Australian Book Review – April 2024, no. 463

Morag Fraser Three literary mothers

Sheila Fitzpatrick Katerina Clark

Sascha Morrell Frank Moorhouse

Frances Wilson Hilary Mantel

Michael Hofmann Nam Le

A minimalist government?

Frank Bongiorno on the Albanese regime

ENJOY THE BEST OF THE PERFORMING ARTS WITH LIMELIGHT ARTS TRAVEL

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2024 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 Jolley Prize closes on 22 April 2024. It will be judged by Patrick Flanery, Melinda Harvey, and Susan Midalia

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. Full

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

previous winners

2010 Maria Takolander

2011

2012 Sue Hurley

2013

2015

2016 Josephine Rowe

Australian Book Review

April 2024, no. 463

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

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Image credits and information

Front cover: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on stage during the ASEAN Australia Special Summit, 5 March 2024 (George Chan/SOPA Images/ Sipa USA/Alamy)

Page 29: Teju Cole in Stockholm, 2013 (Nicklas Thegerstrom/TT News Agency/Alamy)

Page 55: French author Édouard Louis photographed in Stockholm, Sweden, 2022. (Jessica Gow/TT News Agency/Alamy)

ABR April 2024

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Frank Moorhouse by Matthew Lamb

‘Calm Voice’ ‘Rinbo Abdo’

How is the Albanese government travelling?

Portrait of a friendship

Revisiting the power of periodisation

The New World Disorder by Peter R. Neumann, translated by David Shaw

A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel

The Cancer Finishing School by Peter Goldsworthy

The Pulling by Adele Dumont

Mothers of the Mind by Rachel Trethewey

The Floating University by Tamson Pietsch

No Church in the Wild by Murray Middleton

Tremor by Teju Cole

We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain

Always Will Be by Mykaela Saunders

Thunderhead by Miranda Darling

Three new short story collections

The Trojan Horse and Other Stories by Julia Kindt

Rogue Corporations by Quentin Beresford

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy by Brett Mason

Fat Chance by Kent MacCarter

36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le

Poet of the Month

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Our Moon by Rebecca Boyle

Transgender Australia by Noah Riseman

The Buddhist and the Ethicist by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

Expanding Mindscapes edited by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

Gurrelieder

Vanya

Qui a tué mon père

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

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Misha Ketchell, Warwick Fyfe, Malcolm Gillies, John Scully

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ABR Podcast

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

Alan Joyce’s Qantas

Stuart Kells

‘The Great Red Whale’

Michael Winkler

Albanese’s quiet government

Frank Bongiorno

On stopping and thinking

Scott Stephens

Frank Moorhouse, wink wink

Sascha Morrell

David McBride’s ethics

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Indonesia’s Buru Quartet

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‘Sleepers’ Cate Kennedy

Letters

Nemesis

Dear Editor,

Thanks for an excellent review of Nemesis (ABR, March 2023). This is exactly what I felt when watching the documentary series. It too readily accepted the narrow terms of reference of its subjects, which serve them well and the viewer rather more poorly. The real context is not who had it in for whom, but what was at stake for Australians. And that involves addressing policy with more seriousness than these former politicians could muster.

Misha Ketchell

figured that they had hired an opera singer for a reason.

I don’t know how long it took you to write your review dismissing my efforts as parodic, but I can tell you that the abovementioned open-endedness of the task and my search for a version that would make sense both for me and the work cost me months of effort – quite a disproportionate amount of thought and time for such a short contribution. And for a minute there I was proud of myself.

Warwick Fyfe

Gurrelieder

Dear Editor,

In response to Malcolm Gillies’ comment on my performance in Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (ABR Arts and page 56): first, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra hired an opera singer – me – to do the Sprecher, not an actor. Second, Schoenberg wrote all the speaker’s notes. Presumably he didn’t do this for fun or in the expectation that no attention would be paid to the pitches as notated.

Decisions have to be made, because baritone/bass singers cannot reach the top notes as written (except in falsetto) and even performers who can – actors, tenors, women – don’t stick to the notes. (At least I can’t find a recording where anyone does.) There are as many distinctly different versions as there are performances. The recorded legacy is no clear guide. It is not like being asked to sing an opera role where the fundamentals of what is expected can be assumed: perfect technique, optimal sound, maximum resonance, expressive use of text. Instead, one is confronted with an open-ended task and a lack of certainty as to what the conductor will welcome.

Which brings me to my third point: Simone Young, who conducted the performances, liked what I did. Frankly, I would trust her judgement over yours (or mine for that matter). In every one of the several rehearsals, Young required adjustments from me, but my approach – combining some pitch accuracy, where possible, with maintaining the trajectory rather than the pitches of phrases where those pitches were out of reach – seems to have been welcome. I was very proud to have been able to modify, over the course of rehearsals, what I had initially brought in such a way as to win Young’s approbation. And yes, I did use my opera voice. It’s a shame not to, and I

Malcolm Gillies replies:

I think Warwick Fyfe should remain proud of his accomplishment in this great but vexing work by Schoenberg. I am pleased that he has put his finger on the issue that I raised in my review. His explanation as to how he came to his interpretation of speech-song in last Friday’s wonderful Gurrelieder is enlightening. But is it sufficient? The question remains of what a performer, or conductor, should do faced with Schoenberg’s required ‘speech-song’. It is an even more central issue in Schoenberg’s more frequently performed Pierrot Lunaire (1912). My point is that the choice of how speech-like, or song-like, affects the way listeners perceive the tone of Fyfe’s passage. Personally, I hear the section for the Speaker, otherwise known as the Narrator, which leads into the work’s culmination, as having a keen parallel to that other architecturally crucial passage of reportage in Gurrelieder, the (fully sung) song of the Wood-Dove, with its tragic tone, at the end of Part I. I guess I was expecting a more ghastly tone, at least in the earlier parts of Fyfe’s passage, ‘the summerwind’s wild chase’.

That said, Schoenberg himself was inconsistent about what he expected of, or accepted in, performances of the half-dozen of his works using this speech-song technique. The role of the reviewer, also known as the critic, is dispassionately to raise and foster debate of such questions of interpretation and reception.

Dennis Altman

Dear Editor,

‘The Spectre of Tribalism’ is a wonderful essay (ABR, March 2024) – revealing, informative, and reassuring. It offers a candid, honest, and humble self-appraisal. Dennis Altman makes even growing old interesting.

John Scully

Sung

‘When I am famous’

A masterpiece of biographical synthesis

Sascha Morrell

FFrank Moorhouse: Strange paths

by Matthew Lamb Knopf

$45 hb, 480 pp

rank Moorhouse: Strange paths has no introduction, but Matthew Lamb describes it in his author’s note as ‘the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse’, covering the long writing apprenticeship of 1938–74 during which Moorhouse ‘br[oke] into the literary establishment, on his own terms’. Lamb does not explain his use of the term ‘cultural biography’ within the book, but the term is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’ (as Lamb puts it in an article on the Penguin website titled ‘“When the facts conflict with the legend” – How does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?’).

Frank Moorhouse is a masterpiece of synthesis. Lamb has amassed insights from a remarkable range of sources, from private correspondence and notebooks through to unpublished or uncollected fiction and essays. Fascinating juvenilia testify to Moorhouse’s extreme precocity as a satirist and social observer, and to the early onset of a lifelong habit of intensive self-scrutiny (which did not aways translate into self-awareness). The archive is enlivened with oral history; gleanings from myriad conversations and interviews with not only Moorhouse but numerous intimate acquaintances of the author, including some anonymous and highly sensitive material.

Having ‘immersed himself in [Moorhouse’s] archived life’ and its cultural contexts, Lamb stays submerged throughout Frank Moorhouse, as the discreet yet abiding presence holding together the whole. Rarely does this biographer editorialise or draw inferences from the material, implicitly trusting in readers to make the connections. He seems to be writing neither for a broad audience nor for insiders, nor for himself, but as if driven by a sense of duty to do justice to his subject for an abstract posterity. His bare-minimum bio on the book’s dustjacket is an index of this self-effacing style: a mere four lines convey that Lamb is former editor of Review of Australian Fiction and Island magazines, and that he has two PhDs (in Literature and Philosophy). And I won’t lie: the book often reads as though it were written by someone whose passion for research could hardly be exhausted by one PhD alone.

Lamb is addicted to the archive. The book does not begin with any big-picture claims about Moorhouse’s cultural significance, or by making a case for his continued relevance. Instead, following

an epigraph drawn from an ‘undated index card’, Lamb opens the first chapter, rather bravely, with reference to a handwritten emendation Moorhouse made to his typescript for a 1980s talk before the Nowra Historical Society. The second paragraph introduces ‘another set of typescript notes’ (no date given) from the Frank Moorhouse Papers at the University of Queensland. The handwritten emendation concerns the need for ‘the right words’ to accurately record one’s impressions. Moorhouse aficionados will perceive resonances with the preoccupations of more than one Moorhouse protagonist and with persistent themes in Moorhouse’s non-fiction. But Lamb provides no orientation for less seasoned readers. On the second page, without further ado, Lamb tells readers that to understand Moorhouse it is first necessary to ‘examine the archival ghosts that Moorhouse carried within himself’ and proceeds to what he calls an ‘impressionistic prehistory’ entwining ‘fragmented […] seemingly unrelated historical stories’.

Don’t get used to even this degree of signposting. Unless you already know a lot about Moorhouse, you won’t know why Lamb is introducing this or that theme or motif at a given point. For instance, if readers have enjoyed Moorhouse’s fiction but are unacquainted with Moorhouse’s twin obsessions with literary censorship and copyright, they may be puzzled as to why Lamb’s prehistory includes information on these matters as they evolved in Australia over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A subsection on Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life is one of several that make no reference at all to Moorhouse’s forebears, ending on the coy observation that ‘Clarke’s talent reached beyond the capacity of his own society to justly reward that talent’. Did Moorhouse admire Clarke? If you don’t already know, Lamb won’t update you. This whole chapter is full of winks and nudges (or, in contemporary parlance, ‘Easter eggs’) for the seasoned Moorhouse reader, of whom I fear there may be fewer these days than Lamb would like to imagine.

All this is another way of saying that Lamb does not tarry with the ‘so what?’ question. The book relies not only on assumed knowledge but also on assumed interest. This latter assumption is probably fair, in a literary biography, and some will welcome the snub to the genre’s storytelling conventions. In any case, the narrative gathers momentum as Lamb follows Moorhouse’s development through all the milestones we expect in a literary biography: how the author came to write his first story; his early experiences of publication and editing in school magazines; his discovery of authors who became literary influences; rejection letters, and so on (Moorhouse’s bloody-minded quest to be published in Meanjin, despite countless snubs, affords something of a comic subplot). There is his entry into journalism, compulsory military service, and evolving politics, including his famous association with the radical libertarian movement known as the Sydney Push (which Lamb presents as being more ambivalent than legend would have it). Meanwhile, there are countless love affairs (I lost count, anyway) including several on-again, offagain attachments. Perhaps the most important love affair of Moorhouse’s life was his relationship with alcohol, about which Moorhouse was already writing as early as 1955, a full halfcentury before Martini: A memoir was published.

In his article on the Penguin website, Lamb relates that

he had never really considered how biographies were written before taking on this project, and had to abandon his initial ‘embarrassingly naïve’ plan of establishing a chronological outline then fleshing it out from the archive, for he found much that contradicted ‘the legend’ and his timeline. What Lamb did not

more freely between texts and time periods. It is here that we find out, in the most understated way, the source of the book’s subtitle, ‘Strange Paths’ – and we get Moorhouse reflecting on his prehistory in ways that sound very much like what Lamb attempts in early chapters: ‘piece together my customs traditions track back before parents’.

abandon was the chronological approach itself, which is perhaps somewhat surprising, given Moorhouse’s championing of the discontinuous narrative as a literary form.

Frank Moorhouse is actually more strictly chronological than most literary biographies, which tend to point back and forward in time to foreshadow how later developments in an author’s life and career relate to earlier ones, creating suggestive juxtapositions through prolepsis. Not Lamb. Apart from the prehistory, the book’s Coda is Lamb’s only extended excursion in the deliberate arrangement of materials independent of chronology, hopping

Moorhouse himself was no stranger to abandoning careful plans. In the book, we see Moorhouse aspiring to an intentional life, engaged in continual self-scrutiny of his approach to writing, personal relationships, and just about everything else. But Lamb reveals a person whose in-principle commitment to radical honesty was undercut by shame, secrecy, and self-deception, and whose obsession with order was offset by hedonism (besides the excessive drinking, Lamb mentions unpaid accounts from David Jones’s gourmet food court). Moorhouse’s lifelong fascination with etiquette and good form is evident in his earliest writings, such as his formal acceptance letter (written when he was eleven) thanking his father for ‘the opportunity of coming’ to the staff dinner of Frank Sr’s company. Characters in stories Moorhouse wrote at sixteen or seventeen cultivate personal codes of conduct, while Moorhouse’s notes for those stories include reflections on his purposes in writing them. The will to intentionality is nowhere more clearly documented than when Lamb quotes from two starts Moorhouse made on keeping a private journal:

Today I have decided to begin my journal. I am aged 17 and 5 months. I think the journal will record what I call ‘seeings’ which will provide material for future stories.

Today I have decided to write a journal. I am aged 18 years and 5 months. I think the journal will consist of what I call ‘significant incidents’ which will provide material for future literary work.

Such regulated, intentional exercise of the creative faculties is redolent of Moorhouse’s T. George McDowell and reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, with his gauche boyhood notes for self-improvement. Far more revealing is that the gesture had to be repeated, showing a failure to stick to the plan.

It is rare for a literary biographer’s subject to provide such an extensive running commentary on his own Bildung as Lamb found in Moorhouse, whose teenaged writings include essays with titles like ‘The World and Me’ and ‘Rambling in the Mind of an Adolescent (Part II)’, extrapolating general observations about ‘adolescents’ from himself as case study. That Moorhouse was hardly what is now termed neurotypical is suggested through the author’s own words in the title of Lamb’s fourth chapter, ‘I Feel Like Some Other Species

Looking at Humans’. But it is not until page 437 that Lamb mentions a review of The Electrical Experience (1974) calling T. George McDowell ‘a South Coast Martian’, so that readers might connect the fact and fiction. Lamb is too sensitive to the thorough transfiguration of lived experience through imaginative writing

Portrait of Frank Moorhouse, Balmain, NSW 1985 (photograph by Alec Bolton, National Library of Australia Alec Bolton portrait collection, reproduced courtesy of Robert Bolton)

(on which he can quote Moorhouse himself) to produce naïve biographical readings of Moorhouse’s fiction.

Like his heroine Edith Campbell Berry, with her capitalised ‘Ways’, Moorhouse meditated extensively on social and sexual etiquette in both private and published writings. He was famously in favour of sexual freedom and frankness, in principle at least. Lamb, in turn, would never insult readers by suggesting they would be so closed-minded as not to want to hear the details of Moorhouse’s sexual experience, right down to the stickiness of his first wet dream. Yet there is something curiously decorous and contained in the way that both Moorhouse and Lamb write about sexual experiences, whether positive or negative, and Lamb’s respectfully straightforward treatment of such matters as erectile dysfunction, internalised homophobia, and sexual assault is admirable.

I was surprised by the very young age from which Moorhouse’s preoccupation with, and conduct of, sex and relationships were informed by book learning, from Dorsey and Kinsey to (later on) Sartre and Beauvoir, even Durkheim. There is also a whiff of the boardroom. In Chapter Seven, Lamb cites a typescript in which Moorhouse outlines a ‘four-stage plan’ for salvaging his relationship with then girlfriend Sandra Grimes. ‘Certain parts of the central relationship must be preserved and protected,’ Moorhouse informed Grimes, adding: ‘It is perhaps a case of symbols and rituals. Symbols and rituals which mark the faith and strength of the relationship.’ It’s as if Moorhouse is talking about a participant in a clinical study, rather than himself. One of his ‘discussion papers’ for Sandra parenthetically promises ‘an appendix on “Honesty” to come’. For me, the heart of the book came in this seventh chapter, where the deep contradictions of Moorhouse’s outlook on life and relationships are most exposed, yet also properly historicised, as an index of Moorhouse grappling with his sexuality and gender identity in a repressive culture he himself helped to change. Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel frustrated for Wendy Halloway, who was married to Moorhouse from 1959 to 1963, when Lamb describes Moorhouse ‘espousing to her what he called his “Frankness and Sincerity Theory’” only to commence a clandestine affair with John Burrows (one of many things he withheld from her).

Moorhouse was such an eclectic, complex, and contradictory person that Lamb’s book provides an intense, even gripping, reading experience by the sheer depth of access it affords. There is, moreover, far more art to Frank Moorhouse than might be assumed at first glance. Far from lamenting a lack of selectivity, one suspects that what we are given is a tiny fraction of what was available. Every page holds intrigue: I was unaware of the extent of Moorhouse’s acquaintance with Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, or the manner of Moorhouse’s falling out with Michael Wilding. If I longed for a little more editorialising, it was only because Lamb is so insightful. In the stray moments when he allows himself to gloss an incident or passage, his observations are pithy and perceptive, as when he comments on Moorhouse’s tendency to ‘hid[e] behind a rational framework, speaking in generalities’ as a covert confessional mode, or when he deftly summarises the complex tone of ‘Filming the Hatted Australian’ in The Electrical Experience.

Frank Moorhouse is not a story of material struggle. Moorhouse experienced scarcity and precarity at times, but this was

usually because he relinquished steady employment to concentrate his energies on becoming a professional writer (the idea of the writer as worker was one of Moorhouse’s own research interests). Much of the melancholy I felt while reading this book was for the current generation of aspiring young writers and journalists for

It is rare for a literary biographer’s subject to provide such an extensive running commentary on his own Bildung as Lamb found in Moorhouse

whom the paths Moorhouse was able to carve out may look not only strange but downright otherworldly. A school leaver who was never a top student immediately gaining employment as a copy boy then working his way up as a cadet journalist through to editing a regional newspaper (remember those?) by the age of twenty-one, without any professional qualifications? Today, what equivalent paths would be open to one with Moorhouse’s talent and energy? And let’s not get started on the funding landscape for Australian literary magazines (which Lamb himself fought valiantly to palliate during his editorship at Island).

It seems apt that this volume culminates in the publication of The Electrical Experience, itself a ‘cultural biography’ of sorts (and by far Moorhouse’s best work, in my view). I hope that Frank Moorhouse will bring renewed attention to Moorhouse’s short fiction and discontinuous narratives, which the Edith trilogy has somewhat eclipsed. I was struck by the following lines Moorhouse penned in 1957, lineated as if they were verse, as some of Moorhouse’s more emotional private writings seem to be:

here I sit at my old school desk where I wrote many to-be-world-shattering short stories which lie in the folders marked

1954

1955 carefully preserved to exist those who want my old work when I am famous.

Lamb is one of those, of course: the ideal future reader Moorhouse could only have dreamed of at the time. We read these lines with the dramatic irony of knowing of the literary fame and fortune yet to come, but also with knowledge of the falling off in Moorhouse’s literary prominence in recent years. I fear I am one of very few people born after 1980 to have much interest in Frank Moorhouse (I doubt that many of my undergraduates have even heard of him). At the very least, Frank Moorhouse will be of great interest to a small audience, some of whom, like me, will eagerly await the second volume, tantalised by the words of Moorhouse, quoted by Lamb, that ‘no one tells the truth / all at once … / you get at it bit by bit’. g

Sascha Morrell is a Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University.

Calm Voice

On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag a dead manna gum, chained to a ute, into camp. They’re talking innocence. Is it inborn, or clad layer by layer by behaviour? Around the grey stump the men start chainsaws and crack beers, open a phone (there’s reception), search innocence definition Blamelessness. Chastity. Childhood. But also integrity, which means innocence. The confusion – that integrity means wholeness too –heats up when one man says he heard children arrive with sin. Then two-stroke fumes drown the twilight bush’s scat-and-pepper scents. They cut it. Some of the men scream, some don’t, when spiders erupt from the warm hollow.

When spiders erupt from the warm hollow a man tells a story. Halfway down a hill between three brothers’ house and the park where ghosts shoot up in the centre of the oval there’s a house, double-block, yellow brick. It’s for orphaned and homeless youths. At night – any night – twenty kids sleep there. No strict rules can stop it from sounding like a hundred, like a Slipknot concert. The exiles find new shadows. The men roll the logs into the last campers’ pit. Twice in the brothers’ childhood, the house goes up in flames. Cops comb its yard for knives. For bits of evidence because these kids are bad. They steal one brother’s Razor scooter. They’re bad.

They steal one brother’s Razor scooter. They’re bad thieves – the two younger brothers see them from their bedroom, tell their older brother, who’s had enough and leads them down. Twigs, kerosene, and three 18V leaf blowers and it’s blazing, a mountain range whose peaks scratch the dark sky of gum canopy and dark sky. They sedate him

with words, calm voices, or try, the carers: why risk arrest over this? The man recalls the woman saying, I’m speaking in a calm voice Chanting it. A spell. But there are walls she bruises then, backing inside. Her voice like the TV cabinet glass he puts her through. The boy from a good home. Voids her.

What did the boys from a good home lose, shed, void that day? Not the older brother, but the ones on the street who summoned him. The boys who saw a woman valued less than a scooter at an age when the worth of things was molten glass for heroes to blow. It’s the world, one man says. This fire’s the world and when the fireworks go off later, it’ll be all our evolution reaching its end point –bright lights and explosions. Ginger steeps in cast iron, drugs strike blood, charcoal anoints a lentil stew, which dissolves the man’s story. Talk moves on. A herd eating sweeter grass. One man’s dog pulls a roo bone from the ash.

One man’s dog pulls a roo bone from the ash and it turns to spiders, which turn to ash on the younger brother’s eyelids, to ash in the middle brother’s memory settling when the younger brother comes, asks, Remember when you went down the hill to find the boy who’d thrown a hot dog at me? Remember kicking his door till he answered, joined in calling himself what you called him, licked my shoes? The middle brother had forgotten himself back to an innocence the quick of which is fire, innate combustion. Around the fire, the men talk skin-to-skin touch in the early months, so love burns in.

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‘Thin labourism’

How is the Albanese government travelling?

by Frank Bongiorno

The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.

The impression left by the authors was that of a busy outfit. Sometimes, as with energy and climate change, policy pulls in different directions, the decarbonisation of domestic energy supply combining with new and large fossil fuel projects and expanded exports of coal and gas.

On housing, the array of measures is so wide that you could be deceived into imagining that, even if only some of them work, the housing crisis will be over within a few years. The reality, of course, is that they do not match the scale of the challenge of finding homes for all.

On industrial relations, the government has tilted the laws a little in favour of workers and there has been some much-needed wages growth. But the country’s labour laws still provide vast incentives not to join unions, allowing free-riders to receive benefits won on the backs of workers faithfully paying union dues to support enterprise bargaining. There are other legal barriers to organising workers, too, as well as wider changes in the economy, such as the rise of the gig worker, that provide few opportunities for unionisation.

At the time the special issue of JAPE was published late last year, Labor remained committed to the third tranche of income tax cuts that were a legacy of the Turnbull and Morrison governments and were supported by Labor while

it was in opposition. These would have offered big breaks to high-income earners as well as flattening the income tax scales to make the system less progressive. Labor’s refusal for well over eighteen months to modify or overturn them contributed to a belief that the government was too cautious on fiscal policy, too haunted by its defeat in 2019, too willing to allow the decisions of a previous government – one that some would regard as the worst in the country’s history – to shape its course.

Other policy areas contributed to the same impression. There was AUKUS, and its risky and expensive plans for a nuclear-powered submarine fleet whose strategic purpose is so fuzzy that not even its most enthusiastic proponents in government will tell us what it is to be used for. Morrison’s AUKUS was designed to wedge Labor, annoy China, and make him look big on the international stage. It lacked detail, but it did nail Australia’s colours to the mast as a faithful member of the Anglosphere. In that sense, it was good Liberal Party stuff. The Albanese government has invited us all to squint so that we might see it as good Labor stuff. It is an invitation that many have declined, including former prime minister Paul Keating.

Foreign affairs and defence are matters for Canberra, but it is arguable that the Albanese government operates rather like a good state Labor government. That was certainly how it was elected. There was no great wave of enthusiasm such as had propelled a Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, or Kevin Rudd into government. No one proclaimed ‘It’s Time’; there were no catchy jingles or slogans in which the Opposition leader promised to go about ‘Bringing Australia Together’; there was no neat rhyme, à la ‘Kevin07’. There were commitments to higher subsidies for childcare, to tackling housing, and to encouraging wage growth, but it was hardly a big-target strategy.

Anthony Albanese slipped into office quietly on the back of a wave of personal hostility to Scott Morrison, as well as a wider disillusionment with traditional party politics that saw the election of independents and Greens. State elections have frequently been won – most commonly by Labor – in just this way. Narrow victories and minority governments have been carved out of the unpopularity of the incumbent and the inoffensiveness of the challenger. Sometimes, these are turned into larger majorities and long-lived governments, such as those of Bob Carr, Steve Bracks, Mike Rann, and Annastacia Palaszczuk.

Albanese was perfectly suited to this role. He had been in parliament a quarter of a century and in politics, as a political staffer or party official, all his working life. He was familiar to large numbers of Australians. Even if not wildly popular, neither was he unpopular in the way that Bill Shorten became. The Australian Election Study, in fact, had Albanese as the most popular major party leader to contest an election since Rudd in 2007.

Albanese’s promises were mainly about service delivery, in the style familiar from state government, and their lack of extravagance probably contributed to his credibility in an era when political trust was low. Once those of a firebrand, his image and demeanour were now more like a suburban accountant, although one with a quirky nostalgic weekend hobby as a DJ. He probably did ‘ordinary bloke’ better than Morrison; the performance seemed less contrived.

The honeymoon was a long one. Labor’s victory in the Aston by-election on April Fool’s Day 2023 was a remarkable triumph for a government, a solid swing that took a recently ‘safe’ seat away from the Opposition. Labor increased its share of the primary vote by over eight percentage points from the 2022 election held less than a year before, and it achieved a two-party-preferred swing of 6.4 per cent. While one outer-suburban seat in Melbourne was not Australia, there were no signs that voters more generally were inclined to blame the still-new government for their woes, which included a cost-of-living crisis.

