Australian Book Review, April 2021 issue, no. 430

Changes at ABR

Advances

different from other issues, with more commentary, longer review essays, and more creative writing. The focus will be on At our recent Annual General Meeting, we farewelled three younger writers and essayists, several of whom will be new to long-serving members of the Board and introduced two young the magazine. writers/journalists whose contributions have enriched the magWe’ve long wanted to add an eleventh issue. Now it is azine in the past couple of years. possible because of a generous donation from Matthew SandColin Golvan AM QC joined the Board in 2005 and blom’s and Wendy Beckett’s Blake Beckett Fund. Here, once served as Chair from 2015–20. Colin’s contributions to the again, support from philanthropists enables us to expand and magazine have been many and invaluable. He has been the innovate. Readers, authors, and their publishers will benefit principal supporter of the Calibre Essay Prize since 2013, from this added content – not to mention ABR contributors. when Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund’s seeding funding of Calibre came to an end.

The national interest Ian Dickson, who joined the Board in 2012, is our single Monash University Publishing has launched a new publication most generous donor and the sole sponsor of the ABR Elizseries called In the National Interest. Covering the major issues abeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Sarah Holland-Batt, Chair of of our time, it offers accessible and ambitious thinking on subABR, commented at the AGM: ‘It is inspirational to consider jects such as governhow many Australian ment, policy, and govwriters have benefited ernance. Interviewed from Ian’s generosity, and in The Age, Margaret the many ways in which Gardner – President he has transformed the and Vice-Chancellor magazine’s potential.’ of Monash University Professor Rae Frances – spoke of the need to AM – Dean of the Colallow academic staff lege of Arts and Social and public intellectuSciences at the ANU – als to ‘reflect in what I joined the Board in 2016 call the extended essay when ABR and Monash about matters that are University (of which she important to the nawas then Dean of Arts) tional interest, where became partners, an onyou bring evidence going creative association to bear and you have that has introduced dozquestions about what ens of Monash academic would be the programs staff and students to our New ABR Board members Johanna Leggatt and Declan Fry or policies that we readers. should think about’.

Our two new Board There are seven volumes in the first tranche. They include members, both well known to ABR readers, bring distinctive Simone Wilkie on the technological age in The Digital Revoexpertise and experience. Johanna Leggatt is an accomplished lution: A survival guide ; Martin Parkinson on climate change senior journalist with broad expertise in communications, policy in A Decade Adrift; and Don Russell on the disconnect public relations, and media management. between politics and policy in Leadership.

We also warmly welcome Declan Fry, an essayist, critic, Visit the Monash University Publishing website for more and poet of Yorta Yorta descent who is a current Rising Star at details.

ABR, a role in which he has contributed a number of incisive pieces of criticism and commentary. Declan has a background Three trail-blazing women in law as well as literature.

Mandy Sayer – the tenth recipient to date – has been awarded the $15,000 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Sayer will write An extra ABR a biography of sisters Paulette, Isabelle, and Phyllis McDonagh, This year, in June, we will add an eleventh issue to your print three Australian silent filmmakers who wrote, produced, disubscription – at no extra cost. Henceforth there will only be rected, and even acted in a series of films in the early twentieth one double issue per annum ( January–February). century.

To celebrate this milestone, the June issue will be slightly AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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Australian Book Review April 2021, no. 430

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital Editor Jack Callil digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020) Monash University Interns Clarissa Cornelius, Elizabeth Streeter

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Page 29: Fishing boat, cray pots and harbour, Hobart ,Tasmania, 2006 (Bruce Miller/Alamy) Page 57: Tjamalampuwa, Tiwi c.1895– c.1956, Footmarks of the Ninaui at Ilalanu, 1954, earth pigments on Stringybark (Eucalyptus sp.), South Australian Museum, Adelaide, collected by Charles P. Mountford, 10 July 1954 © The artist / courtesy of Jilamara Arts & Crafts Association, Milikapiti 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

ABR April 2021 LETTERS

6

Tricia Dearborn, Trevor Shearston, Andrew McLeod, Andy Morton

HISTORY

7 9 18 53

Barry Hill Kim Mahood Meredith Lake Rémy Davison

Return to Uluru by Mark McKenna Into the Loneliness by Eleanor Hogan A Bridge Between by Katharine Massam War by Margaret MacMillan

MEDIA

10

Johanna Leggatt

News and How to Use It by Alan Rusbridger

POLITICS

12 13 51

Frank Bongiorno Kieran Pender Tom Bamforth

A Liberal State by David Kemp Open Minds by Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone Where the Water Ends by Zoe Holman

FEMINISM

15 16

Zora Simic Megan Clement

Feminisms by Lucy Delap White Feminism by Koa Beck

NON-FICTION

17

Francesca Sasnaitis

No Document by Anwen Crawford

21 23 26 38 55

Jane Sullivan Sarah Walker Andrea Goldsmith Alex Cothren Aidan Coleman

With My Little Eye by Sandra Hogan Monsters by Alison Croggon The Shape of Sound by Fiona Murphy Grimmish by Michael Winkler Walk Like a Cow by Brendan Ryan

POEMS

25 39 54

Anders Villani Jennifer Maiden Stephen Edgar

‘Marlin’ ‘Clare and Kiribati’ ‘Second Circle’

COMMENTARY

26 45

Tim Byrne Claudio Bozzi

How theatre companies are coping after lockdown Restoring a sense of the primacy of science

FICTION

30 31 32 33 34

Thuy On Shannon Burns Anthony Lynch Elizabeth Bryer Anna MacDonald

Pushing Back by John Kinsella O by Steven Carroll Born Into This by Adam Thompson Smokehouse by Melissa Manning Four new novels

LITERARY STUDIES

35 36

Robert Dessaix Susan Sheridan

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders Literary Lion Tamers by Craig Munro

SOCIETY

40

Naama Grey-Smith

The Believer by Sarah Krasnostein

INTERVIEW

41 56

Kent MacCarter Mark McKenna

Publisher of the Month Open Page

POETRY

42 43

Gig Ryan Rose Lucas

Three new poetry collections New collections from three assured poets

SCIENCE

47 48

Diane Stubbings Robyn Arianrhod

A Trip to the Dominions edited by Lynette Russell The Knowledge Machine by Michael Strevens

NEW GUINEA

49

Peter Menkhorst

New Guinea by Bruce M. Beehler, photography by Tim Laman

ANTHOLOGY

52

Merav Fima

The Penguin Book of Migration Literature edited by Dohra Ahmad

ARTS

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 66 67

Valerie Ng Malcolm Gillies Kelly Gellatly Keren Rosa Hammerschlag Christopher Allen David Pear Patrick McCaughey Polly Simons Tim Byrne

Nomadland Bluebeard’s Castle TIWI Botticelli to Van Gogh A History of Art History by Christopher S. Wood Distant Dreams edited by Teresa Balough and Kay Dreyfus Cy Twombly edited by Christine Kondoleon Playing Beatie Bow RUNT

FROM THE ARCHIVE

68

Don Watson

The Blainey View by Geoffrey Blainey

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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

Arts South Australia

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Letters

Sharp, dark, humorous

Dear Editor, I am not here to defend Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of poetry, Dearly, since I have not read it, but I think that David Mason’s review of it (ABR, March 2021) does her poetry a disservice in dismissing it with such statements as ‘across more than sixty years her verse has hardly evolved beyond the serviceable technique we could see at the start’.

There is great variation in Atwood’s collections. For my money, her best are Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974), but there are notable poems in her other books. At its best, her poetry can be sharp, dark, humorous, surprising, mesmerising – even moving. There is vivid imagery, apt rhythm. Here’s a bit I like from ‘The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart’ (Two-Headed Poems [1978]): ‘All hearts float in their own / deep oceans of no light, / wetblack and glimmering, / their fourth mouths gulping like fish.’ Maybe this new collection isn’t one of Atwood’s best – maybe it’s no good at all – and I can appreciate that it may be annoying that her poetry (whether good or not) attracts so much attention because of the success of her prose. Sure, her poetry won’t be to everyone’s taste. But I believe that writing off all the poetry she’s published for any one of these reasons is unnecessary and unwarranted. For the good stuff, I recommend Atwood’s Eating Fire: Selected poetry 1965–1995.

Tricia Dearborn (online comment)

The Proper Beach Caves

Dear Editor, My sincere thanks for giving serious space to The Beach Caves (ABR, March 2021). It’s not an honour I take lightly. To the review itself. The pedantry is impressive, but you could perhaps mention to Andrew McLeod that the first rule of reviewing is to review the book on the page, in the time and place in which it is set, not the book he believes the author should have written. Alternatively, perhaps I should send him all my notes and waive my copyright so that he can rewrite the novel to his specs and give it a better title, something snappy like The Proper Beach Caves.

Trevor Shearston, Katoomba, NSW

Andrew McLeod replies:

I stand fully behind my review of Trevor Shearston’s The Beach Caves. I respectfully disagree with his understanding of the role of the literary critic. For mine, the task of the critic is to engage with a work, consider whether it achieves what it sets out to achieve, and to offer their own thoughts on it. This includes consideration of the work’s place in the cultural discourse in which it is published.

