeremy Martens

Miles Pattenden

Claudia Hyles

Paul Kildea

Kevin Foster

Michael Winkler

Michael Lucy

Richard King

The Manichaean Candidate

Homelessness – on our moral watch

The twilight of Narendra Modi

Young Hawke by David Day

Lessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum by Frank Brennan

The End of Settlement by Damien Freeman

‘Watershed’ ‘Big Meadow’

November 1942 by Peter Englund

The Eastern Front by Nick Lloyd

Battle for the Museum by Rachel Spence

Splinters by Leslie Jamison

Running with Pirates by Kári Gíslason

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Lebanon Days by Theodore Ell

Critic of the Month

Open Page

Cherrywood by Jock Serong

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane

Vortex by Rodney Hall

The Oxenbridge King by Christine Paice

The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson

Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony

Uncle Vanya

Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Song in the Grass by Kate Fagan

Artful Lives by Penny Olsen

Born to Rule by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman

History in the House by Richard Davenport-Hines

Travelling to Tomorrow by Yves Rees

They Called It Peace by Lauren Benton

How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn

Growing up Indian in Australia edited by Aarti Betigeri

The Piano Player of Budapest by Roxanne de Bastion

The Fatal Alliance by David Thomson

Excitable Boy by Dominic Gordon

Vector by Robyn Arianrhod

Techno by Marcus Smith

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ABR Podcast

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

‘Pornwald’ – Jolley winner

Jill Van Epps

Housing and homelessness Kevin Bell

‘First

Snow’ – Jolley story Kerry Greer A profile of Peter Dutton Joel Deane Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13 Geordie Williamson

Imperial violence Jeremy Martens

Science in our literary landscape Robyn Arianrhod

‘M’ – Jolley story Shelley Stenhouse

ABR’s partners

Australian Book Review is supported by 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, Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), the Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Communities Foundation, Sydney Community Foundation, AustLit, our travel partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

Ruby Lowe is a settler scholar who lives in Melbourne and writes about printed forms of speech. Her research focuses on John Milton and popular print culture in the seventeenthcentury Atlantic world, and Kim Scott and contemporary Australian Aboriginal writing. She told Advances:

I am thrilled to be the inaugural ABR Inglis Fellow, because it will give me the opportunity to explore the history and futures of Aboriginal publishing. Multi-award winning Aboriginal authors ranging from Alexis Wright and Kim Scott to Ellen Van Neerven and Jazz Money are known for their multivocal authorial voices. In this series of articles, I will discuss the role that Aboriginal editors and publishers have played in cultivating the multivocal quality of Aboriginal literature, focusing on both the politics and aesthetics of Aboriginal publishing.

Our new Fellow’s first article will appear in our State of the Book issue in November, which will survey publishing trends, literary magazines, government funding, bookselling, decolonisation practices – with some surprises along the way.

Another happy outcome for writers and ABR alike is that a number of those shortlisted for the Fellowship will, we trust, write for the magazine –not just Dr Lowe, whom we welcome aboard and congratulate.

Ray Lawler (1921-2024)

After the London production, Lawler lived for many years in Denmark, England, and Ireland. On his return to Australia in 1979 he became associate director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, one of whose theatre spaces in Southbank is now named after him.

Lawler was not done with The Doll yet. Two prequels followed: Kid’s Stakes in 1975, Other Times in 1976. The Doll Trilogy was first presented in its entirety on 12 February 1977.

John Rickard (1935-2024)

ABR lost one of its senior contributors – and a stalwart Patron – on 26 July when historian John Rickard died, aged eighty-nine. John wrote for the magazine on forty occasions, over as many years. His first article appeared in our twentieth issue (May 1980): a review of R.W. Connell and T.M. Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, narrative and argument

Ray Lawler, who died on 24 July aged 103, wrote many plays, but it was his tenth, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, that secured his reputation as one of Australia’s finest playwrights.

The Doll, as it is fondly known, had its première in Melbourne on 28 November 1955, and soon travelled to London and New York. Leslie Norman directed the 1959 Hollywood version, which was released as Season of Passion in America. Despite the starry cast – Ernest Borgnine and John Mills (see the still on page 39), Anne Baxter, and Angela Lansbury – it was not a success. Lawler himself played Barney Ibbot in the Australian and London première (future magnate Richard Pratt was Johnnie Dowd in London).

John took up a lectureship in History at Monash University in 1971. He was Professor of Australian Studies on his retirement from Monash in 2000. His books included H.B. Higgins (1984), Australia: A cultural history (1988), A Family Romance: The Deakins at home (1996), and An Imperial Affair (2013), a memoir of his parents’ marriage.

John remained a keen contributor to historical debate at his old university, as Professor Graeme Davison attested in his eulogy at John’s funeral.

A true Jamesian, Rickard was always a sagacious contributor to the only club that will have our Editor: the Henry James Reading Group, which Peter Rose created in the 1990s.

A lifelong theatregoer, John was also a thespian and a singer before he turned to history. He returned to Australia for the 1962 production of The King and I

John first saw Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1957 –‘in London, of all places’. Later he would recall feeling some pride in seeing the famous kewpie doll presiding over the New Theatre in the West End. So this seems like the perfect time to reprint John’s discerning critique of Neil Armfield’s celebrated 2012 revival of The Doll at the Belvoir Theatre. His review, first published in March 2012, appears on page 38. g

Ray Lawler with John Sumner, founder and artistic director of the Melbourne Theatre Company (courtesy of MTC)

George Orwell’s Elephant

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Theodore Ell for alerting readers to two factual errors in the essay ‘George Orwell’s Elephant’ in the book of the same name that he reviewed (ABR, August 2024).

I regret the errors and my failure to correct them. The editorial team at Gazebo Books and I worked closely together on the manuscript, and to blame solely the editorial team for errors would be unjust and ungracious. I am the author and I take full responsibility.

I sincerely hope that the readers aren’t put off by the errors and can still enjoy what the book has to offer. Gazebo Books is in the process of correcting the eBook version, and the manuscript is also being edited for its possible second print.

Subhash Jaireth

Singapore gone and the Japanese navy already heading south to Indonesia. Beaumont presents this as a ‘sacrifice of the soldiers themselves’, not of military failure. Not true. She has failed to capture the past, failed to understand that observing places and memorials does not necessarily respect emotions that are still alive in many families touched by war.

No doubt those on the ‘pilgrimage’ who had direct family connections with the past were deeply moved throughout the journey, but, as an observer, Beaumont’s tourist-like remarks verge on the offensive, to both local Indonesians and to those who fought on these sites. ‘Ambon is not easy to get to,’ she says. ‘We stopped at a tired resort for lunch and a swim’, she comments and the bar ‘sometimes struggled to provide enough cold beer’.

I did know my father

Dear Editor,

Difficult as it is for some historians to separate the present from the past in their thinking, that skill is central to their profession. The other is to write with due respect to the likely audience. Joan Beaumont seems to have set aside these two essentials in her article ‘“I never knew my uncle”: The Phenomenon of Pilgrimages and Postmemory’ (ABR, July 2024).

I did know my father – for almost half a century. Not yet born, I was lucky that he survived internment, massacres, and the atrocities visited upon Gull Force 2/21st Battalion on Ambon during World War II. The horrifying statistics that Beaumont relates in her ‘Commentary’ are accurate, but her words do nothing to convey the human reality of those who were there. Nor do they offer a pathway to remembering.

My father, along with six other captives, escaped from the POW camp on Tan Tui early during the internment. His personal anguish in agreeing to attempt escape was because he was leaving mates behind, one from his own hometown, who later perished. The seven men reached Darwin on cobbledtogether boats, surviving on bananas and fish. They were the first to notify the authorities of the Ambon situation.

I came to know these men over the years. I have also interviewed another man who was interned for the duration. All returned to live full lives and had families. Mine was taught to abhor war – yes, to remember, but not to idolise, and later to recognise that Japanese people are, of course, not all war criminals.

A terrible aspect of this mission was the fact that Australian military commanders in Melbourne knew they were sending these young men from Darwin into a foray with

I have been an Australian publisher for decades, and a doctoral historian who has researched the history of the people of Gull Force and the people of Ambon. It seems to me that an attempt to apply a newly minted academic label, ‘postmemory’, by way of explanation of current generational feelings, is far short of the truth. Joan Beaumont may be researching for a revised chapter of her 1988 book, but please, can it not yet consign living memory to cemeteries and academic terminology?

Sandra McComb

Sybaritic lefties

Dear Editor,

Further to Marilyn Lake’s review of Andrew Fowler’s book Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australian sovereignty (ABR, August 2024), it is a matter of considerable shame that the substantive opposition to the nuclear subs proposal has taken the form of letters to the editor by Paul Keating in the Australian Financial Review. Too many on the left have had their passion diminished by the pleasures and indulgences of middle-class affluence.

Patrick Hockey

Gatekeepers

Dear Editor,

What a great and needed article Robyn Arianrhod has written (‘Beyond the Mundane: Popular Science Writing in Our Literary Landscape, ABR, August 2024). The gatekeepers have always underestimated the breadth of Australian readers’ interests, intellectual capacity, curiosity, and willingness to delve into unfamiliar territory. I fear this condescension is getting worse, with so much economic anxiety in the publishing sector.

J.M. Green

The Manichaean Candidate

Peter Dutton’s black and white politics

by Joel Deane

Bill Hayden, the first Queensland policeman to lead a federal political party, wrote of his experiences as a constable – the violence, the squalor, the tragedy – in his autobiography, Hayden (Angus & Robertson, 1996), and concluded: ‘All of these led me to feel a great anger at the injustices some people had to bear.’ At one point, the former governor-general noted that his ‘humanist’ reaction to injustice reflected his background as the son of a father who was an illegal immigrant and a mother who suffered domestic abuse. By comparison, Peter Dutton, the second Queensland copper to lead a federal political party, had a sheltered upbringing. Perhaps that’s why, in his 2002 maiden speech, his anger was directed more at individual than systemic failings:

I have seen the best and the worst that society has to offer. I have seen the wonderful, kind nature of people willing to offer any assistance to those in their worst hour, and I have seen the sickening behaviour displayed by people who, frankly, barely justify their existence in our sometimes over-tolerant society.

Judging by Dutton’s 2023 appearance with journalist Annabel Crabb on ABC TV’s political-cooking show, Kitchen Cabinet, this Manichaean mentality still influences his approach to politics.

CRABB: I’ve read something that [your wife] Kirilly said – I’ve always remembered it – that you’re a very black-and-white person, that’s there’s no shades of grey. So, you make your mind up about something super-fast and then you just proceed on that basis. Is that what that means?

DUTTON: Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s what she would have meant by it, which I think is a bit of a police trait, and it’s dealing with the problem that’s before you and then moving on to the next one and trying to deal with it efficiently, I suppose.

CRABB: Is black-and-white a help in politics? To have really clear views?

DUTTON: I always think the job of prime minister – you know, having worked closely and watched a few others fairly closely – I think you’ve got about twenty issues of the day, so twenty balls in

the air, and I think the people who know what they believe in, I think they can land eighteen of those balls pretty early and then they sweat the two which are really tough issues. The ones that aren’t good and don’t have a clear sense of who they are or want to say something that they know people will want to hear or –that sort of approach – I think by Tuesday they’ve got forty balls in the air, and I think it becomes overwhelming.

Kitchen Cabinet has been criticised for its softball approach, but Dutton’s remarks revealed more than umpteen ‘gotcha’ interviews. Crabb’s interview shows that Dutton sees his leadership of the Liberals – much like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sees his leadership of Labor – as a repudiation of the killing seasons that marred the prime ministerships of Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, and Kevin Rudd. It is also apparent that Dutton, who, Crabb says, is ‘mainly known as the ultimate hard man of politics’, is a conviction politician who believes in the rectitude of his own snap judgements more than in an ideology or a cause. Interestingly, the Crabb interview also suggests that Dutton’s measure of a good prime minister is how fast they empty their in-tray; it’s small wonder he hasn’t gained a reputation for policy innovation during his twentythree years in the House of Representatives. Dutton’s belief in snap judgements also explains why most of his ministerial career has been spent accumulating executive power in command-and-control portfolios such as Defence, Home Affairs, and Immigration and Border Protection. His one foray into a social service portfolio requiring lateral thinking, as Minister for Health in the Abbott government, ended badly, with the nation’s doctors voting him Australia’s worst-ever health minister.

Dutton told Crabb that he has a ‘police trait’ – meaning he sees the world in monochrome – but his belief in his authority also reflects his experiences as a politician and his circumstances as a leader. In politics, you don’t always win. Sooner or later you end up on the losing side of an argument, vote, or election. Dutton, for instance, unexpectedly lost the internal battle to replace Turnbull as prime minister. Still, the Member for Dickson has won more battles than he has lost since entering parliament in 2001 – serving as a minister in the Howard and Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments,

seeing off numerous attempts to unseat him in his marginal seat, and becoming wealthy via business and real estate investments. Consequently, he is a man accustomed to material comfort and ministerial authority.

point in the election cycle, committing a future Coalition government to build seven nuclear power plants in disused coal power stations between 2035 and 2050. Made after the winter recess, the timing of the announcement helped Dutton evade parliamentary scrutiny. In the House of Representatives, he would have been eviscerated over his announcement’s scant policy detail. Outside Parliament, the lack of detail didn’t matter. With a federal election due by May 2025, all that mattered was that Dutton had picked a political fight, starting an argument about nuclear energy to divert attention from the Coalition’s lamentable climate-change policies and direct attention towards Albanese’s broken promise to reduce energy bills.

Dutton’s biggest political wins, though, came after the Coalition’s election loss in 2022. Dutton won because Josh Frydenberg, long touted as the Liberals’ leader-in-waiting, lost Kooyong to teal independent Dr Monique Ryan, and because the Coalition retained most of its seats in Dutton’s home state of Queensland. As a result, a third of the members of the Liberal party room – and almost half of the Liberal members of the lower house – are Queenslanders. Consequently, Dutton is an Opposition leader untroubled by internal challengers or dissent.

Armoured by self-regard and freed from internal competition, Dutton has spent the past twenty-eight months methodically preparing for a return to power. A key part of his campaign preparations – as documented by the Australian Financial Review’s Mark Di Stefano – appears to involve staying close to mining billionaire Gina Rinehart. For example, during the Dunkley by-election Dutton flew across the country to Perth to spend an hour at Rinehart’s birthday party. Rinehart, in turn, has hosted fundraising events for Dutton. None of this is unusual in the moneyed backrooms of Australian politics – Albanese, for instance, attended a private party for Melbourne-based billionaire Anthony Pratt in 2022 – and Rinehart is unlikely to go as far as billionaire Clive Palmer, who spent $60 million to help swing the 2019 election and $120 million to win one Senate seat in 2022. But don’t be surprised if Rinehart bankrolls Dutton’s effort to win back the six seats the Liberals lost in Western Australia in 2022. Why else would Dutton adopt a raft of Rinehart policy positions, including on nuclear energy?

Dutton’s nuclear energy announcement marked a turning

The genesis of the announcement appears to be TerraPower – a US start-up building a new type of nuclear reactor in Wyoming. The TerraPower initiative, backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is highly speculative. The construction of the Wyoming reactor only began in June and the project’s timeline and costs – not to mention its pathway to regulatory approval – remain unclear. As energy expert David Schlissel told The New York Times, ‘There’s no evidence these small reactors are going to be built any faster or any cheaper than larger ones.’ According to Schlissel, wind, solar, and batteries are safer energy bets than nuclear. In other words, Dutton is making a black-and-white decision in a nuclear grey area.

Problematic as Dutton’s nuclear punt is, his interventions in foreign affairs are more concerning. In July, the Opposition leader took two overseas tours that demonstrated his strengths and weaknesses. First, he jetted to Washington DC, to attend the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. There was nothing untoward about this trip; on the contrary, a bipartisan show of unity was in Australia’s national interest in the leadup to the US presidential election. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles also attended the Dialogue and, judging by comments Dutton made in an interview with journalist Sarah Abo on Nine’s Today show, the two pro-US hawks caucused their views.

ABO: Is AUKUS at risk under a Trump presidency? I mean, the Deputy PM, as you know, has met with Republicans – you have as well – to shore up support for the deal. It’s going to go ahead, isn’t it? Even if Trump gets in?

DUTTON: They say up on the Hill at the moment here there’s only two things that unites the Republicans and Democrats. One is China. And two is the relationship with Australia, and AUKUS is part of that … On the Australian side – Liberal and Labor – we’re as united as the Democrats and Republicans.

Dutton’s position in the Today interview was appropriate. His points were nuanced and, as with his 2024 Budget reply, his tone measured and reasonable. Unfortunately, the reasonableness, not to mention the bipartisanship, went out

U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Roe and Peter Dutton in Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Queensland, 2021 (Operation 2021 / Alamy)

the window when Dutton flew to Israel. There, in a three-day trip funded by the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Dutton met Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, and National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi. He also visited areas attacked by Hamas on 7 October and spent an hour with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The extensive access granted to Dutton was unusual but understandable, given how isolated Israel has become over its military actions in Gaza – any international interaction was welcome. Dutton then applied his black-and-white instincts to the greyscale world of diplomacy, appearing via satellite with Sky News journalist Sharri Markson and accusing the Albanese government of damaging Israeli-Australian relations:

I think it’s a relationship that we need to rebuild, that we need to restore, and that we need to respect. I sent a very clear message [to Netanyahu] on behalf of the Coalition that should we win the next election, we look forward to the relationship becoming stronger.

The Sky News interview, during which Dutton also blamed Albanese for increased anti-Semitism in Australia, confirmed that Dutton’s Israel trip was for political rather than security purposes, designed to create domestic and international headaches for Labor. It was a reckless act. A few weeks later, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, over which Dutton had ministerial oversight until 2022, raised Australia’s national terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’.

Dutton is not the first Opposition leader to go it alone on the international stage. In June 1971, then-Opposition Leader Gough Whitlam led a delegation to Beijing and met with China’s Premier, Zhou Enlai. It was a risky venture, but Whitlam wasn’t out on his own. Numerous Australian allies, including Canada and the United Kingdom, had already normalised relations with China – and the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was secretly paving the way for President Richard Nixon to meet Zhou Enlai in Beijing.

Geopolitically, Whitlam’s timing in China was perfect. Dutton’s timing in Israel was terrible. It did nothing to promote a release of Israeli hostages or to encourage a Gaza ceasefire, and it did nothing to ease tensions in Australia. At best, Dutton undermined the Australian government’s relationship with the Israeli government. Then again, judging by Dutton’s past remarks about so-called African gangs, multicultural harmony probably comes under the heading of ‘our sometimes over-tolerant society’ in his mind. After all, he treated the troubles in Gaza and the West Bank as a photo op. Never mind the consequences for Jewish and Islamic communities in Australia. Never mind that, by aligning himself with Netanyahu, he ran the risk of undermining Australia’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East. Never mind the increased risk of terror attacks at home.

It is ironic, really. Dutton’s built his career by talking up external security threats, but, as in the United Kingdom and the United States, Australia’s greatest terror threats stem from

home-grown extremists. His cavalier attitude to national security – undermining multiculturalism at home and abroad – should count as a strike against the Coalition in the coming election, but it won’t be a vote changer. What will change votes is the cost of living.

Since taking office, Albanese has adopted a backroom approach to governing. The PM has tried to play a long game, avoiding wedge issues like tax cuts and nuclear subs, mending diplomatic fences in the Pacific, rebuilding trade with China, and rebooting real wage growth, while preparing a signature policy on universal childcare for the 2025 campaign. But most voters are unaware of these efforts. What they do know is that life is harder; it costs more to pay rent, put food on the table, refuel the car.

Dutton taps into this community angst whenever he talks about using nuclear power to bring down costs, calls for cuts in immigration and better security on our borders and streets, or attacks the government for wasting money on the Referendum for the Voice to Parliament. The attacks are boilerplate Opposition fare, but they are delivered with discipline and amplified by partisan elements of an increasingly dysfunctional media.

Albanese, meanwhile, has a perception problem. He is a competent prime minister leading a strong Cabinet, but, on his watch, inflation has risen and the Referendum on the Voice failed. He is also a poor campaigner – an old-fashioned problem solver who likes to explain, facing a Manichaean candidate who likes to blame.

I began this essay by comparing two Queensland coppers: Dutton and Hayden. The truth is that, of the two contemporary political leaders, Albanese is the one most like Hayden. That’s because Albanese, like Hayden, has firsthand knowledge of the injustices some people bear. Those experiences, combined with the twenty years he has spent on the Opposition benches, have made him a more well-rounded person than Dutton. The trouble is that the qualities that make a better person don’t always make a better political candidate –as demonstrated by two brilliant campaigners, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

Where does all of this leave us ahead of the 2025 election?

My prognostication is that Australia is on track for a hung parliament. Unless there is a dramatic turn in the polls, neither Dutton nor Albanese is likely to win an outright majority. Of the two leaders, Albanese – having handled government business during the minority Gillard government – is the one most likely to navigate a crossbench controlled by Greens, teals, and independents. But I am loath to write off Peter Dutton. The Member for Dickson is a public figure too easy to underestimate. He can win. g

Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist and poet. He worked as a speechwriter for Labor premiers Steve Bracks and John Brumby. His latest novel is Judas Boys (Hunter, 2023).

This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Making a gargoyle

The larrikin who became prime minister

Patrick Mullins

IYoung Hawke:

The making of a larrikin

by David Day HarperCollins $49.99 hb, 430 pp

t is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’.

With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example. Yes, the myth goes, he used slipshod language now and then, and was quite a sight when he was in his cups, but generally Hawkie was a top bloke, a man who would call a spade a spade, a mate who could sup with princes and paupers but never forget who he was.

Just as this use of the term ‘larrikin’ is thoroughly denuded of its original menace, so too is this mythical Hawke. In the 1870s, when the term first emerged, a larrikin was an itinerant and belligerent city thug, a young man who would hang about in pushes (i.e. gangs), abusing people on the streets, leering at women, getting drunk, and brawling with volleys of Irish confetti (i.e. bricks).

Bob Hawke never threw a brick, so far as his biographers have shown, but in so many other ways he was a grotesque and menacing lout much in the mould of the 1870s larrikin. This is a man who propositioned a woman and, when rebuffed, spat that she was ugly, anyway; who took his daughter to a party and, while there, told a woman sitting by her husband that he would like to fuck her; who drunkenly poured himself out of his car to scream at neighbourhood children for using the tennis court his wife had invited them to play on; who accepted a ‘Father of the Year’ award he had done nothing to deserve and posed as a family man to rebut accurate rumours of infidelity and publicly attested chauvinism; and who may well have sold out the nation’s

truckies in exchange for trinkets and treats from transport magnate Peter Abeles.

David Day, author of Young Hawke, is not the first person to lay bare the gargoyle that became Australia’s twenty-third prime minister: that job was in large part performed by Blanche D’Alpuget, whose 1982 biography famously included disclosure of Hawke’s womanising and drinking. Produced while D’Alpuget and Hawke were in a sexual relationship, and published shortly before he became Labor’s leader and then, within weeks, prime minister in 1983, D’Alpuget’s account had its gaps and silences, particularly around Hawke’s sex life and drinking. Troy Bramston’s 2022 biography did much to fill those gaps, occasionally luridly.

There is reason, then, to greet Day’s account, seemingly the first in a two-volume biography, with a degree of scepticism. What more can be said? What is still unknown about a man who lived the greater part of his life in the public eye, who was always in newsprint, and who has been the subject of five previous biographies?

Day’s first answer comes from his laudable habit – shown in his biographies of other Labor figures, including prime ministers Andrew Fisher, John Curtin, Ben Chifley, and Paul Keating – of picking over bones discarded or ignored by other biographers. In Young Hawke, this is most obvious in Day’s account of Hawke’s childhood. For the religiously fervent Clem and Ellie Hawke, church activities were paramount in their lives: their days were filled with services, socials, camps, classes, dances, doorknockings, and more. When they had time and attention to spare, it was lavished on Neil, their golden child, older and taller and more handsome than Bobbie, better at school and more popular, too. Even when Neil was away at boarding school, even when Clem and Ellie took a night off, young Hawke still ranked below the girls and women who were invited to stay at the manse, who turned it into an ‘indoor camp under strict camp routine’.

Day’s attention to the dynamics of this upbringing gives what follows valuable depth and psychological nuance. Day is not the first of Hawke’s biographers to call Hawke a narcissist, but he takes narcissism seriously enough to parse its manifestations and contradictions and to follow its influence through Hawke’s life. Hawke’s heightened level of self-love may well have been a compensation for the conditional and anxiety-ridden love he received

Bob Hawke, 1968

(Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and Courtesy SEARCH Foundation via Wikimedia Commons)

from his parents; their assurances that he was special might well have exacerbated that and fuelled his determination to become a Rhodes Scholar and, eventually, prime minister. That narcissism, and its need for reassurance and reinforcement, might have provided the pangs in Hawke’s insatiable appetite for sex and his unquenchable thirst for alcohol.

Some of the psychologising from genealogical evidence is unpersuasive; at times Day’s speculations unnecessarily harden into statements of fact. He writes in an introductory note that Clem Hawke lost his position in the Methodist church at Forster ‘because of his affair with his future wife’ and that Clem’s running his ‘horse and cart off the road’ is a glimpse of the ‘wildness’ that his son inherited. However, when Day describes these events in the main text, the certainty and significance vanish: the affair becomes a possible explanation, the ‘pony and trap’ going off-road is attributed to pressure that precedes Clem’s nervous breakdown. At other times, Day’s claims for profound significance are unrewarded. The tennis-court death in Hawke’s arms of businessman Lionel Revelman, while Hawke was president of the ACTU, was ‘one of the most traumatic experiences of Hawke’s life’, Day writes – but how it influenced Hawke afterwards, if at all, is unsaid.

Day’s second answer to the utility of his book comes toward the end of Young Hawke, as his subject agonises over giving up the comfort and prestige he has accumulated, as president of the ACTU, and going into Parliament to realise that chancy childhood ambition of becoming prime minister. There were dilemmas and contingencies at every turn; costs and compromises that were

demanded from Hawke. His mother was dying; opponents in Labor were trying to kneecap him; his marriage with Hazel was on the brink; his lover, D’Alpuget, was considering suicide but also writing his biography and saying that she could not end on ‘a note of regret, of hope abandoned’.

Day is not the first of Hawke’s biographers to call Hawke a narcissist

Given the power of Hawke’s narcissistic self-belief, his decision was never really in question. But in these pages, the drama and the value derive from whether all those contemporaries who excused the youthful, larrikin Hawke, ignored his ugly words and deeds, and disguised the revulsion that his behaviour so often engendered might be vindicated. They had all rationalised their silence by making a comparison with what Hawke might be and what contribution he might make if he realised his ambition and became prime minister. Were those decisions justified? Were they redeemed?

The answer awaits a successor volume. As David Day writes, Hawke had made his mark already. Now, greater opportunities and challenges lay ahead. g

Patrick Mullins is a visiting fellow at the ANU’s National Centre of Biography. His books include Tiberius with a Telephone: The life and stories of William McMahon (2018).

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DIRECTOR PETER EVANS

4–8 SEPTEMBER THE NEILSON NUTSHELL PIER 2/3, SYDNEY

13–14 SEPTEMBER

Blinkered laments

Two accounts of the Voice referendum

Dominic Kelly

ILessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum by Frank Brennan

Connor Court Publishing

$24.95 pb, 145 pp

The End of Settlement: Why the 2023 referendum failed by Damien Freeman

Connor Court Publishing

$24.95 pb, 123 pp

t was no surprise, in the end, when the October 2023 referendum on the constitutional enshrinement of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice was comprehensively defeated, given the concerted opposition of the Liberal-National Coalition. The history of Australian referendums is clear: bipartisan support is a necessary precondition for constitutional change. While a great many of those on the political right were adamantly opposed to the Voice, a small number of constitutional conservatives attempted to persuade their political brethren of the benefits of change. These included Greg Craven, former vice-chancellor of Australian Catholic University, and Julian Leeser, former shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, until he resigned from the shadow Cabinet to campaign for the Voice.