That forbearance was never going to last. The second half of 2023 was difficult for Labor. Inflation declined, but the cost-of-living crisis did not go away. The Reserve Bank paused interest rate increases for all of the second half of the year except November, but the succession of hikes since the one during the election campaign itself, in May 2022, was creating mortgage stress for some households and increasing the cost of living for anyone with a loan.

The defeat of the Voice referendum in October, while devastating to those who had worked for a Yes vote, also contributed to a loss of momentum and prestige for the government. The extent to which the Albanese government had committed to the referendum and to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement inevitably produced a perception that this was the government’s failure to own. Peter Dutton and his many friends and supporters in the media developed the narrative that Albanese had allowed himself to become distracted by a folly while neglecting the

more important task of dealing with the economy. That an argument is ridiculous does not lessen its effect. This one helped take just a little more gloss off a government that had every reason to consider that it was doing a good job in difficult times.

By the end of 2023, even the government’s closest friends were beginning to worry about the ground that Dutton and the Coalition had made up and the government’s seeming lack of direction. Albanese himself seemed all over the shop. There had been a narrowing in the Newspoll two-party-preferred vote; the parties were even in late November. Albanese was still easily preferred prime minister, but Dutton’s standing had improved.

The Albanese government operates rather like a good state Labor government

It wasn’t just the polls: there was a sense that the terms of national politics were being set by Dutton and that Labor was, at best, responding – and often not terribly well. The government had implemented its major election promises and seemed to have little more to say for itself. Dutton had used the previous winter to help sink the Voice. Would he use this summer to sink the government?

The early months of 2024 have seen a remarkable shift in the atmosphere of federal politics. The crucial change was Labor’s announcement shortly before Australia Day that it would redesign the income tax cuts due to come into force on 1 July. Continuing its basic fiscal caution, the government’s proposals did not increase the size of the cuts but redistributed them so that there were to be larger benefits for low- and middle-income earners, and smaller ones for the highly paid, than under the Coalition’s 2019 legislation.

If Dutton and the Coalition saw this coming, they gave few signs of having done so. Their response was a mixture of outrage – at Labor’s broken promise – and confusion. Slowmoving Liberal deputy leader, Sussan Ley, gave the impression in a media interview that a Coalition government would roll them back. In the end, the Coalition voted for the changes in parliament, which made the outrage seem performative if not hypocritical. Polling indicated a clear majority of voters favoured the change.

The Albanese government’s selling of this backflip said much more about the nature of the government than the changes themselves did. The government framed the cuts as part of a wider suite of measures to deal with cost-of-living pressures. Circumstances had changed, Albanese and his treasurer, Jim Chalmers, explained, and when that happens, good governments change their policies. What was notably missing here was any sense of a wider vision of tax policy and its relationship to Labor’s vision for the nation. A socialdemocratic defence of progressive income taxation was at least theoretically possible. But Labor had little to say about where their changes fitted into any wider vision of society, the role of government, or justice and equality.

Does it matter how a government explains its policies,

25 APRIL – 11 MAY ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE

7 – 15 JUNE

CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE AND TOURING NATIONALLY

as distinct from what it actually does? Well, yes, because the stories told about policy act as enablers or constraints according to what they imply about the purposes and possibilities of politics. If we have political and media élites unwilling to talk about creating a more equal society, the ability to carry on meaningful debate about equality and inequality across a whole range of domains – such as policy on education, health, and housing – is accordingly reduced. All the space is filled up with technocratic talk of the kind favoured by policy wonks, who have been thick on the ground in and around the present government; or, much worse, by right-wing populists, racists, and opportunists of the kind that increasingly infest the Liberals and Nationals. The Coalition now mainly steers clear of policy at all, unless it is to advocate nuclear power for the 2040s (or thereabouts), as a means of helping their fossil fuel industry friends while we wait for the reactors to appear.

The Dunkley by-election of 2 March saw right-wing populism out in force. The ready resort to rhetoric about foreigners assaulting Australian women – as in a notorious tweet by Ley – is a stark example of how the Dutton-led Opposition, and well-funded third-party supporters such as the lobby group Advance, will pursue the so-called suburban strategy. That the Liberals failed so miserably in a contest for which they had so many apparent advantages – their two-party preferred swing of 3.5 per cent is unexceptional at a byelection – might prompt some self-examination. Or it might not: the Coalition has no obvious pathway back to power, and its organisation in most states and territories is in something close to utter disarray. Talk of foreign rapists and nuclear reactors is probably as good as anything else they are likely to come up with for the time being.

Labor’s fairly comfortable win at the by-election suggests that the narrow and fragile coalition of support which saw it into office in May 2022 remains intact. Labor will likely continue to pursue what political scientists such as Rob Manwaring have called ‘thin labourism’ in relation to state and territory governments. There will be no radical economic reform or redistribution, no expansion of the state at the expense of private service provision, no welfare revolution, and no dramatic transformation in how we are governed. There will be a gentler bending of the neoliberal state and market economy to alleviate the ordeals of the present. That might well be enough for a second term in government. It will not, however, be sufficient to make much headway in solving the country’s serious problems, the most pressing of which concerns our contribution to ensuring the survival of a habitable planet. g

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University. The second and updated edition of A Little History of the Australian Labor Party, written with Nick Dyrenfurth, will be published by UNSW Press in May.

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

State of mind

A whiplash tour of global crisis

William Leben

IThe New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself

by Peter R. Neumann

translated by David Shaw

Scribe

$36.99 pb, 354 pp

n February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Remarkably, Ukraine fought an effective, close-run defensive campaign and the war turned into a quagmire for Vladimir Putin’s regime. As early as the following month, with the appalling revelations from Bucha of Russian atrocities, it was clear that this was – as they all are – a very dirty war. At the time of writing, the frontline exists in precarious stalemate and serious questions loom about the reliability of ongoing US-led material support, which is necessary for Ukraine to continue the resistance.

For Peter Neumann, ‘the war in Ukraine has shown that many people want values-based politics, and that such a basis is what makes the implementation of joint policies possible at all’. It is not at all clear how the war in Ukraine demonstrates this: the argument is never elucidated. Nor is it self-evident that what is occurring in Ukraine offers much of a blueprint for ‘joint policies’ regarding any of the other core challenges facing the planet or the West. Unfortunately, unmoored comments or conclusions in this style are characteristic of this book.

The New World Disorder: How the West is destroying itself was first published in German in 2022. This edition is stamped 2024, with the translation completed last year by David Shaw. This is a book of commendable ambition, chronicling the unfolding ‘crises’ of the West since the end of the Cold War. It traverses engagement and the failure thereof with Russia and China, terrorism and the various Middle Eastern wars, financial crises, the internet, populism, and, fleetingly, climate change. It does not shy away from blunt assessments about various policy failures of American, European, and other Western countries and their élites, nor is it mum about their frequent hypocrisy.

Perhaps the chief shortcoming of the book is the absence of a clear approach to the ideas Neumann invokes: the Enlightenment, aspects of democratic peace theory, neoliberalism, and a range of others. Neumann seemingly sets this up deliberately. He marks out indicative schools of thought on ‘the West’ and its travails: the left-wing (Michael Lüders, Noam Chomsky), the liberals or ‘idealists’ (Heinrich Winkler, Niall Ferguson), and the ‘realists’ (Carlo Masala, John Mearsheimer). He eschews any one such approach, instead picking and choosing piecemeal from these traditions. This approach rests upon the assertion that ‘in many cases, the supposed interests’ have been ‘defined by values (“a united Europe”, “a democratic world”, “free trade”) to such an extent that the two [can] no longer be separated’.

Ultimately, though, this amounts to a squib, because no consistent or explicit approach to how values and interests interact appears. The question of power, how it is constructed and how it functions, lurks just beyond reach. The interests and influence of capital, for example, receive patchy treatment. The assertion that ‘the desire to spread modern liberal ideas has often been a sincere … concern of the West’ rarely meets a reckoning with how this ideological terrain might be shaped or conditioned by ‘brutal economic and power-political interests.’ This is evident, for instance, in the treatment of Western relations with both Russia and China over the past three decades. The relationship

It is, nonetheless, a frustrating book. Neumann, a Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, begins by telling us that this is a book ‘about ideas and their (often unintended) consequences’. He tells us that ‘the West is neither a point on the compass nor a political alliance’, but ‘a state of mind’. The origin of that state of mind is identified in the Enlightenment, a set of intellectual and ideological developments that are then schematically set out in approximately two pages. It is therefore apparent from the beginning that the balance here between a sweeping scope and necessarily selective detail is uneasy, and a few concepts struggle to do a great deal of work.

in the former between the ideologies of ‘shock therapy’ and the interests of financial capital are unclear. Similarly, a corporate thirst for market opportunities is strangely marginal in the telling of Western engagement with an ‘opening’ China under Deng Xiaoping and thereafter.

Climate change occupies an awkward position in the book; indeed, it seems possible that it was a late addition. In a brief final chapter, which is nevertheless re-emphasised in the conclusion, Neumann sets out a two-scenario dichotomy for the future, between ‘Climate conflicts’ and an ‘Energy revolution’, before

People protesting in London against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 25 February 2022 (AdvancedPhotons/Alamy)

settling blithely on the conclusion that ‘the most realistic’ scenario is ‘a combination of both’. So much is, by this juncture, surely obvious to anyone paying attention. Green technology and the long-run decline of legacy energy systems will not obviate deeper patterns of international politics, and the physical impacts of a warmed planet, to say the least, won’t help.

Once again, deeper questions are dodged. Neumann tells us that, as climate change progresses, ‘the West is destroying not just itself, but the entire planet’. But it is a gloss to say that the problem is the prevailing ‘economic and political model’. We know full well that the problem is particular forms of production and particular energy systems, in particular places under particular political-economic regimes: in the West historically, and especially since 1945; in coming decades more significantly in China, India, and elsewhere.

No digestible account that attempts to cover the interlocking challenges of recent decades can be without gaps. Nonetheless, more coherent accounts that incisively grapple with the relationship between various domains, and between the ideological and the political-economic, are available. Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard times in the twenty-first century (2022) comes to mind on geopolitics, climate change, and the energy transition. Adam Tooze’s Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world (2018) came to mind when reading Neumann’s chapters on the financial crisis and European integration.

For an Australian reader, the occasional references to the antipodean role in all of this are sometimes recognisable, sometimes rather odd. The Howard government’s decision to join the

Generative fluid

Hilary Mantel’s couture responses

Frances Wilson

IA Memoir of My Former Self: A life in writing

by Hilary Mantel

edited by Nicholas Pearson John Murray

$59.99 hb, 432 pp

n the title piece of this posthumous selection of reviews, criticism, essays, and journalism, Hilary Mantel describes how she once visited an irritating psychic she nicknamed ‘Twerp’ in order to guide her back to her former self: ‘I didn’t necessarily think I had a past life, but I wanted to know how it would feel if I did.’ Her former self turns out to have been a ‘miserable illegitimate infant’ called Sara, born to a family of millworkers in the north of England. Sara isn’t an unlikely candidate: Mantel’s mother worked in a cotton mill from the age of fourteen, as did her maternal grandmother, who left school aged twelve; Mantel’s great-grandmother had been illiterate. Mantel comes from ‘a long

2003 invasion of Iraq is appropriately characterised as one driven by cynical alliance considerations, rather than by any enthusiastic subscription to the Bush administration’s ideological preoccupations. Australia’s performance on climate change is also rightly noted as poor, among sorry company.

Elsewhere, though, strange observations can be found. In his conclusion, Neumann summarises that ‘China’s “authoritarian modernity” has become the West’s main rival … even within parts of the West, such as in Australia and New Zealand’. It is difficult to make sense of that comment, on the grounds either of Australia’s domestic politics or of its international alignments, or indeed the 2021 AUKUS partnership.

Neumann is unapologetic in his refusal to prescribe a path forward. In the end, the follies and frustrations and tragedies parsed by this book are familiar and uncontroversial. ‘Honesty’ and ‘humility’ are cited in the final pages as necessary to move toward a more ‘sustainable modernity’, though it is unclear if these can function productively as political values. ‘A more sustainable modernity should avoid making lazy compromises with its enemies.’ This seems all well and good, though it is unclear what would constitute a ‘lazy’ compromise and who ought to be designated an ‘enemy’.

Without a clear-eyed diagnosis of how we all got here, it seems unlikely we will develop a clear-eyed idea of how to fix things – urgently. g

William Leben holds an MPhil from Oxford University and was a 2019 Monash Foundation Scholar. ❖

line of nobodies’. All that ‘Twerp’ wants to ask Sara is whether or not she is courting, when the real love of Sara’s life is Billy, her white bull terrier. ‘If Sara had slapped him,’ Mantel wonders, ‘what sort of a defence would I have had to a charge of assault?’

‘The dead are invisible,’ says St Augustine, ‘they are not absent.’ Now invisible herself, Mantel, who died in September 2022, will never be absent. Being dead was in many ways her great subject. ‘For some people,’ she wrote in ‘The Princess Myth’, reproduced in these pages, ‘being dead is only a relative condition; they wreak more than the living do.’ Mantel shared her life with ghosts, including the other former selves who haunt these pieces: the convent girl, her head bulging with knowledge; the stepdaughter baffled by the stranger in her mother’s bed; the nineteen-year-old law student disabled by physical pain which her doctor, not recognising endometriosis, treats with Valium; the twenty-six-year-old wife who is given a hysterectomy. One reason why her gaze is fixed firmly on the past, Mantel suggests in ‘Written on our Bodies’, is that she is the end of the line: the evolution of the women in the Mantel family ‘stops with me’. Her womanhood was, in this sense, another former self: ‘I am willing to write about my life as a woman, knowing that I’ve hardly had one.’

There is little evolutionary progress in Mantel’s journalism, which started good and stayed good. Nor is there a difference in tone between the essays about Jane Austen and Sybille Bedford for The New York Review of Books and her pieces for The Guardian

on sitting exams and fairy tales. Her early film reviews for the The Spectator are as unpredictable as her later reflections, in the London Review of Books, on Kate Middleton as a ‘royal vagina’. Wallace Shawn, wrote Mantel in 1987, has the face of ‘a questing grub’, Glenn Close’s face is made of ‘intersecting hatchet blades’. Death lurks in every film, even When Harry Met Sally. ‘You look like a human being,’ Sally tells Harry, ‘but actually you are the angel of death.’ The final line of Withnail and I,’ Mantel notes, is ‘Bring out your dead’ (anticipating Bring Up The Bodies,) while Close in Fatal Attraction should have handed out cards saying ‘the nightmare life-in-death was she who thicks man’s blood with cold’.

No subject being too large or too small, it is striking how much room Mantel finds in tight spaces. She could write at length – the Wolf Hall books average more than 600 pages each – but she could also write to length. The economy of her newspaper pieces is not explained by Hemingway’s iceberg theory, where the glinting surface of the sentence hides a tonnage of omission. Precision worked differently for Mantel, who said everything she wanted to say without omitting anything or even, apparently, making a cut. When asked to turn in 800 words, she sometimes delivered 799 but never 801. ‘After a while I didn’t even have to use the word count function. All my views on anything fitted 800 words. ‘“Should we be in Iraq?”

Eight hundred words. “Is it cold out?”

Eight hundred words.’

If her 2017 Reith Lectures, included here, are the finest defence of historical fiction ever written, the rest of the volume is a defence of the art of journalism. ‘My other works,’ said Samuel Johnson, ‘ are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.’ There was no need for Mantel’s Guardian or Spectator pieces to be this good; her editors would have gladly taken her watered-down works. But while the regular columnist, she writes, ‘is retained to turn over cliches as fast as the stock at Topshop, the novelist should produce a couture response – lovingly tailored, personal, an unmistakable one-off’, and this is what Mantel did. She wrote pure wine for newspapers because she saw newspapers as pure wine. ‘The paper has never been printed,’ she says, ‘that didn’t make me happy.’ She read the small ads in the freesheets, she liked the dodgy car dealer whose motors ‘drive superb’, she followed the births, marriages, and deaths columns, the Court Circular, and the ‘Appointments in the Clergy’. ‘I can make any paper last two hours,’ she explained in ‘Where Do Stories Come From’, ‘and when I’ve finished it’s not fit for another hand; it looks as if a drunk has been making paper hats with it.’

you how to become a writer, is there not one to help those who want ‘a normal life’ to ‘reverse the process’? And why is the moment-by-moment compression of the computer keys dreaded by so many writers? ‘We don’t hear of accountants who can’t open a spreadsheet, or farmers who take against fields.’ In primary school, Mantel recalls in ‘Blot, Erase, Delete’, they were taught to use nibs, which meant that her earliest writing was ‘like an Edwardian’. The children in her class who used blotting paper, exerting their ‘emphatic, vengeful pressure on the page’, drove her into ‘a frenzy of irritation and dislike’. These child-blotters remind her now of the type of people who wash themselves straight after sex. ‘Ink is generative fluid. If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.’

She is often in a frenzy of irritation, with decapitation being central to her thoughts. She will decapitate anyone, Mantel writes in ‘Persons from Porlock’, who comes between her and her last page. ‘If you can’t speak a truth at a beheading,’ she reflects elsewhere, ‘when can you?’ She once dreamed of being hanged, she

writes in another piece, but the hangman didn’t turn up.

It is tempting to think that Mantel wrote as much and as well as she did because, as Virginia Woolf said of Katherine Mansfield, she was ‘forever pursued by her dying’. Mansfield lived her brief life in fast forward, but Mantel rewound to the past and death, when it came, was unexpected. Neither she nor her husband was prepared, being a week away from moving to Ireland. ‘As soon as we die we enter fiction,’ she said in her Reith Lectures. ‘Once we can no longer speak for ourselves we are interpreted.’ Mantel will continue speaking for herself, and it is she who interprets us. g

Reflections on the strangeness of her craft run through the pieces like tickertape. Why, for example, do writers write differently at night? Who is this second self who takes over the book when you wake at three am? Why, among the manuals that tell

Frances Wilson is the author of six books including Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey (2016) and Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence (2021).

Hilary Mantel in Budleigh Salterton, East Devon, 2012 (Guy Newman/Alamy)

It might be …

P is for Peter, physician,

patient, poet Michael Shmith

TThe Cancer Finishing School: Lessons in laughter, love and resilience

by Peter Goldsworthy Viking

$36.99 pb, 336 pp

hat doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

For Peter Goldsworthy – eminent novelist, poet, librettist, and an Adelaide general practitioner for more than forty years – the notion of being diagnosed with multiple myeloma (cancer of the plasma cells) was as unthinkable as it was putatively unethical. Even Hippocrates himself (so it was said) didn’t die until his late nineties, of causes unknown. Goldsworthy was at least thirty years short of that when, in August 2018, he had an MRI scan for a severe knee problem. The radiologist called him into the office to inspect the images: bone oedema, knee-replacement suggested. ‘There might be another problem,’ the radiologist continued. ‘The bone marrow. Looks a bit odd. It might be multiple myeloma.’

Instant denial, Goldsworthy recalls, was followed almost immediately – in the time it took him to limp to a nearby newsagent to buy a lottery ticket; he won precisely $17.35 – by elation. ‘It feels as if I both have cancer, and don’t, simultaneously,’ he writes, presciently adding, ‘My first stray thought: cancer is a gift. I might be lucky to have it. What priceless material for a doctor-writer!’

If you want to write A memoir, please consider A haiku instead.

In fact, The Cancer Finishing School is much more than a memoir-treatise. It is a disarmingly honest, often graphic, but endearingly positive journey that, like a Glenelg tram, takes its time to trundle along destiny’s tracks, with (one can only hope) a long time yet before it reaches the terminus. Goldsworthy, writing in the chapter ‘Year Zero’ of his stem-cell transplant, puts it more succinctly:

My future hangs in the balance; my fate is being weighed. Will I be granted a pardon, or at least a leave-pass from this incurable disease for another decade?

[…]

I do believe in hope. Writing a happy ending is permitted, therefore, but less as a kind of positive voodoo magic than as plain useful optimism.

Along the way, Goldsworthy expands and enlivens his narrative by bringing in many of the cast who populate his multifarious existences. Whizzing round in this literary centrifuge are many family members, including his wife Lisa, children Anna, Alex, and Daniel, several grandchildren, and various friends and colleagues, plus a litany of Goldsworthy’s patients, long-past and still-present, whose own illuminating experiences and tales form ‘a treasure trove of mental medical files scattered across the messy seabed of my head’. The patients function as a sort of Greek chorus to the action: an important part of the story, yet also peripheral in terms of anonymity. Identities are carefully concealed or even combined, but presented by the ever-precise Goldsworthy in rough alphabetical order – although one patient, ‘G’, ‘wouldn’t stand for Gaylene, but after some negotiating, consented to Gemma’.

Soon enough, strictly clinical common sense prevailed. With test results confirmed, nearest and dearest informed, specialist consulted, and treatment organised, Goldsworthy had the beginnings with which to write about his condition. ‘Does the world need yet another book about cancer?’ he asks. Well, yes. As he points out, getting it down on paper was a combination of self-therapy and ‘special to me, if not yet stamped urgent’. It was also a significant advance beyond Goldsworthy’s own arch seventeen-syllable summation:

Also in the amalgam are some fictitious characters from the past, introduced by Goldsworthy, often to identify, challenge, and elaborate on his own perceived professional shortcomings. Thus a sequence in Uncle Vanya, by his great literary and medical forebear, Anton Chekhov, in which Dr Astrov recalls a persistent memory of one of his patients, who died during surgery. This triggers Goldsworthy’s recollections of his late patients, especially one, Paula, who, years before, had died suddenly, even before he had the chance to counsel her on the true severity of her illness. This, in turn, brings in the spectres of W.H. Auden’s tragic Miss Edith Gee, whose doctor remarked, ‘Cancer’s a funny thing’,

Peter Goldsworthy (Penguin Random House/Jeff Estanislao)

and Henry Purcell’s Dido, who lamented ‘Remember me. Remember me. / but ah! Forget my fate.’ Goldsworthy’s selfdiagnosis, ‘the memories we truly need are still there’, is bolstered by an additional thought that, rather than the long-dead, ‘it’s my living, breathing family of patients I am about to lose, then slowly, inevitably forget’.

This is a truly sad moment, when, earlier on, Goldsworthy realises he will have to stand back from his practice – for his own good as well as the continuing welfare of his patients, that ‘part of a very big, very extended adopted family’. I hope it’s not giving too much away to reveal that ‘Doctor Pete’ does, in fact, return to work, as a bare-headed, skeletal version of his former self who requires long consultations to bring his once-again regular patients up to date.

Then, a few months later, it’s 2020 and Goldsworthy’s hair has regrown to almost Afro luxuriance. Covid sweeps in, along with extended lockdowns and meetings on Zoom. Then, before we know it, it’s October 2021, and Lisa throws Peter a seventieth-

birthday party. After which, we accelerate into the present, and, almost miraculously, remission – at least for the time being.

‘I’ve tried to live the past three years unbothered by the disease and its various remedies, but it has provided the controlling framework of my life,’ Goldsworthy writes in the closing pages, in the chapter ‘Lessons Learnt’. He reflects on dying, but also on beauty and on love: ‘I need love to survive.’

It is, thank heavens, premature to describe this book as Goldsworthy’s epitaph. Better, I think, to say it’s the work of a lifetime; one sustained by inexhaustible knowledge from the creative and medical sides of Goldsworthy’s brain and leavened by his equally honed curiosity and wit. He writes in the unmistakable voice of the poet, with cadences and dramatic pauses you can almost hear. Actually, you can: The Cancer Finishing School is also an audiobook, narrated by the author. I plan to listen to it at once. g Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His latest book is Merlyn (Hardie Grant, 2021).

Rinbo Abdo

There’s a poem that begins

But that other wreck, where the crew tumbles out of a bad dream and into a worldwide storm of interpretation. Life is inhearsed, everything’s on affective hold for an hour as the heavens pause. A melancholy playlist is blinking its lights. It was the time when the awful narrative of their journey was lost at sea, the violence of the weather and the politics of humans and demi-gods all cast into the deep. Its terrible choices sunk amongst the rattail fish, the drowned men sinking backwards into sleep, their dreams infused with azure. But the hero, the sole survivor, one of the great navigators, shorn of his history, and of his genres, made his arduous way back from the ends of the earth –the far territory he headed for was home. There’s a detail from his travels in an illumination, that has him confronting a black Ethiopian panther. By the time he arrives back at the little country town he can’t speak or form sentences, his mind has turned into an anagram, and his memory’s gone. He thinks everyone around him is an imbecile. But he’s looked after by his mother and an old schoolteacher who care for him right up until the end.

I can hardly bear to talk about it, but many of its lines are unforgettable. We inhabit terminals but think we’re halfway there. This is the new lingo, brazen, disfigured, dazzled with halogen. The blinds are still up but it will soon be night.

Intricate webs

RMothers of the Mind:

The remarkable women who shaped Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie and Sylvia Plath

by Rachel Trethewey

The History Press

£25 hb, 368 pp

eading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:

I have never met a single mother (myself included) who is not far more complex, critical, at odds with the set of clichés she is meant effortlessly to embody, than she is being encouraged – or rather instructed – to think.

(Mothers: An essay on love and cruelty, 2018)

It is a virtue of Rachel Trethewey’s triple-headed study of three fascinating women, Julia Jackson/Stephen, Clara Boehmer/ Miller and Aurelia Schober/Plath, that one never underestimates their complexity and power (or impotence) – as agents, lovers, wives, writers, teachers, and mothers. Their stories – as Trethewey tells them – intricate webs of family and social history, make for compelling reading, and would even if the three had not been the mothers of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath. But whether these women were the singular shapers, the ‘mothers of the minds’ of their famous daughters – that is another question.

I understand there is an imbalance to be corrected. Fathers and sons are, after all, a great trope of literature (Turgenev heads my list. Yours?). Mothers and sons? The adjectives ‘Oedipal’ and ‘Freudian’ suggest the longevity of that fraught conjunction. For her chosen mothers and daughters, Trethewey supplies ample and sparklingly lively context – they all lived close, intimately intertwined, and layered lives – but whether from the great braid of familial detail one can separate out extraordinary or specific strands of maternal influence, as ‘shaped’ implies, I doubt. There is just too much going on in Trethewey’s narrative to pin down definitive causes. Also, she has a way of revelling in the

grand guignol of family history, and intriguing her reader with beguiling but extraneous detail. For example: Julia’s grandfather, James, ‘died having apparently drunk himself to death. According to one story, his corpse was preserved in a barrel of rum and sent back to England aboard a ship. During a storm, his body burst out of its container. The sight of her malevolent husband supposedly coming back to life so terrified his widow that she died of shock shortly afterwards and was buried at sea. ’ The rip-snorting energy of Trethewey’s telling is one of the attractions of her book. Does it advance her ‘shaped’ thesis? No.