Malcolm Gillies on Bluebeard’s Castle

Thank you for this thoughtful and nuanced commentary, (ABR, April 2021). I’m so glad that you enjoyed it, your knowledgeable misgivings aside, and that the production seems to have hit home with its aims while remaining mostly true to the music. It’s all we have to go on after all.

Andy Morton (online comment) 6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

History

The adventures of ‘Hanging Bill’ An elegant book about the pull of Uluru Barry Hill

Return to Uluru: A killing, a hidden history, a story that goes to the heart of the nation

by Mark McKenna

T

Black Inc. $34.99 hb, 256 pp

The Centre – the spirit of Uluru, if you like – is sooner or later bound to reveal our errors of understanding and self-presentation, the vanities and nightmares. One error happens as soon we blur notions of heart and centre and sacred, as if each of those terms belongs to an exotic marriage of Western and Indigenous thinking and feeling. McKenna seems to fall for this kind of syncretism when he writes: ‘What had long been the Anangu’s “holy place” and “most sacred spot” had gradually become the entire nation’s centre, at once geographical and spiritual.’ McKenna’s quest – his hunger – is for something he refers to as the ‘interior’ Australia; this as distinct from history as it has been written from the ‘edge’, the crucial term in the title of his last book, which hugged the coast.

I don’t wish to disparage yearnings to go ‘inwards’, except to say that the conceptual challenge is not to quest too much at once. At the very least, the narrative of the Australian interior needs to be cognisant of the complicated Aboriginal grounds of meaning. For instance, Uluru before the present period was no more ‘central’ than many other places. It was one of many nodes

he distinguished historian Mark McKenna has written an elegant and hungry book about the pull of Uluru, that place of mysterious significance to Australians, black and white. Of course, in recent times, the Uluru Statement from the Heart – the heart that had a stake driven through it the moment it was entrusted to the most powerful whites in Canberra – is a complicated domain of passion and polemic. McKenna’s work, pro-Aboriginal and postcolonial in spirit, is itself an addition to the long history of romancing Uluru, albeit with a focus on a hero who seems like an anti-hero by the time this book is done.

Bill McKinnon was, once upon a time on the frontier, the chief policeman, a man much fêted in his day, even though the authorities knew him to be a murderer and a liar with regard to the ‘fearful blacks’ he had in his charge – men often chained together by the neck and tied to trees when they were not on the run from him on his camels, along with his tracker, whose nickname, Carbine, said everything. McKinnon was a cock-strutting hero of the ‘Killing Times’, an epoch by then in full swing with the Coniston massacre of 1928, a slaughter he chose to underestimate.

Ever the colonial master (as well as an amateur photographer), he fancied himself in uniform, along with pith helmet, the get-up he sported in Rabaul, where he first dealt with ‘ill-disciplined natives’ who could be Inspector Bill McKinnon, Northern Territory police, Jubilee Day Parade, Alice Springs hanged in full view of their community. In this beauti(C. Stuart Tompkins, 1951) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne fully structured and illustrated narrative, there’s a shot of (Accessioned, 1984, This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Professor AGL Shaw AO Bequest) McKinnon dressed in his whites, standing at the cairn at the top of Uluru, holding onto it like a ship’s captain.

I snorted when I saw it, and then again when I came to the of important ceremonial meanings on a polycentric map. Indeed, priceless image of him still at the top, but immersed in a muddy Uluru was less significant, in terms of songlines, ceremony, and rock hole, as grotesque a figure as something in a Francis Bacon totemic creatures than its near neighbour, Kata Tjuta. Couching painting. this truth tactfully (within the limits of what the land claims call How a man can fall, I thought, suppressing embarrassment at ‘restricted material’) might temper a nation’s childish need for once having climbed the rock myself. Soon after the Handback, ‘a centre’, when what is really being sought is a less emblazoned and before my own book on Uluru, I had panted my way to the realm of the ‘sacred’ – more in keeping with what McKenna top, where a book for travellers lay open to sign. I could not himself describes as ‘the country’s supple, interconnected Inbear to put my own name down. Instead, I signed in as William digenous heart’.

Buckley, the escaped convict who lived for thirty-two years with Leaving aside the rhetorical uses and abuses of anthropology the Wothaurung people in the Port Phillip District, whose life on both sides, McKenna’s narrative is in tune with the faith in I was immersed in for the purposes of writing a long poem. truth-telling and tenderness that drives the Uluru Statement AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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from the Heart. His revelatory narrative can be baldly stated: that he would have been ‘much happier in the pub instead’. Each the true nature of McKinnon’s shooting of an Aboriginal man, day his mother in law, who was also in hospital, used to tell him Yokununna, in a cave at the rock in 1934, was covered up by an how she might not ‘see the night out, but unfortunately’, the official inquiry in 1935. Two other cruel bushman added, ‘she is not a men McKinnon went after, Paddy woman of her word’. McKinnon’s Uluru (Yokununna’s brother) and next wife was twelve years younger Joseph Donald, kept running and than him. This ‘matrimonial knot’, laid low for half a century, the teased Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, was sound of gunfire ringing in their another adventure for ‘Hanging ears. And not only in the ears: Bill’. in the hearts of kin all that time.

Return to Uluru has redolent ‘Death is still in people’s minds,’ as photographs of McKinnon with Justice Toohey wrote in the 1979 his bush mates, among them Bob Uluru land claim.

Buck, the man who had famously After the celebrations of recovered the lost prospector Harthe Handback, the two escapees old Lasseter. Buck, a laconic man emerged with what they had witwith an armoury of guns on his nessed: namely, the fact that McKdining room wall, was renowned innon had recovered a wounded for his bevvy of young Aboriginal Yokununna from the cave, only to women who gave birth to his shoot him point-blank in the head. offspring, and whose condition ‘So they shot him. They shot him for sexual congress was improved in front of me,’ Joseph Donald told when he used his bush knife. the filmmaker David Batty out In my book, The Rock: Travat Docker River, west of Uluru, elling to Uluru, I called Buck the whence he had fled. The video ‘Bastard from the Bush’, which North east side of Ayers Rock, 1935 (Charles Mountford, is now available on YouTube. By prompted Max Cartwright (who State Library of South Australia, PRG 1218/34/55) pointing readers to it, McKenna made the road to the rock) and powerfully closes the gap between the print record and the Peter Severin (who owned Curtin Springs station and opposed spoken, lived experience. the land rights movement) to pay me a visit as I was conducting There is all manner of atrocious detail on the way to this nar- a writer’s class in Alice Springs. They turned up out of the blue, rative climax. Often we are reminded that a policeman of the day formal and tense. I served them tea and introduced them to the had to bring the head of a deceased person back to Alice Springs. class, and eventually they explained they were there because of How else was a man to be identified? McKinnon severed heads what they called my hostility to white settlers and because of with a shovel. His tool of choice when it came to pesky dogs what I had written about Bob Buck. ‘He was a mate of ours,’ they was a tyre lever, which flattened skulls. It was when he found a cried, to which I replied, ‘Well, he would not have been a mate bullet rattling around in a human skull at Mt Connor that his of mine.’ They demanded to know why, so I mentioned the knife. ‘epic manhunt’ began. The man supposed to have died at the They stared at me, apparently unmoved. The conversation we had hands of tribal relatives had been killed by someone with a white to have was joined by Alexis Wright, the sole member of the man’s gun. Taboo on the frontier! The chase began, and McKenna class who seemed to know what to say in the face of barbarism. embraces it with the gusto of an adventure story that includes McKenna admirably cites Conradian horrors. He writes praise for the hardy policeman’s stamina, as well as native guile. decorously, with painstaking accuracy. But he delves insufficiently McKinnon’s vanity shows through everywhere, not least in into the psyche of the ‘lonely white males’ whose company the memoir that McKenna uncovered at McKinnon’s daughter’s McKinnon so loved over the billy tea. Nor does he unpack the house in Brisbane a few years ago – a scoop if ever there was one, frequently mentioned ‘humanitarian’ lobby down south, or the so much so that McKenna abandoned his planned general essay compassionate ethos of the best missions stations at the time. on the centre in order to write this biographical sketch as a kind As a result, the shameful heart of the Centre is left intact, gothic of primal foundation myth that taints Uluru. and remote. I think I wanted an Australian book that could be More prosaically, McKinnon was a tight-arsed stickler for read in the company of Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss keeping a log of daily events, on and off the job. His archive was and recovery of self under colonialism (1983), the famous dissecreplete with historical documents and memorabilia, including tion of colonial consciousness, its ambivalence and unconscious, the complete films of Marilyn Monroe. I wish McKenna had in India. To live well with the project of the Uluru Statement, cited passages rather than snippets from the memoir. Who knows everyone needs to be in touch with the most complex truths what is really there? McKenna hints at the savage paternalism about themselves. g that coexisted with the policeman’s love of his wife. When his first wife was still in the labour ward, McKinnon wrote to his Barry Hill’s most recent prose work is Peacemongers (2014) and brother saying that his visits were ‘a real morbid experience’ and his new poetry collection is Kind Fire (2020).

8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

History

A different kind of loneliness

set about reinventing herself. There was something impervious about her, an inability to submit to restraints or social rules.