Closely aligned with Craven and Leeser were Jesuit priest Frank Brennan and academic Damien Freeman. Both have now published sorrowful assessments of the referendum. However, each account is diminished by its author’s unwillingness to entertain the notion that conservative politicians continue to engage in Indigenous affairs in bad faith.

Brennan, in Lessons from Our Failure to Build a Constitutional Bridge in the 2023 Referendum, is eager to remind his readers that he has been a supporter of Indigenous rights for much of his life. In this, he has strong pedigree: he is the son of the late Gerard Brennan, former Chief Justice of the High Court and lead author of the 1992 Mabo judgment. Brennan, also a lawyer, has published three previous books on Indigenous constitutional recognition, and in 2019 he was appointed to the Coalition government’s Indigenous Voice Co-Design Senior Advisory Group.

Despite this extensive experience in Indigenous affairs, Brennan is at pains to demonstrate his humility and willingness to bow to those with stronger arguments. This is undermined by his insistence on repeating his misgivings about the Voice proposal over and over again. The book itself is mostly previously aired commentary from 2022 and 2023: newspaper columns and other media appearances, homilies, ‘notes on justiciability’, and representations to government and parliament. That is, Brennan is a prominent public figure with a megaphone. It is thus a little hard to swallow the idea that he is merely a humble citizen seeking to be heard amid the din.

Brennan’s central complaint about the referendum process is the lack of bipartisanship, the blame for which he lays squarely on Anthony Albanese. Despite the overwhelming evidence

before us that the Coalition was intent on exploiting division and damaging the Labor government by opposing the Voice, Brennan believes that bipartisanship could have been achieved with some tweaks to the process: a constitutional convention in which the views of all Australians could have been heard, and a transparent parliamentary committee process in which Coalition concerns were given more consideration by the government.

The issue that most worried Brennan was the wording of the constitutional amendment. He argues that allowing the Voice to make representations to the Executive Government as well as to the Parliament would have led to a constitutional quagmire. Routine administrative decisions made by a quarter of a million public servants would have been bogged down in litigation, Brennan claims, because Indigenous people, through the Voice, might have argued that they had been inadequately consulted.

The impression given by Brennan’s repeated invocation of ‘routine administrative decisions’ is that junior public servants across the country would have been unable to perform their everyday tasks because of a legal requirement to consult with the Voice. This is fantasy, and it is exposed as such when Brennan finally provides some hypotheticals to support his argument. The first relates to mining approvals in which Indigenous interests might be affected; the second relates to the funding and operation of Indigenous schools in remote communities. Neither could fairly be described as routine administrative matters, and both would likely require a decision by a minister or head of department, rather than by one of the many thousands of non-executive public servants. Furthermore, both should involve departmental consultation with relevant Indigenous communities. It is strange that a supposed supporter of Indigenous rights is so troubled by such a basic level of government accountability.

The broader problem with Brennan’s analysis is that there is no evidence that his process and wording changes would have done anything to persuade Peter Dutton and the Coalition to back the Yes campaign. In this regard, Brennan comes across as hopelessly naïve about the cold reality of adversarial politics. When your political opponents have a strong electoral incentive to exploit and misrepresent your arguments, bipartisanship is unlikely. Combine this with Dutton’s longstanding hostility towards Indigenous rights, and it is a mirage.

The difficulty of achieving bipartisanship in contemporary politics is the main theme of Damien Freeman’s book, The End of Settlement. Freeman is a writer, lawyer, and philosopher who worked closely with Craven, Leeser, Noel Pearson, Shireen Morris, and Anne Twomey to bridge the divide between constitutional conservatives and proponents of substantive Indigenous recognition. As he relates in the book, this group’s discussions contributed to the development of the Voice proposal, so Freeman was naturally deeply invested in the outcome of the referendum.

In considering why the referendum failed, Freeman looks to Australian political history for lessons. Drawing on Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty (2008), he discusses the virtues of the Deakinite settlement of the early twentieth century, in which politicians with vastly different views came to a general consensus on economic and social policies. He then lauds the bipartisan

dismantling of that settlement in the 1980s, when it was seen as being no longer fit for purpose. In contrast with these projects, Freeman now views the Voice referendum as being doomed at the outset because of declining trust in institutions and increasing polarisation. More broadly, he fears that we have reached the end of ‘settlement politics’.

Though fairly innocuous on the surface, there are several problems with Freeman’s argument, beyond his leaden prose. First, he is too wedded to Kelly’s triumphant thesis about bold reformers taking on vested interests and changing Australia for the better in the 1980s. With some wider reading, Freeman might have come to understand polarisation and institutional distrust as stemming from increasing economic inequality, which was unleashed by the very neo-liberal reforms he extols. Such inequality is now entrenched through policies that favour the already wealthy at the expense of the most disadvantaged. None of this seems to be of any interest to Freeman.

Second, Freeman’s notion of settlement politics is conceptually thin, and his fear of its decline seems exaggerated. What he is describing is the standard politics of negotiation and compromise that continues to operate in pluralist democracies, to greater or lesser degrees depending on the issue at hand. Referendums are particularly ill suited to this mode of politics, as the Brexit experience in 2016 so viscerally demonstrated. However, ugly and divisive single-issue political battles in themselves do not suggest a terminal inability to reach compromise.

Finally, Freeman seems blind to the ways in which his virtuous conception of settlement politics may come across very differently to Indigenous people. For them, settlement politics

might be better described as status quo politics, in which very little changes. If the past decade and a half of debate about Indigenous constitutional recognition has taught us anything, it is that conservatives remain hostile to substantive change based on the principles of self-determination. An acceptable settlement for the political class – say, symbolic acknowledgment of the special status of First Peoples in the constitution – would have been unacceptable to Indigenous people themselves.

These issues aside, Freeman, unlike Brennan, at least acknowledges the deeply divided political landscape in which the Voice referendum played out. Though he accepts that the Yes campaign made mistakes, he doesn’t share Brennan’s view that bipartisanship could have been achieved with process or wording changes. However, like Brennan, he refrains from criticism of Dutton and other leaders of the No campaign. For both, it was the Yes proponents’ reluctance to compromise that sank the referendum, not the intransigence and hostility of the right.

The notion of conservative goodwill towards Indigenous people is one of the most enduring myths about Indigenous affairs in Australia. Brennan and Freeman perpetuate the fantasy by overstating the significance of limited conservative support for minimal, symbolic change, including from John Howard and Tony Abbott. How the two former prime ministers must have laughed as they enthusiastically joined the No campaign, while still being held up by political naïfs as men of principle. g

Dominic Kelly is the author of Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2019).

Watershed

In times of war

At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf. Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant battering and steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.

Secessionists form into fingers flattening themselves, sliding ever so slowly across sand, eager, curious –this is not a competition but a hungry investigation.

One ventures further and further, then another. It’s like watching, from a long way up, the slow formation, say, of archipelagos and fjords along the coast of Norway.

Fingers of insurgence slide over the waterlogged sand like oil. Vanguard outriders can’t contain their curiosity –if shallow water could sprint it is sprinting and yet it takes its time,

it has all the time in the world to slip into each footprint it finds –the anchor in a gull’s webbed foot; arrows of the blue crane’s trail; the pygmy imprint of dotterel and hooded plover,

now infilling a canal along the stroke of a wallaby tail, the punctuation of each twinned pawprint either side. Hungry for sensation water curls into every recess it can find, learns the kinetics of a marram grass etching, drawing circles around itself.

Water learns the sanguinity of a small dog and the deeper knowing of a large brute’s weight. Water explores each recess, each life: mollusc trail and beetle track, the toes – one by one – of a human, ball of foot, instep; water carnally fills the curve of a heel.

A downhill run over the sand’s hump, the insurgents have a hunch where they are heading now. Under the dunes the glassy creek is waiting. In the distance the dogged surf goes on

with its offensive, crashing and crashing, it wants to outdo itself. The creek’s still water stretches as far as it is able, extends an index finger, the first insurrectionist reaches out to touch.

Sarah Day

‘Crazy hysterical mess’

One month of World War II

Joan Beaumont

ANovember 1942:

An intimate history of the turning point of the Second World War by Peter Englund

translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves

Bodley Head

$36.99 pb, 486 pp

s its title tells us, this book focuses on one month of World War II: November 1942. Swedish author and historian Peter Englund argues that this month was the turning point of the war. In North Africa, the Germans were on the retreat after the Allied victory at El Alamein. American forces began their land operations against the Axis powers by invading French Morocco and Algeria. In the Pacific war, the battle of Guadalcanal reached its decisive climax, while Australian troops recaptured Kokoda after pushing the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track. Most importantly, on the Eastern front, the Red Army launched an attack that surrounded the German 6th Army in Stalingrad. Two months later, the 91,000 German troops still alive in the ruins of the city surrendered. Almost all of them perished in captivity.

Hence, to quote Englund, at the start of November ‘people still believed that the Axis powers would be victorious. By the end of that month it had become clear that it was only a matter of time before they would lose.’ Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously stated that Alamein was ‘perhaps, the end of the beginning’.

This is a view of the war that few military historians would contest, although it is a Eurocentric one. As many Western histories do, it marginalises the conflict between Japan and China from 1937 to 1945. This was at something of a stalemate in 1942, but it resulted in the deaths of at least twenty million Chinese soldiers and civilians (Chinese estimates are considerably higher).

Englund acknowledges the famine in one Chinese province where famine killed perhaps a quarter of million in 1942-43, but devotes only a few of his more than 400 pages to it.

Englund’s book is not a traditional account of November 1942. Rather, it takes the form of interwoven biographies of some thirty-nine men and women from different theatres of the war. It documents their daily lives, as detailed in their diaries and memoirs, fleshing these out with what now seems to be a popular genre, creative non-fiction. Englund concedes that this is an experimental historiography, but he argues that the complexity of events emerges most clearly at the level of the individual.

Englund’s coverage is wide and eclectic. We meet not only soldiers, paratroopers, and tank crews from the various defence forces fighting the crucial battles of Stalingrad, El Alamein, and Guadalcanal. The ‘dramatis personae’, as Englund calls them, also include: a machine-gunner in an RAAF Lancaster bomber;

sailors on British merchant vessels, including on an Arctic convoy taking aid to Russia; an inmate of the Treblinka extermination squad who was forced to extract gold teeth from the corpses of murdered Jews; housewives in the United Kingdom and the United States; a partisan in Russia; a ‘comfort woman’ forced to serve Japanese sexual needs in Burma; refugees in Poland, Stalingrad, Leningrad, and Shanghai; journalists in Tunisia and the Soviet Union; and students in Chicago, Paris, and Germany (the last being the extraordinarily brave protester Sophie Scholl, who was executed by guillotine by the Nazis shortly after November 1942).

Among the more famous figures are Vera Brittain, author of the World War I memoir Testament of Youth and a pacifist in London during World War II; Albert Camus, the French philosopher and author active in the French resistance; and the British fascist and defector to Berlin, John Amery (son of the British politician Leo Amery).

Few Australians make an appearance. One is Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, who in November 1942 was embarking on a journey from Java, where he had been captured in March 1942, to Singapore and, ultimately, the Thai-Burma railway. His diary remains one of the best contemporary records of captivity in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and was an obvious source for Englund. Another Australian, who appears occasionally, is the sergeant with the 3rd Battalion, Bede Tongs, who won a Military Medal on the Kokoda Track in October 1942. (Englund, unfortunately, insists on calling him Bede Thongs.)

Given the range of Englund’s biographies, every reader should find much of interest. Some narratives, of course, are

more dramatic and confronting than others. Surviving the siege of Leningrad is more gripping than coping with rationing in the unoccupied United States and Britain. But Englund’s skills as a storyteller, translated by Peter Graves, bring almost all experiences to life. The dramatic effect is lessened by the biographies being presented in slices, interspersed with other narratives and spread across November. Readers with short attention spans will presumably be motivated to keep going, but the development of individual characters is fragmented.

This is not a book for readers who are unfamiliar with the chronology of World War II. Englund opens by saying that he will not describe ‘what the war was during these four critical weeks’. This is a good call, given the plethora of books about Stalingrad, the North Africa campaigns, and Guadalcanal. But some readers will struggle to know why these three campaigns mattered so much. Why were the British (and, for that matter, Australians) fighting in North Africa? Why were the Rumanians, the Achilles heel in German defences, involved in Stalingrad?

Sickening slaughter

A massive and major corrective

Michael McKernan

TThe Eastern Front: A history of the

first

world war by Nick Lloyd

Viking

$65 hb, 672 pp

his is a massive book: 506 pages of text; eighty-nine pages of references and bibliography; seventeen maps, all of them full page or more; and forty-two illustrations. It is also an important book, and it is easy for the reader to follow Nick Lloyd’s argument. The Eastern Front is a major corrective to how most readers here and in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States understand the Great War, as it was once called.

I have been studying and thinking about World War I, professionally, since I started my doctoral studies in 1972. I have never given much attention to the Eastern Front, barely understanding the war that involved the Russian Empire, the AustroHungarian Empire, the German Empire, and millions of soldiers. The war raged all over eastern Europe, Italy, and the Balkans, across nations, in a conflict that involved the massive movement of huge numbers of soldiers that is unimaginable to those who know the story of fighting on the much more static Western Front.

Themes from the Western Front are present here too: the suffering of soldiers enduring the worst of the weather; the lack of food; the brutality of barrages that robbed so many of their sanity, temporarily or permanently. Like the Western Front,

Why were British convoys going to Russia? Why did American troops land in Morocco and Algeria (this, as it happens, was one of the most contested decisions in the grand strategy of Britain and the United States). I could go on.

Context matters; not least because Englund contends that there is ‘remarkable tension between the purpose of the war and how it was experienced, between its grand aims and the reality that more often than not was a “crazy hysterical mess”’ (here he quotes the novelist John Steinbeck). At times, Englund inserts contextual detail about the war’s wider dynamics in the text or notes. But we learn little about the supposed disconnect between these and the ‘reality’ of November 1942.

The striking achievement of this book is its range of human stories and the personal testimonies that Englund unearthed to document these. Although he speaks of one ‘war’, Englund reminds us that World War II was in fact multiple conflicts, and that the many millions of individuals entangled in these faced radically different challenges in their efforts to survive. g

the Eastern Front saw the weaknesses of so many commanders, with their hatreds and fears of their rivals on their own side, the inability of leaders to understand the war being fought, and the massive death rate among officers, particularly in the first months of the war. Principally, on both Fronts, the main theme is the overwhelming presence of death.

Living in a time of war in Europe and the Middle East, we may respond with more empathy to the sheer evil and horror of warfare depicted in these pages. This is a profoundly anti-war study of war. The carnage was appalling, largely caused by the might of the artillery, which the Germans had in great number, the Russians in lesser number, but still capable of killing large numbers of the enemy. Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides became prisoners of war, though their fate is not spelt out here. Some readers may have liked to know more.

There are, however, problems for readers of The Eastern Front Few, if any, of the place names will be familiar to many Australian readers, and the maps are not always helpful. If Ypres, Pozières, and Vimy are known to most readers, there is no such familiarity with many of the other places named in the book.

Nor will there be instant recognition of the main characters, excepting the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Most of those who read military history have a sense of Douglas Haig, John Monash, Ian Hamilton, William Birdwood, even Herbert Plumer, but almost every other name in this book will be unfamiliar. This meant, for this reader anyway, that I was constantly asking myself, ‘Now hang on, which side was he on?’ It took many pages before I began to feel comfortable with the names. Readers may need to keep a crib sheet by their side to prompt understanding.

Nick Lloyd, a skilled historian and author, must have been aware of this issue, unless his publisher drew his attention to it, for there is an eleven-page ‘Cast of Characters’ at the back of the book. It is a straightforward listing of the appointments each person received: ‘Chief of General Staff’, ‘Deputy Chief of General Staff’, ‘taking charge of the Eighth Army in November 1914’ – that kind of thing. Lloyd makes no attempt to offer vignettes

of men’s characters or foibles.

When the Americans entered the war on the Western Front in 1918, it changed the equation because of the massive increase, on the Allies’ side, of the number of troops involved. But the tsarist army, with an overwhelming advantage in numbers, proved that the equation did not necessarily give the spur to victory that readers might have expected. Take a ‘small engagement’ at Lake Naroch near Vilnius in 1916. ‘The slaughter was sickening,’ Lloyd writes, ‘the attackers fell in piles, with each succeeding wave being hit by the same furious fire and collapsing into little clumps of ragged uniforms and bloodied flesh. In one sector the Germans counted 4,000 Russian bodies, all for the cost of 200 defenders.’ (The Nek on Gallipoli, anyone?) The problem was the appalling Russian leadership.

Look at the figures. In 1916, Russian forces had approximately 670,000 more men than the Germans could field, a figure that grew to almost 880,000 when the latest bunch of recruits joined the fight. Why was this difference not decisive? Largely, Lloyd explains, because of the incompetence of the Russian military

Planet Art

A thudding compendium of sins

Gabriella Coslovich

RBattle for the Museum:

Cultural institutions in crisis

by Rachel Spence Hurst

$39.99 hb, 286 pp

achel Spence’s Battle for the Museum reflects a growing movement to redefine the art museum as a site of activism and social change that has gained momentum in the United States and Britain around issues of race, equity, and diversity.

and political leadership, led by Tsar Nicholas II, an amiable but flawed leader. It is overwhelmingly poignant to read of such incompetence, which led directly to the loss of untold troops. Eventually, the will to fight evaporated among the ordinary soldiers, leaving Russia ripe for revolution.

Events culminated in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas on 15 March 1917. His Chief of Staff, General Mikhail Alekseev, sent a telegram to all Russia’s military leaders declaring that ‘the army in the field must be saved from disintegration’. All the leaders agreed that the tsar must go. On reading the telegrams in reply at 3 pm that day, Nicholas signed the deed of abdication. Lloyd describes the hopes that the war could continue on a smoother basis as a ‘tragic delusion’: ‘far from dousing the flames of revolution, the abdication had poured kerosene on them’.

The new Russian government surrendered to the Germans at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Their allies struggled thereafter, with the Germans eventually triumphing in a series of victories across the Eastern Front. The victory, so decisive and costly, was short-lived. With the armistice signed on 11 November 1918, covering both fronts, the defeated on the eastern one became the ultimate victors. The map of eastern Europe was redrawn. The Eastern Front had not affected the outcome of the war at all.

However, the war on the Eastern Front had provoked the most consequential change in the twentieth century, utterly reshaping the world order. The detail of the war which Lloyd so marvellously reveals in a deftly composed, fast-paced narrative, offers readers the most comprehensive insight into these momentous events. Most historically literate readers have a good understanding of the Bolshevik revolution, but Lloyd provides the context for these events. Though long, this important book adds a huge dimension to studies of World War I. g

Michael McKernan is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including The War Never Ends (2001) and When This Thing Happened (2015).

Advocating the need for radical transformation, Spence paints an insistently bleak picture of art museums, recording their multiple failings on social, ethical, and political fronts. Forty pages in, this reader was already battle-weary, worn down by Spence’s thudding compendium of sins. That’s not to dismiss the validity of Spence’s arguments. The sector’s expansionist, exploitative, discriminatory, and profit-hungry urges warrant interrogation.

An experienced arts journalist (and poet) who contributes mainly to the London-based Financial Times, Spence’s idea for this book arose early in her career, in 2006, when she attended the glitzy launch of luxury goods magnate Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum on Venice’s Grand Canal. Here, Spence came face to face with the troubling contradictions of the art world, which she dubs ‘Planet Art’. On display was one of American artist Barbara Kruger’s best-known works, an image of a hand holding a sign stating: I shop therefore I am. ‘By displaying Kruger’s work here in his sumptuous new Venetian palace, M. Pinault is sticking two fingers up at her values,’ Spence writes. ‘You shop, he is saying, therefore I am. I can buy you and your precious leftie

Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna, 1903 (Oceanicvoyager via Wikimedia Commons)

idealism. I can reduce your art to an ironic, hollow yelp of despair.’

In that moment, Spence understood that art was ‘vulnerable to manipulation by wealth and by power’ and her ‘faith in art’s capacity to remain an autonomous creative force was shaken’. It is an odd realisation given that art has rarely been an ‘autonomous creative force’, and Spence, who was then living in Italy, home of the Renaissance, would have been well aware that artists through history have enjoyed and suffered the patronage of popes, monarchs, ruling families, and assorted wealthy élites. And yet it’s the art that transcends the patronage.

Even so, in her Introduction Spence eloquently probes the tensions between art and the systems of power within which it operates, and the reader anticipates an insightful and enquiring discussion ahead, with a variety of perspectives canvassed. It’s a shame, then, that the friction Spence sets up at the start of book gives way to polemic.

Spence points the barrel at the Western world’s wealthiest and most powerful institutions, including the Tate, the British Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and mega art fairs such as Frieze, Art Basel, and Art HK (whose co-founder Tim Etchells went on to launch the Sydney Contemporary art fair).

who says ‘our opponents … have the money and the guns. We can’t win at that. We can only win at numbers.’

Spence sidesteps some of the adverse consequences of these mass-organised struggles and seems incurious about who will arbitrate the political views to be given priority. Art is indeed ‘vulnerable to manipulation by wealth and by power’ and undoubtedly

She fervently critiques the divide between the progressive values that these institutions profess to embrace and the values they demonstrate – or, as she puts it, ‘the gap between what Planet Art says about humanity and freedom, and what it actually does’. She argues that ‘Planet Art’ is ‘too marvellous, too fertile and ultimately too important not to clean up its act’.

Spence has plenty of ammunition to drive home her point: institutions that underpay staff, outsource jobs, offer insecure contracts, appoint tear gas manufacturers to their boards, accept money from opioid dealers, fossil-fuel giants, and high finance; institutions whose staff are overwhelmingly white, and so too the artists on display; institutions that move into low-income neighbourhoods, spurring gentrification that displaces established communities; institutions that forge alliances with countries of known human rights abuses, such as China and the United Arab Emirates. The chapter titled ‘Behind the Bilbao Effect’, which examines the exploitation of migrant workers building offshoots of the Guggenheim and the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, is particularly powerful and disturbing.

Spence’s book is a furious, heartfelt, and timely exploration of the pressures facing museums from activists on staff and online (often anonymous) who want museums to mirror their values. She backs the call for radical change through mass organising, quoting ‘anarchist, transgender activist and lawyer’ Dean Spade,

needs to clean up its act (as do many industries in the capitalist system). Art is also increasingly vulnerable to the manipulation of activists harnessing social media platforms (that profit from outrage) to demand change in ways that are not always fair, accurate, or transparent. This, too, merits analysis in a hyper-politicised climate where cultural institutions and their curators, directors, and boards, rightly or wrongly, are a ready target for protesters. The book’s blurb promises that these flashpoints will be examined, but ultimately they are glossed over by a writer who has picked her side. A salient example is the manner in which Spence skims over the saga of the Guggenheim’s former chief curator Nancy Spector, whose distinguished career was destroyed after she was accused of racism by independent Basquiat scholar Chaédria LaBouvier, whom Spector had invited to collaborate on an exhibition at the museum. An extensive independent investigation found ‘no evidence’ that Spector had mistreated LaBouvier on the basis of her race. But the damage was done, and on the same day that Spector was exonerated she left the Guggenheim. Spence dispenses the example to further her argument about racism in the museum, and moves on.

Towards the end of her manifesto, Spence reveals that she started out with a different book in mind, ‘broader, less angry, more reflective’. While Spence’s indignation is justified on many grounds, her original intention may have produced a less polarising, more nuanced, and ultimately more persuasive book. g

Gabriella Coslovich’s book Whiteley on Trial (MUP, 2017) inspired a two-part documentary, The Whiteley Art Scandal (2023).

The Guggenheim (photograph by Ajay Suresh, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum via Wikimedia Commons)

On our moral watch

The disgrace of homelessness in Australia

by Kevin Bell

Australia is experiencing a housing disaster that risks turning into a social and economic catastrophe. It is a disaster because all four aspects of the system are extremely stressed and play havoc with the lives and aspirations of millions of people. Home ownership is beyond the reach of many households, even those with two good wages coming in, let alone those with one. Rents have skyrocketed and few affordable rentals are available for ordinary working families. Housing costs are so high as to lower living standards generally. The modern history of social housing is one of deliberate government under-investment, to the point where it is available only to those on income support and with desperate needs. In our land of plenty, homelessness is among the highest in the world and visible to all – a fact reported to our national shame in the international media. This situation has been chronic and worsening for more than a generation. Without a different approach it will go on for at least another. The Australian housing disaster appears to be maturing into a new normal, which really would be a catastrophe.

This is no spider that has crept up on unsuspecting Australia in the dark. The housing disaster has happened in broad daylight, and it continues to do so predictably and avoidably under our moral watch. Writers such as Jim Kemeny and Peter Mares, as well as the UN Special Rapporteur Miloon Kathari, have sounded strong alarms along the way, complemented recently by the likes of Alan Kohler, Saul Eslake, Jessie Hohmann, and Chris Martin. Speaking as housing historians, finance journalists, taxation economists, and human rights experts, they give voice to a powerful message: the current design of the housing and taxation system

puts profit before people and is not fit for its fundamental social purposes. And doesn’t a whole generation or more of young people trying to buy housing know it! So much for the idea that you can be anyone and get anywhere in this country with a good education and job. Don’t the millions of Australians living in high-cost rentals, poorly protected by second-rate residential tenancy laws, know it. A growing number of them will spend all their lives in rental housing. The legal regime needs drastic renovation, and the ridiculous social stigma against renting as a form of housing tenure should end. Don’t those on waiting lists for desperately needed social housing know it. The wait can be decades-long. Don’t women fleeing violence in their own homes – sleeping in cars, often with children – know it. There’s not enough emergency housing for them. Don’t those living with mental ill health know it – for how can you be right in your head without a roof over it? Don’t more than 120,000 homeless people know it – including those regularly and sometimes repeatedly released into homelessness by prisons, mental health institutions, and government child protection agencies (among others). Don’t First People know it – for the continuing injustices of colonisation mean they are affected by the housing disaster far more than any other group, and in their own Country over which they have never ceded sovereignty.

The foundation of a housing system that puts profit before people is the idea that land is to be valued as a commodity for investment rather than as a place for a home. This idea is part of the Australian nation’s creation story. It was brought here by settler colonialists, who ensured that it stayed as the primary mode for implementing the colonial project.

One of them was Joseph Tice Gellibrand who came to take land from traditional owners in the earliest days of Victorian colonisation not far from my home in Balnarring on the Mornington Peninsula. The historical records show that in 1836 he landed a ship at nearby Sandy Point, in the traditional lands of the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people, with hundreds of sheep and walked north-westerly towards Port Phillip Bay. It was the height of summer in January and the party were hot and thirsty. They nearly died but found water near a settlement of about a hundred ‘native huts’ within the wide elbow of a creek in Tuerong just north of Balnarring. Early European maps depict open plains nearby, doubtless produced by firestick farming, so that hunting could take place. The existence of so many huts explodes the common myth that First Peoples did not have physical settlements. But that is not my point. I want to contrast Gellibrand’s idea of land with that of the traditional owners.

First Peoples such as the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung count among the oldest continuous human cultures on earth. Their land was (is, and always will be) the spiritual foundation of their collective existence. It was their home in the fullest sense of that word. Under their culture, land was respected and nurtured as a vital life force. First Peoples today call this ‘caring for Country’. A hundred huts suggest that two hundred-plus people lived there. Important ceremonial and burial places were likely nearby. This human settlement was underpinned by a system of traditional land law that regulated how the huts were arranged in the space and how the community interacted with the surrounding area. The land was owned by and for the whole community. It was sustainably utilised for hunting, gathering, medicines, mining, making tools and cultural artefacts, trading, and in many other productive ways. The community had an economy and understood notions of wealth and value. But this was not the primary purpose of land, which was seen holistically. It was part of a system in balance. Homelessness did not exist.