The many names that Julia, Clara, and Aurelia bore – never their ‘own’ exactly – are in themselves an index of the complexity, the social rigidity, and fluidity, the adoptions (often literal) and displacements of their lives as women over time. Of all the daughters, Sylvia was the only one to retain her birth name (and identity?). One wonders about the nature of books that will be written about mothers and daughters at the beginning of the twenty-second century. Roles, circumstances, birthrates, sexual politics will all have altered, again, by then. But the rivets between mother and daughter? Will they have tightened or loosened in any measurable way?

Julia was born in India in 1846, to Maria and John Jackson (a physician), but grew up mostly in England, becoming ‘the precious jewel of her mother’s house’, while her father was absent, serving the health of Empire. Famously a pre-Raphaelite beauty (as the book’s photographs attest), Julia married her ‘grand passion’, Herbert Duckworth (Eton, Cambridge, barrister, sportsman), in 1867. Duckworth died in 1870, of some kind of internal rupture (the details are cloudy). He was thirty-seven. Julia, widowed at twenty-four, gave birth to their third child just six weeks after her husband’s death.

Eight years later, she married the liberal intellectual (and grieving widower) Leslie Stephen. Henry James ‘was surprised that someone as charming as Julia had “consented to become matrimonially the receptacle of Leslie Stephen’s ineffable and impossible taciturnity and dreariness”’.

Clara, unburdened by the expectations that great beauty imposed on Julia, was nonetheless part of a cohesive, wide-travelling army family. Her life turned upside-down when her father, Captain Frederic Boehmer, died prematurely. Her bereaved mother, Polly (twenty-one years younger than her husband), took in needlework to supplement her widow’s income, but that proved insufficient to educate her four surviving children. Clara, at nine, was sent to live with her aunt and (wealthy) American-businessman uncle, Frederick Miller. Clara’s oldest brother was sent to an expensive boarding school. Clara, resentful, bore scars. Asked, at seventeen, what she would like to be if

Rachel Trethewey’s triple-headed study Morag Fraser

Julia Stephen with Virginia on her lap, 1884 (Smith College Libraries, Leslie Stephen photo album, photograph by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron/Wikimedia Commons)

not herself, Clara replied ‘A schoolboy’.

Aurelia Schober was born in Boston, but her experience was very much that of an alien, an outsider. Her German father, Franz (later Frank), and mother (also Aurelia) made vigorous attempts to integrate, and to conform to American aspiration. They voted Republican. They were ambitious for their children’s education. But Prohibition (Franz worked as a head waiter) and the Great Depression brought financial hardship. Daughter Aurelia, clever and ambitious, had to make her own way. She studied hard, read widely, wrote, participated – with élan – in dramatic productions. She was also, Tretheway claims, ‘a romantic’, with ‘a dangerous intensity of affection’.

I have focused upon the mothers, because much of what Trethewey writes about them is unfamiliar, often surprising, and revelatory in the way that close-grained accounts of human domestic and social interaction and its implications can be. Context is crucial. Trethewey’s descriptions of the multivalent bond between these three women and their daughters can be enlightening, and often moving – I’d not known, for example, about Agatha Christie’s loving dependence upon her mother, Clara.

But Trethewey is also on much more speculative psychological ground here, and obliged to rehearse a lot of material that has been through the grinding mill of psycho-socio-literary debate for decades. Accretion or repetition of data does not necessarily lead to clarification, or to lucidity of analysis. Nor does the occasional descent into socio-jargon. It was jarring to read, for example, that Sylvia Plath ‘planned to combine academic research with spending quality time with her mother’. Did Aurelia enjoy that, I wonder. Or that ‘while dealing with the mundane details

Navigating knowledge

Learning by seeing and doing

Glyn Davis

NThe Floating University: Experience, empire, and the politics of knowledge

by Tamson Pietsch

University of Chicago Press US$65.95 hb, 323 pp

ovelists and historians alike must choose how to tell their story. They may prefer a traditional authoritative voice, recounting the story in chronological order. Events surprise or shock as they unfold on the page, arriving at an apparently inevitable conclusion. This familiar organising principle holds our attention, but comes with constraints. Material must make sense within the timeline, or the narrative stalls. Think of Tolstoy’s long digression on farming in Anna Karenina or Hugo on constructing the sewers of Paris in  Les Misérables, as we wait impatiently for Jean Valjean to flee the barricades.

of domesticity, in private Sylvia was reaching her full potential as a writer’.

I was glad to read the new material about the mothers and/or the daughters that Trethewey’s research unearthed, and glad also when revelations led to enhanced insight – when this explained that, perhaps. I’m gratified, also, to sense that a wheel is turning. Serious American articles have recently assured me that it is no longer mandatory (or even ‘cool’) to sheet all social ills home to mother. I shall, however, continue to treasure James Thurber’s dictum that ‘A woman’s place is in the wrong’.

What I shall not treasure are sloppy publishing and editorial standards. The opening chapter of Trethewey’s book contains this sentence:

Born in India on 7 February 1868, like all the mothers in this book, Julia was an outsider.

Page 235 contains this one:

Like Agatha’s letters to Clara describing travelling the world, Sylvia wanted Aurelia to share her exciting new life.

In between, there are dozens of ‘like’ examples. I marvel that Trethewey could have written them, but I marvel more that her publisher, the History Press, should have allowed them to stand, and thereby mar a text designed, surely, for avid readers of literature. g

Morag Fraser is currently writing a biography of Peter Porter.

An alternative structure is to start small and local, and then expand the frame with each new chapter. This allows the gradual addition of perspectives. The original story gains context and meaning over time. Yet layering can be risky – too much content and the narrative tracks further and further from the starting point. Coherence is lost amid the detail.

In The Floating University, historian Tamson Pietsch frames her story through a sequence of ever wider perspectives. She starts with the story of a boat voyage from September 1926 to May 1927. Some 316 wealthy, white, male college undergraduates joined passengers on the Dutch steamship the SS Ryndam for a journey through Central America, Asia, and then Europe. They would study while at sea and explore new cultures in each port. Here was an early experiment in study abroad, inspired by the experiential psychology of William James and the writing of John Dewey, who believed that students learn best through doing things in and with the world.

Sadly, high aspirations proved insufficient. Even at $US2,500 a ticket (more than $US42,000 in today’s money), the venture struggled financially. Just before sailing, the enterprise was disowned by its original sponsor, New York University, despite the seventy-three subjects offered on board, covering a full college year, complete with exams. The visionary founder of the floating university, Professor James E. Lough, returned home to find that he had been fired. It took a long court case, fought all the way

to the Supreme Court of New York, before NYU offered Lough compensation for his loss of tenure.

To illuminate these largely forgotten events, Pietsch extracts numerous voices, newspaper records, State Department correspondence, and much else beside. We learn about the invisible crew below deck and about the class, gender, and race relations implicit when privileged students sail the world (black applicants were rejected). Tabloid accounts reported japes on shore, including claims that some students had stolen a car in Yokohama

power. Here was a chance for students to experience firsthand the influence of their nation in the aftermath of World War I. During classes and shore visits, students and their teachers compared US values with life elsewhere. Those they visited looked back in turn and formed their own views about an emerging American presence in the world.

Finally, the account turns from the cruise to the educational philosophies informing American tertiary education before and after the floating university. By her final chapter, Pietsch has traversed a vast expanse, from the ambition of one academic to promote a new way of learning through the mechanics of élite American universities, to questions of empire, rapid technological change, and geopolitical shifts. The gamble with a discursive structure succeeds admirably. Through approach and substantive content, this innovative study conveys the international and intellectual history it wishes to explore.

to visit the underworld section of town. The US ambassador complained that the Ryndam’s time in Japan set back relations between the two nations by many years.

Much commentary at the time proclaimed the journey an educational failure. There were problems – the academic leaders were sometimes under-prepared, and the ship offered insufficient classroom and library space. But, once teaching began, ‘a collegiate atmosphere’ enveloped the Ryndam.

Pietsch highlights the curricular and the extra-curricular offerings for students. Students discussed global politics and met significant leaders, from Benito Mussolini to Pope Pius XI. Some travelled overland in India to spend time with Mahatma Gandhi, then leading a revolt against British imperialism. Others started a daily newspaper on board, formed a jazz band, married fellow passengers, and drew on their experience to shape careers and communities. Successful in life, some former Ryndam students later lobbied hard for their government to support more Americans venturing abroad.

With the story established,  The Floating University can slip its moorings for newer worlds. These young Americans were not encountering an itinerary chosen at random. Pietsch argues that the voyage was predicated on growing American maritime

Study abroad is now a familiar feature of higher education, and once again there are ships on the high sea offering accredited courses. That we learn by seeing and doing is now conventional wisdom. In an interview to mark her book, Pietsch cited a recent survey suggesting that one in ten American undergraduates study overseas during their degree. The anxiety of university leaders in the 1920s that engagement beyond the classroom might undermine received wisdom through lectures – and the business model of learning on campus – has faded. New York University, which dismissed Professor Lough, now hosts study-abroad campuses around the world, embracing a pedagogy it once found challenging.

Ultimately, The Floating University is a study of authority: how knowledge is produced and accredited; and who controls the pathways and the exclusion of alternative approaches from the curriculum. Starting with a 560-foot steamboat, The Floating University concludes by highlighting the values and power structures used to legitimise only some models of higher education. Along the way, the author acknowledges the contradictions and lacunae in the story, dives into unreliable archives, tracks undocumented assumptions, and notes that any methodology will struggle to reconstruct any historical moment from fragments.

To work within such constraints, yet provide a satisfying narrative, takes meticulous research and extraordinary writing. The Floating University transforms a forgotten venture into an exploration of an industry, a rising empire, and the contested ownership of knowledge. It offers a memorable contribution to the literature on higher education. g

Glyn Davis is Secretary, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

University World Cruise S.S.Ryndam (from the book under review)

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Portrait of a friendship

In memoriam Katerina Clark (20 June 1941–1 February 2024)

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.

I would date our friendship from this time, when I was in New York, working at Columbia University, and Katerina was teaching at Wesleyan in Middleton, CT. But we had already had thirty years of roughly parallel, sometimes interconnecting lives, and always knew about each other’s progress, thanks to the parental grapevine. The parents were Manning and Dymphna Clark and Brian and Dorothy (‘Doff’) Fitzpatrick, both fathers Australian historians, and all four Melbourne University Arts graduates who, in the 1940s, were part of the local left-wing intelligentsia. Katerina and I were born within sixteen days of each other, in Melbourne hospitals just a few miles apart, in June 1941. Both mothers liked to tell the story of how they were still in hospital on the fateful day, June 22, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Dymphna’s story was presumably literally true, while Doff must be forgiven some poetic licence, unless a two-week stay in hospital after a normal delivery was common in the 1940s.

Our near-simultaneous births were the beginning of the doppelgänger effect that was to continue for the next eighty years. We kept doing much the same things, but separately. Shooting across the world on similar trajectories, we often touched down in the same places, but not at the same time. It started when we both studied Russian in Nina Christesen’s department at the University of Melbourne (though I was two years ahead and did Russian only as my compulsory language). Then it was Moscow – Katerina went first, from ANU in the early 1960s, and I followed from Oxford a few years later.

Katerina did her PhD in Soviet literature in the United States, while I did mine in Soviet history in the United Kingdom, but then I moved to America. (At this point, I have to start calling Katerina ‘Katy’, since this is how she was known in the United States and everywhere else except Australia, where the family’s Katerina persisted, and Russia/the Soviet Union, where she was Katya.) We both taught at the University of

Texas in Austin, although our stints there overlapped by only a couple of months (to my chagrin, Katy and her husband, Michael Holquist, moved on to greener pastures in Indiana). In the 1990s, we almost ended up together at Yale, Katy and Michael’s next stop after Indiana, when I was offered a job there, but I pulled out after my husband (another Michael [Danos], known as Misha) suddenly died.

Katy was elected president of our interdisciplinary professional organisation, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic and East European Studies in 1999; I had preceded her in this role in 1997. It was odd enough to have two Australian presidents within three years (there have never been any others, as far as I know), but even odder when you consider what we were each implicitly elected for – founding a new field that, when we started off in the 1970s, had been only marginally acceptable, but was now flourishing. Soviet literature was the field in Katy’s case, Soviet history in mine.

It was a long march to full scholarly respectability for both of us, but along different routes. This was partly because of conditions in our respective academic fields, but also because we were so unlike in temperament. Katy, much more gregarious than I in everyday life, was remarkably modest and reticent in a professional context. Her style of public presentation lacked the implicit assertion of authority that most academics develop. She moved from job to job as a ‘spousal hire’ (Holquist, her former supervisor, being the more senior); and, when her children were young, was generally employed part-time, which, as I vainly pointed out to her, only meant that she carried a full-time teaching and committee load for a half salary and less respect. Even at Yale in the 1990s, where Katy’s national and international reputation was fully made, the ‘spousal hire’ shadow took some time to dissipate.

In 1975, we were both invited, as fresh faces, to an international ‘revisionist’ conference on Stalinism organised by Princeton Professor Robert C. Tucker. Katy presented a paper foreshadowing her ground-breaking book The Soviet Novel: History as ritual (1981), but its originality was probably not recognised by the political scientists and historians in attendance. I presented a paper that, from Tucker’s point of view and that of his young associate Steve Cohen, was the wrong kind of revisionism, so there were lots of arguments and I ended up withdrawing my paper from the volume and

publishing it elsewhere. That contrast in reception – Katy’s work tending to be ignored, mine to ignite acrimonious controversy – persisted to some degree for a decade or more.

My problem was basically a Cold War one. I was one of a new cohort of historians trying to write social history (history ‘from below’) in the Soviet context, which the old guard saw as ipso facto pro-Soviet, since it implied that there actually was a society to study, not just an atomised mass mobilised by commands from above. Katy’s problem was that the Russian émigrés who dominated the Slavic departments of American universities considered that true Russian literature ended with the revolution, and everything since was just propaganda – not worth reading, let alone analysing.

Katy responded to criticism with outward meekness, which made it easy to overlook the fact that, far from changing her approach, she continued doggedly to pursue it. I, on the contrary, talked back in high-visibility scholarly debates that provoked a lot of Cold War mud-slinging but also made my name. I don’t remember that Katy ever ran into any significant Cold War trouble, despite the fact that she was proposing that Soviet literature should be taken seriously, which, on the face of it, was roughly comparable to my suggestion that there was a Soviet social history to be written. In Australia, Manning’s book Meeting Soviet Man (1960) led to his being accused of being anti-Soviet, but that furore probably didn’t reach America, and anyway, Katy wasn’t yet on the US academic scene. Erupting in Australia in the late 1990s, a new round of accusations that Manning was a Soviet spy did attract international publicity; but by that time the Cold War was going out of fashion in American Sovietology. In contrast, I took considerable flack for Brian in the 1970s and 1980s, even though he was much less known in the United States than Manning was (according to malicious Sovietological rumour, he was a communist whose KGB connections had got me into the Soviet archives).

Katy liked my father, and I liked hers. I remember a delightful walk in New Haven with Manning declaiming Thomas Hardy’s poems of lost love (Katy was not present, probably in the kitchen with Dymphna, preparing dinner). Katy’s memories of Brian went back further, to the occasional visits of the Fitzpatrick family to the Clarks in Canberra when we were adolescents. I have only blurry memories of these visits myself; they focus mainly on Manning’s habit of escaping a noisy household by disappearing up the ladder to his attic study (pulling the ladder up behind him, in my memory, though that may be embellishment). What Katy remembered, and often repeated to me in later life, was: ‘Brian was so proud of you.’ To this she usually added: ‘You were very lucky.’ She saw my father’s pride and encouragement as the source of my intellectual self-confidence. I am sure that Brian boasted to the Clarks about my scholarly and musical accomplishments: he did it everywhere, to my embarrassment as a teenager. I think Manning took me more or less at Brian’s valuation. Music was always a way to Manning’s heart (my brother David, too young to be a real presence in the 1950s visits, later formed an almost filial connection with Manning on that basis), although I don’t think any of the young Clarks, certainly not Katerina, were

encouraged to learn an instrument. A quiet presence, second child and only girl in a family of six, Katerina scarcely figures in my memory of these family visits. Neither Manning nor Dymphna boasted about her.

Brian died in 1965, long before Manning (1991), Dymphna (2000), and Doff (2001), which more or less equalised Katy and me in the parental approval stakes, since my mother was also a non-encourager. Doff made a late about-turn to parental pride in the 1990s, but Katy listened to my accounts of this rather glumly. The positive feelings Katy and I had for each other’s fathers probably did not extend to each other’s mothers, although we never discussed this. Katy, I would guess, took over Dymphna’s somewhat dismissive view of Doff, whose diffidence and self-consciousness could be mistaken for humility.

Katy’s first monograph, The Soviet Novel: History as ritual, a pioneering study of the ‘master plot’ of Soviet socialist realism, appeared in 1981, when it was still very much an outlier in a field focused on the refined products of late Imperial Russia’s Silver Age. But the balance was already starting to shift in American university Slavic departments, largely the result of generational change, As the émigrés grew older, more and more young people interested in working on Soviet literature entered the field. Katy’s Soviet Novel – reprinted in 1985, and then, most unusually for a dissertation book, issued in a new edition in 2000 – became a foundational text. Its appeal was not only to young literature scholars but also to young historians and anthropologists of the Soviet Union. For my graduate students at the University of Chicago in the 1990s and 2000s, it was a must-read classic, not so much because I told them to read it but because their peers did. In an odd twist to our intersecting story, Katy’s stepson, Peter Holquist, became leader of a competing group of Russian history graduate students at Columbia University, rallying under the banner of cultural history to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy in Soviet history, which for them (how short is academic memory!) was my kind of social history. Peter’s Columbia group fought pitched verbal battles with my PhD students at Chicago, but all of them read Katy’s Soviet Novel.

By this time, Katy and I had settled into a close, quasifamilial friendship mainly conducted in long monthly telephone calls, with occasional visits. When I say ‘quasifamilial’, I mean that Katy became something like family for me, not the other way round (with so many Clarks, and their strong sense of collective family identity, Katy had no need to look elsewhere). It was Katy who flew in to lend support when Misha died in 1999; and Katy who, when I found myself short of the two family members required for my induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, volunteered to fill the gap. We came across more like sisters than friends, according to one American colleague, who noted that we finished each other’s sentences (a polite way of saying that we interrupted each other). Katy and I started celebrating our milestone birthdays together at the age of sixty-five, when we were in Melbourne together for a week of conferences that was also, courtesy of the Mellon Foundation, a kind of celebration of our doppelgänger careers: a day on Soviet literature for Katy,

a couple of days on Soviet history for me and my Chicago graduate students, a day on Brian and Manning as Australian historians, a belated memorial evening on Brian’s centenary, and, to top it off, excerpts from Manning Clark: The Musical, performed by my cousin Peter Fitzpatrick and his singers from Monash University.

All her life in America, Katy, unlike me, was homesick for Australia. Ironically, I was the one who, in 2012, returned. We still talked on the phone every couple of weeks; I still went up to New Haven for the weekend whenever I was in New York, which was now once a year, instead of maybe twice; but in addition, on Katy’s regular visits to Australia, we started driving together from Sydney to the Clark family house in Wapengo, Dymphna’s creation, to which Katy was passionately attached. It was around this time that I became fully aware of the uniqueness of Katy’s status in my life, and I suppose mine in hers: nobody else knew all the bits – Australian, American,

Soviet/Russian – and had been around since the beginning. In our phone calls, we exchanged professional gossip and family news (Katy knew the names, places of residence, and occupations of all my relatives, and would ask about them individually if I left anyone out), and talked about whatever was on our minds in non-academic life, which in my case after Misha’s death usually meant playing chamber music. Whenever she was staying with me in Chicago, and later in Sydney, Katy would quietly sit in on my string quartet sessions (nobody else did that) and quiz me about the other participants afterwards (she got to know their names, too.)

An odd thing was that we did not usually talk substantively about our work, or at least my work, even though our areas of expertise were quite close. I read Katy’s books, and I suppose she must have read mine, both the scholarly ones and the memoirs (how not, given all the personal information there), but she virtually never commented on them to me. I think it was a bit of a sore spot with Katy that I wrote faster than she did and published more books. On the issue of social

versus cultural history, I assumed that, as a loving and beloved stepmother, as well as a literary scholar cum cultural historian herself, she was with Peter on the cultural side. (Actually, I was at least half on the cultural side myself, but I’m not sure that Katy acknowledged that.) She knew the names and dissertation topics of most of my old Chicago students, and used to ask about them, but this was one area of conversation where I still watched what I said – I had my own competing loyalties.

Throughout 2023, during her illness, we were doing weekly Zooms, but no video, a condition of hers. Our conversations changed somewhat in this last year. Isolated by the illness, Katy was reading a lot of background on the Ukraine and Gaza wars, and she talked about these issues with such confidence and authority that I could suddenly imagine her, for the first time, as a public intellectual. She was also much readier than in the past to talk in detail about her current work (a book on the very interesting Soviet Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov; she managed to finish a first draft). I saw Katy for the last time in New Haven at the end of November 2023. The ‘no video’ rule made me expect to find her greatly changed, at least physically, but she was entirely herself, quite undiminished. Since she was immune-suppressed and not really supposed to see people, we had to sit at opposite ends of a long table, à la Putin, but then we went for a long walk, the way we always did. Mid-walk, under idyllic blue skies, two tall godlike figures on bicycles swooped down on us with cries of affectionate greeting: her devoted neighbours, one of whom –always these interconnections! – I had known slightly in Texas. Katy was radiant, and we all radiated back, a moment of love. Like an idiot, but also because I knew she didn’t like being photographed, I didn’t take a photo. These last images of her exist only, but very vividly, in my mind.

When I heard of my father’s death in 1965, the first reaction was a kind of childish panic: what next, once the audience for the performance of my life has abruptly left the theatre? Katy wasn’t my audience in that sense (after all, I’m not twenty-four anymore). But she was the audience in the more comfortable, everyday sense that is at the heart of friendship. When something happened, I thought: ‘I must remember to tell Katy.’ She was the person to whom I regularly recounted the events of my life, trivial or otherwise, since our last conversation; the one who knew all the names, didn’t need to have anything explained, and remembered what she was told – a kind of recording angel with no looming Day of Judgement. Thinking back to the 1970s, I have to apologise to Katy for holding out on her, as she tried to gather all the information necessary for her task. By the 2020s, I was telling her everything; and I wasn’t the only one: Katy/Katerina was a person with a gift for friendship. Who is there to keep up the records on us now? g

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (2022) and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). Her new book, Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War, will be published in November. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.

Katerina Clark and Sheila Fitzpatrick, 2011 (courtesy of the author)

‘We live here’

Murray Middleton’s début novel Morgan Nunan

MNo Church in the Wild

by Murray Middleton Picador

$34.99 pb, 384 pp

urray Middleton’s début novel, No Church in the Wild, opens beneath Flemington’s public housing towers in inner-city Melbourne. Residents of the towers flood the street to witness the police arrest a group of children ‘pinned on the concrete, knees digging into their spines’. One of these observers is Ali, a grade six primary school student. Ali recognises a Somali friend of his, Walid, as one of the boys under arrest. From Ali’s perspective, it is the latest provocation in a monthslong campaign of police harassment against the local African migrant community. When things escalate and police direct the observers to leave, Ali responds: ‘Why should we? ... We live here.’ As the first of five parts, this opening scene is prologue to the action of the novel, which takes place five years later as Ali and Walid embark on their final years of schooling amid a community still suffering from problematic police interactions.

In an attempt to repair the ‘[l]ong-term disengagement with local youth’, police invite high-school students to join a training program that will culminate in a trip to Papua New Guinea to hike the Kokoda Trail. This program becomes the central device that unites four of the chief characters of the novel: Ali; his classmate and occasional antagonist, Tyler; their teacher, Anna; and police officer Paul. Using subheadings to signal shifts in perspective between these characters, Middleton mostly pairs two episodic, character-focalised sections per chapter, plotted across a roughly overlapping temporal period; a structure (and prose style) similar to that previously utilised by Middleton in his short story ‘Burnt Hill Farm’ from his collection When There’s Nowhere Else to Run (2015) Extended to the novel format, the result is a rich multiplicity of voices (aided by Middleton’s ear for the unique rhythms of teenspeak, best showcased when characters are contained in classrooms or KFC) and a mostly energetic narrative pacing, allowing for a layered rendering of setting and character.

Although Ali’s perspective recurs most frequently, his role is more often that of an observer, especially of Walid, who is now involved in a long-running civil claim against Victoria Police. As Walid tells Ali, the legal proceeding, which relates to the action of the prologue, is about ‘bigger things’ than monetary compensation. It also offers a stage for truth-telling and police accountability, acting as a counterbalance to the police-driven Kokoda program and other self-serving initiatives and investigations that have failed to build trust with the community.

Walid acts as moral guide to Ali. His commitment to the case, his disciplined attention to his education and religion, his ambition to attend the University of Melbourne, and his retreat from anything crime-related place him at odds (even in conflict) with some of his classmates. By comparison, Ali’s engagement with hip-hop culture (he dreams of becoming a Billboard Hot 100 artist) includes tagging his MC name across Flemington. He also flirts (mildly) with the drug culture that surrounds them and is more at ease with increasingly hardened classmates, though he keeps half an eye on Walid and his education.

