Australian Book Review - April 2023, no. 452

Peter Rose Darryl Pinckney in Manhattan

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth Alexis Wright

Julie Ewington Sydney Modern

Emma Shortis The soaring eagle

Frank Bongiorno MUP

The altar of the alliance

James Curran on Labor’s foreign policy manoeuvres

Advances

New board members at ABR

At its recent Annual General Meeting, ABR welcomed two new board members, both of them long associated with the magazine.

Professor Lynette Russell is a pre-eminent anthropological historian whose distinguished contributions to her field have been recognised with an ARC Professorial Fellowship (2011–16) and a current ARC Laureate Professorship (2020–25). Among the many leadership roles she holds, Professor Russell is presently Director of Monash University’s Indigenous Studies Centre. Lynette Russell guest-edited ABR’s Indigenous issue in 2019 and will do so again in November 2023.

Geordie Williamson is a Pascall Prize-winning literary critic and publisher, and the author of The Burning Library Geordie has been The Australian’s longstanding chief literary critic, and is presently Publisher at Large at Picador. He has been a prolific ABR contributor since 2001.

In welcoming our new board members, Sarah HollandBatt (Chair of ABR), remarked:

Over the past several years we have continued to renew and refresh our Board, and I am so pleased to be welcoming two new Board members to our ranks as a part of this ongoing process. We are immensely fortunate to welcome Professor

Lynette Russell AM and Geordie Williamson to our Board, both frequent contributors to the magazine whose writing and contributions to our broader culture are well known. I know we will benefit enormously from their experience and expertise.

Literary festivals galore

Australians’ public romance with writers’ festivals shows no sign of souring. Is there a hamlet in our equivalent of Hertfordshire that doesn’t platform writers in congenial settings?

Now we have a new one on the tony Mornington Peninsula. Corrie Perkin – former journalist and bookseller – is Director of the Sorrento Writers Festival, which will run from April 27 to 30. Perkin has recruited a stellarline-up for her first festival. Speakers include Marcia Langton on the Voice, Janes Harper, Larissa Behrendt, Kerry O’Brien, and Peter Doherty. Bizarre as it seems, Peter Rose (beanie and all?) will be ‘Talking Footy’ (28 April) with Eddie McGuire, Mike Sheahan, and Caroline Wilson.

Meanwhile, ABR regular and board member Beejay Silcox has taken over the reins as Artistic Director at the Canberra Writers Festival. Beejay brings verve, polish, and flair to

everything she undertakes. Her first festival will run from 16 to 20 August.

Adelaide Tour

ABR’s recent Adelaide Festival tour, conducted in association with Academy Travel, was a big hit. This soldout tour, led by Peter Rose and Christopher Menz, took in some remarkable theatre, notably the searing, confronting A Little Life, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel of the same name, directed by Ivo van Hove, a veteran of the Adelaide Festival. For many, Ramsey Nasr’s performance as Jude (a role soon to be played by James Norton in the new English-language version, in London) was unforgettable. Equally memorable was the Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe, based on the novel by Alhierd Bacharevič. This was inspired, timely, biting, hilarious theatre.

The tour took us to Ukaria, that oasis of chamber music in the Adelaide Hills. The occasion was the world première of Ngapa William Cooper, written and composed by Lior, Nigel Westlake, Lou Bennett, and Sarah Gory. This beautiful, anthemic new song cycle commemorates the life and activism of Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper, who in 1938 led members of the Australian Aborigines League on an eightmile walk to the German Consulate in Melbourne after Kristallnacht, perhaps the sole non-Jewish protest anywhere in the world after that horrific event in Germany. On page 59, Graham Strahle reviews the second performance, which took place at the Adelaide Town Hall.

At a private reception with the tour party, Ruth McKenzie, the new artistic director of the Adelaide Festival, impressed us with her genuine interest in people’s responses to the program (which she inherited from departing directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield), and dropped hints about a major opera component in her next few festivals. This gladdened the heart of operamanes in the party, including our Editor.

The impressive box-office result indicates that the Adelaide Festival has well and truly regained its mantle as Australia’s premier arts festival.

During Writers’ Week, ABR co-hosted its annual party with the Australian Society of Authors, which is celebrating its sixtieth birthday this year (ours was in 2021). Despite the unwontedly cool weather which drove us into the tent, this was a rousing success. Visiting UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage joined us and was promptly surrounded by young local poets.

[Advances continues on page seven]

Australian Book Review

April 2023, no. 452

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing

ISSN 0155-2864

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Image credits and information

Front cover: President Joe Biden shakes hands with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as the two leaders and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak discuss an initiative to create a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines during an event at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego, California on Monday 13 March 2023. The Australia-United Kingdom-US (AUKUS) partnership is a trilateral security pact formed in 2021. (Jim Ruymen/UPI Alamy)

Page 35: Alexis Wright (Giramondo)

Page 53: Andy Warhol. Bianca Jagger at Halston’s house, New York, no. 1 from the portfolio Photographs, 1976; published 1980, New York, United States, gelatin-silver photograph, 40.8 x 28.8 cm (image), 50.5 x 41.0 cm (sheet); James and Diana Ramsay Fund 2020, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency

ABR April 2023

LETTERS

Paul Morgan, Frances Wilson

James Curran

Debi Hamilton

Julie Ewington

Emma Shortis

James Walter

Australia’s new, old foreign policy

Australia’s addiction to background noise

A new landmark building in Sydney

The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy by Michael Mandelbaum

Political Lives by Chris Wallace

UNITED STATES MEMOIR PUBLISHING

POEMS

LITERARY STUDIES

BIOGRAPHY ANTHOLOGY

FICTION

Marilyn Lake

Georgina Arnott

Peter Rose

Anders Villani

Frank Bongiorno

Philip Mead

Paul Giles

Lee Christofis

Patrick Mullins

Susan Varga

Joel Deane

Astrid Edwards

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Stephen Knight

Morgan Nunan

Maria Takolander

Ruth McHugh-Dillon

Michael Winkler

Myth America edited by Kevin M Kruse and Julian E Zelizer

Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm

Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney

You Made Me This Way by Shannon Molloy

MUP: A centenary history by Stuart Kells

Déjà Rêvé

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory edited by John Frow

Cranko by Ashley Killar

Tanya Plibersek by Margaret Simons

Drink Against Drunkenness by Inez Baranay

2022 edited by Michael Hopkin

The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop

Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Three novels about historical masculinity

Shirley by Ronnie Scott

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

SOCIETY SCIENCE HISTORY

POETRY

INTERVIEW

ABR ARTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Shannon Burns

Jessica Urwin

Robert Wellington

Judith Bishop

Pip Williams

Patrick Flanery

Kirk Dodd

Cameron Logan Graham Strahle

Alison Broinowski

Who Cares? by Eve Vincent

Taking to the Field by Jane Carey

The Silk Road by Tim Winter

Two new poetry collections

Open Page

Andy Warhol and Photography

Macbeth

The role of architecture in cultural policy

Ngapa William Cooper

Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro

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The ABR Podcast

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

Australia and China

James Curran

Alexis Wright

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Sydney Modern

Julie Ewington

Andy Warhol in Adelaide

Patrick Flanery

Nan Goldin

Anne Rutherford

Shirley Hazzard

Brigitta Olubas and Peter Rose

‘Leaving Elvis’

Michelle Michau-Crawford

Celebrating Peter Porter

Morag Fraser and others

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 South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

Advances forbore to ask the amiable Yorkshireman what he had made of one of his early sessions, ‘Simon Armitage and Friends’, haphazardly chaired by Sarah Ferguson, who was one of many ABC personalities featured in the program.

The Jaguar

What a time Sarah Holland-Batt is having on the prize front, as in many other spheres. Within a week, her third collection, The Jaguar, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (NSW) and longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for a single book of poetry (it is currently worth C$130,000).

The Jaguar also appears on the 2023 Stella Prize longlist, along with eleven other books, including works by Fiona Kelly McGregor, Tracey Lien, and Louisa Lim. (One remarkable omission from the longlist was Fiona McFarlane’s luminous novel The Sun Walks Down, an early favourite for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.)

The Stella shortlist is due on 30 March, after we go to press, and the winner (who receives $50,000) will be named in April.

Prize entrants

In recent years, thousands of writers have entered our three literary prizes: the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (first offered in 2005), the Calibre Essay Prize (2007), and the Jolley Prize (2010).

Recently, we polled entrants to find out what drew them to the prizes, how they found the process, what they thought of the present division of prize moneys between shortlisted authors, and how we might improve the prizes. Hundreds of entrants completed the survey, and we thank them all.

The feedback was instructive – very supportive too. We were pleased to learn, for instance, that ninety-six per cent of respondents rate our online entry process as good or excellent. Remarkably, almost seventy per cent of respondents told us that they create new works for the prizes rather than disinterring old ones. That’s thousands of new literary works being created because of Jolley, Calibre, and the Porter.

As to people’s primary motivation for entering an ABR prize, sixty per cent do so because of the prestige of that award. The second highest factor was the possibility of publication in ABR g

Letters

A carping review

Dear Editor, Frances Wilson is an esteemed biographer, so I looked forward to her review of Brigitta Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard: A writing life in ABR (March 2023).

I was puzzled therefore to read this sour-toned review. Frances Wilson clearly dislikes Shirley Hazzard. That’s fine, but it’s a personal animus that spoils a review of this important first biography of a major Australian novelist. Wilson quotes a critic’s view of The Great Fire (2004) as ‘the masterpiece of a vanished age of civility’, but then adds the back-handed compliment, ‘which might be said of Hazzard herself’ –suggesting that Hazzard’s work has nothing to say to modern readers. She might be describing a notable but ugly piece of furniture, regretfully inherited.

The review continues in this carping strain, with a catalogue of complaints about Hazzard’s personality. Wilson notes Hazzard’s simple mistake about the title of her first New Yorker story – this prompts an accusation of ‘selfmythologising’. She disapproves of Hazzard’s double crime of marrying an older man who, moreover, is independently wealthy. (Never mind that Francis Steegmuller was a renowned biographer and scholar who twice won the National Book Award in the United States.) ‘Was the marriage a success? On one level, yes, but there were no children,’ Wilson tut-tuts.

Wilson then chides Hazzard for ‘the dreariness of namedropping’ in her diaries, though these were private documents to record meetings, not intended for public viewing. In later life, Wilson cattily observes, Hazzard ‘disappears into her Missoni jackets and Ferragamo shoes’ (another ‘crime’,

apparently). The relevance of this to Hazzard’s art eludes me. Frances Wilson’s review does a disservice to both Shirley Hazzard and Brigitta Olubas.

Paul Morgan, South Yarra, Vic.

Frances Wilson replies:

Paul Morgan is ‘puzzled’ by my ‘sour tone’, and I am puzzled by his misreading of my review. I don’t ‘dislike’ Shirley Hazzard in the slightest; I think she was a remarkable novelist. Describing her as ‘the masterpiece of a vanished age of civility’ doesn’t in the least imply that Hazzard has nothing to say to modern readers, any more than to apply the same term to Henry James would suggest that he is now irrelevant. I can’t think how Morgan finds in that phrase the suggestion that Hazzard is an ‘ugly piece of furniture, regretfully inherited’.

Were Morgan to read Olubas’s judicious and groundbreaking biography, he would see that she does not make ‘a simple mistake’ about the title of Hazzard’s first published story in the New Yorker; it is Olubas, not Wilson, who reveals that the story was in fact ‘Woollahra Road’ rather than ‘Harold’, and Olubas who is interested in the process of Hazzard’s ‘self-mythologising’.

I don’t disapprove in the slightest of Hazzard’s marrying an older man who was also wealthy – why on earth would I? How can Morgan possibly hear a ‘tut-tut’ in the question – again, posed by Olubas – of whether the marriage, in which Hazzard frequently described herself as unhappy, was altogether a success?

As for the lists of famous names in her diaries and her designer wardrobe, Hazzard’s polished persona as a figurehead of literary high-life is fundamental to Brigitta Olubas’s study.

Exorcising the ghosts

Australia’s new, old foreign policy

by James Curran

Nearly fifty years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson decided to begin scaling down Washington’s disastrous war in Vietnam, the Australian Minister for the Air, Peter Howson, confided to his diary that ‘to my mind it’s the first step of the Americans moving out of Southeast Asia and … within a few years, there’ll be no white faces on the Asian mainland’.

Johnson’s decision, followed by Richard Nixon’s statement in July 1969 on the tiny Pacific island of Guam that the United States would never again get involved in a land war in Asia, seemed to spell American withdrawal from the region, or, as the then head of External Affairs in Canberra put it, from ‘West of Hawaii’.

It was geopolitical shorthand that sent shivers down the spine of officials, especially coming so soon after the British government’s decision to wind back its military presence in Asia, or what London referred to as ‘East of Suez’. One local newspaper likened Whitehall’s decision to the serving of a ‘Far East death warrant’. Taken together, it appeared that Canberra’s Cold War nirvana – having its ‘great and powerful friends’ engaged in the region to keep the threat of Asian communism as far away as possible – was coming to an end. Australia was on its own. It would have to fend for itself as never before.

As the record shows, it did.

When it was clear in the 1970s that neither Europe nor the United States offered Australia a sense of security, the country energetically embraced the countries and cultures of Asia in a new way. The process had its agonies – who can forget Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s warning in 1980 that Australia was destined to be the ‘poor white trash of Asia’ – but it also prompted a period of as yet unrivalled creative Australian diplomacy.

Yet even after more than a half century of engagement with Asia, the fear that Australia’s ‘white’ heritage continues to make it the odd one out in the region persists. This despite the end of ‘White Australia’, the adoption of multiculturalism as the national orthodoxy of the country’s self-definition, not to mention a range of initiatives – among them the creation of APEC, the Cambodia Peace Agreement, membership of the East Asia Summit, and countless Free Trade Agreements with regional countries – that have been so central to successive governments’ foreign policies.

But in late 2022, Foreign Minister Penny Wong lamented that over the previous decade of Coalition governments ‘we allowed old narratives to re-emerge that positioned Australia as the other’. Where from the late nineteenth century Asia had been the ‘other’ for Australia, its psychological nemesis, Wong now lamented that Australia had again been placed on the wrong side of this cultural equation.

Unpacking that one line is crucial to understanding the unfolding story of the Albanese government’s foreign policy. The older narrative to which Wong refers was revealed most powerfully in the surreal afternoon light bathing Scott Morrison’s trip to Cornwall in June 2021 to hold preliminary discussions on what would become the AUKUS agreement. Like Robert Menzies, Morrison sought warmth with great and powerful friends at a time of great uncertainty in the region. And like Menzies, he chose to stop in Asia only briefly along the way. Under the auspices of AUKUS, Australia will cooperate with Britain and the United States to build nuclear-powered submarines and cooperate on a whole range of other security-related initiatives.

Conceived by Morrison, the arrangement has nevertheless been backed – with as much, if not more, enthusiasm – by Prime

Minister Anthony Albanese and especially Defence Minister Richard Marles. Albanese even told the Guardian’s Katharine Murphy earlier this year that had Labor been in office at the time, he too would have initiated AUKUS. Labor leaders are wont to credit their own party with conceiving what later became ANZUS in the crucible of World War II: now Albanese is clearly at pains to convince voters he is every bit the co-author of AUKUS. A scion of Labor’s left who once decried the US war on Iraq now comes to render homage at the altar of the alliance.

The initial reaction to the announcement from some regional countries, especially Indonesia and Malaysia, was swift. Already piqued by the lack of consultation from Canberra, they expressed concern about AUKUS’s potential to feed a regional arms race and its implications for Australia’s obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation regime. For some in the region, it added more turbulence to already choppy strategic waters, and the deal seemed the return of an older story – that when a threat from the north disturbs Australia’s psychological equilibrium, its strategic impulse is to huddle in the collective bosom of London and Washington.

Since the federal election in May 2022, it has been a key ambition of Wong to counter this ‘older’ narrative in regional perceptions of where Australia stands. The foreign minister backs AUKUS – but worries about the perceived cultural opprobrium (the white man’s club reconvened) that comes with it. If former Whitlam Immigration Minister Al Grasby said in 1973 ‘give me a shovel’ to bury once and for all the White Australia policy, Wong is on a personal mission to explode the myth that somehow, Australia still doesn’t belong in Asia. Talking about Australian multiculturalism abroad, she said recently in an interview, ‘confounds negative narratives about us’. And the lodestar of her approach has been to consistently stress that Australia supports ASEAN centrality, and that it comes to listen to the region, not lecture it.

The problem, however, is that at the same time the government not only defends AUKUS but projects its importance in the rhetoric of ‘shared values’ with America and Britain. That doesn’t play well in Southeast Asia. Wong’s mission is to keep those tensions – between the dominance of AUKUS in Australia’s strategic imagination and the rhetoric of reassurance required for regional audiences – manageable.

Wong began this task in Fiji at the end of May 2022, a visit that took place only days after the election win and against the backdrop of a concerted Chinese attempt to secure a ten-nation

Pacific security agreement. She said Canberra would consistently proclaim to its neighbours and others ‘Australia’s full identity’. She explained that the 270 ancestries represented in the Australian population give Canberra ‘the capacity to reach into every corner of the world’. It is, she added, a ‘vast untapped power in modern

Australia’. Wong also declared the adoption of a ‘First Nations approach to foreign policy’, a move later defined as having both positive and defensive elements: positive in reaching out to a region ‘where traditional power structures and traditional owners are a very important part of cultures’, defensive so as to ‘remind people, when they dismiss us, of the fullness of who we are’.

Not since the Whitlam and Keating Labor governments has Canberra made so clear a connection between its Indigenous heritage, multicultural reality, and foreign policy posture. But it is not yet clear what the policy implications are of a ‘First Nations foreign policy’ – indeed, it is not clear at all that the term has been properly thought through.

Wong has been at pains to bring these two sides of Australian foreign and defence policy together, to blend the older US alliance with the new patchwork quilt of regional coalitions such as the Quad (with the US, Japan, and India) AUKUS and the Reciprocal Access Agreement with Tokyo. The attempt to do so was also on show late last year during a major speech in Washington.

When Wong discussed the Quad on that occasion, albeit to a sympathetic audience at the Carnegie Institute for International

Foreign Minister Penny Wong with Fijian Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka and the Fijiana Drua in Fiji, 2023 (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/Sarah Hodges via Wikimedia Commons)

A scion of Labor’s left who once decried the US war on Iraq now comes to render homage at the altar of the alliance

Peace, there was no whiff of containment on the foreign minister’s breath. Rather, her concern was to ensure the Quad works ‘alongside ASEAN and other regional architecture to advance our shared interests with the countries of Southeast Asia’.

And while the US alliance system remains central, for Wong Australia’s relationship with Washington and its regional engagement are mutually reinforcing. Burnishing her credentials in Southeast Asian eyes, Wong pressed the Americans to do more to reduce the risk of conflict with China and make economic engagement in the region a ‘core alliance priority’. Her remarks reflected the reality that America’s Asian economic footprint remains patchy. Its ‘Indo-Pacific Economic Framework’ is a start, but its denial of market access to Southeast Asian partners rankles. And there is continued disquiet over Washington’s absence – unlikely to be reversed anytime soon – from the region’s bigger multilateral trade arrangements such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP)

Conscious of Southeast Asian countries’ longstanding distaste for great power rivalry in the region, Wong stressed that Canberra is ‘meeting the region where it is’. The message is significant, since Southeast Asian capitals have consistently said they do not wish to become pawns in US–China strategic competition.

Wong’s strategy is necessarily complex. This new-old Australian foreign policy, which attempts to weave the US alliance with new regional coalitions and a deepening relationship with Japan, will face its own headwinds. Some Southeast Asian countries still raise more than one eyebrow over the Quad and AUKUS. And it will be AUKUS that dominates debates over Australian foreign and defence policy for the foreseeable future.

At the AUKUS announcement in San Diego, the politics for all three leaders was pitch-perfect, the occasion heavy in symbolism and high on the rhetoric of ‘brothers in arms’. But the questions will be whether the path Australia has chosen is credible and affordable. None of these leaders will ever have to be held accountable for what will likely be major slippages in delivery, let alone cost blowouts, over the longer term. But the Americans have gained from Australia what they have sought since the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951, namely for Canberra to share in the responsibility for the defence of Taiwan.

Not that ASEAN leaders will wake every morning to fret or fixate on Australia’s fraught debate over nuclear powered submarines: they have their own substantial areas of focus. These include the ongoing strife and instability in Myanmar and supporting Indonesia’s ambitions for an activist role in its chairing of ASEAN this year. But it may be, too, that Wong does not wish yet either to confront Marles in Cabinet or to argue against a policy – AUKUS – which is not only running strong but has firm bureaucratic backing. AUKUS is not yet causing Albanese embarrassment here or in Washington, but it has the potential to do so, especially should the Defence Department’s less than glittering record in procurement and production affect this project too. The government talks a big game in delivering on AUKUS as a ‘whole of nation’ effort, but the pitfalls ahead are many. And like its predecessor it has done little, if anything, to explain to the general public how it is all meant to work.

Never has so much been so meagrely explained by so few.

Wong’s effort to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism have also had their more curious manifestations. It is not clear why, for example, during a visit to London in January, the foreign minister believed it necessary to remind the British of their own colonial legacy in the Pacific, as if it continued to be an albatross around London’s strategic neck. It flew in the face of decades of decolonisation and the fact that Britain was genuinely multicultural well before Australia adopted the term as its definition of national community. Little wonder that this effort to score trifling points at Britain’s expense left its Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, himself of African background, somewhat bemused.

There is, then, a certain defensiveness emerging here not only from the optics of AUKUS but from Wong’s determination to make up for what she believes was a decade of drift in the presentation of Australia’s international image. Her concern is clearly that through policies enacted by Morrison, Canberra was starting to once more be identified with attitudes of the 1950s. It is not a burden Ms Wong wishes to see Australia shoulder now.

Because at the height of the Cold War it was indeed a load Australia carried. And it was an approach Indonesian President Sukarno saw straight through when he accused Canberra of acting, along with Britain and the United States, in a ‘neo-imperialist plot’ to encircle Indonesia at the time of Malaysia’s creation in 1963. This is where AUKUS could be problematic for Australia in so far as British participation is concerned. In September 1964, during that very crisis with Jakarta over its ‘Confrontation’ with Malaysia, Canberra had to insist that London not authorise the return passage of a British aircraft carrier, HMS Victorious, through the Sunda straits, lest its presence further inflame Indonesian ire.

Of course, the strategic equation has changed fundamentally since that era. If the ‘China threat’ narrative of the Cold War was shown to be somewhat artificial, it is the centrepiece now, and for good reason. China might have dropped its wolf warrior diplomacy for the moment, but its reactions to criticisms from abroad remain sharply ideological. Furthermore, its nationalism flexes worrying strategic muscles that continue to challenge the strategic equilibrium.

In her first substantial interview since taking up the foreign affairs portfolio, given to the Australian Financial Review last month, Wong hinted – though she did not say so explicitly – that her emphasis on multiculturalism and a First Nations heritage was aimed at countering Chinese whispers that Australia’s white British heritage makes it a regional oddity. These tussles over narrative suggest that, like it or not, we are now very much in a ‘new Cold War’. And Canberra might find it increasingly tricky to speak one language to Southeast Asia, and another to its American ally. g

James Curran is Professor of Modern History at Sydney University and the author, most recently, of Australia’s China Odyssey: From euphoria to fear (NewSouth, 2022).

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The soaring eagle

Revisiting the history of US foreign policy

Emma Shortis

The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak power, great power, superpower, hyperpower

by Michael Mandelbaum Oxford University Press

£26.99 hb, 512 pp

Michael Mandelbaum’s book The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy is intended as another instalment, the author argues (quoting Pieter Geyl), in history’s ‘argument without end’. Historians of US foreign policy have long been engaged in their own particular argument – mostly, a competition over naming rights. In the most prestigious instalments – and Mandelbaum’s contribution is certainly one of those – the argument is not so much over the substance of history, but over its categorisation.

Mandelbaum’s contribution, in this regard, is what he describes as a ‘new framework’ for the history of American foreign policy. Mandelbaum breaks that history into four ascending temporal categories: the first, when the United States was a ‘Weak Power’, covers 1765–1865, and includes the road to independence, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. The second, when the US is described as a ‘Great Power,’ covers 1865–1945, and includes World Wars I and II. The third, ‘Superpower’, covers 1945–90 and the duration of the Cold War. Finally, the United States’ reign as global ‘Hyperpower’ covers 1990–2015, and includes the rise of the so-called New World Order, the Gulf Wars, and the War on Terror.

These categories are indeed a ‘new framework’ for the history of the United States in the world. They are convincing and logical. They are also entirely uncontroversial and conventional. Perhaps more importantly, Mandelbaum’s new framework is representative of that ‘argument without end’ in US foreign policy history; a rush to name, to categorise, that is less scholarly than an attempt both to make abstract and to justify the violent, material consequences of the exercise of American power and the ideologies that drive it.

In the significant and meticulously detailed history the book offers, Mandelbaum traces decision making and power dynamics across nearly three centuries of American power. That accessible, readable, and compelling detail jars, though, with the abstraction of Mandelbaum’s theorising. Early on in the book, for example,

Mandelbaum sets out his case for analysing and explaining the rise of the United States from weak power to hyperpower. The United States achieved that status, he claims, ‘through the expansion of its power; of its wealth, which is the foundation of power’. In this passive construction, there is no mention of who built that wealth, or where it came from; no mention of the enslavement and dispossession on which that wealth, and thus power, rest. Mandelbaum describes the North American continent, multiple times, as ‘wilderness’ or ‘vast wilderness’, falling into long discredited descriptions of a place that, when white colonisers arrived from Europe, was no such thing.

The underlying argument, in so many histories of US foreign policy, is that while outcomes might occasionally be bad, intentions were always good. Too many of these histories offer a generosity of interpretation that should not be afforded to those with such immense power who have made such immense mistakes. In his detailed historical analysis of specific events, Mandelbaum is better at avoiding this trap than many of his colleagues and predecessors. He argues, correctly, that when the two grand approaches to foreign policy that have characterised US decision making – realism and idealism – have clashed, realism

has usually won out. Nevertheless, the underlying argument is there, just below the surface. Given that the cover design consists of a classic, clichéd American image – a bald eagle, wings outstretched, with the stars and stripes superimposed over its feathers – that shouldn’t come as a surprise to readers.

Just as the soaring eagle suggests, like many of his colleagues, Mandelbaum’s central thesis is that the United States is different and special – it is always, in the end, exceptional. The nation’s

An American shell casing factory c.1918 (akg images/Alamy)

foreign policy has been, from the start, ‘distinctly American’ in that it has had ‘ideological goals’, that it has used ‘economic instruments in pursuit of them and a democratic process for formulating and implementing decisions about it’. The democratic process is, Mandelbaum argues, ‘unusual’ in the world. The book, though, is focused entirely on the United States – there is no detailed explanation or comparative work to justify this rather tired analysis of America’s role in the world.