We can infer from his conduct that Gellibrand had a completely different idea about land. For him, it was property from which wealth could be derived. Ignoring the prior rights of the traditional owners, he saw land primarily as a physical resource to be used or taken for his enrichment. It was an instrument for maximising private gain. He thought nothing of coming onto the land of the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung and running sheep there without permission for as long as he wished. To him, this land was a physical object he could exclusively own once the often-violent dispossession was legally mandated in the colonisers’ law. Then it could be kept or sold for private gain as he saw fit, without regard to the prior rights of the traditional owners, which he did not recognise. Land might become his home, but that was not its primary purpose. He could stay, move on, or take (or buy) other land if he wished, which in fact he did. Like other settlers, his central idea was that land was a commodity to be used for wealth creation.

This dichotomy between how settlers and traditional owners saw land is between land valued primarily as a commodity for producing private wealth and land valued in

a holistic way, including as a home-place. The exploitation of land valued primarily as a commodity and instrument of private gain is a colonial idea. Promoting and acting on the idea was the main purpose of colonisation. The same idea both underpins and explains the Australian housing disaster in the modern age. It has become embedded in the national imagination and is supported by a national taxation regime that delivers extraordinary benefits to the privileged minority who can afford to buy residential housing primarily for investment purposes.

The current design of the housing and taxation system puts profit before people

A tax expenditure is an amount of taxation forgone by the government because it has conferred a concession on a given activity that would otherwise be taxable. Residential property investment is supported by (among others) two such concessions: negative gearing and a fifty per cent capital gains discount. The official estimate of the yearly value of the negative gearing taxation expenditure is $69 billion in 202425; for the capital gains tax discount taxation expenditure it is $54 billion – a total of $123 billion. In 2034-35, it is expected to be $228 billion. Over time, you could solve the Australian housing disaster with this money.

You don’t have to travel far to see the impact of these concessions on the Australian housing system. Just go to a Saturday auction and see a cashed-up (or loaned-up) investor easily outbid a young couple on two good wages for a home fit for a small family. Just talk to the countless parents whose adult children have had to move back in with them. Just look at families having to go fifty kilometres or more away from family, social supports, and work to buy or rent a home often only if the family can endure housing-cost stress, sometimes extreme. This has been happening apace since about 2000, with disastrous consequences for the Australian housing system and the realisation of the human right to housing, which should be its primary purpose.

There is still time to act, however. Successive Australian governments have framed housing the population purely as a matter of socio-economic policy, except that it is now the other way around. The commodity value of housing as an investment has been allowed to dominate the social value of housing as a home. This is a skewed way of looking at a fundamental human need that is embodied in a fundamental human right. Yet it has come to define the entire housing system. This is the root cause of our torment.

This skewed way of looking at housing has to change. We need to make the realisation of housing as a human right – indeed the ‘Great Australian Right’ – the purpose of the system. Achieving this purpose must be government’s primary responsibility. There will still be wide scope for socioeconomic policy to be democratically debated, developed, and implemented, but consistently with the human right to a decent home.

For this to occur, there must be a national housing and

homelessness plan that is rights-based, comprehensive, strategic, and legislated.

To be rights-based, it must have the primary purpose of realising the right to a decent home for all and apply human rights-based principles in doing so. Among other things, this means balanced support for all potential forms of tenure. In relation to First Peoples, it means the plan must be linked to, and consistent with, the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

To be comprehensive, it must cover all parts of the system, because they are interdependent. Among other things, this means that state and territory residential tenancies legislation must be reformed in line with human rights, especially the right to a decent home. In particular, it means the scourge of eviction without just cause must be ended in all jurisdictions.

To be strategic, it must specify ways and means for ensuring, over time, the right to a decent home for all and ending homelessness, not just lifting the funding effort from a pitifully low base, important though this is.

Finally, the plan must be supported by legislation that is strong enough to achieve its historic purpose in an enduring way, drawing on overseas experience. Because a national human rights act (supported by equivalent state and territory acts) would support human rights in the housing system and across the whole of government, this should also be legislated and include the right to a decent home and other economic, social, and cultural rights. g

Kevin Bell graduated in Arts and Law (Hons) from Monash University and worked at the Tenants Union of Victoria before practising as a barrister for twenty years. As a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria for fifteen years, he wrote many influential judgments on human rights, including the right to housing and home. He also served as a commissioner of the Yoorrook Justice Commission and has a Masters degree in international human rights law from Oxford University. He is presently an adjunct professor at Monash and the patron of Tenants Victoria.

© Robert Ashton 2024

This image of public housing is taken from a new publication: Fitzroy 1974 by Robert Ashton (Hardie Grant Books, $59.99 hb, 181 pp). The original version, Into the Hollow Mountains, was published in 1974, with texts by local authors, including Helen Garner. Fitzroy 1974 contains 100 of Ashton’s black-and-white photographs, plus texts by Tony Birch and Lorin Clarke. Ashton studied in the 1970s at Prahran College under Paul Cox and Athol Shmith. He now lives and works on the west coast of Victoria.

Get specific

Facing life in all its gritty detail

Beth Kearney

LSplinters: A memoir

by Leslie Jamison Granta

$34.99 hb, 272 pp

eslie Jamison never smooths over the thorny edges of life. Her first memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its aftermath (2018), recounts her journey from addiction to sobriety – or, rather, the cycle of addiction, denial, acceptance, sobriety, and relapse that defined her path to sobriety. Like all members of Alcoholics Anonymous, she is not alone in this messy recovery, and her first memoir reflects this by incorporating a multitude of other stories to sustain its central narrative. As with many of Jamison’s essays in The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), The Recovering connects her own subjectivity to the stories of others.

In her second memoir, Splinters, Jamison focuses far more expressly on her own life. And she looks closely, zooming in on the things that chisel her experience, that create life’s jagged edges. She faces life in all its gritty detail and, by refusing to simplify paradox or resort to cliché, generates a sense of honesty and authenticity.

The book opens in the wake of two events: the collapse of Jamison’s marriage and the birth of her daughter. With an occasional sprinkling of humour, she confronts both the pains and pleasures of this aftermath, dwelling not just on the actions and events that wound herself and others, but on her weaknesses and shortcomings: she gave up on a marriage, she smokes on her stoop when away from her daughter, she exhausts a stalwart friend with the tumults of her life, she finds a new addiction in sugar, and, like the sober alcoholic that she is, she always wants more.

Splinters has no clear plot in the traditional sense. Structured by three exposés titled ‘Milk’, ‘Smoke’, and ‘Fever’, it is loosely chronological, tracing Jamison’s life as her baby grows into a toddler.

The book looks back to the time prior to her separation from ‘C’ (the writer Charles Bock) and acknowledges the spectres haunting her life as a newly single mother. At times, Splinters feels like a series of anecdotes about the rhythm of life as a mother, writer, teacher, daughter, and friend who moves through beauty and mundanity, energy and exhaustion, eternal friendships and worn-out love and lust. But these anecdotes hold the book together; they provide the specifics that create not just sincerity, but emotional intensity. From the first lines, Jamison shows that the particularities of a given moment are the threads that constitute the fabric of life, its bigger picture: ‘The baby and I arrived at our sublet with garbage bags full of shampoo

and teething crackers, sleeves of instant oatmeal, zippered pajamas with little dangling feet.’

Most striking, perhaps, is her attention to the body. Jamison writes of her baby’s soft skin, as well as spit, shit, and the tattoos on her ex-husband and a new lover. The most memorable body, however, is that of the mother, whom she describes with an enormous range of emotional depth. She repeatedly reflects on breastfeeding, her sense of servitude to the baby and the breast pump, and the flap of skin above the scar on her abdomen, a reminder of her emergency caesarean section. When she writes of her own mother, her words bristle with gratitude, but also recognition. Jamison explains, for instance, that when she held her baby for the first time, she finally understood how much her own mother loved her, that she ‘could hardly stand the grace of it’.

In Splinters, others appear only in relation to the narrating self. Some readers may find that Jamison leans too heavily into the corporeal and the sentimental, and that, in so doing, she obscures the universality of her anecdotes. This criticism cannot be disentangled from considerations of gender: memoir examining the body and emotions has long been cast as a trivial, ‘feminine’ mode divorced from the rational tenor of writing coded as ‘masculine’. Jamison, who departs from her tendency to incorporate others into her non-fiction, risks facing the tired rebuke of feminine ‘navel-gazing’ (a term that conveniently associates self-absorption with the scar, recalling a physiological attachment to the mother). She appears to anticipate this criticism by connecting bodily experience to broader social concerns. When, for example, she struggles to find a place to breastfeed at university, she judges that it ‘was the institution’s fault, making women run around begging for the basic things their bodies needed’.

Jamison tackles the complexities of lived experience headon, often by focusing on paradox. She describes grief, loss, and impermanence, while also emphasising the eternal: her mother, who made all the book tours possible; her friends, who showed up with power tools to build furniture after moving house. The things that made Jamison leave her marriage are inseparable from the aspects of her ex-husband that she loved – these aspects still exist, but not for her.

These splinters of experience prick and sometimes remain lodged in the body long after the initial puncture. Splinters wound, but they are also, sometimes, surrounded by beauty: a mother, devoted and exhausted, grins back at her daughter, whose smile is sticky from the seeds and juice of a cherry tomato. Jamison shows that paradox and contradistinction render experience rich, and reminds us that the magical parts of life perhaps wouldn’t feel so good if they weren’t predicated on scarcity or the risk of erosion.

Jamison knows, too, that the prickly details – the ones that sting – are what animate her non-fiction. She tells her creative writing students: ‘dislodge the cocktail-party version of the story […] to get at the more complicated version lurking beneath the anecdote’.

Later, she tells of the end-of-semester cake she offered her cohort. Its red frosting says it all: ‘get specific’. g

Beth Kearney is an early career scholar of contemporary literature based at the University of Queensland. ❖

Robyn Arianrhod

Critic of the Month

Robyn Arianrhod is a science writer, and an affiliate of Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her reviews have appeared in Australian Book Review, The Age, Times Higher Education, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Cosmos, and Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Her latest book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation (UNSW Press, 2024).

When did you first write for ABR?

I first reviewed in 2019. The book was The Best Australian Science Writing 2019.

What makes a fine critic?

Intellectual honesty, relevant knowledge, attentive engagement with the work, and good writing. It’s also important that reviewers of narrative non-fiction show readers that such books tell stories or set a context that is broader, deeper, than quick Wiki facts or the best single-topic online articles.

Which critics most impress you?

I first learned the power of great critical writing from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, and Christopher Hitchens. I didn’t always agree with their tone or conclusions, but what depth, insight, and fine use of language!

Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?

I take on most offers, because I find it an interesting challenge to engage critically with a range of books.

What qualities do you look for in an editor?

For both books and reviews I appreciate useful advice on passages where I need to clarify my meaning, smooth my grammar, and check my punctuation. (I’ve learnt to curb my use of exclamation marks, although secretly I still like them!) With books, I also look for guidance in shaping the project. Blending my two hats, I really like the fact that ABR allows authors to respond to excessively negative reviews, and critics to respond in turn. For too long, authors have been advised not to respond to negative reviews, and I wish more editors would encourage this two-way interaction: it’s a deeper way of engaging author, critic, and reader.

Do you write with a particular kind of reader in mind?

As both a writer and critic of popular science books, I write for readers who are intrigued by science, even if they don’t know a lot about it. I know that such books and reviews can require a significant investment of thought and attention, so I like to imagine book-loving readers who enjoy ‘brain candy’.

Do you receive feedback from readers or authors?

I’m grateful for the feedback I’ve received from readers of my books and, in the case of reviews, from both readers and authors. But I haven’t had any responses to my ABR reviews yet – not even when I’ve hoped to promote discussion!

What do you think of negative reviews?

As a writer, I’ve learned from constructive criticism, and as a prospective reader of a book I welcome it. But either way nit-pickers drive me mad – the kind of critic who spends too much limited review space on minor points, or dissecting something in which they are expert but which is a relatively small part of the book under review. In my own reviews, I try hard to ensure that negative criticism is proportionate.

I am also wary of negative reviews proclaiming that the reviewer would have tackled the topic, or structured and written the book, better than the author. Valid criticisms of style and substance are necessary, but this should be constructive, not dismissive or self-serving. I have mixed feelings about uncurated reader review websites, where perceptive, engaged assessments sit alongside glib, ill-informed judgements, or anonymous star ratings that are based merely on personal preference. A good critic reviews in a much broader context than whether or not they personally ‘liked’ the book. And yet, some of the most irresponsibly negative reviews I have seen have been from partisan professionals.

Good criticism takes time, energy, and skill – and it is vital in introducing readers to new books, and to ways of reading those books. Understandably, experts are wary of popularisers misrepresenting or trivialising their subjects. Alain de Botton’s pioneering popular philosophy books spring to mind for having riled some academic reviewers, although their negative reviews did spark useful debate about accessibility. So, there is an art to reviewing popular non-fiction: calling out lack of rigour and misleading simplifications, not uncommon among ‘bestsellers’, but recognising when an author conveys the essence of the subject accurately and accessibly.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know? Generally, I’d prefer not to.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

To be fair to both author and reader. Also, to offer informed insight, rather than a simple summary.

As an author yourself: what do you look for in reviews of your own books?

I hope for a (preferably generous but definitely fair-minded) critic who will review the book on its own terms. I am delighted when a reviewer ‘gets’ the big picture of what I have attempted and explains this to readers – and when the storytelling and conceptual explanations are appreciated, too. g

And the ship sails on

Jock Serong’s elegant new novel

A. Frances Johnson

ICherrywood

by Jock Serong

Fourth Estate

$34.99 pb, 389 pp

ntertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations.

Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.

It has been a while since white historical novelists delved boldly into magical realms, evoking communities grown in unheimlich clusters over unceded land. Meanwhile, Aboriginal realist techniques have flourished in the novels of Alexis Wright and in stories such as Ellen Van Neerven’s ‘Water’ (Heat and Light, 2016). Such works resist Eurocentric lineages of magical realism, evoking Country-specific stories of spirituality and belonging that do not subjugate Indigenous knowledges or reductively romanticise ‘Blak works’ as purely magical.

But the plump settler historical novel, replete with cards of fate, discordant musicscapes, and wraiths a-plenty, is back. Gregory Day’s poetic-polyphonic The Bell of the World (2023) was recently described by critic Joy Lawn as ‘the long-awaited successor to Peter Carey’s Oscar & Lucinda …’ Both books, Lawn opines, ‘leave indelible symbolic images’. Now Jock Serong, departing from his deft historical trilogy – Preservation (2019), The Burning Island (2020), and Settlement (2022) – has written Cherrywood, described in the media release as bringing the ‘delicate, witty character-driven storytelling of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda to bear’.

In Day’s work, the ‘prepared’ piano and its subversive acoustics are pivotal; in Serong’s historical thriller, a salvaged paddle steamer Cherrywood (named for its rare timbers), rebuilt around 1920 as a ghostly hotel of the same name, takes centre stage. The hotel harbours tragic secrets within its timbers, acquired from the Transcaucasus by inexperienced industrialist Thomas Wrenfether, who emigrated to Melbourne with his precious cargo. Shift to Melbourne 1993, and the hotel’s leadlights shatter when resident spirits are put under pressure by occasional visitors. This is never good for trade, as the stock trio of Jack-Irish, old-timer barhops might agree. Ho hum, you might say, or clever intertext via Peter Temple? Why is this pub just like the actual Napier Hotel in

Fitzroy, but with better cabinetry and more gloom? It turns out that the trio were killed in a car accident decades before. It also turns out that the pub moves.

Early on, when the illustrious paddle steamer (detailed shipwright scenes beguile) sinks on its maiden voyage in Port Phillip Bay under the drunken hand of Captain Carville, the devastated Wrenfether feels ‘trapped in a glass cage’. His grief takes a terrible course, and his architecture-trained wife Lucinda is left to salvage the timber for a new business option. Lucinda, a skilful woman come down in the world, steps straight out of historian Clare Wright’s history of female publicans, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s female publicans (2014); Serong deftly foregrounds women’s contributions to labour history sans recourse to stifling narrative revisionism.

Lucinda’s daughter Annabelle (Nan) plays the redoubtable ageing publican in 1993. Nan actively conceals then grumpily reveals the Cherrywood’s mysteries, showing, in Jeanette Winterson’s words, how buildings themselves ‘catch and hold very violent traumatic episodes and then, in certain circumstances, can release them back to those of us who are sensitive enough to pick them up’ (The Book Show, Radio National, 10 June 2024).

This tale of an inner urban pub, trapped within Fitzrovian boundaries, exhibits the writer’s Australianist bona fides, though opening scenes also sketch emergent European modernities. When the first cars arrive on Edinburgh’s streets, the orphaned Thomas is dazzled by the free-wheeling reconfigurations of ‘a kettledrum and a steam engine’. Post–Great War chapters interweave televisual scenes set in a modern Melbourne law firm. Legalese matters are authoritatively detailed, though a stock genre character appears in the form of wolfish insurance litigator Brandon Manne.

Successful lawyer Martha, trapped inside this corporate tower with the tedious Brandon, discovers the pub by chance. Or not. When she hails a cab, a sage, tattooed Repo Man (yes, always the same one-eyed cabbie) drops her outside the Cherrywood. Here, Martha lands more than a bottleshop odyssey and a glass or two of time-travelling red. She falls in love with the benevolent barman Joey, washing and drying glasses of time. A cryptic but ultimately touching love story ensues.

Some uncanny conceits are more pleasurable than others. I could not fathom why Joey, orphaned (there are multiple orphans) in the paddle-steamer debacle, ages less than a decade, while Nan lives through real time. Lifting kegs over decades has perhaps kept him youthful and good in bed. Elsewhere, the Cherrywood’s ‘devils’ find time to undertake carpentry jobs at a local Fitzroy community centre, resurfacing asbestos ping-pong tables and a cigarette-stubbed piano with offcut cherrywood. Sometimes, cheerful, pious binaries of good and evil prevail. This points more to ripping yarn than postcolonial territory.

The hotel periodically sails across the suburb, Mary Poppins style. This goes charmingly unremarked by the general population, and it is the job of the reader and Martha to parse the pub’s sentient agencies. Clever Martha divines pub rules on sticky notes (‘The pub cannot leave Fitzroy’; ‘The pub doesn’t like me’, etc). Rather sentimentally, the beery TARDIS doesn’t budge if someone falls in love inside. But Nan does not own any land, and repossession appears imminent. A solution needs to be found

and Nan, with help from the devils and Martha, is its architect. Rules of craft are elegantly applied to this entertaining historical thriller. World-building and characterisation across time and place are wonderfully realised. The final scenes offer an exquisite set piece, mapping Nan’s moving fate against the extraordinary

A chorus of souls

Fiona McFarlane’s discursive theodicy

Geordie Williamson

JHighway 13

by Fiona McFarlane Allen & Unwin

$32.99 pb, 298 pp

orge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.

Fiona McFarlane’s new short story collection proceeds in fealty to this idea, though in a darkling and inverted manner. Each of Highway 13’s fictions is concerned with murder, the ultimate de-creative act. Such deaths cruelly amputate the full potentialities of a human being, and not just in isolation. The loss of a child, sibling, lover, partner, or friend rends the social fabric; it alters lives, now and into the future. But a cluster of such deaths generates something bleaker still. Entire townships and communities are warped by the pain engendered. Social networks are scrambled and degraded. Whole families are disarticulated by grief, while trauma can recur down the generations in a manner almost epigenetic. The dead travel widely, too, in the form of shadows cast by every effort made by survivors to outrun them.

The dozen stories in Highway 13 use our ghoulish fascination with true crime as a come hither, but they really oblige readers to consider the supposedly innocent past as a field of latent and sinister possibility, where chance events are recast as fates and portents.

Australian readers of a certain age will immediately note the murders described in these pages loosely accord with those attributed to Ivan Milat: an individual who murdered at least five men and two women in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before burying their bodies in the Belanglo State Forest south of Sydney.

McFarlane, quite sensibly, does not face these events directly: Milat’s psychopathy is a black hole that releases no information. What she designs instead is a broad, discursive, ‘suburban’ theodicy. She ponders the existence of evil through its effects

Melbourne floods of 1994. Connections between past and present are well caulked as the waters of memory release. g

A. Frances Johnson is a writer, artist, and Associate Professor (Honorary) in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

on those ordinary lives and places that intersect with the killer’s serial predations.

Take the story ‘Demolition’. Set in 2003, it describes the physical destruction of the Biga family home (Paul Biga, as the murderer is named here, has been convicted of his crimes and any remaining family has scattered). We watch – or rather, hear – events from the next door neighbour’s home and are asked to consider them from the perspective of the wheelchair-bound former teacher named Eva Forsythe: a woman gentle-hearted enough to permit the company, on this day, of a hack writer who interviewed her years before and who has swung back to wring one more article out of the collective pain, but wise enough to continue to withhold information that is significant.

As authorities restrain a growing crowd of gawkers excited at the prospect of destruction and potential souvenirs, the writer witlessly probes Eva’s memories of years spent living cheek by jowl with the Biga family. Even when the old woman is truthful, the writer will not hear what she has to say.

The Biga house was only rented to them, Eva insists, by its original owners; its imminent destruction is a combination of bureaucratic misdirection and primitive superstition. What Eva does not say is that the original owners moved because, as a teenager, she was discovered in bed with the daughter of the house. The pair were in love; their parents were appalled.

As the men outside cheer and clap the destruction of Eva’s most painful and treasured memories, the teacher wonders if some residue of the time with her young lover had not lingered in the dwelling. Why else would the young Paul – quiet, polite, a helpful weekend worker in their garden – send her a letter of carefully articulated pornographic desire all those years ago, unless he inherited the room where her own erotic existence was unveiled?

This is McFarlane writing at ground zero. Yet she is equally capable of playing six degrees of separation with her cast. ‘Hostel’, for instance, set in 1995 in Sydney’s gentrifying inner-western suburbs, plays similar material for sour laughter and a sense of dread that is strengthened by the slanted manner in which it is told. The narrator is a woman who, in the near present, recalls a couple named Roy and Mandy. Careless, carefree types, confident in their social status, education, wealth and youth, Roy and Mandy are kindly generous, for a time, to their marginally less favoured friend and once told her of a chance encounter they had had with a girl, known only as ‘S’.

The young woman had fallen out with her boyfriend and was, for that moment, without a place to go. Roy and Mandy invited her back to their handsome terrace, heard the girl’s story with sympathy and tea, and made up a sofa for the night: a thoughtless act of trust by a couple who remembered the thrills and palls of backpacker travel. By morning ‘S’ was gone, leaving nothing but an appreciative note.

The postscript of this story came several months later, when Mandy read a newspaper article about a pair of Swiss backpackers, Daniel and Sabine, who had gone missing while hitchhiking in southern New South Wales. Their remains were subsequently discovered by mushroom foragers in a State Forest. Both had been shot; Daniel had been stabbed.

The narrator, who has held this story with tongs up until now, finding subtle fault with a couple who had failed to even remember the dead girl’s name, surprises herself in one sincere and unguarded moment: ‘Until then, I had never taken seriously the concept of evil. It was too abstract, I thought, and too convenient. Of course there was no power that moved in darkness through the world, recruiting some people and striking others.’ But the feeling she has while watching footage of the search helicopters on television at the time – a lurch in her stomach and tingle at the roots of her hair – figures like a negative aesthetic response. Her body does not believe her rationalising, and all the drollness of her telling cannot expunge the horror that attends it.

The collection pursues this dark thread back in time. The earliest story in the collection, ‘Lucy’, set in the early 1950s

though placed last in the book, furnishes a prehistory of the murderer’s parents and family, one that tellingly leaves off at the moment when Peter Biga’s mother accepts his father’s marriage proposal. That story, ‘Abroad’, in which the crass, confected horror of the American holiday covers for a real and durable sense of terror and survivor’s guilt, takes us to the very edge of Biga’s universe of evil, just as ‘Lucy’ take us to its origin story.

McFarlane goes everywhere, sees everything, feels everything through her creations. Hers is a tonally adroit collection and one in which the author always has a new seam of narrative potential to mine or a new character to inhabit.

Except one: the killer himself. The central achievement of Highway 13 is to refuse the blandishments of the figure who shapes its assembled stories. He remains, as he must, unknowable, even unthinkable. What McFarlane gives us instead is a chorus of souls united in the face of violence, though if only (as Patrick White put it in The Tree of Man) ‘on the common ground of frailty’. g

Geordie Williamson is a writer, publisher and critic.

Belanglo State Forest (photograph by Maksym Kozlenko, via Wikimedia Commons)

A web of music

A substantial addition to Rodney Hall’s oeuvre

James Ley

Tby Rodney Hall Picador

$34.99 pb, 453 pp

he title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole. As a dynamic metaphor for the novel’s wide-ranging vision of history, the title might be interpreted as the opposite of a widening gyre, a repudiation of the terrifying prospect of mere anarchy, an affirmation of the idea that there is a shape (and indeed a gravity) to events that grants them a kind of coherence, though the fact that the ordering centre of a vortex is also the point of annihilation is hardly reassuring.

One can only push such a metaphor so far before it begins to break down, which is perhaps why Vortex proposes another. It is mentioned at several points in the novel, but stated most explicitly by a Hungarian philosopher and philologist named Dr Antal Bródy, one of several European émigré characters. The English word for ‘history’, he observes, is derived from the Greek istoria, which originally denoted a web. When his interlocutor wonders if the word has something to do with ‘his story’, Bródy’s reply is blunt: ‘Not a story at all.’

There is a visual affinity between these two defining metaphors in the spiral pattern of a spider’s web, and a conceptual affinity in the repudiation of linearity and a shared sense of fatalism – neither is something one would want to be caught in. But it is the suggestive incongruence, the contrast between the respective means of entrapment, that opens up the imaginative space of the novel. The irresistible centripetal force of a vortex is a very different proposition to the static concept of a web. One draws you in; the other immobilises you, fixes you at the intersection of multiple determining threads. Vortex squares this circle by surveying its historical moment from the sclerotic point of a turning world, a marginal setting it conceptualises as central: a place where the violent and chaotic forces of history can be seen to converge, but which is itself inert, a place where nothing much happens –a cultural and historical black hole, so to speak. And where would one find such a place? Hall’s precise solution to this conceptual conundrum, viewed in a certain light, is actually quite funny: Brisbane in 1954.

At its most expansive, Vortex is global in outlook. It depicts a world in transition, still reeling from the carnage of World War II, but beginning to coalesce into a new order. The fragmented

narrative reaches beyond its Australian setting to evoke the waning of the British Empire and the escalation of the Cold War. There are references to the first stirrings of the conflict that would mutate into the Vietnam War and to massacres of communists in Indonesia and Kenya. The novel also alludes to the beginnings of the space race and the communications revolution enabled by satellite technology. There is even some foreshadowing – somewhat oblique, but clear enough (one instance involves a prophetic dream) – of the fortress mentality that has come to characterise the populist nationalism of this century, thanks in no small part to the pioneering viciousness of Australia’s border policies.