Hill was a restless spirit, but her occupation allowed her to The story of two complex Australian women turn her wandering into stories for which she was paid the going Kim Mahood rate, journalism being one of the few professions that did not pay women less than men for the same work. For the women who managed to extricate themselves from writing the social pages, journalism offered independence, travel, adventure, and a public Into the Loneliness: The unholy voice. Hill turned her gender to advantage, travelling to the realliance of Ernestine Hill and motest parts of the country, an exotic and welcome visitor to the Daisy Bates mining camps, homesteads, and pearling and fishing towns whose

by Eleanor Hogan denizens she romanticised and wrote about to feed the urban hunger for news from the wild interior. The archetypal trouser-clad, NewSouth cigarette-smoking, intrepid female reporter, she journeyed with $34.99 pb, 432 pp her swag and typewriter to the furthest outposts of the nation, nto the Loneliness is the story of two Australian women, a model for the rising generation of aspiring women journalists.

A woman travelling alone in remote places is an enduring opposites in temperament, who eschewed the conventional roles expected of women of their eras, lived unconventional trope of risk and danger, yet none of these women – Daisy Bates, lives, and produced books that influenced the culture and imagi- Ernestine Hill, or the author herself – encountered threats. nation of twentieth-century Australia. The book focuses on their Instead they were offered the hospitality and kindness of complicated friendship, and on Ernestine Hill’s role in assisting strangers. As Hogan observes of her solo travels, ‘If anything, I Daisy Bates to produce the manuscript that was published in was more at risk from my own practical ineptitude than a ma1938 as The Passing of the Aborigines, which became a bestseller levolent white male battler.’

The loneliness in the title of The Great Australian Loneliness in Australia and Britain. Hill, a successful and popular journalist, organised the anthropological material and ghost-wrote much describes a state of physical rather than existential isolation. Hoof the book, for which Bates privately expressed her gratitude, gan is exploring a different kind of loneliness, as pertinent today as it was for Hill and Bates, inhabited by a while not acknowledging it publicly. semi-itinerant cohort of wandering womBates emerges as a wilful, self-mytholen writers eking out an existence along ogising, and charismatic personality, while the seams of cultural overlap – members Hill is a self-effacing romantic, a poet– of what Hogan calls the precariat: people, journalist already embarked on a literary especially single women, whose lives are career reporting and idealising the lives and contingent on unpredictable and meagre characters of remote Australia. Hill’s own resources. book The Great Australian Loneliness, based Both Bates and Hill produced beston five years of wandering in the outback selling books that influenced the ideas and published in 1937, became an instant and attitudes of the day. Both lived in popular success. As the subtitle of Eleanor increasingly straitened circumstances, Hogan’s book suggests, Bates and Hill were surviving on tiny stipends, shrinking made for each other. royalties, and the charity of friends. Both Bates railed against the male-domidied broke, an object lesson for aspiring nated institutions that refused to recognise writers today. her ethnographic research or her potential Into the Loneliness is a remarkable to play a formal role in the welfare of the piece of research and writing, and a labour Aboriginal people among whom she lived. of passion and perseverance, given the A self-appointed dispenser of mercy and vast, disorderly archives Hill and Bates largesse, Bates was a law unto herself, marleft behind. From these archives, Hogan rying twice, possibly three times, without Ernestine Hill, Daisy Bates, and the Mathews family at Sunny Brae farm, Westall, 1947 (Robert has created an immensely readable narbothering with divorce, abandoning her Hill/National Library of Australia. MS 8392 III) rative, structured as segues between the son, and embarking on her ethnographic individual stories of each woman and the study of Aboriginal people without trainepisodes in which their lives intersect. The author is intermittently ing or experience.

While Hogan’s forensic research details the when, where, and present, seeking insight into contemporary Indigenous attitudes how of Bates’s activities, the why of a lively Irish girl transforming to Bates, and reflecting on her own experiences as she travels in herself into Kabbarli (the name given her by Indigenous people), her campervan to the locations frequented by her subjects.

The women who emerge from the personas created by the the Daisy Bates of legend, remains an enigma. Bates seems to have thrived on her otherness. Arriving as a young woman in the pro- books they wrote and the lives they led are more interesting tean society of late nineteenth-century Australia, she immediately and less admirable than the legends. Bates was a genuine re-

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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Media bel – mercenary, missionary, misfit and probably mad to boot.

Her increasing eccentricity may have been due to the onset of dementia caused by malnutrition. There is a stomach-turning description of Bates consuming her daily protein intake of a raw egg congealing in a cup of hot tea. Whether she was lonely is hard to say. She made a place for herself among people who did not contradict her sense of superiority and who provided her with companionship and ethnographic fodder. She enjoyed the company of birds, animals, and children. Bigamist, fabulist, narcissist, half-mad, half-blind, tough as old leather: Daisy Bates lived to the age of ninety-two and remained opinionated and indomitable to the end.

A woman travelling alone in remote places is an enduring trope of risk and danger, yet none of these women encountered threats Ernestine Hill (née Hemmings) was an inadvertent rule-breaker. At the age of twenty, she met Robert Clyde (R.C.) Packer, forty, married, progenitor of the Packer media empire.

Although his paternity was never acknowledged, Hill’s son Robert was born in 1924, when she was twenty-five. The birth of an illegitimate child freed her by default from a conventional career. Assisted by her mother and aunt in caring for her son, she called herself Mrs Hill and embarked on the restless wandering that would fuel her journalism, support her family, and render her homeless.

Both women w rote about Indigenous Australians through the lens of their times. Bates shared a codependent relationship Ernestine Hill with swag, leaning against large ant hill, Kimberley, Western Australia, c 1931. with the Indigenous people (University of Queensland. UQ:734073) she studied. Her claims of cannibalism were debunked and her abhorrence of half-castes deemed racist and obsessive, but her ethnographic observations and recording of language contained much of value. Hill’s notes describe sites where massacres took place, and her writing is inclusive and insightful about the Indigenous people she encountered.

In their flawed and idiosyncratic ways, Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill attempted to absorb the loneliness and embrace the uniqueness of the continent and its inhabitants. In paying homage to their lives, Eleanor Hogan has given us a rich and thought-provoking insight into two of the most interesting women Australia has produced. g Kim Mahood is the author of two non-fiction books: Position Doubtful (Scribe, 2016) and the award-winning Craft for a Dry Lake (Random House/Transworld, 2000).

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Breaking the covenant

An editor tries to demythologise journalism Johanna Leggatt

News and How to Use It: What to believe in a fake news world

by Alan Rusbridger

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Canongate $32 hb, 319 pp

s there a profession on Earth more mythologised than journalism? It’s hard to think of one. All that talk about the principles of the Fourth Estate, of keeping the powerful in check and guarding the public interest. In the days of well-funded journalism, university graduates were ushered into weekly shorthand training and could not advance further until their hand flew across the page at an unlikely 140 words per minute. Distinct from other forms of employment, the newspaper ‘profession’ (or is it a trade?) developed a weird and delightful lexicon around its daily production: page layouts were ‘furniture’, sub-editors were taught to avoid ungainly paragraph breaks known as ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’, while copy that was spaced out too sparsely was deemed to be ‘windy’. Meanwhile, many journalists, myself included, were seduced by the clubbish and contrarian quality of the profession, with offices resembling pool halls after 10 pm, rather than formal workspaces. There were certainly no key performance indicators to abide by, let alone an annual performance review.

Of course, this was before people accessed news on social media, before Rupert Murdoch’s virulent campaigns, before phone-hacking scandals, and before so many people concluded that the mainstream press was not necessarily the best arbiter of truth. It was also before thousands of locked-down Victorians tuned in to watch the daily press conferences of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and were shocked at the way some journalists peppered him with questions. Press conferences have long been bullish affairs: you ask an elected representative a question, often multiple times, then you find an angle and write the story. Yet, for some, the indecorous quality of the press conferences broke that covenant between reader and reporter, and highlighted not only the banality of news gathering but the grey areas in which it operates.

The curtain had been drawn back. People didn’t trust some of the journalists to ask questions on their behalf.

Which makes News and How to Use It – by Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian – a timely work. Adopting an A–Z glossary of news-related terms, journalism biographies, and scandals, Rusbridger attempts to index the many-faceted issues of the Western, English-speaking media – not least of which is the loss of faith among those whom journalists seek to serve.