Sacred days, sacred cows

Debunking historical myths about the United States

Marilyn Lake

While it is entirely possible and even justifiable to make this argument, and to categorise the history of the United States in the world into these four periods, the theoretical basis for it all is uncomfortably teleological and deterministic.

As Mandelbaum sets out the justification for his analysis of American power, he explains international structures and the behaviour of states through the metaphor of the ‘jungle’. Mandelbaum describes an international arena as much like nature, red in tooth and claw – just as occurs in the jungle, states are locked into ‘fierce, deadly competition’. In one particularly off-putting passage, Mandelbaum notes that in the jungle (or is it when states deal with other powers?), ‘predatory mammals do fight others of the same species, for control of territory, access to females, and food’. The cavalier and – for this reader, at least – deeply offensive use of the phrase ‘access to females’ in a passage ostensibly describing the behaviour of powerful states and the human decision makers within them, points to a largely unexamined hyper-masculinist approach to understanding international relations.

Furthermore, this understanding and deployment of the ‘natural’ as a vehicle for explaining the relative power and behaviour of states is deeply unscientific. The simplistic jungle metaphor fails to engage with very different approaches to understanding the ‘natural’ world that see relationships as complex, reciprocal, or symbiotic. It also understands ‘nature’ and its component relationships as fixed and inevitable.

As we know all too well, that is far from the truth. ‘Nature’ is not fixed; systems can and do change rapidly. They are doing so now because of nation states’ behaviour, and one of those states and its foreign policies is more responsible for that change than most others. To take the metaphor further, the ‘predatory mammals’ Mandelbaum describes with such relish do not, generally speaking, consciously destroy the very environment upon which they depend. A less conventional approach to the history of international relations might have acknowledged that the jungle, and the states within it that apparently behave like animals, require a functioning biosphere to survive – even if they are hyperpowers. g

Emma Shortis’s first book, Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States, was published by Hardie Grant in 2021. She is a Lecturer in the Social and Global Studies Centre at RMIT University.

Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past edited by Kevin

Basic Books

US$32 hb, 391 pp

M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer

All nations are sustained by myth-making, but some myths are more problematic than others. Australia has long taken heart from the myth of Anzac, the story that in their ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli, in 1915, Australian men gave birth to the nation. Notably militarist in orientation, extolling the feats of men at war, extensive government investment has helped render our national creation myth sacrosanct. Thus, when Alan Tudge, a former Coalition minister for Education and Youth, contemplated suggested changes in the national history curriculum in 2021, he declared that the school curriculum must never present Anzac as a ‘contested idea’. Anzac Day was ‘the most sacred day in the Australian calendar’.

The importance of contesting historical myth is precisely the purpose of a new collection of essays about American history, edited by Princeton professors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. Avowedly political in intention, Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past brings together twenty essays on assorted ‘myths’ relating to a wide variety of subjects, including the American creation myth, the drafting of the Constitution (was Madison really so important or was Washington ‘the man’?), American exceptionalism ( a term invented in the 1920s), the nature of feminism (is it really anti-family?), and ‘the vanishing Indian’ (did indigenous peoples simply disappear or were they dispossessed and destroyed?).

There are also chapters on American socialism, the civil rights movement, the New Deal, immigration (‘they keep on coming’), Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause, voter fraud, and various other topics, but none relating to military history or Americans’ fighting prowess. The War of Independence is ignored in favour of the drafting of the Constitution while the Civil War is mentioned only in terms of its political legacies (‘Confederate Monuments’, ‘The Southern Strategy’). The Vietnam War is discussed, not in relation to its battles but apropos of alleged government betrayal of veterans and the rise of white power movements.

Avowedly engaged in politics, the authors take on ‘lies’, ‘legends’, and ‘myths’ (the terms seemingly used interchangeably), fictions and fables, and ‘ordinary bullshit’ perpetrated by Republican politicians, propagandists, right-wing commentators, libertarian think-tanks and fellow historians, to set the historical record straight. Disturbed by the ways in which historical inaccuracies have been invoked to justify present-day political argument,

The underlying argument, in so many histories of US foreign policy, is that intentions were always good

the writers emphasise the urgency of their task.

Compiled at a time of widespread misinformation, disinformation and a ‘war on truth’, when former President Donald Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen is apparently believed by a majority of Republicans, the timing of the book and its political context are key to its purpose. The ‘current crisis’, the editors write, ‘stands apart both for the degree of disinformation and for the deliberateness with which it has been spread’.

They identify two recent forces propelling the ‘crisis’. The first is the conservative media system, including cable news networks such as Fox News and websites such as Breitbart, augmented by social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Taken together, these venues have given far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans and enabled them to spread lies as well. The second change has been the transformation of the Republican party, its retreat from a ‘commitment to truth’.

As an example of right-wing ideologues rewriting history, the editors cite the example of the ‘Lost Cause’, the argument that Confederates, lovingly commemorated in monuments built in the early twentieth century, weren’t traitors engaged in an attack on the United States, but patriots defending a way of life. But the goal of ‘patriotic education’, the editors insist – in an argument that would outrage former minister Tudge – is ‘inherently at odds with history’. A ‘history that seeks to exalt a nation’s strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn’t history; it’s propaganda’.

Together, the essays in Myth America offer a critical account of American history, one that highlights the centrality of empire, racism, violence, and white supremacy. In ‘The United States Is an Empire’, Daniel Immerwahr begins with a report of a speech by George W. Bush in 1999 in which he stated, ‘America has never been an empire’, adding: ‘We may be the only great power in history that had the chance and refused.’ Like most other presidents, Bill Clinton agreed: ‘Americans never fought for empires, for territory, for dominance.’ One of the country’s most cherished myths is its anti-imperial character, notes Immerwahr, yet it has annexed territory throughout its history and ‘still has five overseas territories, more than five hundred tribal nations within its borders, hundreds of foreign bases and the world’s largest military’.

One national border, the US–Mexican border, looms larger in the American imagination than any other. ‘On the news,’ Geraldo Cadava writes in his chapter on ‘The Border’, ‘we are shown images of migrants piling into government vehicles heading for detention centers, wrapping themselves in Mylar blankets, peering through the slats of the border wall, awaiting their opportunity to cross.’ He criticises both the left and the right for perpetuating these images, if for different political ends. Conservatives focus on the threat posed by unrestricted immigration and dangerous foreigners (‘rapists’, ‘criminals’, ‘terrorists’). The left emphasises immigrant rights and American responsibility. Cadava offers a different view. It is a myth, he writes, that ‘the border is only a place of danger, dysfunction, and illegality’. Rather it is ‘even more so a place of creativity, community, cooperation and connection’. The myth of the dangerous border is potent, however, because it speaks to deep national anxieties arising from powerlessness and

disillusionment. Cadava’s is one of the more interesting chapters in Myth America in that it seeks to explain the process and power of mythical thinking and not just to correct the record.

‘Myths masquerading as reality do enormous damage,’ writes Carol Anderson, a Professor in African American Studies at Emory University and author of a study of voter suppression in the United States. Accusations of ‘voter fraud’, such as those made by Trump and his followers, might claim to be concerned with electoral integrity, but the long history of voter suppression in the United States, as Anderson shows, has aimed, often explicitly, to disenfranchise racial minorities and to preserve the ascendancy of white men, as was clear in late nineteenth-century Mississippi.

The myth of voter fraud continues today as an excuse to deny whole populations the right to vote.

The major aim of the editors of Myth America is to set the record straight, to call out political lies and to correct misinformation about the past. Their major achievement has been to bring together a collection of interesting essays that demonstrate the complexity and inherently contested nature of history. The authors are keen to ‘bring historical scholarship out of academic circles’ and ‘engage the public’, but historical complexity is not conducive to new political slogans, while politics necessarily thrives on simplistic binaries.

Whether historical scholarship is effective in negating the ‘lies and legends’ of the public domain, and diminishing their potency, is not clear. Certainly, some lies about the past would seem to be easily refuted, but perhaps empirical method is not enough to combat mythic power, when the myths in question speak to our deepest human anxieties, needs, and desires. g

Marilyn Lake is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transPacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).

The border fence in Arizona as seen from the American side, 2019 (Bob Kreisel/Alamy)

Nowhere to hide

The ambiguous eye of Janet Malcolm

Georgina Arnott

Still Pictures

by Janet Malcolm Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 170 pp

Janet Malcolm knew the difference between the remembered thing and the thing itself. Her writing life and 1984 masterpiece, In the Freud Archives, explored that crevice, asking: is what really matters how we experience life, not life itself?

This makes the photograph a curious thing: its captured details seem to prove memory. An immaculately groomed, smiling mother cradles her wriggling, blurry one-year-old, her gaze still with love. This photograph of Malcolm and her mother, which opens a chapter in Still Pictures, shows that her mother had an ‘exuberance and vivacity and warmth’. But it disguises the thing which undercut their lives. ‘Her mind was elsewhere. This is what I can’t get hold of.’

Concealment functioned as a survival strategy within this otherwise ‘happy’ family, Malcolm explains. She was five when they migrated to New York from Czechoslovakia in 1939, but only after the war was she told that she was Jewish.

Still Pictures is the last of thirteen books Malcolm wrote before her death in 2021 at the age of eighty-six. Twenty-six pieces –each stimulated by a photograph – follow her friend Ian Frazier’s Introduction, written in shock ten weeks after Malcolm’s death: ‘my sense of carrying on an interrupted conversation … remains so strong’. An Afterword from the author’s daughter Anne Malcolm sits in place of a final chapter, its wisdom and steady pace so like her mother’s, indeed like Malcolm’s own mother’s, it is clear that Malcolm’s death was no annulment of life, on or off the page.

The photographs come from Malcolm’s personal collection and feature family members, a teacher, a school friend, and a smiling middle-aged couple who animate the Czech Jewish sense of ‘American alienness’.

‘Lovesick’ opens with a blurry teenage group shot. Malcolm likens this to the least prepossessing of dreams, which, psychoanalysis tells us, reveal the most meaning, ‘if stared at long enough’. She stares in this chapter at Sigmund Freud himself, carried from this unremarkable image to the founder of psychoanalysis by the theme of ‘chronic longing’ and what Freud called ‘transference love’. Malcolm reads Freud closely – his language, slips, evasions – giving him credit for honesty (something he rarely gave others).

A photograph of Malcolm, middle-aged, cautious, confident, launches an account of the coaching she received for the second trial for libel occasioned by the publication of In the Freud Archives. Malcolm realised only after the first trial that the mode of presentation she had cultivated at the New Yorker – reticent, self-deprecating,

witty – conveyed to the court a woman who was ‘arrogant, truculent, and incompetent’. ‘Not many of us get second chances’: Malcolm’s subjects, including herself, do. It is a fascinating postscript to the libel case: the ‘gentle correction of my self-presentation … took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge’.

Malcolm, who began her career as a photojournalist, has much to offer on the subject of the photograph’s frame – after all, its epistemological cropping was the theme of her writing life. Malcolm was also a visual artist and an art critic. Her essays on photography in Diana & Nikon (1980) gave depth to experiments such as the avant-garde home snapshot moment, recalled in the chapter titled ‘A Work of Art’, which opens with a seemingly unposed photograph of a couple on a tennis court, their backs turned. Malcolm explains that, in an absurdist act, her second husband Gardner Bosford kept it on his desk, though he had no idea who the couple were. Once in Diana & Nikon, it became art. Here Malcolm uses the word ‘mischief’, and her account of the photograph’s unlikely prominence (reinscribed here) reads like a belly laugh.

A writer for The New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, Malcolm is often remembered for her critique of the kind of narrative non-fiction those publications helped pioneer. A 1989 two-part article titled ‘The Journalist and the Murderer’ contended that journalism was ‘morally indefensible’ because the truth was never simple, yet column inches and the readers’ desire forced it so. Her innovative biography The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1993), contemplated the genre’s ‘voyeurism and busybodyism’. In 2010, Malcolm said that autobiography was compromised by the desire to make oneself appear interesting. Reviewers of Still Pictures have described Malcolm’s decision to turn her ‘gimlet’ eye onto family members and herself as striking, inconsistent, possibly the compromise of an ageing mind. For me, Malcolm has found a way to make the biographical humble, in the best sense of that word, allowing nuance, uncertainty, and association, not conviction, to drive her telling of human lives. Generously, she guides the reader in this register.

In ‘The Apartment’, she writes about Botsford, an editor for The New Yorker, in a mere thousand words, a radical cropping, choosing to remember their adultery in a New York apartment. She recalls the crockery she bought for their lunches – a fashionable Italian style – and the fantasy they gestured towards. The narrative drama is clearly moving towards the collapse of their marriages, the couple’s emergence from the apartment, and perhaps, as the story goes, the eventual loss of that fantasy in a domestic American life of cups and saucers.

Instead, Malcolm’s camera turns to Botsford’s memory of another rendezvous (this time in Paris), with another attractive woman, with whom he conversed little in another apartment. The reader knows where this is going – the word ‘schmuck’ hovers – when Malcolm’s aperture adjusts, lets in more light. This Paris affair was the work of his mind alone; a balm for shocking memories created by war, including liberating a concentration camp. The reader does a second take: cue curtain call. Malcolm’s writing leaves nowhere to hide, yet her subjects – even at their worst – are held in her profoundly humanistic gaze, as still as a picture. g

Georgina Arnott is Assistant Editor of ABR.

Pinckney in Manhattan

On the couch with Elizabeth Hardwick

Peter Rose

Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan

by Darryl Pinckney riverrun

$69.99 hb, 419 pp

‘If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember.’

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Ifirst went to New York City in January 1975. It was wonderfully dilapidated. There was a blizzard of sorts, but I had the light jacket I had bought in Athens. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. The morning I arrived, there was a particularly gory pack murder on the subway. I read about it in the Times. So I avoided the subway and walked everywhere, through the sludge. We all knew what happened if you strayed into Central Park. Folks in Columbus, Ohio, where I had been staying with friends, had implored me not to visit New York. They couldn’t imagine why a nice young boy from somewhere called Melbourne – anarchically long hair and freakish wardrobe notwithstanding – wanted to visit that sinful city. (Still missing Nixon, they spoke of sin and sodomy.) I stayed in Midtown, in a grungy hotel soon to be demolished. The old black-and-white TV was on a constant loop, but I followed The Dick Cavett Show as best I could. The louvred door to my room cast terrifying shadows over my bed whenever anyone passed my room. Each night I dreamt that an ogre was on his way from Wall Street to stab me to death. In the morning I had breakfast for 99 cents – or, if I was hungry, $1.99. Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. I haunted the grand old bookshops that lined Fifth Avenue in those days. I visited the Metropolitan Museum for the warmth, but I didn’t know about the Frick. Velvet Underground wasn’t playing at the Metropolitan Opera, so I skipped that. During my stay in New York I didn’t speak to a soul, which suited me fine. It was the purpose of my visit.

It is unlikely that Darryl Pinckney – twenty-one then, still relatively new to Manhattan himself, an outsider because of his race and sexuality – ever went for more than fifteen minutes without conversing with someone of consequence, whether literary, artistic, theatrical, bohemian (he moved in all these spheres). Often it was Elizabeth Hardwick, as he relates in this tender, quirky memoir of their unlikely friendship.

It began in 1973 when Pinckney, a student at Columbia raised in Indiana, joined Hardwick’s creative writing course at Barnard College. During his interview he had confided that his roommate had threatened to kidnap Harriet, Hardwick’s daughter with Robert Lowell, if she didn’t enrol him. Somehow it worked.

Pinckney, though gauche, tried to be formal at first. ‘Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance

made the tough things she said even funnier.’ He ventured into ‘an education of sympathies’ – first as her student, then as a visitor to her apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street, dogsbody, reader of drafts, emptier of the dishwasher, companion, secretary, fact-checker, drinking partner, walker, fellow gossip – even shrink in a way.

Pinckney, a willing pupil, had much to learn. Shocked by what he had not read (he had no idea Melville wrote poetry), Hardwick plied him with books. ‘School and refuge was West Sixty-Seventh Street,’ Pinckney recalls. Nothing if not candid and sometimes tactless herself, Hardwick told him that he was the worst poet she had ever read and that on no account should he write more poems.

Hardwick, then approaching sixty, expected Pinckney to know more than he did. ‘She didn’t let you say just anything, even if you were tipsy.’ He stored up all her aphorisms. There were only two reasons to write – ‘desperation or revenge’. Some of the advice is sage, motherly: ‘Never talk about someone you know very well to someone you know less well.’

Like many New Yorkers, Pinckney is conscious of status, titles. Robert Silvers (co-founder of The New York Review of Books, principal publisher of Hardwick’s essays) has many names – ‘Bob’, ‘Robert’, ‘Mr Silvers’ – but Barbara Epstein (the other founder) is always ‘Barbara’, formidably so. Young Pinckney is intimidated by her; she may have doubted his motives or disapproved of his friendship with Hardwick, who is mainly ‘Elizabeth’, sometimes ‘Mrs Lowell’, seldom ‘Lizzie’. When he remarks how well she looks, Epstein says: ‘I just have Jewish hair.’ It takes years before she relents, but then her affection for him – and reliance on him –are as deep as Hardwick’s.

Pinckney seems at times very young. On the eleventh anniversary of Plath’s death, he hosts a Suicide Party. The narrative throughout is low-key, note-like, confidential but desultory (‘Is this when we talked about Berryman and Mr. Bones?’). Part 6 opens in medias res: ‘She asked me to get her a copy of Lolita.’ Apropos of nothing, we are told that Maria Callas died the day of Robert Lowell’s funeral. It is interesting for a while, then it is not.

The style is idiosyncratic, the syntax sly and venturesome. There are no quote marks, just dashes – a concession or confession of sorts. Pinckney would have drawn on the early journals (those precious tête-à-têtes), but they were burnt in one of several apartment fires he seems to have haphazardly caused.

It is a distinctly New York kind of book. Pinckney admits to being seduced by the city at an early age. When he passes the Dakota, he must remind us that it was the setting for Rosemary’s Baby. When the Lowells take Pinckney to a Fassbinder film they bump into the Alfred Kazins in the lobby. ‘We walked slowly.’ (Hemingway must have crashed the party.) His first funeral is that of James Baldwin, where he finds Epstein in conversation with Claire Bloom and Philip Roth.

Everyone seems permanently hungover. It is always cocktail time – ‘the moment for which all of New York lies, exercises, hurries, dresses’, as Hardwick wrote in Sleepless Nights. Later, Pinckney alludes to his own alcoholism, his secret drug life (NYRB paid for his rehab). From a recent essay of his, we know that he no longer drinks or walks on the wild side. He lives in England with his long-time partner, the poet James Fenton, who

chips in now and then with editorial advice and references to the Homintern (‘The Love That Won’t Shut Up’, as Epstein dubs it). Everyone in this book has a Wikipedia entry.

(Reference to the toll of AIDS casualties is frequent but always succinct, parenthesised, too grave for biography.)

When Pinckney meets Hardwick, she is on her own again, Robert Lowell having left her for Caroline Blackwood, a Guinness heiress and former wife of Lucian Freud. Lowell had just published, with a kind of manic audacity, The Dolphin (1973), a sonnet sequence based on the letters Hardwick wrote him during this wrenching split. Hardwick, though incredulous, seems to have been unusually forgiving. She even tolerated the mercurial Blackwood, whom Lowell described as his ‘Aphrodite and ruin’.

The stuff on Lowell – the early years, the separation, the rapprochement of sorts – is fascinating. Gradually, chastened, Lowell returns to Hardwick, even moves in with her. Pinckney observes them closely, socialises with them. Hardwick is cleareyed, inured to the poet’s tempests. When Harriet, a great friend of Pinckney’s, defends her father, her mother (like a wayward parent in What Maisie Knew) says: ‘Well, not mad, honey. I didn’t mean he was … Yes I did. Papa’s mad.’

Then Lowell dies of course, just sixty – a heart attack in a cab on his way back to Hardwick. He is clutching Freud’s portrait of Blackwood, so tightly that hospital staff have to sever his fingers to release the painting.

On his death in 1977, Lowell was the commanding figure in American poetry. Only Elizabeth Bishop came close. Interestingly, Hardwick’s profile soars now as her husband’s recedes. (Cathy Curtis published a major biography in 2021 – A Splendid Intelligence.) Michael Hofmann (Lowell’s most eloquent devotee) remarked on this in his review of The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (ABR, September 2022). Still, Lowell – hardly read, perhaps untaught – continues to fascinate in light of Saskia Hamilton’s edition of The Dolphin Letters: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and their circle (2019), which records his reckless use of Hardwick’s letters.

Lowell aside, the first half of Come Back in September is shadowed by the novel that would become Sleepless Nights, that great book written during the collapse of her marriage and in the wake of his death – ‘an alchemical tour de force’, as Geoffrey O’Brien describes it in the welcome new NYR Books reissue. Hardwick herself described this unconventional novel as ‘a shortwave autobiography’. When it appeared in 1979, the reception was encomiastic (‘Warren Beatty told Bob Silvers that he loved Sleepless Nights’), but Hardwick was hurt and distressed when she learned that her sole surviving sister disapproved of her depiction of their family. Despite plans, it would be her last novel.

The portrait of Hardwick is intriguing throughout, and Pinckney is never less than captivated, even when he takes himself off to Germany, to avoid temptation. We learn that Hardwick was badly burnt as a child. The recovery took six months, the scars longer to fade. Pinckney writes: ‘[S]he’d felt discoloured, a freak, all her life. Self-consciousness made her physically shy.’ We follow Hardwick’s daily life, her scatty routines. She gains a new hairdresser (‘no longer Kenneth’s’) and her curls are much extolled. She tries to diet and to moderate her drinking. Like one of Woody Allen’s heroines, she dislikes nature, deeming it ‘too

vast’. She is too ‘urbanised’ to fathom the Grand Canyon. Her dislike of the English is intensified by Lowell’s affair, which was the talk of London long before she heard about it. She confides in Pinckney about her own liaisons in the 1940s with ‘two extremely handsome black men’; tells him about her abortion in Harlem, with a black doctor who smoked during the procedure – a detail she used in her Billie Holiday story.

Hardwick is a great phrasemaker. She likens Holiday’s late recordings to ‘sandpaper, or a bruise’. She can be very funny. ‘The purpose of writing classes,’ she tells Pinckney, ‘is to employ writers.’ Later: ‘I can imagine being the queen of England but I can’t imagine being Lillian Hellman.’ During a performance of La Cage aux Folles, she exclaims, ‘Oh, I have a blouse like that. It’s Italian’ – and the audience laughs. It’s such an intensely theatrical city. When a waiter calls her an actress, Hardwick says: ‘Yes, I have a supporting role in the continuing farce of my life.’

The gossip is constant. When the Lowells (pre-Blackwood) visit the Eliots, Valerie says: ‘Now, Elizabeth, would you like to see our bed?’ Hardwick recalls that everything in Hannah Arendt’s Riverside Drive apartment was beige, including the food. George Steiner, at a dinner, is outraged because Charles Rosen – another lion of NYRB – fails to acknowledge his recent essay on Walter Benjamin. When Steiner upbraids him, Rosen says he hadn’t mentioned the essay because it was terrible. Beauvoir attends a dinner in New York in 1964, looks down her nose at the Manhattan wits, and suddenly declares, ‘I want to see Harlem.’

Then there is Gore Vidal. When someone asks him if the first person he slept with was a man or a woman, he replies: ‘I thought at the time it would be rude to ask.’

Most remarkable about Hardwick, apart from her instinctive discernment, is her ear, the trademark epithets. Michael Hofmann has spoken of her natural eloquence and ‘well-aired vocabulary’: ‘these are not dictionary words … Each one is complex, fought over, delicately assertive. Wine words, not lager or lemonade words.’ Open any page at random and you will note examples of her individual style. Who else would risk a gem of a sentence like this: ‘Little called to mind the pitiful sweetness of a young girl’ (from Sleepless Nights)? If they did, rest assured that some righteous editor would rearrange it.

Apropos of editors, Hardwick had the best, as she well knew. The sections on NYRB are choice. From the beginning, Pinckney is entranced by everything about the paper. ‘The Review’s tables of contents were glamorous: they listed writers I’d seen on The Dick Cavett Show.’ He meets the editors, works in the mailroom. Robert Silvers, prompted by Hardwick, sends him a review copy with a note ‘asking if I’d maybe see what could be done’. When he files his article Silvers sends him a three-page letter full of changes. But Silvers, though famously bad-tempered, never abuses Pinckney, such is his reverence for Hardwick.

The forty-three-year partnership of Silvers and Epstein (who launched NYRB because of a strike at the Times) is recalled in fascinating detail. They scheme, they bicker, they conceal proofs to delay publication. ‘They were like a married couple, only worse,’ Pinckney writes. He notes that when the editors leave the office for the same party they never share a taxi. ‘It was like a contest: who arrived at the party later than the other.’ And yet, remarkably, the pact endured: they never published an article without full

agreement from both of them.

Hardwick is typically dry about literary journalism. There is a classic quip about publishing: ‘The only joy in these things is thinking how miserable you’d be if you weren’t doing them.’ She estimates that NYRB pays her about two cents an hour. Still, despite the squabbles, the jealousies, the jockeying, there is real jeu d’esprit. When Hardwick embarks on her mighty essay ‘Bartleby in Manhattan’, Epstein encourages her: ‘Give it a whirl, girl’.

Susan Sontag pops up now and then, ever self-conscious. She tells Hardwick that some mornings she is unsure whether she is smart enough to write. Early on, Sontag craves the older woman’s approval with what Pinckney calls ‘a needy, insecure, throbbing hope’. Sontag is ‘chagrined’ when they all watch the Oscars, not wanting to ‘smudge her record on “never having looked at TV”’. Later, grander, she moves on, won’t return calls, and it is Hardwick’s turn to feel slighted. Despite everything she owes him, Sontag wavers about Robert Silvers. She agrees to write something for his sixtieth birthday but ‘couldn’t print two-thirds of what she thinks of him’. Sheepishly, she admits to Pinckney: ‘I guess I’m too virtuous.’

In Sleepless Nights, Hardwick wrote: ‘I have always, all my life, been looking for help from a man. It has come many times and many more it has not.’ Help, in a way – companionship, encouragement, love – came in the end (improbable though it seemed to some) from a chatty, disorganised black undergraduate and hedonist. This created some confusion. The sight of them together –this grande dame off to the ballet with a black guy in his twenties –

led to gossip, a certain prurience. Never, though, do Pinckney and Hardwick seem to have been confused about what they had.

Race, inevitably, pervades the book. Pinckney has been writing now for decades about the lividity of race in America, while also helping to retrieve key figures in African American literature. Hardwick, who grew up in Kentucky, could be tactless; there are some spectacular lapses, inadvertent or not. Pinckney listens, takes notes, but is forbearing. He sees through or beyond the South. In his essay on James Baldwin in the volume Busted in New York and Other Essays (2019), he recalls Baldwin’s famous words to the astonished Cambridge Union Society in 1965: ‘What has happened to white Southerners is much worse than what has happened to Negroes there.’