Against this sweeping historical backdrop, Hall parades a sharply drawn cast of cosmopolitan characters who have found themselves in the international backwater of Brisbane as the city prepares for the arrival of the young Queen Elizabeth II on her first royal tour of the antipodes. When they are not themselves satirical targets, these characters bring to the novel a droll, defamiliarising gaze, their very presence an ironic undermining of Australia’s presumed distance from world affairs. The intellectual Dr Bródy, a refugee from the European war, supplies the most articulate and amusing denunciations of the cultural backwardness and philistinism of a country that refuses even to recognise his numerous academic qualifications. Vassily Hmelinsky, a loyal tsarist who fled the Russian Revolution and now lives as a vagrant on the streets of Brisbane, gives the novel an angle on Australia’s pre-eminent Cold War scandal, the Petrov Affair. A disaffected Spanish countess named Paloma is there because her pompous husband Colonel Claverhouse – a man full of ‘tinpot self-importance’ – is in charge of security for the royal tour.

But the heart of Vortex, and its narrative spine (it is the closest the novel comes to the dread word ‘story’), is Hall’s sensitive depiction of a relationship that develops between an adolescent boy named Compton Gillespie and a German immigrant named Beckmann. The pair meet at a museum in front of a display of Tollund Man, an ancient corpse discovered in a Danish bog with a rope around his neck. Their casual speculations about his death (was he murdered? was he a willing participant in some kind of ritual sacrifice?) turn Compton’s thoughts to the vortex of history, its many lost and unknowable details, what it might reveal about the mysteries of human behaviour. They also rouse his curiosity about Beckmann, who becomes a somewhat enigmatic father-figure for the solitary fatherless boy, whose mother is in hospital stricken with cancer, and who is uncertain about how to mature into manhood.

Compton is intrigued that Beckmann fought for the enemy in the last war. Even more intriguingly, Beckmann claims that Wolfgang Borchert’s The Man Outside, a celebrated German play about a suicidal soldier recently returned from the battle of Stalingrad, was written about him. Other details about his past are revealed, though pointedly it never quite comes into focus. Beckmann does, however, present Compton with two symbolic gifts: a book (a translation of Borchert’s writing) and a wristwatch. In this sense, Vortex is less a novel of revelation than a story of initiation. Beckmann is an elusive figure who emerges simultaneously from history and literature, awakening Compton to the significance of both. In a deeper sense, he suggests a curious symbiosis between the two, the entanglement and necessity of

Vortex

their insights, his example ultimately leading Compton to seek truths closer to home, in defiance of the denials and evasions of Australia’s violent colonial history.

In a reflective passage that seems for a moment to break free of the novel’s scrupulously observant quality, Hall acknowledges the ‘fragmentation. In this case the chosen year – an arbitrary slice of time – can only be imagined thanks to that friction between what we remember as happening and what actually happened. The interruptibility of a web of music. Such is the tragedy of the book you have in your hand.’ He goes on to quote Kafka’s frequently cited line about literature’s imperative to hack at the frozen sea inside us with an axe, musing in a somewhat apologetic tone that the passing of time and the vagaries of memory have rendered his capacity to do so ‘unavoidably diminished’.

Vortex is nevertheless a substantial addition to Hall’s already substantial body of work. It is a novel that draws its full measure of vitality from its concerted attempt to recreate a particular time and place. Capacious and richly descriptive, it at times earns the

labels loose and baggy; it sets out to cover an extraordinary amount of historical ground. But it is just as often content to luxuriate in its Joycean sprawl, taking pleasure in the sound and shape of its inventive sentences. The fragmented technique is, on occasion, reminiscent of the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode in Ulysses. The novel’s unconstrained perspective ranges across the city and beyond to convey the multifariousness and simultaneity of life. Sections begin and end mid-sentence, allowing them to flow into each other, but also suggesting that we are always arriving in medias res and the events we witness will continue to unfold when out attention is redirected. At its best, the novel’s imaginative reach, and the ease and freedom of Hall’s late style, affirm the literary principle that, for a capable writer, the centre of the world can be anywhere. g

James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. A former Editor of Sydney Review of Books, he has been a regular contributor to ABR since 2003. He is the author of The Critic in the Modern World (2014).

Big Meadow

Someone has left the day wide open here

But no one ever comes to mow the grass. A man stands out of earshot, just a flash

Of red above the green and lemon stalks, And then the sunlight spirits him away. He’s come, like us, to spend an afternoon

With daisies, butterflies, bull thistle spikes, And lose his body in forgotten grass. No talk when wading through this inland sea,

No need to name the milkweed, Queen Anne’s lace, No need to speak of lilies springing out Like tigers from the track we roughly make

And unmake as we wander through the day, No need to call the thorny locust out Or tempt it with a fingertip. No need.

Words without eyelids come and look around From in our heads and from those songs we love, As afternoon grows sweet: air, cloud, and sky,

And then all settle down to flourish here, Where grasses, trees and rocks step out of time And leave us free to live inside the sun

That whispers, ‘Come, rest in my golden breath,’ And half-imagine that we all can stretch Ourselves like this throughout the years to come.

Some bumblebees dance round the bergamot. My son is hidden in the thick long grass: Not even the circling crow can see him now.

Kevin Hart

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip in Brisbane, 1954 (Alpha Historica / Alamy)

Surreal and vertiginous

A dizzying fable of a novel

Rose Lucas

TThe

Oxenbridge King

by Christine Paice

Fourth Estate

$34.99 pb, 346 pp

here is a great deal going on in Christine Paice’s new novel, The Oxenbridge King. In this narrative, we meet the troubled soul of Richard III (1452-85), unable to find rest, a contemporary young woman who struggles with loss and misjudged relationships, an angel emerging from his chrysalis after being trapped for centuries in the cellar of the family home, and a talking bird that operates as a link between characters, places, times. In what can feel like dreamlike jolts, the parallel immediacies of 500 years ago and today keep warping and collapsing into each other.

Paice, an Australian poet, creates a densely textured, sometimes surreal and vertiginous panoply of event and emotion: a novel that is part historical fiction, part gothic imaginings of a house literarily inhabited by the past, part philosophical commentary on the impact of an unaddressed past on our actions and choices in the present. The Oxenbridge King also makes surprising use of the madcap and the irreverent as it traverses its themes of particular and universal significance, and as the tone of its narration veers from the serious or transcendent to the everyday, the offbeat, even the absurdist.

Where does any story start? If ‘story’ can be understood as the way we humans have of making sense of ourselves and our world, Paice’s novel suggests that all stories, however personal they might feel, have their roots in other stories, and are part of an endless loop of story making. This flow – almost a flood in the novel – of interweaving narratives is initiated by a putative visit paid by King Richard to the Abbey of Stern in a town called Oxenbridge, not so long before his catastrophic encounter with ‘the Tudor’ at Bosworth Field in 1485. At the Abbey, he entreats the holy community to protect him with their prayers, but when the impressionable young monk, somewhat mythically named Daedalus, later sees Richard’s bloodied and desecrated corpse slung over a horse, he knows he has failed his king. When, 500 years later, Daedalus stirs in his underground tomb in a cellar in Oxenbridge, finding the Stern family occupying the house above, he comes to see that now is the time to right past wrongs, to help the suffering souls he encounters toward some kind of peace.

The figure of Richard III has long been one of the more ambiguous and mysterious in English history and literature –from Shakespeare’s Tudor-era depiction of him as monstrous and misshapen, to Josephine Tey’s 1951 detective novel Daughter of Time, which investigates Richard’s supposed culpability for the

murder of his two nephews in the Tower, to Sonya Hartnett’s imaginative young adult fiction, The Children of the King (2012). Overwritten perhaps by Tudor propaganda, Richard has haunted popular imagination. Whose version is correct? Could he really be responsible for the deaths of his innocent nephews in a Machiavellian pursuit of power? What might a modern reappraisal of Richard look like? These questions were of course made immediate by the discovery of his remains under a car park in Leicester in 2012. Paice takes a whimsical approach that makes this a story both about how we view the character of Richard and, more broadly, one that considers the kinds of ghosts each of us carries and how to reckon with them.

The notion of an interstitial space between life and death – what Paice refers to as the shadow world of ‘Threadbare’ – is again one which has been explored in different contexts, most notably as a kind of purgatory, underworld, or, in the Tibetan context, the idea of the bardo. In this way, The Oxenbridge King could be seen as a close cousin of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, being also part realist/part fantastical exploration of both an influential historical identity and a foray into an other-worldly fantastical space in which the unmanaged dead still cling to the shards of life and the living still reach out to them with unbearable longing. While Saunders created a quasi-drama with the voices of the dead and the voices of historical record, Paice has blended stories of past and present, allowing the spaces, concerns and souls of the protagonists to co-exist in an extended metaphor of guilt, repression, loss, and their hopeful antidotes of compassion and finding.

As the novel swings between various kinds of worlds, Raven, the smart-mouthed talking bird, operates as a slightly unreliable guide – for Richard’s soul, stranded in the purgatory of Threadbare, for Daedalus as he seeks to rise from various kinds of darkness toward light and insight, and even for Molly Stern and her family, who grapple with their own questions and pains. Raven’s cocky voice also counterbalances the novel’s otherwise portentous themes of life, death, guilt, salvation; for instance, his semi-joking reference to the bedraggled soul of the monarch as his ‘Kingly King, Ricardo’ creates another possible tone and interpretation for the reader, lightening the mood.

The publicity for The Oxenbridge King likens it to the work of Neil Gaiman, among others. Apart from more adult themes such as sexual misadventure, fear of dementia, broken families, Paice’s narrative is reminiscent of Gaiman’s novella Coraline, with its evocation of the gothic trope of the haunted house as a representation of secrets and closures both within the self and within the organism of the family or inner community. In Paice’s version, the architectural metaphor of the house – what is upstairs, what has access to the everyday world, and what is below, cellars that tip into centuries, fantasies, psychological realities –is supplemented by the rigidity of the tower as a place of restraint and guilt. Caught in the past, Molly has literally been ‘half in love’ with death: through the opening of trapdoors, windows, even catflaps, this dizzying fable of a novel signals what it might mean to let happiness in. g

Rose Lucas’s fifth poetry collection, Remarkable as Breathing, was recently published by Liquid Amber Press.

Mother Pulse

A peripatetic first novel

Anthony Lynch

RThe Degenerates

by Raeden Richardson

Text Publishing

$34.99 pb, 309 pp

ecent decades have seen no shortage of what might broadly be called diasporic Australian novels. Works by Brian Castro and Michelle de Kretser, among others, come to mind. Raeden Richardson adds fruitfully to this tradition with his complex début novel, The Degenerates, which sets out from then-Bombay and journeys to the streets of Melbourne and New York. It is not quite a ‘constellation novel’ (the term coined by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk), in which textual fragments and polyphonic voices build a narrative. Richardson nevertheless offers a series of story threads that slowly accumulate and nudge the boundaries of conventional form and storytelling.

Broken into sections with one-word titles, and written in a shifting, intimate third-person voice, the novel comprises scenes conveyed in single-paragraph subsections and a racy vernacular. In the opening section, ‘Nasbandi’, meaning vasectomy or sterilisation in Hindi, we meet a young Somnath Sunder Sonpate, an ‘Untouchable’ who has travelled to Bombay to make his fortune. It is 1976, when Indira Gandhi’s declared ‘Emergency’ has curtailed civil rights and imposed curfews. Somnath ekes out a life on the street fronted by Readymoney Mansion, polishing the shoes of traders and businessmen, repairing the motorcyles of clerks for a single rupee. But Somnath has big ambitions: to amass rupees, build a mansion of his own, and have six sons, then thirty-six grandsons. ‘There was nothing more worthy than an heir, yaah, and nothing more desirable than a hustling, bustling bloodline.’ Meanwhile he befriends Preeti, a street beggar who is tongueless thanks to a ‘beggarwhallah’s’ unbelief in her virgin pregnancy.

Possibly Somnath’s full name is a play on thwarted ambition, but at any rate his plans for sons are cruelly sundered when police arrest him during a curfew and force a vasectomy upon him. Afterwards, he finds Preeti’s abandoned infant on the street. In one of the novel’s magical realist touches, the baby feeds from one of his suddenly lactating nipples. He names the child Maha, for her ‘endless gaze’.

These haunting opening scenes inform all that follows. Quickly we find ourselves in inner Melbourne, where Somnath, Maha at his side, sets up a ‘chop shop’ in Degraves Street, making ‘honest repairs’ to motorbikes and, in time, performing not-so-honest jobs for bikie gangs and passing ‘cash and papers’ to unnamed men.

Years pass, he hires apprentices, Maha grows up, reading widely and munching pastries. But when workaholic Somnath,

‘heart worn out by years of tension’, dies suddenly, Maha’s life pivots. Alone, she begins writing down her father’s story, which metafictionally shapes as the story we have read so far. Though ‘commuter crowds parted at her approach’ (we can only guess at Maha’s physical and mental state), she is blessed with uncanny insight and instantly divines the sad and troubling histories of those she calls ‘the degenerates’ – a term that comes to endow grace rather than contempt. She advertises herself as ‘Mother Pulse … Your Lifelong Listener and Subterranean Storyteller’. Receiving letters from her degenerates, she writes back and becomes known to followers as a ‘deity on Degraves’.

Two stories occupy Maha and form the core of this novel. Titch is a skinny, lonesome boy who finds a soul mate in another outsider, Skeater. Titch and his new friend, who is obese, bond by becoming gym junkies. But when his ally (whom Titch can’t bear to name, and whose name is a literal blank in most of the novel) takes his life, Titch’s life is derailed. He abandons the gym and drops out of university; the ants that overrun his rental, and sometimes Titch himself, are his only companions. Hoping to start a ‘new life’ and ‘delete his months of pain’, he is given a job at a Chadstone bookstore by its young manager, Ginny. Like a baton, the story is passed to Ginny, who bears the scars of familial abuse. Taking a holiday in New York, Ginny finds a new group of friends and plunges into an exciting, if edgy, extended stay. Obliged eventually to come back to dour Melbourne, she pines for and plots a return to New York.

This is a narrative both pacey and immersed in the specifics of everyday life, anchored yet adrift. While the reader must sometimes connect the dots or await a slow reveal, settings and scenes develop by accrual of almost hallucinogenic detail. Events overtake characters with dizzying speed while they mire themselves in minutiae. Richardson locates these characters in particular times and places. We learn what houses, what streets, what shops they occupy. Much takes place in 2017, during Richmond’s AFL premiership season, a non-essential, Melbourne-typical feature. And while Richardson’s attention to world-building is admirable, I didn’t need to know that Ginny’s deodorant is Lynx, her lighter a Bic, and exactly how a strand of her hair winds down a plughole.

For Maha/Mother Pulse and her followers, an area known as the ‘Red Plains’ beyond Melbourne’s fringe comes to signify a final life step, a place of peace and acceptance, or at least of peaceful death. It is also ‘a state of mind’, echoing perhaps the titular remote destinations in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands (1958) and Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982). We learn more about Somnath’s aspirations and plans, but I was sorry his moving story was not tracked for longer and more intimately, post-Bombay. The now ageing Mother Pulse endures. Even allowing for the novel’s fabulist orientation, how are we to read this guru figure, whose devoted followers congregate in a kind of refugee camp where everyone is happy?

For this reader, Titch and Ginny develop as the more tangible and affecting characters in a novel that grants dignity to the lost and troubled, and whose vivid stories are conveyed with humour, insight, and empathy. g

Anthony Lynch writes poetry, fiction, and reviews.

The miracle symphony

The SSO honours Anton Bruckner’s centenary

Malcolm Gillies

On 4 September 2024, the world of classical music, and especially its Austro-Germanic heartland, will celebrate the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. Australia’s homage to this symphonic Titan is relatively modest, though these months do include performances of his Ninth (QSO), and Fourth (MSO and TSO), along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s four performances of the Eighth Symphony, under Simone Young, in early August. Young’s global reputation increasingly rides on dynamic interpretations of large laterRomantic works, by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss, as well as Bruckner.

So, which Eighth Symphony? This question does matter, as with all Bruckner’s (arguably, nine) symphonies there are variants, versions, and scholarly editions aplenty – no less than six, in the Eighth’s case – which help to keep a small army of forensic musicologists and critics happily in business. Audience members do notice the differences in duration between these variant forms – sometimes up to fifteen or twenty minutes – as well as startling changes of content.

On 7 August, using a score based upon Bruckner’s first (1887) version, the first movement ended with a fortissimo blast rather than the pianissimo whimper of (most) later versions. Conductors line up with their favourite forms for this orchestral juggernaut, armed with arguments about genetic purity, sensible or senseless ‘compromise’, relative playability, or simply through knowing the speed needed to keep an evening audience in thrall, or even just awake. Current doyen of Bruckner conductors, the ninetyseven-year-old Swede Herbert Blomstedt, recently hailed this work as a ‘miracle symphony’, noting in the February 2024 issue of Gramophone its highly organic, yet fluid architecture: ‘I believe there is no perfect edition … I have a number of performances of the Eighth planned in the years ahead.’ Blomstedt promptly went on, in May, to conduct a performance with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, informed by a new (Hawkshaw) edition of Bruckner’s 1887 original. The sixty-three-year-old Young, using a somewhat less scrupulous (Nowak) edition, from 1972, stands at the lower end of conductors in terms of performance duration of any of the Eighth’s versions.

This performance showed off the Opera House’s Concert Hall at its acoustic and logistical best. With four traditional

instrumental-only movements, requiring a ninety-five-piece orchestra, it elegantly filled the renovated Hall’s stage, and played to a comfortably full house. The work’s corporate tonal balance is built around a full contingent of sixty-three strings (including three harps) and sixteen brass, with a smaller complement of woodwinds and scant percussion. Yet those winds, especially SSO’s excellent flute, clarinet, and oboe principals, featured illustriously in quieter or more transitional moments, and most deliciously in their cameo solos, duos, or trios. Most distinctive, however, to the rich string-brass orchestral sound, and especially notable in its stalwart final movement, was the busy deployment of nine horn players, including four who switched on occasion to ‘Wagner tubas’ (with skyward facing bells). Curiously, then, it was in the exposed opening and treacherous closing moments of the symphony that the Orchestra momentarily let us glimpse behind an otherwise impressively united corporate posture.

In shaping her muscular and energetic interpretation, Young well balances the competing claims of Bruckner’s dedication to Wagnerian melodic development (although less chromatic than Wagner), and his constant recourse to an almost baroque repetition and sequencing of short mottos. These are the tools by which he, in composition, and Young, in performance, build relentlessly to compelling climaxes. In the third, slow movement, Young audibly stamped her foot to start the final push to the top, where the climax is capped by the singular appearance of cymbals and triangle. Yet, as Wagner and later Richard Strauss demonstrate, the way down from climaxes can be tricky, with thematic and tonal plans sometimes taking divergent pathways, and the composer’s slow winding down of the music’s tension risking a dangerous loss of momentum. Young sure-footedly negotiated these concluding twists and turns, leaving this third movement as the most impressive interpretation of the evening.

If one German word summarises Bruckner’s desired approach to so much of this symphony’s content, it is feierlich. The term is found in the instructions to all movements except the second, Scherzo and Trio. Meaning ‘solemn’ or ‘ceremonial’, its range of English meanings can extend from ‘grave’ to ‘festive’. Young and her orchestra wonderfully explored these various shades of mood, sensibly preferring not to rush the tempos and thereby avoiding a temptation to extend the soundscape to ‘brilliance’, on the one hand, or to ‘bombast’, on the other. Only as the fourth movement found its way towards its final, tonic affirmation did that more modest sense of feierlich become overwhelmed by the sheer tutti blaze of sound.

The audience seemed gobsmacked by Bruckner’s Eighth. The applause was relatively perfunctory, hardly giving time for the conductor to recognise the instrumentalists of particular note, let alone for all to give adequate acknowledgment of the towering achievement it is to conduct such an organic, ‘miracle symphony’ so cogently. The programming was partly to blame. Bruckner’s symphony appeared as the second ‘half’ of the SSO’s program, although three times the length of Mendelssohn’s sparkling E-minor Violin Concerto, which commanded the first ‘half’. There, soloist Augustin Hadelich had wowed everyone, including the orchestra itself. The audience response had been close to ecstatic. How could the dour Bruckner’s long and solemn work even compare? g

Portrait of Anton Bruckner, by Ferry Bératon

Space within turmoil

An uneven production of Chekhov’s classic Clare Monagle

Straddling broad comedy and genuine pathos, Uncle Vanya, first produced in 1899, is a very tricky play indeed. The main characters are mostly puffed up with delusion and fuelled by romantic fantasy. They use mordant self-deprecation alongside flights of fancy to express their dissatisfaction with their lot. The play encourages the audience to laugh at the evident gap between these characters’ vaulting sense of how special their lives ought to be relative to their actual lives of middling privilege, conducted in middling places. And yet, behind the comedy the play offers an exquisite exploration of the ‘insignificant’ disappointments that punctuate most lives, and which, when experienced in sequence, hint at tragedy. For Uncle Vanya to succeed on stage, the production must be able to flourish in both registers simultaneously, seamlessly weaving together the play’s farcical and existential dimensions.

Ensemble Theatre’s production of Uncle Vanya provides vigorous comedy. In its quieter moments, the production offers a restive sense of bleak but stoic contemplation. But the elements do not fuse, and with Anton Chekhov it is in the fusion that the magic happens. There are some wonderful performances, some side-splitting laughs, and some moments of acute tenderness in this production. All too often, however, I felt that I was watching two different plays on stage, without knowing how to find unity in the tonal diversity.

It is the main characters that provide the farce and the satire. Vanya, played by Yalin Ocuzelik, manages the country estate that belonged to his deceased sister. He lives with his sister’s daughter Sonya (Abbey Morgan), his mother Maryia (Vanessa Downing), and an elderly servant Nanny (also Vanessa Downing). Vanya offers tiresome and regular, as gauged by the response of his household, complaints about his rural life and the loss of his youthful potential.

His partner in provincial whingeing is the doctor Astrov (Tim Walker), who manages his own disappointment with vodka. Vanya and Astrov’s routine of impotent kvetching is interrupted

by the arrival of Serebryakov (David Lynch), the ex-husband of Vanya’s sister and Sonya’s father. Serebryakov is a pompous, urbane intellectual with a desirable and much younger wife, Yelena (Chantelle Jamieson). Their arrival arouses desire and jealousy on the part of Vanya and Astrov, as they both resent the smug indifference of Serebryakov, while at the same time angling after the affections of Yelena. Chaos, as you might imagine, ensues between this ménage à quatre. The four actors that make up this central quartet offer excellent comic timing as well as energetic physicality. Their interactions were often riotous and were received with the likewise riotous chuckles of the audience.

The play has been adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith, who was able to modernise and vernacularise Chekhov’s language without depriving it of a sense of context and historicity. Her deployment of Australian colloquialism was deft and never gimmicky, always providing a translational bridge to the world of Chekhov. Her writing shines most brightly, I think, in the scenes that centre the play’s ostensibly secondary characters: Sonya, Nanny, and the neighbour Telyeghin (John Gaden). Sonya holds a torch for Astrov, and Abbey Morgan conveys beautifully the timidity and excitement of her girlish passion, alongside her rigorous sense of duty to her work and her family. Vanessa Downey’s Nanny, while also claiming many comedic moments, offers the gravitational pull of wisdom and acceptance of one’s situation. And, unsurprisingly, even in his small role, Gaden stole the show. His woebegone neighbour elevated every scene he was in; he can do more with a raised eyebrow than most actors can do with their entire body.

Combined, the performances of Morgan, Downey and Gaden supplied a foil to the antic physicality of the show’s leads, somehow generating space for reflection and contemplation within the turmoil. Unfortunately, however, I found that the excellence of these performances overshadowed the ludic dramatics of the leads. It was hard to work out how to hold it all together.

I would thoroughly recommend this production to audiences, inasmuch as it was highly entertaining, dextrously humorous, and bravely ambitious in its commissioning of an excellent new adaptation. I am not sure, however, that the production illuminates the most startling and profound aspects of Chekhov’s work. Chekhov dwells in the ordinary and holds to a limited scale, and yet his plays and short stories are universalising in their account of the feeling-ness and subtleties that vibrate in all spaces, however little or privileged or dull.

The scale may be modest, but the best executions of Chekhov produce the broadest of psychic horizons. By that measure, this production fell short. Although I felt the absence of expanded horizons, Ensemble Theatre’s Uncle Vanya offers a delightful array of elements to its audience; there are scenes of hilarity, dark comedy, and sadness that are wonderful to behold. And when remembering the wistful performance of Abbey Morgan, I have a hunch that a star may have been born. With all this talk of horizons, the birth of a star is surely alone worth the price of admission. g

Clare Monagle is a Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University, with expertise in medieval intellectual history and gender studies.

Abbey Morgan as Sonya and Yalin Ozucelik as Vanya (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Surrender and catch

A Brent Harris retrospective in Adelaide

Patrick Flanery

Art travels, or it does not – in the latter case, often unjustly. Artists known in one country are not always visible beyond it, just as national cultures of literature and music often develop and remain supported entirely from within. This does not mean, however, that the artists, writers, and musicians themselves are untravelled, nor that their individual practices evolve in ignorance of what is happening elsewhere.

Brent Harris might be judged one such artist, a painter and printmaker whose work is known chiefly in Aotearoa New Zealand, where he was born in 1956, and Australia, where he was trained and has lived since graduating from art school. Despite his travels and residencies overseas and appearances in group shows in Europe, Harris has not yet enjoyed the level of international recognition that he so clearly deserves. The Art Gallery of South Australia’s new exhibition, ‘Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch’ (mounted in partnership with the TarraWarra Museum of Art, where a first iteration of the exhibition was on display earlier in 2023-24), along with an accompanying volume edited by curator Maria Zagala, offers a compelling retrospective of this singular artist’s work, making what might be considered a case for acclaim, and one that I found convincing.

Zagala’s long central essay in the elegant and intelligent companion volume charts the trajectory of Harris’s career and his exceptionally varied influences. With great insight and subtlety, Zagala and the other contributors contextualise the work, offering informed analyses of a four-decade-long career. Zagala’s description of Harris’s sustained practices in meditation and automatic drawing, as well as his experience in psychotherapy, allows us to understand the work in terms of its engagement with inheritances of Modernism, and Surrealism more specifically. Harris has explained that ‘[t]he idea of surrender and catch’, drawn from the work of sociologist Kurt H. Wolff, is that ‘you must “surrender” to what is happening’ and be ‘ready to “catch” what is thrown up by the subconscious and the working process – letting things bubble to the surface without too many preconceived ideas prefiguring the outcome’.

For Harris, the result of this psychological process is a body of work that attains the visual sensibility of an ongoing dream state. Logic is subordinated to affect, figuration erupts in a field of abstraction, while figures, shapes, and themes recur like shapeshifting spectres, haunting the works. Two abstract paintings, Weeping Woman and House (both 1987 and among the earliest pieces in the exhibition), help us see some of the origins of Harris’s core visual vocabulary. Here already are the circular forms that he refines over time, evolving them into a variable bullseye shape that operates as both abstract and figurative symbol in later canvases. These two early paintings are also testaments to the traumas of an unhappy childhood and anticipate thematically the stylised figuration of the Grotesquerie series (2001-2, 2007-9), in which a horned father figure, sometimes presented with phallic red tongue, and an eyeless blonde mother appear singly and together in a contrapuntal and deeply disturbing dance of forms. Curator Leigh Robb included some of these pieces in the 2020 AGSA Biennial, Monster Theatres, where I first encountered Harris’s work.

In Laurence Simmons’s essay on monstrosity, in Zagala’s volume, he describes the father of the Grotesquerie works as a ‘horned, devilish’ figure; this is undoubtedly right, but I could not help also recalling the demonic rabbit Frank of Richard Kelly’s cult film Donnie Darko (2001), or the figures in David Lynch’s 2002 short horror films Rabbits (which returned in Inland Empire [2006]).

This is not to imply trajectories of influence, but rather to identify a moment when a certain variety of anthro-pomorphic form returns in culture more widely. In this case, it might suggest an atavistic response to the anxieties specific to a period when our humanity is once again called into question, when the boundaries between the human and animal, the canny and uncanny, again reveal their permeability and arbitrariness. In Harris’s work, such dynamics appear vividly present, unsettling the viewer by exploring histories of personal trauma in ways that have broad resonance.