Tyler’s cynicism towards his teachers (‘… they don’t really give a shit, and neither does he’), his education (‘[students are just] passing time until they don’t have to be at this povo school anymore’), Walid, and the rest of his classmates (‘He’s just going to end up unemployed and addicted to meth, like every other deadshit from the flats’) speaks to his isolation. Tyler’s mother is severely drug addicted; his father incarcerated. He is self-conscious about his poor personal hygiene, and most days he goes hungry. His overt racism, shaved head, and violent fantasies position him as a neo-Nazi in the making (à la Romper Stomper, a connection Paul makes upon observing him), yet there is a sense that his offensive views have not yet crystallised. Though overlooked by most (Anna is one exception), Tyler’s actions often belie his unpleasant remarks. In these sections, Middleton’s use of free-indirect style is at its strongest. The unreliability of Tyler’s implied interior betrays how deeply his defence mechanisms are rooted, yet it is through Tyler that Middleton best illustrates the significance of hope (its presence or absence; its precarity) for characters living on the margins.

This theme, along with some of the character dynamics, the use of the child perspective, and the inner-city suburban Melbourne setting, bear similarities to works like Tony Birch’s Ghost River (2015), although Middleton sets his novel closer to the present, a near-contemporary pre-Covid Australia. Aside from a few brief excursions (including the trip to Kokoda), the novel’s central setting is Melbourne’s inner-west. Initially moving to Melbourne from the country, Anna now finds herself living alone in Kensington following an unexpected break-up. Similarly, Paul has transferred from another district with ambitions to climb the police ranks. The relative ease with which both characters move in and out of the inner-west is contrasted with Ali and his classmates, who are much more tethered to the public housing estates they call home. This tension gives rise to a complex spectrum of feelings about place, ranging from pride to revulsion. Early in the novel, Ali takes in the outlook from a Flemington high-rise building, admiring ‘the best view in the city’. Later, Tyler is mystified by the ongoing gentrification in the area: ‘If Tyler were loaded, this’d be the last place in the world he’d live.’

The final part of the book comprises one chapter within which Middleton elects to escalate his structure by including eleven short fragments, shifting between character perspectives several times. The acceleration in pace suits the increasing tension of Tyler’s narrative (and its progression towards a menacing climax), though it does leave the resolution to other threads feeling slightly rushed. Nonetheless, this is a highly affecting and stylistically engaging novel. With his move to the long form, Middleton’s writing remains daring and ever humane. g

Amid the ruins

A museum of sustained shocks

Andrew van der Vlies

TTremor

by Teju Cole Faber

$32.99 pb, 239 pp

unde, a photographer and art professor at Harvard, attempts to photograph a hedge in his neighbourhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waved away by a white property owner suspicious of a Black man on his street, Tunde tries again midway through Teju Cole’s new novel, Tremor, but, trusting his feeling of unease, leaves. (One is put in mind of the notorious 2009 incident in which neighbours reported Henry Louis Gates Jr for trying to force open his own Cambridge front door.) It is not until the final pages that Tunde returns to the scene and tries again, in the dead of night, after a party he has hosted with his partner, Sadako. The first exposure is too bright, the second too inky; too much is in frame, then not enough. Finally, he makes what he believes might be a successful image. Makes not takes; the difference is significant.

This is one of several scenes in which Cole signals the operations that interest him as writer, critic, and photographer, and that structure Tremor’s episodic narrative: repeated attempts to capture the telling detail that might index the complexity of individual experience at a particular moment, against the backdrop of an invariably hostile context. Another metapoetic moment comes late in the novel, when Tunde and his students watch Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994). We are reminded that ‘a lot of the screen time ... is spent on repeated takes of one particular scene’. The film’s landscape is profoundly suggestive: devastated only recently by an earthquake nowhere explicitly mentioned, ordinary life continues in spite of and amid the ruins. ‘We live,’ Tunde muses, ‘on the accumulated ruins of experience.’

The hostile context for Tunde, who is, like Cole, of Nigerian ancestry, is most obviously racism and the judgement of an establishment that resents a Black intellectual presuming to operate at the heart of its élite cultural institutions (he receives two emails on the same day, one calling him a fraud, the other inviting him to lecture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts). In this moving, messy, multiply focalised narrative, however, the hostile context is also the universe itself. Art in its many forms, from music to photography, painting to film, offers the only reliable strategies for securing a stay – negotiated and provisional rather than acquisitive and permanent – in the face of encroaching death.

Here, Tremor’s presiding genius is neither a jazz musician (though Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane are discussed), nor any real-life photographer, but – perhaps surprisingly – Virginia Woolf. Late in the novel, Tunde reads Woolf’s posthumously

published essay ‘The Death of the Moth’, and the party before that final act of image-making is preceded by Tunde declaring, like Clarissa Dalloway, that he will buy the flowers himself. Woolf’s careful ethics of curation, assembling characters whose experiences coalesce only in moments (rendering fleetingly concrete her friend Roger Fry’s theory of significant form), informs both Tunde’s reflections on art and Cole’s own formal experimentation in a book that tests the novel form through fragmentation and polyvocality.

Cole explores how certain narratives, granting dignity and personhood only to particular subjects, direct the ways in which the West understands itself – whether in the formulation ‘terrible tragedy’ being reserved for the accounting of white victims in narratives of early frontier violence, or the selective attention to suspect provenance in the museum where Tunde does indeed deliver a lecture. He reflects on several works in the MFA, beginning with Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) and explaining the 1781 events that inspired the painting (as it has, in our own time, M. NourbeSe Philip’s poem Zong). He then alights on the small Landscape with Burning City (c.1500), by Flemish artist Herri met de Bles, whose complex provenance involves liens and bankruptcy in occupied Amsterdam, Hermann Göring, and a restorer in New York, from whence it comes to Boston. Wall-text indicates the museum’s eagerness to hear from likely legitimate owners. Tunde wonders why such text does not contextualise the museum’s thirty-two bronzes looted from Benin City. ‘What does it mean to care about art but not about the people who made that art?’, he asks, reflecting that ‘of late I have begun to experience the museum itself as a zone of sustained shocks’.

Tremor everywhere registers these shocks, seeking other ways to recuperate excluded voices. There are frequent digressions to reflect on the slave histories of Harvard; a friend’s son tells Tunde about his husband’s exploitation of a young man in Haiti (at the time of the 2010 earthquake); Tunde is troubled by memories of his family’s treatment of their ‘houseboy’, Michael, during their years in Nigeria.

In the novel’s longest chapter, we encounter the most sustained recuperative experiment: a collection of twenty-four first-person accounts of everyday life in contemporary Lagos, from all strata of society. Ostensibly (it transpires) stories of individuals whose portraits Tunde makes, it is both affecting and challenging, so much richer than any image processed in a darkroom, yet also inevitably voyeuristic in its ventriloquism. This is the wager made by Tunde – and Cole (Tremor is perhaps not so much auto-fiction as autre-biography) – in an effort to honour the ‘untranslatable consolation’ of ordinary lives, whether of friends or strangers, present or past. All are surviving, have survived, on the fault lines, in a bright, fleeting exposure that may register as nothing more than a ripple once death comes (as it does for all), a final tremor. One hears the word in the ‘rumor’ and ‘trace’ that Tunde suspects will be all that remains of him in the future. Cole offers us Tremor, and it is perhaps his richest work to date. g

Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Adelaide and co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee (2023).

On the brink

Anthony Lynch

WWe All Lived in Bondi Then

by Georgia Blain Scribe

$29.99 hb, 176 pp

hen Georgia Blain died at the age of fifty-one in 2016, the reading public was robbed of a superb prose writer in her prime. Her final and, some consider, best novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), achieved wide critical acclaim. Shortly after Blain succumbed to brain cancer, that novel went on to win or be shortlisted in a slew of national prizes.

As readers, we are fortunate to have two posthumously published books. The Museum of Words (2017) was a compilation of reflections, part memoir, part essaying of the writing life, written after Blain was diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme. Her previous non-fiction title, Births Deaths Marriages (2008), tellingly explored a brother’s schizophrenia and subsequent death, and her father’s swings from charm to abuse – though Blain never wallowed in trauma or self-pity, and was also happy to muse, for example, on the joys of dog ownership. The Museum of Words examined her mother Anne Deveson’s drift into dementia, the illness of her friend Rosie, and her own confrontation with sickness and mortality. As many will know, Deveson died three days after Blain.

Now we have been gifted a new short story collection, We All Lived in Bondi Then. As in Blain’s only other full-length story collection, The Secret Lives of Men (2013), none of the stories in either collection reads, or should be read, as autobiographical, but it’s fair to surmise that the experiences so devastatingly depicted in Blain’s non-fiction helped inform her short fiction.

The new collection has a foreword by Charlotte Wood and comprises nine stories, many remarkable for their wrenching portraits of traumatised families. In ‘Australia Square’, a documentary filmmaker retells the story of her younger brother going missing in childhood and subsequent sibling and maternal mental illness. It is a story that brilliantly evokes obsessive pursuits of art and truth while highlighting the inability to ‘make sense of it all’.

‘Dear Professor Brewster’ is a semi-epistolary account of a young woman, Alice, and her correspondence with the doctor treating her mother for Alzheimer’s. With the mother’s health declining, Alice’s father dies, her half-brother falls ill, and a property dispute flares between Alice and her other half-siblings. This may suggest a plot best suited to a novel, but Blain moves deftly between each development, and the story unfolds quietly and without burden.

Many stories have small-town settings, often coastal ones,

and often with characters marking time before heading elsewhere. Two or three take place in cities, generally Sydney (the ‘elsewhere’, as in the story ‘Still Breathing’). ‘Far from Home’ is set in Bali: as revealed here and in Blain’s earlier collection, travel can prove revealing, but the results are far from exotic immersion or enlightenment, with the protagonist left dislocated and yearning for home. Yet the title of this collection alludes not just to a concern with place, but also with shifts in time and an engagement with the past. Nearly all the stories refer to previous experiences that, if not exactly formative, leave an indelible mark on the female protagonist. Many recall youth or childhood in a sun-bleached Australia of the 1970s or 1980s, without nostalgia but not entirely without fondness. Some seem to ask: what does it mean to revisit a place? This return to place is as much an act of memory as a physical return.

The Secret Lives of Men sometimes featured women acting on an out-of-character impulse, usually by taking up, however briefly, with a roué male whom we and the protagonist know to be unreliable – a kind of testing of boundaries. ‘Far From Home’ in the current collection is such a story. A seemingly happily married woman, Sione, holidaying with her aged mother, meets by chance a man she once knew briefly and repeats the onenight (or one-hour) stand she had with him in the past. Yet this transgression is subsumed within the greater drama of Sione’s mother’s tragic decline.

Other stories include ‘Last Days’, which ultimately reads as quietly apocalyptic, as if the world might end not with a bang but with a noiseless extinguishment (if not T.S. Eliot’s whimper); and ‘Last One Standing’, wherein a woman ekes out a tough life living remotely with her old and dying dog, while a Cormac McCarthy-like threat of danger hovers in the air. ‘Ship to Shore’ movingly portrays parental grief following a child’s death. The penultimate story, ‘Sunday’, sees an office worker phoning her partner, who assumes the voice and manners of their pet dog. Something of an anomaly – are we being asked to infer the conversation might be with their actual dog? – the story provides comic, if unsettling, relief before the collection ends on more customary ground with the title story.

The dying dog of ‘Last One Standing’ is emblematic of tropes of decline in many stories. Rundown rentals, water pumps, mowers, ageing mothers, dogs, even artistic careers (and the self-absorbed who pursue them) – all are on the brink of failure. In case this implies a catalogue of griefs, Blain demonstrates throughout her marvellous eye for the absurd, quiet wit, and a wry observance of bodily failures and questionable human behaviour.

I have not yet touched on Blain’s elegant, crystalline prose, but the end of ‘Still Breathing’ demonstrates her typically clean and incisive style, as well as the vivid explorations of place and time that marked an outstanding career:

I could see myself … wanting to be grown up, gone from that place for good, so sure that the next place would be better … And yet the past is always there, hovering at the edge, teasing us, reappearing when we least expect it, and then sliding away again, where it waits, the warmth of its breath reminding us that it still lives.

Anthony Lynch writes poetry, fiction, and reviews.

Georgia Blain’s posthumous collection

Across time

Claire G. Coleman

TAlways Will Be

by Mykaela Saunders University of Queensland Press

$32.99 pb, 312 pp

here has been talk in recent years about so-called Indigenous Futurism. Referencing Afro-Futurism, futurist fiction that imagines a new postcolonial Africa, the Indigenous version imagines a postcolonial world for Indigenous people, a future where the world is the way it should always have been. One quirk, however, is that Indigenous Futurism leans on Indigenous notions of time, an eternal now in which past and future are mere directions. Writers of Indigenous Futurism know that it’s not only possible to imagine the future and the past at the same time, but that it is part of cultural practice.

Always Will Be, by Mykaela Saunders, is centred around Bunjalung Country; specifically, the land now known as the ‘Tweed Valley’ region of far north New South Wales (Saunders has connections to the Tweed and has grown and lived there, but is descended from the Dharug people of the lands around what is now known as Sydney). Driving north along the Tweed coast, you pass through subtropical bushland, the sort of place loved by alternative lifestylers and surfers, until you hit the Queensland border and things change abruptly, bushland and surf hippies giving way to the high rises and tourist traps of the Gold Coast – a surreal experience Saunders is well aware of.

The title is the second clause of a powerful Indigenous land-rights chant: ‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.’ Attributed to Barkinji elder Jim Bates, this is a reminder that Indigenous sovereignty was never ceded, and that we will be here forever. Our culture grew on our ancestral lands where we belong, and we will never leave our ancestral land, and those who are not in their homelands, those whose homelands no longer exist, can find more homes with other Indigenous people but still on Indigenous land. This continent is Indigenous land and always will be.

The book’s title and its history assert not only the author’s politics but also the overarching theme in this collection. The reader is invited to imagine the coming world, the natural end of the Anthropocene in which global warming is causing or has caused the near total collapse of our species. Global warming, social collapse, even environmental damage from ill-considered attempts to correct global warming are imagined, with the traditional owners and other Gooris from the Tweed coast and hinterland surviving as best they can.

Multiple apocalypses and multiple responses to the apocalypse are shown, connected and interconnected, woven together; reminding us the Anthropocene is everywhere and across all time.

Yet there is hope in the collection, and that hope, again flagged in the title, is the story of the book. Every story shows ways the blackfellas of the area can survive, and even thrive, using their generationally trained survival instincts, including those gained by resisting colonisation, to fight back. Nearly every story shows at least part of a path towards decolonisation. In Saunders’s world, Aboriginal people carry the cultural tools to survive the apocalypse. It is this, and our connection to Country, culture, and family, that empowers us.

Indigenous Futurism leans on Indigenous notions of time, an eternal now in which past and future are mere directions

No book is perfect. I would have liked to see more lyricism, and perhaps one more edit, to give these powerful stories the strength and attention they deserve. The work might have been more culturally powerful if Saunders had written stories of her own ancestral Country, the lands that first suffered the impacts of colonisation on this continent, but it is understandable to write about the community that has welcomed you, as communities in the Tweed of Always Will Be give sanctuary to people from other homelands.

The style reminds us of oral storytelling: from the first moment of reading, it felt like we were yarning around the fire. In this way, it connects with the storytelling styles of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, who bring our grandparents’ storytelling into modern literature. Our ancestors’ stories carry the law, they carry knowledge, they tell us how best to live.

We will always be here, even as colonisation is followed by the Anthropocene, even as the colonisers destroy themselves and threaten to take us with them, even as the world becomes almost intolerable for humanity. We are Indigenous, we have survived worse, we will survive this. Always Will Be might not show the how – it’s not a survival manual – but it does show the why, what is important for our culture, and what we need to save. We are the land; we can save the land by saving the people.

In the end, the most important thing is the message, not only that this continent always was and always will be Indigenous land, but that we can survive the coming apocalypse and it will be our Aboriginality that gives us the skills and culture to do whatever we need to do to survive. Our connection to culture, to land and to family is important, our stories, that give us the tools to survive are important; our law, which helps us to live in harmony with others, is important. Our culture and families are what we have fought to protect for generations against colonisation. The Anthropocene, in which the colony is also destroying itself, is merely the latest challenge.

The final story, ‘Kinship Festival’, ends the book with a strong overarching statement that brings the stories, and all Indigenous people, home to culture, and we know that not only can we survive this latest apocalypse, but we can imagine using it to regain the sovereignty we never ceded.

Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land. g

Claire G. Coleman’s most recent books are Lies Damned Lies (Ultimo Press, 2021) and Enclave (Hachette, 2022).

Mykaela Saunders’s new short story collection

Spiral of silence

Homage to Mrs Dalloway

Cassandra Atherton

AThunderhead

by Miranda Darling Scribe

$29.99 hb, 160 pp

feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.

Woolf’s use of modernist stream of consciousness is also important to Thunderhead. In adapting this technique, Darling wrests the narrative away from the male characters. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway is presented as lonely, disillusioned, and depressed, and, as in that novel, Darling reveals that there is something more than clinical depression driving Winona’s feelings of domestic confinement. She creates dynamic and complex postmodern interior monologues for her protagonist, foregrounding her rich and often surprising inner life.

‘zebra walking down New South Head Road during rush hour, parting traffic, hardy and independent’. This is an evocative and important metaphor in the novella.

This desire for the untamed, fierce, undomesticated, and uncultivated is a heady moment of eco-feminist thought and political activism for Winona, who is infantilised and treated as incompetent by her nameless husband. He sends her lists in the form of text-message demands and fills her calendar with entries that he frames as reminders. In addition to the grocery lists that reference the dinner parties in which Woolf’s, McEwan’s and Darling’s books culminate, the use of lists in Thunderhead is a coping mechanism for Winona and includes: ‘BOUNDARIES THAT SHOULD NOT BE CROSSED’; ‘WORDS FOR WINONA’; ‘COLOURATIONS’; ‘ON THE HEALING PROPERTIES OF GARDENS’; ‘ON WHY TETHERING IS NECESSARY’; ‘THINGS I SHOULD BE FRIGHTENED OF TODAY.’ The lists are luminous and often witty moments that contain important revelations. For instance, ‘CAUSES OF SILENCE’ ends with the rumination: ‘the Spiral of Silence. My thoughts snag here. The Spiral of Silence. Public Opinion–Our Social Skin.’

In a clever play on words, perhaps the most telling list comes from the moment where Winona reads an envelope addressed to her as ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Referencing Woolf’s infamous suicide in the line, ‘roll[ing] the name around like a pebble in my pocket’, she sees her name as a list emphasising the trajectory of dilly-dallying as a concept moving toward absence: ‘Dalloway. Dally Away. Dale Away. Away. (gone).’ These are nods to Clarissa Dalloway who feels ‘invisible, unseen; unknown’. Importantly, while Clarissa states that ‘she would buy the flowers herself’, Winona prioritises ‘gentle recklessness’ to state, ‘I have to focus: I have a bomb to defuse at home. And guests invited to dinner. I will do the flowers myself.’

Some of this is achieved through the use of lists and list making, which is one of the most inventive, darkly comic, and sardonic features of the novella.

Furthermore, Winona’s need for, and reliance on, lists serves to emphasise her listlessness. The first list is: ‘LIST OF QUALITIES FOR FAILED DOMESTICATION’, which focuses on six qualities that make a species untameable. It is an illuminating moment as the protagonist reveals she has the qualities on the list and thinks, ‘Perhaps, you, Winona, are single-handedly spearheading the re-wilding of suburbia’, imagining herself as a

The novella contains many intertextual moments to complement Winona’s life as a writer, which adds a metafictional element to this book. Winona writes ‘to close the gap in [her] life’ and to ‘find a way to connect [her] deeper self to this ephemera of living’. In Winona’s novel, her character Nora (who has qualities reminiscent of Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House) must make a choice to accept or reject a marriage proposal. Nora’s deep romantic inner life is in many ways akin to Emma Bovary, and an example of failed domestication, which Winona labels ‘The Anna Karenina Effect’. Intertextually, the novella pays homage to the ‘wild’ heroines in Victorian literature whose freedom often came at an unbearable cost:

I should have chosen a different dress: the long flannel check suddenly has shades of Virginia Woolf, calls to mind rivers and stones

Miranda Darling (Scribe)

and Victorian women encased in attics for their own good: for the good of the family.

Sluts or Nuts.

Furthermore, Winona is engaged with ‘matters of the heart’, especially when she is told by Dr McAlister she has arrhythmia –[t]he improper beating of the heart, irregular, at times too fast in your case’ – and that ‘Your heart shows signs of cardiomegaly. You have an enlarged heart.’ This is also explored in the momentum of the novella, which often becomes a gallop for the reader. As the clock counts down the hours in the day, we are wonderfully lost in Winona’s ruminating fugue. The fast breaths invoked at

Small doses

Three recent short story collections

Debra Adelaide

Over the years the popularity of short fiction has fluctuated greatly, for mysterious reasons. A senior publisher once told me that publishers loved short fiction collections but that the reason they rarely published them was due to booksellers’ reluctance to support them. When I put this to a major bookseller, they claimed it was the other way around.

Since writers keep writing stories, perhaps the blame lies at the feet of readers? Or certain types of readers. Conspicuously, these three new collections come from independent publishers whose readers are unlikely to be found browsing the shelves at Big W. But they all contain such strong examples of the form it is hard to see why it seems continually under threat.

Warwick Sprawson’s first collection, We Will Live and Then We Will See (Riff Raff Press, $29.95 pb, 208 pp), delivers a standout in its title story. Set in Russia and slyly exploiting perennial

Be seen in ABR

the beginning of the novel become part of its narrative impetus.

Named after a round cloud that appears before a thunderstorm, Thunderhead is darkly jubilant. When Winona states, ‘We all want happy endings Win. They are not always possible’, her use of the diminutive ‘Win’, ultimately suggests the possibility of escaping her husband’s controlling behaviour. In one brave moment she becomes the embodiment of Woolf’s ‘match struck in the dark’, when she embraces ‘Winona the kaleidoscope constantly fracturing and re-fracturing into hundreds of dislocating points of coloured light’. g

Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar.

misinformation about the death of Vladimir Putin, it focuses on a presidential double, who is an unwilling conscript as his official stand-in. The story’s relevance was reinforced when news of Alexei Navalny’s death shocked the world, yet it maintains a light touch, allowing its full horror to sink in via implication. ‘Bouzouki’ recounts a history of interactions with an elderly Greek neighbour in a restrained, almost bland, narrative voice that controls the emotions yet allows us to feel much.

While stories such as these reward rereading, some of the shorter stories suffer due to the very brevity they embrace. ‘A for Australia, A for Alive’ and ‘Heroes’ both end just as they becoming interesting; and ‘The War on Cheese’, while clever and funny, relies too heavily on one idea.

Overall, the collection is engaging and quirky although it sometimes flirts with the gimmicky. Alice Munro and George Saunders aside, no short story writer can achieve perfection every time, so it is unfair to expect total consistency across a collection, and Sprawson’s best pieces are extremely good indeed. If you get the sense that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, this is confirmed at the end: the author biography offering ten alternative short paragraphs is more suited to a student anthology.

There is nothing wrong in having fun with fiction. Allen C. Jones’s Big Weird Lonely Hearts (MidnightSun, $24.99 pb, 224 pp), takes humour to another level: the entire collection plays with images, ideas, and language. Many stories negotiate arbitrary shifts of scene and action as Jones leaps from one surreal moment to the next, disregarding the fact that we might actually want to believe in the bizarre, not to mention care about his characters’ fates.

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‘The Last Tiger in the World’ is an example of how readers will readily accept an implausible premise (as they do in Kafka’s Metamorphosis), but not if the voice is misjudged or the story tips into the preposterous. Here a child is told that her missing mother has gone to Paris when in fact she has been eaten by the tiger in her family zoo; it all works until the part about the tiger’s tail tasting like nougat and being shaved and sold as cotton candy (after which the story gets decidedly weird). Other stories concern a woman who discovers a clitoris on the back of her knee (not the most surreal thing in the story); a man who resembles a bush; a boy with a computer screen for a face; and an illegal immigrant mermaid.

Small doses: that’s probably the best approach for these random stories. Amid them is one that is so ridiculously compelling it almost eclipses the rest. Exploiting the classic trope of dog-cat enmity, ‘A Mexican Legend’ manages to be hilarious, inventive, silly, and utterly endearing. It is emblematic of the entire collection: everyone – or everything – just wants to belong, to be loved. Hence the collection’s title.

Perhaps the gravity of Catherine McNamara’s The Carnal Fugues (Puncher & Wattmann, $32.95 pb, 272 pp) is more marked by comparison with these first two books, but her stories are undeniably striking. A selection from three previous collections, all published in the United Kingdom, the book seems a bold punt for Puncher & Wattman, but it is reassuring to see such faith being invested in an author.

The first story is a strong start to the collection. Set on a boutique tourist boat in the Mediterranean, ‘Adieu, Mon Doux Rivage’ is memorable for its unpredictable characters and razor-sharp narrative voice: a man’s tattoos are described as ‘busty women who seem to be feasting upon his physique’. This is only on the second page. The rest of the stories (there are forty-two in all) feature diverse characters in diverse locations – London, Mali, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Verona – yet there is also a distinct thematic coherence in their focus on the ruthlessly transactional nature of relationships, a coherence all the more impressive given that the stories are drawn from three separate books.

McNamara’s characters, desperate and duplicitous, fuelled by illicit desires and poor decisions, are often unafraid to reveal their worst selves. The narrator of ‘Young British Man Drowns in Alpine Lake’ confesses to being aroused by his girlfriend’s history of sexual abuse. Another male narrator gets hard when he overhears his brother and fiancée fighting. Risk-taking is high

on the agenda: ‘Hôtel de Californie’ is infused with tension as a man conducts liaisons that are ‘fragrant with doom’ in a country where homosexuality is forbidden.

Several stories are set in West or North Africa. In one of these, ‘The Cliffs of Bandiagara’, a journalist and photographer drive through Mali to visit a famous musician for an English magazine interview. Despite the self-interested and morally feeble adult characters, the story remains curiously non-judgemental thanks to a documentary style and shifting point of view. A dearth of personal names – ‘the boyfriend’, ‘the journalist’, ‘the boy’ – injects a fabulous quality to the story, yet the only lesson it might contain is that everyone has their secret agenda, even a child.

‘Magaly Park’, one of the few stories set in Australia, introduces a voyeuristic narrator ostensibly spying on a teenage schoolgirl. Unease dissipates as we learn that the narrator is her boyfriend, waiting for her mother to allow her a few minutes to meet him: ‘There are [days] when we sit like two old people who have no mirrors in the house because each is a reflection of the other.’ Amid their tender patience, neither wishes for any more intimacy than this.