In the end, we are left with an illuminating portrait of the most diagnostically acute critic since Virginia Woolf. Michael Hofmann, in his admiring review of Uncollected Essays, writes: ‘It’s as though no one thought to tell Hardwick that being literary was a no-no. Or they did, and she told them where to get off.’ In her own essay on ‘Grub Street, New York’, published in the first issue of NYRB, Hardwick proclaimed: ‘The great difficulty is making a point, making a difference – with words.’ How ringingly and undeterrably she did so from her red sofa on West Sixty-Seventh Street, vodka to hand, Darryl Pinckney by her side. g

Decolonising Animals

Edited by Rick De Vos

Peter Rose’s books include a memoir, Rose Boys (Text Classics, 2001).

Darryl Pinckney in New York (courtesy of Dominique Nabokov)

Death in secrecy

You Made Me This Way

by Shannon Molloy Fourth Estate $34.99 pb, 344 pp

Shannon Molloy’s 2020 memoir, Fourteen, recounted a childhood and adolescence of grisly homophobic violence.Yet many readers of that book – a bestseller, adapted for the stage and optioned for a film production – may find You Made Me This Way noteworthy in part because it reveals what Fourteen left out: the sexual abuse Molloy suffered, beginning at age five, at the hands of an older boy. This omission underscores one of the book’s central theses, that on average male victims of child sexual abuse find it harder than female victims to disclose their experiences. A conditioned reticence with grave implications – ‘[t]here is death in secrecy’. Molloy’s book, a hybrid of autobiography and journalism, takes socially important steps in assessing – and humanising – these implications.

The sociologist Arthur Frank uses the term ‘restitution story’ to describe the dominant Western model for writing about illness, invested in ‘restoring the sick person to the status quo ante’. You Made Me This Way reads, at one level, as such a story. ‘Who can I blame,’ Molloy asks, ‘for being the way I am?’ Elsewhere, referring to male survivors in general: ‘We are this way for a reason. If I know what that reason is, can I somehow figure out a way to heal?’ And again: ‘there’s a new drive to try to fix myself’. Structurally, Molloy frames the book’s interviews with other survivors, its array of evidence affirming the adverse impacts of child sexual abuse in adulthood, and its consultations with experts in several fields as an attempt to alleviate his own psychological suffering. What makes this structure so powerful, and Molloy’s testimony so affecting, is how it reveals the core weakness of the restitution story, and the danger of cleaving to it: an urge to simplify and render static what is, particularly in chronic pain, complex and dynamic.

You Made Me This Way examines men’s experiences after child sexual abuse as distinct from women’s experiences, and the related question of why men are ‘less likely to ask for help’. Molloy’s findings are unsurprising and embedded in broader issues with masculinity. In one interview, for example, the psychiatrist Ian Hickie notes that ‘women share more of their emotional lives with other people – including the sharing of trauma’. Hickie also points to a decline in the social groups – sports clubs, churches, unions – to which men belong. Another expert, Carol Ronkin, makes the upsetting observation that for some victims whom a male perpetrator abused, the possibility of appearing homosexual can forestall disclosure. Above all, for Molloy, it is shame that silences men, a ‘relentless demon that burrows itself within the deepest

recesses of their psyche and can never really be exorcised’. The book’s strength is to evoke these forces of concealment through the testimonies of six men, as well as the partner of a victim who ended his life. Combining journalistic interviews with dramatic retellings of abuse and its aftermath, Molloy brings the reader into intimate contact with such trauma as men live it: in confusion; in shame; in self-blame – ‘the utterly toxic notion that we played some part’. Abuse survivors and those close to them will likely know this cocktail. Some scenes may test the reader’s capacity ‘to no longer look away’. Yet by telling such stories, Molloy helps to redress another problem he identifies: the under-representation of male experiences in the social discourse around child sexual abuse. The poet Louise Glück puts it succinctly: ‘where the gaze is held, voice, or response, begins’.

Molloy’s book is also an indictment of the lack of support – medical, social, judicial – for survivors: ‘only a little above bugger-all is done to help men who were sexually abused as children’. Molloy takes issue, for example, with the outsized role that volunteer-run organisations play in offering men safe spaces to disclose abuse and seek support. Particularly scathing is his attack on the cross-examination techniques to which defence barristers are permitted to subject victims. Knowing what we know about memory, is the ability to recall under pressure precise details of horrific childhood events without inconsistencies – such as, say, the location of a wall – a fair test of truth? After reading the testimonies of men whom the futile attempt to bring their abuser to justice retraumatised, it is difficult to argue with Molloy’s demand to make courtrooms ‘more physically safe spaces, examine every single interaction a survivor has with them, and redesign them to suit’. It is difficult, also, to argue with Molloy’s assessment of the nation’s mental health system: ‘How, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world … are people who need urgent help expected to simply … wait? And then pay a small fortune for it?’ Given the success of Fourteen, Molloy commands the sort of public profile that could catalyse change.

The book ends, as it must, on a redemptive note: ‘hope reminds us that we have the capacity to cope with trauma’. While this is not masterly prose – Molloy’s gift as a writer is his voice more than his style – the turn towards recovery stresses its partiality, its nonlinearity, its necessary subversion of the restitution narrative. ‘Lately,’ the author admits, ‘I also care less about being 100% fixed.’ Given Molloy’s anguished desire to heal throughout much of You Made Me This Way, this seems a profound shift. It may be the clearest statement of self-compassion in a book that catalogues self-hatred. It calls to mind the philosopher Susan J. Brison’s assertion, apropos of her own horrific assault, that ‘if recovery means being able to incorporate this awful knowledge into my life and carry on, then yes, I’m recovered’. Brison goes on to suggest, in a strange phrase, that ‘maybe recovery is reestablishing the illusory sense of the permanence of hope’. Perhaps what Brison means is that those who have known hopelessness might hope again in view of its impermanence – that is, hope not as a given, but as a hard-won habit of mind. The hope that Molloy proffers here feels of that courageous sort. g

Anders Villani is the author of Aril Wire (Five Islands Press, 2018) and Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022).

Shannon Molloy’s new memoir

Anders Villani

A press with purpose

The MUP story

Frank Bongiorno

MUP: A centenary history

by Stuart Kells Miegunyah Press

$60 hb, 543 pp

Publishers rarely become big news in Australia, university presses even less often. It was notable therefore that the departure in early 2019 of Melbourne University Publishing’s CEO, Louise Adler, and some members of the MUP board, became a matter on which so many of the nation’s political and cultural élite felt they needed to have an opinion. A strong coterie came out in her defence. This had much to do with Adler herself, who had courted their attention, published their books, and made MUP a story in its own right.

Adler also attracted opponents of her supposed turn to the commercial and popular. The critics saw seven-figure university subsidies were going in one end, with five and occasionally sixfigure advances heading out the other, often on titles that they believed fell short in terms of either intellectual or commercial value. That said, Adler – on many criteria – had made a success of her role in the difficult times following the Global Financial Crisis. Kells, though not complimentary about Adler’s financial performance, remains broadly sympathetic. She had some triumphs in the early years, such as The Latham Diaries (2005), and several titles generated considerable media attention. MUP’s financial position also improved after some cost-cutting measures following a 2012 review. For all the criticism that suggested otherwise, Adler went on publishing work by academics.

The ‘walk-out’ – as Stuart Kells calls it in the title of a chapter in his centenary history of MUP – became an occasion for mutual insult, especially between journalists and academics. A few politicians-turned-authors – mainly unhampered by any understanding of academic publishing – also weighed in. The journalists and politicians did not hold back in alleging that prominent in the shadows were envious, resentful, out-of-touch inhabitants of the ivory tower. In academic circles, the phrase ‘airport trash’ was thrown around, alongside references to books by or about underworld identities, socialites, celebrities, politicians, and even the occasional politician’s spouse.

Kells shows that the debate at MUP over a university press’s purpose was not new. Academic publishing is ‘part of the wider publishing world, but also distinct from it’. The Press began in response to the need to provide the university’s students with affordable textbooks. It operated bookshops and a campus post office, hired out academic gowns, and eventually ran its own printery. It was as much general store as publisher, even while its founders had in view the great English university presses. And the problem

of how to make academic publishing pay was there from the beginning.

MUP developed a varied and impressive list, starting in 1922, with History of the White Australia Policy to 1920 by Myra Willard, a University of Sydney graduate – a reminder that MUP has never been simply the ‘in-house publisher’ for its own academics. Being a nerd even back then, I first read Willard’s book – a later edition – while at school. I recall my doctoral supervisor, F.B. Smith, later showing me his first edition; it had John Monash’s signature inside. In such ways did MUP books find an audience beyond academic specialists.

Kells tells the MUP story through its managers (later called directors or CEOs), employees, authors, list, and relationship with the university and the book trade. He is a prolific and admired scholar of the book world. A historian with more general expertise might have paid less attention to MUP’s place in the wider industry, and to the book as the work of many hands and evolving technologies. It can be a thing of genuine beauty, utilitarian plainness, or hideous ugliness. (MUP: A centenary history is, as it happens, a notably handsome volume, published under the prestigious Miegunyah imprint.)

Kells is less successful in doing the admittedly difficult job of tracing the reception, significance, and impact of key MUP books, especially from the 1950s to 1990s. His heavy reliance on the Canberra Times for that period may well be a result of the title’s online availability at a time when authors were unable to visit libraries in the pandemic. There is the occasional inflated claim about a book’s impact. No evidence is presented for the unlikely proposition that the Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea hastened that territory’s independence. Kells also chose not to speak to Adler, a decision she has publicly criticised, while interviewing one of her predecessors, Brian Wilder, and the present CEO, Nathan Hollier. But the book succeeds because Kells grasps detail, writes elegantly, and presents the various sides of arguments and controversies with impartiality, although not without venturing informed opinion.

There have been plenty of controversies and arguments. Not everyone at Melbourne University believed that establishing a Press was a good idea. The Press was damaged by questionable financial dealings of its first manager, Stanley Addison, and his brother, who managed the campus bookroom. Addison would be pushed out in favour of Frank Wilmot, a fine poet with long involvement in publishing ventures and book retailing. Wilmot died suddenly in 1942 and was followed by the academic historian Gwyn James. He initiated a couple of decades of expansion that would eventually prove excessive and ruinous.

James’s departure brought on Peter Ryan in 1962. A war hero and accomplished memoirist, Ryan helped retrieve the Press’s finances and developed a strong list. Famously, he published Manning Clark’s six-volume A History of Australia, although it was James who initiated the relationship. Infamously, Ryan produced a brutal take-down of Clark in Quadrant, after the historian’s death. That betrayal was a rehearsal for Ryan’s late career as a right-wing columnist in which enviable literary skill was combined with unenviable nastiness.

Kells is kind to Ryan and over-reliant on Ryan’s account of himself. He could have made more use of Doug Munro’s recent

forensic account of the Clark–Ryan relationship: History Wars (2021). Ryan’s successor, Wilder, was surely restrained in calling Ryan merely ‘eccentric’: the man kept a nude painting of his mistress on the office wall and bundled up and returned his retirement gifts on discovering that the university had overlooked his anointed successor in Wilder’s favour. (The latter, who had earlier published Colleen McCulloch’s The Thorn Birds, also knew a thing or two about the book game.)

Behind the MUP’s visible, public face – until Adler, a male one – there were often women editors who made it work. The most influential and important of them, Barbara Ramsden, was overlooked for the role of leading MUP. Adler was the first woman to be appointed, and some detected sexism lying behind the grumbling about her. That may well have been true, but it also became a way of deflecting valid criticism.

Despite the warnings of Adler’s supporters that it was returning to the academic cloister from which she had rescued it, MUP has flourished under Hollier. It has continued to publish books that grapple with big questions, arouse public debate,

and attract readers beyond the academy.

That was predictable back in 2019 for anyone who did not have skin in the game, and it is a story of continuity from the 1920s. Even those who have only a vague familiarity with what the university said it wanted, or with Hollier’s achievement at Monash University Publishing across town, knew both that he was a strong contender for the role and was likely to do it well. Kells points to the echo of Wilmot, which is astute – both men democratic socialists with a strong commitment to national literature and a deep immersion in the world of books. Each, moreover, was appointed from outside Melbourne’s social, political, and cultural élite, although in contrast with Wilmot, Hollier has serious academic credentials, including a PhD.

It has been a good start to MUP’s second century. g

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His first book The People’s Party: Victorian Labor and the radical tradition 1875–1914 was published by MUP under the late Brian Wilder.

Déjà Rêvé

This is not your life said the sushi train, but this is what happened, illusion and voyaging, all of it episodic-like, muted, a dantological trajectory, advancing as a nebula of mental life. Your guide appearing as a figure from a pack of dreams, a guy who looked like Brecht, and who only ever does what he wants, munching a cigar, telling the clouds how to process. But he was gentle, worried about you.

because you were adrift. So he led you down through your story, your souvenir, its sandy tracks and banks of everlastings, its barren ledges of intention past the muttering of screened crowds. You missed the entrance, distracted as usual, that eternal sense of hiding things from yourself. He said just follow me, don’t take any notice of that witchery of sound. There are endless meanings in this geography, lives streaked with occasions and things they didn’t invite.

Anyway everyone has sundowner issues. Or a brow ache, or memories that are an obstruction. It’s an armselig path this kind of travel,

but look at those bright red kangaroo paws, think about what you might be able to offer. The limit of your experience isn’t a limit, it’s mutable, happily for you this is just a juncture. An induced waypoint, which is not to say you’ll forget. For me, I’m not sure. But get to know the intimacy of the alphabet, I think of it

as microdosing knowledge, googling corrections. And look around, there’s a lot of value in distortions and damage, they can go with you. I can help you with form, and with the visualisation bit.

I’ll see you in the marshy reed beds when you’re free, or freer, on your way out. I’ve got an Airstream near there where I hang out the rest of the time.

Philip Mead

Philip Mead’s most recent collection is Zanzibar Light (Vagabond Press, 2018).

Conceptual applecarts

A hefty examination of literary criticism

Paul Giles

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory

edited by John Frow Oxford University Press

£515 hb, four volumes, 3,140 pp

Coming in at 3,140 pages spread over four chunky volumes and featuring essays by 181 contributors, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory is in every sense a weighty articulation of the state of literary criticism in the early twentyfirst century. In their famous Encyclopédie (1751–66), Diderot and d’Alembert promulgated the virtues of consolidating new knowledge in the public domain,rather than leaving the intellectuals who were responsible for the development of such expertise isolated in their academic cloisters. Looking back self-consciously to this distinguished predecessor, John Frow, in his Introduction, acknowledges a tension between the encyclopedist’s instinct to reproduce conventional categories, instead of risking the introduction of new research that might upset conceptual applecarts, and the desire of ambitious editors to frame these topics in a progressive rather than ossified manner. Hence Frow cites his instructions to contributors as inviting authors ‘to make their own arguments about the topic rather than (just) describing existing treatments of it’, adding: ‘In this way many of our articles may diverge from what readers would expect to see out of a traditional encyclopedia entry.’

For the most part, this strategy is spectacularly successful. The range of topics covered here is extraordinary – from ‘Lyric Poetry and Poetics’ to ‘Hypertext Theory’, from ‘Chinese Literary Theory’ to ‘Modern Manuscripts’ – and the standard of these individual contributions is very high indeed. Each entry judiciously positions itself in relation to existing and emerging work in the field, and this Encyclopedia is likely to be of more interest to scholars and general readers than most of the volumes in (for example) Cambridge University Press’s ‘Cambridge Companions’ series, whose business model involves trading on the authority of established scholars to rapidly synthesise current scholarship for the benefit of hard-pressed undergraduates.

Frow’s own piece on authorship, for example, fills a dense twenty-three pages, with a full bibliography of further reading. He also makes the point in his Introduction that each of these essays was subject to external review as well as approval by the editors, thereby enhancing the quality control associated with a rigorous peer review process. The wide range of distinguished contributors here is particularly impressive, and strikingly unusual for a collection of this kind. Frow explains how this is intended to be ‘a dynamic project … [and] its online version will continue to expand and to be revised’, with these volumes on literary theory being ‘a component of a much larger project,

the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature’, coordinated by Paula Rabinowitz at the University of Minnesota. It is clear that Frow and his editorial team have taken pains to avoid creating a desiccated resource destined to collect dust on library shelves, and that they have deliberately built into this project a capacity to change and evolve over time.

One signal advantage of this Encyclopedia is to highlight the general ubiquity of literary theory as an intellectual phenomenon. In an era when the academic study of literature is frequently regarded as an antiquarian pursuit and when there has been more pedagogical emphasis on writing as a mode of personal expression, Frow stakes out a contrary position: ‘Rather than assuming that theory is something of interest only to people who work professionally with ideas, we could start with an understanding that any engagement with texts, however simple or casual, is informed by theoretical presuppositions.’ The range of material encompassed here offers ample testimony to the ways in which texts of all kinds are shaped by social and political networks as well as philosophical and psychological formations. If there is one takeaway from these four volumes, it is that literary theory reaches into every part of the known world of representation and communication, from song to laughter to pornography, each of which is granted its own entry.

It is also worth remarking on the specifically Australian contribution to this more expansive understanding of literary theory. Frow himself – an emeritus professor at the University of Sydney, who has also worked in the United States and Scotland – and two of his four associate editors (Mark Byron and Sean Pryor) are based at universities in Australia, along with twentyfour of the other contributors. As a point of comparison, this total makes for near parity with the United Kingdom, which has twentyseven, and it suggests significant Australian involvement in this global scholarly enterprise. Historically, one of the enduring contributions of Australian academics to literary theory has been to broaden out the subject’s intellectual base, to intertwine it in creative ways with wider discursive currents such as feminism, postcolonialism, and media studies. This model of interdisciplinary hybridity goes back to epochal figures such as Germaine Greer, who studied English at the University of Melbourne in the late 1950s before undertaking a PhD on Shakespeare at Cambridge, and these volumes help to institutionalise that venerable tradition. Frow also remarks in his Introduction on how, in recent times, ‘literary studies has come to be marked by a structural reaction against the dominance of the US academy’. Though of course there are many distinguished American contributions to this work, its underlying trajectory, sitting on a border between literary and cultural studies, exemplifies this general reaction, with the principled heterogeneity being more Australian than American in its orientation.

There are, of course, various anomalies and curiosities embedded within this project, some relating to editorial choices, others to quirks in the publishing process. There is relatively little, for example, on theories of national literature and how these have been advanced by a range of distinguished critics, from Ian Watt to F.O. Matthiessen. There is, for instance, a section on ‘Indigenous Studies: Australia’, but nothing on Australian Literature as a contested theoretical construction in itself. Nor is there much on historicism in any of its guises: the third section, on Meth-

odologies, contains an essays on ‘Historical Poetics’ and another on ‘Historicities’, but there is little engagement with New Historicism, which under the influence of Stephen Greenblatt and others has become one of the most influential critical methods over the past forty years. The whole question of literary periods and periodisation, which has also received much critical attention in recent times, is also relatively neglected, implying the preferred editorial distance from historicisation per se.

It also seems an odd choice on OUP’s part not to divide these four volumes by the Encyclopedia’s four central thematic sections: Formal Concepts, Identities, Methodologies, and Institutions. This does allow for a uniform set of (rather dull) covers and physical objects of approximately equal heft (around 800 pages each); but it also makes individual articles more difficult to track down, since each volume looks physically the same and bears no relation to any individual subject. For example, the fourth section, ‘Institutions’, begins a third of the way through the fourth and final volume. Perhaps this is indicative of an assumption on the publisher’s part that the digital rather than physical version of this project would be more likely to find its way into libraries, and thus it was not worth paying too much attention to the hardback version. However, a more attractive option might have been to give this fourth volume the subtitle ‘Institutions’ and to have reorganised the others accordingly.

There may, however, also have been commercial considerations involved here. OUP may have feared that dividing the project in this way would have been detrimental to sales, since libraries could then have been selective in deciding which particular volumes they wished to purchase, whereas under this arrangement

they have no option but to acquire the whole series. The ‘Institutions’ section has a useful essay by Evan Brier on ‘The Literary Marketplace’ that covers the history of the book as well as the apparatus of contemporary publishing, but it includes little on how scholarly institutions such as universities, monasteries, and (in Australia) mechanics’ institutes have long been instrumental in the dissemination of learning. The relationship between this particular scholarly output and its institutional framework would certainly be worth further consideration, while the first and largest section on ‘Formal Concepts’,which covers both traditional formats of production (‘Tragedy’, ‘Literary Translation’) and more recent forms of reception (‘Poetic Cognition’, ‘Sympathy and Empathy’), could perhaps usefully have been broken down into more discrete units.

Overall, however, this Encyclopedia should be considered a monumental achievement, one that will surely be an essential resource in all university research libraries the world over, comprising a key point of reference for many years to come. I only came across one typo in the whole four volumes, in the piece on ‘Canon and Classic’ on page 2,586, which describes ‘canon-making’ as ‘a form of gatkeeping’.

OUP of course relies on its established academic reputation to sell books of this kind to university libraries, and indeed their dictionaries and other reference material cross-subsidise their original academic monographs, which are a good deal less profitable. Nevertheless, the compelling achievement of this Encyclopedia of Literary Theory is that it does not rely on any official imprimatur for its worth, and all of its 181 essays contribute significantly towards building up a complex picture of the continuing valence of this multidimensional field in the contemporary world. g

Powerful and personal storytelling

Sam

An

A

‘Sublime.’

Amanda Lohrey

A powerful First Nations memoir that tells of the shattering experience of being stolen. The Last Daughter offers a path forward for all Australians.

Neill’s unmissable memoir is revealing, heartwarming and often hilarious, as he recounts the twists and turns of his life and career. ‘Wonderful.’ Meryl Streep

insightful novel that follows a therapist as she uncovers the truth behind one family’s mysterious escape to the outback.

Peggy Frew

bold new work about the complexity of impending motherhood. ‘Like listening to your own heartbeat.’

Ever-rattling mind

A short-lived, influential choreographer

Lee Christofis

Cranko: The man and his choreography

by Ashley Killar Matador

£24.95 pb, 207 pp

Reading Ashley Killar’s compelling biography, Cranko: The man and his choreography, feels like studying the modernisation of ballet in three countries, the way ballet eats up lives as often as it forms families of peers and lovers, and the unending devotion required for creativity to flourish. It is pleasing to learn how a determined man with an ever-rattling mind, backed by a calm, philosophical manager, could challenge opera house dominance to make the Stuttgart Ballet an independent entity, with its own school supported by a philanthropic institution named after the city’s first ballet master of the 1750s, Jean-Georges Noverre, whom David Garrick called ‘the Shakespeare of the dance’.

John Cranko’s primary concern was for ballet to be as alive as anything Shakespeare put on stage, and that’s how, during Stuttgart Ballet’s Australian tour in 1974, critics saw his two big ballets, The Taming of the Shrew (Scarlatti) and Onegin (Tchaikovsky-Stolze), as well as short works Jeu de Cartes (Stravinsky), Brouillards (Debussy), and Act Two of Swan Lake. A fourth ballet, Voluntaries (Poulenc), was created by guest artist Glen Tetley to honour Cranko, who had died on a flight back to Germany after a successful US tour in 1973, aged forty-five. Although Romeo and Juliet and Onegin remain in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire, Stuttgart Ballet has never returned to Australia.

Born in South Africa, Cranko was one of the most adventurous choreographers to graduate from London’s Royal Ballet School after World War II. A precocious child enthralled by music – such as Stravinsky’s Firebird, which his parents saw in London danced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1924 – he made puppets so cleverly that he was given a theatre for marionettes, for which he sewed colourful costumes by hand. Innately theatrical, imaginative, and mercurial, he was determined to make narrative ballets. His first was The Soldier’s Tale, inspired by Stravinsky’s 1918 score, made for the Capetown Ballet Club. He was just seventeen, and away from his Johannesburg home was exposed to a world of artists, gay bars, and camp chatter.

His father, Herbert Cranko, supported his endeavours, finding new mentors and encouraging his hunger for theatre and ballet, despite his wife’s initial disapproval. In time, working hard as a student, then as a member of Sadlers Wells Theatre Ballet (now the Royal Ballet), Cranko was mentored by their insightful ballet mistress, Peggy van Praagh, and observed two Diaghilev favourites, Tamara Karsavina and Léonide Massine, coaching dancers

for opening nights. In thirteen years Cranko created some forty ballets for the Wells, Royal Ballet and Royal Opera companies, including Pineapple Poll, a romantic comedy by young Australian conductor Charles Mackerras, to a pastiche from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy Operas, and The Prince of the Pagodas, with new music by Benjamin Britten infused with Balinese gamelans. Many more productions would follow with many designers, beginning with his first boyfriend, Hanns Ebensten.

By 1959, still mourning his father, who had died the previous year, Cranko was burning out and soon became persona non grata. Several flops, and the sniping at the Royal Ballet, fuelled by artistic director Ninette de Valois, had depressed him, as did his shaming for public procuring. He pleaded guilty, was fined, and released. Collectively these burdens drove Cranko from England to Stuttgart, where he had friends and the potential to reposition himself.

Ashley Killar is another Royal Ballet School graduate. In 1962, he began his peripatetic career at the Stuttgart Ballet, where Cranko was expanding the repertoire and promoting, expressionism, and a culturally diverse ensemble. His first three-act ballet Romeo and Juliet was in its final rehearsal stage. Battling snowstorms, the ‘green’ Killar arrived just in time to watch the rehearsal and to pass his audition the following day. His crystalline memories of those weeks, and the success of Romeo, are carefully laid out, juxtaposing the man who needed a family of artists to care for him with the man determined to revolutionise the world’s conventional expectations, who shaped every one of his dancers to be better and braver in every ballet and still be themselves, no matter how delicate or strong they were.

Privately, Cranko was dreadfully lonely. The early years of drinking into the night with dancers and friends in the local Greek Café had passed as his workload expanded. Without his general manager, Dr Walter Schäfer, his personal manager Dieter Gräfe, and all his principals behind him, he would not have lasted long. Critics in Germany were as caustic as the British, until they appreciated Cranko’s agenda. In the United States, Balanchine and the New Yorker’s spiky Arlene Croce dumped on him, while showbiz potentate Sol Hurok provided the Stuttgart dancers with many stages to satisfy the audiences who clamoured for them.

Depression and fatigue dominated Cranko’s last years. Killar is sensitive about the early friendships that collapsed. This was followed by the suicide of his music arranger, Kurt-Heinz Stolze, and the death of his adored stepmother. Even artists John Piper and his wife, Myfanwy, his first ‘family’ away from home, faded from his life.

In a more analytic mode, Killar investigates selected ballets to understand how Cranko succeeded or failed to achieve his expectations. As an observant insider and experienced director, Killar is well placed to put each work in context. A collection of letters, like the political timeline in the repertoire catalogue, illustrate the conditions in which each work was made. This may seem rather clinical, but it is greatly illuminating and reveals how Cranko changed the aesthetics of European ballet and produced a new breed of gifted choreographers, dancers, and designers. g

Lee Christofis writes on dance, music, and design.