Zagala explains that ‘Harris’s own understanding of his compositions is that they are generally autobiographical and narrative-driven’, while his ‘deeply personal … psychological excavations are often undertaken through a formal vocabulary that directly quotes from other artists’. She notes as examples of this citational approach the influence of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon, Americans Philip Guston, John Wesley, and Myron Stout, as well as Franco-American Louise Bourgeois, whom Harris met in the late 1980s. The AGSA exhibition places Harris’s work in direct visual conversation with prints from Bourgeois and other artists whose works have been important for Harris, including Edvard Munch and contemporary American artist Kiki Smith.

These influences are often readily apparent in Harris’s works, as are those of a great many other artists mentioned in the book and curatorial notes, including Willem de Kooning and Mike Kelley, but also, more surprisingly, Edgar Degas, Jacopo Pontormo, and Raphael. Confronted with Harris’s haunting dark-field monotypes from The Fall series (made after Harris encountered Degas’s monotypes), I found myself thinking of works from Goya’s Disasters of War, while Harris’s handling of paint in The reassembled self paintings brought to mind Cy Twombly’s largely green

Brent Harris in his Melbourne studio (photograph by Andrew Curtis)

and white Bassano in Teverina canvases at the Menil Collection in Houston and some of his later and vividly polychromatic works, such as the Quattro Stagioni series in Tate Modern.

Like Twombly, Harris is an artist whose sexuality is a key context for the work without its operating as a limiting lens. Rather than ‘queer artists’, both Twombly and Harris might better be understood as ‘artists who happen to be queer’. This subtle distinction expands the interpretative field without requiring that their works speak exclusively to a fixed identity category. For Harris, this context is most pertinent, perhaps, in his monumental response to the AIDS pandemic: the early series of paintings and prints The Stations (1989), inspired by the Stations of the Cross. Informed by his knowledge of Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black paintings, Barnett Newman’s landmark The Stations of the Cross / Lema Sabachthani (1958-66), and McCahon’s The Fourteen Stations of the Cross (1966), Harris’s works are visibly influenced by these precursors, but also make a unique and intensely affecting contribution of their own. The AGSA exhibition includes all fourteen prints and three of the paintings (the full series is scattered across multiple collections), while including all fourteen works in Harris’s more figurative return to this subject in the era of the Covid pandemic.

of citation has little in common with the cool irony of the appropriation art movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s’. In Harris’s world, we are refreshingly far removed from the impulses that lie behind the work of such global superstars as David Salle or Jeff Koons. Rather, Harris seems invested in continuing to probe the juncture of Surrealist compositional practices with evocations of troubling personal experiences that activate the repressed, the dark, the traumatic, but also the playful and anarchic. To spend time with Harris’s work is to discover an artist possessed of both a remarkable command of his materials and an enviable knowledge of the field. Whatever he does next seems destined to surprise. g

Art historian Helen Hughes argues in her contribution to Zagala’s volume that ‘Harris’s works and their art-historical references are … indivisible’, reminding us too that his ‘mode

Patrick Flanery is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Brent Harris, Grotesquerie, 2008, Melbourne oil on linen, diptych 191.0 x 127.0 cm (each panel); Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors 2008 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Brent Harris

They laughed anyway

Travels with Ray Lawler’s Doll

John Rickard

Ifirst saw Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1957 in London, of all places. I remember feeling some pride in seeing the symbolic kewpie doll presiding over the New Theatre in the heart of the West End. June Jago’s performance as Olive has stayed with me over the years; Philip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian reviewer, described her as ‘all chin and elbows, but as genuine a dramatic actress as you could find’, which suggested an element of surprise that she should be ‘found’ in Australia. Jago had been in the original 1955 Union Rep production and placed her stamp on Olive: she was to be a hard act to follow. When The Doll came to London, it had already won itself a unique place in Australian drama, but there had been some concern about how the Brits would receive a play about rough canecutters and free-and-easy barmaids. But critics like Hope-Wallace – and the influential Kenneth Tynan – hailed ‘this harsh, cawing, strongly felt play’. The imperial imprimatur sealed the success of The Doll. Its later failure on Broadway could be dismissed as a judgement on American audiences rather than on the play.

An unsigned program note for the Belvoir production of the play presents an interesting perspective on the original Union Rep production:

Many accounts of the opening night go on about its rapturous reception, with the audience up and cheering and the cast taking endless curtain calls. This merely shows how memories can play tricks. In truth the first audience was a little bewildered. They hadn’t known at curtain rise whether this new Australian play was going to be a comedy or a drama, but early indications were comedy. They laughed heartily at the lively characters, the colourful language and especially the local references. Then in the second act, a little darkness crept in, but they laughed anyway … [At the end] the curtain fell to uncertain applause.

With good reviews the play did well enough for the two-week season to be extended for another week, but, with the benefit

of much more rewriting and rehearsal, it was the 1956 Sydney season, under the auspices of the recently formed Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, that established The Doll as an Australian play to be reckoned with.

There have been many productions of The Doll over the years, but one of the strangest must have been that directed by Jean-Paul Mignon (1983 and 1988), whose Australian Nouveau Theatre (Anthill) in South Melbourne attracted audiences with its highly stylised and inventive productions of European classics. Alas, this attempt to apply a similar technique to Lawler’s text –which often gives very specific stage directions – demonstrated that The Doll could not survive this total subversion of its basic naturalism. It was an emotionally barren evening.

The Doll is technically an old-fashioned play: it comes in three acts, which see a masterly transition from broad comedy to searing drama. A contemporary playwright might have been tempted to use flashbacks and a more cinematic exposition, but in Lawler’s play the past is nevertheless powerfully present, particularly in the memories of Nancy, whose exodus from this unique lay-off arrangement to get married sets the scene for the seventeenth summer.

In the 1970s Lawler was tempted to write two prequels, Kid Stakes, about the first meeting of the two canecutters, Roo and Barney, with the barmaids, Olive and Nancy, and a bridging play, Other Times. The Melbourne Theatre Company presented the three plays in 1977, including performances of the entire trilogy on two Saturdays. It seemed an impressive achievement at the time, but since then the prequels have disappeared from view, though, in the program of the present production, Lawler is at pains to remind us of them, acknowledging the grant from the Australia Council that helped him develop The Doll Trilogy. It may well be that Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is all the more powerful if we have not physically encountered Nancy in the earlier plays. She is the ghost who haunts the play. Bubba, the young woman from next door who has grown up through the sixteen summers, passes on photographs to Roo of Nancy’s wedding, which Olive refused to attend. Olive, much as she condemns what she sees as Nancy’s betrayal in surrendering to marriage, is full of warm memories of her and insists that she was ‘a real good sport’. Bubba assures Roo that Nancy was serious about her marriage, and ‘[d]idn’t do it, just to score a wedding ring’. Pearl concludes more prosaically that Nance must have ‘had her head screwed on the right way’.

Neil Armfield’s production, which comes from Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, respects, and indeed exploits, the naturalism of The Doll. The set, however, influenced, I imagine, by the nature of the Belvoir space, comes as something of a shock. Lawler’s directions refer to ‘the riot of colour’ that disguises the shabbiness of the Carlton terrace house’s interior; there are also French windows opening onto an unseen side verandah dominated by ‘a tangle of plant life’. The overall effect, Lawler insists, ‘is not one of gloom, however, but of a glowing interior protected from the drab outside world by a shifting curtain of light-filtered greenery’. Ralph Myers’ set is austere to the point of minimalist. Contained within two drab-coloured walls, the sitting room has little more furniture than a table and chairs,

Steve Le Marquand as Roo and Olive Alison Whyte as Olive in 2012 (photograph by Jeff Busby)

a chaise longue and a piano, with a few pictures decorated with dusty kewpie dolls on the almost bare walls. There is only one window (through which, on a hot New Year’s Eve, Barney yells to Olive’s taciturn mum, Emma, ‘What are you doin’ out there?’, to be met by the immortal line, ‘Getting a sea breeze off the gutter. What d’you think?’). We might imagine that ‘the riot of colour’ and the ‘glowing interior’ are all in Olive’s mind: and indeed, late in the play, Olive admits to Pearl that ‘I’m blind to what I want to be’. What must be said is that Armfield’s production uses this wide space creatively and that our focus is always on the interaction between the characters. And the scene changes in the first two acts are cleverly managed so that the dynamic thrust of the play is not lost.

Armfield and his cast give us a marvellous ensemble piece, to which all the performances contribute. Yes, I might have wondered whether Helen Thomson’s Pearl was flirting with caricature in Act One, but she comes through impressively as the play progresses. When Pearl departs in Act Three, Lawler has her giving ‘the unresponsive Olive a clumsy hug’. In this production, the hug is sustained for several seconds before Pearl collects herself and walks out. One can read this as suggesting that Pearl, for all her snootiness, does have warm feelings for the bereft Olive; and, of course, they will be back working together again on Monday at the pub. Steve Le Marquand’s Roo struck me as stiffer than his bad back might have required, but he has the actorly guts to bring off the demanding climactic scene. Alison Whyte’s Olive is warm and loveable, passionate yet ultimately fragile; Travis McMahon has Barney, the likeable operator first played by Ray Lawler himself in 1955, down to a tee; and Robyn Nevin brings a dour authority to Emma, demonstrating how crucial the role is to the play. As Bubba and Johnny Dowd, Eloise Winestock and T.J. Power, with their charm and awkwardness, provide the youthful contrast. What came through to me strongly in this performance was Lawler’s easy command of Australian vernacular, reminiscent in some ways, if the product of a very different social background, of Barry Humphries. (Incidentally, Lawler seems much more at home with his working-class Footscray origins

than Humphries is with the suffocating gentility of his Camberwell.) Interestingly, it has been pointed out to me that Emma, presumably with Lawler’s permission, throws in a new line when she storms out of the singalong, ‘You’re all a bunch of amateurs’, a nod to Shasta Davies’ refrain in Sumner Locke Elliott’s Water under the Bridge, made famous by Robyn Nevin in the superb television miniseries (1980).

The classic status of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is confirmed by the emotional power of this production as the play moves inexorably to its tragic conclusion. Even when you know the text well, the third act still hits you in the face. And, remembering the bewildered reaction of the first audience in 1955, one realises that many today are seeing the play for the first time. At the performance I attended, there was some embarrassed laughter when Olive falls to the floor and Roo gets down on his knees in his desperate attempt to get her to face reality.

And what are we left with in the end? Roo and Barney, diminished figures, reconciled out of necessity, limping off into the future – a backhanded salute to traditional mateship if ever there was one. g

This review appeared in our March 2012 issue. See Advances for notes on Ray Lawler and John Rickard, who died two days apart in late July.

Ernest Borgnine as Roo and John Mills as Barney in Summer of The Seventeenth Doll, 1959 (Hill-Hecht-Lancaster Productions, Cinematic / Alamy)

One of the most anticipated poetry audiobooks of the year “The poems in Exits explore the beauty and frailty of life, the cycles of nature, and the promise of renewal.”

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‘Leaves falling like language’

A lyrical index of the natural world

J. Taylor Bell

Song in the Grass

by Kate Fagan Giramondo $27 pb, 101 pp

‘Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do –’

Judith Wright

Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.

It feels impossible not to go into a collection with such a title expecting ninety-two pages of heavily naturalistic and pastoral imagery. Indeed, things kick off with the poem ‘one year one garden’, which, somewhat perversely, just lists a bunch of birds. It is like a copy-and-pasted eBird checklist from the Blue Mountains. And with this, what Fagan seems to say is: grab your binoculars and 600mm telephoto lenses, folks, let’s chill out and appreciate nature for a while.

What follows, after all these bird names, is a ‘lyrical index’ of sorts. Many of these poems are lists that, Fagan notes ‘never pretend that everything can be known or accomplished’. They don’t just list birds, though: they also enumerate the historical functions of a house, things to write about, types of hearts, and reasons to sing praise. ‘Botany attracts me,’ she writes, ‘I think it’s because of my compulsion to make lists.’ It’s fascinating to see how their function evolves throughout the book.

Fagan has always been a language poet at heart. Song in the Grass is still language poetry in the tradition of her first two collections, but now there is more ecology. Each poem does something a little different with these natural images. They slowly begin to subvert themselves throughout the collection. ‘Helena’s letters / bristle with caterpillars, strange lists / of love. My own archive sprouts – Asplenium, Lomaria’. The lists become litany; lullabies of Latin taxonomies; chronologies of genera and species.

Sometimes these indexes trend towards the literal; other times they are quite lyrical. White-naped honeyeaters sing ‘a soft quarrel / in the common air’. Butcherbirds are entreated to ‘carol the swifts skyward’. A rosella ‘slices through dusk’, and a swallow ‘dives until it skims above its own shadow’. What Fagan regularly

does with great aplomb is maintain a type of poetic adherence to Object Oriented Ontology and Ecopoetics, describing birds poetically but never personifying or anthropomorphising them. There is a recognition that humanity must find newer, better ways to write about and interact with the natural world. This imperative is both emphatically and empathically navigated.

Kate Fagan has always been a language poet at heart

At other points, all these lists take on a role that seems more akin to a kind of … radical archivalism. In ‘Immigrants’, Fagan imagines a future-Australia that her grandfather didn’t live to see; one where he could ‘float like spume on Jervis Bay / and under Casuarinas at Sanctuary / Point’. The list acts as a memorial in ‘Elegy for a Felled Eucalypt’ as the poet tenders farewells for all the different birds that will no longer visit it. This almost feels like elegy as protest, an activist poetics that occupies poem-trees à la Julia Butterfly Hill. What’s radical is that the spaces created by absence are filled not with the fatalistic or the maudlin, but with intimations of possibility.

There are elegies not just for trees and grandfathers, however. There are also multiple epigraphs dedicated to the late naturalist and writer Dermot Healy, as well as myriad other environmentalist writers, such as Helen Macdonald and Peter Minter. In fact, of the forty-six poems/sequences that comprise this book, exactly half contain epigraphs and dedications. At times, Song in the Grass reads like an index of people and of things. I am not sure it is possible to grasp all of the references contained in this book, but I don’t think that was ever the point of language poetry.

‘Some people visit the places loved by those they admire / to walk where they did,’ writes Fagan. It is undeniable that this book’s blend of language, cento, and index poetry lends itself to that idea of embodiment. With twenty-three dedications (many to other Australian poets), Fagan seems to consciously position herself within the poetic tradition. She visits and revisits the pages of her inspirations and influences, and works outwards from them. Frank O’Hara said a poem is like ‘a conversation between two people’, and in a way that is exactly what’s facilitated here, although these conversations often feel deeply personal and deeply private.

Ultimately, Song in the Grass is the culmination of many different strands of contemporary poetry. There is a clear debt to the aesthetics and language poetry of Australia’s past two decades, but it sometimes balks at those flourishes of indiscernibility that characterise language poems: ‘I wrote the wading birds are dying / I wrote the frost is disappearing / I wrote the poles are askew.’ This is experiment and lucidity in equal turns – ecopoetry with the hauntological reverberations of language. It’s echopoetry. And why not? What is the point of a song if, soon enough, there will be no grass left on which to sing it? g

J. Taylor Bell is a PhD student at Monash University. His first poetry collection is HELLO CRUEL WORLD (Wendy’s Subway, 2022).

Val and Von

Unconventional sisters in the tropics

Jane Sullivan

VArtful Lives:

From Melbourne to the Islands:

The artful lives of the Cohen sisters

by Penny Olsen

Melbourne Books

$39.95 pb, 303 pp

alerie and Yvonne Cohen were ‘artful’ in more ways than one. Both sisters were artists, and most of their friends and lovers were artists. They were ‘artistic’, seeking an unconventional life. For years they spent their winters on a tiny tropical island. And they – particularly Val – were artful dodgers.

Their cousin Penny Olsen knew them best in their old age in Melbourne: Von died in 2004 when she was almost ninety, and Val, the older sister by two years, died in 2008. Olsen had long been fascinated by the almost inseparable sisters and the family stories about their romantic lives. In Olsen’s experience, Val was the feisty one and Von the passive accomplice. Val would masquerade as a poor, helpless little old lady in op shop clothes, while grinding down the tradie or the butcher to accept a far lower price. But they came from a wealthy family and were always well-off.

Olsen, an ornithologist and the author of more than thirty bird books, has wanted to write their biography for many years. She has drawn on a collection of pictures, photographs and written material, including Val’s articles for various newspapers and magazines, to present two different women devoted to each other, who, unusually for their times, managed to live their lives pretty much as they wanted. What they wanted was art, freedom to create, love, adventure, and highly romantic surroundings.

Their father was Morris Cohen, a well-to-do Melbourne businessman and a lively caricaturist. Despite this heritage, the girls didn’t seem particularly drawn to art. Tragedy struck in 1931, when Morris was killed in a boating accident on holiday in Tasmania. It was a horrendous ordeal for the teenage girls, who were on the boat with him when it was swept out to sea. They leapt overboard and swam ashore, but Morris didn’t make it: ‘A wave broke over the boat, and that was the last they saw of him.’

Their mother, Viva, was ‘completely lost’, Val recalled, and turned to her eldest daughter. What followed during the Great Depression years was an extraordinary series of extravagant and hedonistic voyages around the world by the bereaved mother and daughters. Australian gossip columnists were avid followers of the girls’ views on overseas fashions.

Val and Von were growing into society beauties, seemingly destined to marry and start families, but they weren’t having any of that. They decided to get serious about art through classes at Melbourne Technical College, but were soon bored with paint-

ing gum trees. Then Val escaped to Far North Queensland and discovered Dunk Island.

So began an enduring love affair for both sisters with that idyll of many painters, the tropical palm-fringed island home. They yearned for a simple life and had the means to get it: they bought little Timana Island, near Dunk and Bedarra, and had a bungalow built on the island so they could spend every winter there, fishing, tending a garden, and painting the surroundings.

Tropical beauty wasn’t the only attraction. The sisters were greeted on their visits north by two handsome, bronzed young men wearing nothing but sarongs. One was Hugo Brassey, a playboy who was developing a small resort on Dunk. The other was an artist, Noel Wood, living on Bedarra.

Many pages later we discover that Von fell in love with Noel, who was married and a new father when they met. His wife Eleanor doesn’t appear much in Val’s accounts. When Von fell pregnant to Noel, he returned to his family on Kangaroo Island, grumbling about ‘another bloody girl’. It is not clear whether there was an abortion or whether a baby was adopted, but ‘Von was deeply distressed and fled from the islands to Indonesia on a passing cargo ship’, Olsen writes. For the rest of her life, Von carried a torch for Noel.

Val was a tougher cookie. She was proud of her affairs, and eventually settled for marriage to a psychiatrist, Norm Albiston. She determined to win him the first time she saw him. Norm was an artist of sorts and a music lover: he played classical music on the piano wearing a monkey mask with a cigar between his teeth. He had a number of extramarital affairs which Val tolerated, even encouraged.

At moments like these I wanted to know more about the sisters’ emotional lives. What was the nature of Von’s romance with Noel, and why did it fall apart? Was Val really happy when Norm strayed? How did the sisters get on, in such a remote place? Did they quarrel? Did Von rebel against Val’s dominance? And how did poor Viva fare, anxious to be with her girls, but possibly feeling lonely when she joined them on their tiny island?

I can’t blame Olsen for refusing to fill these gaps. She is an old-school biographer who doesn’t speculate. She admits that she missed opportunities to collect some firsthand accounts. Mischievous Val was a thoroughly unreliable narrator. Her articles contain many contradictions. How much she romanticised her world we may never know.

Olsen doesn’t try to assess them as artists, though she includes contemporary reviews of their art. Most are favourable, if a touch patronising, with Von coming out a little ahead (she took herself more seriously as an artist than Val did). They exhibited regularly and their work sold. Recent feminist appraisals of women artists’ work have enhanced their reputation. But the sisters were never feminists. They didn’t believe that male artists were treated more favourably.

The narrative is filled with incident and intriguing digressions, but those emotional gaps remain. I came closest to the sisters not when they were on their island but when they were old ladies in Melbourne, the time when Olsen knew them best. g

Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne-based author and literary journalist. Her latest novel is Murder in Punch Lane (Echo, 2024).

The twilight of Narendra Modi

India’s leader’s invincibility is fraying by

Ian Hall

The monsoon has now settled the dust stirred up during an eventful and blisteringly hot early summer in India. From April to June, in seven stages of voting and in temperatures that in some parts reached the high forties Celsius, almost 650 million people cast their votes in the largest election ever organised. The polls and the pundits predicted another big victory for Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yet when the verdict came, it surprised most observers. The BJP, supported by its coalition partners, was returned to office with far fewer seats than expected, and with Modi’s political authority much diminished.

At the start of the election campaign, Modi had set his aim high, with a characteristically catchy slogan: ‘Abki Baar, 400 Paar’. Translating into ‘this time surpassing 400’, it focused attention on Modi’s ambition to win more than 400 parliamentry seats. In the end, it fell well short. The BJP won just 240 seats out of the 543 in the lower house of India’s Parliament (the Lok Sabha), down from 303 in the previous election in 2019. Together with seats won by no fewer than fourteen allies, this secured the NDA a total of 293 seats in Parliament and a slim majority.

If Modi himself was unsettled by this outcome, he gave little sign in the days that followed. His victory speeches were upbeat, and he promised to fulfil his election promises in their entirety. He moved swiftly to appoint a Cabinet, retaining many long-serving ministers in their pre-election roles, and reappointed key officials, like the National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval. Everything that could be done to create an impression of confidence and control was done, quickly and efficiently.

It did not take long, however, for cracks to appear in this façade. Some were produced by fresh tensions and others by older ones within the government and the wider Hindu nationalist movement, from which Modi and the BJP derive support. Soon after the election results were published, the NDA’s newly empowered coalition partners – the Telugu Desam Party from Andhra Pradesh and the Bihar-based Janata Dal (United) – began to agitate for bigger slices of the national budget for their states. Within the BJP, disputes broke out about who should take the blame for the party’s relatively poor performance in North India, in states where it

is traditionally strong. National leaders in New Delhi blamed local leaders – especially in populous and pivotal Uttar Pradesh – and vice versa.

Meanwhile, divisions emerged between Hindu nationalist hardliners and more pragmatic elements in the movement. In West Bengal, for example, the BJP Leader of the Opposition in that state’s Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, called for the party slogan, Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas – loosely, ‘Everyone Together for Everyone’s Development’ – be replaced with a less inclusive pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim message.

Some of these disagreements were not novel. The Hindu Right has long been split over whether the best way to achieve its objectives is building a coalition of voters around a technocratic platform of growth and good governance, or trying to consolidate the Hindu vote with sectarian appeals. But the public airing of these disputes and the vocal criticism of the prime minister that went with it were unusual.

Like all successful leaders, Modi, prime minister since 2014, has acquired enemies on his own side of the political divide as well as among his parliamentary opponents. However, for the past decade or more the prime minister has been such a dominant force in Indian politics that few have dared openly to challenge him. Moreover, on the rare occasions when critics have gone public, such as the veteran BJP leader and erstwhile Modi mentor, L.K. Advani, they have found themselves rapidly and firmly sidelined.

This ruthlessness – even towards respected party elders – has long been tolerated, for Modi has an impressive track record of winning elections. Since he made the transition from backroom strategist to elected politician in 2001, he has never lost a major contest. As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi delivered the BJP three back-to-back state election victories – an unprecedented achievement. At the national level, he led the party to landslide wins in 2014 and 2019, securing more seats in the Lok Sabha than the BJP had ever won before.

Over time, this success convinced other BJP leaders that Modi had unique powers and that his autocratic style was best overlooked. They developed respect for his capacity to both hone and deliver a compelling message and to galvanise the party to lead disciplined campaigns. Furthermore, they appreciated his ability to draw votes from numerically large lower caste groups to the BJP, a party that traditionally

appeals to higher caste Brahmins and Baniyas (merchants). They recognised that many people from these disadvantaged but aspirational communities identified with Modi and his meteoric rise, born as he was not into an élite family but one belonging to what the Indian government calls the Other Backward Classes (OBC).

Convinced that Modi was unstoppable, the BJP built its bid for re-election in 2024 around their talismanic prime minister. Its campaign was launched with the slogan ‘Choose Modi’ (Modi ko Chunte hai). With an upbeat YouTube video and a catchy song, the party then launched a viral campaign encouraging Indians to join the ‘Modi Family’ (Modi ka Parivaar) by adding that phrase to their social media profiles, as well as by supporting him at the ballot box. When the BJP finally unveiled a manifesto – complete with almost fifty photographs of the prime minister – it was simply titled: ‘Modi’s Guarantee’.

This Modi-centric approach made sense to BJP strategists. He was a proven winner; poll after poll reported sky-high ratings for the prime minister. But it was risky. Voter surveys such as India Today’s Mood of the Nation poll conducted in December 2023 and January 2024 found widespread unhappiness about the government’s management of the economy, especially the chronic shortage of good jobs. In the early stages of the campaign, there were signs that many Indians were tiring of Modi, regardless of how much they respected him, and tiring of the ubiquitous presence of his image on every bus shelter, gas cylinder, and government website. As voting got underway, some BJP workers told journalists that apathy was widespread, within and beyond the party.

To cut through this apathy and stir up the Hindu nationalist base, Modi went on the offensive. In a speech in Rajasthan, he made the false claim that the Opposition Congress Party planned to seize the assets of Hindu families and redistribute them to ‘infiltrators’ who have more children – in other words, to Muslims. Then, in a rare interview, he claimed he had been ‘sent by God’ to be God’s ‘instrument’.

These two statements were widely criticised as communal and egotistical. Politically they also fell flat, doing little to energise voters or encourage them to vote. In Rajasthan, turnout dropped by five per cent and the BJP lost ten of the twenty-four seats it had won in 2019. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, where the party had championed the prime minister as an almost priest-like restorer of Hindu pride, it suffered similar losses. Across North India, voters turned away from the BJP, including many from those lower caste communities who earlier put their faith in Modi to deliver them jobs and upward mobility.

These failures were not enough to lose the BJP the election, but they foreshadow the end of the Modi era. For the first time in more than two decades, the ‘King of Hindu Hearts’ no longer appears invincible. His political authority has suffered what might be best described as a slow puncture –inexorably deflating and prone to sudden failure.

Other BJP and Hindu nationalist leaders are well aware of this situation. It is this weakening of Modi’s position that

has allowed figures like Adhikari, in West Bengal, to openly criticise the prime minister. Further public challenges will no doubt come, either from inside the Cabinet, from ambitious ministers bruised by Modi’s autocratic manner or envious of his success, or from outside it. Pressure is building up on the hard right of the movement, especially, which wants to see the BJP deliver a more openly pro-Hindu agenda.

How Modi responds will define his remaining time in office. Some think he needs to dismantle what they see as the cult of personality around him and to adopt a more collaborative style of government, allowing other senior figures more space to drive policy. Modi’s close ally, Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (‘National Volunteer Organisation’ or RSS), has time and again counselled the prime minister to be more humble. In the wake of the election defeat, Bhagwat did so again, with the oblique comment that that, while human beings might sometimes want to be gods or supermen, a true servant (sevak) of the nation eschews such arrogance.

Modi has paid little attention to this advice in the past, and there is no reason to think he will do so now. Instead, he will likely look to recalibrate his government’s strategy. But here he has only limited room for manoeuvre. Modi’s past success depended on stitching together a broad coalition of support from different segments of society with different sets of policies. Put crudely, that has meant pledging better infrastructure to the urban middle class, the hope of a brighter future to the young and ambitious, much-needed welfare to the rural poor, less bureaucracy to big business, and temples – like the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya – for the Hindu nationalist base.

