Australian Book Review – April 2022, issue no. 441 by Australian Book Review

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Sheila Fitzpatrick Stuart Macintyre’s posthumous history James Ley Amazon and literary fiction Joan Beaumont Australians at Harvard Patrick Mullins Bob Hawke revisited Glyn Davis Doomscrolling

‘Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished, and certainly not prosecuted behind closed doors for speaking up about abhorrent government wrongdoing. The Collaery prosecution is a stain on our democracy, an insult to our legal system.’

Shooting the messengers Kieran Pender on the Collaery case

Jolley Prize 2017 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story, with $12,500 in prizes. The 2022 Jolley Prize closes on 2 May 2022. It honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English.

Judged by Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500 previous winners 2021 Camilla Chaudhary

2020 Mykaela Saunders

2019 Sonja Dechian

2018 Madelaine Lucas

2017 Eliza Robertson

2016 Josephine Rowe

2015 Rob Magnuson Smith

2014 Jennifer Down

2013 Michelle Michau-Crawford

2012 Sue Hurley

2011 Carrie Tiffany & Gregory Day

2010 Maria Takolander

The Jolley Prize is generously funded by Ian Dickson

Full details and online entry are available on our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Jordie Albiston (1961–2022)

Advances

that one of the highlights of the festival was the ABR party held on 8 March, attended by local luminaries and friends of In early March, the Australian poetry community was shocked the magazine. Congratulations, too, to Helen Ennis, whose by news of the death of Jordie Albiston. Known for both her book Olive Cotton: A life in photography (reviewed in our appetite for formal experimentation and her poetry’s emotional January–February 2020 issue) took out the $15,000 prize for range, Albiston was the author and editor of twenty-two books non-fiction in the Festival’s Literature Awards. Ennis, a regular including the award-winning collections Nervous Arcs (1995) contributor to the magazine since 2005 issue, received ABR’s and the sonnet according to ‘m’ (2009), as well as the historical George Hicks Foundation Fellowship in 2013 in support of works Botany Bay Document (1996) and The Hanging of Jean her work on Cotton. Her essay, ‘Olive Cotton at Spring Forest’ Lee (1998). (The latter was adapted for opera by Andrée ( June–July 2013), focusing on the second phase of Cotton’s Greenwell.) life when she married Ross McInerney and moved to Spring Few contemporary Australian poets thought as deeply Forest in regional New South Wales, about form as Albiston, who drew on can be read online by subscribers. areas as far-flung as Euclidean geometry Continuing our creep eastward, and atomic science for inspiration. As Advances welcomes the return of the Joan Fleming observed in a review of Newcastle Writers Festival (1–3 April). Albiston’s new volume, Fifteeners (2021), Featuring 110 writers from throughout for ABR’s March issue, the latter’s work Australia across seventy free and is animated by a desire for capaciousness, ticketed events, the festival program by a world-crafting and world-catching will match the temper of the times ambition. ‘Albiston’s Everything,’ Fleming with an opening gala focusing on love’s wrote, ‘is made with great tenderness’. transformative impact and closing with Like ‘world’, ‘life’ was also something a discussion of Sarah Wilson’s most of a talismanic word for Albiston. When Jordie Albiston recent book, This One Wild and Precious interviewed as ABR’s Poet of the Month Life, with ABR contributor Beejay Silcox. in May 2016, she remarked that ‘Life is inspiring. Poetry is And, finally, to bring our own festival tour to a close, (joyful) work.’ Advances has just heard that Michael Williams will be stepping down as artistic director after this year’s Sydney Festival round-up Writers’ Festival. Brought on, in his own words (and with After a pandemic-induced hiatus, Australian writing festivals – a nod to The Godfather), ‘as a wartime consigliere, to see the at least those where one can jostle with crowds and be buffeted festival through the COVID period’, Williams has previously by the elements – are back with a vengeance. Starting on the directed another literary institution, Melbourne’s Wheeler westernmost side of the continent: Perth Festival’s Writers Centre. Williams’s swansong program will ‘drop’ (as they Weekend (26–27 February), with headliners including Tim say these days) on 24 March and the festival will soon be Winton, Hannah Kent, Claire G. Coleman, and Helen Garner, recruiting a new director. recorded close to 6,700 visitors, despite interstate author With at least two vacancies to be filled on the festival sessions being moved online due to border closures. Perhaps the circuit this year, Richter and Hunn should get cracking on largest demographic who turned out were aspirational authors, a sequel to their bestseller. with Georgia Richter and Deborah Hunn’s How to be an Author the bestselling book over the weekend at the Freemantle Arts Amazon closures Centre bookshop. Seven years after opening its first brick-and-mortar bookstore On the other side of the Great Australian Bight, the in Seattle, Amazon has announced that it will close all twentyAdelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week took place from March 5 four of its physical outlets and a further forty-four pop-up and to 10. Still Australia’s largest free literary festival, the event ‘4-star’ stores. When the e-commerce giant opened its first treated festival goers to one last hurrah from outgoing festival shopfront in 2015, Americans were bemused by this seemingly director, Jo Dyer, who is standing as an independent for the retrograde move; after all, hadn’t the convenience of Amazon’s federal seat of Boothby. Of the many sessions dedicated ‘1-click checkout’ been responsible for bookshop closures all to our worsening political predicament, perhaps none was over the country (and not just independent retailers, but also as damning as the panel on the government’s prosecution behemoths such as Barnes & Noble)? of whistleblowers. The discussion was chaired by Andrew Advances can only surmise that Amazon’s bookshops Fowler and featured Bernard Collaery (whose case Kieran were intended to provide a more ‘comforting’ veneer to the Pender examines in forensic detail in our cover feature), David company’s ruthlessly algorithm-driven business – Bezosism McBride (the former military lawyer whose allegations led to the Brereton Report on Australian war crimes in Afghanistan), with a human face – but consumers, it seems, failed to be convinced. To understand why, turn to James Ley’s review and Jennifer Robinson ( Julian Assange’s lawyer). As Pender (in this issue) of Everything and Less, a new study by literary puts it in his article, these prosecutions are nothing short of scholar Mark McGurl of what the successes and failures of ‘a stain on our democracy’ and ‘an insult to our legal system’. Amazon’s business model tell us about how and why we read. g On some brighter notes, Advances was reliably informed AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Australian Book Review April 2022, no. 441

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $80 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Intern Stacy Chan, Florence Honybun, Isabella Venutti Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

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Image credits and information Front cover: An image of a whistle (Moodboard Stock Photography/ Alamy) Page 25: Sunrise at Horse Head Rock, Bermagui, New South Wales, Australia (David Chrastek/Alamy) Page 55: Mason Kelly and Ainsley Melham in Watershed (photograph by Andrew Beveridge)

ABR April 2022 LETTERS

Beejay Silcox, David Mason, Paul Morgan, Harley Carter, John Carmody, Patrick Hockey, Belinda Nemec

COMMENTARY

8 39

Kieran Pender Joan Beaumont

How the Collaery case stains our democracy Reflections on Australian Studies at Harvard

POLITICS

12 14 16 23

Patrick Mullins Sheila Fitzpatrick Iva Glisic Glyn Davis

Bob Hawke by Troy Bramston The Party by Stuart Macintyre Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts Our Own Worst Enemy by Tom Nichols

HISTORY

18 19

Peter Edwards David Reeve

Return to Vietnam by Mia Martin Hobbs Young Soeharto by David Jenkins

LITERARY STUDIES

21 36

James Ley Nicholas Jose

Everything and Less by Mark McGurl Eurasia without Borders by Katerina Clark

FICTION

26 27 28 29 30 32 33 34

Susan Sheridan Lisa Bennett Robert Dessaix Patrick Allington Ben Chandler Gay Bilson Jennifer Mills Alex Cothren

Orphan Rock by Dominique Wilson A History of Dreams by Jane Rawson A Previous Life by Edmund White Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight by Steven Carroll Three new Young Adult novels The Grass Hotel by Craig Sherborne Banjawarn by Josh Kemp The Sawdust House by David Whish-Wilson

LANGUAGE

Amanda Laugesen

A hot novax summer

SOCIETY

Diane Stubbings

Skin Deep by Phillipa McGuinness

POEMS

41 49

Judith Bishop Anders Villani

The Forest Deer Knife

POETRY

42 43 45 46

Luke Beesley Jennifer Harrison Theodore Ell John Hawke

New poetry from Anthony Lawrence and Subhash Jaireth New poetry from Jelena Dinić and Jane Gibian Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri, translated by D.M. Black Poetry and Bondage by Andrea Brady

SHAKESPEARE

48 50

David McInnis P. Kishore Saval

The Private Life of William Shakespeare by Lena Cowen Orlin Holding a Mirror up to Nature by James Gilligan and David A.J. Richards

MEDIA

Astrid Edwards

The Power of Podcasting by Siobhán McHugh

MEMOIR

52 53

Jacqueline Kent Andrew Broertjes

My Accidental Career by Brenda Niall Found, Wanting by Natasha Sholl

INTERVIEW

Troy Bramston

Open Page

ABR ARTS

56 57 58 59 60 61 63

Dilan Gunawardana Ian Britain Ian Dickson Humphrey Bower Michael Halliwell Peter Tregear Christopher Menz

Drive My Car Solid Ivory by James Ivory Opening Night Watershed Otello The Grainger Trap Hamilton Gallery’s Sixtieth Birthday

Mark Edele

The Conflict in Ukraine by Serhy Yekelchyk

FROM THE ARCHIVE 64

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

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

Arts South Australia

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Another mangled breast

Letters

Dear Editor, I walked out of a screening of Benedetta last night (ABR, March 2022). I simply could not stomach yet another gratuitous scene of degradation – another mangled breast or ruined girl. Basic Instinct by way of Monty Python, Benedetta is phwoar, peephole filmmaking – a tale of snickering cruelty. It is an object lesson in the male gaze – women’s intimacies as a leering punchline. The persecuted Benedetta Carlini has been exhumed from history for the benefit of a dildo gag. There was a tale to tell here about cloistered power and the lure of rapture. It feels mightily telling that my friends and I were the only women in the screening. Beejay Silcox, Narrabundah, ACT

Mindy Gill

Dear Editor, What an excellent, subtle essay by Mindy Gill (ABR, March 2022). It feels like a companion piece to Zadie Smith’s NYRB piece, ‘Fascinated to presume’ https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/2019/10/24/zadie-smith-in-defense-of-fiction/ Paul Morgan (online comment)

happens to me with that same drug. Thus noci-sensitive pathways probably possess common features. But we cannot know what a conscious canine ‘feels’ or perceives. Furthermore, every dog owner knows that their pets experience what looks like joy and guilt, but that, by no means, indicates that it experiences a comparable ‘consciousness’ to ours, nor that it can think and reflect as we do. We are also aware that animals (including invertebrates) have memory and we know that these must involve biochemical mechanisms, including the synthesis of new molecules. Yet, we have absolutely no idea (apart from theories, some of them fanciful) of how those chemicals (including new proteins) generate the vivid memories – of people, sounds, words, odours and tastes – which are so familiar to us. Furthermore, assertions such as ‘the emergent properties of neural networks’ do no more (in my judgement) than state the obvious in different words. I might just as validly theorise that the picture on the screen of my television is an ‘emergent property’ in its circuitry. It does not take us a single step from our starting point. John Carmody , Roseville, NSW

Something of a stretch

Dear Editor, I am old enough to remember the cult of migrant writing, a forerunner of identity politics. Both are sort of playing the man instead of the ball and losing the point of the game altogether. The work suffers, as do the writers. It is time the situation is called out. Well done, Mindy Gill. Harley Carter (online comment)

Dear Editor, There is no doubt the interruption to the book fair was unpleasant and unfortunate, but to draw from that the conclusion that we are all doomed seems something of a stretch. There exists a grey area in which the rights of individuals have had to be set aside for the greater good, but most of those folk are law-abiding citizens who, once the pandemic is over, will return to their normal patterns of behaviour despite the reinforcement of their fears about the imagined connections between big business and big pharma (never mind that you would have been better off investing in Tesla or Bitcoin in the last couple of years rather than Pfizer or Moderna). Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Perception, consciousness, and cognition

The Grainger Museum

Dear Editor, I appreciate the careful distinctions made in this essay, and hope they can be heard by readers everywhere. David Mason (online comment)

Dear Editor, In her review of Antonio Damasio’s Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious, Diane Stubbings seems to veer between perception, consciousness, and cognition (‘Owning Experience’, ABR, March 2022). They are, of course, cognate but are distinct and need to be kept so if we are ever to understand what they are. Of the three, perception is probably fundamental. It seems to be a property of most (if not all) animal life, but, pace Thomas Nagel (of ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ renown), we have no real idea of how it arises, and though we assume that sensations are comparable, we also know (e.g.in colour blindness) that they are not necessarily the same for different individuals. Why is this a ‘problem’? It is essentially because, though the nerve impulses which convey information from (for example) the olfactory epithelium, the retina, the auditory system or the skin operate with, basically, the same biophysical mechanisms, the perceptions which they evoke are quite distinct and seem to depend upon transformative processes which depend, critically, on where in the brain they arise. Yet it is a reasonable assumption that when, say, my dog is given a general anaesthetic drug, the effects are analogous with what

Dear Editor, What an insightful commentary from Peter Tregear [‘The Grainger Trap’ ABR April 2022]. I have seen the latest installation at the Grainger Museum. Fresh responses to museums and collections should always be welcome, particularly from groups and individuals traditionally excluded. At a university museum, however, surely such efforts should also be informed by awareness of the history of the collection, the institution, the founder(s), and their historical context. These factors can (and probably should) be challenged and critiqued. But to challenge and critique you must first understand: read the existing literature, do your research. Fred Wilson’s brilliantly subversive interventions revealed a solid understanding of the collections and institutions that he was critiquing, gained presumably through reading, research and discussion, and complementing his own lived experience and sharp insights. The Grainger Museum’s latest project is the work of its first ‘Creative Researcher in Residence’. In other typical university/ academic forums, such as seminars, conferences and peer-reviewed journals, research and a knowledge of prior scholarship are essential. They should also be essential in university museums. Belinda Nemec (online comment) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

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The Collaery case Kieran Pender

Fiction and Amazon James Ley

Editor’s Diary Peter Rose

Covid and brain fog Thomas H. Ford

Identity politics Mindy Gill

Fyodor Dostoevsky Geordie Williamson

Tracy K. Smith Felicity Plunkett

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Commentary

Shooting the messengers How the Collaery case stains our democracy

by Kieran Pender

n the first day of March this year, Scott Morrison declared his commitment to democratic principles. ‘My government will never be backward when it comes to standing up for Australia’s national interests and standing up for liberal democracy in today’s world,’ the prime minister told reporters. ‘We can’t be absent when it comes to standing up for those important principles.’ It was a deeply hypocritical statement from a leader who has overseen raids on journalists, the prosecution of whistleblowers, and the degradation of transparency mechanisms at the heart of our democracy. Standing up for important democratic principles is just about the opposite of what the Morrison government has done, domestically at least, in recent years. The secrecy-shrouded prosecution of Bernard Collaery makes that abundantly clear. Much has already been written about the Collaery case, an insidious misuse of government resources that is contrary to the public interest and will only serve to silence whistleblowers. In this article, I want to look to the future. How does this end? And how do we prevent it from happening again? First, though, a recap. Bernard Collaery is a Canberra lawyer. He is an elder statesman of the profession, having acted in many significant cases (including lawsuits arising from the Canberra Hospital explosion and the Thredbo landslide) and served briefly as ACT attorney-general and deputy chief minister. Collaery was also deeply involved in the independence movement of our neighbour Timor-Leste, acting as an adviser to the likes of Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta. In 2018, Collaery was charged with five counts under the Intelligence Services Act 2001. It is alleged that Collaery breached a secrecy provision in that statute, through his communications with various ABC journalists. It was also alleged that he had conspired with his former client Witness K to contravene the secrecy provision. K, an ex-intelligence operative, had received approval from the Inspector-General for Intelligence and Security to seek legal advice from Collaery. It is alleged that Collaery and K conspired to pass information to the government of Timor-Leste. And what information it is alleged to have been. The central issue underlying this entire prosecution is Australia’s alleged spying on Timor-Leste for commercial gain. Just a couple of

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years after Timor had gained independence from Indonesia, and had been left in impoverished ruins, Australia allegedly bugged Timor’s cabinet offices to gain the upper hand in oil and gas negotiations. It was a despicable act of espionage, morally bankrupt, aimed at enriching Australia and a few energy majors at the expense of a war-ravaged, newly born nation. Our neighbours, our friends – victims of the rapacious greed of our government. Rather than prosecuting those who authorised this shocking intelligence operation, the government wants to shoot the messenger. Three years after being charged, Witness K pleaded guilty to a lesser charge; in June 2021, he was given a suspended sentence. But Collaery maintains his innocence. Since being charged, he has withstood a veritable procedural battering – over fifty court hearings and a dozen judgments over the extent of secrecy to be applied to his jury trial, and related issues. The Morrison government, via Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, wants the trial to be mainly heard behind closed doors. One motivation for this secrecy is so that Collaery can be successfully prosecuted without the government having to publicly admit that it spied on Timor. It is not a crime to make something up, so Collaery will only be found guilty if the underlying matter, the espionage, is true. But the government has never admitted its wrongdoing, has never apologised, and it doesn’t want to start now. This is not hyperbole. As much was stated, matter-of-factly, in a decision from Justice David Mossop of the ACT Supreme Court in 2020: ‘By this mechanism the Attorney‑General hopes to maintain a position of “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) in relation to the subject matter of the [redacted].’ In other words, the Morrison government wants to tell a jury one thing, to convict a whistleblower, but refuses to admit the same thing to the Australian public. Thankfully, the justice system disagreed. Despite Mossop’s initially granting the secrecy orders sought by Cash (the deck is stacked in the attorney-general’s favour, with the court required by law to give greatest weight to their views), on appeal Mossop’s colleagues upheld the importance of open justice and ordered a largely open trial. In a public summary of its judgment, released in October 2021, the ACT Court of Appeal indicated that a secret trial would pose ‘a very real risk of damage to public confidence

in the administration of justice’. The summary added that ‘the open hearing of criminal trials was important because it deterred political prosecutions’. It is at this point that the pre-trial proceedings took a turn that would be outlandish even in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The attorney-general appealed to the High Court – not to challenge the underlying decision of the Court of Appeal, but to contest the Court’s refusal to redact parts of their written reasons. The government wants to keep a judgment that said no to secrecy itself secret. The case remains before the High Court, awaiting a decision on whether the attorney-general will be granted special leave to appeal (a hearing is expected in mid-April). If special leave is granted, the High Court will weigh in on the redactions later this year. If not, we might finally see a judgment, handed down six months ago, that said no to a secret trial. It is perversity heaped on perversity. It does not end there. Notwithstanding its robust defence of open justice, the Court of Appeal sent the ultimate secrecy question back to Justice Mossop, because when it was first argued before him, the government wanted to put evidence that it said was so secret only the judge could see it. Contrary to foundational principles of procedural fairness, the attorney-general’s lawyers submitted that they would only provide the evidence if Collaery and his lawyers could not see it. Mossop decided that he did not need to see the evidence to make his decision – now that the Court of Appeal has decided against the attorney-general, the government is back for another bite of the cherry, this time with secret evidence in hand. In mid-March, Mossop agreed to receive and consider the secret evidence, shrugging off constitutional concerns that had been argued by Collaery’s barristers. Collaery will therefore have to relitigate the fight over whether his trial should be in secret, effectively blindfolded, unable to see the evidence on which the attorney-general is relying. And so, almost four years after Collaery was charged, a trial remains beyond the horizon. The current parallel litigation might be concluded by the end of this year. Even that is uncertain, particularly if Mossop, having agreed to receive secret evidence, insists on a secret trial, which may then be appealed – to the Court of Appeal and even the High Court. More pre-trial fighting is likely; no aspect of this case has been uncontested. (In one judgment, in 2020, Mossop complained that the relevant issue, over parliamentary privilege, might have been resolved by consensus; instead, ‘the parties allowed it to become another front in their greater war’.) The punishment by process inflicted on Bernard Collaery by the government rolls on.

o how does it end? The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) or the attorney-general could drop this prosecution today. The Morrison government could apologise to Timor-Leste and Collaery, pardon Witness K, and commit to comprehensive law reform directed towards protecting whistleblowers and promoting transparency. That would be the preferable outcome, even if it is alarming that it has taken them four years to reach the obvious conclusion that there is no public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers. The CDPP has the authority to drop a prosecution at any time prior to a trial. They should exercise that authority. The Prosecution

Policy of the Commonwealth provides that the guiding question is at all times whether ‘the public interest requires a prosecution to be pursued’. Prosecuting whistleblowers is not in the public interest. It punishes courageous Australians who have spoken up and revealed wrongdoing. No one really disputes that what Collaery is alleged to have said is true – that Australia spied on Timor-Leste. Prosecuting someone for telling the truth, when that truth reveals government wrongdoing, is profoundly undemocratic. Prosecuting whistleblowers also has a chilling effect on other Australians who might speak up. Discouraging people from calling out wrongdoing is antithetical to the public interest.