The tyranny of sound

The world’s addiction to background noise

by Debi Hamilton

Back in the early 1980s, when I was working in Canberra as a public servant in an open-plan office, I obtained a doctor’s certificate declaring that I was allergic to cigarette smoke. I wasn’t – not at least in any strict medical sense. I was merely a healthy non-smoker who found being enveloped in clouds of second-hand cigarette smoke distressing and unpleasant.

The doctor’s letter was my final gambit in the ceaseless campaign to keep my hair, lungs, and clothes smoke-free. At the time, I was following the case of a man just over the other side of the Parliamentary Triangle, a Department of Finance employee who was attempting to sue the Department for damage to his health from passive smoking at work. He did not fare well. Reading between the lines of the newspaper reports, I inferred that this plaintiff was being edged, by the public service legal team and by accommodating journalists, into the Nutters’ Corner – a place from which every grievance of his was further proof of his craziness.

My fate, following my grizzles and my doctor’s letter, was not so grim, but I am sure my cigarette ‘allergy’ resulted in my file being marked ‘Not to be Promoted’. Not that it mattered –I got out of there and eventually set my own workplace health standards as a self-employed person – but the faint sense of being an oversensitive pariah still haunts me.

This may seem fantastical to younger readers, but people –something like half of the adult community – used to smoke everywhere. Practically the only place you could be free from smoke was in your own home. Smokers smoked in cinemas and restaurants. They smoked at work, in meetings, in university tutorials. They smoked on planes and in taxis, buses, and trains. One therapist I used to consult puffed away on his pipe during our sessions.

Public smoking made the lives of many non-smokers miserable and socially difficult. I rarely ate out, except when refusing an invitation would ostracise me altogether. I never set foot inside a pub, never went to clubs or discos. I made a pill of myself by asking people not to smoke in meetings and tutorials (a request not always granted). I avoided befriending people who smoked. In response to the doctor’s allergy letter, my desk was moved an awkward distance away from the rest of my team.

Smoking bans in planes and workplaces began in the late 1980s in Australia, and by the early noughties finally extended to restaurants and cafés. After decades of struggle, the rights of those who impinged on the health and comfort of others in

public places were finally put where they belonged – secondary to the rights of everyone else to a safe environment.

So why am I reliving all this now? Simply because I recently found myself fantasising about going to my doctor and asking for a letter claiming that I am neurodivergent and that I require a quietish environment. In the first instance, this letter would be trotted into the gym I attend, where the music has sometimes reached 95 decibels (I measured it one day on my iPhone). My requests for the music to be turned down have been utterly unsuccessful. I can see that I may have to fall back on my old strategy of falsely claiming a medical condition.

As a society, we have finally understood the importance of protecting our lungs, only to accept an increasing assault on our ears. Hearing must be pretty much the least valued and least protected of all our bodily faculties.

Noise is the new cigarette smoke. The most obvious potential fallout of this carelessness is hearing damage caused by sheer volume. You probably have a smartphone with a decibel meter. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the everyday meaning of a decibel (dB) count, remembering that the decibel scale is logarithmic, so that for every three points of increase in the scale, the volume doubles. A refrigerator hum is around 40 dB. Normal conversation is around 60 dB (though I suspect this may underestimate Australians’ propensity to shout). A petrol-driven lawnmower is 80-85 dB and a motorbike 95 dB. A car horn at five metres, or an approaching subway train, is 100 dB. Beyond this level you are into entertainment venues, sirens, and firecrackers, where hearing loss can begin within five minutes.

Most restaurants these days operate in the 85-95 dB range – that is, you are eating and trying to talk beside a lawnmower or a motorbike. At this level, damage to hearing is likely within two hours. That’s a bad thing to do to your customers; it should be an illegal thing to do to your staff, who are there for up to eight hours a day.

It appears that neither the hospitality industry nor WorkSafe is taking this on as a public health challenge. My research, courtesy of Dr Google, suggests that the best the hospitality industry could do was to recommend that because restaurants were often in breach of the noise guidelines set out by several WorkCover authorities, the solution was to change the guidelines. In 2011, Restaurant and Catering Australia lodged a submission with Safe Work Australia recommending that the maximum average

noise level in their workplaces should be lifted from 85 dB to 100 dB. Given the noise levels at some restaurants I have visited recently, Safe Work Australia seems to have acceded to this suggestion.

The other aspect of noise that is rarely discussed is its effect on mental health. Even if ambient noise in public is not sufficiently loud to damage hearing, it can chafe and corrode the soul. Shrill vocal music in supermarkets. Commercial radio in the GP’s waiting room. Commercial television in hospital waiting rooms. Restaurant music piped into the street (which, by my reading of EPA guidelines, is illegal). Television screens and loud pop music in restaurants. Inane, high-voltage music or talkback radio inflicted on paying taxi occupants. Thumping, repetitive electronic music in the airport lounge. Commercial radio in the local florist shop. And the last bastion – bookshops like Readings. During a recent visit, I was regaled by loud doof-doof.

Why has the world become so addicted to background noise? When did music morph from something we listened to consciously, with full attention, to something akin to aural chewing gum? How did it become an experience deprived of flavour and meaning, a stimulus functioning only as compulsive, non-nutritive matter?

I find myself becoming exhausted and irritated by my forays into public places. I can’t wait to get home and escape into blissful quiet or go for a long walk away from it all, where the only singing is that of the wind and birds.

A recent conversation with a young gym instructor cast some light on this state of affairs. I had gone up to him to ask whether the loud music could be turned down. He said people needed to

be spurred on by loud music. I said this was not true of all of us, and anyway, modern technology provided the perfect solution –people who wanted loud music could bring their own ear pods and smartphone and listen to their own choice and volume of ‘motivation’. The gym instructor then delivered his killer argument: you couldn’t have a gym without background music. Earlier that week he had arrived at work to find that someone had forgotten to put the sound system on when the gym opened. The only things to be heard were small flurries of conversation and the whoosh and thump of machines and weights. It was eerie, he said. Eerie I sensed the existential dread he must have experienced as he fumbled for the play button.

That’s it, isn’t it? We have unwittingly created a world in which we are giving up on the more austere pleasure of navigating silence and have opted instead for constant aural bread and circuses. Sadly, I can see several impediments to a prompt resolution to this problem. First, the causes of this fear/desire are more subtle and unconscious than is the case with nicotine addiction. Second, corporate interest in our remaining thus enthralled is more widely and less clearly shared than in the case of tobacco companies and smoking – making it harder to resist. g

Debi Hamilton is a Melbourne writer, poet, and psychologist. She was joint winner of the Newcastle Poetry Prize in 2014, and her second poetry collection, The Sly Night Creatures of Desire, was published in 2016 (Hybrid Publishers). This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Do you ever feel like you’re going through a car wash in a convertible?

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Wisdom and Wit is a thought-inviting read that goes right to the heart of your life like a straight arrow. The book offers amazing insight into those annoying, needling situations, which sometimes need a bit of wit to transcend.

Shanti Rose

Shanti Rose is a visionary, writer, and artist. Through her insightful wisdom, she has helped countless souls to heal their hurts and navigate uncertainties.

Now through her books, Shanti invites you to discover the answers you need to solve the mysteries of your life and grow beyond your fondest expectations.

River

Risk and reward

Biography as political intervention

James Walter

Political Lives: Australian prime ministers and their biographers

by Chris Wallace UNSW Press

$39.99 pb, 327 pp

We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?

Chris Wallace is a shrewd and experienced political journalist; an accomplished biographer with previous works on Germaine Greer, John Hewson, and Don Bradman; and now an academic. This book draws on her PhD thesis. That breadth of experience is significant: she presents an innovative argument, is diligent about archival research and direct engagement with those about whom she is writing, and her lively and accessible style and gift for telling anecdotes will win a wide readership.

Her argument is that contemporary political biography – that is, work published while its subject is still active – can constitute a political intervention that might make or break a politician. She was driven to this realisation by reflecting on the potentially adverse influence of a biography of Julia Gillard she was near to completing while Gillard was still prime minister. It was never intended as an attack biography, yet Wallace became convinced that her analysis of Gillard’s gifts and all too human flaws would be filleted by opponents looking for negatives to amplify their already fierce denigration of Gillard. So, she abandoned the project, and returned her publishing advance.

Turning instead to a review of contemporary biographies of all prime ministers, Wallace seeks to present ‘biography as intervention’, asking how biographies frame the thinking of fellow political actors about leaders, and those who write about them, influence the way they are more broadly represented, and shape the contours of political opinion. Hence, the other novel aspect of her approach: we need to understand how and why biographers wrote as they did. This book is unique in focusing as much upon biographers and their intentions as it does on prime ministers.

Historians will be intrigued by Wallace’s exploration of the few contemporary biographies, the cumulative, long-forgotten journalistic portraits, and the interesting unpublished manuscripts, about our ‘absent fathers’, the early prime ministers, and

those who wrote about them. It provokes the question: why was so much useful insight buried or unpublished?

The answer is outlined in the chapter ‘The Menzies Biography Mystery’, where Wallace compares the few works that appeared while Menzies was in office with an unpublished biography, written with Menzies’ co-operation, and possibly largely completed, by journalist Allan Dawes. What is striking, given her elaboration of Menzies’ hostility to contemporary biography, is Wallace’s revelation not only of Menzies’ engagement with the project – his ‘prescient observation of the trend away from ideas and towards people’ – but the production of the biography as a group enterprise, directly involving several of Menzies’ staff and close friends.

This book is unique in focusing as much upon biographers and their intentions as it does on prime ministers

Wallace’s dissection of the annotations of Menzies and others on Dawes’s manuscript, and the subsequent gossip – mostly to Dawes’s detriment, deftly rebutted by Wallace – about why this work was not completed, are engrossing. It is framed by the supposition that the project was endorsed in the early 1950s, when Menzies’ and his government’s stocks were falling, and was then abandoned in 1954 when opinion swung in the Coalition’s favour. A politician wants to control the story. ‘If the context changes, the abandoned Menzies biography suggests, so might the risk and reward calculus attending it.’ This prompts another question: what of the risk and reward calculus for the biographer? Dawes died soon after without pressing his case, but what of those earlier ‘unpublished’ authors – and what, too, of those writing now?

Notwithstanding the serious attention given to the contemporary Whitlam biographies and later to those of Paul Keating, John Howard and others, the centrepoint of Wallace’s argument – extracts of which have been published and widely publicised – is her discussion of Blanche d’Alpuget’s biographies of Bob Hawke. Here was the ideal conjunction of biographer and subject necessary to Wallace’s thesis. Work started in 1980, when Hawke was on his way to seizing the Labor leadership. D’Alpuget believed in him and, with publication in 1982, was making a political intervention to help him reach that goal. Her judgement, shared by her subject, was that his strengths were so apparent that they would offset her exposé of his heavy drinking, philandering, and ruthlessness, a transparency that would inoculate him against the dirt files of opponents. Wallace suggests that the biographical process – and the renunciation of excesses it identified – also helped Hawke to settle and project ‘an identity which formed the personal plank of the platform from which he pursued and conducted his prime ministership’.

What was not transparent at the time – though it was to be detailed with candour in an essay d’Alpuget published in 2008 and elaborated on in interviews with Wallace – was that Hawke and d’Alpuget then began a sexual relationship. But that too was renounced, at least for a time. Eventually, the relationship covertly resumed and once his period of office ended, Hawke abandoned his loyal partner and prime ministerial wife, Hazel, to marry d’Alpuget. Yet, it is argued, with her first biography d’Alpuget

symbolically reclaimed her man and by implication her second book – on Hawke as prime minister – sealed his legacy.

It is a provocative argument. D’Alpuget’s transition from researcher, to lover, to political player offends every principle of conventional research, appropriate distance, and full disclosure. But is it different in kind, or only in degree, from the work of other committed contemporary biographers – Graham Freudenberg on Whitlam, Don Watson on Keating, for instance? At the least, it alerts us to what to expect from other contemporary biographers, since Wallace on completing her review remarks on ‘the unexpected asymmetry between the number of [postwar] biographies lifting a subject up compared with the single one designed to drag its subject down’: Stan Anson’s Hawke: An emotional life (1991).

One might question this on several grounds: What about Alan Reid’s vitriolic The Whitlam Venture (1976), published while Whitlam was still Labor leader and before the 1977 election? More pertinent to Wallace’s project, Anson was working with theoretical tools learned as a postgraduate under the supervision of Graham Little, a key figure in A.F. Davies’ psychoanalytically oriented ‘Melbourne School’ of political analysis. Was Anson intending a polemic, or simply following where his analysis led? Little, as Wallace explains, had also been a friend of d’Alpuget, encouraging her to develop the psychological insight that was paired with narrative flair to create her successful biography.

Anson’s alternative ‘intervention’ ruptured that friendship. Did the ensuing controversy, provoked less by Anson’s ‘out-there’ psychoanalytic framework than by d’Alpuget’s attempt to have it withdrawn (by threatening legal action challenging its appropriation of her work) terminate the development of psychologically informed biography in Australia? Certainly, it did in relation to contemporary biography, says Wallace, taking it back to the old business as usual model: ‘Voters know just that much less about their potential and serving prime ministers as a result.’

I am not persuaded. Consider other instances. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart on Keating (2002) was as much influenced by his friendship with and insights stimulated by political psychologist Graham Little as was d’Alpuget’s Hawke. Recollections, Wallace might argue, does not qualify as ‘contem-

porary biography’, since Keating was out of office, though still an active public figure. This might also be said of my own book The Leader: A political biography of Gough Whitlam (1980), also a product of the Melbourne School. But it raises a larger problem: how much does this emphasis on ‘contemporary biography’ occlude broader understanding of political biography and the ways in which it is taken up by the reading audience?

Already, reviews and discussion of Wallace’s book have seemingly accepted that early prime ministers have been consigned to the shadows. Really? Voters interested in biography can learn a great deal from conventional biography, which picked up enormously in the mid-twentieth century. A review in 1987, contributing to an Academy of Social Sciences project, identified only four prime ministers who had not been the subject of full biographies. Now there is only one – Frank Forde, who served for just a week in 1945. Politicians (for some of whom reading biography seems a favourite pastime), as well as general readers, can sample the full range.

Further, her lament for the lost possibility of psychologically informed biography consigns not only the essays of Little on Hawke and Keating and Davies on the tasks of biography, but also the marvellous work of Judith Brett on Robert Menzies and Alfred Deakin, to the margins – as well as a host of others working on politicians who never gained the top job (Peter Crockett on H.V. Evatt, Warren Osmond on Frederic Eggleston, John Rickard on H.B. Higgins, Paul Strangio on Jim Cairns, for instance). There is much to admire in Wallace’s spirited innovation, but there is more to be said. g

James Walter is emeritus professor of politics at Monash University, and author of arguably the first psychobiography to appear in what Chris Wallace deems ‘the modern era’, The Leader: A political biography of Gough Whitlam (1980). He has since published extensively on biography, leadership, ideas, and prime ministers.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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Building a golem

The first biography of a Labor survivor

Patrick Mullins

Tanya Plibersek: On her own terms

by Margaret Simons Black Inc.

$34.99 pb, 320 pp

In early March 2023, Tanya Plibersek fronted an audience at the Australian National University to question historian Chris Wallace about her newly released account of twentieth-century prime ministers and their biographers. Coming shortly before the publication of Margaret Simons’s biography of her, Plibersek’s interest in the dynamics of writing about a living, breathing, vote-seeking politician seemed prompted by more than mere professional courtesy. ‘It’s like building a golem, in the shape of a person, in a way, isn’t it?’ she remarked. ‘And then you’re putting magic into it and animating it. It comes out of the mud.’

Simons has considerable experience working with such mud and magic. In addition to writing about gardening, she is a biographer of Penny Wong and Kerry Stokes, a profiler of Mark Latham, co-writer of Malcolm Fraser’s memoirs, and investigator of the Murray–Darling Basin, the Hindmarsh Island affair, and problems in contemporary journalism. Whether at feature or book length, Simons’s writing is thoughtful, welcoming of complexity, and attuned to questions of ethics and power. In this as in many of her other books, Simons eschews a god-like omniscience and foregrounds her presence as narrator, detailing subjective reactions, making sharp observations, and moving seamlessly between events deep in the past, and how they are understood and related in the present. In doing so, Simons constructs a golem of considerable and attractive substance. Her Plibersek is diligent, hard-working, and, if not a visionary, then undeniably a consummate professional.

Born in Sydney, the third child of Slovenian immigrants who came to Australia in the postwar years, Plibersek absorbed the typical ideals of first-generation migrant children: a sense of responsibility, a keen work ethic, and a patriotism that obliged her, in exchange for enjoying the rewards of this country, to give back to it and her community.

This was accompanied by an enduring feminist outlook that has seen Plibersek take an abiding interest in violence against women. After graduating from the journalism course at University of Technology Sydney, Plibersek joined the domestic violence unit of the newly created Ministry for the Status and Advancement of Women in the New South Wales public service. To her frustration, that ministry’s focus was on breaking glass ceilings in the corporate and political worlds. She resigned after less than a year and, in the meantime, reconsidered her relationship with the ALP, which she had joined and left in the space of a year over its

backsliding on uranium mining and native title policy. Plibersek saw in ALP figures Meredith Burgmann, Genevieve Rankin, and Ann Symonds the kind of leadership and understanding that she believed was necessary to reduce rates of violence against women; she also came to believe that while the ALP was an ‘imperfect vehicle’, it was the best vehicle for change.

The bargain she made then is one she has struck repeatedly since, Simons notes. After her election in 1998, Plibersek voted for draconian Howard government legislation on asylum seekers in 2001 and watched in 2004 as the ALP waved through amendments to the Marriage Act that excluded same-sex marriages. Her refusal in the first instance to emulate Carmen Lawrence and resign was salutary: ‘It’s about having some staying power,’ Plibersek reasoned. The desire to preserve power, of some kind, has seen Plibersek make similar bargains with the media – particularly over its coverage of her husband, Michael Coutts-Trotter, today a high-ranking New South Wales public servant who, in his youth, served a jail term for drug offences. Plibersek made the same kind of bargain with Simons. Initially resistant to the biography, she ultimately co-operated in the interests of having some agency

in the process. It is a decision that pays off: there is no mud that sticks here, no feet of clay.

Plibersek’s rise began after the 2004 election, when she was given responsibility for youth, work and family, community, early childhood education, and the status of women. The meatiest chapters of Simons’s book concern Plibersek’s activities in these related portfolio areas over the life of the 2007–13 Labor governments. They track how these policy areas, previously training ground for junior ministers or an afterthought for leaders, have become increasingly central to political debate. Where childcare and parental leave were once the province of welfare policy, for example, they are now regarded as part of economic policy, vital to improvements in productivity, workforce participation, and more. Simons points to Plibersek’s continued activism and effective communication skills as significant factors in the change.

These chapters also constitute the lengthiest rebuttal of Plibersek’s critics, who are cited anonymously as sceptical more than

Larissa Waters and Tanya Plibersek accept a petitition at the Women’s March4Justice Rally Parliament House, 15 March 2021 (Leo Bild/Alamy)

scathing, wondering if Plibersek is too opaque, without vision, and managerial rather than inspiring. Simons points to Plibersek’s record in the women’s portfolio, where she pushed for improved economic outcomes for women, gender equality, and reducing violence against women. Paid parental leave, championed by Jenny Macklin and supported by Plibersek, was one way of addressing the first. Regulation requiring large companies to report on gender equality indicators was a way forward for the second. On the third, violence against women, Plibersek sought development of a long-term national plan that included public education and training campaigns and better infrastructure for counselling and support services for women and victims. The work was incomplete when Plibersek moved to the health portfolio, but its significance should not be understated. Nor, according to Simons, should Plibersek’s role: ‘This is perhaps her single biggest contribution to public policy so far.’

Plibersek was also one of the few to emerge from the wreckage of the Labor government with her reputation enhanced. Anointed by Julia Gillard as a future leader of the party, Plibersek became deputy to Bill Shorten (2013–19) and took responsibility for foreign affairs and then education. Anthony Albanese’s election as leader in 2019 saw Plibersek’s first major political setback. It was untenable for two figures from Labor’s left faction to hold both leadership positions; Plibersek ceded the deputy leadership to right-winger Richard Marles. Having forgone a bid for the leadership herself, Plibersek retained her education duties until the 2022 election, after which she was appointed – or, really, demoted – to the environment portfolio.

Plibersek’s political trajectory is a lengthy, twisting thread throughout this book. Simons notes repeated instances where Plibersek has disavowed ambitions for higher office, or resisted offers of it on account of family. She also cites how the occasions Plibersek has been ambitious – standing for preselection in 1998, entertaining the deputy leadership in 2013 – have become fodder for those who view her with suspicion. Simons argues that this is a profoundly gendered double standard, but wonders about the restlessness within Labor in 2021, when Albanese’s leadership seemed in question, and Plibersek’s star appeared to be waxing. Did Plibersek consider a challenge? Simons’s answer, thoughtfully and eventually reached, is that she did. ‘But she stayed true to her longstanding view that the party – and the team – matters more than individual ambition, and that leadership destabilisation always leaves the party weaker.’

It is no small feat that this explanation, offered near the end of Simons’s biography, does not feel pat or overly credulous. Its persuasiveness comes from the figure sagely created by Simons: a politician who wishes to contribute but is pragmatic about the need to compromise, who is not ego-driven but also not in thrall to cultural expectations that women will put their ambitions second; who sees in herself much of Elinor Dashwood, heroine of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and who might, if push comes to shove, moderate the Labor Party’s tendency to be a mercurial and rash Marianne. g

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

Flogs of war

A missed opportunity from The Conversation

Joel Deane

2022: Reckoning with power and privilege

edited by Michael Hopkin

Thames & Hudson

$32.99 pb, 240 pp

‘Australia faces the real prospect of a war with China within three years that could involve a direct attack on our mainland.’ That was the opening line of a 2,174word article – headlined ‘Australia “must prepare” for threat of China war’ and tagged with a ‘Red Alert’ graphic – that ran on the front pages of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on 7 March. Next day, the authors of the ‘Red Alert’ special, journalists Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ran a 2,241-word hypothetical about how a conflict over Taiwan could, within seventytwo hours, result in missile bombardments and cyberattacks against Australia. On the third day, Hartcher and Knott’s ‘Red Alert’ special concluded with a 2,278-word front-page piece on the steps that Australia needed to take to prepare for war with China.

The basis for the special’s alarming conclusions were the ruminations of a panel of five ‘experts’ brought together by Hartcher and Knott to ‘blow away the fog of war to give Australians some critical points of insight’.

More like the flogs of war. As Greg Barns pointed out in Pearls and Irritations, former public servant John Menadue’s online public policy journal, the ‘gang of five experts’ were not Sinophiles but instead had strong connections to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which are backed by arms makers. Barns’s key point was that Hartcher and Knott presented the panel’s pro-war findings without disclosing their defence industry connections. ‘The community,’ Barns wrote, ‘should be able to make an informed judgement about the prognostications of this group of experts.’

I won’t detail the welter of criticism ‘Red Alert’ received, but recommend googling former prime minister Paul Keating’s evisceration, which includes the extraordinary accusation that the Nine newspapers refused to run his rebuttal of their 6,693-word omnibus. Keating’s comments were happily run by other media outlets, including The Australian and the Guardian.

If I were a cynic, I would say that ‘Red Alert’ was part of an orchestrated campaign to prepare the ground for the announcement on 14 March of Australia’s $368 billion deal to purchase three United States-built nuclear submarines and to build eight British-designed nuclear subs. For the record, I am not suggesting that Nine newspapers should ignore the national security implications of tensions between China (Australia’s number one trading

partner) and the United States (Australia’s number one ally). What I am saying is that, on a subject of such importance, Nine’s decision to trumpet the Hartcher/Knott parvum opus is alarming.

Thirty-seven years after Bob Hawke’s decision to let Rupert Murdoch take control of the vast majority of Australian print media, twenty-seven years after the launch of Google, seventeen years after the launch of Twitter, five years after Nine’s acquisition of Fairfax newspapers, Australian journalism is in crisis. Newsrooms are controlled by too few owners, journalists are vastly outnumbered by think tanks with vested interests and public relations flacks, and media owners are cannibalising each other as they cut costs to survive in the brave new world of content aggregation and social media flame wars.

At first glance, none of this has anything to do with 2022: Reckoning with power and privilege, The Conversation’s selection of commentary published online last year. But the crisis in Australian journalism has everything to do with The Conversation and, by extension, this book.

Since launching in 2011, The Conversation has become Australia’s most influential dot-com start up. Its influence goes beyond the fact that The Conversation is a clearing house for independent, expert commentary and analysis that attracts 6.4 million independent reads a month. The Conversation – an Australian idea that started at the University of Melbourne – is now an international phenomenon, with chapters in Africa, Britain, Canada, Europe, France, Indonesia, New Zealand, Spain, and the United States. As such, The Conversation stands as a multinational bulwark against the kind of narrow-cast reporting seen in the ‘Red Alert’ special and the colonisation of newspaper Op-Ed pages by axe-grinding politicians, business leaders, and thinktank wonks.

All of which is why 2022: Reckoning with power and privilege is so disappointing. It is not that the authors or articles the book contains are substandard. On the contrary, editor Michael Hopkin

chose many excellent pieces, such as Frank Bongiorno and Emily Millane on Scott Morrison’s multiple portfolios, Denis Muller on ‘sub-par’ journalism, and Michelle Arrow on Grace Tame at the National Press Club. But, taken as a whole, Hopkin’s book is limited in three ways. First, he creates an artificial frame by retrospectively grouping the essays as being all about ‘questions of power and privilege’, and thus shoehorns articles under eight ‘power’ headings that often (such as in the ‘power of technology’ section) don’t work. Second, he misses the opportunity to cherrypick essays from some of the international editions of The Conversation and instead publishes pieces past their read-by date (such as an analysis of Boris Johnson’s premiership). Third, he doesn’t take full advantage of the possibilities of the print format.

For instance, why not have an index and adopt a subject-related format that enables essays on, say, Vladimir Putin to be grouped together? There is an assumption (and here I am speaking as a former website publisher) that online readers prefer shorter articles. In a book such as 2022: Reckoning with power and privilege, there is no reason to limit the length of articles. Why would you publish an article of just three pages on an issue as important as the First Nations’ Voice to parliament? Why not expand that article or group the piece with other, related essays?

Unfortunately, one of the book’s longest and opening essays, Michelle Grattan’s nine-page essay on the 2022 federal election, is a slog that simply rehashes the political plays of 2022 without adding anything new to a casual viewer of Insiders. I would have preferred to see more space given to expansive, exploratory essays such as Emma Shortis’s memoirish take on gun violence in the United States, which opens with the compelling line: ‘I have always been afraid of America.’

She’s not the only one. g

Joel Deane is a poet, novelist, journalist, and speechwriter. His third novel, Judas Boys, will be published in 2023.