The very short stories, or flash fictions, are accomplished, but their brevity cannot compete with the layered intensity of the longer ones. Like Sprawson’s, some end with a sense of frustrating prematurity. One of these, ‘The Mafia Boss Who Shot His Gay Son in a Beach’, is essentially encapsulated in the title. An exception is ‘Banking’, which, in less than three pages, charts the demise of a relationship and its accompanying acts of revenge with an ending that is neither too neat nor too ambiguous, allowing our imagination to supply the rest.

McNamara writes in arresting prose and uses vivid descriptive detail: an old, decrepit man has ‘towed his own body for years now’; another, younger more cocksure man, seems to his aunt to be glowing with a ‘strategic, masculine beauty’. Intriguing and cosmopolitan, her stories are infused with historical weight and a worldly wisdom suggestive of timeless, even epic, narrative. They also reflect a keenly observant, well-travelled life (McNamara has lived and worked in France and West Africa, and currently runs a writing retreat in Italy.) A serious reader disregards cover comments, no matter how glowing or prestigious, but Hilary Mantel’s endorsement of McNamara’s stories is thoroughly apt. g

Debra Adelaide has published eighteen books, the most recent of which is Creative Writing Practice (2021), edited with Sarah Attfield.

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Wonders

Julia Kindt’s thought-provoking new book

TThe Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten ancient creatures that make us human

by Julia Kindt Cambridge University Press

$47.95 hb, 370 pp

he gods of the Greeks are uniquely anthropomorphic; they are not only imagined with human bodies but with thoughts and feelings largely similar to our own, except for the fact that they cannot grow old or die, and are thus spared the greatest part of human pain and suffering. They can feel anger at the misbehaviour, or pity for the fate, of mortals, as when Zeus sees that his beloved son Sarpedon is about to be slain (Iliad 16.431 ff.), but compared to us, they ‘live at ease’ (Odyssey 5.122 and elsewhere).

The theriomorphic divinities of the Egyptians, represented in the form of animals or at least with animal heads, were far more remote and incomprehensible; their connection to the subhuman world simultaneously recalled how alien their supra-human and spiritual reality was. In both aspects of their dual natures, these gods were categorically non-humanistic.

Animal forms could be temporarily adopted by the Greek gods, as when Zeus becomes a bull to carry off Europa to the island of Crete, but these are disguises, not the revelation of the divinity’s animal nature: Zeus does not turn into his emblematic eagle, for example. Permanent metamorphosis is another matter; in this case, humans at least do sometimes turn into creatures that reveal their innermost nature, as when Lycaon is transformed into a wolf.

The boundaries and distinctions between human and animal are themes that arise in all cultures, but they are no doubt particularly important in one whose sense of the human is so decisive that even its gods are conceived on this model. And this is precisely the subject of Julia Kindt’s fascinating new book about animals of different kinds in the ancient world – living, mechanical, fabulous, or metaphorical – and what they tell us about the relations between human and animal existence.

The creatures, the stories, and the ideas that Kindt evokes are so memorable that they have not only survived for two millennia or more into the modern imagination, but have in many cases become fundamental references, paradigms, proverbs, or even part of a language of ideas and forms whose origin has been forgotten. The Trojan Horse of the title, for example, is now used to describe a kind of digital virus by people who would in many cases be entirely ignorant of the Trojan War itself.

Kindt begins, in the book’s introduction, with the brief but significant episode of Odysseus’s encounter with his faithful dog Argos on his return to Ithaca (Odyssey 17.291 ff.); though

disguised as a beggar, he is naturally recognised by the dog and recognises him in turn, wiping away a tear at the sight of the once-fine hunting hound he had himself bred as a puppy. This brief meeting, at the threshold of the palace he has not seen for twenty years, is a marker of the time that has passed as well as a reminder of a loyalty that contrasts with the treachery of humans like Melanthius and others.

The ten chapters that follow discuss, in much greater detail, the Sphinx, Xanthus, the speaking horse of Achilles, the Lion of Androclus (or Androcles), the Cyclops, the Trojan Horse, the Boar of Trimalchio’s feast, the Political Bee, the Socratic Gadfly, the Minotaur, and, finally, the Shearwaters of Diomedes. Each of these creatures has a rich and complex history in the myth and literature of antiquity, and an equally intriguing narrative and philosophical afterlife in the modern period.

To take one example, Achilles’ speaking horse is not just a wonder, but raises the fundamental question of speech as the faculty that most obviously distinguishes us from animals. As Kindt shows, the same theme is evoked in Kafka’s short story about an ape who becomes human by learning to speak. According to Diderot, the Cardinal de Polignac was so struck by the humanoid appearance of an orangutan in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century that he apostrophised it rhetorically: ‘Speak, and I will baptise you!’

The Cyclops in Book 9 of the Odyssey is not truly an animal, but, like the speaking horse, he makes us think about the boundaries between human and animal. He is not civilised, since he does not cultivate the soil or raise cereal crops; he is not political, for he is solitary, nor social, as he has no conception of hospitality and reciprocity. His cannibalism is especially problematic, since abstaining from eating one’s own kind is generally taken as a criterion of humanity as against bestiality.

Trimalchio’s boar, the centrepiece of his ludicrously ostentatious feast in The Satyricon, elicits reflections about hunting and meat-eating, and thus also arguments against eating the flesh of other living creatures. The bee has been an extraordinarily powerful political image from antiquity to the present day, while Socrates’ metaphorical gadfly leads us to ponder the role of individuals who question the orthodoxies of their day.

This is a truly thought-provoking book and a delight to read. It is addressed to the intelligent and educated reader, rather than to a handful of fellow specialists. The scholarship is extensive and thoroughly but discreetly referenced, so that it is easy to follow up any leads of particular interest. Although most of Kindt’s readers will no doubt have some familiarity with many or all of the subjects she deals with, she never takes this for granted.

Above all, she does not approach the past, as so often today, with an agenda or a set of judgements formed in advance of studying the material – in other words prejudices – but instead adopts a truly hermeneutic method, seeking first to understand what these stories and themes meant in their own time and, on that foundation, pursuing their subsequent history and their resonance for us today. g

Christopher Allen is currently Senior Master in Academic Extension at Sydney Grammar School. He is the national art critic for The Australian

Christopher Allen

Thirteen scandals

A litany of corporate wrongdoing

Stuart Kells

QRogue Corporations: Inside Australia’s biggest business scandals

by Quentin Beresford NewSouth

$34.99 pb, 426 pp

uentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope of the book extends to corporate collapses but also to wage theft, climate-change denial, occupational health and safety failures, and the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites.

‘This is the first book,’ Beresford writes, ‘to explore corporate scandals as a continuous phenomenon of Australian society over the past four decades.’ Perhaps, but the book sits firmly in the tradition of such works as Adele Ferguson’s Banking Bad (2019), Dan Ziffer’s A Wunch of Bankers (2019), Alan Kohler’s It’s Your Money (2019), and, going back, Michael Cannon’s Land Boomers (1966) and Trevor Sykes’s Two Centuries of Panic (1988).

Beresford’s background is in public policy and juvenile justice, rather than finance, and he makes some financial missteps, such as spelling the name of well-known stockbroker J.B. Were twice as ‘J.B. Wear’ and conflating the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ (which is about securities pricing) with the wider concept of laissez-faire economics. In surveying the respective scandals, Beresford uses to good effect the work of journalists such as Ferguson, Kohler, Janet Fife-Yeomans, Elizabeth Sexton, and Ian Verrender.

Beresford writes lucidly and has an eye for curious details that add spark to familiar stories. I didn’t know, for example, that before Alan Bond was a white-collar criminal he was a no-collar one, caught wearing a pair of State Electricity Commission overalls and trying to break into several properties. ‘Young hustler’ Brad Cooper, Beresford writes, ‘loved his exotic toys. He is said to have hired a security guard to watch over his Ferrari when it was parked in the street.’ Emmanuel Cas-

simati ‘looked more like an aging wrestler with his stocky frame, large, bald-domed head and jowly cheeks, than a financial guru’.

HIH boss Ray Williams was ‘a Christadelphian, a member of a small, cult-like sect whose believers wished to reconnect with the literal word of the Bible and the culture of Christianity as it arose in the first century ad’. Williams was so devoted to the sect that he even ‘built a chapel in the grounds of his mansion at Lake Macquarie, north of Sydney’.

On the way to wealth and infamy, ‘Chris Skase’ transformed himself into Christopher Skase. The former Skase’s Christmas parties were modest; the new Skase’s were anything but. At his first Skase party Alan Kohler was horrified: ‘He and the other guests were pressured to go up on stage and say nice things about Christopher.’ Skase’s 1987 party was held at the Gold Coast Mirage resort. ‘The ballroom air-conditioning was turned down to chill level … allowing Skase to stride triumphantly on to centre stage to the sound of Bob Dylan’s “Quinn the Eskimo”.’

Skase reportedly spent half a million dollars on his fortiethbirthday bash. That same month, he opened the Port Douglas resort, where ‘an odd collection of pale, drunken stockbrokers, bankers and journalists tried in vain to blend in with the suntanned celebrities’. At a Skase golf event, ‘many of the guests ended up in the lagoons, designer wear cast aside, while one company director was seen on a hotel balcony suite in a very compromising position behind a younger woman who was gripping the balustrade tightly’.

Beresford is at his strongest when looking at legal cases and loopholes, such as the one that allowed Skase to declare bankruptcy and flee the country to a villa on Majorca. In preparation for his escape, Skase filled two shipping containers with ‘a pair of Rolls-Royces, a BMW, fifteen Bang & Olufsen stereos, televisions, and enough beds, marble furniture and antiques to spread through the nine-bedroom estate’.

Several common factors link Beresford’s thirteen scandals, including acquiescent regulators, incompetent accountants, and high-living, psychopathic CEOs. The big banks also repeatedly enter the picture: ‘Bond Corporation’s 1980s spending spree was underwritten by some of the largest banks in Australia and the world. Just how these banks ended up lending Bond $14 billion is like entering an Alice in Wonderland fantasy world.’

Regulatory lassitude was another common factor. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), our principal corporate overseer, ‘had always been a lame-duck’. Victims of Storm Financial mounted a class action against ASIC, ‘the first legal case of its kind … testing the boundaries of how far a regulator could be held accountable for its actions’.

Meanwhile, banking watchdog APRA ‘was described as

Quentin Beresford (NewSouth)

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a “hear no evil, see no evil” regulator, with an “embarrassing” record’. Beresford identifies free-market ideology and ‘the very essence of the neo-liberal worldview’ as an overarching cause of the recurring scandals.

Australia has embraced the neo-liberal idea of allowing corporations maximum freedom with minimal responsibilities to wider society.

Australia incorporated the so-called ‘Friedman doctrine’, the view associated with Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who, in the 1960s, argued that the only purpose of a corporation was to maximise shareholder wealth.

Powerful corporations captured the decision-making processes of the state. In sectors such as aged care and insurance, corporates were permitted to write their own legislation, thus cementing their own interests.

Opportunities to temper market excesses were ignored on ideological grounds. ‘In 2002, John Howard backed away from demands for enhanced corporate legislation. Self-regulation coupled with appropriate “but not excessive” levels of government involvement was what Australia needed, Howard explained.’ Addressing fundamental weaknesses in corporate law was not on his agenda.

Beresford charts the decline of once-respected companies such as Westpac, which, in 2020, was hit with a $1.3 billion fine, the largest in Australian corporate history. Among a wide range of shocking failings, the bank was found to have facilitated transfers to a person in the Philippines ‘who was later arrested in November 2015 for child trafficking and child exploitation involving the live streaming of child sex shows and offering children for sex’. According to Amanda Wood, Westpac’s former anti-money laundering officer, ‘a very different culture did exist inside the company from that of its carefully crafted corporate image’.

The superannuation industry was another hot zone of bad actors.

[Compulsory superannuation] spurred a financial services industry imbued with a ruthless culture: one that charged high fees for advice and exploited clients by taking commissions to direct them into designated financial products. In other words, financial advisers didn’t always act in the best interests of their clients. Large sections of the industry had become ‘the sales force for financial product manufacturers’.

Beresford rightly points out that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians were upended due to the misconduct he describes. The upshot is clear: as a society, we urgently need to reset our collective tolerance for corporate wrongdoing. That will require a concerted effort across politics, the law and the media, extending to stronger corporations law and more assertive corporate regulators, as well as to improved political donation rules and more robust whistleblower protections.

To prepare for that effort, everyone should read Rogue Corporations, and all students of business and the law should study it. g

Stuart Kells’s new book is Alice™: The biggest untold story in the history of money (2024).

JFK’s war

An awkward account of rescue

Nick Hordern

ISaving Lieutenant Kennedy:

The heroic story of the Australian who helped rescue JFK

by Brett Mason NewSouth

$34.99 pb, 254 pp

n August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.

Kennedy had command of PT-109, a small wooden patrol torpedo boat that had been rammed and cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. For some days he inspired and led the survivors of his crew, swimming between three small islands in what is now the Western Province of Solomon Islands. There were thousands of Japanese troops in the offing, and back at the Americans’ base on the island of Rendova, JFK and his men had been given up for dead. Then Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, two of Evans’s network of Islander scouts, came across them and paddled sixty kilometres through enemy lines to carry a message to Rendova. Evans made radio contact with the PT base and fine-tuned the subsequent rescue.

This is Brett Mason’s declared subject, but in fact Saving Lieutenant Kennedy bears out the old adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Mason’s account of the rescue and the New Georgia Campaign in which the PT-109 was engaged takes up less than forty pages. The other four-fifths of the book is an encomium of the Australian-US relationship, to which biographies of Evans and Kennedy have been rather awkwardly attached. And so, the reader wonders, if the intention was to produce a general history of US-Australian relations, why rope Evans and Kennedy into it? The PT-109 saga tells us little about the bilateral relationship; indeed, for years Kennedy believed Evans was a New Zealander. And the parallel biographies of Evans and Kennedy, including the story of Evans’s visit to the White House in 1961, really only serve to show how little the two men had in common.

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy has its interesting aspects. There is the account of how the PT-109 story became central to JFK’s political career, a process which began in August 1944 when his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr, used his influence to place an account of the episode in the mass circulation Reader’s Digest. Kennedy’s wartime heroism helped him to defeat Hubert Humphrey in the crucial 1960 West Virginia Democratic Primary, paving his way to the White House. Then there is the story of the Solomon Islanders who participated in the rescue, including that of Evans’s principal scout, Benjamin Kevu, who made his own visit to the White House

in 1962. Kumana and Gasa had previously been invited to Washington, but they were prevented from leaving Solomon Islands by the colonial authorities. However, Kennedy’s family has not forgotten them: recently the US Ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, visited the Solomon Islands, meeting the families of Kumana and Gasa, and swimming one of the open water passages between islands that her father swam repeatedly in his attempt to attract rescuers.

Saving Lieutenant Kennedy bears out the adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover

Much of the time, however, Mason’s narrative has little to do with his declared subject. There is a laudatory chapter about the 1942–43 campaigns in New Guinea, which has only faint relevance to the story of the PT-109. The book’s illustrations are a striking example of this focus on the periphery: among the sixteen pages of images, the one that really matters – a map of the area where the PT-109’s crew waited for rescue – requires a magnifying glass to read it.

And so the reader wonders further: if Mason wanted to tell the story of Saving Lieutenant Kennedy, why didn’t he make more of it? Rather than yet another paean to the Diggers in New Guinea, why not write about the New Georgia Campaign itself, and the Coastwatchers’ role in it? There’s more to tell: two months before the PT-109 was sunk, a Coastwatcher base on nearby Bougainville had been wiped out by the Japanese, emphasising the dangers that Evans and his colleagues faced. Eleven survivors were rescued from PT-109, but weeks earlier Coastwatchers on a nearby island had organised the rescue of ten times that number of survivors from the sunken cruiser USS Helena. In his 1945 classic Green Armour, the great Australian war correspondent Osmar White gave a vivid description of the New Georgia Campaign, concluding with an account of how he himself was severely wounded during a Japanese bombing raid on Rendova.

Full disclosure: the current reviewer was disappointed Saving Lieutenant Kennedy didn’t say more about the unique atmosphere of the small boat war in which JFK fought. During the Pacific War, in the same Solomon Sea waters where Kennedy was sunk, my father, Marsden Hordern, served on small wooden vessels operated by the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). Reg Evans, after leaving the Coastwatchers, actually finished his war service in one of these RAN workhorses. In his memoir, A Merciful Journey (2005), my father writes about how, like the PT-109, these small boats rolled heavily in any kind of weather, how they leaked, how appallingly hot and humid they were below deck, how their engines posed a terrifying fire risk, and how they were so fragile that any enemy they met could sink them with one blow. He himself, by the narrowest of margins, avoided Kennedy’s fate of being run down at night by a large vessel – in this case an American military transport. And even now, at the age of 102, he retains a healthy respect for the destructive propensities of the Imperial Japanese Navy. g

Nick Hordern’s most recent book is Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books, 2023).

When we talk about the Middle Ages

Revisiting the power of periodisation

by G. Geltner

Few terms capture the imagined structure of European history as succinctly, and aptly, as ‘the Middle Ages’. Whether the era is being invoked fondly, casually, or with deep disdain, the term at once offers a comprehensive, normative account of civilisation and casts aspersions on those out of sync with it. It was designed to do just that. ‘The Middle Ages’ inserts itself as an antithesis between two seemingly cohesive periods: Antiquity and the Renaissance (the latter soon to be replaced by Enlightenment and then Modernity). It thus creates continuity by underscoring rupture, and stresses similarity through difference. Despite the era’s appeal to the Romantics and nascent nationalism in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, respectively, its poor reputation has been steady: from Jules Michelet’s quip about ‘the Middle Ages’ being ‘one thousand years without a bath’, to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where Marsellus Wallace famously vows ‘to get medieval’ on his torturer’s ass.

To state the obvious, ‘medieval’ societies (like ‘primitive’ ones) never saw themselves as savages living at the nadir (or dawn) of civilisation. Writers first systematically outlined a medium aevum – literally, a middle period – as an era in human history during the early seventeenth century: that is, centuries after it allegedly ended. The newly defined lull was meant to set apart a self-consciously renascent civilisation and the dark, dogmatic millennium separating it from Classical Antiquity. Yet, as Europeans pursued new colonial projects, ‘the Middle Ages’ was enlisted, either as a script or a resource, to disentangle cultural insiders and outsiders. In Europe’s new territories around the world, the legitimacy of expropriation, enslavement, pollution, and other violent tactics benefited from the perception of indigenous people as languishing, at best, in ‘feudal’ times, or else having no legal relationship with their homelands. Eventually, ‘medieval’ emerged as a slur defining a range of radical Others at the dynamic intersection

of non-white, non-Christian (or, when convenient, non-JudeoChristian), non-democratic, non-industrial and non-capitalist societies.

The polarities reproduced by the adjective ‘medieval’ are mutually reinforcing. Together they give broad berth when it comes to deciding what falls under the term’s purview at any given moment. For instance, during the early outbreak of Covid-19, Asian governments that decreed basic preventative measures were dubbed by some Euro-American commentators as ‘medieval’ (sometimes approvingly) for their simplicity and strictness. Some months later, as the very same tactics became more common in OECD countries, groups who resisted them began occupying the medieval category. And with the vaccine rollout, the designation shifted once again to lump together groups that, for a host of different reasons, refused to get the jab. Such seamless transitions are unsurprising because ‘the Middle Ages’ was created long ago to house the quintessential Other, all that secular Western civilisation left behind.

We medievalists and students of European culture, society, and politics roughly between six and sixteen centuries ago gladly share our enthusiasm about the era. Our nearmiraculous employment, in academic departments and institutions around the world, proves our efforts are welcome. Moreover, many historians of non-European civilisations, including Japan, India, China, and the Islamic World, have adopted the term, blowing wind in the sails of a ‘global Middle Ages’. But some of us are beginning to wonder whether these efforts remain subordinate to or indeed undermined by the work that ‘the Middle Ages’ is constantly doing, especially outside academia. What if our critical voice and nuanced interventions can never be enough, given the cultural weight that ‘the Middle Ages’ continues to lift? Are we not, in the end, enshrining a deeply problematic category by seeking to

redeem the unredeemable?

To be sure, there is unity and difference in any period, and arbitrariness inhabits any attempt at periodisation. Yet, given the cultural hierarchies it reproduces, perhaps it is time to consider decommissioning ‘the Middle Ages’ as a historical era. Inconvenient though this might be, it would be far less challenging than weaning ourselves off other harmful practices we have become accustomed to over the years. And who thought decolonisation would be easy? To me, such difficulties, which are mostly administrative, do not stack up morally against the perpetuation of a category designed to create civilisational inferiors and legitimise a violent European expansion, and that continues to veil and justify racism and discrimination today.

As with any monuments and memories of the past, cancelling ‘the Middle Ages’ is not a viable or indeed desirable option; we should instead recontextualise the term. The shift begins with distinguishing between, on the one hand, the concept of ‘the Middle Ages’ as an object of study and, on the other, the civilisations that supposedly comprise it. Broadly speaking, the former belongs to the already thriving domain of Medievalism. The latter, however, may benefit from experimenting with a nomenclature that strives for an objective (if inevitably imperfect) historical and comparative perspective. This combination of changes would support a more meaningful analysis and comparative basis, although implementing an alternative periodisation, or indeed periodisations, presents a serious challenge.

What are some alternatives to periodising without ‘the Middle Ages’? Cultural specificity tends to disappear under overarching eras, but there are ways to periodise while resisting bias. In this respect, the inherent Europeanness of a term such as ‘the Global Middle Ages’ has evident shortcomings as an otherwise welcome comparative and transregional intervention. ‘The post-Classical world’ has been batted about as one way to create a more level playing field. However, students of Antiquity (which, in theory, can be culturally specific and hence globally irrelevant), may well object to the implied dis/continuity, while others, such as indigenous people and their heirs, may find it, in a similar vein to the one advanced here, Eurocentric.

Archaeologists and anthropologists periodise along material and technological lines, for instance by dividing human history into stone, bronze, and iron ages, or by distinguishing between a pre-industrial and industrial world. However, the former eras’ linearity (not to mention teleology) has been routinely challenged and their chronology varies widely across regions; while industrialisation tends to recentre European history. Other periodisations choose to decentre humanity itself by emulating the natural sciences and collapsing distinctions between life writ large (bios) and its material surroundings, including the earth and its climate. These are far more transparent divisions, but they often operate at resolutions that are too low to be useful from a common, human-centric historical perspective. There are exceptions, of course; some historians of the North Atlantic and western Europe deliberately focus on the Little Ice Age

(LIA), which is specific to the region and variously defined as lasting from five to seven centuries ago until the late eighteenth century.

Within and even between certain cultures, it is possible to agree on a single event as a stable reference point from which to move backwards or forwards: a cosmic event, a coronation, a volcanic eruption or a technological, intellectual, or artistic milestone. However, such moments are hard to translate between regions or cultures without seeming to bolster a political ideology, a set of religious beliefs or a certain teleology or normativity. Another option is to use BP – time or years before the present – in the manner of some paleo-sciences. While BP requires some getting used to, it is explicitly situational and, as such, a more liberating option than relating events solely to Judaism’s traditional date of Creation, the Nativity of Christ, or Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, or Hijra. The latter methods certainly remain relevant, albeit as culturally specific ways to periodise. As such they need to accompany and enrich rather than define or discipline. Experimenting with and eventually normalising such intersecting temporalities could be one way out of the epistemic violence perpetrated by subordinating all cultures to a single system, however convenient that may seem.

Are we not, in the end, enshrining a deeply problematic category?

As the late Natalie Zemon Davis showed us, resisting a colonial legacy, or any imposition of a strict hierarchy of value, matters because it allows more voices to be heard. If geographers are doing this with place and space, historians should lead the charge with time. It is also an imperative of historical accuracy that we refuse to settle for hegemonic shorthand such as the Middle Ages, the Age of Discovery, or, indeed, bce and ce as acceptable replacements for the Christocentric bc/ad. After all, Europeans living deep in ‘the Middle Ages’ considered themselves to be moderni (contemporary), as opposed to members of earlier societies (antiqui), and rarely saw themselves as constituting a dormant civilisation. A heightened awareness of the power of periodisation exposes attempts to weaponise it – that is, to launch demeaning and culturally offensive attacks that seek to place something or someone beyond the boundaries of a fantasy civilisation. g

G. Geltner is Professor of History at Monash University. His latest book, Roads to Health: Infrastructure and urban wellbeing in later medieval Italy (2019), has won the American Association for Italian Studies book award. His current book project is entitled Lucifer’s Land: The mines and miners of Europe, 1180-1550 ❖

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

Survivals and endings

A hotchpotch of personal and global menace

Des Cowley

FFat Chance: Journalism poems

by Kent MacCarter Upswell

$24.99 pb, 124 pp

at chance. A million to one. Buckley’s. We’ve all come across bizarre tales of survival that defy belief. Take the case of sixty-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, found floating ten miles out to sea, clinging to the roof of his house, days after a tsunami wiped out his home town in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan in 2011. What were the odds?

Shinkawa doesn’t feature in Kent MacCarter’s Fat Chance, but plenty of other such stories do, recounted in the form of ‘journalism poems’. But, just as MacCarter’s poems are festooned with chance survivals, so too are they drawn to chance endings. Case in point: Akbar Salubiro, the twenty-five-year-old Indonesian farmer who, in 2017, was swallowed whole by a reticulated python, the first such recorded incident of its kind. Pure bad luck? MacCarter’s supplemental note that ‘the tropical biota of Indonesia has lost 0.84 hectares of primary forest and predator habitat per year since 2000, significantly outpacing deforestation in Brazil’ gives reason for pause. Added to which, Akbar’s wife learnt of his death watching television ‘while eating snake bean salad’, a sting in the tail if ever there was one.

Jessica L. Wilkinson, in her eloquent introduction, attributes the phrase ‘journalism poems’ to MacCarter. But what exactly are journalism poems? On the available evidence, MacCarter envisions them as prose poems – or arguably micro-fictions – that rely heavily on the tradition of reportage. MacCarter purposely eschews stock-in-trade poetic devices, leaning instead on a form of journalistic plain-speak. Just the facts of the matter, please, and nothing more.