Indeed, the problem of accuracy is at the core of many readers’ concerns, and Rusbridger captures how hard it is, even for the most well-intentioned reporters, to be accurate: ‘When do you

use the word assassination (rather than “killing”)? Is it a wall, to avoid attributing every bushfire to the warming of the planet, or a barrier, or a fence or a separation barrier? Is it a border, or a as ‘it breeds the same confusion that allows climate deniers to boundary, or a green line, or the 1949 Armistice Line? Is there use cold weather events as proof that global warming is a hoax’. such a thing as a “cycle of violence”? If so, who started it – or is Rusbridger is similarly illuminating on the ‘numbers’ entry, ofit better not to go there?’ fering advice to reporters about how to assess the relevance of Rusbridger is rightly concerned about some media organisa- statistics and to sort the genuinely helpful data from the incontions’ blasé approach to truth and accuracy. As advertising dollars sequential. Reporters should ask how the data was collected, by have moved to the far less lucrative online realm, it takes a brave whom, the sample size, what quality-assurance processes took editor to demote an incendiary columnist who clearly does not place, and whether a poll used non-probability or quasi-probaknow what they are talking about but who brings much-need- bility sampling. In medicine, he notes, the ‘gold standard’ is the ed attention and readership. Yet he also argues that subjective double-blind, randomised controlled trial. ‘campaigning’ journalism has its place. The Guardian’s exposés of bribery allegations against arms company BAE Systems are Rusbridger captures how hard it is, one example; The Sunday Times’s relentless pursuit of truth in even for the most well-intentioned the Thalidomide scandal is another. Campaigns work best when reporters, to be accurate there is ‘not much argument about the justness of the cause they articulate’, and indeed sometimes campaigns fail because there was no one there to claim them. As Rusbridger points out, some Rusbridger is a stylish writer – his prose is taut, concise, commentators argue that the Grenfell Tower fire would not have punchy – but the book fails in its remit, largely because one is happened had local journalists been available to listen to residents’ never sure what the remit is. In some entries, Rusbridger is incomplaints about the quality of the external cladding. It also structing readers on how to evaluate the trustworthiness of their makes it easier for despots, such as Vladimir Putin and Donald news; other times he is addressing journalists directly. Sometimes Trump, to cry ‘fake news’ when there are fewer local journalists he is impugning appalling behaviour or skewering the profeson the ground, covering events in sion’s penchant for inflammareal time and filing daily record tory puns – worth a book in journalism. its own right – while at other The missteps and abuses of times he is merely defining a media proprietors play a large journalism term without much role in the public’s waning trust, accompanying comment. The and the entry on Rupert Murproblems of journalism are, doch does not disappoint. In the likewise, far too complicated manner of an assiduous journalto be shoehorned into an ist, Rusbridger tries to provide A–Z format, and Rusbridger’s a complete picture of Murdoch approach comes across as a rather than a one-dimensional clumsy attempt at avoiding the study – ‘he loves newspapers and constraints of a hypothesis and respects journalists’, he manages the rigid dichotomy of good – before outlining many flaws, versus bad journalism. including the culture of phone The result is a book that hacking at the now-defunct lacks a hierarchical arrangeAlan Rusbridger at the International Journalism Festival, 2014 News of the World, his boundless ment of information, with (Alessio Jacona/Wikimedia Commons) influence over politicians, and the terms such as ‘bias’ and ‘boremedia monopoly he enjoys in Australia. dom’ gifted almost equal weight, though they impact on jourThankfully, Rusbridger does not advance the rather ludicrous nalism in different ways. On the rare occasion that Rusbridger notion that Murdoch’s editorial agenda extends to every journal- approaches synthesis or attempts a conclusion, it is usually a ist, in every paper, so that all of his news pages are essentially a rather uninspiring sentiment to the effect that the journalist’s ‘through edit’ for the mogul’s ideological line. (The Murdoch-con- job is harder these days yet ‘more important than ever’. He is trolled Fox News, which Rusbridger only briefly touches on, may more sophisticated at the end of his entry on ‘Experts’, in which be a different story.) However, he is right to propose that, despite he outlines the growing public weariness with expertise and adthe many talented reporters at Murdoch-owned publications, vances an idea that could form the basis of an exploration into a worrying level of groupthink exists at News Corp, especially a renewed pact between journalist and reader: ‘Perhaps for the among senior management and editors. One has to only witness, public, the real definition of an expert is someone who has dived as I have, the fear in editors’ eyes when Murdoch pays one of his so deep into a topic they know how much they don’t know and papers a visit to get a sense of the sway he holds. are prepared to take that ignorance seriously.’ It would have been Rusbridger devotes a considerable amount of time to parsing a better place for him to start. g the climate crisis, and the way it breeds misinformation among right-wing pundits. He is instructive when he calls on journalists Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist and writer.

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Politics

The gymnastics of rectitude An unrelentingly partisan history Frank Bongiorno

A Liberal State: How Australians chose liberalism over socialism, 1926–1966

by David Kemp

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Miegunyah Press $59.99 hb, 616 pp

avid Kemp, formerly professor of politics at Monash University and minister in the Howard government, has a fairly simple thesis about Australian politics in the years between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. Put crudely, Australians were offered a choice between socialism and liberalism.

The Australian Labor Party offered them socialism. Kemp doesn’t much like it. It is one of the remarkable features of A Liberal State, that in more than five hundred pages of packed type, the author struggles to find a single idea or policy pursued by the Labor Party worthy of praise. The gymnastics involved in this effort are sometimes remarkable. To take just one example, the casual reader might imagine that it was a Liberal government that initiated Australia’s massive postwar immigration program.

John Curtin and Ben Chifley, Kemp concedes, weren’t bad blokes, but they were surrounded by deluded ideologues and class warriors who wanted to nationalise everything.

Liberalism was the offering of a succession of political parties that came and went over the forty years examined here. Most of them, sadly, were unable to overcome their addiction to economic controls. Following the economic historian Edward Shann, Kemp regrets that Australia sought to make of itself a ‘hermit’ nation, closed off from the rest of the world by high tariffs. Its system of compulsory industrial arbitration encouraged industrial conflict and was A Bad Thing; except, presumably, when it proved an efficient way to cut wages during the Depression, as Kemp at least concedes.

Fortunately, the Institute of Public Affairs run by Kemp’s father, C.D. Kemp, Robert Menzies – the book’s hero – and the Liberal Party all come to liberalism’s rescue in the 1940s. On the

way to this salvation, we are treated to long chunks of Menzies’ ‘The Forgotten People’ broadcast of 1942, which we are enjoined to see as a new departure in Australian liberalism.

In more than five hundred pages, Kemp struggles to find a single policy pursued by the Labor Party worthy of praise For a man who spent a large part of his career as a practising politician, it is strange that Kemp does so little to distinguish between what politicians say and what they do. Menzies preached self-reliance and enterprise, and bemoaned a bossy state. Yet his government of 1949–66 was so reliant on controls and regulations that it’s rather difficult to see how, under the constraints of the Australian constitution, a Labor government could have been much less ‘liberal’. Australia maintained import licensing through much of the 1950s. Nor were the 1960s a notable era of free trade, with McEwenism in full flight. Reforms to industrial arbitration were insubstantial. Government spending rose as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product. Australia’s fabled home ownership was so propped up by subsidy that each and every white picket fence ought to have carried the names of Menzies, Fadden, and Coombs. Kemp’s claims that Menzies’ liberalism played any significant part in the decline of the White Australia policy are poorly substantiated, implausible, and belied by evidence not cited by Kemp.

Kemp sees his book – and the series to which it belongs – as an effort to emphasise that ideas have played a major role in Australian politics. This is a worthwhile enterprise, and the book does succeed, to some extent, in fulfilling this goal. There are periodic reminders of key overseas developments in political thinking that had Australian echoes and adaptations, as with the Keynesian revolution, which is explored in a stimulating and well-informed way. Kemp provides a sympathetic and intelligent account of the rise of progressive middle-class liberalism in the 1960s. There are also sensitively crafted accounts of Aboriginal affairs.

Politics, as Kemp acknowledges, is also about both passions and interests. Nonetheless, he spends much of the book treating the impact of each as a negation of true liberalism. At the end, I felt I had a fair understanding of what Kemp thought the politics of the era should have been like, yet a cloudier sense of what had actually happened and why. Kemp is particularly weak on the ‘why’ question, partly because he appears unfamiliar with

ANIMAL DREAMS DAVID BROOKS

‘one of Australia’s most skilled, unusual and versatile writers’ The Sydney Morning Herald

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much of the recent work by economic historians. Scholars such as Ian McLean and Simon Ville do not try to explain Australia’s slide down the international economic tables as a simple outcome of the wrong-headed attachment of policymakers to economic controls, or because wharfies and miners kept going on strike.

Rather, they recognise the nation’s economic history as a complex story of transformation in a dynamic domestic and global context.

But it is now an axiom of the political class that gained ascendancy in the final decades of the twentieth century, and of which Kemp is a fully paid-up member, that Australia’s policy history before they fixed it was a story of failure, a triumph of the clamour of selfish interests over rational decision-making. This is essentially a right-wing version of ‘black armband history’. If only Australia had left things to the market! Imagine what kind of country this would have been if they’d had Friedmanite professors to guide them! What great things deluded and muddle-headed Deakinite liberals could have achieved had they enjoyed a proper grounding in public choice theory – those influence peddlers would have been run out of town!

For a book as long as this one – and one with three older siblings and a younger one still to come – it’s a somewhat selective account of the era’s political history. There is little on state politics, except for New South Wales premier Jack Lang, because of his national importance and his role in the story as a socialist bogeyman. What does Kemp make of Thomas Playford’s ‘liberalism’ in South Australia? Even as significant a figure as Victoria’s long-serving Henry Bolte gets just one brief reference.

Kemp underestimates some of his liberals’ flirtations with authoritarianism – and even fascism – just as he exaggerates the influence of communism in the Labor Party. He has multiple references to Labor radicals arming themselves during the Depression, as if they posed a serious danger to capitalism. He mentions only in passing the much larger and better-organised right-wing paramilitaries, which were the only forces capable of overthrowing democratic governments in the period. Andrew Moore’s ground-breaking study of these secret armies, The Secret Army and the Premier (1989), does not appear in the bibliography.