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Lyrical layers at AGNSW

A new landmark building in Sydney

by Julie Ewington

Nearly three months have passed since the new building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) opened (3 December 2022). This summer, Sydney Modern, as the new North building by Japanese architectural firm SAANA is popularly known, has been Sydney’s main attraction and topic of conversation. Critical opinion has been mixed, and Sydney’s famous snippiness – one version of the national tendency to doubt our achievements – has been in overdrive, but the public response is clear: hundreds of thousands have visited the Gallery to take in the building, view its first exhibitions, and revel in the renewal of the Gallery’s much-loved old buildings. It’s been a triumph: ‘Sydney Modern’ is now a city landmark.

It is, quite simply, glorious. SAANA’s Pritzker Prize-winners, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, have given the city an exceptionally beautiful setting for its contemporary cultural life that responds to, and respects, the ancient significance and historical inflections of the site. A series of intersecting pavilions seem to float down the slope from Art Gallery Road to the Harbour, all lightness and air on four physical levels, in curvilinear natural forms that have been described as ‘informal’, to quote architect Anthony Bourke. In fact, the building conforms to a complex geometry whose very different logic from the post and lintel architecture of the older AGNSW buildings, whether classical or modernist, is immediately apparent. To underscore the point: at the threshold of the new building, giant playful blue figures by Francis Upritchard cavort and clutch at the columns of the Welcome Plaza. It is a clear invitation to leave preconceptions at the door.

Inside, the diagonal descent through the four levels from bright light into what will eventually be Stygian darkness, is centred around a great void. The core of the building is space, more or less vertical airy space: lyrical, diaphanous, and intersected horizontally by enormous galleries. This is a bold solution to an extremely difficult site. I keep searching for a vegetal analogy for the structure: the lateral relationships, and the ways the galleries and external terraces come off the central core, seem like lily pads coming off a rhizomatic stalk.

Despite the immense complexity of the shapes and volumes of Kazuyo Sejima’s building, and the impossible grandeur of the three-storey volume at the heart of her building, it is, remarkably, immediately legible: there is an unforgettable moment on arrival when the entire gallery lies before and below, when one sees at a glance how it is structured, where main destinations are located.

This instant intelligibility, this accessibility, is fundamental to a successful public building: it welcomes everyone, it shows, in its very structure, that the Gallery is for everyone, in every way. This attitude drives each aspect of the project, expressed here in the making of the building. Art museums are one of the contemporary world’s great meeting places – free, mostly unscheduled, engaging, relatively Covid-safe – and the AGNSW’s frank embrace of this function is meeting a huge need. The social value of the reconfigured Gallery’s two buildings is immense. ‘Art for all’ say the Gallery’s royal-blue street banners, and this promise is kept from the minute one steps into the building.

It is an emotional tone underscored by Seijima’s use of lovely warm materials, simultaneously elegant and relaxed. The fleshpink screen around the shop was commissioned from surfboard manufacturers on Sydney’s Northern beaches; a magnificent rammed-earth wall is offset with Portuguese limestone, the colours soft, slightly golden. This apparent casualness allows careful management of the enormous spaces: despite summer days when 18,000 people poured in, and queues formed for some displays, the building never seemed over-crowded. That is the point of the huge interior volume: traffic management is about the sense of space as luxury, to be freely enjoyed. The transits down the escalators are not only physical: they are emotional.

A clear statement of this determined inclusivity runs through the content of the first installations, in both buildings. Importantly, Indigenous Australian art is foregrounded with the placement of the Yiribana Gallery at the moment of arrival in the SAANA building, the only art on that level, and is everywhere integrated in displays in both buildings; work by women is now a focus, with the Gallery honouring its commitment to gender parity across collections, commissions, and exhibitions; and an innovative conception of the relationships between Australian and international artists is manifested throughout, perhaps most strikingly in the South building, where historical international and Australian collections are shown together for the first time, a welcome innovation.

In the North building, with its focus on the contemporary, I see a distinct preference for art from the Southern Hemisphere – New Zealand, the Pacific, South Africa – and from Asia. This is a truly global conception of contemporary art. In the magnificent Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter, for instance, we see commissioned works by Los Angeles artist Samara Golden alongside collaborative work by the Filipino-Australian duo Alfredo and

Isabel Aquilizan, together with major works by the British artist Phyllida Barlow and Māori Michael Parekowhai. The exhibition’s provocative title – whose ‘dream home’? in the suburbs? in a new country? – speaks to the Gallery’s commitment to contemporary questions. This runs through the splendid Outlaw, featuring video works in a specially equipped gallery; these spring from Chinese drawn martial arts narratives and centre on Howie Tsui’s terrific five-channel Retainers of anarchy (2017). Not all displays are equally successful: it will take time for the Gallery to settle into this new home and explore its challenges and possibilities, and at the moment, to be honest, they are often crammed full, manifesting the urgency with which the new building has been awaited. (All new art museums are overhung.)

Finally, the lowest level of the building: the Tank, built in 1942 as wartime maritime fuel storage. It was extraordinary good fortune to be able to incorporate the Tank into the North building: it is exactly the sort of resonant industrial setting that today’s artists crave for installations. The passion for frisson between contemporary art and obsolete settings may change or fade away, but this 2,200 square metre space, now featuring a fantastical subterranean world by Argentinian-Peruvian Adrián Villar Rojas, is reconfigurable for annual ephemeral projects. It is an unexpected gift from the past to the future.

Let’s return to the light-filled upper floor of the North building, to address a few of the canards quacking around the AGNSW this summer. One opinion suggests the new building is all entertainment, that there is not much additional space for art. Nonsense: exhibition space has nearly doubled, from 9,000 to 16,000 square metres. The 1,300 square metre room in the new building, which will first be used for temporary exhibitions when the Louise Bourgeois show opens next summer is, I believe, the largest in an Australian art museum. I suspect the sheer size of the building has led some to mistake the scale of its huge rooms: to wit, Soojakim’s participatory Archive of mind (2016) is given the luxury of one gigantic room for a single work. One more measure: floor space for twentieth-century art in the South building has doubled. This reconfiguration has ensured huge visitation.

That said, Naomi Stead in The Saturday Paper is right: the huge circulation spaces are for parties and being seen and Instagramming. That’s exactly the point: public use in all its forms. And while there has been a lot of talk about the availability, or not, of Harbour views, the new building is not a Harbour viewing platform. Instead, SAANA offers a series of conceal and reveal moments that promise, flirt with, and eventually reveal Sydney Harbour to the north, as one transits through the building. Finally, the exterior terraces are revealed as park-like spaces for public use, day and night, with those spectacular views.

The Sydney Modern Project has, as the AGNSW claims, transformed the older South buildings, with beautiful work there by Sydney firm Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects. In the process, the Project has renovated the offerings spread between the two buildings. Taken as a whole, the Gallery’s campus provides the full range of the contemporary art museum: galleries, including huge

reconfigurable spaces, but also film and lecture theatres, spaces for performances and music, function and members rooms; cafés and terraces, and what is undoubtedly the country’s leading art library, complete with a dedicated children’s library.

Each function is enabled by specific architectural settings. Which is one way to look at the relationships between the principal building campaigns at the AGNSW: each moment is

recognised, preserved. There are three distinct museum moments: the grand Old Courts at the turn of the nineteenth century; 1970s brutalism for modern art in Andrew Andersons’s Cook Wing; and the floating spaces of SAANA’s building for the multiple art forms in the future museum. All are respected. Which is why I prefer the buildings being completely separate. And while cross-references between historical holdings in the South building and contemporary works in the North are continually made, each manifests a particular moment in the development of art museums. By May 2023, the two buildings, indeed the entire site, will have been linked, and with the entire site, by Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones’s Indigenous art garden, entitled bíal gwiyúŋo (the fire is not yet lighted), which is still under construction. Expect an update then.

Above all, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has made bold choices: to welcome all; to respect the past while welcoming the future; to recognise that the Gallery sits on Gadigal land, and to be conscious of that legacy and responsibility; to actively address social issues; and to engage a firm of Japanese architects to build its new future-facing building in the country’s largest Asian-Australian city. This is a defining moment in Australian art museum history – on many levels. g

Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Art Gallery of New South Wales (photograph by Iwan Baan)

A bon vivant’s life

The long awaited biography

Susan Varga

Drink Against Drunkenness: The life and times of Sasha

by Inez Baranay

Local Times Publishing

$39.99 pb, 506 pp

Soldatow

Sasha Soldatow was a writer, gay activist, member of the Sydney Push, party animal, and bon vivant with legions of friends. In Drink Against Drunkenness, Inez Baranay maps the life like an archaeologist’s dig, though we are looking into the recent past (Soldatow died in 2006, not yet sixty). A fall in the icy streets of Moscow, in which his hip was broken and subsequently badly reset, heralded a steep decline; his alcoholism grew apace, and many of his friends tired of him. It was a sad end, yet he had a life full of daring: avant-garde writing and living freely as a gay man in a still repressive age.

Soldatow was born in Germany of Russian parents who were intent on leaving Europe. His first memories were of the famous Bonegilla migrant camp. A Melbourne boy, he grew up with a fearsomely dominating mother. He escaped to Sydney, where he quickly found his niche in the Sydney Push, despite its uber-macho feel. He was already an anarchist. Even Push men fell for his insouciant charm, and Push women welcomed him with open arms. That’s where I first met him. He soon counted David Marr, Margaret Fink, Wendy Bacon, and later, Christos Tsiolkas among his intimate friends, as well as a wide circle of filmmakers, activists, poets, and writers such as Pam Brown, joanne burns, and the publisher–bookseller Nicholas Pounder. He also kept many Melbourne lifelong friends, among them Judith Brett and George Papaellinas.

Soldatow was immensely likeable, with a silly, infectious giggle. Always interested and curious, he took his friendships seriously. He was also erudite, arrogant, an unashamed sponger, and someone who craved public acknowledgment of his talent and learning. He lived his life as if he were waiting for his biographer, documenting everything, making copies of his copious letters. Baranay has done him proud. Her biography is a mosaic that fits the pieces together to reveal an original and varied life.

Drink Against Drunkenness is a big, dense book, but never obscure. At first it feels untidy, flitting in and out of diverse subjects, sometimes rounding back to them, with a loose chronology. A couple of early chapters about early group endeavours have little interest and some chapter headings and subheadings yield no obvious meaning until the reader gets used to Baranay’s free-flowing style. Then it becomes a lively, often gripping read. The early chapters are full of parties, lovers, alternative publications, and gender-bending performances, poems (the most notable, the scurrilous, funny ‘The Adventures of Rock-n-Roll Sally’), and pamphlets like the influential What is this Gay Community Shit?

Soldatow did a four-year stint as a subtitle writer at SBS, then a hotbed of poets and ‘ethnics’ needing to pay the rent. It was a lively atmosphere where Soldatow excelled. Around this time, he also wrote a scholarly analysis of the anarchist poet Harry Hooton, the love of Margaret Fink’s life – a landmark book for Australian culture. Then Soldatow and Bruce Pulsford fell in love. Bruce was ten years younger, a lawyer, good-looking, shy, and entranced by the exotic Soldatow. The affair ended quite early but Bruce was the great love of his life; he remained his most loyal friend and supporter until Soldatow’s death.

Inez Baranay maps the life like an archaeologist’s dig

Soldatow’s first collection of short stories with its cheeky title Private, Do Not Open (1987) appeared when he was forty It was well reviewed. (Those were the halcyon, far-off days when new left-of-field authors were given space and taken seriously in the weekend papers.)

Soldatow was gradually making his name, but never felt accepted by the broader literary world. He famously took the Australia Council to court in 1990 for never giving him a well-deserved grant after sixteen years of applications. He actually won his case with the aid of his canny barrister, John Basten. Next year a grant materialised and he went to Vietnam on it, declaring, ‘It won’t stop me whingeing.’ It never did.

Soldatow’s time in Russia was a turning point in his life. Long after they had a youthful affair, David Marr re-entered his life in Moscow. Then Marr went back to Sydney, leaving Soldatow broken-hearted. Worse, he was unable to find his place as a Russian; his romantic idea of his own Russianness was shattered by the harsh realities of Moscow life just before the USSR fell. He finally understood that he was an Australian, but he could not grasp that living between two cultures could be a fecund place for a writer; the outsider’s observing eye, a slight distance.

Nevertheless, two of his best books came after the Russian interlude. Jump Cuts (1996), with Christos Tsiolkas, was a lively exchange between two generations of migrant gay men: Greek and Russian. Mayakovsky in Bondi (1993) shows his best qualities as a writer: innovative in form, with some angelic phrasing, bravery of subject matter, and a deep sadness from his Russian ancestors. The last piece, his wonderful translation of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, shows his erudition and empathy.

But Soldatow carried on drinking and partying. His oeuvre was slight but not in originality or quality. Inez Baranay is his ideal biographer. Knowing Soldatow as a friend, yet having lived away from Australia for many years, she can maintain her distance. Drink Against Drunkenness is both affectionate and forensic, with generous dollops of interviews with friends and associates, along with Soldatow’s letters and drawings. Baranay has captured an important and vivid era of Australian cultural life. You can read the book in two ways – picking subjects of interest, or following the whole rich panoply that was Sasha Soldatow. g

Susan Varga is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her latest book is the memoir Hard Joy (Upswell, 2022).

The aftermath

Stephanie Bishop’s alluring new novel Astrid Edwards

The Anniversary

by Stephanie Bishop Hachette $32.99 pb, 421 pp

Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary is an example of both deft literary craft and an engrossing read – a feat rarer than it should be. Billed as a ‘novel about writing and desire’, this is more a work interrogating the nexus between art, celebrity, and commerce, while unpicking the ways in which gender informs all three.

JB, the narrator, is an accomplished novelist on the cusp of winning an international literary prize, and perhaps eclipsing her husband, Patrick. A celebrated film auteur, Patrick is two decades her senior and at the peak of his career. He is also her former teacher. Their art is intertwined, a joint project melding the personal and the professional in ways that cannot be separated – until, of course, they are. Given the key event of this novel can be no surprise to the reader – the blurb reveals that Patrick is lost at sea while they are celebrating their anniversary on a cruise –questions about their creativity, their reputations, and who advanced whose career more are what drive the narrative.

Narrative tension there is aplenty. Early on, JB leaves the reader wondering what exactly were the words Patrick ‘must have been trying not to say’. Later, when conducting a reading of her latest work, she muses about boring book-club questions that focus on causation and motive, when she herself is ‘always more interested in the aftermath’. This novel from Bishop explores that aftermath – a famous husband lost at sea and a younger wife left exposed – but events from JB’s past surface slowly.

Bishop delights in piercing the stereotype of the charismatic male artist. She reflects on how age, ambition, and talent are deemed acceptable; how men can get away with things in a way that women can’t. Despite his old charisma, Patrick is now past his peak and has ‘the body of an ageing rockstar’. Any reader who has found themselves wondering about the gatekeepers in their industry will revel in such deft barbs. Gender-based commentary is frequent. The men have ‘large, long-handled umbrellas ... a dry force field all about them’, whereas the women have the kind a person has ‘to shrink in under’. This commentary operates as a sub-theme in the first half of the novel, only to emerge forcibly near the dramatic climax.

As a novel about a fictional female novelist written by a female novelist, The Anniversary is a comment on the publishing industry itself. On the book tour, Bishop has JB critique the interview process, noting the poor questions so often asked by radio hosts (who have not read the book) and the predictability of bookish

interviewers who want to know how much of a work of fiction is drawn from the writer’s life. One cannot help but feel that Bishop is playing with us here. The reader cannot ask whether Bishop is providing a commentary on her own experience, because that type of question is being critiqued. The same is true of JB’s account of conversations with other shortlisted writers at the awards ceremony – one wonders if this has happened to Bishop. The structure of the industry, especially publicity, comes in for scrutiny. While JB’s publicists offer compassion and care, they also organise publicity junkets in the days after Patrick’s death. Celebrity sells books, and so does trauma.

As a novel about a fictional female novelist written by a female novelist, The Anniversary is a comment on the publishing industry itself

The commentary on the industry is simply the most overt form of engagement with the literary world. What is of more interest to Bishop is how one can interrogate life through literature. This is made explicit throughout the work. JB muses about the literary novel, ‘the form most approximate to the unruliness of living’. There are extended discussions about literature and form; one of them includes an explanation of caesura to elucidate both trauma and gender power dynamics.

At some point, the reader becomes aware of the unreliability of the narrator. While JB’s inner voice is at first competent and assured, over time it becomes more intense and often startling. In the days after Patrick’s disappearance, she surprises police with graphic depictions of the last time she and Patrick had sex, and then flies to the other side of the world to accept a literary prize. Are her actions driven by grief or guilt or trauma – all frequently attributed to grieving widows and female artists? Or are these the actions of an artist who knows what she wants?

This is a work predominantly interested in women. The sex scenes (and there are quite a few) are a delicious evocation of a woman’s thoughts during sex, with little focus on the acts themselves. As the narrative progresses and JB retreats from the limelight, the longing for absent mothers and the presence of stepmothers begin to surface. It is only as the novel progresses and more of her family history is revealed that we learn JB is a pen name – her real name is Lucy. Lucy has a sister, a mother, and a stepmother; these relationships come to the fore after Patrick’s death.

The Anniversary interrogates how we communicate within families, through our art, even in the bedroom. This is a novel worth reading twice, for all the subtleties missed the first time around.

Bishop has previously published three novels. The most recent, Man Out of Time (2018), was longlisted for the Stella Prize and shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. It is worth noting that The Anniversary will be published internationally – not common for much new Australian fiction. g

Astrid Edwards hosts the podcast The Garret: Writers on Writing and teaches Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT University.

The question of the future

Alexis Wright’s expansive new work

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Praiseworthy

by Alexis Wright Giramondo $39.95 pb, 736 pp

An ochre-coloured haze has gathered permanently over the town of Praiseworthy somewhere in the Gulf country. It is composed of dust, soot, broken butterfly wings, memories, and grief – and it isn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, on the ground, thousands of feral donkeys are being corralled into the town cemetery by an Indigenous leader called Cause Man Steel. Most call this man Planet because he is always banging on about the collapse of the planet.

The donkeys are Cause’s scheme to secure his people’s future when the world goes to ruin. When the planet collapses there would, he reasoned, be a worldwide demand for donkeys. The millions of donkeys that flourish in Australia’s tropical savannahs, and that will work through any hardship, would become once again the transport system of peoples far and wide. Cause’s long-suffering wife, Dance, is at her wit’s end: the cemetery is on her Native Title land, and so the people blame her for the invasion of feral donkeys. And anyway, Cause is her husband. When it all gets too much, she goes out to the plains and talks to the myriad butterflies that do what they always do. Somewhere else, the spirits watch on and bide their time. This is just another day for them, and they work to their own schedule.

This is the scenario that comes tumbling into view in Alexis Wright’s latest monumental novel, Praiseworthy. It is a worthy, I will not say praiseworthy, successor to her earlier epics Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013). It also works as a complement to her choral biography Tracker (2017), which told the story of ‘Tracker’ Tilmouth through multiple voices. Indeed, the donkey scheme in Praiseworthy alludes to one of Tilmouth’s more creative projects, which was to sell Australian camels to the Middle East. The wild superfluity of Tracker’s shimmering personality seems beautifully evoked in the baroque contours of Cause Man Steel, the hero of Praiseworthy. What unites Tracker and Praiseworthy is an irreverent reverence towards the audacity of their heroes. Both Tracker and Cause were royal pains in the arse, and that was their whole point. You could argue yourself blue in the face and they would always win, even if they ended up seemingly saying what you said to begin with. Their magic lay in the fact that when they won you didn’t lose. You might end up wondering what the hell you were going to do with all these donkeys, but that was always a distraction.

There is only one true enemy in Praiseworthy and Tracker, and that is assimilation. If you think you know what assimilation

is, you should read Praiseworthy and think again. In the world of Wright’s fiction, we see the many faces of assimilation. The anatomisation of assimilation is also central to the literary projects of Kim Scott, Alison Whittaker, and Evelyn Araluen. Within Indigenous critique, assimilation occupies the position that capital has in Marxism. Assimilation exists as a permanent demand that hystericises settler society as much as it sends Indigenous Australians scurrying this way and that. In its most innocuous guise, assimilation is simply what is socially good – what is praiseworthy. In that sense, being good is assimilation. But half the time, being bad is also assimilation. More fundamentally, for Wright, assimilation is the question of the future – futurity as such. This is why the question of assimilation directly connects to climate change and environmental destruction in Wright’s work. The real question in assimilation is always, what time are we in? One comes out of a Wright novel with one’s basic temporality wobbling on its pegs.

In the town of Praiseworthy, there is an anaemic enterprising Indigenous ‘Major Mayor’ who is the most immediate face of contemporary assimilation. He works hand in hand with the Australian government to develop a better future, close the gap, deliver outcomes and so on. He becomes so white and translucent that he is called Major Mayor Ice-Pick. In the mythology of the novel, he had been a regular Indigenous person but had sucked in too much of the hovering grief haze that he forgot who he was and became a white ghost instead. While the novel is scathing about his contortions and doublespeak, if you have read any of Wright’s work you will realise that there is plenty of derision to go around. The townsfolk of Praiseworthy are certainly not the repository of any conventional form of wisdom, though they are deft in coining nicknames. They are by turns recalcitrant naysayers, self-interested busybodies, and gullible hypocrites ready to join the latest evangelical megachurch. There are many would-be prophets and Messianic figures in Wright’s work, but they always end up looking ridiculous or pitiable. In Praiseworthy, the donkeys evoke both Jesus Christ and Sancho Panza. Indeed, the relationship of the narrator to the hero is essentially the relationship of Sancho to Don Quixote.

One of the joys of reading Wright is the wry exasperation that permeates the narrator’s voice. Praiseworthy’s narration is a sustained rant that calls to mind the work of Thomas Bernhard or the quiet rage of Dostoyevsky. But as with the work of these great writers, there is always a gleam in the novel’s eye that causes the story to hover between tragedy and farce. This undecidability is the symptom of the scale of the novel’s address. Wright is that rare thing in Australian writing: a writer of political reality. Her subject is Indigenous political reality and it comes from her own lived experience of decades of doing what Alison Whittaker calls Blakwork. At this level, there is no real distinction between Wright’s fiction and non-fiction. But what her fiction does is enter the dramatic domain of allegory. That single figures – Cause Man Steel in Praiseworthy or Oblivia Ethylene in The Swan Book – are

There is only one true enemy in Praiseworthy and Tracker, and that is assimilation

made to carry the weight of epochal historical forces is at the same time preposterous and sublime. But Wright’s novels continually draw us back from these two impasses. Against absurdity and the numinous, Wright interposes reality. Obviously, this is not the workaday realism that claims to speak for everyday life in the Western tradition, but a fundamental political reality that only allegory seems able to name.

‘Such sadism, such pain’

Three novels about historical masculinity

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What Wright does is to dramatically expand the political domain by grounding it in Indigenous cosmology. The animistic immanence of Indigenous Country emerges, in Wright’s writing, as the ground of politics. It remembers, it knows, and it bides its time. Yet, along with the expansion of political franchise into realms that Western secularism brackets off as metaphysical, there is also the curious fact that the spirits in Wright’s novels are often rather indifferent. They sometimes scratch their heads at the latest human folly, but little seems to shake their equanimity. You get the feeling they have better things to do than look after needy humans.

At the other end, in Praiseworthy you find that the whole of Indigenous political reality is made to balance on the fulcrum of an acrimonious marriage. What is Dance meant to do with Cause? Here is the welding point in the whole allegory, where the epic contest of forces finds itself wedged into the painful silence of two people who can no longer talk to each other. That Dance has married Cause seems to speak to a primary dimension of Indigenous being. Indeed, the relationship of dance to causation was the animating question in Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance. In Wright’s Praiseworthy, we see this dialectic enacted once again.

Praiseworthy blew me away. If one wants to feel the grit of Indigenous sovereignty, or to see it working in its most unassimilable and joyously maddening forms, then Wright’s new novel offers that possibility. It is a novel that runs rings around the mincing discourses of reconciliation. It seems to casually hold the whole universe in the teasing circularity of its incantations. The novel also introduces an inflexion point in the political basis of the Australian polity by proposing a new ethics founded on the refusal of assimilation. This is what Hegel called the negation of a negation (insofar as assimilation negates Indigenous life). And, as in Hegel, in Wright the negation of a negation is not nothing. From the denial of assimilation’s denial, Wright’s novel spins a precious filament of hope that persistently tugs survival into sovereignty. g

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia.

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In recent historical fiction, women authors have explored the Australian past from a female viewpoint, as in Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves (2020), focusing on Elizabeth Macarthur, and Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, River of Dreams (2022), about Wagadhaany, an Indigenous woman from the Murrumbidgee River. As if in response to such potent novels, now comes a trio expressing historical masculinity.

In A Man of Honour (Echo Publishing, $32.99 pb, 337 pp), his first book, Simon Smith explores the experience and context of a past and notorious relative, using historical data to present the thoughts and actions of Henry O’Farrell, who, in March 1868, at Clontarf in New South Wales, shot a pistol at Alfred, duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria. The prince was badly wounded: O’Farrell was attacked and beaten by the monarchist crowd, rescued by arresting police, and executed within a month.

Smith turned from his respected career filming documentaries to research his relative, including recorded prison conversations with Henry Parkes, already Colonial Secretary, to go on to the premiership and – if not fully positive – fame. The book has notably cinematic qualities, with strong close-ups of O’Farrell’s thoughts; it cuts from scene to scene and across periods in O’Farrell’s life, especially between his sometimes difficult earlier days and the grim final sequences.

O’Farrell’s family, of Irish origin, were ‘charity’ immigrants from Britain to Australia. His mother pressed early Celtic myths on him as a child, and when he later visited Ireland he saw ‘such sadism, such pain’ that his anti-English radicalism was confirmed. Disturbed by the execution of the three Irish ‘Manchester Martyrs’ late in 1867, he attended a meeting of Sydney Fenians, who agreed that one would shoot the soon-to-arrive prince. Though he voted against the idea, O’Farrell drew the bleak lottery result – though later, presenting himself in prison as of deeply troubled mind, and so not executable, he denied that this happened.

In court, his sister speaks strongly for him as essentially insane, but the jury disagrees: here, O’Farrell himself says that Aspinall, the courtroom grandee who had in 1854 successfully defended the men of Eureka, was both too ‘ripe’ and too ‘florid’. Equally dubious is Parkes, whose interest in O’Farrell seems based on developing his own fame. The author uses as epigraph to the novel two verses by Parkes (also a prolific poet) that find a ‘gentle face’ and ‘beauty free from pride or blame’ on one who lived ‘but to terrorize’. Yet as a final note to the book, Smith reports that

Praiseworthy’s narration is a rant that calls to mind the work of Thomas Bernhard or the quiet rage of Dostoyevsky

these lines were in fact written in 1885 about Sofia Perevskaia, a Russian woman terrorist. The very frame of this strong narrative raises doubt about public assertions – like believing that Simon Smith’s distant relative was sane enough to be executed.