It would be unwise, however, to believe that MacCarter is not fully in command of his material, that he has not judiciously selected, arranged, massaged, and edited these happenings into his adopted poetic form. Incidental facts are often tacked on to the bare bones of these narratives, as if to cushion explicit linguistic content; but equally they serve to suggest new ways of reading these poems. When two-year-old Mohammed el Fatah Osman –found wedged inside a food trolley – survived a Sudan Airways plane crash in 2003, we are told: ‘The trolley was lodged 8 metres up into a tree and was festooned with charred human epidermis. Sudan consumed 5300 barrels of refined jet fuel per day in 2013. The United States consumed 1,434,400 barrels.’ How to forge links between unvarnished facts and improbable plotlines is part of the puzzle MacCarter sets the reader.

Or take the case of Canadian travel agent James Neil Camp-

bell, sole survivor of an airline crash five kilometres north of Papeete Harbour, in French Polynesia, in July 1973: ‘He walked off the rescue boat, not knowing who he was or anything about his life before impact, and he never would again.’ Almost a year later to the day, the forty-first French test was carried out over nearby Mururoa atoll: ‘Its mushroom cloud drifted in an unexpected trajectory, exposing 110,000 people on Tahiti and the Windward Island Group – the entire population of French Polynesia – to extreme levels of ionising radiation.’

Just as MacCarter’s poems are festooned with chance survivals, so too are they drawn to chance endings

These poems are not without storyline hooks. ‘7 June 2016’ begins: ‘When a Yellowstone National Park ranger crew returned the next day, they discovered that Colin Nathanial Scott, age 23 of Portland, Oregon, had completely dissolved.’ We subsequently learn that all that remained, after Colin slipped into a pool in Wyoming’s Norris Geyser Basin, was a melted orange flip-flop and a blackened wallet. Furthermore, ‘The ASTM International Resin Identification Coding System lists the type of rubber used in the flip flop’s manufacture as 7 – a durable polymer that cannot be recycled.’ You want to say ‘you couldn’t make this stuff up’, but a quick check online confirms its veracity. Truth is stranger, right? In the case of Colin, there is even a video, captured by his sister, which, due to its disturbing nature, has not been released by Park officials.

MacCarter proves himself something of a bricoleur, cherrypicking facts and rearranging them for his own purpose. But, lurking beneath the surface, there is a far graver issue implicit: has our impact on the planet reached such untenable levels that the occurrence of aberrant life-and-death events is no longer to be considered exceptional, but inevitable?

MacCarter’s ‘Fat Chance’ sequence, which occupies over half the book, is succeeded by three shorter works – two prose and one lineated – and an epilogue. ‘Gossypiboma’ juxtaposes a child’s letters to Santa Claus with brief accounts of medical apparatus left in bodies following surgical procedure. ‘California’ comprises a suite of poems described by the poet as ‘an exercise in reverse ekphrasis’; and ‘Case Study’ presents a satire on the US doll industry of the 1980s, loosely based on the phenomenon of the Cabbage Patch Kids. In contrast with ‘Fat Chance’, these sequences read more like experiments in style, or works in progress, that never quite reach fruition.

Sydney designer Zoë Sadokierski’s razor-sharp cover design cleverly marries the opening poem ‘18 July 2011’, concerning Minnesota farmer Jim Dostal’s prize-winning pig, Corndog, with the looming presence of plane crashes, by far the most common thread linking MacCarter’s poems (nine by my count).

MacCarter’s journalism poems, once encountered, are not easily forgotten. They reward careful re-reading, their unadorned prose divulging a hotchpotch of personal and global menace. Is it likely we will see a spate of journalism poems in the future, an entire new genre perhaps? I like to think that Kent MacCarter, mischievously, might well respond thus: fat chance. g

36 mirrors

Force majeure by the truckload

Michael Hofmann

E36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

by Nam Le Scribner

$26.99

hb, 67 pp

ven in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.

Things cross, good intentions with bad situations. There is force majeure, force majeure by the truckload. ‘Hiroshima’ is Hiroshima in 1945. The man alienated from his violin virtuoso daughter is a painter diagnosed with cancer, who has long since stopped painting; the boy who has failed to murder his friend, as instructed, is now told to present himself for punishment by his gang boss; even the student at the Iowa Writing Center – as Nam Le was, back in the day – has a story to write for workshop when his Vietnamese father fetches up. But is it to prevent him from writing his story, or to present him with one? Or leave it and then take it anyway? The stories push and pull, they are titanic struggles suddenly frozen in lava. Even when the young football player gets the girl, it is at the expense of his family and a beating-up from which he will presumably never recover. There is an unforgettable image in the story ‘Halflead Bay’, that does justice to the Nam Le project: the boy reels in his double-hooked line. Yes, there is a fish on one, but on the other a bleeding seagull. One should beware of what one wishes for.

All this was fifteen years ago. Since then, Le has published a monograph on David Malouf (2019), which, from the account I have read of it, seems again to go with push and pull. And now a book of poems. The German poet Gottfried Benn’s advice to writers was ‘Disappoint the season-ticket holder’, but that was probably in more patient times. (The Guardian had a piece in February entitled: ‘The Return of Nam Le’, as though he was a long-retired sheriff in a western.) It is a big risk in the present attention-deficit, oblivion-happy, rabbit-hole world, where more than ever one has to play the game, deliver product, put up one’s hand and go, ‘Please, sir, me sir, me sir!’

One would surmise either that Nam Le feels a powerful pull

away from writing; that his desire to be unpredictable, to resist any hyphenated auto-commodification, is very strong; that he has enjoyed a happy midlife retirement; or that he has been stuck for what to do by way of a follow-up. Or even all of the above. There is said to be a novel on the way, but until then, we – whoever ‘we’ are, dwellers of the poetry reservation, diligent Le readers following his brand over from prose, or most likely jargon-adoring academics in postcolonial or transnational studies – will have to make do with 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.

It is truly a strange, fierce product. You pick it up and you cut yourself. You pick it up and it cuts itself. Both true. The poems – or poem? – anticipate responses and make themselves accordingly under their descriptive egghead sub-headings: ‘Diasporic’, ‘Eastern-Epistemological’, ‘Megaphonic’, ‘Violence: Paedo-affective’, ‘Matri-Immigral’, ‘Palpebral’. All aspects of the Vietnamese immigrant experience. Thirty-six times, and once for luck. (It may remind some readers of the dry labels of the British poet Peter Reading.) You never get away from the feeling that a very clever reader-writer-designer has got there ahead of you and found it all good. Feel bad-good. Nam Le reassures us – or himself – that before he wrote prose, he thought of himself as a poet. But not much poetry is like this: so synthetic, so conniving, so propagandistic, following or suggesting a recipe. It can seem like thirty-six mirrors with no figure. Perhaps Tony Harrison at his most bronze-beak diagrammatic.

The writing is heavy, metallic, purposefully espousing exactly what the young and metamorphic Nam Le successfully eluded: the Vietnamese identity, the exilic or émigré experience, the accumulated resentments of racism and othering and alienation, the precise anatomisation of where one no longer is. The word ‘violence’ occurs nine times, and it feels like many more, in poems of seppuku or immolation (‘bonze orange / Skin lacquered black’), but where even translation or taxonomy are described as ‘a violence’. It feels heavy all the time: heavy when punning (‘Dis place ment / Everything to me / Before the power went // Home’); heavy when angrily parodic of the Oriental (‘Note expression: inscrutable, impassive, / passive as craters, / scuffs on jade terrace’; heavy when doing the lateral lexical slither (‘Give us each day our diacritics – our low and high, fall / and rise, our horns and holds: Flat we are without’; heavy when chanting (in ‘33. Euphemistic’), ‘When they say Peacemaker they mean mass death. When they say / collateral damage or spillover they mean rounded-up death. When they say / roundup or dispersal they mean residual death. When they say / fluid they mean cascading death. When they say / attrition they mean slow and steady death. When they say / kinetic they mean moving-on-now death. When they say / resistance they mean what d’you expect death’; heavy when tumbling among lyrical Dylan Thomas or Heaneyesque portmanteau words (‘craglands’, ‘waterlight’), or lyrical Dylan Thomas or Heaneyesque monosyllables (‘reave’ and ‘roil’). It is all powered (and stymied) by a splintering but still unbearably heavy self-consciousness, a condition itself addressed in ‘20. Titrative’:

Unself-consciously?

Ha ha!

Too late.

Poet of the Month with David Brooks

David Brooks, critic, novelist, short story writer, animal rights activist as well as poet, taught Australian Literature, ran a writing program, and co-edited Southerly at the University of Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest (The Peanut Vendor) included in his new and selected poems: The Other Side of Daylight (UQP, 2024). He lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep and advocates for kangaroos. The Sydney Morning Herald called his The Balcony (UQP, 2007) ‘an electrical experience’. (University

Which poets have influenced you most?

Galway Kinnell, Czesław Miłosz, Ezra Pound, Li Po, Bruce Beaver.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Most of my poems begin with inspiration, but then are crafted. It’s taken a lifetime to learn that craft. I’m still learning.

What prompts a new poem?

An event, a memory, a thought, an image, or some trigger in someone else’s poem. Often there’s a kind of inner signal, a feeling something is coming. Sometimes when I’d like to write a poem but don’t have anything in particular in mind, I ask myself, If I were going to write a poem, what might it be about? and, Bingo, I’m in.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Silence, darkness, calm, a good sleep the night before, freedom from distraction.

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

In earlier years quite a few, dozens sometimes. But the internal editor gets better with time. I’m needing less and less, doing more drafting in my head before setting anything down. Some poems now come almost fully formed. I’m getting better at doing what the poem wants, rather than trying to get it to do what I want it to.

Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?

Some great poets can be spiky and defensive in person. I’d prefer someone who’s actually pleasant to talk with, and you can only be confident about that if you’ve already talked with them, so I’ll say Mark Strand, who was pleasant and generous and whom I still find myself talking to, occasionally, in my mind. Or Bruce Beaver. Or Jan Harry. Wise and generous beings.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Several, but I’ll name just five: Robert Adamson’s Where I Come From, Jenny Rankin’s Earth Hold, J.S. Harry’s A Dandelion for Van Gogh, Coral Hull’s Bestiary, Bruce Beaver’s Odes and Days

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Solitude, though I’m conscious there are two or three living poets whose friendship is important to me, and that I converse with a coterie of dead poets much of the time. Amazing how poets continue to see, think, feel, and speak long after they’ve died.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

It’s probably impolitic to choose from the living. My sense overall is that the public discourse surrounding poetry is getting better and better and that some strong new voices are emerging. But in truth I’m no longer the person to ask. The bulk of my reading is now in and for animal advocacy. The poetics of that are very important. Were there more critics working in that area, or receptive to poets who are, I might be reading criticism more.

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

I’d once have said Strand and Charles Simic’s Another Republic anthology, or Pound’s Cathay. Now it’s Classical Chinese Poetry, translated and edited by David Hinton.

What is your favourite line of poetry?

Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal… from ‘Briggflatts’ by Basil Bunting.

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

Thinking about them a bit more. Keeping it clear, simple, entertaining. Letting the images do the talking. Remembering the power of narrative. Leaving one’s cleverness at the door. g

Trichotillomania

Adele

Dumont’s memoir in chapters

Anwen Crawford

‘IThe Pulling: Essays

by Adele Dumont Scribe

$29.99 pb, 276 pp

n the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.

Dumont has suffered from trichotillomania since adolescence, and The Pulling is her exploration of both the condition and her own experience. This is billed as a book of essays, though it is really a memoir in chapters, beginning with reminiscences of an itinerant, unorthodox early childhood and proceeding through to the present, where the author remains perplexed, and preoccupied, by her ongoing illness. The early chapters are by far the most vivid and varied; as the book goes on its repetitions come to mirror the narrowing effects of Dumont’s condition, and the ways in which it confines her to a set of careful, and brittle, routines.

Dumont’s parents worked as fruit pickers, ‘moving from farm to farm according to the seasons’ before settling on the semi-rural fringes of Sydney’s west in order to give Dumont and her younger sister a steady education. Her father, born in the Alsace region of France, is phlegmatic, bookish, self-educated; Dumont observes that he ‘belongs to an age’ where mental illness – alcoholism, for instance – was understood to be a personality trait. It is perhaps for this reason that Papa, as Dumont calls him, remains unflappable in the face of Mama’s more volatile temperament, her ‘unrelenting tears, and yelling that would last hours into the night’.

By Dumont’s own admission, her parents, and their strict anti-materialist values, still shape her engagement with the world. She clearly loves and admires them, and her confession late in the book of ‘deep shame … that my life feels so much easier’ will ring true for any reader whose opportunities have been greater than their caregivers’ were. But the trouble at the heart of this family escapes the author’s knowing, just as the reasons for her illness do; Dumont never asks her mother what has tormented her all these years. Few of us would ask, to be fair: confronting a

parent with their own frailties is a thing most children, including adult children, find frightening, for to be reminded of a parent’s weaknesses is also to remember their mortality. If that parent is already frightening, the task may seem impossible.

In the absence, then, of explanations, Dumont repeatedly turns to description of the mechanics and rituals that characterise her hair-pulling, the self-imposed rules that she sets (and then breaks) when attempting to stop, and the lengths she has gone to, over decades, to conceal her illness from nearly everyone. I’m not sure these repetitions – of scene, of subject – are entirely intentional: they never quite rise to the level of an explicit design. The back and forth feels more like a writer in search of an ultimate expression of purpose, one that keeps eluding her precisely because, as Dumont writes, at the heart of her illness and its trance-like episodes ‘remains something unknowable; a thing sublime’.

Dumont repeatedly turns to description of the mechanics and rituals that characterise her hair-pulling

The idea of sublimity – Dumont also refers to it as ‘magic’ –hints at a more expansive, more ancient understanding of mental illness, or what we once may have called ‘madness’, than our current times generally allow for. Dumont does not glorify her illness, but nor does she seek to reduce it to a set of symptoms, or to a chemical imbalance in the brain. The Pulling is mercifully free of the jargon of neuroscience, and Dumont’s insistence on non-medical phenomena as a part of her experience is the book’s most original aspect.

In light of this, I find it strange that Dumont so often secondguesses her reader, as if, despite her own multifaceted conception of illness, she can only conceive of one type of reaction. ‘Before I go on,’ she warns early, ‘let me say that the chapters that follow this one may be hard for you to bear.’ But why would that be so? Dumont’s subject may be difficult, but there is nothing that makes her presentation of it difficult, let alone unbearable. Her prose is sober and diligent, possibly too diligent: there were moments when I longed for an outburst of bad taste or impetuosity, of humour of any sort. The impulse to get ahead of the reader’s presumed disgust or bewilderment, and to deflect it, seems to rest on the assumption that bewilderment, disgust, or shock are provoked by one’s subject and not by one’s style. All I can say is that I have read more shocking things about far more trivial subjects, and I don’t need to be coddled.

Repeated deference to the ‘you’ is then confused, towards the end of the book, when the ‘you’ changes shape: ‘To be able to write any of this I had to pretend that you – you, my mother –would never set eyes on it.’ After 260 pages, are we now to assume that the reader Dumont is so anxious not to upset has been her mother all along? This would make emotional sense, though on a technical level it would leave things in a muddle, with Mama at once a third-person figure and the subject of a direct, second-person address. But I think there are two ‘you’s’ here: the parent whom Dumont has never been able to appease, and the reader in whom she seeks companionship. The split is interesting, and one of many that Dumont has documented in this book. g

Ode to the Moon

Earth’s unique, life-sustaining partner

Robyn Arianrhod

DOur Moon: A human history

by Rebecca Boyle Sceptre

$34.99 pb, 336 pp

uring a recent lunar eclipse, I marvelled as Earth’s shadow nibbled away the Moon’s light. This creeping shadow testified to the awesome movement of the celestial spheres, Earth inching along its trajectory around the Sun while the Moon fell around Earth until, on this special night, all three bodies were closely aligned in the same plane: Sun, Earth, Moon. A related alignment occurs each month, when the Sun’s light is reflected from the full, uninterrupted Moon. We can see it because the Moon orbits Earth in a slightly different plane from that of Earth’s motion around the Sun. But on this night, the Moon was passing through a point where these two planes intersected, so that Earth directly blocked the light from Sun to Moon.

Two hours after those first shadow bites, the fully eclipsed, rust-coloured Moon appeared – rusty because Earth’s atmospheric shell does allow some light through, especially orange and red light. These colours have the longest wavelengths, so they can more easily slip past the molecules in Earth’s atmosphere without bouncing off and being scattered away; the atmosphere refracts this escaping light towards the Moon, which then reflects it back to us. It is the same physics that gives us red sunsets: as the Earth rotates away from the Sun, the evening light needs a longer path to reach us, travelling through more atmosphere than during the day; blue light is scattered away while red slips through.

Sunsets and eclipses, moonrises and starry skies, all are marvellous to behold – the kind of shared human experiences that science journalist Rebecca Boyle explores in her first book, Our Moon: A human history. She knows we all have sky stories to tell, some scientific, some numinous, and some with cultural significance – stories that connect us to our ancestors, including those whose years of extraordinary patience produced the first records of the Sun’s and the Moon’s paths. Boyle outlines the work of the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians who left the most detailed of the early astronomical records, some five thousand years ago – and of the Greeks who used those records to form the basis of modern scientific astronomy. But she also introduces lesser-known players, such as the makers of a strange series of pits in Scotland’s Warren Field.

Boyle tells a thrilling tale about these ten-thousand-yearold pits – twelve of them, graduated in size from smallest to largest and back. One theory is that they combine the phases of the Moon and the (approximately) twelve lunar months,

while their alignment to sunrise on the winter solstice resets the months to the solar year so that they represent the very first true calendar. Not everyone agrees, but Boyle presents a compelling case that these pits ‘mark the first time humans figured out how to predict future time’. Such a ‘monumental shift in thinking’ would enable people to predict and prepare for seasonal fishing, hunting, and gathering, and Boyle gives other examples from a range of cultures. She also makes the interesting case that, in the history of astronomy, practical calendar-making came first, then religion, and finally science – and she covers well all three of these developmental phases.

Boyle is interested not so much in the Moon itself, but in what it has meant to us humans, and she cleverly shows the scientific enterprise as one of many ways in which we have told stories about the Moon. But Our Moon begins long before humans gazed at the sky – long before we even existed – with the story of the formation of the Earth-Moon system itself. Yet even here we remain in focus, for Boyle points out that it is unusual for a planet to have a single, large moon, and that this unique partnership quite possibly gave birth to life itself. For instance, the Moon is not so large that its gravity distorts Earth’s orbit, but it is large enough – and ‘bears so much of the angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system’ – that it stabilises the tilt of Earth’s axis, thereby stabilising the seasonal cycles that most living organisms depend on. Boyle also shows how scientists discovered the existence of genetic lunar (as well as circadian) clocks, and how the Moon may be linked to the evolution of the first land-dwelling creatures that crawled out from the sea.

Our Moon contains many other fascinating facts, including what the Moon rocks collected by Apollo astronauts have taught us about the geology and formation of Earth, why the Moon looks silvery, and much more. Boyle draws on a wide range of disciplines: astronomy, geology, archaeology, genetics, evolution, physics, chemistry, religion, history, technology, indigenous cosmologies. She tends to favour information (and occasionally hyperbole) over explanation; for instance, all she says about the physics of lunar eclipses is that the Sun and Moon are 180 degrees apart and the Moon is red because it ‘reflects the sunsets’. Her strength is bringing to life the work of many researchers, both historical and contemporary, famous and otherwise – and she is adept at digging out lesser-known information even for the famous ones. Sometimes she recounts her globetrotting research trips in too much irrelevant personal detail, but she has woven a stimulating story of scientific discovery and the cultural impact of knowledge – with some lyrical writing, too, as befits an ode to the Moon.

By contrast, much of today’s scientific lunar effort is decidedly unpoetic. Boyle critiques the nationalism and private commercialism spearheading current attempts to exploit and lay claim to the Moon, asking: who decides how to treat this ‘special, spectral, spiritual thing, that we all share’? She rightly hopes that any further lunar research will benefit everyone and that we never forget our ancient bond with the Moon, Earth’s unique, life-sustaining partner. g

Robyn Arianrhod is an affiliate in the School of Mathematics at Monash University, where she taught for many years.

Update your nightstand.

The Golden Sands Of Change

Julia Giacomelli

AUD $64.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8047-9

also available in hardcover & ebook

www.xlibris.co.nz

This memoir tells the story about Julia Giacomelli’s love for Italy, her magical experiences while living there, and her frequent visits back to keep their familial and friendship ties strong. Beautiful and vibrant, Venice forms a fascinating background to Julia’s life as she raises their bilingual daughters and gradually integrates with the help of her husband, her family, and her friends.

Their Names Shall Live Forever More

The Story of the 60th Australian Infantry Battalion during 1916, including the Untold Account of the Needle Trench 10, and the Investigation to Identify the Soldier from This Group Buried in a Grave without a Name

Trevor Jardine

Detailed account of the first year of existence of the 60th Australian Infantry Battalion, including the investigation to identify a soldier from this battalion buried in the Guards’ Cemetery, Lesboeufs.

AUD $24.99 paperback

979-8-3694-9204-8

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Rupert, Your Croaking Is Perfect!

David Colquhoun

In this children’s story, a young frog just starting to croak at night feels bad when he sounds different from his friends, but he soon learns his unique skills are important.

AUD $12.86 paperback

979-8-3694-9149-2

also available in hardcover, ebook & audiobook www.xlibris.com.au

The Way of the Sith

Edwin Ferreira

A self-help book to enhance your selfdevelopment, growth and transformation, to be able to become more passionate, stronger and powerful to overcome your problems and to create and establish order.

AUD $28.99 paperback

979-8-3694-9027-3

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

The Way of the Sith World Mastery

Edwin Ferreira

This manual on breaking the self-limitations imposed by society, family, religion or culture helps you to gain formal power in whatever shape or form you desire.

AUD $18.65 paperback

979-8-3694-9060-0

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Practical Plants

Useful Survival Products, Unusual Foods, Wood & Protective Charms from Northern Australia and the World Tropics.

Steve Price

A wealth of natural resources for the serious outdoors person, woodworkers, craftspeople, hikers, campers, and survivalists, and an education tool for children’s camps and activities, military training programmes, and extreme expedition adventure.

AUD $33.99 paperback

978-1-6698-8950-2

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

The Gift of Literacy

A Special Education Guide for Teachers and Parents

Elaine Alvin

This manual aims to guide teachers and parents as they handle students with learning difficulties, as well as underachieving gifted and talented kids, in the area of literacy.

AUD $12.86 paperback

979-8-3694-9134-8

also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Sistergirl, Brotherboy

A history of gender flux

Jack Nicholls

ATransgender Australia: A history since 1910

by Noah Riseman Melbourne University Press

$40 pb, 368 pp

t the first Australian Conference on Transsexualism, convened in 1979, a Dr Michael Ross declared that Australia had the highest incidence of transsexualism in the world. Whatever proportion the good doctor was observing, it must be immeasurably higher today; and yet until now there has been no formal history of gender-diverse Australians.

On one level, this is no surprise. Gender dysphoria is a subjective experience, its sufferers tending to hide their pain, and some historians consider it anachronistic to label our predecessors according to contemporary social understandings, not least since terminology shifts every generation. Conscious of these pitfalls, Noah Riseman has made a good stab at a difficult topic.

Transgender Australia: A history since 1910 grew out of Riseman’s previous book, Pride in Defence (2020), in which he and co-author Shirleene Robinson transcribed the stories of queer Australians in the military. As in that work, Riseman’s use of oral histories allows a multitude of trans voices to take centre stage, and he structures them to recount a history that can be loosely divided into eras of criminalisation, sexualisation, medicalisation, and liberation.

Riseman chooses as his starting point 1910, the year when German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld pathologised gender non-conformists in his book Transvestites: The erotic drive to cross-dress (1910). From this moment, gender non-conformity was linked to sexual deviance, and what was often seen as a lark or adventure in the frontier days was now stamped as perversion.

With Australian law enforcement literally policing the gender binary, Riseman’s early chapters lean heavily on court records and sensationalist newspaper accounts. They offer a biased – but fascinating – glimpse into a world of secrecy and shame, but one where those in the know could attend underground ballroom parties that were, in the approving words of one 1940s regular, ‘frequented by perverts and their associates’.

American GI Christine Jorgensen challenged this culture of secrecy with her very public medical transition in 1952. ‘Transsexual’ entered the lexicon. Australia was no laggard in this burgeoning field, and Riseman shows how transgender Australians then became subject to the discourse of modern medicine. In Melbourne, the psychiatrist Dr Herbert Bower began treating trans patients from 1951 and, astonishingly, was still doing so when I entered his rooms fifty years later.

But the middle-class respectability strived for by Christine Jorgensen was out of reach for most Australian trans women, for whom a lack of economic opportunity led many to become showgirls or sex workers in the 1970s. Here, the varied voices of Noah’s interviewees recount their fight for legal recognition from recalcitrant governments. Trans men, too often ignored, are well served by this sifting of detail.

Riseman’s use of oral histories allows a multitude of trans voices to take centre stage

Riseman, who began his academic career with a study of First Nations soldiers, takes a step out of his chronology to address Australia’s parallel traditions of gender variance. So much of the Western transgender experience is a battle over externals: how we look, how we speak, how we keep up on the never-ending treadmill of gender performance. It is a refreshing contrast, then, to read about Sistergirls and Brotherboys, who emphasise internal identity.

Not that there was much cross-cultural support between trans Australians of colour and their white counterparts. Riseman observes: ‘Trans individuals and groups who adhered to white, middle-class values and ideas of respectability tended to exclude those who did not fit those norms – including, often, Blak, indigenous and people of colour.’

This recurring conflict between respectability and countercultural politics is the most fascinating strand of his history. If the 1990s debates between the Transgender Liberation Coalition and the Transsexual Action Group are reminiscent of the squabbling between Monty Python’s People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front, they illustrate Riseman’s point that ‘much of transgender history has been about the tensions between those advocating for a more gender-pluralist approach and those who were wedded to existing … understandings of gender’.