Prosecuting someone for telling the truth, when that truth reveals government wrongdoing, is profoundly undemocratic If the CDPP will not exercise their discretion to discontinue the prosecution, then the attorney-general must. At common law, the government has the prerogative power to discontinue the prosecution – in technical terms to direct a nolle prosequi (‘no bill’) in relation to a criminal charge. Section 71 of the Judiciary Act 1903 also provides express statutory authority for this power. The attorney-general can, at any time, end this madness. Cash has so far refused to drop the case. At every Senate estimates hearing, upon being grilled about the Collaery case by the likes of Senator Rex Patrick, Cash offers the same excuse. In the most recent exchange, in February 2022, the attorneygeneral insisted that it was ‘not appropriate for me to intervene to discontinue this matter … it would be extraordinary and, given its nature, represent political intervention in a process that … conventionally, has been independent’. This is wrong for two reasons. First, the nature of the charges against Collaery required the attorney-general’s consent for the CDPP to proceed. The brief reportedly lay dormant on former Attorney-General George Brandis’s desk, for good reason. It was not until Christian Porter became the nation’s first law officer that the case was given the green light. It has therefore been political from the start; there is nothing apolitical about refusing to intervene now. Second, this is an extraordinary case, and extraordinary cases deserve the exercise of extraordinary powers. Those powers exist for a reason. Hopefully, the CDPP or the attorney-general acts. If they continue to refuse to drop the prosecution, it is incumbent on the next government – whether Coalition or Labor – to intervene. Labor has been making the right noises, thanks to agitation by Canberra MPs and senators. If Labor is elected, Mark Dreyfus, the current shadow attorney-general, who was responsible, back in 2013, for the enactment of federal public sector whistleblowing laws in the first place, will have the power to end the case. If he fails to do so, it would represent a great betrayal. The alternatives are grim. Without the government or CDPP dropping the prosecution, the case will, eventually, go to trial. At the earliest, it would be heard by a jury, in open or closed court, in mid-2023. The following year is more likely. Whatever the outcome, an appeal seems inevitable – further prolonging the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

prosecution. It is not impossible that the case could still be on foot in 2028, a full decade after Collaery was charged (at which point he will be in his eighties). Even a not-guilty verdict would be a pyrrhic victory, in a case that should never have commenced. The alternative, that Collaery is found guilty and imprisoned, for allegedly speaking up about Australia’s wrongdoing against Timor-Leste, is intolerable. Collaery is not the only whistleblower currently on trial. David McBride spoke up about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, while serving as a defence force lawyer. Richard Boyle, while working at the Australian Taxation Office, blew the whistle on unethical debt recovery practices. Both thought they were doing the right thing – speaking up internally, and then to an oversight body, and only going public, to the ABC, as a last resort, as is expressly permitted by whistleblowing law. Both have been vindicated: the Brereton Report alleged horrendous conduct by Australian forces in Afghanistan; an investigation by the Senate confirmed Boyle’s allegation. And yet both are on trial, later this year. How can we ensure that these types of cases never happen again? Whistleblower protection reform is essential and long overdue. An independent review told the federal government to improve the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which protects public servant whistleblowers, in 2016. Despite promising to do so, six years later the law remains unchanged. Whistleblowers are suffering as a result. Whoever wins government should prioritise whistleblowing reform as part of a wider suite of integrity measures, including a federal anti-corruption commission. The three prosecutions underscore the failure of existing whistleblower protections. The PID Act provides no avenue for external disclosure by an intelligence officer, no matter how egregious the wrongdoing. McBride and Boyle, meanwhile, both thought they were abiding by the law – only to find themselves on trial. Each is defending the case on the basis of the PID Act; hopefully they succeed. But the very fact of the prosecutions shows that the protections for whistleblowing to the media are too narrow and technical. Reforming prosecutorial guidelines, to underscore the lack of public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers, is important. A general public interest defence to secrecy offences, as exists in other jurisdictions, would provide an additional safeguard. Finally, we can prevent future prosecution of whistleblowers, and more raids on journalists, by making it clear that this is unacceptable. By attending rallies – the Alliance Against Political Prosecutions convenes outside the Supreme Court in

Canberra at almost every Collaery court date. By contacting our elected representatives and expressing our displeasure at these prosecutions. And by doing all we can, as individuals, to support and empower those around us to speak up about wrongdoing, of whatever nature. Collaery, McBride, and Boyle might be the faces of whistleblowing in our popular imagination, but each week there would be thousands of people across Australia who speak up about wrongdoing at work. Some are protected and empowered, too many others are punished. Research shows that eight in ten Australian whistleblowers suffer some form of backlash. Changing that culture is the ultimate challenge. I try to attend every court date in the prosecution of Bernard Collaery. I feel it is the least I can do, to show solidarity and keep the public informed about this unjust case. Sometimes I am expelled from the courtroom after a few minutes, together with the handful of journalists who keep an eye on the proceedings, when the court goes into closed session. Other times I watch from the back of the courtroom as the attorney-general’s barristers – eminent members of the Sydney bar – make their submissions, before Collaery’s counsel, all acting for free, in the public interest, have their turn. What I find most infuriating, and why the prime minister’s recent homily about defending democracy drew my ire, is how the law is used to wrap this prosecution in respectability. Smartly dressed silks orate as if this were any other case – the application of the law to the facts, nothing out of the ordinary. An uninformed spectator, on stumbling into courtroom six at the ACT courts building, could easily conclude that there was nothing to see here, just the wheels of justice in motion. They would be wrong. There is no public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers. Doing so in secret is the sort of thing more commonly associated with authoritarian regimes than with liberal democracies. Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished, and certainly not prosecuted behind closed doors for speaking up about abhorrent government wrongdoing. The Collaery prosecution is a stain on our democracy, an insult to our legal system. Scott Morrison: if you really care about democracy, drop this case now and fix our broken whistleblower protection laws. g Kieran Pender is a senior lawyer with the Human Rights Law Centre, and a regular contributor to ABR. This is one of series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

Made in Chinatown

Chinese Australian Furniture Factories, 1880–1930

Peter Charles Gibson CHINA AND THE WEST IN THE MODERN WORLD

10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

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History

From Vietnam to Việt Nam Conscripting memory of a divisive conflict Peter Edwards

Return to Vietnam: An oral history of American and Australian veterans’ journeys by Mia Martin Hobbs

Cambridge University Press $141.95 hb, 288 pp

ustralia’s Vietnam War has passed through several phases in the last six decades. In the mid-1960s the commitment of combat forces by the Menzies and Holt governments was strongly supported. The war and the associated conscription scheme became the focus of enormous controversy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contributing to Labor’s electoral success in 1972. Gough Whitlam did not pull out the troops – that had already been done by his predecessor, William McMahon – but he did recognise the communist government in the north, even before the war was over. In the 1980s and 1990s, debate over the wisdom and morality of the war was superseded by emotive controversies over the reception given to returning veterans and the effects of service on their postwar physical and mental health. It remained possible for many Australian veterans to retain the geopolitical views that had shaped their commitment, as well as believing that they had fought their war more honourably and successfully than their American counterparts. The postwar debate in the United States was far more intense and lasted far longer, despite President Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the war had been a ‘noble cause’ and President George H.W. Bush’s assertion that America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome’. Veterans, whose views on the war ranged from profound opposition to staunch support, were major contributors to bitter debates over what many regarded as the country’s first defeat. The stream of books on America’s war in Vietnam included memoirs by veterans, the predominant tone being highly critical. Today, Australia’s Vietnam War most commonly appears in public discourse bracketed with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as painful and unsuccessful military ventures in which Australia participated primarily, if not solely, as the premium on our strategic insurance policy with the United States. As our current leaders double down on the US alliance, adding the new AUKUS agreement to the seventy-year-old ANZUS treaty, their critics point to the Vietnam War as a classic example of the disasters to which that might lead. That argument seems to have gained little traction partly because, beneath the obvious parallels, the Australian and American experiences of the war – its aftermath, its legacies, its memories – were not identical. That is but one of the insights into current affairs to be gained from what might seem an unreliable source: an oral history of American and Australian veterans who returned to Vietnam. Mia Martin Hobbs has examined, mostly through personal 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

interviews, the testimony of forty-three American and twenty-six Australian veterans, exploring their motives for enlisting, their reactions to the experience, their reflections on the politics of the war, including the anti-war movement, and their thoughts about the country to which they returned. Much of the book is about how the veterans resolve the tensions between the country in which they fought and the country to which they returned. The contrast is neatly underlined by Martin Hobbs, who uses Western script for the former and Vietnamese script for the latter. Thus, for example, the Australian veterans’ recollections of Vietnam include the Battle of Long Tan, the task force base at the place they knew as Nui Dat, and the logistic base at Vung Tau; but they return to Việt Nam, attempt (successfully or otherwise) to conduct commemoration ceremonies at Long Tân, visit or even settle in Vũng Tàu, and perhaps learn that núi đất simply means ‘dirt hill’. Recording and analysing the words of veterans much older than her, Martin Hobbs writes more like a counsellor than someone pressing a political, social, or historical argument. She is both compassionate and dispassionate: compassionate in the sense that she does not question the physical or psychic trauma suffered by the veterans, whatever their views or attitudes, but dispassionate in analysing the views they express and how they attempt to settle their ‘ghosts’ and ‘demons’. Martin Hobbs points out that some claims or assertions are historically inaccurate or simply unfounded. Rather than denouncing or disparaging, she proceeds to interpret and comprehend the assertions sympathetically, as evidence of individuals trying to reconcile their personal memories of Vietnam with their experience in Việt Nam. To carry this off requires knowledge not only of the military and political history of the war and its memorialisation in all three countries, but also of relevant works in sociology, psychology, and psychiatry. There are succinct but apposite references to such varied and potentially dangerous topics as Agent Orange, PTSD, the Anzac Revival, Orientalism (and its obverse, radical Orientalism), and the differing Australian and American traditions of battlefield pilgrimages. The book began as a PhD thesis, and one can hardly imagine a topic in which a candidate has had to tread more carefully through so many (if the phrase may be forgiven) academic minefields. The writing is dense, as Martin Hobbs protects herself with scholarship, at times providing a footnote to every sentence. One of Martin Hobbs’s academic mentors was the leading oral historian Alistair Thomson, whose book Anzac Memories (first published 1994, new edition 2013) pioneered the serious study of veterans’ memories. Australia’s Vietnam War veterans often expressed the wish to be incorporated into the Anzac tradition, from which they felt for some time excluded by the controversies surrounding the war. This book integrates them into the tradition of Anzac memories. The analysis is both chronological and thematic. Martin Hobbs divides the returns into three periods: Reconciliation (1981–94), Normalization (1995–2005), and Commemoration (2006–16). The first was dominated by American anti-war veterans seeking forgiveness for their involvement in a war that they had thought was profoundly wrong. The second includes the period when the United States and Việt Nam normalised their

diplomatic relations, but the concept of normalisation applies to individuals as well as governments. The Australians predominate in the Commemoration period. The book’s conclusion is centred on two events in 2016, one of which was the controversy surrounding the attempt by about a thousand Australian veterans to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan. The thematic chapters refer to the ‘Relics and Remnants’ of the war encountered by the returning veterans, everything from Zippo lighters and dog tags to the Amerasian children fathered by American veterans; the experience of meeting those who fought, or experienced the war, from ‘the other side’ in ‘Meeting the Enemy’; and the returnees’ emotional responses to four principal places of commemoration: the War Remnants Museum in Hồ Chí Minh City; the Hóa Lò Prison Museum

in Hà Nội (the ‘Hanoi Hilton’); the Son Mỹ Memorial (to the My Lai atrocity); and Long Tân. Drawing broad conclusions from a small number of oral interviews is problematic, but Mia Martin Hobbs’s careful presentation and wide-ranging scholarship give many insights into the war’s aftermath, the differences between Australian and American experiences and attitudes, the risks and rewards of oral history, the construction of memory, and much else. Scholars in many fields will welcome this work, and its insights should be conveyed to wider audiences, not least veterans and those concerned for their welfare. g Peter Edwards is a historian specialising in Australia’s national security policies and policymaking. He is the author of Australia and the Vietnam War (2014) and other works on the Vietnam War.

History

Soeharto’s various worlds A nuanced portrait of President Soeharto David Reeve

Young Soeharto: The making of a soldier, 1921–1945 by David Jenkins

Melbourne University Press $39.99 pb, 547 pp

t last we have it – the much-anticipated first volume of the definitive biography of President Soeharto (1921– 2008). It is the culminating work in the distinguished career of Australian journalist David Jenkins. This startling volume, covering the years 1921–45, will appeal to the general reader and the Indonesia specialist. It has been described as ‘truly extraordinary’ by the late Benedict Anderson, the prominent Indonesia scholar. President Soeharto has been a preoccupation throughout David Jenkins’s life. Jenkins conducted a first, nervous interview with the newish president in November 1969, and was treated with affable caution (described in the preface). At a later meeting, he was embarrassed by an unexpected wedding gift from Madame Soeharto, creating a dilemma about accepting a gift from a foreign head of state. (Of the two versions of his name, Suharto/ Soeharto, Jenkins argues for the ‘old’ Dutch spelling Soeharto, which the president himself favoured.) Jenkins went on to various countries and positions, in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand; he was foreign editor and then Asia editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. One posting back in Indonesia from 1976 to 1980 resulted in his book Suharto and His Generals: Indonesian military politics, 1975–1983. This book demonstrated the author’s astonishing access to a great many senior figures in the military, and the startling candour with which

Jenkins managed to get them to talk. Jenkins’s ability to persuade senior figures to talk openly is a hallmark of the new volume. In 1986, a Jenkins article on the Soeharto family’s wealth in the Sydney Morning Herald caused a short crisis in Indonesian-Australian relations; a planeload of tourists was even turned back from Bali. David Jenkins was not allowed back to Indonesia until 1993. This volume joins a substantial list of previous works about Soeharto. There have been several major works, including O.G. Roeder’s The Smiling General in 1969, R.E. Elson’s Suharto: A political biography (2001), Angus McIntyre’s The Indonesian Presidency (2005), various long form press articles, and Soeharto’s own accounts, particularly My Thoughts, Words and Deeds, in English and in Indonesian, in 1989. Nonetheless, there remain many unresolved issues about events in Soeharto’s life, partly arising from contradictions between the claims made by Soeharto and his associates, and by others more critical. Jenkins argues that not enough has been written about Soeharto’s early life and career up to 1965, and that his rule from 1966 to 1998 can only be understood in the light of a ‘richer, more nuanced portrait’ of the kind of man he was and the profound impact of his early years. These three volumes (two more will follow shortly) have a double purpose: first, to provide the definitive Soeharto biography; and second, to retell the story of the Indonesian nation: ‘an accessible introduction to the many factors that have shaped and continue to shape Indonesia, the story of how a new nation came into being … and how it made its way in the world’. Soeharto’s life, ‘through a fortuitous combination of birth, geography, training and circumstance’, was interwoven with key events of modern Indonesian history, and thus provides a connecting thread between the biography of an individual and that of the nation. As part of both these stories Jenkins evokes the various ‘worlds’ in which the young Soeharto lived and operated: Javanese, Islamic, Dutch colonial, and Japanese modern and military. This volume is based on Soeharto’s first twenty-four years – the troubled childhood and adolescence, the Dutch colonial army in 1940, followed by service under the Japanese Occupation as a policeman and then a soldier – but is not restricted to them. Jenkins moves back and forth across the whole life, depending on AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

where he sees relevance and continuities. The preface starts with the events in 1965 that brought Soeharto to power; the fourteen succeeding chapters move in similar ways across the decades. This volume has many sharp evaluations of the man and the whole of his career; for example these two of many: an outsider who overcompensated for the difficult hand that life had dealt him, who trusted only his family and his closest colleagues, who was obsessive in his attention to detail, ruthless in his pursuit of objectives and indifferent to considerations of propriety. A man of resourcefulness and guile, an enigma even to his closest associates, obsessed with stability, order and economic development, finding relaxation in farming, golf and deep-sea fishing …

Jenkins is always trying to explain how this figure, with such a disordered and unhappy childhood, modest social origins, and limited education, should throughout his career unexpectedly surpass so many other leaders, military and civilian, who were better educated and more sophisticated. In making his judgements, Jenkins includes a range of comparisons with other leaders. One line is a comparison with other tough and successful Asian leaders, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and Deng Xiaoping in China. Jenkins sees Soeharto as one of the most complex and important Third World leaders since 1945. Another line is broader and more historical, comparing Soeharto to General Pinochet of Chile, General Franco of Spain, then Bismarck and particularly Napoleon. There is also a comparison to Lyndon Johnson. As part

In a riveting combination of memoir and history, Ashenden traces the great Australian silence, and discovers that the story of Tennant Creek is the story of our nation.

20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

David Reeve has been visiting Indonesia for fifty-three years, as a diplomat, researcher, historian, language teacher, and program manager.

‘A drily elegant, bracing work from a pained and open heart’ —Helen Garner ‘A graceful, unostentatiously scholarly, wise (and highly readable) book on a subject of overwhelming and enduring significance for all Australians.’ —Robert Manne

OUT N OW

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of his continuing commentary on the Javanese ‘world’, Jenkins compares Soeharto to Javanese sultans and princes. There are for me three great strengths to this book, where the writer’s delight communicates itself to the reader. The first is Jenkins’s late-career delight in the huge volume of interview and archival material – astonishing, massive, across Indonesian, Dutch, Japanese, British, and Australian sources. The second is Jenkins’s pleasure in selecting from all this material to make narratives, analyses, and evaluations about Soeharto’s career and Indonesian life. The third is the veteran wordsmith’s delight in polishing these selections into vivid and striking accounts. As the young Soeharto moves from place to place, and upwards within organisations, Jenkins provides thumbnail sketches of each step with unprecedented clarity and detail. These strengths are particularly evident in the masterly coverage of the twists and turns of the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia (1942–45), which takes up the second half of the book, chapters eight to fourteen. There is also, occasionally, a dry wit that I hope to hear more in the later volumes. So far, one volume in hand, I think there is little about ‘how a new nation came to being’ that is unfamiliar, but there is plenty of new information about the man and how he was shaped as a leader, and much that is of interest in the vivid, gritty accounts of Soeharto’s career. This volume, a fine read in itself, thoroughly whets the appetite for what is to follow. g

‘A unique window on Australia’s past and its barbed resonance today . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of truth-telling.’ —Mark McKenna

Literary Studies

The vampiric supply chain Amazon’s experiment in literary populism James Ley

Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon by Mark McGurl

Verso $39.99 hb, 333 pp

n 21 July 2021, one of the world’s richest men, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, staged a press conference in the small town of Van Horn, Texas, the purpose of which was to boast about his recent ten-minute joy ride into space atop a rocket so comically penis-shaped that one could be forgiven for thinking that the whole exercise was intended as an outrageously expensive joke, albeit one that Mel Brooks would likely have rejected for its lack of subtlety. Dressed in matching blue jumpsuits and looking thoroughly pleased with themselves, Bezos and his three fellow space cadets sat in a row on their wooden highchairs, framed by an enormous set of thrusters, while a lickspittle with the unnaturally thick hair, glittering dental work, and unctuous demeanour of a game-show host lauded them as great heroes and benefactors to humankind. The lickspittle, whose name I can’t be bothered finding out, then presented them with commemorative lapel badges, which he pinned with some difficulty to their lumpy suits. There were smiles and hugs all round. In an apparent show of deference to the rustic setting he had chosen for this historic display of crapulence, Bezos had augmented his shiny blue spacesuit with a pair of tan cowboy boots and a grubby stetson, a wardrobe decision bold enough to call into question his judgement on other matters, but which did nothing to disguise the fact that he was basically a chinless geek with a degree in computer science who looked like he was using all of his willpower to prevent himself from jumping up and down on the spot and clapping his hands with glee like a three-year-old at Christmas who has discovered that he gets to have everyone else’s presents too. ‘I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,’ he blathered, ‘because you guys paid for all this!’ I would like to digress briefly at this point to say a big hello to Karl Marx. Marx’s name does, in fact, crop up several times in Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The novel in the age of Amazon, though not, alas, in the service of any kind of rigorous critique of the company’s ruthless monopolistic ambition and disgraceful employment practices. While McGurl acknowledges that Amazon has ‘many detractors’, and while he discusses various ways in which it might be considered an ethically questionable operation, his attitude is tempered by a sneaking admiration. ‘If we could bracket the million troubling implications of its rise,’ he writes, ‘we could easily admit that it is one of the most

impressive ventures of our time, equal in its way to the aqueduct system, cathedrals, and moonshots of the past, those triumphs of logistics it distantly resembles.’ One cannot fault the logic. Nothing is more apt to make something seem good than discounting a million things that are bad about it. And McGurl, to be fair, is writing as a literary scholar, not an economist or political scientist. His concern in Everything and Less is not to pass judgement on Amazon, as such, but to consider the objective fact of its market dominance. He admits that his thesis is essentially the same as that of his previous book, The Program Era: Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing (2009), a widely discussed cultural history of MFA programs in the United States, which argued that the institutional support such programs provided for writers had a decisive effect

The company’s ambition is no less than to expand its interests to the point where it is a ubiquitous presence on the form and evaluation of ‘literary production’. Everything and Less simply shifts the focus from the academic realm to the commercial. McGurl proposes that ‘the rise of Amazon is the most significant novelty in recent literary history, representing an attempt to reforge literary life as an adjunct to online retail’. Therein lies the central conundrum of Everything and Less. It hardly needs emphasising that Amazon, the self-proclaimed ‘Everything Store’, is in the business of selling things. It doesn’t care about the content or the quality of the books it sells; it just wants to shift as many units as possible. As far as Amazon is concerned, differences between books are of interest only insofar as they reflect consumer preferences. You might want to read Middlemarch or you might want a copy of Space Raptor Butt Invasion – which, thanks to McGurl, I now know is one of a popular series of high-concept pornographic novels by Chuck Tingle that also includes Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls and (I swear I am not making this up) Slammed in the Butt by the Prehistoric Megalodon Shark Amid Accusations of Jumping Over Him. Amazon, the ‘market personified’, will gladly sell you either or both, noting your predilection with a view to selling you similar books in the future. On these grounds, McGurl argues in his introduction that ‘literary fiction’ should be considered a genre, in the sense that it cannot escape the irresistible taxonomies of Amazon’s algorithm-driven brand of consumer capitalism. So-called ‘literary fiction’, he maintains, is ‘the genre that likes to think of itself as non-generic’, but in reality it is merely ‘one genre among many’. McGurl presents this assertion as a humbling truth: one in the eye for all those obsolete idealists who cling to the idea that literature might be something more than just another commodity. Its deeper significance lies in its combination of the question-begging and the plainly false. The most charitable thing that can be said about the term ‘literary fiction’ is that it is vague. From a reader’s perspective, as distinct from that of an online retailer, it is meaningless as a generic classification because it says nothing about a work’s formal properties. Is that ‘literary fiction’ like George Eliot or like Clarice Lispector? When Mikhail Bakhtin AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

defined the novel as an anti-genre, he was not suggesting that it was non-generic; he was noting that it has the capacity to incorporate and recombine many different narrative structures and new modes of expression. He was pointing out that the formal properties of a ‘novel’ are not predetermined or fixed. In this sense, the notional opposition of ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction has always been a straw man. All novels have generic properties. That the adjective ‘literary’ has become a lazy way to describe books perceived to be prestigious for whatever reason (or that at least have aspirations in that direction) is a relic of the old, exploded distinction between high and low culture; which is to say, it functions as a qualitative claim for marketing purposes rather than a substantive term.