Ben Hobson is the author of two successful novels with nature settings, To Become a Whale (2017) and Snake Island (2019). In The Death of John Lacey (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 342 pp), he offers a robust story about nineteenth-century human experiences. Lacey is a greedy bully who prospers in early gold-mining days and has a town named after him. The rather confused young Ernst Montague and his Indigenous half-brother Joe encounter Lacey’s violent malice, and resist him seriously, in ways that should be left for readers to discover.

The novel has powerful scenes, such as Ernst’s mother dying in a fire, and before that his ex-convict father enjoying himself with his other woman, the Indigenous mother of Joe. The author also seems to know film techniques: he cuts boldly from one character and period to another, and finally introduces as commentator Father Gilbert Delaney, gentle but ill, who observes the Montague-Lacey drama’s grand final scene. Hobson explores convincingly the difficulties of seeking for gold, and the response of the Indigenous locals in a novel that effectively combines past credibility and sudden drama.

The third book is another historical account, with strong archival details. In The Investigators (Michael Joseph, $32.99 pb, 349 pp), Anthony Hill simply adds novelistic colour to detailed material that deals with Matthew Flinders’ famous first exploratory charting voyage around Australia in 1801, adding as a viewpoint his shipmate John Franklin, a fifteen-year-old midshipman who had already witnessed Nelson’s first distinction at the Battle of Copenhagen.

Flinders finds the great continent at its south-west point and sails near the coast all the way to Port Jackson, facing maritime storms and reefs – and other dangers. Nine men will be dead of dysentery by the end of this journey. Of the ten in a small boat that capsizes, only two can swim: eight drown or are eaten by sharks at what Flinders calls Cape Catastrophe. He leads, and charts, strongly throughout, but is constantly thinking of his

new wife, Ann, whom the admiralty did not permit to sail with him, as he had planned. Meanwhile, young Franklin learns about navigation and charting and steadily develops his nautical trade, despite having difficulties with Flinders’ younger brother Samuel. After reaching Port Jackson they soon sail on, with the ship slowly rotting. The rest of the circuit of Australia is made more quickly: Indigenous man Bungaree helps with the natives they meet. When they finally leave Sydney for home, now in a better ship, they are suddenly stranded on what Flinders naturally names Wreck Reef. He heads back in a cutter for a new boat: the others bravely sleep on the sand and, with their many skills, build a new schooner from the wreckage. Soon Franklin and others sail all the way home in one ship, but Flinders travels separately on another, which also proves unsafe. He has to put into Frenchrun Mauritius, where the brutal governor imprisons him for six years. He arrives home, quite ill, in 1810. After writing his famous account of A Voyage to Terra Australis, he dies in 1814. Franklin continues sailing, including to Trafalgar, and before long on three Arctic voyages: the last in 1847 ends when all the men, including Vice-Admiral Sir John Franklin, are trapped in the ice and lost.

The Flinders journey has been recounted before, by Ernestine Hill in My Love Must Wait (1941): that was rather more novel-like, with Ann Flinders appearing at the beginning and the conclusion. Anthony Hill himself humanises credibly the data he has researched, and in what he says will be his final novel adds a convincing reality narrative to this trio of men-in-history stories. Perhaps their narrow masculinity might inspire a new modern response: Kate Grenville’s account of Mrs Ann Flinders, waiting as she did for nine years for her once new husband, would itself be worth a wait. g

Stephen Knight, a long-term British migrant, of Welsh family, is in retirement an honorary Professor of Literature at the University of Melbourne, having previously been at universities in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and, finally, back in Cardiff. He specialised in medieval literature, writing books on Chaucer and Robin Hood, but he also reviewed crime fiction for the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1970s and 1980s, and has written several books on that topic.

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Foodies and fame

Ronnie Scott’s pandemic-inflected novel Morgan Nunan

Shirley

by Ronnie Scott Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 292 pp

The unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s second novel, Shirley, is a socially engaged thirty-something foodie from Melbourne’s inner north. She works as an internal copywriter for a health insurance company. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the vegan-friendly bars and eateries within a fivekilometre radius of her small apartment in trendy Collingwood. She also cooks: scrambled tofu and vegan chorizo soup; Korean vegan pancakes and Cantonese soy sauce noodles; pan-fried gnocchi with blended basil and gochujang. She might wash these down with a glass of wine or whisky, or even a michelada, followed by the occasional menthol cigarette. She has been confined to her apartment alone for 262 cumulative days of lockdown (‘and the wild, long days that have fallen between them’), imposed by the Victorian government to curtail Covid-19. She also happens to be the daughter of a celebrity.

Until the age of fourteen, the narrator was raised by her single mother (then ‘a late-nineties fixture of morning and lifestyle TV’) and an entourage of assistants whom the narrator nicknamed ‘the Geralds’ after the longest serving member of staff, a seemingly ageless business-manager-cum-butler. After the mother was ‘papped’ wearing a blood-soaked coat outside her Abbotsford home (the novel takes its title from the name of the house), she left her teen daughter to the care of ‘the main Gerald’ and the rest of the staff were terminated. Moving abroad, the mother eventually landed a gig hosting an international celebrity cooking show called (fittingly) Chef on the Run, from then on styling herself as an ‘e-parent’ to her daughter.

Almost two decades later, from the vantage point of post-lockdown Melbourne, the narrator reflects on the moveable relationships that wound and unravelled during the 2019–20 Australian summer, when megafires served as an entrée to the global pandemic. There is the ex-boyfriend David, an acid-tripping hospitality worker. While they are still a couple, David surprises the narrator by leasing the apartment next door, then a further surprise comes when he begins pursuing men. The slightly awkward dynamic in the apartment block following their breakup is heightened by the addition of two new residents: Frankie (‘the famous condiment maven’ who happens to be David’s boss), and her partner of convenience, Alex, a self-proclaimed ‘gigolo’, paid by Frankie to father their unborn child. Frankie enjoys the words ‘high’ and ‘drugs’, but her favourite word is surely ‘boss’, which she and her business partner (the similarly ‘famous’ Abi Zhong) wield as a

cherished identity marker. Abi’s child also happens to be fathered by Alex. As ‘food entrepreneurs’, both Frankie and Abi are fans of the narrator’s mother. They (along with, it seems, the nation) are dying to know more about the circumstances of the television icon’s scandalous exit from the country all those years ago; circumstances that become the novel’s chief mystery. In passages where Scott flirts with a departure from his mildly grungy realism, the narrator hints (via dreams and flashes of memory) at an elusive confrontation in the basement of the mother’s now infamous home.

Scott is a perceptive and assured writer. His first novel, The Adversary (2020) followed Salad Days (2014), a long-form essay exploring contemporary food culture. With Shirley, Scott’s spare, compulsively neat prose bears stylistic resemblances to writers like Rachel Cusk and Elizabeth Strout. The latter’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) has a comparably detached first-person narrator and shares several thematic concerns (complex mother–daughter relationships; the legacies of familial estrangement, childhood trauma, and loneliness), while also involving a period of confinement and a pandemic. Yet Shirley is a decidedly funnier novel. By incorporating a mischievous deadpan humour, albeit one inflected with the battle-weariness that follows lockdown, Scott maintains interest even when some narrative events pale as lower stakes or commonplace.

As with his first novel, Scott has a precise ear for millennial banter and is particularly skilled at representing group social dynamics (house parties and music festivals; run-ins with neighbours and office drinks). He is acutely alert to undercurrents in contemporary life: the unreality of fame, the internet and ecological disaster, the subtle flexes of social standing. In the shadow of celebrity and its muddying effect on people’s motives, Scott’s narrator is in search of something more solid. This is explored most compellingly in the novel’s emphasis on food.

In ‘foodie discourse’, write the authors of Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape (2010), authenticity is ‘one of the primary characteristics that foodies use for making culinary choices’, while also being used by some ‘to facilitate status distinctions’. From this perspective, the novel’s elaborate ingredients lists and cooking instructions are anything but gratuitous. Rivalling Ernest Hemingway’s similarly restrained posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986) for its gastronomic detail, Shirley builds on issues addressed by Scott in Salad Days: the interplay of food habits and class; the competing ethics of consumption. In a unique representation of the slippery nature of authenticity, the novel pits the narrator’s humble, open-minded cooking hobby against the opportunism of those around her (neither her mother nor Frankie were cooks until it meant money and status). Yet it is often the narrator who insists on signalling her ‘class knowledge’, as well as her connection to fame (she relentlessly identifies her mother’s house by its famous name, despite the unwanted attention her mother’s profile often brings).

In Shirley, the pandemic becomes incubator for the narrator’s largely psychological journey; a nuanced maturation that slides between cringey and comic; touching and mundane. Ultimately, it is Scott’s attentiveness to language and contemporary culture that proves most engaging. g

Morgan Nunan is a writer based in Adelaide.

High noon

Romance through the generations

Maria Takolander

Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 336 pp

While the terms ‘romance’ and ‘novel’ are entangled at their origins, romance novels have been traditionally disparaged as formulaic and frivolous, feminine and anti-feminist. Nevertheless, romance is the most popular genre in the world. Harlequin reportedly sells two books every second. In recent times, scholars have given the genre serious attention.

Of course, a romantic plot is hardly exclusive to genre writing. Some of the great works of world literature, from Jane Eyre (1847) to The English Patient (1992), rely for their power on romantic love – its frisson of desire and fear, its inevitable association with transgression and betrayal. Romance, in other words, is not merely fare for women readers reputedly keen to escape into hackneyed fantasies of love.

Madelaine Lucas has unashamedly described her début novel, Thirst for Salt, as a love story, though it is hardly marketed as genre fiction. There is no burly shirtless man on the cover for a start. Indeed, given that Lucas developed the novel from the story that won the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the book invites high literary expectations. Unfortunately, those expectations, at least for this reader, were far from realised. Despite its lyrical language and its melancholy complication of the happy-ever-after plot of genre romance, Lucas’s novel – whose protagonist dreams of ‘having a baby with a man I loved and raising it together’ – is almost anachronistically conventional. It might even be called post-feminist.

It seems necessary at this stage to confess: I’m not much of a romantic. In fact, my husband – who must surely carry some authority when it comes to these matters – claims that I am the least romantic person he knows. Nevertheless, it is the case that I married him, and even I have found the Sturm und Drang of Jane Eyre and The English Patient irresistible. There are literal storms aplenty in Lucas’s novel, which is set in a holiday hamlet on the New South Wales coast, where even the environment is invested with romantic potential: the ‘sea and sky seem to merge, to kiss’, and black swans are described as having ‘dark hooked necks like one half of a love heart’. However, there is little in the way of pageturning drama.

The lovers’ initial meeting seems to portend suspense. When the first-person narrator, a young woman aged twenty-four, first sees her lover Jude, a man twenty years her senior, it is in the sea beyond the breakers, where she is narcissistically enjoying, perhaps owing to her youth, the ‘salt tangling my hair and making

my eyes brighter like after sex or after crying’. When Jude later approaches her on the beach, he calls her ‘Sharkbait’ because of her habit of swimming alone out in the deep. Later in the novel, the narrator calls her lover a shark, and reflects on how she wants ‘to be devoured, pulled apart limb by limb, or swallowed whole’. This dialectic of menace and masochism reminded me of Kathryn Heyman’s superb novel Storm and Grace (2017), which self-consciously repeats the tropes of a romance narrative to critique the gender ideology at its core, which she relates to society’s epidemic of domestic violence.

Lucas, however, has no interest in exploring anything so provocative. Her young narrator is concerned with standard matters: ‘He looked at me … as if he could see through to the core of me, burning away all that was not essential, the way the high noon sun burns up all the water in the morning air. No man had ever looked at me that way before.’ In fact, when Lucas does touch on domestic violence, with the protagonist remembering an episode involving her single mother and a past boyfriend, it is explained as evidence of the violence of desire. It is a deeply problematic suggestion, to say the least, that required further thought.

The obligatory passionate encounter – discreetly portrayed –that soon takes place between our lovers is again associated with danger. The narrator is stung by a bluebottle before they have sex. However, any damage that our lovers go on to wreak upon each other can only be described as low-grade – so low-grade that I wonder if there was enough here to sustain a whole novel. The narrator may complain that Jude likes ‘love with a loose leash’, but this hardly makes him a monster. Likewise, while the narrator typically presents herself as lonely and vulnerable, she is also jealous and possessive, and unable to maturely articulate her fears and desires, including her fantasy of having a baby.

The generation gap could have given rise to some interesting material. While a potential power imbalance between the narrator and her much older lover is noted, nothing really noteworthy is unearthed. The novel also explores the relationship between the narrator and her mother, but their conversations about generational change mostly prove disconcerting. For example, when the narrator’s mother remembers how a man at the supermarket showed sexual interest in her then twelve-year-old daughter instead of her, she puts it down to ‘Nature’. The narrator privately reflects: ‘I did not wish to eclipse my mother, even if it was, as she said, only natural.’

Perhaps simultaneously the most interesting and the most boring aspect of this romance is how soon the couple settles into domesticity, complete with roaring fireplace and dog. Of course, there has to be some difficulty – this is aspiring to be a literary romance after all – but this is a novel without any real surprises, where everything is ultimately thoroughly accounted for. It is almost enough to take the romance out of romance. g

It seems necessary at this stage to confess:

much of a romantic

Maria Takolander won the inaugural ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2010.

Queers in the canon

Navel-gazing in the name of Sappho

Ruth McHugh-Dillon

After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 277 pp

Whether or not you have read literary critic Harold Bloom, you will have heard the term ‘anxiety of influence’, coined in his 1970s book of the same name. There and in The Western Canon (1994), Bloom proposes a vision of creativity inspired by Freud, the Romantics, and the Ancient Greeks, in which great men throughout history wrestle one another for poetic supremacy. Creative production is a violent, Oedipal struggle in which only a ‘strong’ poet can overcome the influence of his forebear. And yes, it is almost always a ‘him’. In The Western Canon, only four women in history make the cut in a list of twenty-six, mostly English-language, writers whom Bloom deems central to Western civilisation (Shakespeare, Proust, Beckett, etc.). My nit-picking would no doubt have annoyed Bloom, who rankled at what he called the School of Resentment – feminist, Marxist, and race studies scholars who kept tampering with the canon in the name of social justice. For him, aesthetic value transcends these concerns and can be objectively assessed. Some people (almost always male) are simply geniuses.

Bloom died in 2019 so we can only guess his take on Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, a novel which weaves together fictionalised biographies of real-life, queer, feminist writers, artists, and activists – some famous, others not – who clustered in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Pitting her novel against centuries of systemic gatekeeping, erasure, and violence, Schwartz has eyes on the canon. By weaving historical events and legal texts into fiction, After Sappho exposes how the patriarchy has erected its narrow canon in law and in literature and then defended itself as if it were already there, the natural order.

Like her masculine predecessors, Schwartz is well versed in the classics. She diverges from their path with knowing glee, however, to revel in influence as an immersive experience. After Sappho creates a vision of creative, sexual, and romantic connection between women that is as lush and joyful as it is enraged by men’s violence.

Individual genius? Creation as a battleground between fathers and sons? These ideas are on the chopping block. After Sappho instead builds a portrait of artistic vitality through repetition and return, in vignettes depicting historical figures such as Eileen Gray, Sarah Barnhardt, Lina Poletti, Natalie Barney, and – of course –Virginia Woolf. Although the narrative generally moves forward in time, it overlaps, jumps and traces back. The novel’s uniting thread is Sappho’s poetry, interspersed throughout, and the dream of her

sexy queer life on Lesbos, which yokes together the novel’s huge community of characters. As a unifying foremother, Sappho is also an appropriate paradox, given that so little is known about her life and that her poetry survives only in fragments. This Sapphic past holds the promise of a queer future, what the novel repeatedly calls ‘becoming Sappho’. Creative life as a queer ‘chosen’ family – what you assemble rather than what you inherit.

Like queer sex meant for pleasure, not reproduction, After Sappho delights in the messy, non-linear state of creative connection. However, it frequently delights too much in its own cleverness, and the cumulative effect of reading vignette after vignette, each closing with a line freighted with meaning, can be exhausting as the story continuously changes gears. The novel’s relentless sweeping and swapping, and its devotion to poetic imagery, arch observation, and untranslated morsels of French and Italian, ultimately depersonalise the very characters it aims to bring to life. Quirks, whims, and fancies masquerade as personality:

Romaine detested crowds and sandwiches, she liked solitude and cakes that were half-chocolate and half-vanilla. Romaine wore black clothes that made a room colder, more elegant.

Where After Sappho succeeds is through its communal voice: Schwartz summons a group of anonymous women to narrate the story in the collective pronoun ‘we’. As the novel’s most inventive element, they function like a Greek chorus: ever-present to observe and comment; implicated in the story yet slightly removed. The collective voice claims both tragedies and triumphs. When people hiss that the dancer Liane de Pougy is too whore-like and low-born to have written her own book, the narration bristles, protective and faintly puzzled: ‘in our eyes no one had written any of this herself. We were grasping each other by wrists in a circle.’

Sustaining an entire novel in the choral ‘we’ is an impressive feat. Yet precisely because its voice and its ideals of equality, community, and emancipation are so ambitious, the novel invites scrutiny over who its tight-gripped circle excludes. Reading, I tried to resist imposing that heavy burden on marginalised voices, to represent everyone and everything. And yet I kept wondering where the poor punky dykes were, and the illiterate queers enslaved in domestic work. What about the homophobic laws the British installed in its colonies, which still wreck lives today? Schwartz herself seems self-conscious about the omissions as the text flits over Italy’s colonial atrocities in Eritrea: ‘Perhaps we closed our eyes in order to linger in that dream of our idyll … We kept them at a distance and turned our eyes to Sappho, to Lina Poletti, to the Divine Sarah [Bernhardt]. We wanted stories set about us like gleaming surfaces, reflecting and burnishing our hopes.’

Thus the novel excuses us for where ‘we’ turn our eyes by eliding the intellectual engagement it claims to celebrate. The postcolonial scholar Edward Said knew, unlike Harold Bloom, that the Western canon could only be enriched by readings which acknowledged the imperial violence that it created and that created it. Disappointingly, for all its passionate talk of messiness, subversion, and communality, After Sappho seems intent to preserve many of the myths empire has perpetuated for centuries, tucking them – polished, gleaming, and self-reflective – out of reach. g

2023 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 2023 Jolley Prize closes on 24 April 2023.

It will be judged by Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander

The Jolley Prize honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. It is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. Entries should be original single-authored works of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500

previous winners

2010

Maria Takolander

2011

Gregory Day & Carrie Tiffany

2012

Sue Hurley

2013

Michelle Michau-Crawford

2014

Jennifer Down

2015

Rob Magnuson Smith

2016

Josephine Rowe

2017

Eliza Robertson

2018

Madelaine Lucas

2019

Sonja Dechian

2020 Mykaela Saunders

2021

Camilla Chaudhary

2022

Tracy Ellis

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM.

our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Avant-garden

Privileging reflection over action

Michael Winkler

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton Granta $32.99 pb, 432 pp

Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a thriller that, for much of its length, privileges reflection over action.Thus, when aspiring journalist Tony Gallo makes it back to his car after multiple threats to his life, does he speed away from his potential assassins in search of safety? He does not. Instead, he has a good long ponder:

He was so staggered that he started to laugh, but his laughter subsided almost at once, and in its place he felt a wave of fury and despair roll over him at the sheer inexorability of late-capitalist degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more – a familiar surge of grief and helpless rage at the reckless, wasteful, soulless, narcissistic, barren selfishness of the present day, and at his own political irrelevance and impotence, and at the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life – ‘real life’, Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.

The prolixity, undergraduate social analysis, and choice of exposition over action are emblematic.

Birnam Wood is set around the fictional Korowai National Park on New Zealand’s South Island. A neighbouring property owned by Sir Owen and Lady Darvish is being sold to American billionaire Robert Lemoine, ostensibly so that he can build an apocalypse-proof bunker. His true purpose is the illegal mining of rare earth minerals. The property also appeals to Birnam Wood, a collective of guerrilla gardeners, as a place to grow produce. The year is 2017, immediately before the election of Jacinda Ardern.

Catton’s previous novel, the Booker-winning The Luminaries (2013) had two intriguing organising principles – astrology, and chapter lengths seemingly governed by the golden mean. By contrast, Birnam Wood is split into three sections – beginning, middle, end. It is structured on an exponential curve, so pacing stays sluggishly close to the x-axis for almost half the book. The plot steadily picks up speed through the middle third and is break-

neck by the time it smashes into a denouement more ruthless than anticipated.

Great thrillers are economical, propulsive, studded with hooks. Through much of this book, Catton chooses tension-killing disquisition. Action that could be conveyed in a lean sentence is explicated in exasperating detail. It pivots on the idea that a leftist/anarchist collective would willingly accept a large cash donation from a sinister US billionaire who runs a surveillance company, and that, conversely, a villain engaged in an illegal activity worth trillions of dollars, guarded by armed mercenaries, would jeopardise everything by allowing a band of avant-gardeners to squat nearby.

Catton constructs Lemoine – presumably based in part on billionaire Peter Thiel, controversially granted New Zealand citizenship and permitted to purchase wilderness-adjacent land, allegedly as a doomsday bolthole – as the sort of uber-baddy who provided camp fun in golden era James Bond films. ‘Lemoine’s risk appetite tended to be whetted by unforeseen disaster; he experienced the deaths of other people as a challenge, a chance for him to test his own mortality and win.’ As for his heinous activity, ‘If he pulled this off – and he had never failed in any of his ventures yet – he would become, by several orders of magnitude, the richest person who had ever lived.’

The stranglehold of the show-don’t-tell literary mandate has slackened in recent years, happily, but Catton’s insistence on telling is tiring. Consider her explanation of how Lemoine appears to the Darvishes: ‘He was simply a far-sighted, short-selling, risk-embracing kleptocrat, an incarnation of unapologetic zero-sum self-interest, a radical misfit, a “builder” in the Randian sense, a genius, a tyrant, an obsessive, a prophet, a status-symbol survivalist hedging his bets against any number of potential global catastrophes that he himself was doing absolutely nothing to prevent, and might even be taking active measures to encourage if there was a profit to be made, or an advantage to be gained, in the pursuit.’ The satire trudges in heavy boots.

We are told initially that the collective’s unelected leader Mira ‘was quick to punish anything she judged to be a sign of moral weakness, no matter how privately or invisibly it was expressed’. However, with little effort, the evil Lemoine seduces her, a bewildering flaw in the novel’s own logic. Tony sleeps alone, but warms himself with dreams of proletarian triumph: ‘For once in Tony’s life, the privatising maniacs in power had been impeded; for once in his life, the greed and degradation of their placating free-market dogma had been exposed for what it was!’

The novel has a strong commitment to place, but no Māori characters. Its title links to Macbeth, ideas of hiding in plain sight and moral culpability. There is an earnest desire to engage with political philosophy – especially the tension between ideological purity and achievable action – but the copious dialogue conveying this lacks edge or insight. Ultimately it pushes the cynical and inaccurate idea that selfishness governs all behaviour, whether crusading journalist, anarchic horticulturalist, or multi-billionaire supervillain. This charge of complicity with rapacious capitalism could be fairly brought against sheep-in-wolves’-clothing centrists like the NZ Labour and Australian Labor governments, but the besetting flaw of the left-wingers Catton scolds is impotence, failing to engineer sufficient change while the planet lurches deeper into climate crisis. No selling out – but headed for destruction anyway. g

Care as concept

A binding force revealed

Shannon Burns

Who Cares? Life on welfare in Australia

by Eve Vincent Melbourne University Press

$33 pb, 170 pp

According to its author, Who Cares? offers ‘an up-close, humane and grounded ethnographic account of life on welfare’. Eve Vincent foregrounds the perspectives of people who are subjected to ‘an endlessly reforming welfare system’. Vincent spent substantial time in the field, building relationships with her subjects, and while the history of welfare in Australia is neatly sketched and the social and political theories underpinning the study are worthy of interest, the voices of her subjects – those who live in poverty while being subjected to strict (and sometimes nonsensical) conditions – are the book’s most vital and captivating features.

The publication of Who Cares? coincides with testimonies given to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, which have further demonstrated that the harms inflicted by the unlawful debt recovery scheme were a product of malicious pigheadedness on the part of the federal ministers and high-ranking public servants who oversaw it. The revelations are entirely consistent with Vincent’s analysis of how welfare is administered in Australia. Vincent – Chair of Anthropology in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences - notes that social security became ‘increasingly conditional and punitive’ in the 1990s, and that the trend has persisted in this century. To be unemployed is to ‘subsist in crushing poverty, especially in major Australian cities where housing costs are steep’, but pleas to increase rates and expand access to essential resources are continually rejected.

Who Cares? focuses on people who are ‘affected by two significant recent welfare measures: the cashless debit card and a pre-employment program called ParentsNext’. In both instances, welfare assistance ‘comes with complex conditions attached, and there are financial sanctions associated with non-adherence, or alleged non-adherence’. The cashless debit card trials were introduced in Ceduna, in March 2016, and were abolished by the Labor government last year. The card ‘quarantined 80 per cent of all income support payments’ and initially targeted First Nations people disproportionately. The aim was to prevent the purchase of alcohol and drugs, to limit spending on gambling and pornography, and to thereby reduce violence and other destructive behaviours. However, its impact could not be measured because necessary data was not captured before the trial. The cashless debit card was a shoddy social experiment run by people who failed to do the basics.

ParentsNext is a compulsory program for parents of young

children who receive income support, obliging them to participate in various parenting and work-ready activities that are designed to push them towards employment. According to Vincent, ‘the Australian welfare system positions working women as ideal mothers’, and ParentsNext is underpinned by the belief that ‘impoverished women who stay home to raise their children’ need to be moulded into workers. She argues that ‘Caring is delegitimised as activity, while the parents of infants are recast as essentially unemployed.’

ParentsNext has also been plagued by mismanagement. Vincent provides confounding statistics, like: ‘85 per cent of parents on ParentsNext who had their income support temporarily cut off in the 2018–19 financial year were found not to have been at fault’. Alongside the threat of wrongful loss of income support, the program is partly implemented by low-wage, under-qualified employees of multinational conglomerates, who are prone to confusion and basic errors.

Imagine being a single parent who relies on everything going right in order to manage meagre funds and care for a small child, only to be informed that your payment has been suspended just as the bills are due. Will you have to beg someone for money? Will you be able to feed your child? Will you have somewhere safe to sleep if the decision isn’t reversed in time? Will the people who help you during this crisis do it willingly or grudgingly? How can your children thrive while you are under this kind of strain? The difficulties that carers have endured under ParentsNext suggests that the government is more concerned with extracting additional labour from impoverished mothers than with the welfare of their children.

The good news is that ParentsNext may soon be scrapped as well, a parliamentary committee having found that it does too much harm and recommending substantial changes. Vincent has captured two slices of Australian welfare history just as they begin to fade into history, but there is no evidence that the underlying principles that produced both programs have been abandoned.