However, these internecine debates pass frustratingly fleetingly. I understand Riseman, a cis man, not wanting to platform views he may find abhorrent, but a clear voice from the anti-transgender LGBT scene would have put this era into perspective. What happened to the anti-trans queer voices of the 1990s, and do they hold the same positions today?

At the turn of millennium, the book caught up to my own era. Here I was shaken to find anecdotes exactly matching my own experiences – criticism from doctors about my insufficiently feminine fashion and endless questions about my genitalia. At the time I had assumed this was how it always was – it is the great value of this book that I can see my own life in historical perspective; that I had the misfortune to throw myself on the mercy of a medical profession at the exact moment it was doubling-down on gatekeeping to stave off legal attacks.

As I read Transgender Australia, I felt an author both in command of his material and uncertain of his responsibility. As his sources multiply, Riseman gets bogged down in the details. Chapters that exhaustively recount the policy debates across eight states and territories are good history but a slog for the reader. The book is a mosaic in close-up that could have benefited from a broader view of Australian cultural evolution.

In his final chapter, Riseman charts the incredible progress of the twenty-first century and does a brave job distilling the backlash that has, in his reading, targeted trans people since the gay marriage plebiscite brought gay and lesbian people safely into the mainstream. Yet if this book tells us anything, it is that This Too Shall Pass. Human gender roles, laws, culture are always in flux.

Pain and suffering

Two thinkers in conversation

Adam Bowles

TThe Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altruism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world

by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei Text Publishing

$36.99 pb, 256 pp

his volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

Peter Singer is Australia’s best-known philosopher. An atheist and a utilitarian, he is most famous for extending the utilitarian ideal – often understood to be the greatest good for the greatest number, but described by Singer as the ‘greatest possible benefit’ – to all sentient beings. Shih Chao-Hwei was born in Myanmar, after her family’s flight from China following the rise of communism, and moved to Taiwan at an early age. After exploring Buddhism at university, she was ordained as a Bhikshuni – a nun –in a Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which (like most forms of Buddhism) is known for its strong ethical standpoints and its aversion to killing. Chao-Hwei belongs to an international network associated with the term Engaged Buddhism, which was coined by the Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (who was not the fourteenth Dalai Lama as the book’s prelims suggest). Engaged Buddhism, a modern Buddhist ecumenical movement, aims to connect Buddhist teachings and practitioners to social justice issues. Chao-Hwei has been a vocal advocate in Taiwan for the rights of women, LGBTQI+ communities, and animal liberation.

For that reminder, I thank Noah Riseman. His book has given trans Australians what we have hitherto lacked – the historical context of our own existence. g

Jack Nicholls is a speculative fiction author and essayist living in Melbourne. ❖

more formally than others; it may also account for one passage that leans heavily on Wikipedia, which we can perhaps overlook as a careless editorial inclusion. Singer illustrates his points with hypotheticals or ‘provocations’, while Chao-Hwei typically illustrates hers with stories from the Buddhist canon or her own experience. The tone is friendly, and each accords the other great respect, even when disagreeing. The pair, after all, share several common interests, not least strong convictions about alleviating the pain and suffering of sentient beings.

The book has nine chapters, mostly even in size, apart from the rather too long fifth chapter on embryo research and abortion. The first two chapters lay the groundwork for ethics and key Buddhist concepts. The remaining chapters concern gender equality, sexuality, animal welfare, euthanasia and suicide, and the death penalty and killing in war.

In the terms of Western ethical categories, Singer’s ethics are consequentialist, emphasising the outcome of an act in assessing its ethical merit. To anticipate this outcome, he resorts to an implicit mathematical futurism, without appearing to attempt (at least here) the mathematical formulation. This is a common critique of utilitarianism. If we were all to become vegetarians or vegans, how do we anticipate the consequences in terms of the

The Buddhist and the Ethicist presents as a series of conversations that took place in 2016 at a monastery in Taiwan. The book, however, incorporates subsequent interactions over the next five years. This may account for its varying styles, since some parts read

collective good of living beings? For her part, Chao-Hwei’s ethics are deontological, emphasising intentionality and informed by the normative tradition of Buddhist thought, though she at times rejects norms she doesn’t like, such as women’s monastic rules, which express a distrust of and are designed to control women’s ‘dangerous’ sexuality.

But there is another, more profound point of difference between the two. Both Singer and Chao-Hwei wish to ame-

Peter Singer (Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek/Text Publishing) and Shih Chao-Hwei (Venerable Shing-Kuang/Text Publishing)

liorate the suffering produced through objective relations, i.e. the suffering or pain that might be inflicted on another. Only Chao-Hwei, however, is concerned with pain and suffering as a subjective experience that one must subjectively attend to through psychological management. It is unclear if Singer or Chao-Hwei recognises this second difference, though it simmers continually under the surface and occasionally bubbles over.

A case in point is in the chapter on sexuality. Singer queries Chao-Hwei’s commitments to ‘liberation from sex’, construing the phrase in the context of sexual mores and repression. There are plenty of examples of such things in Buddhism, but this is not what Chao-Hwei means. Rather, sex represents ‘desire’ or ‘thirst’, which leads to suffering due to our holding on to things and experiences as if they can be permanent sources of pleasure and fulfilment. Liberation from sex, therefore, addresses two related Buddhist concerns: first, that the ultimate aim of Buddhism is to alleviate suffering once and for all (suffering and pain, in this sense, are fundamentally existential and unavoidable, and their cessation, as the formula goes, is nirvana); second, that individual subjects are responsible for alleviating their own suffering (not just others’) by cultivating productive psychological habits towards desires and attachments (i.e., controlling and diminishing them and developing a deep awareness of the impermanence of these experiences and their objects).

Singer doesn’t believe in ultimate ends. Nor does his ethics appear to be much concerned with the psychology of suffering, which, for most forms of intellectual Buddhism, is fundamental to identifying it and curing it. To this extent, at least, Singer’s and Chao-Hwei’s ideas of suffering and pain are not quite the same.

Embryology reveals another fault line. For Singer, the key thresholds for determining the ethical merit of acts directed to other living things are those beings’ capacity to feel pain and to

Problem child

A global psychedelic renaissance

Ben Brooker

AExpanding Mindscapes: A global history of psychedelics

edited by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

MIT Press

US$55 pb, 520 pp

n anthology dedicated to the transnational history of psychedelic drugs and culture seems a timely enterprise. We are twenty or so years into what has become known as the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, the global revival of interest in compounds such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin centring on their use alongside psychotherapy as treatments for a growing number of mental health disorders.

have consciousness (which are corollaries of each other). For consciousness, an elusive and hardly universal notion, he relies on a modern scientific understanding of the embryo, according to which it has no capacity to feel or experience consciousness until after sixteen weeks. For Singer, an embryo before this time is not a sentient being, since it is incapable of consciousness and feeling, which informs the moral circumstances of abortion or the use of embryos for medical research. Chao-Hwei has strong reservations about this reasoning. In Buddhist terms, an embryo is the next life of a being that had a prior existence. If it has no feeling or consciousness now (a point she was also reluctant to concede), it did so in its previous life. Killing a living thing terminates its opportunities to eliminate its suffering – again, this is because Buddhist conceptions of suffering include its subjective experience, not just suffering as a product of objective relations. For Chao-Hwei, the potential of a living thing to become sentient in its lifetime is an important consideration when such a being might be harmed. She often referred in such contexts to an ‘instinct for survival’, though I shared Singer’s confusion on this point. Sentience for Singer is a condition for moral consideration only in the immediate moment; the past or future sentience of a living thing does not condition the morality of harm done to it.

If rather too long and repetitive, this is a stimulating volume which raises important questions. It is at its most interesting when the points of contention between the interlocutors reveal the tensions stoked by their – perhaps incommensurable – presuppositions. But the volume also shows that agreement on many substantive issues can be reached, despite such incommensurabilities. g

Adam Bowles is Associate Professor in Asian Religions at the University of Queensland. He is co-author of A History of State and Religion in India (Routledge, 2012). ❖

Previous books which have both documented and shaped this revival – most notably Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (2018) – have recalled the history of the psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics dating back to the 1950s, but largely through a Western-centric lens. Expanding Mindscapes seeks to redress this imbalance by offering what editors Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock call in their introduction ‘perspectives currently lacking in the historiography of psychedelics’ and ‘important discussions on hitherto underexplored or untouched topics such as gender, parapsychology, anarchism, and technological innovation’.

The book, which contains twenty essays on subjects as varied as soma consumption in West Bengal, the uses of ibogaine in Africa and ayahuasca in China, and the fate of LSD psychotherapy in South America, Israel, and communist Czechoslovakia, is divided into three parts. The first draws the reader into a variety of locations, prompting us to reflect on the ways the uses of psychedelics both cohere and diverge across dissimilar times, places, and sociocultural contexts. The second traces what the editors term the ‘global networks of knowledge’ which have facilitated the planetary (not to say cosmic) movement of substances and ideas. The third and final part explores how psychedelics have fomented and intersected with cultural, political, and technological change,

challenging prevailing orders wherever people have chosen to ‘turn on, tune in, and drop out’.

Taken together, the essays constitute a useful reminder that the psychedelic renaissance, far from being sui generis, has roots reaching across continents and eras, and far beyond the United States and the ‘summer of love’ with which psychedelics have become synonymous. They also amount to something of a warning. Several authors here, including Zoë Dubas in her essay ‘Women, Mental Illness, and Psychotherapy in Postwar France’, reflect on the disturbing absence of ethical standards in the first wave of psychedelic research. Just as, in our own time, horror stories involving physical, emotional, and sexual abuse have emerged from psychedelic trials, Dubas and others document a wild west of manipulation, non-consensual dosing, and the exploitation of patients made vulnerable by acute mental illness as well as dynamics of gender, class, and race. As Stephen Snelders observes in his essay on LSD in the Netherlands, ‘in the 1950s, psychiatrists ruled their departments as feudal lords and developed the accompanying personality styles’.

Nevertheless, the book falls short of its editors’ goals in important ways. Most obviously, its almost totalising focus on LSD – only around a quarter of the essays centre on a different compound – undermines the book’s claim to present an expansive, less Western-focused historiography of psychedelics (LSD was first synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in 1938, and subsequently globally distributed from pharmaceutical company Sandoz’s headquarters in Basel). Equally consequential is the editors’ decision to exclude from the book’s purview not only Pacific countries like Japan and Australia but also any First Peoples’ perspectives.

Israel, and the Netherlands, arguably more binds than separates these histories. Each account follows a similar trajectory: an initial wave of research beginning in the 1950s, focusing on the idea of LSD as a ‘psychotomimetic’ (i.e. psychosis-mimicking) agent; a shift in the 1960s to the exploration of psychedelics as adjuncts to psychotherapy; the near-total abandonment of research in the early 1970s due to the global prohibition on drugs; and finally, beginning as a trickle in the 1990s and turning into a flood in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the return of research with a renewed focus on the psychotherapeutic application of

various psychedelics but most especially psilocybin and – though not in itself a ‘classic’ psychedelic – MDMA.

While several essays, including Timothy Vilgiate’s fascinating account of Voacanga africana in the ‘transnational imagination’, touch on the deleterious effects of colonialism and exoticisation, none centres on or is written by Indigenous people. This seems an especially egregious omission given the whitewashed nature of much psychedelic historiography, as well as the vigorous debates currently underway in global psychedelic circles relating to cultural appropriation and exploitation, and the marginalisation of First Peoples’ experiences. As is well known, the longstanding use of mind-altering substances in sacred and ritual contexts in the Global South predates the West’s ‘discovery’ of psychedelics by centuries.

The inclusion of indigenous perspectives would not only have gone some way to correcting the minimisation of this fact in the existing psychedelic literature, but it might also have led to a more compellingly heterogeneous book. As it is, many of the essays here hit the same beats with only minor variations. While, on the surface, it might appear interesting to juxtapose the psychedelic pasts of countries as disparate as England, Brazil,

It is ironic that, while this anthology functions more as a history of LSD than of psychedelics, vanishingly few of the current clinical trials are exploring the uses of what Hoffman once dubbed his ‘problem child’. In 2024, LSD remains so, a drug still feared, misunderstood, and freighted with the subversive. While psilocybin and MDMA appear destined to be folded into an instrumentalised psychotherapeutic model (the book makes no mention of Australia having become the first country in the world to formally recognise these drugs as medicines), Mike Jay’s epilogue ponders what stands to be lost in the medicalisation of psychedelics: namely, their ‘striking potential as tools of creativity or social solidarity, ethnography or mass communication, philosophy or revolutionary politics’. At its best, Expanding Mindscapes presents a challenge to the medicalised and, increasingly, capitalised conception of psychedelic compounds which obscures their rich, protean history – and future. g

Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and a former bookseller.

Promoting the use of the drug LSD in London c.1966 (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

Critic of the Month with Ian Dickson

Ian Dickson reviews theatre and books for ABR and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee. As a schoolboy, visiting London in the 1960s to catch Saturday matinees, Ian developed his obsession with the performing arts, which followed him through degrees at the University of NSW and Yale. A lifetime spent one way or another around the theatre has made him understand the importance of the critic to make a record of that most ephemeral art.

When did you first write for ABR?

June 2013, when I reviewed Richard Davis’s biography of Marjorie Lawrence.

What makes a fine critic?

The critic must have a real knowledge and understanding of what they are reviewing. Although there are critics, including, apparently, a certain former British prime minister, who can write hilarious put-downs of works they haven’t bothered to read or see, it’s more useful to the reader if the critic has some connection to the work reviewed.

We should get some sense of a critic’s personality from their writing. To be a critic is, by definition, to have opinions. No one approaches a book or a play as a blank slate. While one would not want a critic to be completely predictable, it helps to know where they are coming from.

They should have a passion for their subject and the ability to transmit that passion to their readers. Over the years, I have discovered countless writers, musicians, and artists about whom I knew nothing, thanks to the advocacy of reviewers.

A fine critic must also be a fine writer.

Which critics most impress you?

I grew up in England following Kenneth Tynan, who seemed dazzling at the time. Reading him now I find he hasn’t dated that well. For poetry I read Helen Vendler. For practically anything I read Clive James. I learned an enormous amount from music critic Andrew Porter’s erudite, enthusiastic work, a tradition which Alec Ross is continuing at the New Yorker. I am not a great fan of dance, but Arlene Croce had the ability to link even the most esoteric work to the outside world.

Sticking with The New Yorker, Antony Lane’s razor-sharp wit and wide range of reference would have made him a welcome guest at the Algonquin round table. Finally, John McDonald’s uncompromising opinions are frequently a refreshing counterpoint in local discussions of the visual arts.

Do you accept most books offered you or are you selective?

I only decline a review if I feel I have no rapport with the writer or their subject or, as happened recently, I don’t think the

book deserves a review.

What do you look for in an editor?

One who will correct my spelling, encourage me to clarify my more arcane comments, break up my interminable sentences, and not overdo the semi-colons. Also, one who supports, encourages, and challenges.

Do you write with a particular reader in mind?

Yes. One who, with fiendish delight, picks up any factual errors, evasions, or misunderstandings.

Hypocrite lecteur – mon paranoia – mon peur.

Do you receive feedback from readers or authors?

Yes, but mainly for theatre reviews, rarely for books. They are either: ‘Thank you for saying what we felt’ or ‘Did you go to the same play I went to?’ Whichever it is, it’s always good to know that there are readers who are committed enough to react.

What do you think of negative reviews?

If there weren’t negative reviews, positive reviews would be meaningless. Having said that, a negative review should treat the performers or writers seriously. Mockery is easy, cheap, and of no use to anyone.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

To quote Bartleby, I would prefer not to.

How different, if at all, are theatre reviews from book reviews?

The difference is in the timing. One can spend weeks on a book review, but a theatre review is based on an instant reaction. I have huge respect for those critics who would phone in their reviews to their paper’s night editor minutes after the performance finished. The challenge with a theatre review is to develop a nuanced reaction in a short time.

What are a critic’s primary responsibilities?

A critic’s primary responsibilities are equally to their readers and to the performers or writers they are reviewing. To be clear and informative when addressing the former, and to be accurate and respectful when writing about the latter. g

‘The colourful sun’

A splendid performance of Schoenberg’s ‘opera’ Malcolm Gillies

What is Gurrelieder? Arnold Schoenberg’s massive cantata, or oratorio, or symphonic psychodrama, is technically a song cycle, presenting ‘Songs of Gurre’, a small Danish settlement best known for its crumbling medieval castle. A five-part sequence of naturalist poems, by the Danish ‘Modern Breakthrough’ writer and botanist Jens Peter Jacobsen, became the text of Schoenberg’s cycle, in a lacklustre German translation by Robert Franz Arnold, to which Schoenberg made few revisions.

Conceived at the turn of the twentieth century for soprano and tenor with piano accompaniment, Schoenberg’s work soon busted through any salon constraints, effecting a 100-minute work for extraordinary resources: a gargantuan orchestra, with six vocal soloists, joined in later sections by four choirs, three male and one mixed. Gurrelieder’s Viennese première of 1913 involved 757 instrumentalists and voices, thereby posing an everlasting dilemma of where you fit that other essential element of any performance, the audience. The recent première at the Sydney Opera House (15 March) was more economical, with just four hundred musicians, but still needed to reassign the first ten rows of the Concert Hall’s stalls for the stage overflow.

The concert’s conception, casting, and successful execution owe most to Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s conductor, Simone Young. Her musical carte de visite in recent times has been Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss, three crucial influences upon the young Schoenberg. So rare still are this work’s performances that Young herself had not previously attended an actual live performance of it. Indeed, Sydney’s Gurrelieder project became a veritably federal one, with SSO’s playing strengths being buttressed by young stars from the Australian National Academy of Music, in Melbourne. The muster call for chorus members was answered by contingents, mainly of tenors and basses, from Melbourne and Hobart, not to overlook the massed resource of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.

Schoenberg, like Mahler, uses this huge assemblage of instru-

ments and voices to explore many exquisite, sometimes unique, blends of timbre. It is only in Gurrelieder’s last few minutes that he pulls out all stops in his (and Jacobsen’s) glorification of the rising of ‘the colourful sun’: ‘she rises, smiling, from the waters of the night, and a splendour of radiant curls flies from her clear forehead’.

Gurrelieder, then, involves a medley of mainly solo songs, interspersed with orchestral interludes, introductions, and tailpieces. Unlike in a Lieder recital, these songs are placed in a rich, luscious, Wagnerian orchestral sea of continuous sound. It surges around and sometimes its higher waves challenge the outpourings of the most  Helden  of tenors, or most coloratura of sopranos. Young’s pick of the work’s half dozen soloists was superb: her two lovers Waldemar (Simon O’Neill) and Tove (Ricarda Merbeth) possess the height, the power, and the untrammelled grandeur that Schoenberg demands for his Danish King and his adored and adoring lover. Their ability to cut right through this massed orchestral texture was never in doubt. O’Neill’s more interpretative virtues were most evident in the work’s mid-point crux, Waldemar’s rebuke to the Lord God himself, ending with ‘Permit me, Lord, to be your Fool.’ Equally impressive was the darker-hued mezzo-soprano voice of Deborah Humble, as the chatty Wood Dove. In the longest of Schoenberg’s songs, she reports on the deadly revenge of Waldemar’s Queen upon his husband’s illicit lover, and even announces her own impending fate through the outraged Queen’s action.

The three cameo roles, appearing in single song numbers in the work’s ghastly, ethereal third part, The Wild Hunt, were, by contrast, less high-flown. They required more modest, albeit still desperate, utterances from Sava Vemić as Peasant, Andrew Goodwin as Fool, and Warwick Fyfe as Speaker. However, Goodwin’s beautiful voice was, in its lower registers, simply overwhelmed on occasion by Schoenberg’s glutinous orchestration. Fyfe’s attempt at the speech-song style (Sprechgesang), specified by Schoenberg, certainly well conveyed its crazed purpose, but it was too close to the ‘song’ end of the speech-to-song spectrum, thereby sometimes pushing the Speaker’s serious reportage of ‘the summerwind’s wild chase’ towards parody.

Amid the hubbub about Schoenberg’s adoption of an atonal approach to composition – a small step in his mind, undoubtedly, but ‘a giant leap for mankind’ as it turned out – within the time frame of his composition of Gurrelieder, it is often forgotten just how magnificent a craftsman Schoenberg was. His analytical yet imaginative command of form, style, harmony and counterpoint, instrumentation, and text-setting are all on display within the dazzling texture of this complex work. In fact, Schoenberg totally seduced his Viennese audience, which had hitherto rather loved to hate him.

It is in the orchestral writing and the sinewy parts for Gurrelieder’s three male choirs that Schoenberg’s compositional expertise is most apparent. The orchestra’s constant presence, as in Wagner’s later operas, is like an unpunctuated psychodrama, reflecting in its mélange of disparate motives and themes the inner musical narrative, to the meaning of which the ‘libretto’ makes its occasional, and often simplistic, reference. Schoenberg’s music has the flow, the swing, the shock, and the subtlety that surpass anything that words alone can attempt, however sung or

Simone Young conducts Gurrelieder (Sydney Symphony Orchestra, photograph by Dan Boud)

chanted. Had Schoenberg continued in this vein he might have surpassed Wagner, or Mahler, in becoming the final exemplar of late-Romantic ultra-expressionism. But that would not be his direction: ‘I was not destined to continue in the manner of

Gurrelieder … The Supreme Commander had ordered me on a harder road.’ And so it was.

There were two heroes of this spectacular Sydney production of  Gurrelieder: Schoenberg, and Simone Young, who made it all possible. Throughout nearly two hours, she held her massed forces tightly. Her smooth, incisive, at times athletic direction paid particular attention to the work’s nuances, to the balance of voices with instruments, and to projecting the work’s larger-scale architecture. Like an organist, her footwork was as purposeful as her upper-body and hand directions. While I am sure many in the audience were gob-smacked by the sheer effrontery and overthe-top decibels of Schoenberg’s huge work, no one surely could be anything less than admiring of Young’s flawless musicianship, inspired interpretation, and sheer resilience.

As reported verbatim by Limelight (19 February 2024), Young envisioned three challenges in bringing her  Gurrelieder to pass: ‘to keep 10 percent of yourself outside this orgiastic orchestral sound’, to ensure a cool-headed steerage of the enterprise; ‘to create a transparency of sound’ that always leads ‘the listener’s ear’ from one vocal-instrumental soundscape to the next; and, first of all, to ‘conduct the work as an opera because architecturally it is an opera’.

Is Gurrelieder, then, best approached as an opera? Indeed, has it ever been produced as an opera? And, yes, it was Pierre Audi, the French-Lebanese director, and conductor Marc Albrecht, who first put  Gurrelieder on the stage, at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam on 16 September 2014, set amid a ‘poisonous’ industrial landscape, echoing the decadence of 1910s Vienna. It

Adrift

was a splendid achievement – I was honoured to be there – and revived in 2018. Given the ovations of this weekend’s bold Sydney

initiative, might we one day not invite Simone Young to the Joan Sutherland Theatre to demonstrate Gurrelieder, as the opera she believes it architecturally is? But first we might have to work out where to put the gargantuan orchestra, the four choirs, and, of course, the appreciative audience. g

Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist, and former music and opera critic of  The Australian. Since 1997 he has edited the Studies in Musical Genesis series of Oxford University Press (New York).

The dramatic energies of Uncle Vanya are basically centrifugal. As the play (first produced in 1899) rotates in its unwieldy way, the various characters – all of them dolorous creatures – are driven apart, pushed outward into the dreary wastes of private disappointment. Human relationships are of little consequence in this play; everyone is adrift in his or her own special incapacity. Maybe it is the increasing emotional and spiritual isolation of the characters, those lonely eccentrics gathered at the Serebriakov estate, that inspired director Sam Yates to create a one-man version of the show, concentrating the action, such as it is, on a single figure? In any case, this new adaptation of the play, with Andrew Scott playing all the parts, is one of the melancholier examples of Anton Chekhov you’re likely to experience – which is saying something.

This is an interesting but challenging production because Scott, who found fame as the attractive priest in the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, does not try to make us see a stage crowded with personalities. This is not a bravura display of character acting or quicksilver impressions. Instead, his performance of the eight different roles has a lethargic, almost careless quality. He modifies his voice a little, and gives each character a token object and an obvious mannerism by which they can be

Simone Young conducts Gurrelieder (Sydney Symphony Orchestra, photograph by Dan Boud)

A one-man version of Chekhov’s classic Andrew Fuhrmann

Andrew Scott in Vanya (photograph by Marc Brenner).

identified – Vanya wears sunglasses, the doctor bounces a tennis ball, the nurse smokes a cigarette, and so on – but the characterisations are flat and rather flimsy. Indeed, they are somehow deliberately transparent, as if we are meant to look beyond them.

It is almost as though Scott is playing the part of someone who is doing a one-man version of Uncle Vanya. And that person is tired and alone; he has, perhaps, been alone for a very long time. Just as he gives each character a significant gesture that distinguishes them, he also gives them all a unifying gesture that tends to erase the differences between them. Again and again, he rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms. All the main characters do this. It is as if they are all tired in the same way, as if they are all longing for that ultimate rest that Sonya speaks of in the play’s final lines. In the moment of that repeated gesture, it is as if the whole pretence of characterisation is dropped entirely. It is just too exhausting.

Scott, of course, is an amiable and accomplished actor, and carries this complicated multiplication of realities with apparent ease. He projects a sense of desolation, but the old charm is still there. And we already know that Scott can do this kind of loneliness. Think, for example, of the first scene in All of Us Strangers (2023), where he wanders about the apparently empty apartment building in a daze.

The atmosphere in this production is a lot like those opening scenes. One could imagine this strange production as a game played by the last person on Earth. What better way to while away the empty hours? What better way to confirm your utter isolation

It is an incongruous bit of costuming, but rather than give the play a holiday atmosphere, it suggests the lurid blue-green patina of weathered copper. It is an absurd symbol for the way Vanya’s life is tarnished and all his brightness worn off. In one corner of the set is a piano, which is a permanent memorial for Vanya’s dead sister, whose ghostly presence is emphasised in this production. Behind the piano is a curious sphere on a platform, which might have something to do with the Moon, but looks more like the mysterious sphere in Dürer’s Melancholy

Simon Stephens’s adaptation is compelling. He has changed little in the plot, although the retired professor is now an ageing screenwriter. The pervasive dour atmosphere is efficiently conveyed through a laconic, almost terse, rendering of Chekhov’s lines. Minor characters, notably Vanya’s mother and the family friend usually known as Waffles, are often forgotten and might just as easily have been cut completely; but the great monologues – of which there are many in this play – are attractively shaped and resonant with contemporary anxieties.