This delicate balance was enabled by Modi’s unmatched political authority. For a decade, he seemed to all these different interests to be the only leader capable of meeting their demands. Now, with the defection of some aspirational lower caste voters, things have changed and difficult choices loom that could alienate more key constituencies.

Modi could push for reforms required to attract more foreign investment and to create much needed jobs. However, this would likely involve challenging powerful corporate interests and those of the rural poor. He could tack right and embrace the more sectarian, pro-Hindu agenda demanded by figures like Adhikari in West Bengal.

But that could harm India’s global reputation, undermine the confidence of investors, and slow growth, disappointing the middle class. Modi’s legacy will be defined by which path he decides to take, in the twilight of an era defined by his dominance. g

Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at Griffith University and an honorary Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy (2019).

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

His father’s eyes

A memoir of roads not taken

Shannon Burns

KRunning with Pirates: On freedom, adventure, and fathers and sons

by Kári Gíslason

University of Queensland Press

$34.99 pb, 224 pp

ári Gíslason’s memoir of escape and adventure during his early adulthood begins in transit: he is freshly eighteen, ‘sleeping on the floor next to hot air vents at the back of a grand old ferry that connected Brindisi in the heel of Italy with Athens’. Kári is travelling with an ‘often-jolly, sometimes sarcastic’ Scotsman named Paul, and their relationship has begun to fray. Worse, they are low on money, which means their travels and ‘freedom’ may soon be over. Gíslason notes: ‘We were unemployable. I was sickly thin, and my hair past my shoulders and knotted. Paul always looked like he’d just woken up.’ Both are searching for ways to forget their troubles and orient themselves as they take the first steps into manhood, but the pressures that come with such a task have left them feeling oppressed and alienated.

Fortunately, a woman who runs a tourist hostel in Corfu offers to take them in and helps them to find work. They can repay her later. This is a consistent theme of Running with Pirates: the people of Corfu are generous with their hospitality, offering shelter, food, employment, and friendship, with one exception: ‘They lock away their girls as though they’re some kind of fragile possessions that need to be kept safe.’

Early in the book, Gíslason signals that his travels took place in the aftermath of a painful rejection. Kári is a ‘love child’ who sought out his father just before adulthood, arriving in a moment of developmental need, when everything was intense and urgent and uncertain, but his hopes were badly disappointed. He experienced refusal, instead of acceptance and love, and is left to grapple with the legacy of a likeness that has no significance. Kári glimpses his father’s face in his own reflection, but that is the limit of their relationship.

In the skies and waters of Corfu, Kári sees a blue that was ‘eternal but was also the very same blue I’d seen in my father’s eyes, and in my own’. The colour triggers a yearning for belonging, and he thinks to himself: ‘I will stay here for the rest of my life.’ The symbolic connection between Corfu and the absent father is strong from the outset, and only increases when Kári and Paul meet an enigmatic taverna keeper nicknamed ‘the Pirate’, who treats them like his sons. The Pirate is many things: ‘a host, a reveller, a cook; kind and nostalgic, violent, sexist and foul-mouthed, accepting. On the best days, he offered friendship; on the worst, he was terrifying ...’ According to Gíslason, the Pirate is exactly what he needed at that moment in his life. He is also essential

to the machinery of the memoir: the Pirate’s past life, his true motivations, his business dealings, and his status in the village are sources of mystery that provide necessary suspense throughout the narrative. He is its vital force.

Running with Pirates oscillates between the time spent in Corfu in 1990 and the time spent remembering Corfu in 2022. One is the story of a fatherless young man trying to find himself in a small village on a foreign island, and the other is of a writer who returns to Corfu, as a father, in an effort to decipher the significance of that earlier time in his life. He does this with the help of his family, particularly his teenage boys.

The more recent strand of story explores the realities of fatherhood in the modern world. Gíslason believes that he has been an anxious father, ‘overly concerned’ about his sons’ safety. He ‘worried obsessively’ about them being hurt when they were small and struggles to allow them to take risks as teens. Running with Pirates documents his attempt to ‘let go’, to allow his sons the space he had as a young man, to face the world unsupervised, without sacrificing the paternal connection. He attempts to forge this new relationship via personal stories, which he sees as vehicles of transmission: his experiences – including his time with the Pirate – are converted into narrative and claimed by his boys, who will use them for their own purposes. Ideally, they will be instructive.

Not much happens in Runing with Pirates. A budding romance is unconsummated; moments of seeming peril resolve safely; friendships strain but never break; there are no great sins or passions or epiphanies in the moment, and dangerous adventure is avoided. The most troubling episode, for the author, involves the slaughter of a pig at the Pirate’s hands. Kári is sickened by the man’s easy brutality with the animal and feels that he is being drawn into something that he wants no part of: ‘How awful to be led along like this.’ This episode is infused with potential malice, suggesting that the Pirate may be similarly brutal with people when it suits him. When he asks Kári and Paul to sail with him to Brazil on secret business, Kári fears that he is ‘being readied for slaughter’, and this paranoia prompts his decision to leave the island.

Gíslason’s prose is clear and straightforward. He evokes a strong sense of place and is wonderfully attuned to the sensitivities of early adulthood, but the roads not taken have the most appeal, and what might have been overshadows the reality. Kári is sensible to avoid sailing to Brazil as one of the Pirate’s crew (and to thereby escape what may have been illegal and dangerous adventures), but it’s an unfortunate decision for a future memoirist. Instead of ‘running with pirates’, the hero runs for home, and the reader is left pining for a more compelling adventure. The coded message to his sons is clear: go out into the world, embrace new experiences, but always be careful and alert to dangers, real or imagined, and don’t take foolish risks. Gíslason observes that, ‘[b]roadly speaking, our generation seemed very motivated to provide safety, whereas our parents had been less concerned about it.’ Running with Pirates remains true to that cautiousness, even as it frets over it. g

Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and author of the memoir Childhood (2022).

The secret garden

Melding memoir and cultural criticism

Kate McFadyen

TThe Garden Against Time: In search of a common paradise by

Olivia Laing Picador

$44.99 hb, 336 pp

he practice of making a garden is simple. Prime the soil, choose and arrange the plants, tend it, water it, enjoy it. The complications arise with the awareness of the cultural, environmental, and personal elements. Is it your land or are you renting it from a landlord? Is the soil tainted with lead or other contaminants after centuries of industrialisation? Are the plants you have selected meaningful to you or just modish markers of good taste and affluence? Will your curation withstand extremes of anthropogenic climate change or will the plants struggle and perish, become overgrown by the botanical bully boys that can adapt and dominate?

The Garden Against Time is an account of Olivia Laing and her husband, the poet Ian Patterson, buying a house in Suffolk in the south of England in 2020. Although they loved the house, the unkempt garden was the main attraction. It had been designed by a previous owner, Mark Rumary, a beloved local gardener and, as his executor observes, a gay man ‘when it wasn’t good to be gay’. He designed it as a series of rooms, intentionally never allowing the whole to be visible all at once, a ‘secret garden’ quality that Laing loved. Rumary had planted a wide variety of species and cultivars, many now hidden below the overgrown vegetation. Laing refers to ‘the strange intimacy that went along with repairing his design’. With each day of hard work clearing and renovating the space, she finds new plants that have struggled for many seasons in overcrowded darkness, ready to be revived.

In those first months of the Covid pandemic, Laing reads Paradise Lost for the first time. The poem compels her to think about the idea of paradise, a word derived from ancient Persian, meaning ‘enclosed space’. In the desire for perfection and purity, and the inevitable enclosures and exclusions that paradise necessitates, she sees a determination to reclaim paradise in the vivid colours and salvaged treasures of Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage garden in Dungeness, built in the last years of his life as he was dying of AIDS. It is there, too, in Rose Macaulay’s blitz-scarred postwar novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), with its hope for botanical beauty (albeit wild and weedy) amid the destruction. Laing also acknowledges the ‘often misunderstood’ aspirational contradictions of William Morris, whose tireless idealism was bound up in both utopian socialism and the industrialisation that allowed factories to mass-produce his botanically inspired fabrics. She examines John Clare’s sorrow and grief at his expulsion from the Northamptonshire meadows, where he had found solace and

inspiration for his poetry, as a consequence of the Enclosure Acts passed between 1760 and 1845.

Laing has a fondness for figures who have become unfashionable or neglected, or whose complexities trouble contemporary assumptions. In her previous books, she has written about the river Ouse and Virginia Woolf (To the River, 2011); writers and their relationship with alcohol and creativity (The Trip to Echo Spring, 2013); queerness and loneliness (The Lonely City, 2016); and the politics of bodies (Everybody, 2021). In each of these works she approaches her themes through a veil of memoir, seeking a cultural kinship of sorts. This melding of memoir and cultural criticism is almost a cliché now, but Laing’s books are memorable because of the felicity with which she chooses her subjects. She is inquisitive about all aspects of their work and doesn’t shy away from the parts of their lives that might be contrary or messy.

The Garden Against Time is similar in form to Laing’s previous works, but more cohesive and confident in tone. When she looks to past periods of upheaval, considering how artists and gardeners have imagined paradise, she reveals how the parcelling, labelling, and sequestering of paradise have left the commons both physically and politically bereft. She also examines the way the ideal of paradise is itself contentious. Milton’s political ostracism at the end of the English Civil War, as he was writing Paradise Lost, would influence his vision of Eden as much as his vision of Hell. Laing is obviously knowledgeable about her subject matter. She is a lifelong gardener who has trained and practised as a herbalist. She has strong views about access to public gardens, and how class and race often determine access to gardens. ‘The fact that owning a garden is a luxury, that access to land itself is a luxury, a privilege and not the right it should be, is hardly a new phenomenon. The story of the garden has from its Edenic beginning always also been a story about what or who is excluded or cast out, from types of plant to types of people.’

Jarman’s garden had no fences; it grew in a harsh stony and salty environment, ‘so that the garden continually undid the distinction between cultivated and wild that a garden is meant to proclaim’. Laing shares Jarman’s love of variety and plant nomenclature. She also recognises that the instinct for noticing, naming, curating, and improving can be destructive, a never-ending quest for the new that contributes to gardens being out of kilter with the environment around them. It is her ability to recognise the garden as a multifaceted and thus potentially radical metaphor that makes this book so interesting. Milton’s principle that the rebel is more charismatic than the authority figure becomes a connection between romance and science – the queering of botanical prowess into a way to survive. The Garden Against Time is about the artistry of subversiveness and why beauty is worth pursuing. g

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‘The climax of nothing’

Visions of absolute nullity in Lebanon

Richard Freadman

OLebanon Days:

Memories of an ancient land through economic meltdown, a revolution of hope and surviving the 2020 Beirut explosion by Theodore Ell

Atlantic Books

$34.99 pb, 346 pp

n 4 August 2020, a gigantic explosion in the Beirut docks devastated much of the city and the local economy. In this powerful and beautifully written memoir, Theodore Ell writes that while opaque causes must have been at work, the event itself was ‘senseless, random and barren’. He adds that the account he had given of the disaster in his Calibre Prizewinning essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’ (ABR, July 2021), erred in seeing the blast as ‘the climax of a narrative’. In fact, it was ‘the climax of nothing’.

Lebanon Days is an expanded and refocused version of the essay. Ell brings to memoir the skills of a published poet, a talent for the haunting vignette, and an extraordinary sensitivity to the chaotic palimpsest that is the history of this ancient place, whose modern identity resulted from a carve-up by colonial powers after World War I. (The book contains a useful Historical Timeline, together with a Glossary.)

Ell accompanies his wife, Caitlin, when she takes up the post of deputy ambassador in Lebanon from the end of 2018 to the beginning of 2021. Like many travellers who commit their experiences to paper, Ell embarks in a heightened state of receptivity. He wants to let the wider world in. He hopes that the journey will cause him to ‘alter course’ in a way that will ‘alter me’. They find a country ravaged by centuries of conquest and defeat, and a fifteen-year civil war (1975-90). During their stay, they live through a revolution (the thowra), the Covid pandemic, and the explosion at the docks, which they were lucky to survive.

The word ‘nothing’ comes up repeatedly, but in unhelpfully shifting ways. It is not on the whole a version of existential nothingness, though Ell does seem at times to fear that reality might be wholly contingent. Its range of meanings includes a thing or project without value; an absent cause; a crusade that comes to nothing, sometimes for discernible reasons; the vanity of human wishes; and people’s inability to learn from the past. In one of many moments reminiscent of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, he thinks of Beaufort Castle in southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel: ‘the only spot in all those ranges commanding views in every direction, retreated from as many times as it was captured, a flagstaff on top of a pile of rubble. It stood for nothing …’

Ell seldom anatomises kinds of invasion (imperialistic, religious, colonial), or even contemporary regional politics. He prioritises underlying propensities: sadistic constructions of the Other, greed, grandiosity, and sheer ‘evil’. When someone det-

onates fireworks on the brink of expected war, he yells, ‘What idiot … what maniac launches fireworks on the night all of Beirut thinks it’s going to die?’; lying in bed on Christmas Eve of 2021, he hears Israeli fighter planes flying low and menacingly over his suburb of Hamra. He wonders in ‘suppressed rage’ how they could do that at just the time when ‘for once the people of Lebanon might take some comfort together’.

Ell is one of those writers who is less adept at explaining what he is trying to do than at doing it. In his Preface, he tells us that ‘the drives to know and be known in the face of nothingness are what this book is about, not the explosion’. He wants to shift the narrative ‘point of view’ he adopts in the essay in a way that eschews ‘abstraction’, ‘symbolism’, and the depiction of the explosion as the culmination of a narrative arc. It was, in fact, the ‘culmination of nothing’.

Yet however imprecisely he uses it, ‘nothing’ often carries tremendous emotional and rhetorical force in this book. Lebanon Days is many things – expatriate memoir, memoir of place, social-historical reportage – but it is also the cri de cœur of a highly sensitive man who is overwhelmed by what he sees and experiences. It is, then, also trauma memoir; and ‘nothing’ is the appalled finding of a man racked by visions of absolute nullity. Lebanon Days is consistently intense, sometimes apocalyptic. One consequence of this is that the line between direct, unmediated description and ‘symbolism’ becomes particularly hard to draw. Consider for instance the following vertiginous vignette, pitched at a moment of sharp economic downturn that hits the construction industry. Theodore sees from his apartment a man whom he presumes to be a manager, high up on a nearby stalled building, trying to fix a crane:

The manager began to climb out onto the neck of the crane, spreadeagling himself among the steel struts and triangles for purchase and picking his way out into space without a harness. His tiny head and limbs were agitating against the sky and his jacket was flapping in the breeze. He quickened his pace out along the bouncing neck and prepared to bend down and fiddle with the pulley, holding onto a strut with only one hand. I turned away and left the room, on the point of vomiting at the sight.

It is a typically superb piece of direct description, but most readers will find symbolic implications in it as well: the parlousness of life during economic strife, perhaps the parlousness of life in general; the imperilled self’s genius for survival; Ell’s inability to tolerate the confronting strangeness of the place. One of the strengths of this memoir is that it leaves ample room for the reader’s imaginative collaboration.

The thowra is the second major event that occurs during the couple’s stay. Ell is buoyed by the conviction that the moment ‘belonged to those people in Lebanon who believed in an unsegregated and unexploited life’. His descriptions of the ‘carnival mood’ and the accompanying violence are typically memorable, as is his demoralisation when the movement, lacking in his view a vision for the country, peters out. The revolution had ended ‘in nothing’.

And then comes the explosion:

A shadow, like a bird crossing the sun, came rushing at our windows.

At one blow, with a surge of thunder, the tall windows of the long gallery crashed in and a wall of air punched its way through the middle of the house, like an express train howling down a tunnel. I never completed my final stride into the kitchen. As the blast tore through the house, it sent a piece of glass or metal flying into the last part of me that had not crossed the kitchen threshold: my exposed right heel. I was barefoot. The gash spat blood in all directions.

The last third of the book often describes feelings of derealisation: he feels ‘[v]acant and indistinct even to myself for long stretches’, ‘stupefaction as heavy as sunstroke’, and the sense that he has ‘become an imperfect copy of my previous self’. The nightmares and liminal states he now experiences are conveyed with characteristic power: ‘There was a dark mirror to my waking thoughts. Once or twice I was distinctly aware of the moment at which I fell asleep, passing through the lining of my mind in

The Thing

The propulsive power of the British Establishment

Gordon Pentland

WBorn to Rule: The making and remaking of the British elite by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman Harvard University Press US$29.95 hb, 317 pp

ithin the English language ‘elite’ is one of those French loan words comfortable enough in its new habitat to have dropped its accent in many publications (though not this magazine). Adopted substantially following France’s reckoning with its own élites after 1789, it joined other Gallic descriptors of high society such as ‘le bon ton’ and still retains a residual whiff of suspicious foreign origins. Crusading journalist William Cobbett preferred the robust old English term ‘the Thing’ to describe the interlocking networks of social, economic, and political privilege that misgoverned Britain in the aftermath of revolution. Usage of ‘elite’ only soared after World War II, and especially from the 1950s, when cognate terms such as ‘the Establishment’ also became common coin. In its adjectival form in the United Kingdom, as in Australia, ‘elite’ retains some positive connotations. Generally, we are comfortable with the notion of élite athletes, as even the most cursory follower of the recent Olympic Games will have noted. As an adjective applied to other areas of life such as education and politics, or worse still as a noun, it has become a kind of slur.

So much so, argue the authors of this forensic dissection of Britain’s élite, that their subjects are almost allergic to describing themselves using the ‘e’ word. There are nice, knowing flashes of humour throughout this book. The opening vignette provides

a way [I’ve] never known before or since.’

He is tormented by involuntary memories. When he returns to Australia, he receives treatment for what is presumably PTSD.

The author’s anguish is in large part moral. Lebanon ‘weakened disbelief’ in the depravities of which people are capable. Thus in one respect did Theodore Ell indeed ‘alter course’. A brilliant late formulation again laments our inability to learn from the past. So often, instead, we choose ‘to turn chaos into a blowtorch of will’. He has indeed become ‘a changed man’ during his Lebanon days. But not as he would have hoped. Change now entails this: ‘I had accommodated evil.’ g

Richard Freadman is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in the Swinburne University Department of Psychological Sciences. His volume of short stories, High Noon at Starbucks, was published this year.

one of these. The authors recount sitting in the drawing room of a seven-bedroom Bloomsbury townhouse talking to a multimillionaire, public-school- and Oxford-educated corporate lawyer. He bristles at their question as to whether he considers himself a member of the British élite with an irritated ‘complete rubbish’. The authors must have wished he had used ‘tosh’, ‘bosh’, or ‘twaddle’, but we can still easily conjure up the cut-glass accent in which this dismissal was delivered.

This collective disavowal of élite status is the starting point for Reeves and Friedman’s timely and important book. They sketch the political, cultural, and economic context for their subject with skill. The accelerating pace of economic inequalities in the United Kingdom since the 1970s has been tracked by ballooning rhetoric about the élite that works the levers of power to its own advantage. The left, the right, and the centre can all denounce their own versions of this phenomenon. Similar dynamics are apparent in other Western nations. As the volume of speech and writing about the élite has grown, however, it has become ever more challenging to pin down exactly who qualifies for membership.

Reeves and Friedman offer a disarmingly straightforward attempt to reinvest this now dangerously broad term with some sociological precision. The empirical bedrock of their efforts is the data on more than one hundred thousand individuals who have appeared since 1897 in the pages of Who’s Who, the biographical dictionary of the ‘noteworthy and influential’. The authors, joint editors of the British Journal of Sociology, embrace the irony that their own élite status as white, male professors at Oxford and the London School of Economics grants them the cultural capital to broker privileged access to this closely guarded dataset.

The great strength of this book is the diversity of angles from which the authors come at their subject. The Who’s Who data is used in conjunction with more than two hundred qualitative interviews with living entrants. The datasets scoured range from probate records to the music choices made on Desert Island Discs, a long-running radio program, whose guests select eight records, a book, and a luxury to soothe their exiles. It is this blending of the qualitative and the quantitative that lends credibility to some of the authors’ bigger claims.

The first third of the book is, for a historian like me, reassuringly qualitative. Chapter Two largely uses interview transcripts to access élite discomfort with the notion of being élite. It explores what the authors call the ‘cosplaying of ordinariness’, a practice through which their subjects navigate and soften their own status. The recent general election campaign in the United Kingdom furnished countless further examples of this strategy in action. Rishi Sunak’s ‘About Me’ section of his website is three hundred words of cloying discomfort with élite privilege. During the election night coverage, the semi-professional Boris Johnson groupie Nadine Dorries was widely pilloried for her efforts to portray Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as a product of meritocratic Britain, an Eton scholarship boy who has ‘known real hardship’. The list could go on.

My favourite chapter deals with another aspect of this performance of ordinariness: how members of the élite describe their cultural preferences. Who’s Who recreational profiles and the data from Desert Island Discs are used to present modern élites as ‘cultural chameleons’. The shift from unrepentant public interest in Wagner, antique-collecting, and hunting to embrace Beyoncé, family, and football has been pronounced. Residual élitism remains in the efforts to name only critically acclaimed popular music as a preference, but the direction of travel is clear. The authors are surely onto something in attributing this affected effort to blend into the background to the élite’s vanishing sense of moral legitimacy.

the political spectrum, from Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘vested interests’ to Nigel Farage’s ‘woke political class’ and everything in between, are equally right and equally wrong. For Reeves and Friedman, partisan positions around cultural questions of gender and race

The second third of the book is more quantitively focused. The authors fold in their statistical materials to illuminate and enumerate the mechanisms and processes of élite reproduction. The ‘totalising, shapeshifting, and often hidden qualities of wealth’ are presented as essential to understanding how élites (and not just wealth élites) perpetuate themselves. A small number of schools and an even smaller number of universities have unique ‘propulsive’ power. Not much of this material will shock, though it is welcome to have it presented with statistical ballast and sometimes with numerical precision.

The really big contribution of the book lies in the authors’ deft ability to weave all of these different factors and types of evidence together to offer nuanced and suggestive conclusions rather than the kind of simple Manichaean ones that furnish current political and populist rhetorics. This is exemplified in the chapter devoted to ‘How Elites Think’. This marshals all of the authors’ data to make the case for the élite as a whole having distinctive political preferences, but also to offer more fine-grained analysis of divisions within Britain’s top 0.05 per cent. Most predictable of all are the attitudes of the wealth élite, who privilege education and economic growth as public policy goals but don’t think they should be taxed more to pay for their delivery.

Otherwise, the authors identify three broad ideological groups within the élite: a redistributive left, an essentially centrist ‘New Labour Left’, and an ‘Establishment Right’. In a sense, therefore, anguished protests against élites from across

cohere around either end of this spectrum and they divide its large centre group. The final two chapters offer a somewhat detached and provisional analysis of how an élite diversified along gender and racial lines might (or might not) change the content and orientation of élite politics and political action.

Overall, the achievement here is a uniquely textured and detailed deep dive into a sociologically concrete élite. No doubt there will be quibbles about how accurately Who’s Who maps onto the holders of cultural, political, and economic power, or about whether performative interview answers and survey responses can really get us into their authentic mentalities. As a first resort, the quibblers should consult the careful methodological appendix. The authors’ central aim is to persuade the reader that, because the élite matters in real political, economic, and cultural terms, identifying it, reconstructing its attitudes, and interrogating its mechanisms of reproduction with sociological precision also matters. They succeed admirably. Throughout, the language of the book is that of careful, measured, and objective social scientists with a splash of wry, knowing humour. The conclusion, however, opens out into a more passionate register as the authors make the case for rejecting the language of meritocracy as a sufficient remedy and for embracing wholesale reform of the institutions of élite reproduction. In this sense, the book is also a gauntlet, thrown at the feet of the least privately educated cabinet and parliament in the United Kingdom’s political history. g

Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University. He has published widely on the political history of Britain since the late eighteenth century. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History (2018).

Boris Johnson and David Cameron on a Brexit protester’s sign (Paul Smyth / Alamy)

‘History makes us old’

A meditation on a lost world of tradition

Glyn Davis

IHistory in the House: Some remarkable dons and the teaching of politics, character and statecraft

by Richard Davenport-Hines

William Collins

$29.99 pb, 432 pp

n Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby spells out the really important things in British life: Radio 3, the countryside, the law, and the universities – both of them. It is an amusing reminder that writing on higher education in the United Kingdom focuses on just a handful of institutions. In History in the House, Richard Davenport-Hines takes this approach much further – to just one discipline in a single Oxford college, Christ Church, known as ‘the House’.

An accomplished historian, Davenport-Hines has previously delved into twentieth-century British history, from Cambridge spies and the Profumo scandal to a celebrated biography of John Maynard Keynes. His writing is precise and engaging, relying on the specific to spell out wider trends in society.

Amid this distinguished oeuvre, History in the House is unusually narrow. Over more than 400 pages, Davenport-Hines traces how a handful of historians – all male, all based in the House –developed their understanding of historical practice. This might suggest a commissioned work, but the author stresses there was no ‘sponsorship, oversight or approval of any Oxford institution or individual’. Davenport-Hines, trained at Cambridge, formed deep friendships with colleagues at Christ Church, who offered ‘new ways to think, watch and rejoice’. History in the House is his thank you, an exploration of the character and meaning of history.

A superb opening chapter spans the origins of Christ Church amid the foundational role of universities – Oxford is six hundred years older than the United Kingdom. The historian, he suggests, is nurtured by working over long periods with an impressive collection of like-minded colleagues. The remarkable dons of the subtitle study the past to interpret the present. This is the central thesis of the book: the Christ Church tradition is not historical study for its own sake but careful attention to statecraft – the ‘study of how history improved the minds, enlarged the imaginations and broadened the vicarious experiences of princes, noblemen and administrators’. Christ Church has educated a British monarch (Edward VII), thirteen prime ministers, and sundry leaders of other

nations, alongside generations of civil servants. The teaching of modern history becomes a vehicle for shaping those who will govern.

This mode of history does not lean to impartiality. ‘History is an interpretation of the past as seen through another’s temperament,’ suggested essayist Charles Whibley. Though shaped by professional norms about evidence and argument, writing history in the Christ Church mode is an intensely personal journey. No wonder E.H. Carr urged his readers to ‘study the historian before they begin to study the facts’.

Davenport-Hines acknowledges the maleness of the House; it was 1980 before a woman graduated from Christ Church, and 2023 before a woman became Dean, after nearly five centuries of continuous appointments to the role. The stories of dons and students, statecraft offered and absorbed, are those of males, including boys (from medieval times, those attending university were often aged between twelve and eighteen, as they trained to serve the state). During the Civil War, the College was sacked by parliamentary troops, who expelled most scholars and students for loyalty to Charles I. It proved a short interruption amid centuries of fealty to the British monarchy. The philosopher John Locke was ousted for preferring a pretender to the throne, while Catholics were barred for two hundred years because Anglicanism was the accepted orthodoxy. Young noblemen enrolled in the College added a gold tassel to their trencher to signify rank. Until 1862, students drawn from the nobility had designated seats at high table. Christ Church being also a cathedral, here was the British state at prayer and study.

Yet Davenport-Hines is keen to stress innovation within this apparently settled institutional role. Edward Nares, educated at Christ Church and later the Regius Professor of Modern History, worried about the undergraduates who passed their university years ‘idle, ignorant and dissipated’. Oxford introduced exams to test student learning, and from 1809 divided degrees into first, second, and third classes. New subjects were introduced alongside the Literae Humaniores, the classics curriculum, including mathematics and physics.

This is the setting for Davenport-Hines’s chief interest: the individual scholars of Christ Church and the idea of history they embraced. This begins with rejection of ‘mere’ chroniclers in favour of history as an art of thought, bringing a critical spirit to the materials interrogated. To provide lessons in statecraft, history must be empirical, ‘a form of knowledge that deductive minds might apply in practice’. In the words of Thomas Fuller, who wrote the first history of the Crusades in English, ‘history makes a young man to be old’, privileging him with wisdom without the inconvenience of acquiring experience.