It is hard not to admire Kemp’s industry. While this handsome book is based mainly on secondary authorities with a sprinkling of printed primary sources, it nonetheless rests on prodigious labour. But it is also an unrelentingly partisan history, written from within a particular tradition. For Kemp, Liberals have principles, Laborites prejudices. The portrayal of Menzies sometimes approaches North Korean official biography – which is unnecessary, because a man can have flaws and blind spots (Menzies had plenty) and still be both the political giant and civilised man that he was.

The book’s partisanship is evident in this melodrama of goodies and baddies, but also in its implicit vindication of the careers of late twentieth-century neoliberals as saviours of the nation. The text is peppered with references to policies or ideas that, while occasionally stirring in this era, could only flourish in the 1980s and 1990s once rational policymaking supposedly prevailed over the special interests that had previously blighted politics.

This is history as professional vindication. The problem is that the sweeping victory of the very policies that Kemp wishes to

celebrate – and which will presumably receive explicit treatment in the final volume of the series – now imperil not only global liberalism but the future of democracy itself. They have also been a great boon to powerful interest groups seeking favours from government. The protectionist clamour of a former era has its echoes in the rampant corporate welfare of this one. g Frank Bongiorno is Professor and Head of History at the Australian National University.

Society

Untangling concepts

Exploring academic licence and freedom of speech Kieran Pender

Open Minds: Academic freedom and freedom of speech in Australia

by Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone with Jade Roberts

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La Trobe University Press $29.99 pb, 224 pp

cross the Anglosphere, academic freedom is in crisis.

That, at least, is the conclusion one draws from reading conservative newspapers and listening to right-wing politicians. Boris Johnson’s government, concerned about ‘unacceptable silencing and censoring on campuses’, recently announced plans to appoint a ‘free speech champion’ for British universities. In 2019, Donald Trump signed an executive order to protect free speech on campus, describing it as a ‘historic action to defend American students and American values that have been under siege’. In February 2021, the Australian government amended higher education legislation to redefine academic freedom, amid shrill calls from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) about the ‘free speech crisis at Australia’s universities’.

All of which makes Open Minds, a compelling new book from Carolyn Evans and Adrienne Stone, particularly timely.

The authors provide a stimulating analysis of threats to academic freedom in Australia. Open Minds is measured, informed by history and law (with twenty-three pages of footnotes and two appendices), yet still accessible to a general audience. Bringing clear-eyed analysis to an issue too often hijacked by partisan voices, it resists the hyperbole of the right while acknowledging that academic freedom is legitimately at risk in certain contexts.

Australia’s new education minister, Alan Tudge, would be well advised to read this book.

Concern about academic freedom is not new. In medieval times, British universities were built as fortresses due to the risk of violence between students and villagers. In the earliest days of Australia’s Federation, public controversies ignited debate about the freedom of university staff to speak freely. In 1902, for example, a AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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professor was censured by the University of Sydney for his pacifist critique of the Boer War. Perhaps the most severe threat to academic freedom faced by Australia came in the mid-twentieth century, when anti-communist fears led to direct interference by the government. Spies kept watch – Evans and Stone note that at one point ASIO had files on about ten per cent of Melbourne University’s academic staff – and appointments were vetted, sometimes even vetoed. More recently, Robert French undertook a lengthy independent review into academic freedom in 2019.

While some criticised the former High Court chief justice for offering credibility to the ongoing culture wars, the authors suggest his findings – that there is no free speech crisis on Australian campuses but that there are areas of concern – ‘has been valuable for Australian universities’.

In medieval times, British universities were built as fortresses due to the risk of violence between students and villagers Having sketched the history, Evans and Stone move to the law. The ‘centrepiece’ of Australian law on academic freedom, they write, is section 19–115 of the federal Higher Education Support Act 2003. This contains a requirement, introduced by the Gillard government in 2011, that Australian universities must have a ‘policy that upholds free intellectual inquiry in relation to learning, teaching and research’ as a condition of receiving government funding. Evans and Stone also outline the broader legal framework: university-specific authorising laws, workplace enterprise agreements, and distinct campus policies. They note, pointedly, ‘most academic freedom policies recognise that academic freedom also entails responsibilities’.

There have been a number of cases before Australian courts in recent years where academic freedom has been pleaded by disgruntled university employees. The most high-profile example is Peter Ridd, a climate sceptic at James Cook University who fiercely criticised the research of colleagues on the health of the Great Barrier Reef. Ridd was dismissed for breaching the university’s code of conduct and has become a cause célèbre for the IPA; he successfully challenged the sacking in the Federal Circuit Court but lost on appeal. The High Court will hear the case this year. Evans and Stone are sympathetic to Ridd’s predicament, but they note the challenges in drawing a clear dividing line between robust academic criticism and bullying.

Perhaps the most important point Evans and Stone make is a conceptual one. ‘Academic freedom and freedom of speech are often treated as synonymous,’ Evans and Stone write. This tendency of public discourse fails to recognise important differences between the two terms. Accordingly, a primary aim of Open Minds is to ‘untangle these concepts and to explain the relationship between them’. Three aspects of that discussion are noteworthy. First, Evans and Stone suggest that academic freedom deserves heightened protection, above and beyond that offered to free speech generally; a consequence of this approach is that those engaged in research are entitled to stronger safeguards than professional staff. Second, the authors make a vigorous case for academic freedom protecting criticism of institutions them14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

selves: ‘Academic criticism of university governance is essential to the flourishing of research and teaching and, consequently, the pursuit of knowledge.’ That freedom is jeopardised by universities following the corporate trend towards employment contracts that prohibit bringing an employer into disrepute. Finally, academic freedom is not an excuse for underperforming academics: ‘If legal scholars fail to stay on top of changes in the law, if historians misread or fail to consult historical records, academic freedom does not entitle them to immunity from the consequences.’

It would be hard to find two more capable guides for navigating such turbulent and politicised terrain. Evans is the vicechancellor of Griffith University; she previously held senior roles at the University of Melbourne, and is an international authority on religious freedom. Stone, meanwhile, is Australia’s leading free speech scholar and a distinguished professor at Melbourne Law School. Accordingly, they bring both academic expertise and practical insight to some of the vexing issues raised by the current debate.

Evans and Stone also spend time pondering the future. Several trends represent ongoing challenges to academic freedom.

The authors consider the corporatisation of Australia’s higher education market, noting that universities cannot become ‘an educational supermarket, where the customer is always right’.

The pre-pandemic level of international students was central to the balance of many Australian universities. This often gave rise to problematic attempts to accommodate both academic freedom and student sensitivities. There have been several incidents involving lecturers being challenged for teaching in relation to China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

Funding is another ongoing challenge. With less government money available, commercial and philanthropic revenue is becoming particularly important. The Ramsay Centre’s desire to donate large sums to universities to teach ‘Western civilisation’ courses is the most high-profile example of the risk of inappropriate influence associated with wealthy funders. But it is by no means the only example. ‘If a research team can only retain its funding by obtaining the “right” result, how might that knowledge affect researchers?’ Evans and Stone ask.

The authors conclude with brief observations about how universities might better uphold academic freedom. This section is the least developed part of Open Minds, although that, perhaps, was the point. ‘We have no wish to be prescriptive as to how exactly other universities might foster a culture that respects both academic freedom and free speech,’ they write. ‘Universities are best placed to decide on matters of tone and emphasis themselves.’

Events of the past year loom over this book; the pandemic is referenced but not explored in detail. But Covid-19 has betrayed the grand irony undermining the professed concern of the federal government and its cheerleaders for academic freedom and free speech on campus. In 2020, the Australian university sector was devastated by the pandemic. Morrison refused to help. Thousands of jobs were lost. It is this wilful indifference to the health of the sector, rather than overblown concerns about academic freedom, that poses the greatest threat to Australian scholars being able to think, write, and speak freely. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer.

Feminism

A feminist mosaic

Feminism as experience and embodiment Zora Simic

Feminisms: A global history

by Lucy Delap

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Penguin $39.99 hb, 416 pp

ucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge, is a consummate historian and not one to privilege her own experience. Indeed, one of her chief aims in her innovative new global history of ‘feminisms’ – the plural is important, no matter how inelegant – is to bring to the fore feminists and other activists for women’s rights who are less well known, but hardly less significant, than the usual suspects. In this aim, and from the very first page, Delap succeeds admirably. Feminisms: A global history opens with an ‘incendiary letter’ published in 1886 in a local newspaper in the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana), written by an anonymous author on behalf of ‘We Ladies of Africa’. At once a protest against the sexual violence of colonial incursion, and an assertion of cultural power and defiance, the letter also flags to a presentday audience that this history will not be the standard White Feminist narrative – and hooray for that.

Delap, upholding this commitment, often returns to the vibrant and diverse forms of women’s activism across the African continent (and elsewhere) – not all or even much of it explicitly ‘feminist’, given the term’s Western baggage, but nonetheless essential to any global history of feminisms worthy of the name. Some readers may already be aware of some of the people profiled, such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900–78), the charismatic women’s rights activist from Nigeria, while others, such as Senegalese-born, French-educated writer Awa Thiam, an enthusiastic but sometimes naïve advocate for African feminism, are given necessarily nuanced treatment. One of the ways Delap’s history is especially useful – and the ‘usability’ of feminist history for contemporary feminism is an animating concern, as it has been for generations of feminist historians – is in refreshing wellknown examples and showcasing new ones through a thematic approach that simultaneously honours specificity, connection, and context.