As far as Amazon is concerned, differences between books are of interest only insofar as they reflect consumer preferences I take this to be McGurl’s point, at least in part. The levelling logic of consumer capitalism has co-opted whatever lingering cultural prestige literature may once have had. Your fancy ideas about artistic integrity and the life of the mind are of no consequence; in the end, a book is just a product and you are just a customer like everybody else. Should you object that ‘literary life’ is not simply a matter of buying books, but the meaningful labour of writing, publishing, reading, translating, and discussing them, McGurl has the ready response that Amazon has insinuated itself into those activities as well, having devised ingenious ways to cream profits from literary endeavour at every stage. The company’s ambition is no less than to expand its interests to the point where it is a ubiquitous presence, all but synonymous with the capitalist system itself: ‘Echoing a familiar quip to the effect that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,’ writes McGurl, ‘we could say that ideally, for Bezos, it would be easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of Amazon.’ McGurl does not identify the source of this ‘familiar’ line, which has been variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, but was given currency by Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (2009). Fisher presents the remark less as a ‘quip’ than as an encapsulation of capitalism’s basic confidence trick, which is to perpetuate the illusion of its inevitability. His point is that recognising that we are all implicated in its processes is the first step towards understanding that there is nothing natural or inevitable about a rapacious system that generates outrageous social inequalities and environmental devastation on a global scale so that a billionaire manbaby can play space-cowboys. ‘To reclaim real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital,’ Fisher argues. ‘What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation.’ Much of the oddness of Everything and Less can be attributed to McGurl’s acceptance of the idea that we are all implicated in Amazon’s universe of consumerism at the level of desire, without troubling himself to imagine anything beyond the capitalist 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

utopia of the present. ‘The pleasures we seek are already at hand,’ he claims. McGurl attributes Amazon’s success to its unique emphasis on customer satisfaction (as if ‘the customer is always right’ were not retail’s hoariest adage). The company’s strategy, he observes, has been to identify and satisfy our desires as swiftly and as cheaply as possible, hyper-charging its distribution systems with sophisticated computer algorithms and, in its early years, adopting the aggressive business strategy of pursuing rapid growth at the expense of profits until it had achieved a large enough market share to press home its advantage and crush its competitors. Books were a convenient Trojan horse for Amazon’s ambition to sell anything and everything because they were non-perishable and easily shippable. McGurl proposes that they came with the additional advantage that they were eminently classifiable, and thus highly legible as desired goods. ‘Amazon is the host of a genre system,’ he argues, ‘conceived as an engine of infinitely infoliating permutations of narrative desire.’ One could argue (recasting his metaphor) that this is confusing the host with the parasite, since the company produces very few products of its own. For McGurl, however, the fascinating thing is the implied metaphysics of consumerism. The insight upon which Amazon is built is that our desires can be identified and satisfied because they are themselves generic. Everything and Less develops several arguments in support of its thesis that Amazon is redefining the aesthetics of the contemporary novel. Some of them are interesting as provocations; none is ultimately convincing. McGurl’s assumption of Amazon’s commercialised perspective makes him susceptible to the rationalisations that underpin its version of capitalist realism. His book is heavily invested in the notion that the company is, to use the self-flattering terminology of tech entrepreneurs, a ‘disruptor’. He contends that the rise of Amazon compels us to reconceptualise fiction as a ‘service’ and the role of the writer as that of an ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘service provider’. Its innovation has been to offer readers electronic access to vast quantities of cheap fiction via Kindle (one of the few products the company manufactures itself ) and writers the opportunity to bypass traditional publishers via its self-publishing platform Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). McGurl observes that these developments have empowered ‘indie’ writers to connect with readers directly, without the kinds of institutionalised cultural mediation that once prevailed, and in some cases earn a decent living from their work. He dwells, in particular, on the example of E.L. James’s salacious bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey (2011), which began its life as a piece of online fan fiction based on Stephenie Meyer’s popular Twilight series of vampire novels, and which McGurl reads, cleverly, as an illustrative generic synthesis that owes much of its appeal to the way it redeems the depredations of capitalist exploitation, embodied in the figure of a sadistic ‘alpha billionaire’, through the narrative conventions of the popular romance novel. (Given that Bezos’s fellow entrepreneur Peter Thiel has openly canvassed the idea of prolonging his life with infusions of younger people’s blood, one can’t help but feel that the novel would have been more credible if the author had left the vampirism in.) Yet commercial success is, inevitably, the exception not the rule. The predictable effect of Amazon’s radical experiment in

Politics literary populism has been to flood the market with worthless writing. McGurl records the boggling statistic that in 2018, while traditional publishing houses in the United States were producing new books in their tens of thousands, another 1.6 million works were self-published. The vastness of this indigestible mass of words is chastening. If nothing else, it might return us to the fundamental question of why we read and write in the first place. Amazon’s answer, and McGurl’s, is that we read to fulfil desires. This is something of a truism. It accords with the individualistic imperatives of consumerism, reinforcing the assumption that novels are sources of entertainment, pleasurable distractions from reality, indulgent if not entirely frivolous. But the fact that novels appeal to our imaginations is also the source of their power. They remind us of the autonomy of our own minds, even as they draw us into the ideas of others, and this makes their influence unpredictable.

As far as Amazon is concerned, differences between books are of interest only insofar as they reflect consumer preferences Everything and Less acknowledges this in an interesting if unresolved way. One of the conceits that runs through the book is that Amazon is a novelistic enterprise: a realisation of the grand imaginative vision of its founder. McGurl describes the company as the successor to the literary avant garde. He notes the way that American culture regards billionaires as heroic figures, avatars of self-realisation, who overcome obstacles and remake the world after their own designs. He also places considerable emphasis on the fact that Bezos is known to be an admirer of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day (1989), which he encourages all his employees to read. We cannot know for sure how Bezos interprets Ishiguro’s fiction about a starchy old butler named Stevens. He might understand it as a cautionary tale about becoming stuck in the past, or he might appreciate its meditation on the notions of honour, duty, and loyalty. But what makes the detail intriguing is how oddly it sits with the apparent ethos of the ‘Everything Store’. The Remains of the Day is, among other things, an extended exercise in dramatic irony, in which the reader is able to grasp quite quickly – well before the narrator himself – that Stevens’s belief system is no longer supported by reality. History has moved on and he has not; his determination to cling to his old values, his old ideas about order and propriety, proves to be so strong that he cannot recognise this fact until his world has crumbled to dust. He is the last person to learn the truth about himself. One way of interpreting the novel might be to see it as a fable about the vulnerability of all ideas. That would extend its implications to the contemporary notions of the heroic billionaire and the capitalist as benefactor. What seems indisputable may well seem absurd later. Ideologies are powerful, but they are never unassailable; sometimes they can have a surprisingly short shelf life. Novels, if they are good enough, tend to last a little longer. g James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne. He has been a regular contributor to ABR since 2003.

Doomscrolling

The long road to civil disobedience Glyn Davis

Our Own Worst Enemy: The assault from within on modern democracy by Tom Nichols

Oxford University Press £18.99 hb, 256 pp

he reverberations from 6 January 2021 continue. On that day, two thousand or more protesters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, intending to overturn the formal ballot electing Joe Biden as president of the United States. Waving phones, livestreaming their moves, some called for the execution of politicians, notably Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. For the first time, a Confederate flag was waved on the floor of the Congress, while a man wearing horns and waving a ‘Q sent me’ sign became the global image of the invasion. The mob was eventually pushed out of the building, but five people died during or after the assault, and four police officers caught in the mêlée later suicided. Hundreds of protesters were soon picked up by the FBI, swift identification assisted by all those social media posts. ‘Why are they arresting the patriots?’ demanded some puzzled participants, pointing out the president of the United States had encouraged them to ‘fight like hell’ when addressing the crowd. The man with the horns, Jake Angeli, is now serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence, after pleading guilty to violent illegal entry. The aftermath has sparked many reflections – and some fierce defences. In February 2022, the Republican National Committee described the attack as ‘legitimate political discourse’ and censored two Republican lawmakers who dispute President Donald Trump’s claim of electoral fraud. Politico reports that more than fifty Capitol Hill rioters will stand for office in forthcoming US elections. Tom Nichols is among the Americans who despair over events at the Capitol. A popular columnist for The Atlantic, and an academic who specialises in military strategy, Nichols is also a former Republican staffer, driven from his party by its embrace of Donald Trump. Our Own Worst Enemy is his analysis of the long road to civil disobedience in the name of overturning a national election. Worrying whether America is a failed state is fast becoming a profession – and a crowded one at that. Fellow contributor at The Atlantic Yoni Appelbaum has already enumerated potential explanations for the assault on democracy: from discontent over globalisation and automation to inequality, racial tensions, social media, and demographic change. As in Murder on the Orient Express, concludes Appelbaum, ‘every suspect has had a hand in the crime’. Nichols expands this list of the guilty. His title, Our Own AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Worst Enemy, references a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln in 1838, claiming that the United States was already so strong that all the armies of the world combined could not invade its shores. Should American democracy falter, prophesied Lincoln, the danger would not come from abroad. ‘If destruction be our lot’, he said, ‘we must ourselves be its author and finisher.’ Nichols shares Lincoln’s fundamental commitment to democracy and understands that self-rule requires endless attention, introspection, and participation. Democracy is a hard taskmaster, asking much of citizens. Our Own Worst Enemy traces trends in contemporary American life undermining the republic – the attacks on expertise, the refusal to compromise or negotiate, a lack of civic engagement, falling trust in institutions, self-pity among the privileged, and the rise of narcissism. Nichols focuses on cultural rather than economic or international causes for the decline of the American polity. He rejects assertions that globalisation and job losses are the core problem, citing rising living standards and unparalleled national prosperity – ‘it’s not the economy stupid.’ Instead, Nichols explains how first cable television, and now social media, fuel rage and resentment. He laments the absence of public spaces to support reasoned debate, the diminished stock of social capital. Endless connections through our screens, Nichols concludes, make people angry, isolated and selfish, easy to manipulate. We hunger for apocalypse to give us meaning. Citizens spend their time doomscrolling, a practice which feeds constant panic. The devil lives in our phones. Chapter after chapter details this cultural assault on democratic norms, admirably supported with citation and data. The result is engaging but not quite enough to convince. The author recognises this, apologising several times that he can see the problems but not all the answers. Some comparative analysis might help. For though the focus is the United States, there is little distinctively American about the trends Nichols describes. Social media are ubiquitous, and many nations grapple with inequality, resentment against élites, racial discrimination, and economic insecurity. Democracy has challenges everywhere, but mobs seizing the legislature remain, fortunately, rare. Beyond the occasional mention of Hungary and Turkey, the absence of a global dimension leaves the reader unsure why outcomes are different in the United States. Nor, beyond a well-crafted passage on Pericles and democracy, does the text examine historical precedents. The long-term loss of faith in politics, suggests Nichols in passing, began in the 1970s with the decline of heavy industry. Suddenly other nations, often helped by US aid, could compete. For that generation of Americans, shaped by the exceptional historical circumstances of 1945, anything less than US hegemony feels like decline. Yet the world has seen the eclipse of earlier dominant powers. The American republic draws heavily on the Roman republic for its symbols and guiding rationale – a separation of powers to prevent tyranny, limits on the terms of leaders, even minimum age requirements for office. The new nation named the seat of its legislature The Capitol, a conscious nod to the Capitoline Hill at the centre of the Roman republic. But why model American institutions on a Roman republic that eventually failed, replaced by autocrats and family dynasties? Tacitus described republican government as ‘fragile and evanes24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

cent’, easy to admire but difficult to practise. He noted a view that Rome became too big and complex to rule itself through republican conventions. Rules developed for a small city state struggled with empire. Once it conquered the Mediterranean, ploughing enemy cities into the ground, Rome was left with little to unite its elites. Factions fell upon each other for power and spoils.

Endless connections through our screens make people angry, isolated and selfish, easy to manipulate The Americans who wrote the US constitution embraced Roman concepts of shared power, balanced institutions, and multiple points of veto to constrain power, but added mechanisms so that their constitution could adapt and change. The resulting document has operated without break since 1789, an impressive record of enduring commitment. Amendment, though, has proved difficult, with only twenty-seven amendments, the most recent in 1992. This leaves in place arrangements such as the electoral college, designed to protect the interests of smaller states. In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but was denied the presidency. In 2016, the electoral college made Donald Trump president, though Hillary Clinton secured substantially more votes. Such outcomes undermine trust in a constitution which provides few protections for the core principles of democracy, from majority rule to fair electoral boundaries. The Roman republic fell when ambitious men cynically manipulated existing institutions and blocked reform, sometimes killing those advocating more democratic norms. They created mobs to threaten legislators, propagandists to argue their case, and private armies in case persuasion failed. Within three generations, Rome went from functioning republic to permanent dictatorship, maintaining the façade of representative institutions as a nostalgic nod to an earlier time. Our Own Worst Enemy asks whether similar pressures erode America from within. Tom Nichols brings impressive breadth to the subject and finishes with a case for three urgent reforms to modernise the American polity. He proposes stronger political parties to better represent the entire American people, a form of civic conscription to recreate a culture of obligation in young people, and constitutional reforms to increase the size of the US House of Representatives and to address rampant gerrymandering. Nichols also encourages citizens to turn off Facebook, citing a study which shows that even a month offline improves mood and happiness in those willing to try. Even these modest reforms, concedes Tom Nichols, seem unlikely amid the extreme polarisation of contemporary America. If democracy is further undermined by social media, and if the next would-be authoritarian leader is more skilled than Donald Trump, concludes Our Own Worst Enemy, American democracy may perish. Abraham Lincoln, as so often, will have foreshadowed the path for the nation he called ‘the last best hope of earth’. g Glyn Davis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Fiction

Bess and Kathleen Dominique Wilson’s new novel Susan Sheridan

Orphan Rock

by Dominique Wilson

Transit Lounge $32.99 pb, 484 pp

ominique Wilson’s new novel is another foray into the field of historical fiction. Her two previous novels deal with the pain of living through periods of civil strife and migration, and cover long periods of time and several cultures: The Yellow Papers (2014) is set in China and Australia from the 1870s to the 1970s, while That Devil’s Madness (2016) moves from Paris to Algiers to Australia and back from the 1890s to 1970s. Orphan Rock, covering the period from about 1870 to 1941, is like an animated dictionary of Sydney: it features familiar places, like the Botanical Gardens and Callan Park Mental Hospital, as well as some famous Sydney personages from the past: feminist journalist Louisa Lawson and her paper, The Dawn; philanthropist and defender of the Chinese community, Quong Tart; and the notorious Darlinghurst madam Tilly Devine. With these features, and attention to issues of the time ranging from women’s rights to anti-Chinese riots, from economic depression to public health concerns about syphilis and smallpox, the novel nevertheless holds its two main characters front and centre: Bess, introduced as a little girl in the Parramatta Orphanage; then, after her death, her daughter, Kathleen. Orphan Rock begins with Bess being taken from the orphanage and brought to a comfortable home in Phillip Street in the city to live with a mother she never knew existed (a woman ironically named Mercy) and stepfather, Cornelius. Life with a delinquent mother and a kindly but naïve stepfather, who sees to it that she has some education, comes to an abrupt end when Bess’s teenage rebellion against her mother coincides with Cornelius’s sudden departure to undergo what readers know (but Bess never discovers) is a lengthy treatment for syphilis. From then on, Bess’s life encompasses the whole gamut of women’s oppression: maternal rejection, the constant struggle to hang onto respectability, limited and ill-paid employment, the uncharted territory of marriage, unfaithful husband, syphilis and madness, death of husband and child, periods of desperate poverty. Her life includes a few positives – a faithful friend, a helpful teacher, a gentle sexual initiation, one or two kind and devoted men. More than anything, Orphan Rock demonstrates the precariousness of women’s lives, especially in female-headed households. Her daughter’s life is similarly precarious, despite a more secure start as the beloved only child of a comfortably-off middle-class couple. She, too, is orphaned when her parents are killed in a motor accident. She struggles as a single mother to raise her

26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

son during the Depression years. Like her mother before her, she has the support during this time of Lottie Li, Bess’s friend from her Parramatta days, whose Chinese husband and children were tragically lost to her after the Boxer Rebellion. Also like her mother, Kathleen is at first loath to accept the love offered her by a good man. But at the end of the novel, when World War II has begun, and readers learn that the new husband is assigned to the HMAS Sydney, we know that her life is about to be wrecked yet again.

Orphan Rock, covering the period from about 1870 to 1941, is like an animated dictionary of Sydney This pattern of rags to riches to rags again, both materially and psychologically, sets a narrative rhythm that is powerfully evocative of life’s precariousness, but it tends to limit the novelist’s capacity to develop her characters. We are always moving on to the next stage, the next crisis. As well, there is little differentiation between Kathleen and her mother as characters: they suffer the fate of women, of scrambling for a living and mistrusting – with reason – the blandishments of men. Yet one might have expected Kathleen, born in the 1890s and more worldly (having spent several years in Paris as a young woman staying with her mother’s art-loving lesbian friend), to see things somewhat differently from her mother – that she might resist the rules of respectability rather than falling victim to them. Kathleen’s sojourn in Paris allows Wilson to focus for a while on French culture, which has been a recurring theme in the Sydney story, and to draw on her own culture of origin, having been born in Algeria to French parents and migrating to Australia as a child. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) is an important linking device in this episodic novel. Both Bess and Kathleen read and reread Hugo’s story; they recall its heroines, Fantine and her daughter Cosette, as they try in vain to hide the stigma of illegitimacy and are flung into the depths of poverty or lose their fragile social respectability. What kind of a historical novel is Orphan Rock? It is not in the nineteenth-century tradition of epics that encompassed a whole society in crisis, like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Nor is it the kind of popular romantic saga so familiar to Australian readers, like Ernestine Hill’s My Love Must Wait, nor a critical historical novel of the kind that sets out to challenge national myths, like Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup. Rather, Wilson’s sense of history seems to be shaped by a commitment to ‘history from below’, a history of everyday life as it affected oppressed people: the destitute, the orphaned, the women seduced and abandoned, the ethnic and sexual minorities cut out of the social contract. The ‘orphan’ in the novel’s title evokes this sense of being cut loose from the social fabric, a feeling that Wilson’s characters experience again and again. They are the dispossessed, les misérables. g Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016).

Fiction

Choirs of reform Jane Rawson’s topical allegory Lisa Bennett

A History of Dreams by Jane Rawson

Brio Books $29.99 pb, 312 pp

llegories can be divisive. They are inherently deceptive, forever speaking with forked tongues. Animal Farm both is and isn’t a fairy story about talking pigs. Spenser’s Faerie Queene isn’t just an epic poem about the Redcrosse Knight’s chivalric virtues. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn’t merely a fantasy about plucky children conquering a malicious ice queen. Some readers enjoy being literary archaeologists fossicking beneath a narrative’s surface for deeper meaning. There is a thrill in peering through a story’s topsoil, discovering the many-layered substrata beneath it, seeing the author’s politics supporting the words. Others prefer texts without overt messages. To them, as Barthes puts it, the writer should be ‘dead’. Let readers engage with the work on their own terms. Let the book speak for itself. Jane Rawson’s A History of Dreams isn’t a novel about four young women learning witchcraft in 1930s Adelaide. Not really. Nor is it a book about ‘female friendship, the power of finding a vocation, and the importance of joy in a time of political darkness’, as the back-cover copy claims, though these themes are obviously developed throughout the narrative. It doesn’t quite ring true as clear-cut historical fiction: the main characters (Margaret, Esther, Phyllis, and Audrey) are middle-class school-leavers with feminist spirit, next-generation suffragettes who are ‘woke’ beyond their years (and, indeed, their era); the setting is, initially, self-consciously cosy, all train journeys and rose-coloured summer holidays, meetings of the girls’ regular ‘Semaphore supper club’ at which they plan tennis parties and other fundraisers; and, start to finish, the cis-het male figures are universally repellent, poster-boys of the patriarchy. In any other, straightforward novel – one that privileges superficial prose over, say, an author’s complex creative engagement with ingrained social inequities – these aspects might seem heavy-handed. Unreal. Unbelievable, even. Rawson’s writing has never been straightforward. A History of Dreams is: a profoundly unsettling allegory; a timely satire; a scathing indictment of life in twenty-first century Australia, despite its being set nearly a century ago, when fascism is on the rise (at home and abroad), Hitler’s name is on everyone’s lips, conservative rich men dominate the government, misogyny is both overt and internalised, and women are rammed into nuclear-family-shaped boxes and told ‘Don’t forget to smile!’ when these conditions aren’t a good fit. The parallels between Rawson’s fictional then and reality now are too disturbing to ignore. The four witches–revolutionaries in this novel are avatars of

women in our country today: women who outnumber men in higher education, yet still bear the brunt of child-rearing and home-making: by age thirty-five, eighty per cent of men in Australia are employed full-time compared to only forty per cent of women, who earn substantially less than their male counterparts. Esther, Mags, Phyl, and Audrey are all versions of Grace Tame, who made headlines in January this year because she refused to be a ‘good girl’ and smile submissively at a powerful man. They are all Brittany Higgins, former Liberal staffer, whose National Press Club address in February bristled with rage at the prime minister’s lack of real action in the wake of her allegations of sexual assault in a minister’s office in 2019. They are the generation of women Virginia Trioli described on ABC Radio Melbourne soon after this address, the ones ‘stepping into their power fuelled by the unasked-for anger that is the by-product of their trauma’.