According to Vincent, many people on welfare experience life as a series of encounters with uncontrolled and uncontrollable events, and ‘the card and ParentsNext often represented one more such interruption’, compounding those difficulties instead of alleviating them. Vincent sees a hidden purpose behind welfare’s anxietyinducing conditions: recipients are being prepared for ‘lowwage, unpredictable and casualised work’. Insecurity and poverty are features of contemporary employment as well as unemployment.

Care and caregiving are central concepts for this book. Vincent wants to give them primacy in our political and personal dealings, to assert the value of caring both as work and as a binding social force, a testament to our interdependence. Caregivers are workers, she argues, and caring for the most vulnerable is a core function of decent societies and their governments. In contrast with this ideal, Who Cares? documents a period where the Australian welfare state extended ‘its transition to a more disciplinarian guise, marking an ever-diminishing offer of care to those in need’. Vincent avoids nostalgia for twentieth-century welfare programs, however, noting that they excluded and punished segments of the population due to biases around race, gender, and sexuality. Instead, she pleads for a new system of welfare underpinned by an expansive conception of care.

Start something you won’t want to stop.

A Japanese Boy Sees A New Light Escaping from North Korea

Shu Shimizu

A Japanese boy experienced Imperialism, Communism, and Democracy in the Korean peninsula in the period of less than a year before and after the end of World War II, and decided under which principle he would rather like to live in the future. Find out how he survived the harsh North Korean winter as a refugee.

AUD $19.95 paperback

978-1-5437-7095-7 also available in hardcover & ebook

www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Random Constructive Writings

Corinne Phillips

AUD $16.99 paperback

978-1-9845-0683-2 also available in hardcover & ebook

www.xlibris.com.au

Corinne Phillips delights readers with a compendium of eclectic poetry reflecting her observations and thoughts about different things. Each piece is unusual and unexpected. They are odd and different — and you never know what you are going to get with her writing as she tackles about all subjects and random topics.

Down From the Mountain

The Path of a Baby Boomer

Brian Vickery

This biography takes a glimpse into the life of one man who unexpectedly found himself drafted into an Army that he had no interest in joining.

AUD $24.99 paperback

978-1-9845-0653-5 also available in hardcover & ebook

www.xlibris.com.au

Run! Oongly Moongly!

Thanmolie K Vellasamy

A charming friendship blossoms between a little girl Meena and a caterpillar Oongly Moongly. Can Meena protect him as he crawls from one danger to another?

AUD $36.95 paperback

978-1-5437-6778-0 also available in hardcover & ebook

www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore

Much of the material in Who Cares? is enraging. One sixtyyear-old woman, who is caring for her mother and has a history of fulfilling her responsibilities, says of the cashless debit card: ‘They’re taking the responsibility away from me … It’s treating me like a little kid again.’ Others speak of the humiliation associated with possessing the cashless debit card instead of an ordinary bank card. The card was not only infantilising in its restrictions; it was also a brand that people were forced to wear, to display their economic and social status whenever they made a purchase.

Vincent’s larger argument is shakiest when she advocates for a new and de-stigmatised conception of dependency as an extension of the ‘primal scene’ of an infant suckling its mother’s breast. She seeks to emphasise the mutually nourishing aspects of dependency, but her ambition is in conflict with those who speak of the humiliations associated with being infantilised by a controlling and distrustful system. For such people, the invi-

History

Escaping the barriers

Debunking myths about women in science

Jessica Urwin

Taking to the Field: A history of Australian women in science

by Jane Carey Monash University Publishing $34.99

pb, 336 pp

In 1943, of the 101 science graduates of the University of Sydney, 55.4 per cent were women. That same year at the University of Melbourne the proportion was 46.2 per cent, and by 1945 women made up 37.4 per cent of all science graduates across Australia. Given contemporary anxieties about women’s involvement in science, these statistics appear unbelievable. Yet, as Jane Carey explores in Taking to the Field, between the 1880s and the 1950s women were not only completing science degrees in notable numbers but, even outside the unusual war years, were contributing valuably to Australian science through research, teaching, and social reform.

Taking to the Field aims to ‘name’ and ‘reclaim’ these women. Across six chapters, Australia’s little-known women of science are placed into their respective arenas: as amateur natural scientists in the bush; social reformers gracing community halls and lecture theatres; and as academic women in Australia’s universities. These women, Carey contends, were ‘those who escaped the barriers that restricted other women so completely’. They were women whose social and financial mobility, family connections, and education ‘expanded their horizons’. Carey maintains that these influences – i.e. those that have supported women’s participation in science – demonstrate that there was ‘remarkably little resistance’

tation to imagine themselves as a baby suckling at a benevolent and attentive mother’s breast is probably only marginally less demeaning than being treated like a naughty child.

Single carers – usually women – are worse off now than they were forty years ago. Social housing is a precious rarity, and rent prices are obscene. Full-time parenting is challenging under normal circumstances, but to care for a child or an impaired dependant while grappling with suffocating poverty requires uncommon stamina and ingenuity. Suspending essential payments to any person living under those conditions should always be taboo; instead, it has become the norm. Vincent shows that towards the end of the twentieth century Australia stopped caring for welfare recipients and began punishing them instead. g

Shannon Burns is the author of a memoir, Childhood (Text Publishing, 2022).

to their inclusion, despite our tendency to think otherwise.

This is evident in women’s involvement in the acquisition and dissemination of scientific knowledge prior to science’s professionalisation. Carey uses various colonial women, including writer and keen botanist Louisa Atkinson and amateur geologist and (later) anthropologist Georgina King, to demonstrate that gathering scientific knowledge of the Empire’s far-flung territories was considered a worthy pursuit for financially and socially mobile women in the mid-nineteenth century. Women’s early contributions to science as amateur naturalists aided colonisation by both ‘uncovering’ nature’s ‘secrets and treasures’ and assisting in the ‘quest for national identity’. This was especially important for a nation finding its feet.

But women’s participation in science expanded beyond amateurism. Once Australian universities opened their doors in the 1880s, the prohibitive cost of undertaking a degree and the inaccessibility of good secondary education prevented many from entering universities. Those that acquired bachelor degrees were part of an élite group. Women were not naturally excluded from this. To the contrary, women’s admission to science degrees existed as an example of Australia’s progressivism at the turn of the century, especially in comparison to the staunch tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, whose first women graduates received their degrees in 1920 and 1948 respectively. And while the number of graduates in science was still remarkably low, Australian universities were openly proud of their ‘sweet girl graduates’. These were women whose scientific pursuits seemingly placed them ‘above ordinary feminine trivialities’, while paradoxically representing the compatibility of scientific work with ‘traditional feminine activities’ as specimen jars were likened to ‘the thrifty housewife’s jam jars’.

Reading Taking to the Field, it becomes clear that women were invaluable to science not only as university students, but as educators. It is in this context that Ada Lambert became the first woman to be appointed a university lecturer in 1899. And while few other women would achieve similar permanency over the succeeding decades, university departments were heavily populated

by women. Walter Baldwin Spencer’s biology department at the University of Melbourne became entirely dependent upon women as researchers, tutors, and demonstrators. This was certainly not an anomaly; the lack of career prospects in science made it an unpopular pursuit for men. The shortage of jobs also ensured that many scientifically trained women turned to secondary teaching or even scientific social reform, the latter influenced strongly by eugenics. Regardless of the space they occupied, Carey maintains that these ‘pioneering’ women demonstrated their ability to overcome many of the obstacles of gender in this period.

Yet, gender still mattered. A key enabler of women’s early inclusion in science was men’s absence. In the early twentieth century, senior male biological scientists lamented the abundance of women applying for vacant positions; considerable effort was put towards attracting men to science, not least by increasing salaries. Women, seldom promoted beyond casual positions, were often forced to give up their research careers following marriage. Nepotism was forbidden by many universities; while daughters of famous scientists (such as Douglas Mawson’s, Patricia and Jessica Mawson) were able to follow their fathers into science, women could not be gainfully employed by their husband’s institution. Naturally, this precluded many educated women from employment.

But it was the masculinisation of science following World War II that most acutely impacted women’s participation. The importance of science to the war effort resulted in a remarkable growth in male university enrolments. By the 1960s, academia

was rebranded as an unwomanly pursuit, ‘at odds’ with women’s ‘feminine appearance’. Biology, where women had found a safe haven, was recast as a man’s domain. Women were actively paid less than their male counterparts and some universities forced them to retire earlier than their male colleagues. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of women science graduates dropped considerably, contributing to what Carey considers our contemporary presumption of ‘the impossibility of women scientists’ in the early twentieth century.

Challenging this presumption, Taking to the Field reiterates that women’s contemporary participation in science is not a teleological tale of progress, from absence to inclusion. Rather, it is one of ebbs and flows. By highlighting the enigmatic and unique women who participated in Australian science during its early days, Carey demonstrates that their contributions have been vastly underappreciated by historians. This has been to our detriment, not least as their stories unsettle our understandings of women in science as a markedly contemporary – and exceptional – development. In exploring the historic contributions of women to Australian science, Taking to the Field confronts contemporary anxieties about the place of women in the field by demonstrating that it has not always been – therefore does not have to be – hostile to women. g

Writing that matters, wherever you go.

Jessica Urwin is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Environmental History at the ANU.

More than a trade route

The Silk Road as metaphor

Robert Wellington

The Silk Road: Connecting histories and futures

by Tim Winter Oxford University Press £18.99 pb, 264 pp

The Silk Road is not one place, nor is it a particular route for travel, trade, and cross-cultural exchange. It is an idea, and a powerful one at that, as Tim Winter’s The Silk Road: Connecting histories and futures shows. The concept of the Seidenstraße was popularised by Ferdinand von Richthofen in the 1870s to define the trade routes westwards from Han China in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Since then scholars have argued for many Silk Roads over land and sea between Africa, Eurasia, and the islands around those landmasses through which goods and ideas have been exchanged for at least two millennia.

The bountiful, exotic lands of the Silk Road have been part of the Western imagination for centuries. It was as fanciful as it was dangerous, fuelling the age of exploration, and, ultimately, violent colonisation. The connection between European colonisation and a fascination for global material culture is well documented, but it is not the focus of this study.

Winter, an ARC Professorial Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia, touches on that topic in the second chapter. He shows how European treasure hunters took advantage of new rail lines into Central Asia to travel to the sites they plundered. Boxes and boxes of books, manuscripts, and objects that documented cultural exchange were sent to St Petersburg, Berlin, and London to form the nucleus of Silk Road collections. Thousands of manuscripts written in Chinese, Tibetan, Tangut, Sanskrit, Turkish, and other more obscure languages, which had been sealed for centuries behind a wall of ‘the Library Cave’ in the Mogao Buddhist cave complex, were shipped off to European collections in the early twentieth century. The wealth of cross-cultural ideas expressed in the material culture of the Mogao caves solidified the notion of Central Asia as the crossroads of the Silk Road, and that site became the focus of interest (and plunder) for French, Japanese, and Russian archaeologists in the years that followed.

That section of Winter’s book will pique the interest of those who have been following recent debates about looted artefacts in European museums. The ABC podcast hosted by Marc Fennell called Stuff the British Stole is a case in point, along with its counterpoint: the BBC’s The History of the World in 100 Objects podcast co-produced with the British Museum.

The Silk Road entered the popular imagination in the West in the 1930s, around the time that Marco Polo’s travels became a favourite subject for Hollywood. The story of a Venetian merchant

adventurer who travelled through Central Asia to China at the end of the thirteenth century became a quintessential story of the European encounter with the exotic Other in the perfumed orient, a land of spices, silks, carpets, porcelains, and jewels. The fascination with the ‘exotic’ East led many to follow in Marco Polo’s footsteps in the age of mass tourism. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this, and much more that Winter includes in his study. The popularity of Joanna Lumley’s Silk Road Adventure, aired by the ABC in 2018, suggests that travelling the Silk Road is still a fantasy adventure holiday for many.

The creation of the Silk Road discourse in the West is covered in the first two parts of Winter’s book. The subsequent three sections are where the real innovation of his analysis lies. He presents a compelling argument that the boom in Silk Road studies from the 1990s to the present day has shifted focus away from Europe to Asia within the academy. A new conception of the ‘Maritime Silk Road’, mooted by Japanese scholars in the 1950s, incorporated the island nation of Japan into the story of Eurasian exchange. The culmination of the Japanese focus on Silk Road studies was an exhibition in Nara (1988), now defined as a key node in historical international trade; thirty tonnes of sand from Central Asia were shipped to the museum to provide a tangible material connection of lands separated by seas. This consolidated Japan’s cultural reintegration into the global community following World War II. As Winter cogently argues, the focus of Silk Road studies shifts in tandem with ‘the geographic and institutional parameters of conflict and peace-making’.

The book culminates in a fascinating analysis of China’s Silk Road revival. It is the framing idea for Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious infrastructure and development strategy that aims to place China at the centre of a global network of trade and diplomacy. China’s leader announced the initiative in 2013. Sharing a Common Future: Exhibition of treasures from national museums along the Silk Road, held at the National Museum of China in Beijing in 2019, made the concept of a Silk Road revival explicit. Each country that lent works to the exhibition was a ‘Belt and Road’ partner, and as a result the objects on show expanded the scope of Silk Road artefacts to include transcultural European items of clothing, furniture, clocks, and dinnerware.

Winter leads the reader to the intriguing conclusion that the Silk Road has become a concept aligned to geopolitics, and a metaphor for ‘China’s international ambitions’. In Xi Jinping’s China, ‘the Silk Road and its associated metaphors conceal its geopolitical qualities and intentionally render infrastructure, multinational banking, and development aid as benign and of benefit to all’. Winter’s important book takes us through the formation of Silk Road studies from the Western interest in Eastern material culture, to the age of adventure tourism, to soft power and diplomacy in China today. It is a revelatory study, dispelling orientalist myths and cross-cultural accord, and showing how the Silk Road functions as a metonym of cultural exchange to buttress the diplomatic and economic interests of those who promote its study. g

Robert Wellington is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University, and coeditor of the Humanities Research Journal. ❖

‘The song of null land’

The poetics of disorientation

Judith Bishop

The

Book of Falling

by David McCooey Upswell

$24.99 pb, 112 pp

ter other worlds and world views.

$24.95 pb, 104 pp

In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something

A Foul Wind traces its lineage back to a hermetic Occitan troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, whose provocative poem ‘Pus Raimons e Truc Malecx’ reads in part (the translation is unattributed), ‘ Cos the trumpet’s crude and hairy / And the swamp it hides is dark’ This poem, Giorgio Agamben suggests in The End of the Poem (1999), ‘transforms a sexual prank into a poetic query’, with a trope that seems to doubly signify the anus and a break with metrical norms. Dante referred to Daniel as il miglior fabbro, the better maker. Clemens’s genre-blending fluency is likewise highly artful, formidably energetic, and incessantly coded. Some readers will relish digging up the source codes and spotting the compulsive transformations (‘Hombre Wail, / Sea Moan’s brother’, ‘Punk Fraud’, ‘Lacky’, ‘Thus Spuke Zerothruster’). Others will enjoy the Beckettian nihilist exuberance and its self-reflexive, rollicking disorder and muck:

i put me trumpet to me lips and blow much like roland at roncevalles but this is not navarre & there’s no Charlemagne to send belated aid: there’s only champagne & abominations breeding like the cane toads of Outremer flowering to deliquescent pustules in fading night (‘the song of null land’)

Do not endure the enteritis of elocutionary ordure a voice brayed suddenly through the half-light of the hall. (‘Busting stile to prolong the mechanical’s existentially intervallic void’)

If representational meaning is off the table here, emotive meaning slides into its place, underscoring the black humour with recurring tropes and jokes about putrescence, orifices, money, death, escape, power, illusion, hype, ruin, abomination, and exhaustion. A hallucinatory, David Lynch-inspired opening poem, ‘the problem of evil’, sets the scene by DJ’ing a sequence of four genre snippets in as many stanzas, one of which reads like a punk rock lyric: ‘All doing / Is a death ray / To fuck the one you love.’

Dizzying lexical and dialectal mash-ups thumb their nose at the conventional lyric conflation of identity and language, offering in its place a style driven by the accidents of ‘stochastic metaneuronic discharge / and exhaust’:

Ah he wuz well rewarded later wit a million books he couldna read, so it’s hard to feel too sorry for the impersonal personage he felt himself.

(‘Mentaphonic radiocules enwinkling ordographic delicacies outta insalubrious oncophores’)

that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encoun-

The final section, ‘Home of own’, which comprises half the book, is energetically and tonally distinct from the rest, though many of its lexical moves are the same. Spoiler alert: ‘Home of own’ is a near-homophone of – well, you know what. Lacking the rewards of exuberant lingual energy, this extended play on philosophical conceptions of language, naming, and being falls

A Foul Wind by Justin Clemens Hunter Publishers

Justin Clemens

rather flat, with the effort of deciphering lines such as ‘One a mat, a peer / and a lurgy. / I, runny, / Lie to tease’ offering little even to the most ardent lover of homophony.

And yet, there are arresting lines here, though one hesitates to read them as transparently sincere: ‘so many prophets of hate / hate needs no prophets’.

David McCooey’s fifth collection, The Book of Falling, opens with a section on other creative lives. Here is the poet voicing over Elizabeth Bishop as she contemplates her imminent move to Seattle:

Underneath us all, the heavy, red earth keeps faith with the human structures built upon it, [...]

Meanwhile living things spring and decline, in their godless and Biblical manner.

(‘Questions of Travel’)

‘Fleeting’ imagines Sylvia Plath, having lived fifty years past her death at the age of thirty, finding life again after ‘the deranging noise’ of poetry and ‘the brief duration of abysmal sleep’.

Elsewhere, McCooey’s poems can be oneiric in their understatement. In the serial poem ‘Chamber Pieces (ii)’, the unremarkable becomes the revenant:

We are at a dining table. The window looks out onto bush.

Someone remarks on the view. ‘What is a view?’ I ask.

My father gestures with his hands. I look outside at the unfamiliar trees.

A number of the poems reveal a disjuncture between human frailty, including depression, and the many cultural frames (movies, interviews, and theme parks among them) that urge and compel our energy and involvement. ‘Extracts from an Interview’ points to this as a common artistic experience (On the Beach was famous as a comedown from earlier successes):

Q. How do you feel about critics?

After the downpour my son puts on an LP:

Neil Young’s On the Beach.

Joining an increasing number of books that use the cognitive ricochet between word and image to strong effect, a section titled ‘Three photo poems’ invites us to parse that space for various sorts of disconnect. The lines in ‘Posing cards’ read as directives to a photographer (‘Have the couple half hug / with their arms crossing in the front’). The words underline the parents’ estrangement with instructions on how to create the false impression of a close-knit family. (Later in the book, ‘A Brief Family History of Falling’ touches on a fall that may have led to their marriage: ‘He was a broken man, and she felt sorry for him’). In ‘Bathroom

abstraction’, photographs of bathroom tiles foreground the inhuman indifference of their surface, while the words limn the vulnerability of human bodies trying to keep it all together in post-operative, post-partum, and foreign bathrooms.

In her critical work The Lyric in the Age of the Brain (2016), Nikki Skillman proposes that lyric and anti-lyric modes are less distinct than their proponents might imagine, at a time when materialist, somatic, and neurological thinking are increasingly sources for both kinds of poets. The Book of Falling substantiates her thesis with a neurological poem, ‘Synaptic Transmissions: An Elegy’. Here, the dead father ‘becomes real in a human sense’, in the neural reconstructions of presence that memories are. There is comfort in the bodily traces of intimate connection that continue in the brain:

Now he is heavy as a thought distributed in the deep sediment of my memory, in the uncanny articulation of a gesture, a signal from a dying star.

If McCooey’s book keeps faith with the representational mode and affective powers of contemporary lyric, Clemens’ is a vigorous exemplar of the anti-lyric mode. Both move through the maze of biological and cultural disorientation and emerge with a poetics that deserves our undistracted attention. g

Judith Bishop has twice won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection is Interval (UQP, 2018).

David McCooey (Maria Takolander)

Open Page with Pip Williams

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills. She is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published by Affirm Press to wide acclaim. Her first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, was published in 2020 and became an international bestseller. The Bookbinder of Jericho is her second novel and again combines her talent for historical research and storytelling.

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

The future – to see if we do better, or worse.

What’s your idea of hell?

A party I can’t leave.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Morality, when it takes the high ground.

What’s your favourite film?

My life as a Dog and A Single Man. I’m also partial to anything made by Taika Waititi or Wes Anderson.

And your favourite book?

Two spring to mind: The Other Side of You by Sally Vickers, and The Hours, by Michael Cunningham.

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

Vanessa Bell, Vera Nabokov, Catherine Dickens

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

There are plenty of words I dislike (words that denigrate and silence), and I’m not fond of ‘housewife’. I’d like to resurrect ‘Satisdiction’ – I discovered it in the first edition of the OED. Already obsolete in 1914, it means having said enough.

Who is your favourite author?

Not a fair question. It changes all the time but I have a few authors I return to with confidence – Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Winman, Emily St John Mandel, Sebastian Barry, Rabih Alameddine, William Maxwell, Dr Seuss.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Trixie Belden

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Curiosity, uncertainty, compassion

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis, and the Trixie Belden mysteries.

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

Marion Zimmer Bradley – I read the Mists of Avalon in my late teens and loved the feminist retelling of the Arthurian legend. I will always love that book, but I have no admiration for the author.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

The First Time Podcast, with Kate Mildenhall and Katherine

Collette. They combine friendly banter with excellent author interviews and useful industry insights. I love it.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

My upcoming book tour will keep me away from the story for a while. But in general, I have trouble writing when I’m alone in a room especially set up for writing – I need the buzz of a café. The feeling of community and the white noise of life helps me write.

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

I think a good critic tries to understand what a book wants to be; what the author intended and how well that intent is realised. They keep the audience for the book in mind, and they reflect on the influence of their own personal taste and experience, though they do not deny these things. I enjoy reading reviews from Tegan Bennett-Daylight, Jason Steger, Jane Sullivan.

How do you find working with editors?

Published books are a team effort and I love working with editors. My principal editor, for all my books, has been Ruby Ashby-Orr, at Affirm Press. She takes the time to know what a book wants to be, then she advocates for it. If I stray from the intent, become lazy or inarticulate, Ruby lets me know and she’ll work with me to make the book better.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I’ve been attending writer’s festivals as a reader for twenty years because I love the unscripted conversations between writers and readers, and the sharing of ideas. As a writer, I have only attended a few festivals in person (the Covid-19 factor). The opportunity to meet other writers and connect with readers was wonderful. I’m looking forward to the year ahead – it is filled with festivals!

Are artists valued in our society?

A loaded question. Artists are taken for granted in the sense that every one of us consumes the products of artistic endeavour, though few of us consciously acknowledge the value artists contribute to our lives. The past decade has been difficult for artists, and Covid shone a spotlight on the disdain government can have for the arts. That’s changing, I think. But we still have a way to go before artists are considered essential to a healthy community and adequately supported to do what they are good at.

What are you working on now?

I have two ideas vying for attention – one is historical fiction, again based in Oxford but a different era. Another is more contemporary and closer to home – I think it might win the race to the page. g

(Andre Goosen)

Andy comes to town

A major new Warhol exhibition in Adelaide

Patrick Flanery

Ask the average person what they picture when they hear the name ‘Andy Warhol’ and they will likely mention Campbell’s soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, or Elizabeth Taylor. The Art Gallery of South Australia’s exceptional new exhibition ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’ (until 14 May) reminds us that such ubiquitous images of Pop Art are but one aspect of Warhol’s oeuvre. The show demonstrates throughout how technologies of still and moving image were integral to Warhol’s work over the course of his prolific but abbreviated career.

This is a first for Australia, but also a landmark in global Warhol exhibitions, perhaps the first major show in nearly a quarter century to focus exclusively on photography. Ten years in the making, the exhibition’s depth of focus is everywhere on display in Julie Robinson’s sophisticated and intelligent curation. AGSA’s timely intervention is as serious and smart as it is terrifically fun – a vanishing rarity for gallery shows of this calibre and scope; it helps us to see, without ever forcing the point, that Warhol’s approach to photography anticipated so much about the dynamics of the social media ecosystem that has been transforming the world for the past decade.

Robinson and her team have produced a career-spanning overview of Warhol’s photographic practice, but the show also offers visitors a vibrant sense of the way still and moving photography functioned as a defining medium in the wider artistic milieu centred around The Factory. The first image we encounter is not in fact by Warhol, but an autographed publicity photo of child actor Shirley Temple with a dedication to the future artist. This memento might appear to speak to the obsession with celebrity that characterised much of Warhol’s screen-printing work, but it is more usefully understood in terms of self-mythologising (or, in Temple’s case, the aggressive mythologising of the movie industry), mass reproduction, and the significance of the found image to Warhol’s screen-printing work.

In the adjacent room, visitors are confronted by one of the larger-than-life-size screen-print paintings of Elvis Presley that Warhol produced from a publicity still. Beneath the photographic referent, Robinson has juxtaposed Elvis at Ferus, a film that Warhol made in 1963 on the occasion of his Elvis paintings’ show at the influential Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. The marvel of these three minutes of black-and-white 16mm is that Warhol is not producing just a home-movie travelogue of his works’ exhibition, but a further expression of the impulse driving the work, exploring in dizzying pans and ludic jump cuts his fascination with repetition and reproducibility, with the commodification and objectification of the performer depicted in the work, a man who seems to exist always in a state of performance that obscures whatever might remain of the core self.

So for Elvis, so for Warhol. The studied mystification of the ‘true’ self is one of the key problems that this exhibition frames so brilliantly. It offers in almost equal measure a multifaceted portrait

of Warhol as artist and as private person (as much as he might ever have been truly private), alongside a compelling selection of Warhol’s screen prints, editioned photographs, unique polaroids, films, and videos. The great revelation for me was much less well-known work from the last years of Warhol’s life, including a series of non-editioned street photographs from the 1980s, and a selection of his stitched-together photographs (multiple prints of the same image sewn into grids). These subtler, more obscure works hint at a Warhol who is arrestingly unostentatious, and remind us in staggeringly different ways of the importance of the intertwined impulses of chance and repetition in the practice.

How does one reconcile the quiet, Atget-like preoccupation with uncanny details like mannequins and neglected shop window displays, or attention to the line of a shadow on urban pavement, a collection of protest signs, a lover seen only from the back and below the waist strolling on a beach, or the unassuming double portrait of Dolly Parton and Keith Haring with, from the same period, the almost Dadaist freneticism of Andy Warhol TV and its wild use of early 1980s video animation, a montage of fashion shows, and awkward but no less endearing clips of Warhol flirtatiously interviewing actors and models? The answer, perhaps, is that the impulses behind such a range of practice and intervention in popular culture cannot be reduced to a single formal or aesthetic logic. What the AGSA show instead offers is a portrait of the artist that tries to reflect as many facets of the practice and the person as can be encompassed by a single exhibition.