Without entirely eschewing chronology – in her thoughtful introduction, she commits to a span of 250 years – Delap organises her history into eight thematic chapters: ‘Dreams’, ‘Ideas’, ‘Spaces’, ‘Objects’, ‘Looks’, ‘Feelings’, ‘Actions’, and ‘Songs’. It is an approach explicitly and respectfully indebted to recent developments in feminist historiography, though Delap never lets the scholarship overwhelm the stories being told. A few of them are even her own, and these charming yet fleeting glimpses into her own feminist history enhance rather than detract from the wider

themes. As a teenager, Delap read My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and felt that her ‘refusal of the path of heterosexual romance spoke powerfully to my own emotions across the many oceans and decades that separated us’. Elsewhere, she recalls a feminist history seminar in the 1990s in which a colleague’s colourful rainbow socks, ‘with a space for all of her toes’, caught her eye. Her new friend shared her dream of a world ‘where male and female were simply irrelevant categories’. Such encounters can be as transformative, Delap suggests, as reading a canonical text. Crucially, Delap also recognises that one woman’s dream (say of a ‘common language’, for Adrienne Rich) could clash with another’s (like Audre Lorde’s for a ‘house of difference’). Hers is a capacious history, with plenty of room for competing visions and politics. Delap can comprehend and convey the appeal of feminisms and feminists past – Mary Daly, for instance – without insisting on their contemporary relevance.

This is a capacious history, with plenty of room for competing visions and politics Each chapter enlightens and entertains, with some of the best material reflecting Delap’s expertise on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘Woman Question’, as covered in her book The Feminist Avant-Garde (2007). In ‘Dreams’, we learn that the early twentieth century was a particularly ripe time for imagining what a feminist world might look like. The steady beat of women’s suffrage and communist revolution variously inspired Bengali woman Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain to publish Sultana’s Dream (1905), a fictional account of a feminist utopia named ‘Ladyland’ in which men were banished into harems and women ruled the world in an ecologically sustainable fashion; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), her ‘paean to a female-centredlifestyle’; and Alexandra Kollontai’s extensive fictional and non-fictional writings advocating the merging of sexual and socialist revolution. In ‘Ideas’, Delap dutifully traces the history of feminist theorising around patriarchy and double-or-triple jeopardy (also known as ‘intersectionality’). The stand-out comes from the dawn of the twentieth century, in the writing and activism of Chinese anarchist-influenced feminist He-Yin Zhen (c.1884–1920).

The themes of ‘Spaces’, ‘Looks’, and ‘Action’ cohere around enduring faultlines in feminism – for instance, about the pleasures and problems of separate or dedicated spaces; the politics of clothes and the gaze, and different ideas about how best to achieve social change. But Delap’s case studies are, pleasingly, not always predictable – in ‘Spaces’, there is far more about the mobilisation of women workers, including in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in the United States (on the basis that formal equality eroded hard-won gains for ‘protection’) than there is about the separatism of ‘cultural feminists’ in the 1970s, though there is some of that, too. In ‘Looks’, Delap offers fresh analysis of the politics of the veil, including by placing in context Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’arawi’s deliberate unveiling of her face at the meeting of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Rome in 1923.

At the risk of sounding parochial, I was pleased to see AusAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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tralia referenced multiple times, in both positive and negative terms. The chain protests of Merle Thornton, Rosalie Bogner, and Zelda D’Aprano in the 1960s, and the anti-sexist graffiti activism of BUGA-UP throughout the 1970s and 1980s, feature positively in ‘Actions’, while the racism of early feminist refuges is not glossed over in an account that also acknowledges the importance of these spaces. Australian examples of feminist material culture are littered throughout ‘Objects’, a testimony to the important work of Alison Bartlett and Margaret Henderson in their edited collection Things That Liberate: A feminist Wunderkammer (2013).

In contrast, Australian feminists such as Jessie Street who have featured in histories of feminist internationalism do not appear here, but Feminisms: A global history is not that kind of history.

Delap wants her readers to comprehend feminism as emotion, experience, and embodiment, rather than only or primarily as a movement aggregated into national, regional, and international organisations. Against the Western-centric narrative of ‘waves’

or peaks of feminist activity, where nothing much happens in between, Delap offers ‘“mosaic feminism”, built up from inherited fragments but offering distinctive patterns and pictures’.

In ‘Songs’, the final, rousing chapter, Delap draws on historian Nancy Hewitt to suggest that ‘rather than seeing successive “ocean waves” of feminism, we might imagine competing, simultaneous broadcasts, some loud and clear, others disrupted by static’. Delap does not labour these metaphors, but her intermittent discussion of them is a reminder of the interpretative and political challenges facing those who dare to write the history of something as widely dispersed, multi-faceted, contested, and ongoing as feminism.

Delap rises to the occasion in the best feminist spirit – building on and acknowledging the work of those who came before, while bringing new ideas and energy to the task. g Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales.

Feminism

‘We are the men in this situation’ Overcoming feminism’s racial distortion Megan Clement

White Feminism: From the suffragettes to influencers and who they leave behind

by Koa Beck

T

Simon & Schuster $32.99 pb, 319 pp

he most difficult thing for white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class, cis women to accept seems to be that feminism was designed for them. But the reality is that from a suffrage movement that forced Black marchers to walk at the rear to the ‘girlboss’ CEOs who bully their poorly paid underlings, the cause known as ‘feminism’ has long been dominated by the aspirations of an élite group of women.

This is the history Koa Beck diligently traces in White Feminism: From the suffragettes to influencers and who they leave behind. She illustrates how, for centuries, this dominant version of feminism has combined the twin forces of white supremacy and capitalism to advance the interests of a select few while leaving behind the working classes, ethnic minorities, trans and queer people, and those with disabilities – not by accident but by design.

Again and again, wealthy, white, heterosexual women have forced everyone else to take a back seat while they set the priorities of the women’s movement. Beck asks white feminists to consider that when it comes to, for example, debates over the inclusion of trans women at the élite American women’s colleges she herself attended: ‘We are the men in this situation.’ This history has led to a contemporary reality in which, for every white feminist 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

CEO who is ‘leaning in’ in the boardroom, there is a poor woman of colour caring for the CEO’s children and cleaning her house so she can climb the corporate ladder.

Beck points out that the troubling regression in gender equality during the pandemic, particularly within heterosexual households, where the burden of cleaning, feeding, schooling, and working under one roof has fallen disproportionately heavily to women, is because the solutions white feminism has come up with for the twenty-first century were no real solutions at all.

‘Because white feminism wasn’t made for this real life with real challenges and very real barriers to economic stability.’

Again and again, wealthy, white, heterosexual women have forced everyone else to take a back seat while they set the priorities of the women’s movement In Beck’s telling, white feminism is the ethos of individual success and self-optimisation. At its heart is a neoliberal logic: ‘I have value because I have money.’ What this means for those without money – because of racist practices, the marginalisation of queer and gender non-conforming people, or the legacy of colonialism, among myriad other structural barriers – is that they are simply not trying as hard as the thin, white actress on the magazine cover or, say, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.

Beck comes from a successful background in women’s media, having worked at Vogue and Marie Claire before landing a job as editor-in-chief of the irreverent feminist website Jezebel. Many of her insights come from her experience toiling in the women’s media content mines, trying to smuggle stories about trans men’s reproductive options alongside ones with headlines like ‘Women Are Allowed to be Mean Bosses, Too’.

At once witty and authoritative, the book is packed with pithy explanations of the phenomenon that is white feminism, from ‘social justice for all and equal pay but also, this is all just

really about me’, to ‘the idea that radical change will come one woman at a time, in a nice corner office, in a leadership role, in a woman with a sharp red lip and a severe heel’.

It is also replete with the jargon taken straight from the white feminist corporate sphere she so handily eviscerates elsewhere.

We hear of social media posts that ‘scale a tonality of ambitionfostering’. Some of the metaphors are particularly tortured.

‘The Feminist Lady CEO media hunt and Lean In set into motion a moving formula that now resounds so loudly over Pinterest and Instagram that it’s hard to believe it wasn’t always there,’ she writes. But can a formula move or indeed be set into motion?

Can it resound at all, never mind over Pinterest?

Beck writes from an American perspective, but there is much in here that can be applied to Australia. With its own bleak tradition of dispossession, genocide, and the upholding of white women’s ‘purity’ as a stick with which to beat minorities and First Nations people, the continent known as Australia is the logical stomping ground for white feminism, evident everywhere from the deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women to the pages of Mamamia. The limitations, and often the violence, of this ideology have been well documented by a number of Australian feminist thinkers, including Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Talkin’ Up to the White Woman (2000), Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life (2017), and Ruby Hamad in

White Tears/Brown Scars (2019).

This is in part because for as long as there have been white feminists, there have also been those with a more inclusive outlook. Beck draws on the 1940s meat boycotts led by Jewish housewives, the disability rights sit-ins of the 1970s, the Native American-led Dakota Access Pipeline protests, and the push for a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights to present an alternative feminist vision based on collective organising and solidarity.

It’s an energising prospect: surely we deserve more than a world in which Audre Lorde quotes are used to sell us underwear.