Hence the latter half of the book is devoted to essays on a small number of Christ Church dons, beginning with Frederick York Powell. There are traditionalists and reformers, brilliant lecturers and those given to rambling.

Hugh Trevor-Roper in the middle, A.J. Ayer on the right (Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy)

Generations of teachers and their students walk through Davenport-Hines’s narrative of history at Christ Church. The detail can be daunting – but just as the historian Edward Armstrong taught his pupils to frame their writing from ‘trifling incidents, the straws and feathers of history’, so Davenport-Hines is a skilled writer, confident the picturesque will hold attention as he sketches the broader theme.

There are high points for the College, such as Keith Feiling teaching an extraordinary array of politicians and administrators from 1911, with an influence through the Conservative Party that was felt for decades. Among his skills was recommending students who ‘excelled at sports rather than brainwork’ to rule outposts of the British Empire. The undergraduate study of history at Christ Church reached its apogee in the 1920s, before courses in Politics, Philosophy and Economics began drawing away many talented students during the Great Depression.

Yet nearly a century of history, in both senses, awaits in later chapters. Memorable figures follow, including the masterful historian J.C. Masterman, who combined scholarship with wartime duties as a spy. Hugh Trevor-Roper also proves a champion for his college. ‘Modern History,’ he argued in 1952, ‘is replacing the ancient classics as the intellectual training of our century.’ Books such as The Last Days of Hitler and combative television appearances would make Trevor-Roper a public intellectual in Britain and beyond. The account by Davenport-Hines touches

A questioning lens

Falling through the cracks of history

Kirsten Tranter

YTravelling to Tomorrow:

The modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America by Yves Rees

NewSouth

$34.99 pb, 339 pp

ves Rees’s accessible, entertaining study blends personal experience with rich archival research into a group of disparate women who followed their passion from Australia to the United States at a time when it was relatively easy for a white woman with talent and a few connections to just show up in Hollywood or New York and get to work. They are very different women – a surfer, a dentist, a concert pianist, a nurse, a decorator, an artist, a lawyer, and a writer – all fiercely courageous trailblazers in their own way. Travelling to Tomorrow weaves their stories together in a loosely chronological shape, using deep research to ground Rees’s imagining of these women’s hopes, dreams, achievements, and disappointments.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, from personal letters and photographs to traditional historical archives, Rees brings

on numerous academic controversies, though not the Hitler diaries scandal of 1983. By then Trevor-Roper, recently ennobled by Margaret Thatcher, had left Oxford to become Master of Peterhouse College at Cambridge.

And so through to Robert Blake, historian of the Conservative Party and biographer of Benjamin Disraeli, made a life peer by Edward Heath. Davenport-Hines’s story begins to end here, sometime late in the twentieth century. History as a training in statecraft seems no longer credible in a diminished Britain. History in the House closes with a trenchant list of proximate causes. Academic specialisation narrowed the aims of imagination, while young scholars were attracted to the ‘schematizing yet destructive ideas of Michel Foucault’. Cultural leadership passed from universities, while government direction turned university administration into something resembling ‘the managerialism of nationalized industries’. On this lesser world, concludes Davenport-Hines, shades of the past historians of Christ Church, students and scholars alike, ‘watch agape’.

It is a bleak close to an unusual work, a meditation on a lost world of tradition and custom, a place where original thinking was nurtured within a deeply established institution. DavenportHines does not ask whether contemporary understandings of democracy and equality are incompatible with the House ethos recalled so lovingly in these pages. But then melancholy at time past might be the most fitting memorial. g

their stories to life in a study that balances narrative energy with academic rigor. We learn not only about the impressive accomplishments of these adventurous women. Rees also opens a window into their lives, conjuring them with vivid attention to sensory experience: the way New York glittered like a fairyland to a young artist on a boat sailing up the Hudson; the butterflies in the stomach of a law student about to address her class at the University of California; the fizzy impatience of a surfer just off the boat in Honololu, charming a reporter before rushing to catch the famous waves at Waikiki.

Rees’s chapter on pioneering nurse and writer Cynthia Reed (most famous for her association with the artists’ colony Heide) begins by immersing the reader in the formaldehyde smell and excitement of the lab: ‘Inside the laboratory, 28 women were hunched over dead cats. One cat per pair. With scalpels and forceps, each duo dissected their pickled feline to test their newfound knowledge of anatomy.’ Rees has a storyteller’s knack for engaging the reader – we read on, wanting to know what happened to Isabel after catastrophe struck on the streets of San Francisco, or how Persia managed to resolve her love dilemma.

Rees captures not only the specific appeal of America as a set of ideals and imagined possibilities, but also something more: not just what has made America alluring and what drove Australians, specifically Australian women, to make the long journey by boat in the early decades of the twentieth century, but what it might have felt like when they got there, and beyond that, what it felt like to become strangely unmoored as a result of making that journey, whether or not one returned to Australia.

The Australian turn away from England and towards America

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SWIMMING IN WORDS brings together seventy of Simon’s poems, some previously published, many revised for this collection as well as completely new works such as the 4,000+ word eponymous prose poem.

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as the imagined centre of the cultural and intellectual world, cast as a turn towards modernity, is well documented. Rees adds important dimensions to this story: for a start, it happened earlier than we might think – it was not simply a post-World War II phenomenon, aligned with the decline of the British Empire and the rise of the United States as global superpower. Rees documents the ways in which Australians saw opportunities in America before World War I and actively pursued them, acting as emissaries for the arts, sports, and sciences. In England, an Australian would always be patronised as a colonial subject. In America, an Australian could forge a form of identification through the narrative of plucky, spirited ‘pioneer’ settlers. Rees shows how the work of writers such as Dorothy Cottrell, one of the subjects in this study, contributed to the power and influence of this narrative. As Rees painstakingly acknowledges, this is a story available only to white people, a story that depends on the deliberate erasure of colonial violence.

Why have these women been forgotten – ‘written out of Australian history’, as Rees puts it? Why is May Leahy, for instance, the first Australian woman to become a judge, not accorded recognition? Just as these women fell between the cracks of citizenship, not properly Australian or British or American, they have fallen through the cracks of history, Rees suggests. What would it mean to restore them to history and to cultural memory? How would that change how we think about ‘Australian history’ and what it means to be Australian? The answers are complex, and Rees acknowledges the difficulties that face a contemporary academic committed to decolonising history. Rees maintains a critical perspective on these questions, acknowledging their subjects as complex human individuals, not feminist heroines.

FB: Luke Icarus Simon

This is a history of women written by an author with a complex relationship to the category of ‘woman’: Rees is trans and writes with moving eloquence about how this structures their position as a historian, including the shifting forms of identification and desire that suffuse the work of research. What does it mean to write trans history? For Rees this does not mean searching for evidence of non-binary identification in women of the past, or studying trans people separately. ‘It is not a new little subfield that can sit neatly adjacent to women’s history. Women here, trans folk over there,’ Rees argues. Trans history entails, for Rees, an orientation towards openness and being comfortable with uncertainty that runs counter to authorised forms of academic knowing: it invites ‘a way of looking, a questioning lens that encourages us to doubt our certainties about any given person’s identity’. This has implications beyond the issue of gender, and Rees suggests how it might contribute to reshaping academic convention: ‘How refreshing, to throw off the conceits of Western colonial knowledge, which controls and dominates through claiming to comprehend all, and admit how much we do not and cannot understand.’ Travelling to Tomorrow suggests how illuminating this approach can be and how powerfully it can speak beyond an academic audience, accompanied by the author’s sense of real joy in sharing these fascinating stories. g

Kirsten Tranter is an Australian writer living in California. Her most recent novel is Hold (2016).

Raid and truce

Private violence and imperial conquest

Jeremy Martens

TThey Called It Peace: Worlds of imperial violence

by Lauren Benton

Princeton University Press

US$39.95 hb, 300 pp

he Australian War Memorial (AWM) is unique among the former settler Dominions in our reluctance to acknowledge as warfare violent conquest and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The national war museums of Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa all contain exhibits dedicated to military conflicts between First Nations and European colonisers, yet the AWM has for decades refused to heed calls for a frontier war gallery at Mount Ainslie. As veteran journalist David Marr noted earlier this year, while the AWM saw fit a decade ago to memorialise explosive detection dogs and their handlers, ‘we haven’t yet found the space in those halls to commemorate the war that is the basis of our country’s existence’. Kim Beazley, appointed in 2023 to chair the Australian War Memorial Council, recently signalled a shift in direction and has promised that the AWM will soon ‘give the Aboriginal population the dignity of resistance’.

Beazley faces strong opposition from conservatives who consider any change to the status quo as woke ‘capitulation’. Quadrant contributor Peter O’Brien, for example, insists there ‘were no frontier wars in the sense of a military conflict with organised Aboriginal forces defending their land against invasion’. It is a ‘myth’ devised to overturn the ‘accepted history that this land was annexed according to international law of the time and peacefully settled’ and, as a ‘political ploy’ to delegitimise the Australian nation, ‘has no place in the Memorial’. O’Brien claims that most violent acts against Indigenous people were carried out by private individuals who violated British and colonial laws. These illegal actions were not military operations and ‘were certainly not sanctioned by the colonial governments’. On the few occasions when troops were

deployed, they constituted policing actions to aid ‘the civil power’.

In They Called It Peace, Lauren Benton, a historian at Yale University, offers a heuristic framework to understand imperial ‘small wars’, which she defines as both sustained colonial military campaigns and brief acts of violence motivated by plunder, reprisal, or punishment. At first blush, this book might appear an unlikely guide to Australian frontier warfare, for Benton ranges over five centuries and in geographical spaces as diverse as the Caribbean, the Americas, and South Asia. Only in the final chapter does Australia make an appearance, with a brief analysis of the extreme brutality attending Tasmania’s Black War (1824-32). However, it is precisely this broad scope that enables Australian readers to identify evolving global processes and patterns, and to recognise that our experience of imperialism was not unique. The decades-long and bloody conflict across the continent between settlers and Indigenous Australians bears the distinct hallmark of myriad small wars waged in European empires between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries.

Benton divides her study in two. Part One outlines how imperial conquest in the early modern world instituted a global ‘regime of plunder’. The colonisation of Cuba, Goa, and New England proceeded unevenly, but was characterised by two key practices of imperial violence: raiding and truce-making. Raiding across frontiers enabled soldier-settlers to supplement their agricultural and pastoral activities with purloined property. Once raids and counter-raids became frequent or destructive, the appetite for retribution and plunder was transformed into demands for permanent acquisition and rule of Indigenous territory. Small wars along unstable frontiers regularly generated serial truces and agreements to pay tribute. But truces also set the timing and the terms for a return to warfare; as Benton demonstrates, some of the ‘most spectacular acts of brutality recorded in the early modern world took place in the wake of truces’.

In their negotiations with Indigenous leaders, men such as Hernán Cortés, Afonso de Albuquerque, and John Winthrop Jr made it clear that peace could be secured only on European terms, and that a refusal to submit to them would result in renewed warfare. Furthermore, violations of truces were perceived as breaches of honour that justified punitive, juridically protected acts of extreme violence, including massacres. Benton is careful to emphasise the importance of individual households in these processes. The proliferation of settler homes transformed imperial outposts into communities that claimed the right

Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2017 (Kgbo via Wikimedia Commons)

to self-defence and facilitated the transformation of plundered booty into property. Private violence quickly became foundational to imperial conquest and governance.

Part Two of They Called It Peace examines the evolution of imperial violence between 1750 and 1900. Benton argues that in this period European participants in small wars began to formulate legal claims about Europe’s special right to regulate conduct in war. While older justifications for colonial warfare continued to circulate, the new emphasis on European legal authority altered the forms and frequency of imperial violence and gave rise to a global regime that Benton terms ‘armed peace’. Navy captains, army officers, and governors in distant places claimed the right to use military force to protect the lives and property of imperial subjects or to restore order. The punitive violence they directed at Indigenous communities was described as limited and defined as ‘measures short of war’, but paradoxically the regime of armed peace often facilitated the commission of atrocities. Limited operations to protect subjects evolved in an orderly legal sequence into sustained campaigns to protect imperial interests. A pathway was mapped out whereby lawful interventions with modest objectives could then lead to ‘brutal campaigns of dispossession and extermination’, such as those that occurred in New South Wales and Tasmania.

Indigenous communities were never the mere objects of imperial violence. European empire builders vacillated between characterising Indigenous resisters as rebellious subjects in need of policing and punishment, and claiming they were members of sovereign political communities engaged in lawful warfare. However, in defending their lands and livelihoods from European

Ancient pasts and truths

Decolonising Europe’s history

Miles Pattenden

DHow the World Made the West:

A 4,000-year history

by Josephine Quinn Bloomsbury

$49.99 hb, 576 pp

ecolonising has reached the classics. Complexity, diversity, and entanglement are in. Greece and Rome are, well, out. The movement to ‘reclaim’ Antiquity began with noble aims: to emancipate the ancients from the prism of politics and war through which we like to see them, to emphasise the role of technology and trade in their lives, and to make women and people of colour visible among them again. Alas, decolonisation all too often seems to have descended into ugly arguments over restitution of artefacts (Elgin marbles, anyone?) or the skin shade of this or that Roman notable (Septimius Severus or St Hadrian

aggression, Indigenous militants made their own distinctions between war and rebellion.

Some leaders insisted on defining imperial violence as inter-political warfare because it enabled them to reinforce their claims to sovereignty. Others presented themselves as loyal subjects in need of imperial protection under the law and sought to negotiate an end to hostilities. In both cases, Indigenous élites rapidly adapted European legal terms and arguments to advance their interests in times of war and peace.

Keith Windschuttle has claimed there was ‘no encounter between whites and blacks anywhere on the Australian frontier that could accurately be described as warfare’. Such violence that did occur bore no resemblance to, for instance, ‘the genuine colonial warfare’ between British settlers and Māori in New Zealand. Such comments reinforce Benton’s conclusion that ‘for centuries the world has worked with an impoverished vocabulary to describe violence at the threshold of war and peace’. The imperial lexicon of protection, emergency, pacification, and ‘measures short of war’ has served to minimise and obscure the brutal reality of Indigenous conquest and dispossession. The lethal violence of small wars, however limited in scope, underpinned imperial regimes of armed peace and characterised settler empires across the globe, including in Australia. g

Jeremy Martens is currently chair of the Department of Classical and Historical Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Empire and Asian Migration: Sovereignty, immigration restriction and protest in the British settler colonies, 1888–1907 (UWA Publishing, 2018). ❖

of Canterbury, for example). Books such as Josephine Quinn’s are the sensible, balancing side of the equation, an antidote to so much virtue signalling and grievance mongering. Quinn’s is an ancient world decentred – provincialised, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s celebrated term. Greece and Rome remain, but must jostle with others for attention, space, and significance. The argument is simple. Antiquity was far more multipolar, dynamic, and integrated in reality than in the civilisational – and, indeed, civilising – narratives that Europeans since Petrarch have been telling themselves about it.

Quinn’s basic conceit is that the reader is best guided through ancient complexity by place. Thus, each chapter opens with a setting: Amarna 1350 bce, Susa 324 bce, ‘between Poitiers and Tours 732’. The aim is laudable, and perhaps a nod to the success of her Worcester College colleague Peter Frankopan, whose well-received The Silk Roads: A new history of the world (2015) travels twenty-five ‘silk roads’. Through her settings, Quinn hopes, like Frankopan, to craft a series of vignettes that reveal connected histories.

The effect could be said to wear off somewhat after thirty chapters, for the book does become something of a whistlestop tour through ancient sites, major and minor. But perhaps such fatigue is unavoidable once you withdraw Greco-Roman primacy and are forced to engage pre-modern totality. Quinn starts early (c.2000 bce) and finishes late (Christopher Columbus), which

at least leaves plenty of scope to present unknown examples and original insights.

Some of Quinn’s insights: polyvalent patterns of maritime trade, a constant shapeshifter throughout Antiquity; uncertain adoptions, and adaptations, of alphabetic writing; the sudden (or was it?) disappearance of Minoan civilisation; the political predicament of the King of Pontus, a subject the young Mozart immortalised in his opera Mitridate, rè di Ponto. Chapters engaging familiar stories from very different angles are among the most interesting of all in Quinn’s telling. Rome and Carthage, not Rome and Athens, are brothers, as one of these explains. Another: the Persian War was not that great Greek victory of the classical tradition but a comparatively minor skirmish for Xerxes, King of Kings, with irritating recalcitrants in a far-flung corner of empire. Ancient – and, indeed, medieval – historians will certainly find fresh material in Quinn’s account to flesh out their knowledge about how different places, forces, and movements interrelate.

The test of Quinn’s opus is: does she prove her thesis? The premise that Athens and Rome owed much to societies beyond a privileged Greco-Roman modern category is certainly persuasive (although not original per se). Yet showing that the world was always heavily connected does not in itself also elucidate important specificities. Why Athens and Rome and not Corinth, Sparta, or Veii? Or why not Byblos, Tyre, Alexandria, or that ‘Rome before Rome’: Carthage? Quinn’s emphasis on broad-brush economic histories, and the role of contingency, or exigencies such as climate change, limits her potential to answer such questions. Just as significantly, it creates certain narrative tensions which are not always fully resolved. How do you tell the most exciting stories about lists of objects and items? How do you make one discussion of an archaeological site sound qualitatively different from another? The difficulty of quantifying in Antiquity, and the ambiguities of reading ancient evidence, are also issues here – and explaining how ‘the world made the West’ means Quinn needs to answer them. Her answers are necessarily tentative, and that could be thought to underline the fragility and ephemeral nature of much new-found ‘ancient’ knowledge.

of the history of ancient history is that it was all too often shaped by Europeans invested in notions of civilisation or else evangelically obsessed by the historicity of the Bible. Such motivations anchored much early archaeological initiative. Unfortunately, geopolitics, slow scholarship, and (most problematically) growing encroachment on sites by contemporary populations make those early anchors hard to shift.

The paradigm Quinn presents has ongoing consequences. It invites a question: what about the gaps – those local histories of China, India, and, indeed, the lands to the East and South of them which we know but are not covered here? A second question: how does the evidence assembled in Quinn’s chronicle relate to the totality of the evidence once knowable but now lost? Known unknowns and unknown unknowns should surely come into play, even if responsible historians, such as Quinn, are naturally reluctant to address them too directly. Can we write history without texts, even when we have archaeological evidence, and how do we interpret that evidence in the absence of textual assistance?

Both are crucial questions that Quinn’s romp through the centuries inevitably foregrounds.

A broader critique of Quinn’s approach might also go like this. The ancient story which she tells is, in fact, surprisingly conventional. For all her determination to escape a GrecoRoman trap – to range around the Antique map – Quinn’s remains a fundamentally Mediterranean story. From Mesopotamia to the Pillars of Hercules, from the Saharan sands to the shores of the Black Sea – save for Alexander’s quixotic foray into India, and Marco Polo’s to China – her Ancient World knows its own bounds. But is this the right, or even sufficient, frame of reference for doing the sort of ‘big history’ through which Quinn seeks to understand pan-human developments? Her entirely valid critique

Of course, other scholars have also taken on such great global questions about the rise of human civilisation before. The Michigan professor Victor B. Lieberman, for instance, wrote a two-volume 1,400-page account of the ‘strange parallels’ in economic and military development, and state and religious formation, across the whole of Eurasia since 800 ce. German philosopher Karl Jaspers likewise coined the phrase ‘Axial Age’ to describe the seemingly simultaneous adoption of transcendentalist religion across many Eurasian societies around the sixth and fifth centuries bce. Lieberman, a Burmese studies expert, theorises not merely connected histories but concurrent ones across a whole continent and its margins. And Quinn’s Mediterranean is marginal to him, which again invites enquiry about how it fits into the larger picture. An early modern scholar, on the other hand, would raise different objections – for instance querying Quinn’s 1492 terminal date on the grounds that the nexus of cross-cultural, trans-Mediterranean ties she describes continued to strengthen in the centuries that followed Europe’s ‘turn’ towards the Atlantic. Overall, this is a brave, engaging, even charming attempt to tell world history accessibly, by an author with considerable versatility of frame and perspective. Those who would decolonise Europe’s history would do well to start with this book, and to think about the problems it raises regarding claiming too much ownership of one version of history or narrative of traditions. Ancient pasts, and truths, live on in all of us. g

Miles Pattenden is Director of Core Events at The Europaeum, Oxford.

Josephine Quinn (courtesy of the University of Oxford)

Toshakhana

Indian paths to self-discovery

Claudia Hyles

DGrowing up Indian in Australia

edited by Aarti Betigeri

Black Inc.

$32.99 pb, 263 pp

on’t judge a book by its cover? There is no problem with this book. The cover and artist’s note, declaring inspiration from such diverse art forms as traditional Indian miniature painting, Indian matchbox design, and a ‘harmonious blend of Indian and Australian flora’, encapsulate the intertwining narratives and cultural crossovers of the stories within.

The introduction by the editor, Aarti Betigeri, is headed by a sweet photograph, as are nearly all of the stories. Notes at the end of the book about the writers often reveal interesting lives shaped by childhood. The book is the latest in the Black Inc. Growing Up series and the first to appear under a national flag.

Betigeri writes, ‘We used to call ourselves ABCDs, AustralianBorn Confused Desis.’ Desi means a person of South Asian descent but also, pure. Pure confusion? It is a recognised condition described by most writers, starting at school, often lasting into adulthood, perhaps forever. Children have to learn how to navigate two paths, home life and outside.

The diversity of the Indian subcontinent means that, while there are numerous common experiences, there are also many differences. The writers, ranging in age from sixteen to the midfifties, settled with their families all over Australia, in big urban centres, in suburbs ranging from the sublime (Sylvania Waters) to the ridiculous (Blacktown), and in smaller country towns. They are female and male, gay, straight, and trans, from different castes and backgrounds: Anglo-Indian, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, and lapsed. Some were born in Australia, others arrived as children from India or Indian communities in Fiji, Malaysia, and East Africa, adding further regional divergence.

The story of migration lies at the heart of the book, and with it the search for coherence, connection, identity, approval from new communities, and, importantly, self-acceptance. ‘My path to self-discovery’ could be a subtitle. The Indian-born population is now Australia’s second-largest migrant community – 976,000 at last count and growing constantly. The numbers doubled between 2011 and 2021. Australia proclaims multicultural diversity as a strength, promoting societal tolerance, but instances of racial profiling, verbal abuse, and worse still occur.

Several stories allude to the suffocating atmosphere of Indian community groups, with elders failing to cope with the growing Australianisation of the younger generation. Faith group gatherings, once the week’s highlight for children, can become tedious for moody teenagers flexing their muscles.

Today, many Indian migrants come as tertiary students without having to navigate the minefield of schoolyard, classroom, and bullies. Those experiences might, with hindsight, have been character-building, but they were an ordeal. Some new wave arrivals feel that the experience of childhood and adolescence, with the family immersion, is an advantage. The anthology probably reinforces this, but achieving such an edge in the quest for belonging usually involves pain. Being the only brown child, or one of few, in a school full of whites (or pinko-greys, to quote E.M. Forster), can be daunting. Some find their tribe at university, others rediscover yoga and Indian dance in a white milieu.

School is a major theme; a second, food, features in more than half the stories, some at nostalgic length – special festival dishes no longer being made by some; the evocative smell and crackle of curry leaves frying; fasting; philosophy on the nature of curry; learning how to cook ‘by feel’ as a metaphor for life; children yearning for sandwiches or a meat pie for school lunch instead of leftover sambar, rice, and pickles, or idli and chutney, its distinctive aroma inviting ridicule from white sandwich-eaters.

Clothing, like food, is connected to what is familiar and traditional. The need to conform and look like everyone else is a common condition, and not just for children. It is unsurprising that a mother’s colourful sari, highly visible among other parents, caused acute embarrassment for her offspring at a conservative private school. For that child, being dressed in kurta pyjamas and a Congress cap for a special multicultural day years before was a similar torture, reminding him that he didn’t belong.

Some writers grew up in affluent homes with professional parents, often doctors. Other families had to count every cent in order to achieve the goal of a better life that brought them to Australia. A touching memory about clothing was the second-hand coat bought by one father to keep warm while waiting for his commuter trains. His daughter later discovered it was a cast-off school-issue lab coat, too light for winter chills.

Discipline at home was generally more restrictive than for Australian children. Sleepovers, discos, and parties were often forbidden. Adolescence brought a certain level of understanding and confidence, but also defiance – wearing clothing deemed unsuitable, binge-drinking, clubbing, the strange new beach culture, or even the removal of superfluous hair. Many regretted losing connections with grandparents, particularly when they no longer shared a language. Family values and dutifulness to parents remain strong, and stories reveal parents accepting all manner of shocks from their children, perhaps a form of growing up for them too.

One contributor quotes the first line of L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ India, with its rich and pervasive culture, is famous for subtle absorption and transformation of foreign elements, and diasporic Indians are chameleons. It is a continuing metamorphosis for those endowed with the good fortune to be citizens of two countries.

Often amusing, sometimes sad, the anthology is a toshakhana, a treasury of delights for readers of all shades. g

Claudia Hyles’s most recent book is So You Can See In The Dark: And other Indian essays (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016).

Dark times

Without Brecht’s prescience

Paul Kildea

IThe Piano Player of Budapest by Roxanne de Bastion Robinson

$34.99 pb, 268 pp

n the winter of 1937–38, Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from National Socialism, lived in furious exile in Svendborg, a small town on the Danish island of Funen. There he wrote and compiled a collection of poems under the working title ‘Gedichte im Exil’ (Poems in Exile). Sometime between galleys and the poet’s move to Sweden following the Munich Agreement, the book was renamed Svendborger Gedichte, the second section of which begins with a simple motto:

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing

About the dark times.

In the final sentence of her touching family history, the singer-songwriter Roxanne de Bastion quotes Brecht’s motto, seemingly unknowingly. She is at a family reunion in Hungary, meeting relatives from Sweden, France, Australia, and Hungary, their profiles familiar where their personalities are not. Those present have talked much of de Bastion’s grandfather Istvan Bastyai Holtzer, who miraculously survived the worst the Axis powers could throw at him. At the end of dinner, she sits alongside her father at the hotel piano, the two of them joined by an Australian relative on violin. As they play one of her songs, de Bastion looks at the crowd and feels ‘overcome with a deep, primal feeling of peace and satisfaction, an ancestral sigh of relief that we are here and together. We exist and we’re singing.’

It is only following this encounter that de Bastion embarks on her book, 250 pages of her singing about unconscionably dark times. She is not the only one on pitch: this is a narrative knitted together from letters, diaries, interviews, and a sequence of cassette tapes her grandfather recorded in the last years of his life, reliving the years bookmarked by two catastrophic world wars. It is a memoir of European privilege, of high art and popular culture, and the inevitable downfall of a Jewish family in the shadow of National Socialism.

De Bastion writes well, never quite dispelling the impression that she can’t quite believe the extent of her grandfather’s suffering. A pianist and composer himself, Istvan (Stephen) is forging a successful career as a club musician and film composer when he is called up for military training in late 1939, only months after rejecting an opportunity to emigrate to America. Thereafter he

suffers the privations of training, forced labour camps, imprisonment, long winter marches, near and real escapes, uncertainty about the fate of his family, emancipation from a concentration camp, repatriation, confrontation with the Soviets following their siege of Budapest, and finally his disgust at the postwar communist government that replaced that of the immoral Nazi puppet Berenc Szálasi.