Jane Rawson’s writing has never been straightforward A History of Dreams conveys this conflagration of women’s rage in the face of systemic oppression. It presents a coven of young women wielding the only weapon they have in this situation: the subtle magic of manipulating dreams. As their alternate-1930s Adelaide becomes increasingly authoritarian, the witches slip suggestive images into water and wine, then wait for the nightmares or fantasies they have conjured to affect change from within sleepers’ psyches. They are relying on hopes and dreams to sway hearts and minds, to inspire ‘a revolution brought about by conviction, not violence’. What a sharp, insightful narrative device! On the one hand, it highlights the importance of individual action; each dreamer is inherently capable of resisting and reshaping social structures. Slowly but surely, this dream-magic optimistically suggests, single dissenting voices can become duets, quartets, national choirs of reform. On the other hand, it also calls to mind Puck’s epilogue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘If we shadows have offended / Think but this and all is mended …’ If these women’s lives hinge on things as ephemeral, erratic, and effaceable as dreams, what real hope is there that matters can improve? Like much allegorical fiction, A History of Dreams doesn’t offer solutions to any of our nation’s problems, but rather illustrates the cyclical nature of history, the resilience of tyranny, and the glacial pace of change. Though it aims to emphasise hope, joy, and the importance of friendship in times of darkness, this novel ultimately reflects the bleakness of women’s circumstances – then and now. It tells us that reason, rationality, and human decency aren’t always enough to incite revolution: magic is the most viable option. But even when witches band together, even when they employ impossible magic, even then their supernatural power may not be as powerful as the patriarchy. ‘“[Men are] everywhere,” Esther said. “And everywhere, they’re like this. There’s nowhere on earth or in history where it’s good to be a girl.”’ g Lisa Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Flinders University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Fiction

The impish slug

Edmund White’s masochistic metafiction Robert Dessaix

A Previous Life by Edmund White

Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 270 pp

hat a performance this novel is! And not just in the virtuoso sense. What an exhausting mishmash of contradictions: snobbery, self-abasement, campery, stock masculinity. The whole pastiche is laced with vivid images of what it means to be finally old and ugly. The main characters in this parodic romp all revel in belonging to an élite. This one imagines himself a literary nabob, this one even knows Susan Sontag, while another is a Sicilian aristocrat who fancies himself a world-famous harpsichordist (surely something of a paradox). This tacky gaggle of would-be sophisticates all want to outshine their peers at whatever they do. In the case of the Sicilian, this means having the longest, thickest, most reliably erect penis anyone can remember chancing upon. They are obsessed with what people

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Missed an issue? Sheila Fitzpatrick Stuart Macintyre’s posthumous history James Ley Amazon and literary fiction Joan Beaumont Australians at Harvard Patrick Mullins Bob Hawke revisited Glyn Davis Doomscrolling

Shooting the messengers Kieran Pender on the Collaery case

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who matter in places that matter such as New York and the Île Saint-Louis (mysteriously misspelt, along with other words in a variety of languages), but not of course Phnom Penh, make of their performance. In short, they have a compulsive concern with style. There’s a problem here. ‘Style,’ as Gore Vidal, a true patrician, once observed, ‘is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’ The octogenarian gay novelist Edmund White, who hails from a family of sexually deviant nobodies in Chicago, does indeed give a damn – or at least the octogenarian gay novelist called Edmund White at the centre of this novel does. Ruggero Castelnuevo, the virile Sicilian aristocrat in his prime who falls in love with this ‘fat, famous slug’, is rigid with status-anxiety from the first page to the last. Apart from anything else, postmodernly, he’s afraid he may be remembered chiefly not for his triumphs at the harpsichord but for ruining Edmund White’s life. Consequently, frantic to be stylish, they both come across as simply needy, narcissistic poseurs. I’m not telling you anything here that Edmund White, the celebrated chronicler of life in gay America for half a century, the very inventor (he has claimed) of the genre of the gay novel, and admirer of Proust’s interminably meandering sentences, doesn’t know. One of the real pleasures of this occasionally repellent piece of masochistic metafiction is that Edmund White knows and anticipates everything. Before you can utter a word against any of the characters in the book, including Edmund White, or ridicule the Bad Sex Award sex scenes, Edmund White jumps ahead of you and says it far more wittily than you ever could yourself. A giant slug, yes, but also such an imp. As the novel opens, the year is 2050 so that Edmund White can be dead (slumped on the toilet, like Elvis and possibly Catherine II). White did not bother to imagine a 2050 markedly different from 2020, although the Soviet-style political correctness and cancel culture we live with at present are but a faint memory. Ruggero, now in his seventies yet still fantastically svelte and priapic, is laid up with his wife and a broken leg in his Swiss chalet furnished with ‘priceless sidetables’– or is it in the Prince Bishop’s Schloss, with frescoes by Tiepolo? In the face of such an overworked canvas as White’s, it’s hard to recall – somewhere amusingly classy at any rate. He and his decades-younger wife, Constance, who is as tirelessly polyamorous as he is (‘all normal people are polyamorous’), decide to write their erotic confessions and then read them out to each other in digestible chunks to fill the empty hours. They actually sound remarkably like each other – in fact, everyone sounds pretty much like everyone else in this comedy of manners because they’re all ventriloquist’s dolls sitting on Edmund White’s knee – invoking high culture, not always sensibly. Ruggero, for instance, thinks Caravaggio’s Bacchus looks like a Neapolitan street boy who would do anything for a few lira. He doesn’t. (White presumably means Italian lire, not Turkish lira, but who can be sure?) As White’s readers might expect, the confessions of Ruggero and Constance spiral around a love affair Ruggero once had with the famous gay writer Edmund White. There are endless accounts of the love lives of the libidinous Sicilian and his wife over many years – their adolescent experiments, the sexual abuse, their affairs with any number of partners in odd combinations, as well as these partners’ affairs with yet other lovers – each told

Fiction in crisp, baroque, or at least rococo, detail. But the plumbline remains Ruggero’s brief, violent ‘dalliance’ with White. In about 2018, Ruggero (who is fortyish) sends a fan letter to Edmund (who is eightyish). Eventually they meet and become a sadomasochistic couple, although sex with Edmund is like ‘being betrothed to an eel – all teeth and slime, except the teeth were falling out’.

Silence and screams

The end of Steven Carroll’s T.S. Eliot quartet Patrick Allington

What a performance this novel is! And not just in the virtuoso sense We can see why Edmund might think all his Christmases had come at once: he’s an obese, impotent, disabled writer with a small penis, while Ruggero is a pornographic fantasy and upper-class to boot. Why this hunky polymath would call Edmund his wife for two years is less clear. Edmund thinks that being his ‘slave’ helps, since ‘slaves’ are ageless and always desirable because they’re ‘property’. No, they’re not, and it doesn’t take long, just long enough to cause great pain, for Edmund to find himself abandoned for being too old and unsightly. Thirty years later, Ruggero’s wife Constance leaves him for a younger man, however witty in several languages and beautifully dressed the Sicilian may still be. For a brief time, quite recently, the real Edmund White did indeed have a Sicilian lover who played the harpsichord. It only matters because it raises the possibility that, with its ostentatious obscenity, it is basically a ‘vicious old queen’s’ revenge porn on a faithless lover. Or is it just an extravagant and over-long theatrical performance about celebrity, narcissism, and finally being old and disgusting? Not that it teaches us much we didn’t know: we already knew the old often stay concupiscent, if unlikely to inspire crazed lust in forty-year-old spunks, whatever line SilverDaddies may push on this. White is doubtless acutely conscious of being thought old-hat by the 2020 literary taste-makers. He started well with his early novels, but he has bravely ignored the dictates of ‘queer’ academics. In this novel, with some flair, he has tried to outsmart the present gatekeepers, leaping right over the top of them to 2050. The paradoxes are amusing enough. You can’t be a writer and also famous, White tells us, avid for fame. He also reminds us that you can’t be a performer and at the same time a ‘gentleman’. Can a subtle intellectual be an animal in bed? At the end of his career, White yearns to be all these things at once. And he is. That takes some flair. In A Previous Life, however, his long-winded performance runs out of steam. Metafiction can be fun, but White is no Chaucer, Fowles, Pynchon, or Burgess. Sex, too, the dominant subject, can be enjoyable in old age, but reading about it in detail (the ‘silky foreskin sliding over the sticky mushroom head’ and so on), once erotic urgency has passed, is mostly ho-hum. White never asks himself if his readers might have stopped caring who did what to whom. He needs a defter touch. g Robert Dessaix is a broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His most recent book is The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well (2020).

Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight by Steven Carroll

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 239 pp

arly in Steven Carroll’s novel Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, a middle-aged woman contemplates her own existence: ‘Vivienne, Vivie. Viv. Now distant, now near. Who was she? The Vivienne now sitting in the gardens of Northumberland House, Finsbury Park, is contemplating the question.’ This Viv is Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the first wife of T.S. Eliot – or Carroll’s fictional rendition of her. Northumberland House is an asylum where, by 1940, Viv has lived for several years. Her previous actions include not accepting the end of her relationship with Eliot, dabbling in fascism (‘Did you tell him I just liked the uniform?’), and asking a police officer at five one morning if it’s true her husband has been beheaded. Institutionalised, she now lives in quiet defiance of other people’s perceptions and diagnoses of her. And with the help of her friend Louise and a group called the Lunacy Law Reform Society, she is about to do a runner. Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight is the last of Carroll’s four novels that use the life, times, and poetry of T.S. Eliot to ponder the messy ways people interact and, especially, the inner worlds of those people. Carroll’s third-person narrator, like the character herself, asks who Viv is – in a probing but sympathetic way. What is her state of mind, and what was it before? How does she see the past and the future? How does she judge her marriage, long over except in law? What was her part in the creation of the eminent poet T.S. Eliot? Eliot – sometimes Tom, sometimes T.S. – intrudes upon the novel as if he were the humid air that Viv and readers must inhale. And although Eliot and various other characters line up to judge Viv’s well-being, her past behaviour, her role in a failed marriage, Carroll works hard to emphasise Viv’s perspective, her clarity, her calmness. At one point, Viv tells Louise to ‘watch out for that awful other woman who everybody mistakes me for’. After Viv escapes from Northumberland House, she goes into hiding. She hopes to benefit from an old law that says an escapee from an asylum can stay free if she is not captured and returned within thirty days, and if a judge so agrees. She is free enough to be reunited with her beloved terrier, Polly, who, Louise says, is like a child from Viv and Tom’s dire marriage. But it is only half a win: she is not free enough to go where she wants when she wants under her own name. The task of finding Viv falls to detective sergeant Stephen Minter, a young war veteran with a bad knee. Minter is the son of Austrian migrants, people who, like Eliot, have made a new life in AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Young Adult Fiction England. But whereas Eliot is ‘a kind of Winston’ when it comes to his role in the war effort, Stephen’s parents face internment. Stephen’s boss makes it clear that he must find Viv, given Eliot’s public status and connections. In Viv’s words, ‘Mad wife on the loose’. Stephen is clever, thorough, and creative as he uses others not just to look for Viv but understand her – a novelist’s dream detective. He sees that Louise is lying when she claims not to have helped Viv escape; he senses, too, Louise’s anti-Semitism. He finds Eliot’s demeanour, his Englishness to be ‘a sort of performance’ – and, in any case, he does not believe in geniuses. Before he visits Eliot at the Faber offices, Stephen reads East Coker and a collection of Eliot’s poems. He reacts with distaste: ‘Stephen feels the need to wash his hands after putting the book down.’

Eliot – sometimes Tom, sometimes T.S. – intrudes upon the novel as if he were the humid air that Viv and readers must inhale Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight contains layers of tension beyond whether Viv can stay hidden from Stephen and be permanently free. There is Carroll’s excruciating, shard-like depiction of Viv and Tom’s strained, dysfunctional relationship, what Viv calls ‘a marriage of silence – and screams’. And then there is the wrestling match Carroll gifts readers, between what is (or might be) the real story of Viv versus his fictionalisation of events and Viv’s thoughts – and in turn, what is (or might be) the real T.S. Eliot, a much contested canonical figure, as against Carroll’s invention of Eliot. This novel – like the three that precede it (The Lost Life [2009], A World of Other People [2013], A New England Affair [2017]) – is more convincing and compelling if the reader resists the temptation to compare Carroll’s creation of Eliot with the real man. But such resistance is hard work. One of Carroll’s skills is his capacity to dwell on the inner worlds of his characters in a way that defies triteness. In Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, he gives Viv a capacity for self-reflection and an ability to weigh the past in a sober, honest way without it crushing her all over again. There are glimpses of humanity in the way Carroll depicts all his characters – including his version of a mostly bloodless, snooty T.S. Eliot. As a creator of fictional humans, Carroll is compassionate and respectful towards his inventions. It’s no small reason why this novel succeeds. When I read The Lost Life at the time of its release, I considered it a modest achievement compared to Carroll’s Glenroy series of novels about outer-suburban Melbourne. A decade later, both series of novels are complete. I still consider that Carroll’s great strength as a novelist – his ability to dwell on particular moments, to slow down time and look hard and long at bits and pieces of the world – is best displayed in the Glenroy novels. Nonetheless, the Eliot quartet have a searching and delicate, almost frail, beauty. And the four individual novels come together to make a tense, echo-laden whole. g Patrick Allington is the author of Rise & Shine and an adjunct Senior Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts at Flinders University. 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

Sinister undercurrents Three new Young Adult novels Ben Chandler

ew traits typify the mythology of the Aussie bloke quite as strongly as a love of water and a laid-back attitude. Increasingly acknowledged is the role violence plays in shaping our laconic beach-lovers. Three Young Adult novels tackle this sinister undercurrent of male identity, but in different ways and to different effects. In Kate Hendrick’s Fish Out of Water (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp), swimmer Finn aspires to be a ‘top bloke’ like his father, but does he really? Philip Gwynne’s Taj just wants to surf, but he must deal with a foreign government intent on executing his father in The Break (Penguin Books, $19.99 pb, 384 pp). In If Not Us (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 272 pp), by Mark Smith, surfer Hesse is trying to save the environment but soon discovers that taking a public stand on a controversial issue can have dangerous consequences. Hendrick’s Finn is obsessed with swimming. He keeps his head down, stays in his lane, goes fast, and wins – until the day he doesn’t. Finn’s swimming is the lynchpin of his identity and a tenuous link to his inexplicably absent father. Without swimming, Finn is lost and starts to question everything his father taught him about how to treat other people. Hendrick sets Finn up as the golden boy son of a ‘top bloke’ before slowly chipping away at the foundations of that identity with thriller-like intensity. The spark for Finn’s journey into self-discovery comes from the wonderfully exasperated Aaliyah, a solitary girl at Finn’s school who takes none of his nonsense. Aaliyah is unwilling to let Finn’s unexamined misogyny go by without comment, but is resentful that he has chosen her to be his sounding board and, eventually, his conscience. Finn gaslights his sister, convinces himself his mother had it coming, and selects a girlfriend as if he were shopping for an accessory, but his attempts to first acknowledge and then escape his negative influences make for a compelling read, and the tension between the man Finn is and the man he could become gives the novel its impetus and urgency. Hendrick captures Finn’s inner voice perfectly as he struggles to reconcile his growing self-awareness with his need to maintain his star-athlete identity. At times horrified by his own thoughts and deeds, he is compelled to play them out. It all works: Finn is a likeable young man beneath his programming, and worth rooting for. Hendrick’s powerful honesty and uncompromising interrogation of Finn’s mental processes culminate in a thoroughly satisfying conclusion that, fittingly, offers no neat solutions.

wynne’s Taj has no time for introspection and little self-awareness. He’s an expat Aussie living with his mother in Bali while his father awaits execution for smuggling drugs into the country. All Taj wants to do is surf and hang out with his girlfriend, Inga. Though vaguely aware of his own privilege, Taj is understandably more concerned with his father’s upcoming sentence than with questioning the societal, geopolitical, and ethical complexities of his situation. It is possible this lack of awareness is Gwynne’s point, but if so, its effect is muddied by the offhanded deployment of certain stereotypes, such as the gaggle of flouncing gay fashionistas on page forty-nine, the wealthy white people who are almost all crooks, and the servile non-white characters. While the reader may interrogate these problematic depictions, the text itself never does. Gwynne bounces his narrative between several perspectives, each serving to highlight elements of Taj’s character or plight rather than offering much insight into the other focal characters. This is particularly egregious in the case of the two female leads, Inga and Kartika, who have lives of their own but are almost entirely subsumed by Taj’s. It is telling that the culmination of Kartika’s otherwise compelling subplot is told mostly from Taj’s viewpoint and serves to tie otherwise disparate threads from his plot line together. Despite this focus on Taj, he is given surprisingly little chance to develop or demonstrate any innate strengths. He often throws money at his problems, comes across solutions by chance, or requires help to get things done. Kartika, quite literally, kicks butt, but this is Taj’s story, and the others are just along for the ride. Speaking of butt-kicking, Gwynne’s writing shines in the action sequences, and there are plenty of those as Taj attempts to help his father to escape from prison. There are many twists and turns, and enough political intrigue to keep you guessing. Everyone has an agenda, and Taj’s inability to judge someone’s character accurately leads to some tense and exciting moments. It all makes for a ripping yarn before the novel pivots from adventure to mystery in the final third. This shift, while leading to some uneven pacing, is a welcome change that allows Gwynne to tie everything up cohesively, though it’s unclear if Taj learns much from his experiences.

mith’s If Not Us depicts one small Australian coastal town divided by the climate change debate. The town is heavily reliant on the nearby coal mine and power station, but when both are about to be sold a small group of locals, led by protagonist Hesse’s mum, see an opportunity to shut them down for good.

Hesse loves surfing, though his father died while surfing many years ago; he even works at the local surf shop on the weekends. He’s worried about the impact of climate change on his beloved coast, but is not convinced that he can do anything about it. As his mother’s action group gains momentum for their campaign, Hesse decides to take a public stance, inadvertently becoming their spokesperson, gaining instant notoriety, and more than a few enemies. Mine employees and union officials see him as the face of their job losses. Climate science deniers are vocal about ignoring him. Media personalities just see him as a story. Even Hesse’s friends are upset with him, as several of their parents work for the company that owns the mine. There’s also the sinister Jago, an adult willing to use intimidation and actual violence against teenagers simply because he enjoys it. Hesse navigates these escalating tensions and threatening personalities while falling for exchange student Fenna, and although their budding romance encapsulates Hesse’s transition to adulthood, Fenna is defined by far more than her relationship to Hesse. The same is true of Felicity, the mine manager’s daughter, who challenges Hesse on his assumptions but may not be a villain after all. While the adult characters are often categorised in Manichean terms, Smith’s teenagers have richly complex lives that operate beyond their immediate needs. The only off-note in his characterisation is how unconvincingly uninterested Hesse is in the social media fallout of his actions. This aside, Smith deftly captures the transition from the teen world of wide-eyed optimism and first love to the adult world of concrete responsibilities and severe repercussions. The development of the young men at the heart of these novels is shaped by the violence they see, experience, and even perpetuate. That violence is intimate and global, inflicted as readily by governments and ideologues as by strangers, neighbours, loved ones, or nature. Dangers and threats permeate everywhere and everything, and affect everyone, in the lives of these young men. These novels explore how their protagonists navigate through, are shaped by, and ultimately reconcile themselves with the violence around them. g Ben Chandler holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Fantasy. He writes Young Adult Fiction and has published academic work on popular culture, video game narrative theory, Japanese heroism, anime and manga, and Creative Writing pedagogy. Every now and then he teaches Creative Writing, English Literature, and Media Studies topics at the University of Adelaide and Flinders University.

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Fiction

‘Pill me harder’ Dementia’s ventriloquist Gay Bilson

The Grass Hotel by Craig Sherborne

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 193 pp

n How Fiction Works (2008), James Wood examines how novelists write characters and allow us to sympathise with them. He refers to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s now famous question, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Nagel reckoned we cannot know, can only imagine what it would be like to behave like a bat. We can’t know ‘what it is like for a bat to be a bat’. This is pertinent to Craig Sherborne’s main character in The Grass Hotel, a woman whose dementia has robbed her of sensible and comprehensible language, but who, to put it far too simply, relates the story. This is a remarkable feat of wordsmithing by the real author, and it is probably churlish to ask if we can really know what it is like to have dementia, to have ‘flicker-faint wiring’ and ‘drivel words’, until ‘Each week worse. Blank. Blink. Think. Blank. Goes.’; to know what is really going on in her brain. It’s a version of a black and terrible joke that the person who has lost correct and coherent language is written by someone who is something of a word magician. If you have read Hoi Polloi (2005) and Muck (23007) – Raimond Gaita called the latter a masterpiece, and this reviewer deemed it pitch-perfect – both described as memoirs, then it is a feat of imagination on the reader’s part to read The Grass Hotel as a novel, but the definition of novels in general has transmogrified into whatever it wants to be these days. The Grass Hotel stands alone as a virtuosic deferral of self-examination by delivering an often cruel version of a woman who has lost her mind. The only names in the book (apart from Twinkle, the father, who had a ‘salesman’s glint’ and dies before the mother, and whose ashes are central to a comedic scene of dispersal at a public beach), are those of the horses, Sock and Boy. And the ‘grass hotel’? According to the narrator, her son called his farm his ‘grass hotel’. The parents had owned hotels, made money, bought a farm (she had been a fine rider) to please the son who, though he is also a reader with a fantastic memory, ‘only has eyes for animals’. ‘I’d complain to Twinkle … If he ever has offspring their legacy will be those piles of paper. Those encyclobloodypaedias.’ This is an obsessive trope in Sherborne’s writing. Early in the book, after her complaintive but still sensible reminiscences of son and husband, she says, ‘Off you went, the father of horses, to become the father of us.’ Some way into the book, the horse, Sock, is put down. Should a person be put down? 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

Where did the mother’s mind go, this woman who cared so furiously and comically for social status (piano, not bongos), had wanted her son to be a daughter (thoughts of Rilke who was dressed as a girl until he was two), and whose furies are now garbled verbal losses but at the same time Sherborne’s readers’ gain. Boy ‘whinnied because Sock had disappeared from this twohorse herd’. And the mother is losing herself and her (wonderfully) garbled words: ‘They’ll have to pill me harder … me pilled into drivel words.’ Her bed needs railings, her keys and money have no meaning. And in her voice, which voices the writer’s version of her version of the son’s feelings (are you still with me here?), there’s a realistic and piteous scene of his caring for her: You see a smile on me, my lips at least. Top one beaked to milky tea. You lift tea. I suck. You are repulsed but pitying. You get up and leave. You return. You sit and want to leave. Leave now means to shun. You stay. The long hour to sit through. Stand and leave for a breather. Return … You do speak sweet. But this not-me repels you. The me me was grit to your teeth. Against me. This new me is not me even enough to touch. But you do touch because you expect I expect it. You don’t know what I expect.

And now, only now, are we treated to a transcendent scene in which the son brings Boy to the sea and his depleted mother with them. In her voice, he writes, ‘You thought for me’. The reader senses a version of theft. ‘She had you, her mammal child. Made sure you were punished and neat.’ It’s an act of barbed ventriloquism, perhaps a kind of love, a putting down. In his novel Off the Record (2018), Sherborne has his central character say, ‘The more you get to know yourself, even the bits you hate you like.’ There is a touch of something like exorcism in The Grass Hotel: the mother spitting out, in her dementia, in her furious loss of word-use, her inability to lipstick her lips, to control her evacuations, and all that is festering in her. Sherborne as exorcist, emptying himself as well. I thought of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In His Master’s Voice (1968), Stanisław Lem wrote: ‘What would happen to us if we could truly sympathise with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals.’

Is this Sherborne’s concern, too? Early in the book, the mother says, ‘I am dead; you can have me speculate anything.’ And so the author does. g Gay Bilson reviewed Muck in October 2007.