Both times I visited the show I came out of it deeply moved and certain of two things: the assertion by photographer Peter Hujar that Warhol was the Leonardo of his age is not an overstatement (even as it says as much about the age as it does about Warhol’s importance); and that, behind the glitter, glamour, and outrageous playfulness, there was a profound sense of melancholy – not only in the last decade of Warhol’s life, but almost from the start. We see the longing for something or someone in his brother John’s early portrait of ‘Andy Warhola’ (as he then was), and throughout images from the following decades an ever more conscious management and curation of his image. Behind the revelry is effort and industry; as Lou Reed sang in the tribute album to Warhol, Songs for Drella, ‘The most important thing is work.’

One of the pleasurable coups de théâtre the exhibition mounts is to cover the walls of the first full room with metallic silver paper that evokes the ‘Silver Factory’ – Warhol’s industrial loft space decorated by photographer Billy Name in the early 1960s and in which we see Warhol working in a photograph by Name from 1964. In this room, the first images one encounters by Warhol himself are disarmingly intimate: a tiny series of photobooth strips from 1963, one set depicting Warhol being theatrically punched, others of gallerist Holly Solomon, collector Ethel Scull, and Claes and Patti Oldenburg clowning for the automated camera. (In another playful touch, AGSA has installed a photobooth at the exit of the exhibition where visitors can have their own strips of images taken, reminding us of the analogue origins of the photographic ‘selfie’.)

In the same room, Robinson has mounted a display of ten of Warhol’s famous black- and-white ‘screen tests’, including of the artist’s one-time lover John Giorno, as well as Lou Reed, Edie

Sedgwick, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dalí, and other Factory regulars. The subjects sometimes look away, stare at the viewer, vamp, cry, or seem to resist the act of filmed portraiture entirely. Several other Warhol film works are also on display, including the chaotic Camp (1965) and uncannily menacing Haircut (1963), colour footage of Warhol’s soulful fellow artist Marisol in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the early 1960s, and half an hour of the Kennedy children playing on a beach in the early 1970s (these last two, in particular, convey an unmistakable sense of existential anxiety, even crisis).

This is a rare opportunity for the gallery-goer to engage with works that are otherwise nearly impossible to see; Warhol withdrew his films from public circulation in the 1970s, and although one knows more or less which films exist, gaining access to them is so difficult that anyone even mildly interested in Warhol should make the effort to see this show. As with his still photography, the films and videos repeatedly demonstrate Warhol’s readiness to experiment with technologies and media, but also to present to the world an unabashedly queer sensibility. Haircut, for instance, is at one level merely a document of what its title describes but becomes a chiaroscuro multiple portrait that inserts itself into a canon of visual art, even recalling Caravaggio in its use of light and shadow and in its abundant homoeroticism. The most unsettling of the film’s subjects, Fred Herko, repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, engaging the gaze of the filmmaker but also staring back at every viewer who encounters him down through the years, demanding that we register both his vulnerability and his menacing power.

While queer Abstract Expressionists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns might be said to have obscured their sexuality through a practice of non-figuration (or evasively symbolic figuration), Warhol, for all of his maybe-I-am-maybe-I’m-not dissembling about his sexuality in the media, was consistently presenting work that could not be mistaken for anything other than the practice of a queer artist. Whether that amounts to depicting drag and trans performers (as in the moving series Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), which the show pairs with some of the original reference polaroids for the screen-prints), or homoerotic polaroids of male nudes, or the moment in Camp when Warhol collaborator Gerard Malanga recites a poem about

being ‘buggered’ by a Cornell University student, or the sustained fixation on queer icons like Liza Minnelli and Jackie Kennedy, or Christopher Makos’s melancholy images depicting Warhol himself in drag (though Makos insists this was not what is being figured), one leaves the exhibition convinced that Warhol moved global culture forward by mainstreaming an extravagant range of queer sensibilities. Sometimes almost blandly commercial (as in the celebrity images), in other moments radically subversive and risqué, Warhol’s outpouring of art surely stands as among the most significant engines of social representational transformation in the last seventy years.

Through the lens of photography, this exhibition offers a taste of many central aspects of Warhol’s work without diluting the significance of his photographic practice in particular. For Australian audiences, there is certain pleasure in seeing six images of Warhol’s only two portrait subjects from this country: four screenprints of philanthropist and Australian editor of Warhol’s Interview magazine, Henry Gillespie (who also recorded a short video for the show), and two of the late arts benefactor Loti Smorgon. This is not only a major show that brings together works from all over the world, but one that is not travelling. If there is any disappointment, it is this, but also that there is no catalogue for the exhibition, despite the curatorial team’s best efforts. What a pity that there will be no permanent record of the important work it is doing for two brief months this year. (I wrote an essay for the intended catalogue, which now appears on the AGSA website.)

I came away from my visits to the show feeling that with any justice, or better luck, Warhol might still be with us (as his collaborators Makos, Duane Michals, and Stephen Shore – all with works in the show – continue to be). We can only imagine how he might now be responding to the evolution of photographic technology and the bewildering visual vocabulary of our time. What he left behind continues to prompt us to reflect on questions of subjectivity, the gaze, agency, and the effects of objectification that mark Warhol’s photographic work from the very start. g

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

Andy Warhol in Gristedes Supermarket, New York City, 1965 (Bob Adelman, courtesy of Bob Adelman Estate)

When fresh eyes meet

An enthralling new Macbeth from Bell Shakespeare

Kirk Dodd

There is a moment often conveyed in romantic films (and it was certainly the case with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet) when fresh eyes meet across a crowded room and become fixated, unable to stop ‘looking’, searching for more and more of the alchemical fire that triggered an intense magnetism.

Ten minutes into Bell Shakespeare’s new production of Macbeth (directed by Peter Evans), I sat there in a crowded room feeling similarly enthralled, not sitting back and waiting for the scenes to roll through, but sitting forward, trying to figure out how the intimacy of Anna Tregloan’s set design of monochrome ‘green’ was working so well. Brilliant green curtains fall from the ceiling to seal off the back half of the stage and restrict the performance space to compress the action. A patchwork carpet of differing greens is adorned with a standing green lamp to complete this monochromic ‘greenery’, disturbed only by seven antique chairs, which are deployed to establish a stately interior but also upended occasionally to create the chaos of a battlefield. But why all

the green?

The excellent 1920s costumes (also by Tregloan) ensure a dapper postwar setting, replete with a host of military trench coats. Everything is so neat, though. This sense of realism is matched by the realistic deliveries of the first several speeches, and risks a filmic or televisual tone. The early staging of a séance seems awkward. The program refers to the popularity of spiritualism at the time (1920s), and the need for people ‘to reach the dead’, but the séance appears to be another device of realism employed to justify some of the creepier supernaturalism in Shakespeare’s psychological thriller of murder, guilt, and ambition.

As early scenes unfold, the actors rarely leave the stage but often creep towards a patch of curtain to make themselves discreet, like warm bodies skulking in individual tableaux. ‘Pausing’

actors on stage seems to me a dicey ploy, with great potential for de-energising the action, but it works well in this production, for interesting reasons. The program proposes that the characters are at ‘a perpetual banquet and séance’, so perhaps all the greenery conveys the sumptuousness of a banquet as well as the gothic ethereality of communing with the dead.

Evans’s production really kicks into gear when it settles into the psychological embroilment of anxiety, guilt, and trauma that harries Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Hazem Shammas and Jessica Tovey) when they begin to navigate the fraught terrors of premeditated murder and the daunting consequences of obtaining a ‘fruitless crown’. Shammas commits himself fully to the leading role, breaking the shackles of imposing realism as he produces an authentic bodily connection to the sense of Shakespeare’s verse, delivering a dynamic performance that must have thoroughly tested the boundaries in the rehearsal room. The dagger scene is terrific, the banquet scene superb. Tovey’s Lady Macbeth also finds excellent range, one minute sultry and alluring, the next forceful and domineering, then covering comically for her husband, who appears to have gone completely mad.

All this is assisted by the compressed restriction of the stage. With few exits and entrances, the performers must use Shakespeare’s language to evoke the location and mood of each scene, so the sense of the verse is truly driving this production, as it should, despite all the snazzy costumes and lights. What shimmers forth when this happens (apart from the excellent acting) is Shakespeare’s craftsmanship, conveying a nuanced impression of the pathological villainy of pursuing a ‘vaulting ambition’.

Standout performances included Julia Billington as Banquo, who struck the right notes as an affable chum and comrade for Macbeth, and James Lugton as King Duncan, but perhaps more so as the comical Porter (if only he emptied his hat on the audience!). Lady Macduff and her son (Isabel Burton and Eleni Cassimatis) capture the sweet snapshot of the Macduff family home before tragedy strikes, but this scene seems truncated, and the pathos of Macduff (Jacob Warner), sometimes the most excruciating moment of the play, seems still to be finding its feet. One missed opportunity in this production was the treatment of the three witches, who didn’t seem particularly ‘witchy’ at all – neither vocally nor in their costumes. Has ‘witchiness’ been cancelled? Are the stereotypes of the ‘witch’ considered too crude for the contemporary stage? Did the opportunity fall prone to the dominating modes of realism? At best, the witches seemed to become mere ‘Blavatskian’ spiritualists, despite their segments being supported by some impressive pyrotechnics. The program devotes two pages to fifteen costume designs by Tregloan, yet none of them was for the witches. This seems unMacbethian to me. Nonetheless, I am still applauding the actors, days after the standing ovation they received on opening night. g

Macbeth (Bell Shakespeare) continues at the Sydney Opera House until 2 April 2023, then moves to the Canberra Theatre Centre (15–22 April) and Arts Centre Melbourne (28 April–14 May).

Kirk Dodd is a playwright and lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

Hazem Shammas and Jessica Tovey in Bell Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Brett Boardman)

Beyond real estate

The role of architecture in cultural policy

by Cameron Logan

Architects and architectural culture do not slot easily into cultural policy. Those in other creative fields might well say the same, but the ambiguity around the professional and artistic identity of the architect amplifies the problem. Are architects artists? Or ‘creatives’, like those in advertising and marketing? Or white-collar professionals and managers in the property and construction industry?

The answer depends, of course, on where you look. Existing government policy in Australia tends to endorse the authorised view of the professional bodies, the state-based institutes of architecture, which tend to emphasise professional competencies. The Victorian government lists ‘managing’, ‘co-ordinating’, and ‘selecting sites’, alongside ‘designing’ as things architects might do. The same document identifies ‘understanding regulatory frameworks’ and ‘project co-ordination’ as the bodies of knowledge and expertise architects might provide to prospective clients.

Popular culture furnishes a different set of answers. Peppa Pig’s father Daddy Pig hints at least once in the popular children’s cartoon that he might be an architect, and his Corb spectacles leave us in no doubt. Far from being a competent professional, however, he comes across mostly as a pompous and bumbling windbag. Elyse Keaton, Meredith Baxter’s clear-eyed mother in the long-running 1980s sitcom Family Ties, is perhaps closer to the sanctioned idea. She is smart, capable, and organised, just the kind of person you might want to manage your construction project. What’s more, she wants to ‘do good’, make the world a better place.

Perhaps the most salient literary image of an architect is the unwaveringly principled visionary Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. This is a man who turns to terrorism when his design for a public housing project is altered by bureaucrats. For Australians of a certain age, this high modern idea of the architect as a form-giving creative genius (and a man) resonates with events from earlier decades that involved the figure of the architect. The best-known public controversies were Jørn Utzon’s removal from the Sydney Opera House project in 1966 over resources and creative autonomy, and Harry Seidler’s decades-long battle with what he regarded as petty bureaucrats over local planning controls.

Clearly, there are multiple notions of the architect, none of which can be positioned easily in a government cultural policy. The focus on professional competency in official documents reflects the profession’s own anxieties about the possible perception

of architecture as useless or merely aesthetic. But the concern to underline the efficacy of design, its value to clients – think engineer or project manager rather than visual artist – also risks devaluing the extent to which architecture might have something to say. And here is the nub of the issue for cultural policy. Should government policy support the work of architects as professionals, or merely to the extent that they have something to say about Australian people or places?

Revive, the Commonwealth Government’s recently announced cultural policy, leans heavily on the idea of the artist as storyteller. It is the kind of anodyne idea that one might expect in a document like this. We all know that today everyone has their own story, and we have the inspirational wall art to prove it. Revive affirms that wisdom by asserting the policy objective of supporting ‘A Place for Every Story’.

Making sure that creativity is encouraged and supported everywhere is doubtless a worthy objective. But it is not clear whether the places for these stories are actual or just metaphorical. The document is silent on the question of whether we need to design and build more places where Australian stories can be told. The document adopts the five pillars established under Labor’s previous national cultural policy, Creative Australia, and ‘Pillar 4’ talks about infrastructure. But the amount of money historically involved in arts funding suggests that recurrent support of companies and funding of new initiatives is not going to include enough money for capital budgets. The ‘building’ in the document is mostly about capacity and partnerships, as well as about ‘building on’ previous ALP policy achievements.

It is not surprising that Revive mentions architects only once and the practice of architecture on just one other occasion. Most of what might count as a discussion of architecture appears on a single page under Pillar 2 of the policy, A Place for Every Story.

Revive does seem to like the idea of place. But the authors of the document – including its Introduction, which is provided by historian Claire Wright and novelist Christos Tsiolkas – are clearly more comfortable with an idea of place framed as place protection or cultural heritage. The design of buildings and public places and the shaping of our cities and other settlements goes unremarked. Place is important, the document tells us, for tourism and national identity, but it is vague about the role of architecture and design.

The problem perhaps is the uncertainty around whether ar-

chitecture is itself a mode of storytelling or just one of the steps needed to create the vital infrastructure for storytelling. Revive makes reference to Kerstin Thompson’s award-winning Bundanon Art Museum and Bridge for Creative Learning, noting that it will support creative endeavour and that it is award-winning. It does not recognise that the design of the place itself is an act of creativity that frames our relationship to the landscape and suggests a way of experiencing that place. The same uncertainty beset the competition brief for Australian Parliament House (APH) in the late 1970s. A series of reports were in no doubt that the winning entry should be a place that contains important expressions of national meaning in the arts and crafts. But, as Luke Tipene’s recent work on the APH competition has demonstrated, the building itself was not expected to say anything in particular about Australian democracy.

The Commonwealth’s hesitancy and uncertainty about the scope of what architects do is understandable. Seinfeld ’s George Costanza habitually lied about being an architect through the several seasons of the show. He sensed that there was something interesting and worthy about architecture, but it was also clear that he didn’t really know what architects do. In this respect, the Commonwealth is a bit like George.

This uncertainty is no doubt exacerbated by the current set of crises remaking architectural practice globally. The profession is in the midst of a major transformation, or what Jess Myers, writing in the Architectural Review, called ‘an act of speculative professionalism’. Newly vocal groups of architects around the world have

made the novel demand that they be treated as an organised labour force. In the past couple of years, architects in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and the United States have all engaged in efforts to unionise.

Add worker, therefore, to manager, professional, and creative artist on the list of ways to think about the architect. The set of economic and professional ambiguities embedded within the meaning of architecture makes its position in cultural policy challenging – but not impossible.

There is one domain in architectural culture that has obvious potential to be included in an inclusive cultural policy like Revive. Broadly known as research architecture, this work takes the form of exhibitions and publications and is mostly dedicated to creative speculations and curated visual reflection on the challenges facing architecture now. It is distinct from the more methodologically bound research pursued in architectural academia. In the United Kingdom, where this form of architectural creativity thrives, it is largely supported by philanthropy. But there are obvious downsides to that model. If government was to become a more active partner in supporting research architecture here, the subject of the work – how we respond architecturally to the changing climate and landscape, spatial relations between humans and the non-human, the limits of the public domain, to name a few – could acquire a new relevance and vitality as a set of reflections on who we are and how we live, work, and interact.

The success of research architecture will depend not so much on government money as it will on a clear signal that it is part of a wider field in the visual arts and design. Such a signal has the capacity to link the arts more directly to city-making. While the impact of including research architecture in cultural policy is sure to be modest, any effort that helps us move beyond the dominance of real estate and the municipal as the limits of our spatial imagination is worth a try. At its most compelling, the resulting work might even revive and enliven debates about how we live and what we value in our buildings and public places. g

Cameron Logan is an architectural and urban historian. He teaches in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. He is not an architect. ❖

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Harry Seidler lecturing on modern architecture at the Building and Housing Exhibition at the Trocadero, 1955. (Leyden/Sydney Morning Herald/Superstock/Alamy)

Despair, resolve, reflection

An anthemic tribute to William Cooper

Graham Strahle

For anyone who encountered Compassion, the profoundly moving and beautiful song cycle by Lior and Nigel Westlake from 2013, the prospect of hearing another work from this duo was always going to arouse interest. Would their newest collaboration rise to the same magical level as their first, or perhaps even surpass it? Would it be entirely different?

Ngapa William Cooper (‘Father’ William Cooper, in Yorta Yorta) takes its name and subject matter from a figure whose devotion to the cause of Aboriginal rights has written him into Australian history. Bain Attwood’s book William Cooper: An Aboriginal life story (2021) has helped bring recognition to this pioneering activist; it may have been the catalyst for Lior and Westlake to base their new work on his life. Either way, the book is a helpful starting point for those wishing to learn more about Cooper’s extraordinary protest against Kristallnacht, in which he, along with his family and members of the Australian Aborigines League, marched from Footscray to the German Consulate in Melbourne to serve a letter protesting Nazi violence towards Jews. It is useful information, because Ngapa William Cooper is narrative-based through its seven distinct sections and might lose some of its impact if one does not read the song texts beforehand or cannot pick out all the words. Not all of them were audible in this Adelaide Town Hall performance; by all accounts the same performance a couple of days earlier at Ukaria (an intimate space, ideal for chamber music) was superior auditorily.

Ngapa feels like a bigger and bolder conception than Compassion in every way. It is certainly the more viscerally powerful of the two works. In large part, this owes to its being written for two singers. Lior and Lou Bennett share vocal duties, neither one personifying Cooper but articulating his inward voice through the seven sections of this work: his despair, his resolve, his reflections. These sections are not songs so much as scenas in an oratorio, where singers sing separately in solo, exchange phrases in duet, or walk right up to each other as if merging into one persona.

In two of the sections, ‘The Meeting’ and ‘The Protest’, we hear audio recordings of Cooper’s grandson Uncle Alf (Boydie) Turner

reading portions of the letter that was served to the German Consulate in 1938. Thus Cooper becomes a direct participant in the work. The power of these elements combines to make Ngapa a gripping experience. One could enjoy and be moved by Compassion for its sheer contemplative rapture, but this new work is different: it wrests one’s attention and never lets go.

A growling ferment of sound erupts in ‘The News’. The mood is sinister as a solo cello wraps around Lior’s voice and glistening sounds from the ensemble accompany his words about Kristallnacht. The guttural harmonic gestures are unmistakably those of Westlake, and the players are in top-notch form: a tight little ensemble, they comprise the Australian String Quartet, pianist Andrea Lam, double bassist Kees Boersma, and percussionist Rebecca Lagos. With a couple of changes of personnel, it is the same combination that presented Compassion in a highly successful chamber version at Ukaria for the 2019 Adelaide Festival.

‘The Meeting’ starts with a bare fifth in Dale Barltrop’s violin, and the string quartet dances ecstatically. This is a gorgeous score – Westlake at his best. In ‘The Protest’ that follows, the lights turn red and we hear the ensemble work hard in an episode of high virtuosity. The players are right up to the challenge. Rock drumming breaks out and the mood is full of jubilation as Cooper and his comrades unite in their cause. Lior and Bennett soar in anthemic unison.

‘At the End of My Days’ sees the two singers reflect on a life led by conscience and unperturbed by surrounding ignorance. ‘I will have crossed the divide,’ they sing. Telling words these, ones that resonate through the decades to remind us how battles for Indigenous justice are far from over. Rich harmonies rise, perhaps Westlake’s most beautiful music. Can composers ‘do’ beauty anymore? Most surely yes, in the case of Lior and Westlake: here’s another score where it exists in abundance.

One can admire so many things about this new work and its performance. The two voices of Lior and Bennett find a complementary perfection in their shapely lilt and in the heart and warmth of their delivery. Bennett has a wonderfully open expression that is heightened by her poetic gestures. Lior has a unique intensity, placing his notes with special deliberation, like a painter applying paint to a canvas.

If Michael Tippett could present a child of our time in his great secular oratorio of that title, honouring the life of the Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan, whose actions precipitated Kristallnacht, Lior and Westlake have presented a man of our times in their musical portrayal of William Cooper. It shares the same musical DNA as its forebear Compassion. It is a work of sweeping power and truth. The standing ovations that followed each performance attested to that.

Two American works came earlier in the concert. Bristling with jagged rhythms, Bryce Dessner’s Aheym (‘Homeward’ in Yiddish), from 2009, felt like a fairly accurate encapsulation of contemporary times. The ASQ performed it with terrific speed and conviction. It was interesting to revisit mid-1980s minimalism in the form of Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3, Mishima (based on Yukio Mishima, the novelist and political dissident who suicided in 1970). Glass’s music, if anything, gains in stature over the decades: it possesses a wistful nostalgia. Played with such loving warmth as it was by ASQ, it was almost like hearing Schubert. g

Lou Bennett and muscians performing at Ukaria (Adam Forte)

From the Archive

Brian Castro was, during the 1980s, among the first Asian-Australian writers to be celebrated. As James Curran makes plain in the current issue, mainstream Australia continues to misread perceptions of Australia in the region, as much from misunderstanding as from a disinclination to understand. This gives a special significance to Castro’s oeuvre, including his novel Shanghai Dancing (2003), which Alison Broinowski reviewed for ABR in May 2003.

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some –where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers, and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it.

Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.

Australia has received several serves from Castro in the past for not being that kind of country. In an elegant little book of essays, Looking for Estrellita (1999), he wrote about a gathering of the world’s top writers in Atlanta, Georgia, an ‘intellectual Olympics’ that included eight winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Australia, he implied, is not a member of that intellectual or artistic league: it does not put great value on intellectual production. In Asia, he warned, to be modest about your collective intellect is to be taken at your own valuation. In Hong Kong, where Castro grew up, a back-slapping egalitarian tradition is not admired but is seen as weakness or rudeness. Other ‘Asians’ (he was thinking of Chinese) regard Australians – teetering on the cultural median-strip, and hesitant to cross over to Asia – as people of no great interest.

Like Antonio, his fictionalised self in Shanghai Dancing, Castro is heir to several nationalities and three religions. His father was Portuguese, Spanish, and English; his mother English and Chinese. He speaks three languages fluently. Castro’s family was always on the move – up, down, or sideways – economically and politically. This hybrid background, says Castro, plants him in a fluid mental space that is richer than a world of static identities. In Shanghai Dancing, as in all his writing, he interweaves language and uses ethnic hybridity to send up race-based assumptions. Castro has compared his novels to holograms, in which the action moves between several spaces and times, containing several people’s voices. Demanding, always ironic and often parodic, he parades his copious literary memory. Castro began to use black-and-white photographs to reinforce his essays in Looking for Estrellita, something he continues to do in Shanghai Dancing He adds sections of italicised or interlined text that seem to ask to be recited or sung. It is as if he wants to take hold of us by all our senses and shake us out of our torpor.

Stepper, Castro’s last novel, published in 1997, evoked the frivolity, decadence, and menace of the 1930s in China and Japan.

It can now be seen as the fictional precursor to Shanghai Dancing, which begins earlier, with the arrival of British missionaries in China, and ends later, with their descendants settling in Australia. Thus the new novel sandwiches Stepper’s rich filling. Castro has done his research for Shanghai Dancing as thoroughly as for Stepper. He describes the flotsam of Hong Kong harbour, the jetsam of Macao, the tenements, apartments, hotels, and brothels frequented by Castro’s extended family, the cars they drove, the planes they flew, and the drinks and other drugs they took. And the band his father led begins to play. With Antonio leading, Castro sets off at a fast pace in a whirling dance. Music metaphors multiply, with side excursions into foot and shoe fetishism, skirt-lifting and much more. Here’s one scherzando movement, slightly abbreviated:

He wakes at three in the afternoon with dancing on his mind and waltzes to the brothel at 52 Kiangse Road ... and he tangos along Soochow Creek with a girl, paying by chit, then he charlestons stoned on pink opium pills and ducks into an arcade as Chinese gangsters roar past on some kidnap mission … or he jazzes until midnight in some absinthe-soaked bed and then foxtrots on to supper clubs and ends at the palatial mansion of one of his partners … or furious waltzing, the girls in voile blouses, spinning transparently, the points of their breasts rouged, and in the summer night he studied the business far into the small hours, fever rearing up in three-four time, the girl bob-haired and shaped like a boy beneath blowing kisses in his ear and he heard the sea, the sea, yes, thanks for the memory.

When young Antonio needed his father, he was never there; his mother was, but she was often out of it; his four half-sisters fought each other and him; his Chinese grandmother tormented him; his English grandmother couldn’t hear him. Antonio’s father, grandfathers, and uncles led colourful lives of dubious legality and diminished responsibility. The blended Wing and Castro families display the natural, uncontrived multiculturalism and unfettered entrepreneurialism that thrive in Hong Kong, but they don’t set much of an example of ‘Asian values’. However, Australia is certainly not the promised land: merely a place where Antonio survived forty years. Both nakedness and self-interest, often simultaneous, drive these lives and this extended family. Yet what strings this tangled novel together and stops it unravelling is Castro’s capacity to hear all the resonances between them and to demand the same from us. g

1978 Mungo MacCallum reviews a biography of Don Chipp

1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair

1980 Nancy Keesing reviews Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs

1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite

1982 Brian Dibble reviews Elizabeth Jolley’s The Newspaper of Claremont Street

1983 Don Watson reviews Geoffrey Blainey’s The Blainey View

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

1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker

1986 Judith Brett reviews James Walter’s The Ministers’ Minders

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

1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White

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

1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism

1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley

1993 Peter Straus reviews David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon

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

1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage

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

1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks

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

1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems

2000 Carmel Bird reviews Robert Drewe’s The Shark Net

2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems

2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon

2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers

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

2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith

2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

2008 Richard Holmes’s Seymour Lecture on biography

2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands

2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard

2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead

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

2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton

2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour

2015 Catriona Menzies-Pike reviews Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses

2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience

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

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

2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

2021 Theodore Ell’s Calibre essay on the explosion in Beirut

2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case

SOLVE LANGUAGERELATED PROBLEMS AT A MICRO AND MACRO LEVEL

STUDY A MONASH GRADUATE DEGREE IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Monash University’s Master of Applied Linguistics offers a competitive advantage to language teachers, interpreters, editors and other people working with language in increasingly multilingual and multicultural societies. Through considering the implications of multilingualism and intercultural communication for modern society and the professional sphere, you will develop the linguistic and intercultural communication skills to reach wide audiences.

Learn more about the Master of Applied Linguistics:

monash.edu/arts/study/MAL