While there is a long history of critiquing the limits of feminism, Beck offers what may become a definitive account of whitefeminism-as-ideology – where it came from, why it persists, and how we might overturn it. She has undertaken the thorough archival work necessary to present a bulletproof case that white feminism does not work and that it should be discarded. It is now – and has long been – on those of us for whom this movement was built to work out how to be ‘a feminist who is white, as opposed to a white feminist’ and lean out. As she concludes: ‘We won’t wait.’ g Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, human rights, international development, and social policy. She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015.

Memoir

‘What was the question?’

Spaces that signify the unspeakable Francesca Sasnaitis

No Document Anwen Crawford

Giramondo Publishing $26.95 pb, 160 pp

I have been made by what was done, by what gets done, what I have made, and I can’t redeem one part of this.

N

o Document begins with a description of the opening sequence of Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts,1949) in which a horse is led to slaughter – a significant misremembering that Anwen Crawford rectifies later.Franju’s black-and-white documentary actually begins with a collage of scenes shot on the outskirts of Paris; surreal juxtapositions of objects abandoned in a landscape devastated by war and reconstruction.

Cinematic structure informs the narrative composition of No Document and permits Crawford to draw seemingly arbitrary connections through time: parallels between impressionistic memories of the friend to whom No Document is dedicated, their collaborative art practice, their shared activism, and historical

snippets. She identifies with artists whose lives were abruptly curtailed, in particular Franz Marc and August Macke of Der Blaue Reiter school, whose work was declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime. Crawford links Marc’s Blue Horse (1911) and The Tower of Blue Horses (1913) to freedom of expression; his death in World War I to the slaughter of animals; the Nazis’ removal of Marc’s paintings to absence, detention, and Australia’s reprehensible treatment of asylum seekers.

Crawford graduated in photography from Sydney College of the Arts, has a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Columbia University, and is best known for her critical writing on music and film. Her diverse interests inform a text that defies easy categorisation. It is an inventive combination of poetic devices and documentary fragments in a paean to friendship and creativity, and an elegy for a lost friend. Crawford positions her life in a historical and political context, intertwining personal grief with a meditation on the suffering caused by inhumane, self-interested actions.

The combination is not without precedent. Like French memoirist Annie Ernaux, she writes to guard against ‘future absence’ (The Years, 2018), against forgetting; to salvage the past and make sense of the pain of absence. For Crawford, the present is a repetition of battles fought in the name of a better future. She finds herself ‘afflicted by the sadness of thinking that it is too late to remember the futures they were dreaming of ’, and pictures herself hand-in-hand inside a loop of evenings/ the carlight/ the sense there isn’t time enough/ to stumble the cash machine/ the glow in other people’s/ houses/ the threshold AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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moving again us moving against moving against the violence of the state. I gather I am gathered in the ghosts round.

The final passage of The Years begins with the words ‘to save’, followed by a list of evanescent moments. It ends: ‘To save something from the time where we will never be again.’ Crawford addresses the friend whose ghost is ever present (and whose name we only learn towards the end): ‘seriously what about our plan to take over the world, don’t think I’ve forgotten about it ’.

Crawford’s conjunctions – visual, linguistic, technical – between the processes of photography, filmmaking, and art production are pathways to understanding the enormity of loss, destruction, and sorrow; the calamitous scars wrought on body and mind by resisting injustice. Meanings multiply with repetition, seemingly innocuous terms assuming the significance of politically expedient euphemisms, like ‘rendition’ to refer to the forced repatriation of asylum seekers.

‘Latent within the word asylum is the notion of something inviolable, without right of seizure,’ she says of a word that has been used to denote a place of incarceration, the antithesis of sanctuary. Crawford is candid about her week in a psychiatric ward on suicide watch and about the self-inflicted scars that crosshatched her torso. She draws a comparison between her own body and the carcass of the slaughtered horse. She was ‘teenage in the 90s and it felt like the answer was to die, but what was the question?’ Though Crawford and I are a generation apart, I remember this feeling from my art school years, when despair and suicide attempts pervaded my peer group, as if we were ‘going crazy’ together, as if suicide were infectious. Psychology’s remedy was to advise Crawford to distinguish her own moods from ‘the state of the world’. Her response was characteristic: ‘But what if the problem, I said, is capitalism? ’ The accuracy of memories and the veracity of photographs that purport to document reality are brought into question. As Crawford says, ‘the photograph will frame a truth only the photograph contains’. She remembers scenes and places (Indigenous names meticulously cited), but conversations escape her: ‘There must have been many days and evenings when we sat in the shed where you lived / on Gadigal country […] and yet what we might have said has left me.’ African-American poet Claudia Rankine says that ‘a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce—/ a truce with the patience of a stethoscope’ (Citizen: An American lyric, 2014). Breath and the cessation of breath have, of course, taken on horrifying significance for the Black Lives Matter movement. But breath also informs poetic syntax and rhythm.

In No Document it is represented by the space between thoughts and the pauses in lines of text. Ruled lines inserted in the text serve as fences, borders, redacted sentences, spaces that signify the unspeakable: the anomaly between some Australians’ belief that ‘we don’t behave barbarically’ and the shocking reality. The black-bordered rectangle that reappears periodically on a white 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

page is an enclosure, a corral, but also an absence made visible; ‘the failure to remake a world where there is no place now that contains you’; the ‘no document’ of the title.

Perhaps Crawford feels guilty about her absence overseas when her friend died. She never saw his body, and ever since she has wondered if it would have ‘helped to have the fact of this |: body in my mind | to not be saying this |: goodbye.’

I don’t know if she found the redemption she sought by writing No Document, but what she has achieved is a stunningly crafted testament to the enduring power of art and literature.

For a world often bereft of empathy and compassion, she quotes Franz Marc: ‘New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible.’ g Francesca Sasnaitis was recently awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia.

History

A network of compulsion The riddle of reconciliation Meredith Lake

A Bridge Between: Spanish Benedictine missionary women in Australia

by Katharine Massam

W

ANU Press $65 pb, 390 pp

hat kinds of stories are possible now about a mission community at the height of the assimilation era?

How might scholars narrate the lives of religious women who ran an institution for Indigenous children?

Historian Katharine Massam has lived with these questions for more than twenty years. Her long-awaited monograph, A Bridge Between, is not so much a solution as a response: a delicate, unsettling story told largely ‘in the language of tears’.

Begun in the aftermath of the Bringing Them Home report (1997), and completed as the Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) reverberated across the nation, this book is ultimately a hopeful search for a reconciling kind of memory.

As the subtitle indicates, A Bridge Between is focused on a very particular group of people: Spanish Benedictine missionary women, active in Australia between 1904 and the early 1970s. There were around sixty-five sisters in all; all of them connected to New Norcia, north of Perth, Australia’s first and only monastic town.

Already, this is challenging territory – for collective memory and for historical scholarship. New Norcia was established as a Benedictine mission, in Yued Noongar country, in the mid-nineteenth century. Founded by Dom Rosendo Salvado, it was initially staffed by religious brothers. By the time religious

Category

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women joined the mission, in 1904, there were two institutions for Indigenous children on site: St Joseph’s ‘Native school and orphanage’ for girls, where the sisters went to work, and St Mary’s for the boys.

There have been many profound and painful experiences associated with New Norcia, since the mission’s beginnings. Massam knows she cannot recover or bear witness to them all. She has listened deeply to Noongar women who lived at St Joseph’s as girls. A Bridge Between is informed by those relationships and what she has learned from them – about control, neglect, suffering, and other things. But as a non-Indigenous scholar, Massam does

The Abbey Church of New Norcia (Gnangarra/WikimediaCommons)

not presume to distil the messy realities of life as ‘a St Joseph’s girl’. Massam therefore restricts herself to the Benedictine missionary sisters who came to work at St Joseph’s, and in some cases also at Kalumburu Mission in the Kimberley. As the leading historian of Catholic women’s spirituality in Australia, Massam is well equipped to draw out the depth and complexity of their collective biography.

A history of a few dozen Benedictine sisters may still seem niche, but Massam engages with many of the deeper themes in Australian historical writing. She shows that these women had an unusual and often risky relationship to the world around them. They were Catholic in a Protestant-majority society; typically Spanish-speaking people in a corner of Britain’s empire.

As mostly Mediterranean folk, they had an ambiguous place in white Australia’s racial hierarchy. Who were these women?

Why did they come here? And how did they understand their vocation in Australia?

One of Massam’s clearest achievements is to have coaxed the details of these women’s lives from a dispersed and disrupted archive. Much was discounted as unimportant and went unrecorded, even in their own time. The documentary traces that remain are scattered across Australia, Spain, and Belgium. Massam has pieced these together with exemplary patience. She has also ‘read’ the physical site of New Norcia and summoned new meaning from scores of old photographs (about eighty are reproduced in the book). There are hints that her conversations with several of 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

the sisters were mutually transformative.

Perhaps because certain details were so hard won, at a few points they threaten to overwhelm Massam’s narrative. Mostly, though, they bring otherwise forgotten women into vivid remembrance. We meet sisters who, as teenagers in the 1940s, left their homes and families in the north of Spain for a life of prayer and work in Western Australia. We see their missionary efforts shifting and unfolding, within toxic policy contexts that they usually did not influence, let alone determine. We even get a glimpse of what it meant for Marie Willaway, a Noongar girl, to enter religious life and become a Benedictine Sister herself. Some things, of course, remain unknown, but we see these women’s lives in motion.