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Fiction

The push-pull of the past A hypnotic trip into outback gothic Jennifer Mills

Banjawarn

by Josh Kemp

UWA Publishing $32.99 pb, 416pp

he latest in a new crop of outback gothic fiction, Josh Kemp’s début has everything readers have come to expect from the genre. There’s a messed-up bloke with a past. There’s a lost girl, ten years old and traumatised. There’s plenty of guilt and shame, damaged landscapes, haunted houses, injecting drug use, altered states, brutal acts of violence, and of course, there is the road. Our main character, Hoyle, is a true crime writer, but after one successful book he has given it up in favour of driving around remote Western Australia in search of redemption, or perhaps an escape from the past – he’s in a push-pull relationship with his personal history. When we meet him, he is perpetually high on PCP, and the dissociative and hallucinogenic effects of the drug reverberate through the evocative desert into which he regularly walks. In Hoyle’s eyes, the landscape is symbolically weighted: the light, the trees, the vast sky, an eagle picking at the carcass of a kangaroo, all seem to hold personal significance. Kemp’s characters are dazzled, confounded, and sometimes crushed by forces greater than themselves. The story takes off when Hoyle finds and rescues, or perhaps abducts, an abandoned ten-year-old. His driving becomes more purposeful as our broken man looks for a way to do something right for once, to help someone in need. Slowly, we discover why he has this urge to redeem himself. The West Australian setting is more than a character, it’s the animating spirit of this book. The narrative perspective is sometimes zoomed right out, giving the reader a hovering view of isolated places that seem more sky than land. If the book’s more contemporary details – catching Covid is an outside risk – sometimes detract from this mythical sensibility, they also add to the setting’s vivid sense of isolation and mistrust. The hallucinatory episodes are sometimes over the top, and there are moments when Kemp seems to be enjoying his own gross spectacle too much. There are many scenes, real or imagined, that are not for the faint of stomach. With the horror genre, sometimes dialling things back has more of an impact; too much gore can tip a reader’s disbelief out of suspension. Fortunately, there is sporadic humour, rural and self-effacing, that provides some relief, and Kemp’s characters are rendered with love, in all their complexity and vulnerability. It helps that Kemp writes with a compelling voice, the kind you want to follow into dark places, no matter how gruesome

things get. He has a way with language that is often delightfully lyrical: at the edge of the Banjawarn homestead, ‘a clutter of gimlets ... fresco the ground’; elsewhere, a possum ‘flexes its little vampire hands’, and I clap mine. There’s a long tradition behind this kind of fiction in Australia, from the lost and wandering men of Patrick White and Randolph Stow, to the haunted landscapes of Joan Lindsay and the human terrors of Kenneth Cook. More recently, historical fiction like Chris Womersley’s Bereft (2010), or the outback noir of Garry Disher and Jane Harper, stake out nearby ground. Cormac McCarthy is a quoted influence here, and Kemp shares the American recluse’s interest in evil, his ambivalence about redemption, but not his more nihilistic portrayals of human nature. What’s interesting about Banjawarn is the way it shows the genre developing and diversifying. Unlike some exponents of the outback gothic, Kemp is conscious of the political context of his storytelling and works hard to counter its racist tropes, acknowledging Aboriginal ownership of story, contemporary police violence, and even the destruction of Juukan gorge. Banjawarn is further enriched by Kemp’s willingness to render the most minor of characters fully human, which makes his sparse world lively. It’s encouraging to see Kemp question himself – even the presumption that violence has to escalate (even with his hand on the throttle). Halfway through this journey, Hoyle wonders if ‘perhaps there were no terrors waiting for him at the end of the road’, a speculation that turns out to be optimistic. Like ghost stories and westerns, Banjawarn is about justice and is attentive to many forms of injustice: the neglected child, the destructive violence in Western Australia’s history, old poisons left behind in the land. It is even haunted by the spectre of the unethical author. Retribution offers some satisfaction, but it’s incomplete and it opens the way to further violence. The conflation of violence and justice here is very like a western, as the boundaries between good and evil shimmer and dissolve. Kemp does not confuse that evil with the land. To him and his broken heroes, the country is refuge and teacher, messenger and warning, often hypnotic, a narcotic in itself. Cruelty comes not from the haunted landscape but from human rage. Horror does have the capacity to soothe. It can be comforting to imagine terrible things, to ride out fears in fiction and come back safe. There’s power in that narrative trajectory. As the evil of Banjawarn escalates, there’s a risk of fatigue; the violent crescendo crashes on beyond its usefulness. Despite the novel’s brutal events, care and compassion hold it together. There is a genuine feeling for the strength of friendship and the way that traumatised people can find and ease each other’s pain, even with betrayals, even when there seems to be no safe place, no escape from violence or abuse of some description. It offers glimpses of survival and of the power of a chosen family. One thing about the outback gothic: there’s always more road stretching out into the distance, the landscape so vast it can accommodate infinite possibilities. Banjawarn is a spirited addition to the genre, one which shows it moving with the times and looking to its horizons. g Jennifer Mills’s latest novel is The Airways (2021). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Fiction

Shadowboxing

The story of an American pugilist Alex Cothren

The Sawdust House

by David Whish-Wilson

Fremantle Press $32.99 pb, 304 pp

n David Whish-Wilson’s new historical novel, The Sawdust House, it’s 1856 San Francisco, where the citizen-led Committee of Vigilance has convened to purge foreign undesirables from a city populace swollen beyond control by the gold rush. Of course, armed nativists ‘enthralled by their own performance’ are a common feature of U.S. history, from the Virginian lynch mobs of the late 1700s to that guy in the fuzzy Viking hat parading around the Capitol Building just last year. In an intriguing twist, however, the pitchforks are aimed this time at those ‘vermin from some hellish southern continent’, aka Australians, particularly a criminal element who congregate in a lawless quarter nicknamed Sydney-town. Whish-Wilson has dipped into this fascinating pocket of history before. His 2018 novel, The Cove, was a rollicking adventure of a young boy and his dog trying their best to sidestep the brutal violence exploding – in Cormac McCarthy-like bursts of lyricism – around each corner of Sydney-town. The Sawdust House is equally gripping, but the way it weaves fact and fiction is more complex than that earlier work. It is both a stylish retelling of one extraordinary life and an investigation into the truths that slip through history’s net, sinking to depths only imagination can plunge. The protagonist is a real-life boxer who went by many aliases but was most commonly known as James ‘Yankee’ Sullivan. When we first meet Sullivan, he is being held in a squalid prison cell, charged by the Committee with racketeering and election fraud on the behalf of a local Democrat. Thraldom is nothing new to Sullivan, born in an Irish town so controlled by the English that ‘even the pigs are protestant’ before later enduring servitude in remote Australian penal colonies, where ‘it were a rare morning when a man weren’t flogged to death’. He still managed to carve out a life of remarkable accomplishment, including winning the English middleweight boxing championship, introducing pugilism to the United States, and counting Walt Whitman as a friend. Across five days, Sullivan relates moments from this bulging biography to a Mormon journalist, Thomas Crane, whose own secrets are teased out along the way. This tidy framing device allows Whish-Wilson to dole out chunks of his research to Sullivan, the great mass of which might have otherwise passed into the flow of fiction about as smoothly as a kidney stone. Sullivan roams back and forth across his life, pressing on a memory only until its recollection becomes too painful: ‘I remember everything, but that doesn’t mean I have the words.’ When Sullivan does speak, his voice takes some acclimatising to. At times, it is 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

grammatically broken – ‘we were poor hungry dirty’ – at others, a touch highfalutin: ‘is there a soul within me or am I merely an empty chamber that rings out with endless questions for which there are no answers?’ Some might not accept the veracity of an uneducated boxer, even one who shared the occasional whiskey with Whitman, arranging a sentence so. But this is nothing compared to the portions of the novel where Whish-Wilson dives into Sullivan’s inner life, finding nightmares about vicious crow-people and feverish meditations on violence: ‘it is myself that my fists annihilate, and his pain that I feel, and both of our lives have led to this pure moment’.

This is both a stylish retelling of one extraordinary life and an investigation into the truths that slip through history’s net These wild bouts of speculation are reminiscent of the hallucinations that Benjamin Labatut dreamt up for Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and other geniuses in his collection, When We Cease to Understand the World (2020). Reviewing that book for The New Yorker, Ruth Franklin fretted about the destabilising effect of these imaginative excursions: ‘If fiction and fact are indistinguishable in any meaningful way, how are we to find language for those things we know to be true?’ In response, The Sawdust House seems to argue that ‘true’ and ‘fact’ are not synonymous, and that any language treating them as such is faulty. The novel’s distrust of official sources is immediately flagged when Crane admits that his editor wants a ‘penny-dreadful story’ for his Murdochish newspaper whose ‘hastily stitched spine fans out beneath the humidity of the reader’s panting breath’. Sullivan is not the ‘jug-eared low-browed buck-tooth bog-Irish knuckle-dragger’ Crane was made to expect, but instead a melancholic man with a soft voice ‘like the song of a new species of bird’. The great irony of Sullivan’s life is that he has pulled himself out of poverty through boxing, yet he detests the sport, his first victory leaving him ‘sick and ashamed ... certain that I never wanted to fight again’. This gap between Sullivan and his public face is underlined by the real boxing records and magazine articles scattered throughout text, the sum of which reveal nothing of the complex soul we come to know. When Crane mentions reading The Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, a real book published in 1854, Sullivan dismisses its supposed biographical authority as just ‘a veil of clever words as though my combat and bleeding were but a poem or a legal contract or a mathematical problem to be understood’. How did Whish-Wilson come to such a dizzying scenario, with his fictionalised version of a real person denouncing a text that Whish-Wilson must have partly used in creation of said character? I like to imagine that as he dutifully read The Life and Battles of Yankee Sullivan, a dark little door opened up in the back of Whish-Wilson’s mind, through which Sullivan’s true, bird-like voice began to trill, telling him, as Sullivan tells Crane, to ‘write it down like I say it and no other way’. But who knows; I’m just speculating. g Alex Cothren is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University.

Language

A hot novax summer

The influence of sport and Covid on Australian language

by Amanda Laugesen

he Australian summer was once again a story of Covid. Just as things were slowly reaching a state of ‘Covidnormal’, Omicron came along to present us with new, decidedly unwelcome, challenges. Despite Omicron, our summer did not pass by without one of its most defining features: sport. Many events went ahead as planned, not least the Australian Open tennis tournament. The 2022 Australian Open brought a whole new saga instigated by our Covid times: the tale of Novak Djokovic, or as he quickly came to be known, ‘Novax’ Djokovic. The Serbian tennis player was controversially granted an exemption from vaccination to play, only for his visa to be cancelled on his arrival. He was then taken into hotel detention (thereby casting an international spotlight on the refugees who have been in such detention for years). The case went to court, where his visa was restored. A few days later, the federal government cancelled the visa once again and, after an unsuccessful court appeal, Djokovic left the country without having competed. For the lexicographer, the Djokovic case had an additional interest: it seemed inevitable and irresistible that people would call him Novax (or Novaxx, if your preference is for the double-x form of vax). The act of refusing an athlete entry to the country if they are unvaccinated was a topic of discussion, with the government signalling that such athletes ‘get vaccinated or get novaked’, as the ABC succinctly summarised Minister for Sport Richard Colbeck’s words. Whether we’ll see any other athletes get novaked remains to be seen. From the unique terminology of Australian Rules football to the joys of campdrafting, the influence of sport on Australian English is well attested. Words derived from the names of sportspeople comprise a fascinating subset of this sports language. One we commonly use is fang. Used as a noun it means ‘a drive at high speed’; as a verb it means ‘to drive at high speed’. You can also fang it or be fanging. The word comes from the name of Argentinian racing car driver Juan Fangio (1911–95) who won five world championships in the 1950s. Other champion sportspeople have inspired Australian English phrases. Don Bradman (1908–2001), Australia’s legendary cricket player set a standard you can be compared to: one can be the Bradman of something. First recorded in 1930, the phrase quickly applied to things as well as people, with one 1933 newspaper article referring to ‘the Bradman of deficits’. The sports cry

up there Cazaly, inspired by South Melbourne AFL player Roy Cazaly (1893–1963), became a general cry of encouragement or approbation. Too easy Campese came into usage in the 1990s, paying tribute to Australian rugby player David Campese, who held the world record for the number of tries scored in test matches. While great sporting triumphs are sometimes commemorated in the lexicon, one of the quirkier moments in sporting history gave rise to another phrase: to do a (Steven) Bradbury. At the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Australian speed skater Steven Bradbury won a gold medal after all the many skaters ahead of him crashed out. He was the first person from a southern hemisphere country to win a gold medal at a Winter Olympics. Since then, the phrase has become a part of the Australian vernacular, now applied to whenever an unlikely winner emerges from a race, event, or even an election. Australian English also has a large number of rhyming slang terms, and sportspeople feature heavily among them. They include boxers (Lionel Rose ‘nose’; Bill Lang ‘slang’), cricketers (Wally Grout ‘shout’), jockeys (Edgar Britt(s) ‘shit(s)’), and tennis players (Adrian Quist ‘pissed’). Rugby league footballers have perhaps been the most prolific sports contributors to rhyming slang, because rhyming slang seems to be used a lot in the code. They include Barry Beath ‘teeth’; Malcolm Clift ‘lift’; Ronnie Coote ‘root’; Mal Meninga ‘finger’; and Johnny Bliss ‘piss’. Only one sportswoman has been officially recorded in the rhyming slang lexicon – Dawn Fraser ‘razor’, but Ash Barty has inspired the Barty party and we have some evidence that Ash Barty is now also being used as rhyming slang for ‘party’. Racehorses, too, have made their mark on the lexicon. Phar Lap is probably the best known of these: to have a heart as big as Phar Lap is to have great courage or stamina, and Phar Lap odds are very short odds. A more recent variant of the latter is Black Caviar odds. The word drongo for ‘a fool’ was likely influenced by Drongo, the name of a racehorse who ran between 1923 and 1925 and never won a race. As long as sport continues to be so important to Australian society and culture, we will continue to monitor it for new words and expressions. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian and lexicographer. She is currently the director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANU) and Chief Editor of The Australian National Dictionary. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Literary Studies

Eastward, ho!

Clark describes the cultural structures directed vertically from Moscow and the horizontal networks of ‘encounter and crossfertilisation’ across the world that were not necessarily commuThe dream of a red Eurasia nist-affiliated. She proposes two overlapping models, a leftist Nicholas Jose ‘literary international’ on one hand and a more amorphous, selfselected ‘ecumene’. ‘A huge question for this book has been how to reconcile the call of the national with that of the international’, the cosmopolitan and the patriotic, she writes. She recognises the ‘non-fit’ of concepts from Euro-Russian culture with China, for Eurasia without Borders: example, even as activists linked Spain and Shanghai in the fight The dream of a leftist literary for democracy in 1936: ‘bookends that marked the parameters commons 1919–1943 of Eurasia’. by Katerina Clark Clark explains how under the banner of Eurasia – chimerical, Harvard University Press utopian, a zone rather than a geographical place – Soviet ideology US$39.95 hb, 458 pp projected new cultural possibilities It’s a mighty tale that ventures well beyond the usual scope of n the time before festivals, writers used to attend congresses to perform their role as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world literature, and timely too. Eurasia is back if you hadn’t noworld’ in Shelley’s fine phrase. A who’s who of literary leftists ticed. After they met at the Winter Olympics in Beijing last month, and liberals gathered in Paris for the First International Con- Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping released a joint statement progress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935, in solidarity claiming the ‘no limits’ friendship of Russia and China and reafagainst the rise of fascism across Europe. Nettie Palmer was a firming ‘their focus on building the Greater Eurasian Partnership’. As Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages member of the Australian delegation. She was pleased to spend time there with her younger compatriot Christina Stead, who and Literatures at Yale University, Clark commands an extraorwas living in London. Both writers were internationalists, but dinary breadth and depth of scholarship across languages. Her at different points on a spectrum. Stead showed her communist account is arranged artfully and with pedagogical thoughtfulness, credentials by urging fellow writers to ‘enter the political arena’. moving forward and eastward from the idealistic early phase of Palmer had trouble squaring this with Stead’s interest in fashion. literary internationalism in the 1920s to ‘the unravelling of the Stead was a ‘lightly-elegant young woman’ who spoke in ‘a voice ecumene’ in the 1940s, with successive chapters on Turkey, Persia, without an accent … slightly coloured by her … pan-European Afghanistan, India, and China. The focus is on individuals who years’, Palmer wrote. Hazel Rowley wonderfully evokes the Paris reveal the distinctive challenges each cultural arena presents, as Congress in her 1993 biography of Stead, touching on what was political divisions intensify into war. There are far-flung nethappening behind the scenes as the dashing Soviet-aligned Brit- works and conflicting loyalties. W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, in China when Nazi Germany invades Austria, ask ish communist Ralph Fox set the novelist’s imagination on fire. Fox, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War the following themselves: ‘What does China matter to us in comparison to this?’ Among Clark’s fascinating cast of cultural year, reappears as an ‘idiosyncratic commuintermediaries and fellow travellers is the poet nist functionary’ whose ‘intellectual purview Nâzim Hikmet, who stood with Vladimir was Eurasia’, in Katerina Clark’s bold new Mayakovsky to chant poems in Turkish to study. ‘The call for a Eurasia without boravant-garde Moscow audiences, who heard ders represents a much more radical gesture only the boom of his voice. Hikmet’s poem than the call to form a revolutionary Euroabout his Chinese friend Ėmi Xiao, The Giopean culture, given that Eurasia’s two conconda and Si-Ya-U, imagines the Mona Lisa tinents, Europe and Asia, have for centuries departing from the Louvre and acquiring a been regarded as absolutely, and irrevocably, bamboo frame in Shanghai, ‘thereby challengseparate,’ Clark begins, explaining how under ing the hegemony of European art’. Xiao, a the banner of Eurasia – chimerical, utopian, a real-life Comintern operative, was sent to the zone rather than a geographical place – Soviet Chinese communist base at Yan’an as Mao ideology projected new cultural possibilities. Zedong was developing his defining Talks at the The ‘Congress of the Toilers of the East’, Yan’an Forum on Literature and the Arts (1942), at Baku, Azerbaijan in 1920, promulgated a which stressed vernacular Chinese folk culture. ‘postnational political order’ in which literAs Soviet envoys, Xiao and his German Jewish atures would ‘harmoniously intermingle … wife were out of place. Katerina Clark (Yale University) in a single common international ocean of Then there is the fearless, admired Larisa poetry and knowledge’. That was despite the ‘post-Babelian variety of languages’ spoken at Baku, with Rus- Reisner, another Soviet emissary who rode into Afghanistan sian uncomfortably dominant, leaving many delegates unable to on horseback and wrote feverishly about the experience – who understand what was said. Language and translatability would ‘lived, loved, and fought in the hyperbole’ in Clark’s phrase. There is the Anglophone Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand, darling of always be problems.

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Bloomsbury and hero of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, founded first in London in 1935 and then in India. And fictioneers André Malraux, Anna Seghers, and Mao Dun. Clark seeks balance in assessing such impassioned, contradictory, compromised figures. Her analysis of their texts pays attention to aesthetic features with a feeling for cultural nuance and polyvocality in changing political and historical contexts. In a discussion of revolutionary poetry and the Persianate tradition, for example, she compares Persian poems by Russian avant-gardist Velemir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) with Soviet-influenced writing by Persian and Kurdish writer Abulqasem Lahuti (1887–1957) as part of a larger scoping of the cultural options available to so-called ethnic minorities in the Soviet sphere. Where Stalin demanded that literature be ‘socialist in content and national in form’, Clark shows it could never be as simple as that. Sergei Tretiakov (1892–1937) spent sixteen months as professor of Russian literature at Peking University in 1924–25 and was a special correspondent for Pravda. Writing his ‘literature of fact’ from this experience, he sought to dispel orientalist fantasy for the revolutionary realism of ‘scientific socialism’. His great success was the agitprop play Roar, China!, based on an incident of anti-colonial resistance among workers on the Yangtze River. Premièred in Moscow in 1926, it toured the world as part of a ‘Hands off China!’ campaign and was influential in German translation as a template for revolutionary texts about China. The climactic ‘roar’ – the din of uprising – was a motif that Chinese woodblock artists would take up. Clark appreciates the surprising routes of cultural influence. The Stanislavsky method for training actors was adopted in China, including at Yan’an, she notes, as ‘tearing off the masks’ through self-confession and exposure of class enemies became a mark of revolutionary vigilance. How far the literary international succeeded or failed in its dream of a red Eurasia is a matter of perspective. Comintern cultural diktat was resisted or modified according to local circumstances. The 1930 writers’ congress in Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) pushed for a more uniform proletarian aesthetic, even as the ecumene was widening and diversifying. Socialist realism didn’t always translate. But to jump forward to yet another conference, this time in Tashkent, capital of then Soviet Uzbekistan, where the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association was formed in 1958, a speculative link emerges ‘between the interwar literary international and postcolonial literature as we know it today’. Leading postcolonial writers including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Alex La Guma, Chinua Achebe, and Mahmoud Darwish come on board. In time, they will be guests at writers’ festivals and studied in the academy. Something persists. So where is Australia in this Eurasian dynamic? There is a passing reference to Roar, China! being performed here in the 1930s. Yet the ideological faultlines that Katerina Clark excavates in this impressive and important book would bedevil Australian literary life for decades. At the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934, delegates were told they had a choice: ‘James Joyce or socialist realism?’ Australian writers have often wanted both or neither. g

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Society

The circle of life Phillipa McGuinness on skin Diane Stubbings

Skin Deep: The inside story of our outer selves by Phillipa McGuinness

Vintage Books $34.99 pb, 325 pp

n Skin Deep: The inside story of our outer selves, Australian writer Phillipa McGuinness gathers some impressive facts about skin. A square centimetre contains, among other things, six million cells, two hundred pain sensors, and one hundred sweat glands. The skin of an individual weighing seventy kilograms ‘covers two square metres and weighs five kilograms’. A YouTube channel where you can watch a dermatologist popping pimples has amassed more than three billion views. The beauty and personal care industry accrues half a trillion dollars in annual sales, while one major cosmetics company now spends seventy-five per cent of its billion-dollar advertising budget on influencers. As McGuinness explains in an occasionally nebulous overview of its biology, skin comprises three primary layers: the exterior layer of the epidermis, the dermis beneath it, and beneath that the subcutaneous tissue of the hypodermis. Further, skin undergoes a continual process of death and renewal, the cellular structure of the skin recreating itself every month as the dead cells of the outer layer shed themselves and the layer beneath moves to the surface to form the new epidermis, ‘the circle of life playing out on your skin’. Noting that skin is the largest organ of the human body (although some argue that the lining of the intestines is the larger organ by virtue of its surface area), McGuinness emphasises the dynamic nature of skin and its fundamental role in our sense of touch, our immune system, and our evolution. For example, the relative lack of hair on human skin fostered both the development of our ‘acute cutaneous sensory system’ and our ability to sweat, thus allowing human beings to ‘regulate our internal temperatures’ and spread across the globe, ‘[honing] skills of cognition and coordination’ along the way. There are chapters examining dermatology, cosmetic/plastic surgery, sunbathing, skin cancer, skin disorders (for example, psoriasis, eczema, and acne), tattoos, and the urge to touch and be touched (‘Skin as comfort. Skin as friendship’). McGuinness blends anecdotes, interviews, and personal observations with secondary scientific sources, and her personable style results in a book that often reads like a lively conversation between friends. Notwithstanding, what quickly becomes apparent is that McGuinness’s understanding of skin – its biology as well as its historical, cultural, and metaphorical implications – is often only one step ahead of the reader’s. Skin Deep is more a chronicle of McGuinness’s peripatetic research than an analysis of her find-