It is one of the sadnesses of this book and of Stephen’s life that his loyalty to Hungary could be so egregiously betrayed time and again. In 1946, he is jailed on fabricated charges, since, as de Bastion explains, a criminal record was often given by the government as an excuse for not paying reparations. ‘I can tell you that in jail I was in the best of companies,’ Stephen says in one of his cassette tapes, a reference to the Jewish businessmen and distinguished countrymen with whom he shared a cell and fate. He soon thereafter moves to England, repelled by his country’s behaviour and the political path it was following.

Stephen does not come across as particularly likeable. He is prickly and proud, self-important, and at times an unreliable narrator (which his granddaughter acknowledges). He behaves monstrously towards his pregnant girlfriend (which his granddaughter does not acknowledge): ‘In normal circumstances, perhaps it would have been possible, but after a long deliberation, I decided to stay [in Switzerland] and not to marry Roszi.’ Roszi undergoes a late, illegal abortion – without Stephen’s knowledge, support, or even interest, so it seems – which leaves her hospitalised for weeks.

Such caveats aside, his is the story of European Jewry’s and Stephen’s unlikely survival. ‘What sort of people had we been?’ he asks at one point, answering that his family had been cultured and artistic, educated, Jewish, patriotic, though sadly without Brecht’s prescience. But in misfortune lies courage and invention, as Raoul Wallenberg and his Swiss confrère Carl Lutz – both here with walk-on parts – demonstrated. Stephen cuts out headshots from a family photo to forge papers for his parents. He tells of playing piano for Hungarian soldiers on a train from Kyiv to Budapest, the commanding officer having recognised him from pre-war days. He relays the occasion when a Nazi commander at the labour camp outside Mauthausen walked behind a long line of prisoners digging a trench, shooting every tenth man, the body of each slipping effortlessly into the new grave. Perhaps inevitably, in this camp he ‘acquired a very wide knowledge of looking at people’s faces and knowing in advance that this person is not going to make it’.

The other great survivor of the story is de Bastion’s piano, which was still standing in Stephen’s parents’ apartment when most of the façade and surrounding buildings were destroyed in the siege of Budapest. It is this piano that gives Stephen’s granddaughter her first musical experiences in addition to her narrative structure. The survival of this instrument and its role in her own emergence as a musician is a lovely story. For when she gathers with her many relatives from different corners of the world, she discovers that ‘without fail, each one of us has dedicated our lives to either music or humanitarian sciences, or a combination of the two’. Her singular touch is in excavating some of her grandfather’s music, recording it in new arrangements that show off her beautiful lyric voice. Yes, there is singing there. g

Ready. Aim. Shoot.

Rehearsing the end of the

world

Kevin Foster

‘FThe Fatal Alliance: A century of war on film by

David Thomson Harper

$35 hb, 457 pp

ilm critic’ rather undersells the breadth and depth of David Thomson’s engagement with the medium. A distinguished historian, biographer, novelist, and encyclopedist of film, he has also made documentaries, written screenplays, and been a respected judge on the international film festival circuit. He is widely regarded as the greatest living writer on film. It is fitting, then, that after more than twenty books on cinema he has finally turned his attention to war, a matter whose scope and import across the history of film provides a true match for his gifts.

Ironically, in light of this impressive resumé, Thomson’s key experience of war came as a participant, not an observer, when, as a child in early 1940s London, his parents’ home in South London was bombed by the Luftwaffe. This experience was ‘invaluable’, he reflected in later life, not only in teaching him how ‘a state of war had always been there’, but in providing perspective on his own and Britain’s privations: ‘We were not invaded, or put out on the streets as refugees; we were not sent to camps … Our outrages were very small compared with those that were available not far away.’ This insight organises, illuminates, and sharpens Thomson’s analysis of how, over more than a century, cinema has restaged and recreated war, the moral and historical artifices this has entailed, the misleading narratives it has generated, and the dangers that lie therein for all of us.

A patient if sometimes salty guide, Thomson leads the reader through some of war cinema’s most celebrated monuments, pointing out their architectural merits and solid construction, while peeling back the façade on others to reveal rotten foundations of lies and silences. In historical and geographical terms, the tour does not take us all that far – from an extended stay in the Europe of the two world wars, to Vietnam, with a side trip to Mogadishu. Further, the journey is principally routed through the United States, and Hollywood, whose preoccupations and industry imperatives did so much to shape the world’s view of these conflicts. But the moral and psychological distance covered is colossal. Probing the cinematic treatments of the world wars, rejecting Hollywood’s more anaesthetising bromides, Thomson lays bare the frail certainties and vain heroism of so much war cinema for the whistling in the dark that it is, drawing the reader ever closer to the terrors that flicker at the fringes of the camera’s footage and crowd the corners of the brain.

The book’s central conceit is that war and cinema are Siamese

technologies, that ‘world war and world cinema came into being in the same burst of change. Like an explosion.’ Their language, the organisation of their technologies and personnel, even their aims are interwoven. In both, resources are mobilised, participants are gathered, costumed, marshalled, choreographed, and finally called forward by their commanders. The machinery is locked and loaded. Ready. Aim. Shoot.

This technical and linguistic symbiosis reflects one of Thomson’s key arguments, that cinema is more war’s enabler and accomplice than its mirror and scourge. War films, especially the modern, CGI-enhanced variety, as witnessed in 1917 (2019) and All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), seek to transport the audience onto the battlefield, amid the mud and blood, the suffering and dying, the blighting of lives and the blasting of worlds, assuring them, ‘Look, you are there, all of this is happening’, while never removing them from the comfort of their seats. The ‘panoramas of ruin’ that ensue are made all the more sublime by the audience’s consistent realisation of their artifice. Such effects, Thomson notes, open ‘a gulf of taste between slaughter and composure’. Put simply, audiences can too readily enjoy the vicarious thrill of the battlefield without being required to imagine, let alone suffer, its terrors or its lasting debilitations. As a result, war films, even – sometimes especially – anti-war films, are inescapably celebratory, their moral posturing underpinned and undermined by fantasies of heroic virtue and a pornography of armaments: ‘In the dark, whatever the official motive or the orders, we go to war for excitement.’

Jean Renoir, director of La Grande Illusion (1937), hoped that ‘movies could save the world’. Thomson argues that they are far more likely to hasten its destruction. As time has passed since the end of the world wars and as the eyewitnesses to their horror have died off, the algorithms which bloat us with information have narrowed the pathways to a richer understanding of the experience of combat and have blocked the impulse to empathy with its victims.

In this context, Thomson laments the fact that ‘the most available sense of history is reappraisal through a movie’. Movies are ‘rarely adequate as history’, not least because the expense involved in their making requires their producers to feed the public ‘a few tasty white lies’ to make sure they recover their investment. So where does this cocktail of falsehood and ignorance leave us? ‘If we let the movies be our history book,’ Thomson cautions, ‘we will only repeat the movies.’ But in this replay the fallen do not get to rise again once the director calls ‘cut’.

Central to popular cinema’s vision of the past is the simplified moral terrain of so many of its battlefields. Here, valour triumphs, certainty overpowers doubt, good prevails, and a benevolent postwar order is permanently set in place. The films that draw Thomson’s appraising eye – Life and Nothing But (1989), Go Tell the Spartans (1978), The Human Condition (1959-61), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Act of Violence (1948) et al. – problematise or push back against these complacent certitudes, refusing to accept that all wounds heal, that the fighting is ever really over, or that war delivers the just settlement that its victors promised.

Though the movies have customarily portrayed combat as ‘a field for courage and its prowess’, wars are fought by people in a state of almost constant terror. This is a truth, Thomson believes,

that the cinema should not only acknowledge but honour. The real hero of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), he proposes, is not Tom Hanks’s noble everyman, Captain Miller, but the hapless translator, Corporal Upham, whose shuddering fear leaves him utterly helpless: ‘This is a man so true to life and terror; he deserves a medal. Or a whole movie about how he made his way in peace.’

It wasn’t only Hollywood. Things were no better at Pinewood Studios. As Britain struggled through rationing and the glacial advance to promised prosperity, its postwar cinema was ‘boisterous, cocksure, often foolish’. The year 1955 alone saw the release of The Dam Busters, The Colditz Story, and Above Us the Waves –films ‘loaded with syrup to pour over the suet pudding of abashed morale’. Contemplating this theatre of bombast, Thomson sagely reflects: ‘Sometimes bad films tell you more about the country that made them than the masterpieces.’

The English-speaking cinema’s swagger, Thomson argues, was born of ignorance of just how bad things could get, the result of neither modern Britain nor the United States ever having known ‘the adult dismay’ of occupation. By contrast, he applauds the ‘daunting honesty’ of The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). Marcel Ophüls’s unflinching exposure of the humiliations and compromises imposed by the Nazi occupation of France is propelled by its insistent – if unspoken – question: ‘What would you have done?’ In this light, Thomson argues, ‘all modern war finds its pathos and its fatal knowledge in Russia’, where conflict wreaked

its greatest destruction and visited its most lacerating indignities on the population. The best Russian cinema, like Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977), faces up to and anatomises the evil that attends on collaboration, the failure of human conscience it exposes and the spiritual corruption it breeds.

The deeper failure of cinema’s treatment of war over the past century, Thomson believes, lay in its refusal to accept and advertise the deflating truths about us that conflict revealed, that ‘we were – and will be – craven, corrupt, treacherous and human’. Instead, the movies proffered ‘a pattern of lies’, from which it constructed ‘a dreamworld of battle stories, as if we might be ennobled by them. Or saved in victory.’ The consequences of this childish make-believe could be fatal for us all. While US and British cinema persistently circles back to the ‘garden-party exuberance’ of films about D-Day and Dunkirk, they wilfully ignore the fact that ‘between 1939 and 1945 we rehearsed the end of the world’.

Cowering from the bombs in his London home, the little boy who spent a lifetime sitting in the dark, witnessing cinema’s endless battle with the truth about war, knew from his earliest days where this drama might yet end. g

Kevin Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His most recent book is Anti-Social Media: Conventional militaries in the digital battlespace (Melbourne University Press, 2021).

Felix Kammerer as Paul Bäumer in All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) (BFA / Alamy)

Scuzzball nihilism

Transmitting the abject into art

Michael Winkler

LExcitable Boy: Essays on risk

by Dominic Gordon Upswell

$29.99 pb, 173 pp

oïc Wacquant has documented the migration of the term ‘underclass’ from its original structural meaning (as coined by Gunnar Myrdal) to contemporary usage, classifying those who exbibit a cluster of behaviours provoking anxiety or disgust from mainstream society. Australian publishing is, belatedly, providing opportunities for diverse voices across gender, sexuality, and race, but the underclass Wacquant delineated remains largely mute.

Enter Dominic Gordon, who, in Excitable Boy, writes Melbourne’s margins with punch and panache. He takes the reader to places we know exist but probably have not experienced: for example, the sedulous unpaid shiftwork of the night-time graffiti vandal, combining inks and dyes to add ‘toxicity to the stain’; and the world of the dedicated clothes stealer.

Think of Jean Genet, who described a criminal world smelling of ‘sweat, sperm, and blood’. Gordon shares the Parisian’s sexual adventurism, disengagement with quotidian morality, and conviction that the abject can be transmuted into art. Like Genet, he is unapologetic about his illegal activities. Gordon’s demesne is the world of ‘oddballs, addicts, loners, fugitives of self’. He documents the crackle of the ‘street orchestra in full swing’, in an environment where ‘hard city shapes chop and change, jabbing in and out of each other like unfinished conversations’. The bloated, partially bogus Chopper Read books were a commercial phenomenon that titillated the law-abiding majority. By contrast, Gordon portrays the petty pleasures and dank longueurs of scuzzball-level criminality with alarming vividness – and, presumably, accuracy – without ever making it glitter.

Taking himself as both subject and object, Gordon strives to collapse the distance between words and experience. The fluctuating energy of the writing, ebbing to ennui and cresting to chaos, does not merely echo but exemplifies what he is capturing. Sometimes the prose becomes overheated; as Gordon explains, ‘meth brain at full speed is Lance Armstrong on the sprint’. Sometimes an essay drifts, but then the life he was living, and the lives of his erstwhile comrades, were directionless, even nihilistic.

One of the book’s many surprises is that Gordon’s family ties are stretched but not ruptured. While Dominic ransacks shop tills and binges meth, his parents are at home watching Kieślowski and Buster Keaton movies. The removal of this most obvious motivation for his behaviour – broken family! – leaves the reader wondering about the possibility of psychological factors

as a partial explanation. A weaker writer would have paraded pathologies for exculpation or cheap thrills. As Cher Tan writes in Peripathetic (2024), ‘we have seen how easy it is to leverage pain as a kind of currency’.

Gordon wears no labels. He offers no pat resolution, no moral lessons, no arc suitable for acclamation. The only concession comes in the short final essay, where he chooses to return home to his partner and baby rather than chasing a methamphetamine wipe-out. As redemption stories go, it is slight, but it signals progress in the author’s drive to integrate his competing strands of self. Throughout the book, we see him compartmentalising aspects of his life. For example, the pickpocket also loves watching vintage movies. The sometime streetfighter spends long hours reading in various public libraries. He describes his sexuality as straight, but for a decade he slaked his ‘chaotic’ sexual thirsts at gay sex lounges and beats.

The skill of hyper-observation developed as an opportunistic thief is equally valuable to the prose stylist. In a brief introduction, Christos Tsiolkas observes that there is ‘something almost frightening in the clarity and unsentimentality of [Gordon’s] storytelling,’ without ‘a hint of self-pity or sanctimony’. The writing is as pugnacious as Charles Willeford; the bathos and self-revelatory bravery recall Scott McClanahan, and Gordon’s hymning of the marginalised matches the Glaswegian grittiness tales of Ryan O’Connor’s The Voids (2022).

The collection begins with a whipcrack, ‘The Adelphi Hotel’, a finely turned account of honour among pilferers. Equally effective, albeit in a different register, is the sardonic ‘Spiralling in Stream C: Slow Days in the Newstart Alcove’, in which the mature Gordon and an ensemble of Josef Ks struggle to navigate punitive unemployment processes. By contrast, the longest essay, ‘Coming of Age in the Wild West’, slows the pace and connects more obliquely with the stated theme, risk.

Readers eager for sociological insights into issues of masculinity and low-grade criminality may be frustrated by Gordon’s commitment to depiction, not explanation. He admits to enjoying ‘the power I could wield on the general public’, but otherwise his most pungent insight is that ‘[t]he heightened, insular nature of that world is also a good place to hide out, especially if there’s hectic subconscious pain in your soul’.

Shannon Burns’s indelible Childhood (2022), recounting the author’s emergence from utter neglect and occasional abuse to become a respected writer and academic, is already a classic of Australian memoir. Excitable Boy might be its rogue cousin, scratching and scrapping, chasing the chimera of an undivided self. Both books ultimately confirm the old-fashioned verity that love exists, and can provide salvation – familial, romantic, occasionally between friends or criminal acquaintances, and ultimately between parent and child.

Until love overcomes, other forces dominate. How else to explain the risks taken in the service of something so ostensibly unnecessary, for anyone beyond what polite society terms the underclass, as illegal painting of public property? ‘For young men looking for masculine expression, Graff had it all, and even though it was a deeply fragile, anti-developmental, addiction-incubating backward claustrophobic headfuck, everybody needs a rite of passage, right?’ g

Celebrating twenty-one years of outstanding poetry!

Entries are now open for the twenty-first Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).

This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane and Peter Rose.

For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs

First prize

$6,000

Four shortlisted poets

$1,000 each

Entries close 7 October 2024

i² = j² = k² = ijk = –1

Vectors as an entire method of thinking

Michael Lucy

IVector:

A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation

by Robyn Arianrhod

University of New South Wales Press

$44.99 pb, 472 pp

f you ever came across a vector in a high-school science class, it probably looked quite simple: a little arrow you might draw on a diagram to show the motion of a train or the forces on a swinging pendulum. An arrow pointing right would cancel an arrow pointing left, or → + ← = 0. Add together two arrows pointing in the same direction, you get one twice as long: →. A rightward arrow plus an upward one? You’ve got yourself a diagonal: → + ↑ = ↗.

As it turns out, this arrow arithmetic is a handy way to think about numbers and spatial relationships, especially if you combine it with other kinds of mathematical gear like algebra and calculus. Although the vector picture was originally devised to describe the familiar three-dimensional space we live in, it can be expanded in surprising directions. Vectors turn up in the curved spacetime of Einstein’s relativity and the weird twelve-dimensional universes of string theory, as well as in Google’s page-ranking algorithm and the abstract spaces with thousands of dimensions that AI models use to represent things like language and meaning. However, as mathematician and historian Robyn Arianrhod shows in her new book, Vector, the invention of this deceptively simple piece of conceptual technology took several thousand years.

Arianrhod starts her tale in ancient Mesopotamia, where numerical record-keeping and geometry developed alongside agriculture and urbanisation. Next we encounter Euclid and other ancient Greeks, the Persian ‘father of algebra’ al-Khwarizmi, Isaac Newton and the invention of calculus, and other milestones of mathematical history, before slowing down and zooming in as we reach the nineteenth century.

Here things kick off with a famous event that occurred in Dublin on 16 October 1843: Ireland’s astronomer royal, William Rowan Hamilton, had a flash of insight while walking to a meeting. He had been trying to describe mathematically the rotations of three-dimensional objects and finally understood how to do it using some items he called ‘quaternions’.

Overcome with the same impulse that sent Archimedes running naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting ‘Eureka!’, Hamilton took out his pocket knife and scratched a formula into the stone of the bridge he was crossing: i² = j² = k² = ijk = –1

What does this mean? Why was it so important? Well, as Arianrhod shows us, the letters represent different dimensions at right angles to one another, and the multiplications are a way of showing their relationships in number form. Quaternions were gradually streamlined into vectors, which do much the same job in a more intuitive way, and sent slow shockwaves through physics.

Vectors, Arianrhod explains, were not just a handy tool for calculations, but what Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell called an entire ‘method of thinking’ which helped him reformulate his revolutionary theory of electricity and magnetism. Maxwell’s discoveries later inspired the young Einstein to rework our understanding of space and time.

Arianrhod has an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of physics and mathematics, as well as a deep understanding of often very technical subject matter. The book has no shortage of mathematical detail for those who want it, much of it in the excellent and thorough endnotes. While the intricacies can be skimmed over without losing the narrative thread, less mathematically inclined readers may struggle with some sections.

Arianrhod’s deep research and attention to neglected figures in the history of science, many of them women, is refreshing. I was charmed to learn about the sixteenth-century Italian mathematician Nicolo Tartaglia, for instance, and his quest to understand the trajectory of cannonballs, and to read the enlightening section on Emmy Noether, the early twentieth-century German mathematician, whom Einstein and others called ‘the most important woman in the history of mathematics’. (If you’ll excuse a mathematical interlude, the result that physicists call Noether’s theorem is a cracker, proving that there is a fundamental link between symmetry and the idea that some things, like energy, are neither created nor destroyed.)

Parts of the story told in Vector will be familiar to readers of Arianrhod’s previous books, Seduced By Logic (2000), about the pioneering scientists Émilie du Châtelet and Mary Somerville, Einstein’s Heroes (2004), which covered the precursors of the theory of relativity, and Thomas Harriott (2019), a life of a little-remembered English Renaissance mathematician and astronomer.

Here, however, the events are all understood via the question of ‘how to represent information’, and how the right representation can suddenly make clear unsuspected truths and connections. As Arianrhod writes, ‘describing physical reality mathematically creates a magnifying glass, revealing, through mathematical patterns, underlying physical attributes that had long lain hidden’.

Vector is a fascinating read in itself, but it also benefits from the context in which it arrives. In popular culture, the Promethean narrative of science often seems to have reached the ‘frequent eagle attacks’ part of the story. You come away from recent works like Benjamin Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand The World and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer feeling that the twentieth century’s surge of scientific and technical development was a spree whose bill is now coming due. Reading news reports about climate change or impending AI-driven doom does little to dispel the impression.

Vector is something of an antidote to, or at least respite from, this bleak picture. It focuses on the struggles of noble minds – sometimes tortured but mostly by the quest for knowledge –climbing to ever more rarefied levels of abstract understanding.

Early on, Arianrhod quotes Hamilton writing to a friend about his work on quaternions: ‘Do you not feel, as well as think, that we are on a right track, and shall be thanked hereafter?’

Perhaps works like Vector constitute a kind of thanks to Hamilton and all the others who found a path to the strange heights from which we now survey the world. g

Taking a hammer

Thinking within the guardrails

Richard King

FTechno

by Marcus Smith

University of Queensland Press

$34.99 pb, 238 pp

or those of us who would like to see a revival of the ‘technocritical’ tradition in public debate (the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Langdon Winner, inter many alia), it is a cause of some irritation that the hegemonic view of technology remains the instrumental one. Here, technology is deemed to be neutral, in a way that precludes any serious analysis of its constitutive role in human affairs. Technologies, it is said, are merely tools to serve the needs of their users; they have no political content per se. I can use a hammer to drive in a nail or bludgeon my next-door neighbour to death. It is my actions that matter, not the hammer itself.

One effect of the instrumental view (which will strike many readers as common sense) is to herd all discussions of new technologies towards the door marked ‘regulation’. For if technologies have no political content – if they do not shape, and are not shaped by, the societies into which they emerge – the issue of their relationship to ‘human nature’ or ‘the human condition’ will never arise. Instead, the discussion will tend to focus on matters of misuse or safety, before moving on to what the state can do to keep this or that technology within its ‘guardrails’. The question of where the road between the guardrails is going, and where it originates – and indeed of who built the road, and why – is almost always left unasked.

Marcus Smith’s Techno is a book about technology that sits solidly within this instrumental approach. For Smith – an associate professor in technology, law, and regulation at Charles Sturt University – the current revolution in technology, and in digital technology in particular, necessitates not a counter-revolution but carefully drafted legislation that will spread the benefits of digital tools while mitigating their risks. Certainly, Smith has an impressive grasp of the issues involved in this endeavour, and he communicates those issues to a non-specialist readership in straightforward and uncluttered prose. But for all his obvious expertise, his book also demonstrates the limitations of the instrumentalist approach to technology and the regulatory solutionism it engenders.

Though Techno is divided into three broad sections – ‘Technology and Government’, ‘Technology and the Individual’, and ‘Technology and Society’ – most of its material is concerned with the relationship between the state and the private individual, and with how the modern technology company complicates that relationship. In a key chapter, Smith relates at length the story

of how the Australian government came into conflict with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta over plans for a media bargaining code, which would oblige social media platforms like Facebook to pay for the news that appeared in their feeds.

The example is an important one, for while in one sense it bears on conventional questions of political economy – on the relationship between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ liberty, and between market freedoms and social democracy – it is clear that digital technologies pose a challenge of a different order to this ‘agonistic’ vision of liberalism, evading as they do the jurisdictional controls that apply to other industries.

I should add that this is much more academic language than Smith employs in his analysis; but to the extent that this book has intellectual weight, it relates to the fundamental questions posed to the liberal-capitalist state by the information economy, and the affordances that emerge from it. From the discussion of how law-enforcement agencies are empowered by the new technologies (and of the benefits and potential dangers that flow from that empowerment) to the discussion of cryptocurrencies and the opportunities they open up for both honest investors and criminals, all the most compelling sections in Techno are relevant to this highly significant question.

The problem, however, is that the question is not new and does not even begin to grapple with the ways in which new and emerging technologies – technologies that allow us to seed the world with new forms of intelligence, and, indeed, to intervene in nature at the level of the atom, the cell, and the molecule, up to and including human molecules – are affecting human beings now and are likely to affect them in the future. Indeed, there is a certain fatalism baked into the regulatory approach, a fatalism that, while seeming to search for solutions to the problems caused by those technologies, remains wedded to the system from which they emerged, and blind to the ways they reproduce its values of individualism and utilitarian efficiency. Smith’s subtitle is ‘Humans and Technology’; but his human, as noted, is the private citizen, which is first and foremost a legal entity. Similarly, the word ‘rights’ is sprinkled throughout the book like currants in a Chelsea bun: governments have the right to regulate Big Tech; Big Tech has the right to healthy competition; and individuals have the right to take advantage of Big Tech. However, communities aren’t composed of rights: they are composed of flesh-andblood human beings – technological animals whose technologies, I would argue, increasingly work against the grain of their social, creative, and embodied lives.

Smith might object, and object with some justice, that I am being insufficiently pragmatic, and I should say that his list of three ‘imperatives’ to guide us in the legal space – involving ‘key players’ in the drafting of legislation, using technologies to ensure compliance, and the establishment of a global agency to coordinate technology regulation – are both sensible and lucidly set out. But pragmatism has an annoying tendency to concede the important points in advance, and my sense is that Techno falls into this trap. As the Luddites were only too aware, sometimes you need to take a hammer to the system. g

Richard King is a Fremantle-based writer. His most recent book is Here Be Monsters (Monash University Publishing, 2023).

George Williams

Open Page

Professor George Williams AO is the Vice-Chancellor and President at Western Sydney University. He commenced as Western Sydney University’s fifth Vice-Chancellor in July 2024, bringing decades of experience as a constitutional law scholar and teacher, senior leader in higher education, barrister and as a national thought leader. His latest book with David Hume is People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won (UNSW Press, 2024).

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

To Western Sydney University! It is a bit sad I know, but I have just started as vice-chancellor and am thrilled to make a difference. Education changed my life, and I want that for others. There is no better place to achieve this, as two-thirds of our students are the first in their family to go to university and we have the highest number of low SES students in Australia.

What is your idea of hell?

A slow afternoon shopping for clothes.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Modesty. If you have something to be proud of, share it.

What’s your favourite film?

That is a tough one! By a nose, it would be the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended editions of course) over the original Star Wars trilogy (not to be confused with the prequels or the very disappointing sequels).

And your favourite book?

I do not usually like reading books a second time, but there are a few I come back to every few years. One is Earth Abides, a 1949 American post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by George R. Stewart. It is a forgotten classic that details the decline of civilisation after a worldwide plague.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine, historical or contemporary.

I would love to get J.R.R. Tolkien together with movie director Peter Jackson and screenwriter Fran Walsh. I suspect a bit of tension in the room over the adaptation of the Lord of the Rings novels and would love to see the reaction.

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

Restaurant. It has nothing to do with the word itself, but I always struggle to spell it, going back to the fact that I paid so little attention to spelling in school. Thankfully, my dreadful aptitude for spelling has been made up for by good dictation systems. They have saved my writing career. ‘Forsooth’ deserves a comeback. It rolls off the tongue nicely.

Who is your favourite author?

George R.R. Martin would have got the nod for his Game of Thrones novels, but I have been waiting thirteen years for the next book, and that takes him down several notches. My favourite of all time is Stephen R. Donaldson. I love his willingness to subvert our expectations of fantasy in the

Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and his science-fiction Gap series is breathtaking. His capacity to ratchet up the tension and reader engagement with complex characters and intricate plots is exactly what I look for at the end of the day.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

I cannot go past the true and loyal Samwise Gamgee. Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Brevity.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Lord of the Rings

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

Jane Austen’s novels have never appealed to me, but I loved the recent mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

The Daily by The New York Times

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

These days it is time. I had this in spades as an academic, but it declined precipitously when I became dean and then deputy vice-chancellor, and now has completely disappeared as vicechancellor. My days as an author of books may now be over. My latest is my forty-third book, so it has not been a bad run.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Engaging fairly with my writing and bringing something new and surprising to the table.

How do you find working with editors?

I am constantly impressed with their ability to point out errors and problems that I have somehow missed. I have been fortunate to work with wonderful editors across a range of publishers, especially UNSW Press and Federation Press.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

They are such great fun. It is a privilege to engage directly with readers and to hear their take on your work. They also bring in energy that can be inspiring.

Are artists valued in our society?

Not as much as they should be.

What are you working on now?

I am learning on the job as a newly minted vice-chancellor. I am advocating on behalf of our students, including to do away with the unfair and highly damaging $50,000 cost of Arts degrees. The world needs more writers and philosophers. g

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