Scott wears an eye-catching bright-blue, short-sleeved shirt.

This is a quiet, nocturnal sort of production. The accents that Scott uses are mostly Irish, but Simon Stephens has given a surreal twist to many of the details in Chekhov’s play. The doctor, who is an amateur conservationist, now speaks of the disappearance of bluewinged warblers. And when the old screenwriter and his wife eventually decamp, they head for Lille in France. So where in the world are we? The set suggests the narrowness of life on the estate; Scott needs to move only a few steps from the door to the sink to the tables. And yet when the doctor shows off his maps of the region, the whole vast stage is illuminated with images of wildfires and blood-red skies. It all adds to the feeling that this is nothing but the dream of a damaged soul in a small room.

Scott’s layered performance is very fine, but I wonder if this production doesn’t revel too much in the play’s melancholy. Where is the struggle? Where is the encouragement to resist all that hopelessness? What is it all for – Scott’s world-weary grin and soulful brown eyes? Are we only to be seduced by this display of charming lassitude? Even the final scene, where Sonya declares that it is only through hard work that we can find any satisfaction in life, falls flat. In the enclosed world suggested by this production, it is impossible to believe that Sonya and Vanya really have any work. Or no work worth doing, in any case. It’s just more self-delusion. g

Andrew

Fuhrmann is a past ABR Fellow and the current dance critic for the Age newspaper.

Anton Chekhov, 1892 (Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy)

Acts of reinscription

Édouard Louis’s states of precarity

Patrick Flanery

For the past decade, French writer Édouard Louis has been excavating and recuperating a childhood spent in a state of acute precarity in the Hauts-de-France. He has written both critically and empathetically about the lives of his parents and siblings, while also casting a probing eye on himself. His first novel, the autofictional En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey, 2014), was published when he was only twenty-two and has enjoyed significant success in translation. Each of the subsequent books has offered a further investigation of these lives and experiences, with a pointed focus on the ways that poverty, at least in Louis’s experience, is intertwined with racism, homophobia, misogyny, and domestic violence.

Louis is undoubtedly and unabashedly a political writer, and his 2018 book, Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father, trans. Loren Stein), is no exception, even perhaps the most overtly political of his works to date (not including his most recent novel, Changer: Méthode, which appeared in English as Change, trans. John Lambert, very recently). A monologue-meditation, Qui a tué mon père is informed by Louis’s childhood in poverty, assailed by homophobic attitudes, and a life beyond that experience, which has seen him move to Paris and into a world of bourgeois intellectualism. There he has been mentored by the philosopher Didier Eribon, himself the author of a magnificent memoir, Retour à Reims (Returning to Reims, trans. Michael Lucey), about coming to terms with his own working-class background.

Four years ago, during the first months of the pandemic, German director Thomas Ostermeier premièred a one-man stage adaptation of Qui a tué mon père at the Théâtre des Abbesses in Paris. The production had its Australian première at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, to a warm reception and standing ovations. (Earlier, at Writers’ Week, Louis was in conversation with Ruth McKenzie, Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival.)

Performed by Louis in French with English surtitles (though these occasionally flatten the original language and leave some passages untranslated), the play begins even as the audience is

entering, with Louis already on stage and typing away at a laptop, making notes to one side, sipping from a canteen. One way of understanding the play’s form is to see it as an essay that we enter in medias res; in fact, all of Louis’s work is potentially understandable in this way. To enter his world on the page or in person is to find oneself in a flow of ongoing critical self-reflection.

Louis’s work has at times had an unjustly mixed critical reception. In France, centrist and right-wing publications have charged him with what they take to be whininess, narcissism, and repetition. Certain gatekeepers never want to admit people such as Louis, no matter how fine and arresting their work. There will always be a complaint, whether about the nature of the work itself, or about the man standing behind it. To come from a working-class background, to be homosexual, to insist that literature can and must be a space for left resistance seems to inflame the prejudices of those who have never had to question their place in the field of cultural or intellectual production.

Even in English, reviewers in leading global newspapers have taken Louis to task for daring to insert the political and theoretical into the literary, as if an art evacuated of politics were not itself deeply political (and most often reactionary). Such hostile reviews are nearly always judging the work by the wrong criteria, implicitly holding it up against a body of largely realist literature that is trying to achieve effects entirely different from those that compel Louis. We should rather look to his fellow French writer, Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux, or to any number of other European writers and artists, to understand the traditions in which his work is participating and making its own significant contribution.

All that said, I was expecting Louis to be something other than the person I witnessed on stage at Adelaide’s Dunstan Playhouse. I did not anticipate that Qui a tué mon père would offer such an intensely felt and nuanced performance, and one that refuses the tired trappings of theatrical realism in favour of a Brechtian-inflected direct address (to the absent father, to the audience). The work on stage seemed often to function as an exorcism of the ghosts with whom Louis continues to grapple, and in a way that was more emotionally urgent than the adapted book can sometimes seem.

When he begins speaking to his absent father, embodied by a leather armchair at the front of the stage and positioned in a diagonal line from the desk, it is difficult to imagine anyone not feeling moved. If one knows his work, it is impossible to forget that the charming and charismatic person standing before you on stage has also been raped by a one-night stand, an experience that gave rise to (in my view) his most important and formally inventive book, Histoire de la violence (History of Violence, trans. Lorin Stein, also directed by Ostermeier in a stage adaptation). To be conscious of this is to understand the high-wire act to which Louis has committed himself, one demanding a balance between commitment to formal innovation that often foregrounds the constructedness of a particular work, and the searing intimacy of the revelations he is prepared to offer.

A video projection at the back of the stage frames much of the play as a road movie traversing the unlovely motorways of France’s industrial north. This imagery recalls similar moments in Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), a documentary essay-film on

Édouard Louis in Qui a tué mon père (Roy Van Der Vegt)

precarity in France’s regions, and the comparison offers another way of understanding what Louis is doing: blending the personal and political to make an incisive argument that is also painfully self-revealing. The collision of these two impulses manages, when embodied by Louis on stage, to produce moments of unconventional, brutalist beauty.

If this all sounds so serious as to be exhausting, the staging of Qui a tué mon père is often surprisingly fun – funny and queer in a way that is not as evident on the page. References to Louis’s childhood acts of drag-adjacent performance become, on stage, opportunities to dance joyously, both in and out of drag, to Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’ and Britney Spears’ ‘…Baby One More Time’. A lip-sync to Whitney Houston’s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’, ‘sung’ to his absent father, is disarmingly tender.

It would be a mistake to search for anything like conventional dramatic coherence, let alone narrative unity, in this work: it is, rather, an essay in lyric fragments that left me convinced that Louis’s project (perhaps his entire oeuvre to date) is an act of multi-textual and multi-media becoming. When, in this production, he inhabits himself as a child in a Pokémon T-shirt (we see the reference photograph on the rear projection) and tells the audience, briefly switching to English, about a catastrophic family fight, the emotional temperature of the piece reaches its peak. Addressing

the audience rather than the absent father for the only time in the show, he recounts how his mother used a homophobic epithet against him as a young child, and describes the suicidal feelings he experienced as a result. The words feel almost unscripted, extemporised. One senses this is an artist trying to make himself whole through acts of reinscription and artful repetition.

Louis does, ultimately, answer the question about who he believes must answer for his father’s untimely ill health. In a tableau that unites elements of a child’s magic show with party games and street protest, he assails leaders from across the span of France’s political spectrum, holding them responsible for decisions that have routinely punished the poor and rewarded the rich. His father, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. This man who used to side with the racist right now tells his son, ‘What we need is a good old revolution.’

In a moment when fascism has made alarming inroads into the political mainstream across Western democracies, Édouard Louis offers us a compelling ode to the hope that anyone’s views may be changed for the better, if only we can find the right words to show them the way, and to hold the powerful accountable. g

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

Édouard Louis in Qui a tué mon père (Roy Van Der Vegt)

A spectacular tome

Vincent Namatjira’s humour and intense vision

Roger Benjamin

AVincent Namatjira

edited by Vincent Namatjira

Thames & Hudson

$90 hb, 256 pp

t last a spectacular tome for the many fans of Vincent Namatjira, one that will also win him new admirers.

Originating from an exhibition at the Tarnanthi Festival and the Art Gallery of South Australia, this beautifully laid-out book from Thames & Hudson Australia captures the humour and intense vision of Namatjira’s career to date.

The fascination with Vincent Namatjira – Indigenous painter of figures, portraits, and lately landscape – lies in the way he twists the human visage to tell stories. (He fittingly won the Archibald Prize in 2020, with a portrait of former AFL player Adam Goodes.) He is not a caricaturist in the usual sense of the word, although caricature is invoked in his wry use of political figures, from Paul Keating to Donald Trump, Elizabeth II to Vladimir Putin. But unlike newspaper caricatures of such figures, Namatjira’s message is ambiguous. This is because it’s hard to tell if his distortions are deliberate, or result from his being ‘untrained’, like a latter-day Douanier Rousseau or fellow Iwantja artist Kaylene Whiskey. For me, they are deliberate in the way that Francis Bacon’s figures were made with deliberation. Bacon drew on pre-existing images, such as Velázquez’s painting of the pope, for his often grotesque, distorting reinterpretations. Photographs, be they snapshots of boyfriends or Muybridge’s wrestling men, were another great inspiration.

Namatjira uses the mediated photographic image that brings the world into his home in Indulkana, South Australia. Unlike the images he creates from live sitters, photographs of celebrities are rendered into two dimensions – they are both processed and submissive images. His pantheon of politicians (Tony Abbott), country singers (Charlie Pride), and rock and rollers (AC/DC’s Angus Young) arise from press photographs, superseding them with a new entertainment value. No two portraits of Namatjira’s great-grandfather Albert Namatjira (the celebrated Aranda landscapist whose impact on Indigenous Australian art is incalculable) look the same. The features of Albert’s face twist this way and that; the shape of his head becomes unstable, as does the very idea of resemblance. The same is true of Namatjira’s many Queen Elizabeths, cast as a bejewelled dowager. Does her smiling maw

have a sinister edge, as in Destiny Deacon’s Whitey’s Watching? Or is there a residual fondness for the aged matriarch, despite Namatjira’s clear repudiation of neo-colonial Anglo-Australia?

The book’s earliest works date back to 2014, the early years of Namatjira’s arrival on the art scene. I first saw his work in 2016 at ‘Nganampa Kilipil – Our Stars. Art from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjarra Lands’ – a big Iwantja Art Centre exhibition at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. The little-known painter was making an ironic series of small pictures that documented events such as the landing of Captain Cook at Gamay, or visits of the Crown to Australia (including the occasion when Albert Namatjira was presented to the newly crowned queen). Namatjira’s humour was already undeniable, and he went on to posit the absurd incongruity of the cosseted monarch in the breathtaking Centralian scenery. As he writes in the book: ‘Cook and the Queen are both displaced and totally out of their comfort zone in my Central Australian landscape – they’re turning pink in the heat and their power and status doesn’t mean much here.’

Namatjira’s preference for thematic series is used to organise the book across eight chapters: Albert; Leaders; Footy; Music; Power; Royals; Cook; and Myself. Namatjira paints what he

loves (Albert, Footy, and Music) and what he ridicules (Leaders, Royals). The chapter ‘Leaders’ begins with a set of colour portraits of Australia’s eight richest people, starting with Gina Rinehart (Australia’s wealthiest person and landowner of vast tracts of unceded Country). The artist poses for a photo in front of his ‘Richest’ panels propped against a dusty tin shed in Indulkana. Symbolically speaking, the smiling, handsome Namatjira has ‘their peckers in his pocket’.

One has to laud the way the artist has determined the format of this book and guides the reader through its beautifully

Albert Namatjira meets Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Canberra, 1954 (2021) (image courtesy of Fort Gansevoort, New York, photograph by Tony Wang)

laid-out pages. I am reminded of the late Murri artist Gordon Bennett’s brilliant first monograph, its theorised autobiographical text coupled with art historian Ian McLean’s learned appraisal. In contrast to that intellectual heft, Vincent Namatjira is mostly the artist’s own informal but gutsy writing, the concession to art history and criticism represented in four brief essays. Two of the essays are by artist friends of Namatjira: Tony Albert, with whom he collaborated on a joint pop-up figure book, and, more surprisingly, Ben Quilty, who painted alongside Namatjira in 2022. Balancing these are two curators’ essays: a short piece by the NGA’s Bruce McLean, and AGSA’s Indigenous team of Nici Cumpston, Lisa Slade, and Gloria Strzelecki, covering Vincent’s recent mural-sized canvases, painted outdoors on Western Aranda country.

Unlike his great-grandfather, who was born and usually lived on tribal lands, Vincent Namatjira was raised at Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and Ntaria (Hermannsburg), but soon became exiled and displaced. After the tragic death of his mother, he was sent with his sister into Perth’s foster-care system. It wasn’t until his late teens that Namatjira returned to Western Aranda country, only then learning of the connection to his famous relative. The young man was reintroduced to Country and culture by Western Aranda elders like Jimmy Pompey, a Yankunytjatjarra lawman, musician, and painter who had worked for decades as a stockman.

From the new world

Musical activist and cultural agent

Malcolm Gillies

LPursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, publisher and collector

edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill Lyrebird Press

$55 pb, 283 pp

ouise Berta Mosson Dyer (née Smith; later Hanson-Dyer; hereafter, Louise) lived several lives. An eccentric Melbourne socialite, married into the money of Linoleum King, Jimmy Dyer, she moved on from the expectations of provincial charitable good works in her mid-forties to found a groundbreaking new publishing house in Paris. Les Éditions de l’OiseauLyre, or the Lyrebird Press, pioneered innovative, daring editions –of music, books, and later, recordings – sometimes at the cutting edge of technology.

More interested in effective spending, rather than earning, of money, she harboured an aim of always producing, beautiful deluxe publications, with novel bindings, covers or record sleeves, for which she won a Grand Prix des Beaux-Arts for quality design and printing at the 1937 Paris Exposition. Her managerial abilities in marshalling musicological and performing expertise behind

The theme of return to Country figures strongly in recent works, with Namatjira placing himself and, wittily, foreign notables in the bush. One of the best is Welcome to Indulkana (2018): the artist in his old green utility (based on Albert’s famous art truck) waving an Aboriginal flag to welcome a grotesque, orange-haired mannikin (Donald Trump) and a whimsical bare-chested horseman (Putin, from his famous promotional image). Another cracker is the three-metre canvas Vincent and Vincent (2022), of the iconic landform of Rutjipma (Mt Sonder, made famous by Albert’s watercolours). On this grand scale the painter achieves a muscular, open-brushed style in a palette based on the pink rocks and powdery white ghost-gums of the region. Standing alongside a black-hatted Namatjira is another avatar: Vincent van Gogh himself. The Dutch genius of the passionate brushstroke is there as a reflective, pipe-smoking witness. Imagine it! What would van Gogh, who sought Japan in the blazing light of Provence and turned the Alpilles ranges into semi-human forms, have made of the Aranda’s Tjoritja (Macdonald Ranges)? This book propels us all into the worlds of Vincent Namatjira, weaving ways of culture-making forward, backward, and in upon each other. g

Roger Benjamin is an art historian and curator who teaches at the University of Sydney.

her forays into early, baroque, and contemporary music were most astonishingly seen in the eighteen-month schedule she set herself for the production of a twelve-volume edition of François Couperin’s music. And she delivered that complete edition in time for the bicentennial commemoration of the composer’s death in 1933. The French president, Albert Lebrun, attended its launch in support of this unexpected ‘non-French, female, and from the new world’ champion of a French musical icon.

Despite her thirty-five years of European residence, Louise still called Australia home, with the University of Melbourne becoming a major beneficiary of her will. Even the eponymous lyrebird finally started its flight back home, after completing its last European sorties, some twenty years ago. Pursuit of the New is the seventeenth volume in Lyrebird Press’s Australian phase, all volumes of which are devoted to themes concerning Australasian music and musicians.

Somehow Australia, even its musicians, forgot about Louise, until Melbourne historian Jim Davidson produced his detailed yet delicious Lyrebird Rising in 1994 (reviewed by Thomas Shapcott in the May 1994 issue of ABR). Davidson presents her as a New World ‘cultural revenant’, with ‘a polymath’s thirst for knowledge combined with a dash of intellectual buccaneering’. Moreover, he looked upon Louise as having ‘a perfect formula for female independence’, through her two intergenerational marriages. For Jimmy Dyer, a musical enthusiast, was a quarter century her senior, while her second husband, the musician and linguist Jeff Hanson, was a quarter century her junior. Mind you, among musicians this is not so unusual. Perhaps the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály was the ne plus ultra, with a rich first wife old enough to be his mother, and a second wife young enough to be

his great-granddaughter. Louise, then, comes across in Davidson’s account as a self-confident patroness who refines her roles of cultural agent and musical activist through her mid-career translation to the larger canvas of France and then, after spending the war years in Oxford, soon deciding to base her enterprises in Monaco. The title of his biography’s third part, ‘Herself At Last’, devoted to her pre-war decade in Paris, perhaps says it all.

In editing Pursuit of the New, musicologist Kerry Murphy and rare-music curator Jennifer Hill, have wisely not sought to duplicate or update Davidson’s ‘lynchpin’ biography. They have concentrated upon Louise’s role as an innovative publisher of ‘monumental editions’ and a substantial collector, particularly of visual art works. Their book’s chapters evolved from a two-day symposium in 2018, in Melbourne, at which much new research about Louise’s Press was presented. This circumstance arose from the final consolidation of the Lyrebird archives at the University of Melbourne, affording access to information about its business operations, its correspondence files, and the brilliant designs of its many publications. Pursuit of the New is, however, also noteworthy because of its presentation of once-forgotten Louise as a model of ‘women’s work in music’ of its time. Indeed, she now has her own chapter, as a ‘Patroness of Music Publishing’, authored by Elina G. Hamilton, in The Routledge Handbook of Women’s Work in Music (2022). Louise stands tall among peers such as the founder of the Cleveland Orchestra, Adella Prentiss Hughes, or, perhaps more closely, Francophile founder of New York’s Society of the Friends of Music, Harriet Lanier.

Pursuit of the New’s dozen chapters were written by a network of mainly Australian, French, and British scholars, ‘united in their admiration of Louise Hanson-Dyer’. Occasionally, both in what is said, or what they avoid saying, there is a whiff of hagiography around the representation of this Melbourne PLC Old Girl turned international patroness-publisher, only strengthened by the fact that the book’s publisher is essentially the book’s subject. What is most impressive about this heavily footnoted volume, however, is the way in which these newly available documentary sources, as well as countless other now-published sources from Louise’s contemporaries, have been woven into major contributions to music and art histories, performance and recording practice, and the understanding of French artistic life during the Depression.

The most substantial infusion of new perspectives postDavidson comes in the volume’s three chapters written by Gerard Vaughan, former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria: about Louise’s early Melbourne connections with the visual arts; her work as an intensive collector of visual art works, mainly during her first half-dozen years in Paris; and her longer-term proselytising for French modernist art in general. Particularly illuminating are Vaughan’s detailed descriptions of the décor of her extensive Paris apartment at 17 rue Franklin, and its aesthetic aspirations. Coupled with a chapter by Thalia Laughlin and Carina Nandlal on the design of L’Oiseau-Lyre scores, in the hands of decorative artist Rose Adler, and a generous allocation of high-quality illustrations throughout the volume, you can only agree that Louise’s visual-arts collaborations are presented in the splendour that she so craved.

Other chapters detail her well-financed support of many

contemporary composers (Murphy and Madeline Roycroft), her energetic promotion of the British Music Society in 1920s Melbourne (Sarah Kirby), and the driving of new partnerships, especially with the academic Yvonne Rokseth, in support of the revival of medieval music (Isabelle Ragnard). As the volume’s extensive Appendix of medieval and renaissance music recordings shows, Louise’s desire to produce 78rpm recordings of works found in the Press’s own editions only reached fruition in the late 1930s, presaging a much bolder expansion into more mainstream LP recordings from the late 1940s, all under the L’Oiseau-Lyre label.

A series of case studies of the Couperin edition – its impetus (Murphy), volume editors (Catherine Massip), context and launch (Susan Daniels), and press reception (Rachel Orzech) –deservedly takes a central position in Pursuit of the New. This was,

Louise Hanson-Dyer c.1920 (Spencer Shier/Bibliothèque nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons)

undoubtedly, Louise’s finest hour, for which she was in 1934 appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. The War, with more restrained finances and dislocation, the postwar complexities of a rapidly internationalising business, the shelving of many pre-war enthusiasms before the heady lure of recordings, all conspired to deny her such focused recognition again, as publisher, collector, or cultural change-agent.

In an early review of Lyrebird Rising, ‘A Tornado from Toorak’, for Island magazine, Peter Stewart predicted that Davidson’s would be ‘probably the only biography she will ever have’. Given the fervour and quality of current scholarship, I cannot see our Louise settling for mere demi-god status. The definitive biography is yet to come. g

Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist, and former music and opera critic of The Australian.

LFrom the Archive

Tony Tuckson was a Sydney-based abstract expressionist who died in 1973, at the age of fifty-two, just as he was beginning to be recognised as one of Australia’s finest artists. Before then, Tuckson was known as a gallery director and curator. A major retrospective of his work recently took place at the Drill Hall in Canberra, reviewed in the June 2023 issue of ABR. In the November 2006 issue, Mary Eagle, art historian and former Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, reviewed Tony Tuckson, by Geoffrey Legge et al., describing it as ‘the authoritative book about one of Australia’s greatest painters’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

awrence Alloway observed that Abstract Expressionism was the creation of middle-aged artists and not an avant-garde. Jackson Pollock was in his mid-thirties and already a considerable painter when he laid a canvas on the floor and began to swing paint on a stick. Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman were in their forties before they found their signature styles. For twenty years, those painters explored a variety of styles and thoughtfully drifted towards individual expression; yet the change, when it came, seemed to pounce into their art rather than extend neatly from the preparation. The case was similar with Tony Tuckson.

Tuckson (1921–73) studied painting at art schools in England and Sydney, where the teachers who influenced him most were colour abstractionists of an older generation, Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson. After graduating, he worked at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, first as assistant to the director, subsequently as the expanding institution’s Assistant Director: he was also, by choice, the inaugural curator of Aboriginal and Melanesian art. For reasons of professional ethics, Tuckson decided not to exhibit his work. His friends saw the occasional painting, enough to know that he continued to paint in the studio attached to his home, but beyond his enthusiasms, and the occasional explosive comment about what constituted painting, he was silent about his own art.

In 1966, Daniel Thomas, junior curator, returned from a trip to the United States and told Tuckson that his paintings were equal to the best Abstract Expressionist and colour field art showing in the mainstream New York galleries. Tuckson was soon to see this for himself. Back in Sydney, he approached Frank Watters for a first exhibition in 1970. In a crowded display, the dominant works were red/black/white paintings reminiscent, perhaps, of Robert Motherwell’s striding paintings of the early 1950s, and certain boldly morphing patterns in Melville Island and Melanesian art. In 1973, Tuckson had a second, smaller exhibition – a revelation that he had found a transparent sensitivity and sureness of touch. Six months later, at the height of his powers, he died unexpectedly of cancer. He was aged fifty-two. His widow and executors found in his studio ten thousand undated paintings on paper, and hundreds of undated paintings on board.

This book is about living up to the legacy. Most of the material has been published in a previous edition (1989) or elsewhere, but everything is patiently overhauled, updated, and some works have been rephotographed. A judgement appropriate to the project is that

it is the authoritative book about one of Australia’s greatest painters.

Three years after Tuckson’s death, Daniel Thomas organised a retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I saw it on a visit to Sydney and was bowled over, especially by early 1970s paintings with trembling vertical lines and paper-thin transparent veils of paint, and by others painted in an agony of white slashes. Tuckson was a Barnett Newman, but he wasn’t; he was Oriental in sensibility, though clearly not in touch; he was Tuckson. While Thomas was at the research stage for the 1976 exhibition, Sandra McGrath broke the news that Tuckson was the best Action Painter in Australia. She quoted him saying, ‘All painting is – is up and down and back and across’, and making the body-stretching fast gestures of an Action Painter.

Thomas’s 1976 essay – enquiring, searching, patient, casting around for answers to questions about the sequence of the works, the painter’s inspirational triggers, and the core evolution of his style – has its third publication here. Thomas regretted not pushing his way into the studio, to see more of the paintings and to ask the curatorial questions that, in the absence of exhibitions and public and private commentary, proved difficult to answer. Perhaps only Daniel Thomas could conduct the careful detective work and come up with markers that stand firm and reliable. He pieced together the evolution of the artist’s style: his early choices of line before modelling, fewer colours, and ‘a personal language of form … in ladder-like clusters of horizontals held down by verticals’. He remembered Tuckson in the unpacking room in 1961 poring over the surfaces of J.M.W. Turner’s oils and watercolours. Tuckson’s Watery (National Gallery of Australia) corroborates Thomas’s suggestion that Turner’s vaporous watercolours of Venice inspired the fragile dry washes of thin oil and fine scribble of bobbing ferry boats, crane and high approach to the bridge. Thanks to Thomas’s empirical research, the record of Tuckson’s influences is not simply the conventional match with contemporary art.

Geoffrey Legge has written about the working legacy, Renée Free about Tuckson’s career at the Art Gallery, and the final chapter by Terence Maloon (first version, 1989) is complementary to Thomas’s. Asking what large heritage is suggested by Tuckson’s art, Maloon found qualities of investigativeness (Cézanne), touch (Matisse), linear conceptualism (Aboriginal painting) and ‘spirit resonance’ (Chinese painting) – Tuckson’s ‘art became, in effect, an arena of Australian multiculturalism’. g

Jane Austen’s Music

Saturday

4 May 3pm & 7pm

Calling all Jane Austen a cionados and classical music lovers!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that this is the concert you’ve been waiting for. Immerse yourself in Jane Austen’s world, with gorgeous music from Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, plus works by Mozart, Beethoven and Purcell at Melbourne Recital Centre next month.

Visit melbournerecital.com.au

or call 03 9699 3333