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ings. As such, any reader wanting a deeper exploration of the biology, dermatological history, or politics of skin may find it more profitable to go directly to one of several books on which McGuinness regularly draws: for example, Nina Jablonski’s Skin: A natural history (2006), Monty Lyman’s The Remarkable Life of Skin: An intimate journey across our surface (2018), or Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue With a Racist: History, science, race and reality (2020). In The Year Everything Changed: 2001 (2018) – a spirited account of Australian politics and culture in 2001, and a book anchored by both the global convulsions of that year and the death of her son – McGuinness demonstrated her capacity to examine complex events and themes, and to draw perceptive connections. However, in Skin Deep the absence of a central narrative or thesis binding together her disparate observations and facts culminates in writing that seems more haphazard than considered. McGuinness recognises that skin can be both ‘[c]oncealing and revealing. Our surface and our depths’, and that there are few of us who aren’t conscious of a gap ‘between our exterior and our interior selves’, but she struggles to articulate the significance of the rift between what skin is and how it is read. Where McGuinness comes close to realising her aim of getting ‘under the skin of skin’ is in her delineation of the relationship between skin colour and racism. Drawing on Rutherford’s reflection that, had genetic science predated anthropology, the opportunity to categorise and colonise people based on their skin colour would have been curtailed, McGuinness stresses the absence of any link between skin colour and race; that race is ‘an idea we ascribe to biology and apply through culture’. Consequently, in many societies skin colour has become a ‘predictor of inequality, of struggle’. There is intensity also in McGuinness’s scrutiny of ‘skincare’ and ‘wellness’, her fascination, even obsession, with the beauty industry – and her own ambiguous relationship with it – apparent from the first pages of Skin Deep, the prologue given over to an account of an eighteen-minute make-up tutorial posted online by US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Here, McGuinness pivots between admiring Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Femininity has power’ mantra and questioning whether paying so much attention to her appearance ‘undermine[s] a credible woman’s status and legitimacy’, a tension that defines McGuinness’s attitude to the beauty industry throughout Skin Deep. She rails against the way the beauty industry ‘target[s] our insecurities and manipulate[s] us’, and the rampant body dysmorphia that is – with cosmetic and surgical help – churning out a generation of young women who look uncannily alike, yet ends her investigation of the industry with a ‘measured acceptance of what we do for beauty’, a resignation that, given the disquietude preceding it, is not entirely convincing. ‘I see this obsessive beauty culture for what it is,’ McGuinness writes. ‘It identifies my subjectivities, inadequacies and vulnerabilities, and makes me pay to make them go away, while simultaneously consolidating and augmenting them.’ Had McGuinness interrogated more keenly her own unresolved relationship with the beauty industry – that place where the biology of skin intersects with the ‘forces of commerce, sexuality, desire, art’ – Skin Deep may have found the narrative it is lacking. g

Commentary

‘Too busy to have time for us’ Reflections on Australian Studies at Harvard

by Joan Beaumont

n 1976, the Australian government signed an agreement with one of the leading universities in the world, Harvard, to fund a visiting professorial position in Australian Studies. Originally conceived by the government of Gough Whitlam, the gift of US$1 million was a token of Australian goodwill to the United States on the bicentennial celebration of the American Revolution. Its purpose was to promote increased awareness and understanding of Australia by supporting teaching, research, and publication. The Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies, as it became known, was a striking bipartisan gesture of cultural diplomacy at a time when Australian Studies flourished across the nation. Its apostles claimed with an almost evangelical fervour that rigorous interdisciplinarity would create a new synthesis. Nearly half a century later, much in the world of Australian Studies, cultural diplomacy, and university education has changed, and it might be asked: what has the Harvard Chair achieved, and what might its future be? The impact of cultural diplomacy is notoriously difficult to quantify, since one of its main aims is to change, for the better, the attitudes of foreign populations. Of one thing, however, we can be certain: the Harvard Chair has enriched the professional lives of those forty Australian men and women who have been fortunate enough to occupy it since 1978, usually for a year. Given Harvard’s expectations of intellectual excellence, the list of appointees has been illustrious. One of the founding fathers of Australian history, Manning Clark was the first formal appointment under the agreement. Whitlam, recently retired from politics, himself followed in 1979. Almost all subsequent chairs were scholars (mostly male) with stellar academic reputations, mainly in the humanities and social sciences. Many have been historians and political scientists, the mix being leavened by the occasional artist, biologist, musician, and lawyer. Mick Dodson, the Aboriginal leader and 2009 Australian of the Year, was based in the famed Kennedy School of Government in 2011. This disciplinary orientation was anticipated in the original agreement, where it was assumed that the humanities and social sciences would be inherently and more explicitly ‘Australian’ in their content. What, it was asked, was distinctively ‘Australian’ about engineering, digital technology, natural science, or medicine? (In fact, Australian science, for one, can offer distinctive

perspectives on climate change and drought.) Moreover, the Chair can only be appointed if a department at Harvard agrees to the nomination made by an Australian Committee. Some departments have been notably supportive; others, less so. Former Chairs’ memories of the time they spent at Harvard are almost universally positive. Harvard became the jewel in the crown of the Australian Studies visiting professorships that sprang up across the globe from the 1980s on – among them, University College Dublin; the University of Tokyo; the Menzies Centre in London (now located in King’s College); the University of Copenhagen; and the BHP Billiton Chair in Australian Studies at Peking University, Beijing. Winning the Harvard Chair rapidly became an honour that adorned a professional CV. Harvard, too, has always offered the opportunity to meet and work with some of the world’s best students and scholars. Research contacts can be extended beyond Cambridge through attending conferences at other academic institutions and think tanks. The benefits of this networking have often extended beyond the individual scholar. The value of collaborative research in the United States has lasted over the years, while local institutions have benefited from subsequent visits by American scholars. For Australian academics jaded by the pragmatic approach of many domestic undergraduates (‘I just need the piece of paper’), Harvard students are a delight to teach: extraordinarily able, self-confident, sometimes even brighter than their teachers. As one former Chair recalled: ‘If I came into the US class and said the American President had been killed, who will save the US and be President … all the class would put up their hands instantly … and they would believe they could do it. In Australia no student would put up their hand but if you pressed the class really hard some might say “I can try. I will do my best?”.’ What of the impact of the Australian Studies Chair on the wider Harvard community? It is hard to tell. Harvard is a complex and exceptionally well-endowed university. In the Law School, alone, one former Chair counted at least twenty such visiting positions in one semester. Visibility for the Australian chair can be a problem. Harvard is ‘simply too busy to have time for us’. Chairs, then, need to be extroverts as well as stellar scholars (the two qualities are not always aligned). Whatever its quality, teaching has a modest impact as cultural AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

diplomacy. Harvard does not offer a formal Australian Studies program, as does the Edward A. Clark Centre for Australian and New Zealand Studies, University of Texas, Austin, or the University of Tokyo. Without a structured academic context, there is no progression for interested students. ‘Australian’ courses simply stand alone, competing with multiple others in a highly discerning student market. Over the years, enrolments in courses offered by Chair holders have ranged from the healthy to the very low – even zero. Possibly if the Chair were held for a longer period – as is the Canadian counterpart at Harvard – student numbers might build up through word of mouth.

For Australian academics jaded by the pragmatic approach of many undergraduates, Harvard students are a delight The Widener Library (a towering temple of learning in the Harvard Yard funded by the mother of a young man who went down with the Titanic) holds an impressive collection of Australian titles. The original endowment specified that funds could be used to purchase publications on Australia and the Library maintains and enhances this collection, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But books need to be read, and the Widener has no data as to how often Australian titles have been borrowed. Neither of the two major bookshops outside the Yard has (in 2022) an identifiable Australian section among their wellstocked shelves. That said, books with Australian content and/or by Australian authors might still be found in thematic sections. Both stores are willing to order Australian titles on request. The demand for Australian content will probably remain low. It is no cultural cringe to ask why US students should want to study Australia – any more than why Australian students should want to study another relatively small middle power, such as Canada. Is Australia a problem that will repay significant intellectual investment by US students? Are Australia and the United States too similar socially to engage those students looking for exotic learning experiences? The healthy Study Abroad market of two decades or so ago has shrunk, and with this the interest in Australian Studies has also withered. Moreover, the intellectual fashion for area studies has waned. From the 1990s scholars moved towards positioning Australia within wider transnational and comparative perspectives, includ-

ing the imperial. Intellectually commendable though this might be, the distinctiveness of the Australian ‘core’ is arguably diluted. The pressure on Australian scholars to demonstrate ‘relevance’ to contemporary issues tends also to risk trivialisation in the eyes of more traditional Harvard academics. None of this should be read as discounting the value of the Australian Studies Chair at Harvard. It has done many good things. The local Committee of Australian Studies, formed of faculty members across the University, is ably chaired by George Putnam Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, David Haig. On his astute watch, the Chair’s funding has been defended against potential predators and the reach of ‘the Chair’ has extended well beyond the teaching and research of the incumbents. In 2011, the original agreement establishing the Chair was amended, allowing surplus funds to be used to support student research and to facilitate conferences and other cultural activities profiling Australia. In 2010, a conference on climate change was convened by then Chair, Alison Bashford. Including a suite of eminent scholar–colleagues, this meeting provided the opportunity for sixteen postgraduate students from Australia to pair with students selected competitively from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. A further eighteen Chinese postgraduate students were selected from the then China 9 Group. In 2016, meanwhile, the Committee for Australian Studies took a leading role in developing an exhibition of contemporary Indigenous art. With backing from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Consulate-General, New York, the exhibition was curated by the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museum, Stephen Gilchrist, of the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of Western Australia. Local collaborators included the esteemed Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the analytical laboratory of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums. The latter conducted the first ever large-scale technical examination of traditional Indigenous bark paintings The exhibition catalogue was published by the Harvard Art Museums and distributed by Yale University Press. Such exemplary cross-institutional collaboration should surely impress even those among Australia’s governing élite who view the humanities as an irrelevance and who expect international education and cultural diplomacy to be transactional and instrumental rather than having intrinsic merit. Fortunately, the Harvard Chair is financially secure, the 1976 gift having grown via judicious investment. In biblical terms, the

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40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

two talents have grown to considerably more than ten. In contrast, the Keith Cameron Chair in Dublin has died for lack of funding. Canberra was purportedly more interested in Asia. Efforts to find other donors – even if this meant renaming the Chair the ‘Go, Harvey, Go’ Norman Chair – failed. The pre-Covid appointment to Dublin will be the last. Likewise, the Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen concluded in 2016 and funding was not renewed. Perhaps the risk for the Harvard Chair lies elsewhere. Australian academic life is now very different from 1976. Increased class sizes; the demands of digitally enhanced teaching as well as face-to-face; the casualisation of much of the workforce; and the insistence that humanities and social sciences research should fit into a procrustean bed of ‘relevance’ and ‘national impact’: all these militate against excellence in scholarship as Harvard understands it. Rather than valuing the pursuit of research funding against difficult odds, Harvard sees the single-authored ‘Big Book’ as the benchmark. Without being unduly pessimistic, we might ask if scholars beginning their academic careers today will have the same opportunities as their predecessors to build up the kind of publication portfolios that Harvard expects? The talent and the will are certainly there, but what about the time and the intellectual space? Big books take years to research and write. Australian research

metrics rarely recognise this. Perhaps, then, the Harvard Chair reminds us that these metrics generate serious distortions in academic practice. Let’s reinstate the book to the place it deserves in the pantheon of the humanities and social sciences and acknowledge the challenges of writing such important works. g Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University and author of Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013) and joint editor of Serving our Country: Indigenous Australians: War, defence and citizenship (2018). Her new book is Australia’s Great Depression (Allen and Unwin, 2022). In writing this article while visiting family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I consulted the chair of the Australian Studies Committee at Harvard University, Professor David Haig, seventeen former incumbents of the Harvard chair, other Australian Studies colleagues, and the collections department of the Widener Library, Harvard. Quotations are unattributed for reasons of privacy, and the opinions expressed are my own. This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The Forest

There could be someone, there, walking through a forest – upright or slightly bending – gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms, but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down through the air to this someone, who is not ‘someone’ to insects, but at most, might be a chemical, electrical or visual site; there could be someone over there, making noises in a forest, shaking off the always-fleeing thought of fleeing from the always-being of their own country; in their head, packing up the child, the dog, the goat, the – can you hear it now, the whining, no, not an insect really, but if real can be a metal thing, airborne, or a steel box, grunting and churning through the mud, ‘really’ must be how the thing advances calmly through a forest, seeing – if a thing can see – other objects running off; they call them ‘signals’, as the thing does – the thing detecting signals seems calm but it is metal – a signal’s walking by again, restless, through the forest, moving slowly, making sounds to itself and not – as would be less unusual – to another signal, but as if in a loop, making sense of itself – in its system, the fleeting-but-recurring thought of fleeing, in a loop – and there is one, hanging from a tree –

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Aflame

by Subhash Jaireth Life Before Man $19.99 pb, 134 pp

ustralia has a stylish new poetry press. The two books reviewed here by Life Before Man, the poetry wing of Gazebo Books, preference book cover art and poem above all the usual paraphernalia: publishing details, barcodes, author notes – even the epigraph – are tucked into a back page, and there are no apparently distracting contents pages or page numbers. Most of the poems sit neatly on the right side of the page with a private blank beige page buffer. There’s orientation in a contents list, and I trust the poets have a choice about whether they want one. That said, there’s a holiday-like liberation in slipping through unmoored. It’s a subtle reading experience, but do these aesthetic somewhat precious innovations justify the use of extra paper? The protagonist of Anthony Lawrence’s seventeenth collection, Ken, is the titular plastic boyfriend of the Mattel Barbie doll. It’s no coincidence that the Ken doll was first produced in the late 1950s, when Lawrence was born – a mode of self-reflection in the context of hypermasculinity is not unusual in an Anthony Lawrence poem. Replace ‘Policeman’ with ‘Ken’ in ‘A Policeman Revealing Extremes of Emotion’ at the end of his Skinned by Light (2002) and you have a typical title here. Though the poems of Ken are more about playful language and aesthetic extracurricular landscapes as Ken ‘waits for playtime to save or kill him’ (‘Ken Considers’). A montage – to capture this book-length, twenty-seven-poem focus on Ken’s hijinks – seems apt. We observe ‘Ken the builder lawyer beach comber / doctor drain cleaner teacher lover / homewrecker counsellor vet’, via suburban rooms and obscure tortures. He is finger-printed, buried in sand, ‘smeared with honey for the ants’; he deep-sea dives, gets his shiny enlightened forehead anointed with star anise in Rajasthan (‘Spiritual Ken’), and finally farewells Barbie in a poem called ‘Pandemonium’: they ‘embraced like ampersands // in a sentence about disease’. The mise en scène is more John Cassavetes than Home and Away. Ken, bewildered hobbyist, slides through decades beyond nostalgia for The Rolling Stones towards climate activism and the mask accessory necessity of Covid-19. Several poems coalesce into a taut climax, such as this delectable musical endline: ‘Barbie, he said / Ken he said, with her intonation’. Every stanza resembles the two below – three lines (one indented, then two), no commas or full stops. Lawrence uses the stanzas and the space between them to manipulate pace; he sets 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

up expectations and trips us up. Cleverly, the form reflects the limited arc of Ken’s plastic parts and Ken’s (and poetry’s) agility in spite of this. Here is poetry making a dream of these three-line restrictions. In the dream, Ken’s ‘father’ pinches his bicep or ‘gun’: as he liked to say he said you are getting strong son you are a fine young fine young Ken woke still waiting for his father to complete the sentence fine young what dad he asked then

The concept of staging is ever-present. There is much here implied about what’s outside Ken’s action, how he’s choreographed. In one scene, this direction arrives beautifully in the shape of the wind, which ‘comes in & spins him full circle’. It’s not always clear if the puppeteer, so to speak, is adult (‘some / collector’) or child. One scene ‘trembles & dies away with an outtake / from Thunderbirds’. In another cinematic moment, Ken is positioned ‘under a lamp like the sun / at midday in the Lion King’, and suddenly the lamplight is butterscotch-cartoonish. There are innumerable moments of lyrical virtuosity in this commitment to the Ken doll, yet in the long run of Lawrence’s oeuvre the book may turn out to be more curiosity than masterpiece – a gem of a B-side.

flame is the fifth poetry collection from Indian-born, Canberra-based poet, novelist, essayist and translator Subhash Jaireth, who also spent nine years in Russia. Indeed ‘Moscow – 1974: Oratorio in Two Voices’ is the first of Aflame’s three parts. These ‘Voices’, though, are more elusive; its song comes over like the broad strokes of allegory. The language of Aflame is often simple, sometimes familiar. The night is ‘raven black’, the moon is ‘veiled by cold mist’, a thought ‘flashes’, the sea is ‘turquoise’, a face is ‘ashen white’ – all this within the first few pages. But Jaireth’s images are imaginative, and he has an intricate control over the poem’s spaces and rhythms (know that the beat in ‘veiled by cold mist’ enhances the poem). In this introductory twenty-piece prose-poem sequence, a woman and her lover meander dreamlike in Moscow through concerts and galleries and markets. There is a game of eggs with a nun; a man with a painted face sings to a horse in a stage play. The poems contain mishearings, echoes, doublings and strange musical puzzles: ‘The blood on the wedge could be his or of the pigeon’s.’ There is intensity and an atmosphere of novelty evoking Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities or the surprise and strangeness of Michal Ajvaz. Indeed a few pages over we find: ‘Like Calvino’s Marco Polo he wants to trace invisible parabolas the swallows cut in the air. Without them the skies are hollow, he says.’ Aflame’s second part, ‘In Praise of Silence’, consists of twentyone prose poems – almost microfictions – each swivelling off wry haiku from Japanese poets including Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa. In a piece following ‘Kobayashi’s snail’, the protagonist walks up a mountain, but the reader is wonderfully lost in the stickiness

of the poem’s circling discourse. Uniquely, Jaireth brings native Australian animals to the quietude of Japanese minimalism. Jaireth looks to mirror the dysphoric whimsy of these haiku masters, but in Japanese filmmaker Isao Takahata we have an example of a counterbalance that feels more dynamic. In his delectable My Neighbours the Yamadas (1999), Takahata wittily contrasts the crass and pitiful Yamada family with epigraphic haiku by Bashō. Aflame’s third part is the titular sequence dedicated to Tibetan Buddhist monks. Over fifty pages, in twenty-seven shortish poems, mostly quatrains, the feel is a melodic, loose villanelle, a lost walk, a long night, as the poem returns to its central horrible nightmare about a mother and her goat, both shot by a soldier. There’s contemplation in the repetition and transparent simplicity, and the poem builds to catharsis with bloodstained milk: in the bowl she held when the bullet the bullet hit her the bowl breaks

into pieces I gather in my dream to hold the bowl, from which I drink and drink

The significance of each player – mother, bullet, bowl – deepens as they’re interleaved. To follow just one strand, a carved finch sits in a nest or pecks at grains and twitters ‘enchanted syllables’. Later it receives a mother’s whisper or becomes a measure word – not a sliver or a twist but a ‘finch of compassion // for the soldier’. Eventually, the wooden bird enters the throng via a tourist market. The poems of Aflame often return to the act of writing. After the dream’s trauma – also hinted in Jaireth’s continually strung-together phrasing – the protagonist sleeps (presumably again) clearly, empty: ‘the cleanest sliver [or finch?] of an oak bark / akin to the one on which my mother / taught me to scribble words I remember’. g Luke Beesley a poet, artist, and singer–songwriter. His fifth poetry collection, Aqua Spinach (Giramondo, 2018), was shortlisted for the 2019 ALS Gold Medal.

it breaks

Poetry

More than holding on

New poetry from Jelena Dinić and Jane Gibian Jennifer Harrison

In the Room with the She Wolf

by Jelena Dinić Wakefield Press $19.95 pb, 83 pp

Beneath the Tree Line

by Jane Gibian Giramondo $24 pb, 87 pp

n an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.’ Although far from improvisational, Dinić’s poetry compositionally integrates both fragility and strength as it draws together diverse experiences of war trauma, cultural displacement, the petty administrative routines of immigration departments, a Malaysian writing fellowship, Australian icons (such as the rainwater tank), folklore, and bathing in the Adriatic Sea. While influenced by Serbian poetry, particularly that of Vasko Popa (‘Give me back my rags’), Dinić searches the dislocation and strangeness of migrant experience for a language that connects identity deeply to homeland. The poem ‘Zahra’s Page’ critiques administrative ‘box-ticking’ and indeed all bureaucracies that

dehumanise, infantilise, or diminish respect for individuality. There is a quality of lucid toughness that sparkles in a poem such as ‘Boudoir Grand’: She opens its mouth to warm her body, then takes off her cardigan. Hands rise and strike the keys. Broken ivory bones smell of elephants. Only the sounds, hard and soft, violently repeat like birds fighting for their prey. on the edge of a pillow filled with feathers. Like an animal that needs to survive I sharpen my ears and look up at the music in the air.

Popa’s strongest influence might be found in Dinić’s succinctness, and in the slightly surreal imagery, often elliptically striking. The poems cover a great deal of emotional and intellectual ground in very few lines. Folk idioms hold wisdoms that remain powerful – as a grandfather says, ‘Not easy on earth ... not easy below’ (‘The Silence of Siskins’) – and fairy tales are also treated pragmatically as if they have lost their power through cultural displacement: ‘Down in the basement / the fairytales / smell of mould’ (‘Hide and Seek’). Dinić effortlessly finds metaphoric potency in ordinary events and objects (‘Babysitting’, ‘Handbag’, ‘Reading’, ‘Scrapbooking’). These pared-back poems possess a distinct quality of complexity perhaps best seen in the title poem, ‘In the Room with the She Wolf ’, which although ostensibly about washing an old dress, moves swiftly into larger themes of death and identity: ‘Coming / closer / is this a girl who turned into me? / I circle her like an AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

opponent ... her body will take my shape. / I know her weak spots. / I can’t protect her from myself.’ The poem is a remarkable account of identity in conflict. As old and new selves circle each other, the poem ends with the slightly bleak, inevitable conclusion: ‘There is no going back.’ Poems such as ‘The House’, ‘Rainwater Tank’, and ‘The Water Factory’ recall the observations of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1964): how our perception of

While influenced by Serbian poetry, Dinić searches the dislocation and strangeness of migrant experience for a language that connects identity deeply to homeland home shapes our thoughts, memories, and dreams when we inhabit space. Dinić concludes ‘The House’ with the lines ‘only air is coming through the floorboards – / how it sounds like wheezing. / Like a fight for life.’ Danger seems always to be nearby: a water factory has metal hooks; words are ‘trapped’ by poems; a rainwater tank weakens the knees. The constructions of civilisation are fragile, and there is an overarching ancestral history that is not always comforting. The section beginning with ‘Devil’s Elbow’ contains one of my favourite poems in the collection, ‘The Treachery of Images’. Exploring trust, distrust, and eroticism within a relationship that appears to be as much with poetry itself as with a real lover, the poem offers the image of a strong woman who just might let a snake out of its basket, ‘but the snake / will have a mind of its own’. Dinić definitely has a mind of her own, and these poems of visceral lyricism – ‘The small flames // burn violently / in my eyes’ (‘Back’) – return repeatedly to cultural origins both imaginatively and physically. The initial couplet in the collection, ‘Swing’, when read again, in retrospect, suggests that an essential resilience and creativity, sometimes earned through reworking trauma, underpin self-authenticity, ‘When my country collapsed, I was on a swing. / My mother shouted from her window “hold on, hold on”.’

ane Gibian’s fifth collection Beneath the Tree Line begins confidently with ‘Tilt’, a poem that, despite the formal, neatly lineated stanzas and precise detail, implies that the perspectives here will ask the reader to consider what is imbalanced, uneven, off-centre. It’s not surprising that the second poem in the collection, ‘Balancing Summer’, is an exquisitely toned poem of pure balance, where naturalistic observations are displaced from narrative and emerge almost as collage. The poem ‘where walls meet’ further explores the orientation and disorientation between the human and natural worlds ‘where earth meets ditch and weed’ and ‘wall hits gate’, and where mountains are chopped and dispersed. The poem is stripped of capitalisation and full stops and this absence of boundaries enhances the sense that we inhabit a precious, precarious space between nature and what we desecrate to make way for our houses and cities. Gibian’s interactions with the environment are quietly respectful and celebratory of nature’s beauty, diversity, and vulnerability. 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

The book’s epigraph acknowledges the UK poet Alice Oswald’s lyrical experimental work, especially perhaps its compulsive inner music (in the stage directions to her second collection, Dart, 2002, Oswald suggested that ‘All voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’). In this tradition, Gibian’s poems are remarkable accretions of sedimentary detail in which the reader is almost ask to eavesdrop on the way linguistic processes construct an environment of words. Nature, though ‘less golden’, is still shedding and renewing itself. Observations are ordinary, descriptive, at least on the surface, yet extraordinary in litany and texture. ‘Grenade’ is a poised example, ‘To let time pass with ease / like the grey-green lichen, tufts of unspun wool / hanging from the branches’ – and a few lines later, ‘The pinecone grenade holds // a season, a stopwatch ticking towards winter.’ These poems feel understated yet multiplex and I was reminded of David Lehman’s comments in The Last Avant-Garde (1998) where he discusses John Ashbery’s poetry in terms of Zeno’s paradox: where a journey is interrupted before it gets off the ground ‘and the denouement advancing slowly never arrives, though it remains imminent’. Gibian’s poems often end as surprising interruptions or pauses, accomplished with significant skill because nothing is surmised or judged. Again, as Ashbery suggested in My Philosophy of Life (1995) ‘sort of let things be what they are.’ Nature is allowed its own presence, but there is also an intensity of observation that responds to what Oswald terms ‘the hush of things unseen inside, the heartbeat of dead wood’. Gibian seems interested in the way we catalogue, organise, and are shaped by information, and she approaches these concerns through variable poetic forms. ‘Lash’ is written in epistolary mode, and there are several found poems including ‘Seventeen titles on the New Books shelf: June–July 2019’, as well as a medley of excerpts from Wagga Wagga’s ‘News of the Week’ column from The Worker (1910). In contrast, the poems that investigate nature, particularly the marks of human presence upon environment, are all the more engaging because of the sensual acuity of imagery, ‘a dissected escalator stacked in neat rows’ (‘Street of hollows’), ‘the percussive rain of uncooked rice hitting the pan’ (‘Each turn’), ‘Mouths learning to stitch together new vowels’ (‘Double-jointed’). Human experience carries neither more nor less weight than nature’s, in a perspective that is humble yet somehow interdisciplinary. The text of several poems in the final section of the book, (‘within’, ‘Hint of a track’, ‘slow-moving eye’, ‘restless’) spills across the page organically as natural formations with plenty of space and visual drama. It feels as though Gibian can write about anything, from a loans slip to an imaginative curiosity cabinet, but it is the experience of poetic engagement with nature – from the beautiful elegy ‘First season’ to the final lines of the last poem in the collection, ‘tidemark’, ‘that part of the beach / pining for home, and at the centre / of an instrumental continuo around which / all other voices circle and rub’ – that elevates to brilliance this optimistic, generous poetry, which more than holds on to a world cautiously contemplating its future. g Jennifer Harrison’s latest poetry collection is Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). She is Chair of the World Psychiatry Association’s Section for Art and Psychiatry.

Poetry

Wake up to yourself !

what we know as ‘motivation’, and that Dante’s idea of ‘discernment’, clear-sightedness, or purity of intent is, for us, ‘insight’. In Purgatorio, the middle book of the Commedia, Dante and Virgil A vivid new translation of Dante climb the mountain on which souls are purged of their sins in Theodore Ell preparation for paradise. At the summit, Dante is reunited with the soul of his lost love, Beatrice. Black has chosen to translate only Purgatorio because he believes it carries the most uplifting and urgent message of the Commedia: wake up to yourself. Black observes that Dante’s Purgatorio is not merely a ‘detention’ zone, where souls simply await purification. The punishments demand an effort to understand sin: that is, to recognise Purgatorio motivation and change it. In Inferno, souls are ‘stuck’, unable to by Dante Alighieri, translated by D.M. Black change. In Purgatorio, souls are redeemed because they achieve NYRB Classics self-knowledge. Black finds an exact equivalent in the mission $32.99 pb, 483 pp of psychoanalysis, as articulated by Sigmund Freud: ‘to make the n Italy, Dante is known as il sommo poeta (‘the supreme poet’). unconscious conscious’, to understand one’s motivations and turn Ironically, such reverence obscures the creative personality. their conflict into coherence. For Dante, as for the psychoanalyst, We know Dante responded to the shock of being exiled from there is no formula for achieving this. For Black, the punishments Florence in 1302 by writing a visionary poem of hell, purgatory, that Dante tailored to each sin show ‘there is a right configuration and paradise, in which his tormented life and feuding world for ‘every soul.’ Unlike in Inferno and Paradiso, the geography and mechwere set right – but why did he do it? With little biographical evidence and no original manuscripts of the Commedia surviv- anisms of Purgatorio are Dante’s inventions. Black draws a ing, most translators and commentators prefer to concentrate fascinating parallel between Dante’s concept of allegory, as exon Dante’s myriad historical and theological sources. It takes a pressed in his treatise Convivio (1304–7), and the ways in which simple shift of logic to search them for the missing psychological psychoanalysts read the images and symbols through which the unconscious communicates with the evidence. consciousness. Black describes the It is the marvel of this edition of allegorical pattern of Purgatorio – the Purgatorio that translator D.M. Black climbing of the mountain, punishpresents a vivid portrait of Dante’s ments tailored to sins, the reshaping mind. This edition complements of the self – as Dante’s projection of NYRB Classics’ 2004 edition of the his struggle to understand his own Inferno, translated by the late Cifailings and overcome his self-resentaran Carson. (Who will do NYRB’s ment. This is a bold claim that rests Paradiso?) A poet with a background on inferences about Dante’s unconin philosophy, Black has also had scious motives. His descriptions of a distinguished career as a psychopassing through the rivers of Lethe analyst. His edition of Purgatorio and Eunoè, forgetting sin and reexercises all three disciplines at once, membering his better self, are potent mounting a psychoanalytic enquiry dramatisations of mental renewal into the poetic suggestions of trauma, – but could reuniting with Beatrice obsessions, fantasies, and repression. really revive Dante’s repressed grief It is a truism that Dante must have for another woman, his long-dead experienced all these facets of mental mother? Black believes so, finding life (though he could not have conclues in Dante’s description of their ceived of them in those terms). But it meeting and Beatrice’s rebuke of his is uncommon for a translator to credit wavering faith in her (Canto XXX). them as Dante’s reasons for writing, Dante’s awe at seeing her turns to seek out their traces in the text – in shame – he cannot even look at his the qualities of its drama, narration, own reflection in the water – just as a symbolism, philosophy, language – The Boat of Souls, by Gustave Doré engraving for the psychoanalyst would expect, if Dante Purgatorio by Dante, 1870, ( RYDMB0 Artokoloro/Alamy) and construe the psychological and were carrying unresolved trauma emotional origins of Dante’s ‘divine’ connected to love for women. construct. Whether or not we agree fully with this speculation, Black’s Black draws parallels between the therapeutic aims of psychoanalysis and Dante’s depictions of the redemption of souls. approach is humane and is derived in good faith from evidence Black argues that what Dante calls ‘the soul’ finds its modern in the text. In turn, Black elucidates the text wonderfully. His equivalent in ‘the mind’ or ‘the person’, that Dante’s idea of ‘sin’ is opening and closing essays, and his notes at the end of each Canto,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

are as energetic as they are thorough. More than a glossary of medieval ideas, Black’s commentary integrates each explanation into the structure and development of Dante’s psychological drama. Interpreting the Purgatorio is only half of Black’s task. A translator must keep faith not only with the meaning but also the experience of the text. Black has opted for a verse translation, wisely refraining from rhyme but employing a loose and unobtrusive pentameter and keeping Dante’s tercet, a design that maintains momentum strongly. Black’s rule was to stay ‘as close as possible to the movement of Dante’s thought’, rather than seek pedantic parallel meanings. More than pace or rhythm, ‘movement’ here means drive, agility, immediacy of detail, and, most importantly, an impression of restless mental activity. Each line and tercet of Black’s verse is calculated to match Dante’s in conveying the cascade and interlacing of thoughts, through and around the narrative. Black has a gift for condensed and aphoristic single lines – ‘that noble shoot that sprang from humble grass’ (Canto XIV), ‘you gather darkness from the light itself !’ (Canto XV) – and his immense labour appears, in most places, effortless. Even the passages of theological or moral discourse skip along, thanks to a deft use of monosyllables. Unfortunately, the focus on ‘texture and movement’ creates some results that upset tone and register. Black acknowledges the influence of J.D. Sinclair’s biblically inflected prose translation (OUP, 1939–46) on his approach to passages of dramatic weight and moral gravity, but

frequently, and inconsistently, for the sake of metre, he resorts to contractions – ‘it’s,’ ‘you’re,’ ‘can’t’, and the like – which sound awkward when spoken by solemn characters. Black also undercuts himself through the grating use of modern slang. Early on, Dante and Virgil search for a ‘doable’ path up the mountain, and in the next Canto the lethargic Belacqua scoffs, ‘OK, you climb, if you’re so energetic!’ In compensation, Black translates some of Dante’s most decisive scenes superbly. Dante’s reunion with Beatrice is as tense and poignant as it should be, and Dante’s speech about the vocation of poetry (in Canto XXIV) is as confident and straightforward in Black’s English as in Dante’s Italian, rendering the crucial phrase ‘a quel modo / ch’è ditta dentro vo significando’ as, ‘I go, / as he [Love] commands me inwardly, making meaning.’ The overall poetic quality of the translation is impressive in an edition that already does more than most to portray Dante as a thinking individual and to bring a general audience closer to him. Our contact with Dante can only be fleeting, but Black makes him as hauntingly present as the departed souls whom Dante himself glimpses. As Black puts it in Canto XXVI, ‘He vanished then in the refining fire.’ g Theodore Ell is an honorary lecturer in literature at the Australian National University. His essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize.

Poetry

Bondage as metaphor

A monumental study of poetry and constraint John Hawke

Poetry and Bondage: A history and theory of lyric constraint by Andrea Brady

Cambridge University Press £90 hb, 435 pp

ndrea Brady’s monumental study of poetry and constraint focuses on ‘the ways that poets invoke bondage as metaphor while effacing the actuality of bondage’. Milton’s aspiration to deliver poetry from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’, and Blake’s injunction that ‘poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race’, associate formal freedoms with political liberation. The modernist discovery of free verse was quickly followed by a formalist reaction in the 1940s, which was in turn displaced by renewed experimentation over the following decades. Yet poetry always and inevitably imposes boundaries on experience, and Oulipian or procedural devices are just another instance of this shaping practice. Brady is not occupied with tired oppositions between neo-formalist and free verse approaches – though a con46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

cern with prosody is foregrounded in her analysis. Rather, the focus of her work is a fierce interrogation of the lyric mode itself, and what she identifies as a ‘lyric whiteness’, both in its historical and contemporary formulations. Brady is herself a significant late modernist practitioner, associated with the field of British writers who have followed the experimental Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne, including Keston Sutherland and John Wilkinson. The political radicalism of the late Sean Bonney – a dedicatee of this book – is also evident in Brady’s firm emphasis on a poetics of commitment. These poets share a suspicion of the lyric mode, with its assumption of a private subject venting emotions in transparent language, secluded from social concerns. Brady positions this conception within John Stuart Mill’s definition of the poem as self-enclosed soliloquy, ‘like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell … quarantined from sociability’. This can be further traced to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, in which the solitary lyric poem is distinguished from, and elevated above, simple and direct collective ‘song’: within the constrained space of the lyric, according to Hegel, ‘the poet’s own subjective freedom … flashes out’. As Brady asserts, there is a racial undertone to this distinction, which underwrites ‘the coupling of whiteness and lyric’. This raises important questions within the recent history of poetics and its reception. Postmodern poetry critics of the 1990s, such as Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, were often dismissive of multicultural poetries, arguing that a shared formal reliance on lyric strategies (a stable speaking subject enouncing personal or familial history), led to similitude rather than an

assumed ‘diversity’. This is complicated by the enduring model of the Black Arts movement, with its liberationist (via Frantz Fanon) claims for the assertion of identity: this influence can be seen in Aboriginal protest poetry (such as Kevin Gilbert’s 1988 anthology Inside Black Australia) and continues in spoken word practices across a wide diaspora. I would argue that Australian multicultural poetry – from the Steinian writings of Ania Walwicz to the polyglot dialect of Π.O. – has mainly resisted this reductive categorisation. Certainly, local work by writers from the past decade, such as that of Natalie Harkin and Bella Li, has directly contested the assumptions of the lyric mode. Brady’s central example, and a crucial model within such contemporary practice, is M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong (2008), which recollects in highly fragmented form an infamous 1781 maritime massacre that activated the anti-slavery movement. Philip’s poem, a radical rearrangement of archival documents, works within the ‘constraint’ of limited source material. It is also deliberately anti-lyrical in its refusal of both narrative and subject positioning. As Brady notes, the poem exemplifies the ‘indeterminacy’ and openness of meaning that critics like Perloff identify as central to the postmodern poem. Its structure of relational patterning also links it to late modernist practices of paratactic arrangement, such as in the poetry of Charles Olson. But, as Brady argues, these formal qualities are exceeded by the poem’s political goals: fragmentation and mutilation at the level of the syllable provide a mirror for slave experience. As Philip herself says, ‘I wanted to destroy the lyric voice’, replacing the lyric ‘I’ with a multivocal, communal subject that directly reorients the hierarchy of Hegel’s distinction between lyric and song. Another key text, Rob Halpern’s Common Place (2015), utilises a similarly limited documentary source – the autopsy report on a Yemeni detainee who suicided in Guantánamo – recalling the use of legal documents by Objectivist poets like Charles Reznikoff. But Halpern’s approach is anything but objective, his eroticised projections on the body of the deceased – which Brady concedes are ‘disturbing’ and ‘deliberately shocking’ – are an excessively pornographic ‘rendition’ of the Petrarchan lyric evocation of the qualities of an absent beloved. Brady’s critical method resists enclosure in a similar manner: her historicist approach, swerving beyond the poems to engage with sociopolitical backgrounds, draws attention to John Keats’s slave-owning brother and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s experiences of

incarceration. It is no digression that one of her turns describes the racist history of the Southern Agrarian movement, and the early support for segregation by New Critics such as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren; nor is it hyperbole when she likens their conception of the poem as ‘well-wrought urn’, the central critical tenet for the reception of the lyric, to an idealised plantation free from modern industrial influence. The historicism that Brady opposes to this formalist approach is most evident in her deployment of ‘figural method’ (after Erich Auerbach) to draw synchronic parallels between contemporary examples and canonical figures within the history of the lyric form. Her approach reveals complicities that in each instance undermine Mill’s definition of poetry as solitary self-enclosure. The turn towards private experience in Ovid’s tropes of love as slavery and as a substitute for military service apparently subverts the imperial order but also reproduces its social practices. Wyatt’s English Petrarchism ‘speaks only for himself, performing enslavement as dissent’. Emily Dickinson, the epitome of the bounded and solitary reclusive poet, is positioned in terms of her lack of sympathy for the cause of emancipation. Against this, Brady provides examples of actual incarceration and genuine suffering. A harrowing chapter on the use of solitary confinement in the US prison system presents contemporary prison poetry as a space in which ‘lyric’s promise’ becomes ‘a form of resistance’. This transcends their value as sociological artefacts, and even the liberationist claims of the Black Arts-inspired prison writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Describing the extreme isolation of ‘control units’, and the symptoms of states of hallucinatory dissociation these produce, Brady gives the example of Bob Kaufman’s ‘Jail Poems’ (1960), which culminates in a visionary and explicitly Rimbaldian erasure of self, in which ‘I am not me’. As the critic George Fragopoulos says of these works, Kaufman ‘is not interested in creating a new kind of identity or subjectivity. He is, instead, attempting to utterly erase the subject position from the lyric itself.’ g John Hawke is a poet and literary scholar. His scholarly books include the monograph Australian Literature and the Symbolist Movement (2009) and a collection of essays co-edited with Ann Vickery, Poetry and the Trace (2013). He is also the author of two collections of poetry: Aurelia (2015), which received the Anne Elder award, and Whirlwind Duststorm (2021).

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Shakespeare

A Stratford man

The enterprising young Shakespeare David McInnis

The Private Life of William Shakespeare by Lena Cowen Orlin

Oxford University Press £30 hb, 442 pp

he basic facts of William Shakespeare’s life – his baptism, early marriage, three children, shareholder status in his playing company, acquisition of a coat of arms, purchase of New Place in Stratford, and his death in 1616 – are well known. Is there anything new to say? Lena Cowen Orlin examines a series of seminal moments in the writer’s private life that reveal a Shakespeare ‘who knew what he wanted to do with his life’. A hallmark of her biography is the prioritisation of ‘evidence clusters’ about ‘cognate lives’, with a strict focus on the personal and an insistence that ‘historical documents and accounts should be subjected to as close a reading as any play or poem’. Indeed, in the case of Shakespeare, who, Orlin observes, ‘did not write autobiographically’, close reading of historical documents is more important than straining to decipher significance in his plays and poems, which are conspicuous in their near absence in this biography (hence ‘private life’). Therein lies the paradox and challenge of Shakespearean biographies, of course: ‘The scope for literary interpretation appears infinite; the resources for life information are limited.’ Orlin is interested in ‘parallel lives’, including that of Shakespeare’s father. With John Shakespeare’s rise in status as alderman came responsibilities, which John failed to discharge from early 1577 onwards, when his chronic absence from council meetings began and his financial situation degenerated: ‘The collapse of his father’s enterprise was the defining event of [Shakespeare’s] private life; from it, all else followed.’ But earlier, in 1569, the young William Shakespeare would have witnessed travelling players attend his own father in the Guildhall’s Upper Hall, a space repurposed for theatre by John Shakespeare as the borough’s chief officer for the year. Orlin calls it a ‘formative experience’ for the five-year-old Shakespeare. As he came of age, however, Shakespeare ‘confronted a life in trade just as that of his tradesman father failed’: a fork-in-the-road moment for young William. Orlin proposes that Shakespeare may have set his impending life in trade to one side strategically and afforded himself new possibilities with the ‘positive life choice’ of wilfully entering into a marriage with Anne Hathaway in 1582. Because Shakespeare was just eighteen and Hathaway apparently pregnant before their marriage, scholars have assumed that theirs was a shotgun wedding to which William was an unhappy or unwilling party. Orlin sees a different possibility: ‘that there was purpose in the union, in part because its consequence was his translation to 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

London’, where the glovemaker’s son could instead become a playwright. If Shakespeare had begun a term of indenture as an apprentice in Stratford (perhaps to a butcher), his marriage would have broken the terms of any apprenticeship (which required ‘undivided allegiance’ to a master, to the exclusion of a spouse). Instead, Shakespeare became self-determining. Orlin turns to parallel examples, including the remarkably full documentation for Stratford leatherworker’s son and butcher’s apprentice William Trowte, to ‘help normalize the gaps in Shakespeare’s that have occasionally misled biographers’. Such exploration of cognate lives makes more intelligible the Shakespeares’ experiences of the law, finances, and civic and family life. The antiquary John Aubrey may have been right that Shakespeare arrived in London in 1582, aged eighteen, almost immediately after having married. Orlin helps us see that Shakespeare was more likely fleeing an apprenticeship than a marriage; the marriage had liberated him. Even the seeming peculiarity of William and Anne procuring an episcopal licence to marry away from Holy Trinity Church in Stratford can be explained without the conventional assumption of a clandestine ceremony: marrying elsewhere would allow John Shakespeare, who avoided Holy Trinity (where he risked arrest for his debts), to attend his son’s wedding. Even after Shakespeare moved to London, he ‘maintained currency in local matters’, seemingly continuing to style himself as a Stratford citizen when communicating with those back home, when acquiring property, or preparing his taxes. To better understand how Shakespeare escaped his family’s history of debt, Orlin turns to Richard Quiney (regular commuter between Stratford and London) as ‘another of Shakespeare’s cognates’, and to Richard’s wife, Elizabeth Quiney, whose well-papered life is of interest here for clarifying ‘how a Stratford household could prosper when the head of household was absent in London’. Elizabeth ran a household of sixteen, collected rent, made and sold malt, took responsibility for financial matters, sold wine, ran events for the community, and was even a notable philanthropist. Although the Stratford records of the Shakespeares seem ‘obstinately trivial’, Orlin sets about ‘making biographical sense of them’ via affinities with the Quineys, and the wives in particular. The Shakespeares’ hoarding of ten quarters of grain in 1598 likely points to a household of female staff whom Anne would have trained not just in malt production but in brewing. Anne ‘balanced cash accounts’, may have hosted market vendors, and certainly housed guests at New Place (Thomas Greene rented there for six years). In short, we ‘should know Shakespeare’s wife to have been a partner in building his estate’. Grasping this helps elucidate how the Shakespeares could amass £960 worth of property at a time when Philip Henslowe was paying playwrights £4 to £6 for a new play at the Rose playhouse. Orlin’s most stunning provocations are left till last, and concern the bust of Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church, which she argues is the most ‘autobiographical’ artefact of Shakespeare that we possess. Shakespeare likely met the sculptor, newly identified here as Nicholas Johnson (not, as commonly supposed, his brother Gerard), and commissioned the monument himself. Orlin identifies polychromed demi-figures with ‘a cushion terminating the torso’ (like Shakespeare’s) as a peculiar type of memorial style for monuments, and one made more significant by the fact that

the ‘epicentre of the cushioned funerary monuments was Oxford University’; an unexpected revelation, given that Shakespeare is famously known not to have received a university education. Shakespeare was said (by Aubrey) to have routinely lodged with William Davenant’s parents at their tavern in Oxford on his way from London to Stratford. Taken in conjunction, this evidence cluster leads Orlin to ‘picture Shakespeare participating in the intellectual culture of Oxford’, suggesting that, although he may not have attended university formally, he ‘found another way of learning’: by frequenting the Oxford taverns that were the precursor of college common rooms, where his bearing of news from London would have placed him at the centre of learned discussion. What Orlin establishes as likely being a self-com-

missioned funeral monument in the Oxford style is thus a final act of ‘self-determination that is a through-line of his private life’. Orlin’s painstakingly detailed recontextualisation of evidence pertaining to Shakespeare’s private life reveals a family man in touch with his Stratford roots, who exercised self-determination from a tender age, forging his own path out of his socio-economic lot and, in what was perhaps his greatest creative achievement, imagining a life and career for himself that seemed scarcely possible. The private life of William Shakespeare was key to his success. g David McInnis is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne.

Deer Knife

When life hides behind the mulch of what lives, can they expect more than this refusal to hold each other in the open? Lemongrass floss between molars, you wish for foxes. You tell me you don’t wish for them any novel way, no way – no word – being more or less novel. You wish for foxes in the impossible neutral, piss baroquely on the coal heap around the young lime whose illness we’ve yet to diagnose though we yoke answers to the answer. At the rim of the secret’s crater, you balance on your head and imagine water to slant, migrating, because it must. But listen: the Pacific gull that slit childhood, bombing the ocean, never resurfacing? It did resurface. What hides from us leaks what we do not see. Brothers speaking together underwater. Brothers holding each other’s breath. I have hidden from you. Keep counting. Keep grinding memory’s deer knife through gritty, mulched soil to clean it. When we hold each other, may it not be the afterlife. Here is a public garden – a body lighting lemongrass the breeze wicks from airy, flax clothes as hunger wicks a fox from another den.

Anders Villani Anders Villani’s first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Shakespeare

Corrupt with virtuous season A therapeutic approach to Shakespeare P. Kishore Saval

Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Shame, guilt, and violence in Shakespeare

by James Gilligan and David A.J. Richards

Cambridge University Press $43.95 pb, 174 pp

amiliarity may have inured us to Shakespeare’s violence. Poison, suffocation, suicide, rape, and assassination are among the central events of his major plays. But the uppermiddle-class respectability of too many Shakespeare performances and the insipid, managerial culture of academic ‘Shakespeare studies’ threaten to reduce the greatest of all dramatists to something antiseptic and safe. Holding a Mirror up to Nature attempts to correct this tendency. James Gilligan, a professor of clinical psychiatry who specialises in violence, draws upon decades of experience with ‘murderers, rapists, and others incarcerated in prisons or prison psychiatric hospitals in the United States or other countries’. David A.J. Richards is a professor of law who has ‘critiqued the criminal justice system which our society has created in an attempt to solve the problem of violence’. The authors have brought their experience to bear upon Shakespeare because Shakespeare ‘has more to teach us about the proclivity of humans to kill others and themselves than any other author we know of ’. It is the authors’ familiarity with real-world problems of violence and justice and their sensitivity to extreme violence in Shakespeare’s art that make their work unique. A central preoccupation of Holding a Mirror up to Nature is that Shakespeare can help promote love and restorative justice in a world damaged by shame, guilt, and nihilism. At least since the writings of E.R. Dodds, it is well known that tragedy marks the transition from a culture of ‘shame’ to a culture of ‘guilt’. To put it in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s terms, shame cultures are dedicated to ‘aristocratic’ values of ‘good and bad’, whereas guilt cultures are dedicated to the ‘priestly’ values of ‘good and evil’. In the epic world of the Iliad, for example, to be good, among other things, is to be beautiful, valorous, and strong in battle, whereas the opposite of good is to be, not evil, but rather cowardly, ignoble, or ugly. The guilt cultures of tragedy exhibit a transvaluation of values in which the principles of shame culture are experienced as evil. Gilligan and Richards take this often-discussed feature of tragedy as the basis for a new consideration of the causes of violence in Shakespeare and the world. For Gilligan and Richards, shame motivates self-love and corresponding hatred of others, while guilt motivates self-hate and corresponding love of others. The book claims that both moral codes emerge as causes of violence. Shame directs violence externally, and guilt directs 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

violence at oneself. These observations lead the book to one of its central claims: that morality, whose purpose is ostensibly to prevent violence, ends up causing violence instead. The relationship between guilt, shame, and human violence forms a central part of the book’s genealogy of morality. Another aspect of the book’s moral critique is its claim that the scientific revolution produced nihilism by framing the world in a disinterested, objectified manner, thus reducing all non-scientific meanings to the status of subjective values. However, the book ends by insisting that the dead ends of shame and guilt morality on the one hand, and the dead end of nihilism on the other, can be transcended. Their solution is the ‘replacement of the moral affects and cognitive structures with the affect of love’, and replacing ‘retributive justice’ (which focuses on moral condemnation and punishment of guilt), with ‘restorative’ justice (which involves reconciliation, rehabilitation, and more communitarian values). Examples of the latter, for the authors, include Measure for Measure, in which the Duke chooses not to murder or imprison Angelo but rather to reconcile him with his victims; and the ending of The Winter’s Tale, in which ‘the play overcomes loss and past violence with love, forgiveness, [and] reconciliation’. The relationship between guilt, shame, and human violence forms a central part of the book’s genealogy of morality. Among the merits of the book are its moral seriousness and its humane, compassionate attitude towards its subject. But the book might have benefited from confronting the limitations of its central project: ‘to understand Shakespeare’s plays as if they were case histories, and derive our theories from them’. One of the most celebrated aspects of Shakespeare’s characters is the degree to which they resist being ‘case studies’ of any particular malady or theory. In their idiosyncrasy, variety, and imaginative vitality, Shakespeare’s charismatic personalities stubbornly refuse to be particular instances of general laws. Moreover, in seeing Shakespeare’s characters as instances of psychological and social maladies, the authors often find it difficult to avoid condemning Shakespeare’s characters for their failures. In a book that sees morality itself as a cause of violence, one is astonished to encounter so much moralising. Henry V is condemned as a war criminal, Othello and Iago are rebuked for their shame-driven values, Timon is compared to Hitler, and so on. Such judgements are not entirely inappropriate, since our legitimate sense of moral outrage forms an important part of our response to the plays. But one of the most uncomfortable aspects of Shakespeare’s art is the way in which it exposes our own susceptibility to passions and failures that we would otherwise condemn in others. Gilligan and Richards adopt towards Shakespeare a stance of clinical and forensic distance and a capacity for judging characters as if from the outside that we rarely experience in the theatre. The authors bring to their work a commitment to justice and morality that is palpable and real. But the book might have benefited from remembering that Shakespeare’s resistance to Pharisaical self-righteousness is one of the most important dimensions of his moral intelligence. g P. Kishore Saval is Senior Lecturer in the Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) at Australian Catholic University. ❖

Media

Audio evolutions Siobhán McHugh on podcasting Astrid Edwards

The Power of Podcasting: Telling stories through sound by Siobhán McHugh

UNSW Press $34.99 pb, 312 pp

book about podcasting prompts an immediate question: what is the intended audience? Is it for listeners already devoted to the audio medium? Is it for storytellers who already podcast and want to enhance their craft? Or is it for those interested in podcasting but clueless as to how to go about it? The Power of Podcasting, by Siobhán McHugh, attempts to appeal to all three audiences, with mixed results. The strength of the work is clear when exploring the history of the medium. These sections are, to put it simply, fascinating. There is a dearth of information (whether written or audio) about the evolution of podcasting as a storytelling medium, and McHugh provides a tantalising entry point. For lovers of storytelling – whether fiction and non-fiction – these in-depth sections are a delight. McHugh delves into the history of radio (including news commentary and sports broadcast) to explain the elements of podcasting as an artistic medium. Radio clearly influenced podcasting. But how, exactly? And how does podcasting avoid the more unsavoury elements of radio, such as ‘gotcha moments’? McHugh lays out this history for her readers in a manner that lets her own experience with audio shine through. For example, when Orson Welles read his adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds on CBS Radio the night before Halloween in 1938, panicked listeners rang the police to see if an alien invasion had begun. This is a striking reminder of the fundamental similarity between audio and the written word: when a story is told without pictures, the reader and/or the listener is free to imagine whatever they choose. McHugh’s detailed explanations of how audio can transform words are profound (and may well challenge those who prefer to read the stories they consume). This is another strength of The Power of Podcasting – the accounts of how a story makes it to publication, including the manifold decisions of the podcast producer (who is essentially the ‘author’ of a podcast), are moving. A prime example is McHugh’s description of the process of interviewing a female Australian veteran of the Vietnam War. Both print and audio versions were created, and although both were based on the same interview, each has a different impact for their audience. However, when the book veers into lists of ‘how to podcast’, the momentum is lost. To go from a riveting discussion of the power of audio storytelling to an exhortation such as ‘Let’s podcast – with passion!’ is distracting, to say the least. These phrases, presumably written to segue between the heart of the book and

the bolted on how-to elements, break the rhythm. The how-to sections are valuable, to be clear, but an appendix would have prevented the narrative from being interrupted and still provided practical steps for those new to podcasting. Serial, This American Life, The Daily, and other global podcasts feature prominently, with good reason. They represent watershed moments in the evolution of audio storytelling, and arguably laid the foundation for podcasting as an artform. Aus-

Radio clearly influenced podcasting. But how, exactly? tralian podcasts – and we have world-class podcasts here – are also explored. However, McHugh’s focus on three podcasts from The Age and Sydney Morning Herald stable (Phoebe’s Fall, Wrong Skin and The Last Voyage of the Pong Su) felt too much. McHugh was intimately involved in the development of all three, but no matter how storied or acclaimed, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald do not represent all narrative journalism in Australia. An examination of the research, approach, and technique behind other (competing) true-crime Australian podcasts would have represented a valuable new dimension. For example, a critique of Teacher’s Pet (The Australian) or Trace (ABC) would have lifted The Power of Podcasting to a new level. Examining these seminal Australian podcasts would have been an opportunity to extend discussions that appear elsewhere in the book, such as: who is the best host for a podcast? How does the choice of host change the story? And most importantly, it would have enabled McHugh to delve into the murky ethics of true crime narrative storytelling. The Power of Podcasting will offer unexpected insights for lovers of the written word. McHugh draws out the links between contemporary podcasting and the development of literature in the nineteenth century, including the use of serialisation to hook an audience (think of Charles Dickens). Podcasting is also a form of literary journalism (yes, you read that correctly, literary journalism), and McHugh’s analysis of how the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s influences narrative podcasting today begs to be read. Throughout the text, avid readers will recognise the names of the authors they love and may be surprised at their podcasting endeavours. For example, The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain: The secret history of the Sackler dynasty (2021), is also the voice behind Winds of Change, a podcast exploring how the CIA attempted to use music to bring about the end of the Cold War. The Power of Podcasting is a reminder that audio storytelling is an art form. It can change minds and influence opinions, and its reach is vast. The audience for a moderately successful podcast is much larger than the audience for the average book published in Australia. McHugh herself is an example of how dedicated storytellers cross media, always seeking out the best way to tell a story. Not only is McHugh an award-winning podcaster, she is also the author of four social history works, and she was awarded the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. g Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing, and a director of the podcast company Bad Producer Productions. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Memoir

Quiet achiever

school to win a Special Exhibition at Matriculation, and one of only five girls to do so in Victoria. At the University of Melbourne she worked hard, did brilBrenda Niall’s new memoir liantly, and was noticed. Family connections got her a job with Jacqueline Kent B.A. Santamaria’s Catholic Action as a researcher; a job she thoroughly enjoyed. She fell in and out of love, travelled, and returned to Australia, still without knowing what career she wanted. The new Australian National University provided an answer, and she embarked on a thesis about Edith Wharton under A.D. Hope. She settled happily in Canberra and subsequently taught at Monash University. At a time when academic My Accidental Career opportunities were beginning to open up for bright women, she by Brenda Niall began a distinguished career, not just in academe but also, later, Text Publishing as a biographer and critic. $34.99 pb, 293 pp Niall readily acknowledges the help and support she received t’s always interesting to see biographers decide to turn the from male colleagues, including Hope, Bob Brissenden, and Bill spotlight upon themselves, and to ask why. Will it be another Scott. It is heartening to be reminded that this did, and does, case of ‘now it’s my turn’? The need to confess, even to enter happen – perhaps more often than one is sometimes told. (It’s also true that men often find it easier to give support to a female into the Land of Too Much Information? Brenda Niall is clear about her own motives in writing about colleague who does not rock any boats.) Has her career been accidental? It’s probably true that most her life. This is not an account of her development as a biographer – she has already done that, in Life Class (reviewed by Peter – if not all – careers fail to progress entirely according to plan. Rose in the April 2007 issue of ABR). Here, as many do, she has Niall benefited to some extent from happening to be in the right yielded to the compulsion to try to understand the events and place at the right time, as is often the case. She has been shrewd enough to take advantage of fortunate accidents, patterns that have formed her own life. ‘Writers both in her academic career and in her work as a don’t have to stop,’ writes the woman whose bibiographer. ographies – of Daniel Mannix, Judy Cassab, the Niall is a clear and sometimes stately writer; she Boyds, and the Duracks, among others – have comes across as an astute and confident girl, and been winning acclaim and awards for decades woman, who knows how to keep her own counsel now. ‘After writing nine biographies, I can ponder and who just gets on with things. Anyone seeking the events and encounters that got me to this highly coloured descriptions of emotion will not find point.’ My Accidental Career is also, as she says, them in this book. As in her biographical and critical ‘the story of a 1950s consciousness gradually work, she generally prefers to keep some distance waking up to a new world in which opportunity from the reader, to explain rather than to empathise and equality were within a woman’s reach’. or to seek sympathy. Born in 1930, the youngest of three children As always with Niall, My Accidental Career repays in a middle-class Catholic family – her father Brenda Niall close and attentive reading, for much is going on was a prominent cardiologist – she had a com(Text Publishing) beneath the even surface of her words. Sometimes fortable and protected childhood in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Kew. She suffered badly from asthma, often her discretion about seismic events can be a little frustrating – we having to miss school, and like other children who have to spend are told little about her emotional life. The sudden death of her a great deal of time at home, she evidently became a thoughtful lover and mentor Grahame Johnston must have been absolutely and introspective child. Her family lived in a Catholic enclave: devastating, for example. But sometimes, and very effectively, her one of their neighbours was Archbishop Daniel Mannix, often apparently smooth words conceal depth charges. As she and her seen striding into work in St Patrick’s Cathedral, his route taking mother hold vigil at her dying father’s bedside, Niall is shocked him through working-class Collingwood, where he distributed when her mother assures a visitor that he will recover. Her mother explains: ‘You never know what he might hear. Hearing is the sixpences to children. At school – like other girls in her cohort – she was taught to last thing to go.’ Niall makes no comment about how wrenching value the virtues of unselfishness and submissiveness; ‘the suppos- this must have been for her mother: she lets the reader do that edly feminine qualities of quietness and gentleness were supreme’, work, here as elsewhere. The occasional tart aside is also welcome. This, then, is the story of a rich and satisfying life of creative she writes. The important thing was learning how to be this version of a good Catholic wife and mother. Some well-known achievement, as well as being an individual portrait of the 1950s. women rebelled against the rule of the nuns – see Germaine Greer It is good to be reminded of a time when universities were places and Susan Ryan, among many others – but Niall saw no need where the life of the mind, not that of the abacus, was essential. g to join them. In most cases, she says, the kindness of the nuns somehow coexisted with the rigidity of their rule. She had good Jacqueline Kent is the author of Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth teachers, too – Niall was the only student from a Catholic girls’ Cook (UQP, 2019) and Vida: A woman of our time (Viking, 2020).

52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

Memoir

The snares of grief Pathways, not closure Andrew Broertjes

Found, Wanting: A memoir by Natasha Sholl

Ultimo Press $32.99 hb, 279 pp

e all seem to be thinking about grief lately. As Covid keeps many of us away from loved ones and people who are dying or have just expired, how we process death has received a renewed focus. The number of memoirs and guides and stories about grief and loss that have been published in the past two years – over two hundred – is staggering. It is a challenge to write about grief. Every society on earth has its own forms and rituals around grieving, its own texts on what grieving is like. Trying to find something new or original to say is daunting. What we are left with are our own words, our own terrible experiences to put down upon the page. When she was twenty-two, Natasha Sholl lost her partner, Rob, from what seemed to be Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Nine years later, she would lose her brother Matt. How she slowly regained her life during those years, and pulled herself out of the darkness, is narrated in the fractured and haunting memoir Found, Wanting. Sholl, a Melbourne-based writer, has presented an open and uncomfortably honest account of her life during those years. She takes us through the initial shock of grief, the depression, the breakdown and the eating disorder that developed as a result of that grief, and finding someone new, trying to move on from death in a way she realises ultimately is not possible. All Sholl can do is build a life different from the one she thought she would have. As she recalls this process, touchstones familiar to anyone who has suffered loss appear: relatives and friends bringing endless food, the halting attempts to respond to comments like ‘I have no words’, the aspects of grief that Sholl, like all of us, feels compelled to perform when we just want the world to go away: From the outset it was clear I was being watched. People hovered. Waiting. And so I had no choice but to act out what I thought grieving looked like. That I would have no appetite was a given. People turned up on my doorstep with home-made pumpkin soup, chicken soup, vegetable and barley soup. Broths and liquids. At mealtimes I smiled and shook my head politely and they nodded sympathetically. I mean, what kind of girlfriend would eat a steak after they just let their boyfriend die?

It is a performance: a performance that is exhausting. Mourning is a complicated, messy process. After my first major loss, a close friend wrote to me and said, ‘There is no right way or wrong way to grieve, and I’ll remind you of that from time

to time over the coming weeks and months. We, your friends, do not expect you to do anything, be anything, or move on to anything along any timeline, or in any order.’ Nearly two years to the day after sending that email, he would be dead himself. I had no religion, no particular cultural framework to draw upon when dealing with my losses. The frameworks of culture and religion are important. For Sholl, who describes herself as a lapsed Jew, the rituals and rites of the Judaic faith provided pathways, but not closure. And some of those pathways would be blocked: Rob’s parents’ house became the central hub. Part of this was instinct, a search for comfort. To be together. Part was tradition. Rob’s family was sitting shiva, the week-long mourning period in Judaism for first-degree relatives. I was not technically part of this process because we were not married. Another reminder of what I had lost: the future.

At times, Sholl’s writing can be frustrating. The chopped sentence fragments, particularly in the first half of the book, convey a sense of unease. The reader is not allowed to settle. There are interludes between the main chapters, lengthier fragments and thoughts that mirror the scattered sentence structure that coils throughout the book. It can be unsettling, uncomfortable, but perhaps that is largely the point. Sholl was splintered, fractured, struggling like so many of us who have experienced loss to put herself back together and function on a day-to-day level.

It can be unsettling, uncomfortable, but perhaps that is the point. Sholl was splintered, fractured, struggling like so many of us who have experienced loss Found, Wanting is not an easy read for anyone who has been through the grieving process. At times I found myself wondering how anyone could have had an experience so different from mine. She’s misremembered, I thought. Too much time has passed. And then there were moments that forced me to put the book down and go for a walk to clear my head, to clear the grief that came rushing out in front of me. Sholl writes about helping her brother’s wife, Fiona, put out Matt’s clothes for charity, and I realise that my partner’s clothes are still all packed up, more than five years later, still going nowhere. Sholl recounts the moving-on process of her other brother, Andrew (oh, the synchronicity!), who began to get fit and compete in marathons for charity. In 2019, three years before I read this book and two years after the death of my partner, I decided to do a half-marathon for charity. When Sholl writes that ‘grief itself is an endurance sport’, I know exactly what she means. In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote of the need to ‘go to the literature’ when grappling with loss. With Found, Wanting, Natasha Sholl has added an important work to that canon, a wrenching step for those in the midst of their own ‘endurance sport’, and a necessary read for anyone supporting someone caught up in the snares of grief. g Andrew Broertjes’s essay ‘Death and Sandwiches’, about death and grief, appeared in our December 2019 issue. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2022

Open Page with Troy Bramston

Troy Bramston has been a senior writer and columnist with The Australian newspaper since 2011. He was previously a columnist with the Sunday Telegraph. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including Robert Menzies: The art of politics (2019) and Paul Keating: The big-picture leader (2016), and he co-authored The Truth of the Palace Letters (2020) and The Dismissal (2015) with Paul Kelly. His most recent book is Bob Hawke: Demons and destiny (2022).

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

Florence, Italy. The city of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli, and the Medicis. I was married in the Palazzo Vecchio a few years ago.

What’s your idea of hell?

An airport terminal or airport hotel with a long flight delay or stopover.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Tribalism. It infuses our politics and parts of the media. Social media has energised it. We are a better people when we respect and appreciate other views and allow ourselves to be persuaded by their merits.

What’s your favourite film?

Back to the Future (1985). It is filled with courage, imagination, and humanity. It mixes adventure, romance, comedy, sci-fi and drama – what more could you want? I was thrilled to interview co-writer Bob Gale a few years ago.

And your favourite book?

Probably Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982–) in four volumes with a final volume to come. He’s the master of political biography. I would love to spend ten years writing a book. But I’d go broke.

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

Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Robert F. Kennedy.

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

I dislike ‘trending’ which is seeping its way into public discourse. I have always liked ‘inexorable’, as in unremitting and inescapable, which should be used more.

Who is your favourite author?

Again, probably Robert Caro, and Michael Beschloss. But I love Clive James, Robert Hughes, Donald Horne, Graham Freudenberg, and Christopher Hitchens. I got to meet them all and had a dialogue with Clive, who was very generous to me. Graham was my friend.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

I loved Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels as a teenager. Going back to Casino Royale (1953) last year, some of it doesn’t hold up well. 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2022

(Penguin Random House)

Interview

I still love the movies, especially those of the Daniel Craig era.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

The ability to be impartial, and balanced in making judgements. And to write something new and fresh, to illuminate my thinking with their idea or an argument on a page.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

First, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr’s A Thousand Days (1965), an insider account of John F. Kennedy’s presidency, told by a historian. Second, Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty (1992), which set the standard for writing books about Australian politics.

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

I enjoyed William Shakespeare at school but developed a real liking for Jane Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. I couldn’t stand Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) – garbage.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I love listening to Conan O’Brien’s Needs a Friend.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

The seeming need to read emails and text messages immediately, and the urge to see what is making news.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? I want critics to read the book – you can usually tell when they have – and really engage with the subject. I always read Neal Blewett in ABR.

How do you find working with editors?

I’ve been blessed to work with many great editors. Some editing suggestions can be hard to take, but editors are always on your side.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I love writers’ festivals, especially if there is a diversity of views and respectful discussion.

Are artists valued in our society? Yes, but not enough.

What are you working on now?

Trying to have a break from book writing for a while, having had five books published in just over six years. But I’m always bursting with new book ideas. Stay tuned. g