In all this, Massam is especially attentive to the lived experience of faith and vocation. These can be difficult realities for Australians to imagine in our apparently secular century. But Massam leans in, sympathetically, to the challenge and even the gift of Christian belief. The result is a landmark in the study of Catholic communities in this country, and female religious more generally.

At the same time, Massam’s fundamental commitment to women’s experiences animates A Bridge Between. She does not overlook the heavy domestic labour that loomed so large in the sisters’ lives, as they cooked, sewed, mended, and washed clothes for the entire New Norcia community. She recognises the St Joseph’s laundry, a place as utterly marginal to ordinary record keeping as to the public memory of the mission, as a place of high drama. In the laundry, vocations were tested, bodies exhausted, and the boundaries of race and gender debated and defined. There, too, Massam faces up to one of the deepest difficulties of this history. For the sisters, work, like prayer, was central to Benedictine life and spirituality. Even in the laundry, they laboured with a sense that their choices were part of some divine plan. It was a matter of sacrifice and obedience, a trusted path to holiness.

But what of the girls who worked alongside them, shouldering the same domestic duties? St Joseph’s was part of a network of compulsion that wreaked havoc on Indigenous families. There is evidence that some parents saw it as a refuge of sorts, the lesser of various evils. There are testimonies, too, of deep suffering: St Joseph’s was riven with griefs and traumas that some former residents continue to live with.

Telling the story of the missionary women is not a matter of weighing these experiences against each other. Massam sees her task in terms of paying attention, especially to the relationships forged at St Joseph’s and that somehow endure beyond it. These relationships do not erase conflict, or resolve all the pain and ambiguity. But in their commitment and their complexity, they provide a context for deep – even holy – listening.

A Bridge Between invites the reader to listen and reflect on the lives of the missionary sisters, almost as a spiritual discipline. In Massam’s compelling vision, this work of remembering – without shying away from darkness, yet in search of shared horizons – is an act of hope for reconciliation. g Meredith Lake is the author of The Bible in Australia: A cultural history (2018). She is an Honorary Associate of the Department of History, University of Sydney, and presenter of Soul Search on ABC Radio National. ❖

Biography

The Doherty Bunch Recruiting your own children as spies Jane Sullivan

With My Little Eye: The incredible true story of a family of spies in the suburbs

by Sandra Hogan

H

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 240 pp

ere’s a story about a spy with a wooden leg, another spy who liked to sit around with his penis exposed, and a spy’s daughter who spent decades refusing to believe her father was dead. If this tale of an everyday family of secret agents were a novel or a Netflix drama, we’d laugh, frown, and admire it as a surreal fantasy. But it is real, the children are still alive, and their recollections are proof that truth is nuttier than fiction.

Spy families are not unheard of, but the usual outcome after the exposure or disgracing of parents is that the children are bamboozled, completely unaware what was going on behind the smooth exterior of suburban life or that their parents weren’t the people they appeared to be. That was the case with the two Foley boys in the United States, who thought Mom and Dad were a typically nice, boring American couple until the FBI raided their home in 2010 and revealed them to be KGB agents. The Foleys rate a brief mention in journalist Sandra Hogan’s With My Little Eye, but the focus here is on another nice suburban family: the Dohertys in Australia, where the three children were recruited into the spy business virtually from the day they were born. What better cover for a young mum chatting to other women in the park than a baby in a pram?

In the 1950s, it wasn’t unusual for a father to often be away on work matters or for his children to regard his occupation as a mysterious concern of such vital importance that it dominated family life. The Dohertys took that concept much further. From a very young age, Mark, Sue-Ellen, and Amanda knew that their parents, Dudley and Joan Doherty, were spies. Indeed, they became trained accomplices in their parents’ work for ASIO. They shared their Sydney living room with a massive device bugging the apartment below, with Joan and other agents wearing headphones, listening in. They knew how to memorise car number plates and how to keep an eye open for any unusual behaviour, while remaining inconspicuous themselves. And they knew not to ask questions or to talk to anyone about what they were doing. As children will, they saw themselves at the centre of their universe, so their universe was normal. The mind-boggling weirdness for the reader lies in the detail. Dudley was a kindly man: if he heard of a child with an amputated limb, he would drop everything and pay a visit, often taking his own children with him.

Then he would reveal his own wooden leg and explain how good his life was: ‘You can do anything you want.’ His children used

to wish he wouldn’t give everything away, including their pets.

Later, they wondered: was he really kind or were the visits just part of his cover?

The spy who liked to sit around exposing his penis was the defecting KGB agent Vladimir Petrov. In 1956, he and Evdokia, his wife and fellow spy, lived in a Surfers Paradise apartment above the Dohertys, who were tasked with looking after them.

Joan and Evdokia, known as Peewee, formed an unlikely friendship. While Vladimir went fishing with Dudley and little Mark, the wives would walk along the beach with Sue-Ellen, and Peewee would let off steam about her drunken, disgusting husband.

From a young age, Mark, Sue-Ellen, and Amanda knew that their parents, Dudley and Joan Doherty, were spies There are many crazy moments in this story where I laughed out loud. Yet the prevailing reaction is one of sorrow, regret, and sympathy for the three children. It’s likely that Dudley and Joan had the best of motives in recruiting them: both came from families with their own traumatic secrets, and they had decided they would always be honest with their own children. ‘In any family that’s a tall order,’ comments Hogan, ‘but in an ASIO family it is impossible.’

The three children were inevitably traumatised, because of what they were and weren’t told and what they were expected to do. Interestingly, their trauma took different forms, and they have different memories. Hogan has extensively interviewed each of them and also their mother, but the main source is Sue-Ellen, who related her story for the first time when she was nearly sixty – to Hogan. She was still seeking to understand why for so many years she could not believe that her father had died of a heart attack in 1970, when she was seventeen. That man in the coffin couldn’t be him. He was always going away on long trips – wasn’t this just another one?

Hogan has turned her meticulous research over the past ten years into a straightforward, no-nonsense narrative, which is all the story needs, though there are occasional passages in italics where she recreates a childhood memory. Dealing with such a clandestine organisation as ASIO means that many questions remain unanswered, though despite all the talk of Dad’s vital work, it emerges in a curious and telling passage that Joan was probably a more important agent than her husband.

The crucial question is: would the children have led happier, more fulfilled lives had their parents kept silent about their secrets and not recruited them as junior spies? We will never know. The three had an emotional reunion to talk about their memories for the purposes of the book. At first Mark said he couldn’t remember anything at all, then certain scenes started coming back.

The siblings have their own children now, all free to go their own ways, unrecruited. They have reknit as a family, though they no longer talk about the past. But they still keep their eyes open.

I bet they don’t miss a thing. g Jane Sullivan’s latest book is Storytime (Ventura Press, 2019).

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Memoir

What is it about sisters?

A deeply wounded memoir Sarah Walker

Monsters

by Alison Croggon

A

Scribe $29.99 pb, 272 pp

lison Croggon has written poetry, fantasy novels, and whip-smart arts criticism for decades, but Monsters is her first book-length work of non-fiction. In this deeply wounded book, Croggon unpacks her shattered relationship with her younger sister (not named in the book), a dynamic that bristles with accusations and resentments. In attempting to understand the wreckage of this relationship, Croggon finds herself going back to the roots of Western patriarchy and colonialism, seeking to frame this fractured relationship as the inexorable consequence of empire.

It’s a big ask, and Monsters offers no simple explanations. The writing is tangled with discourses and tangents that blend memoir, historiography, and philosophy. Croggon is our guide through literature, theory, and myth, through the guilty colonialist credentials of her own ancestors, the ‘middle-class or upper-class soldiers of empire’. She writes with angry clarity about her early years as a journalist in a misogynistic workplace and about the frustrations of being expected by her divorced parents to care for her younger siblings. Whenever she mentions her sister, her critical objectivity crumbles. The writing flickers with panic, resentment, humiliation, and rage. The pain is tangible and corrosive.

What is it about sisters? I know so many women who are agonised by their relationships with their sisters, by the weight of miscommunication, presumptions, and hurt. Many sisters feel like victims, doubly wounded because their own victimhood is not acknowledged. So it is in Monsters. The book follows the final breakdown between Croggon and her sister, after years of fragmentation. Both women perceive the other as deceitful and cruel, and each feels that they possess the real truth of the situation.

Croggon rues the fact that in their relationship she is cast as the perpetual monster. This profoundly reductive thinking, she considers, is the legacy of British colonialism.

The crux of Monsters is the notion that the lasting inheritance of empire is a violent lack of imagination. Its binaries of good/bad, male/female, black/white are the frame that forms our society, condemning us all – but women especially – to being desperately misunderstood. Croggon rails against this reductiveness, this diminishing of complexity. This is the force at the heart of this book: Croggon’s refusal to be reduced to a woman, a mother, a monster. As a piece of writing about colonialism, Monsters is less about how the British project treats the Other, and more about how it treats its own. For Croggon, the two are inescapably linked

by the terror of complexity, of people who step outside their given roles and construct their own narratives. In the monomyth of colonialism, she suggests, one’s story is always written by others.

In a book full of hurt, this is the core pain for Croggon. Her sister wounds her deeply by not accepting Croggon’s version of their relationship. She denies Croggon’s narrative authority over her own story, and in so doing denies Croggon’s personhood. Croggon refuses to be diminished. Monsters is most powerful as an investigation of the psyche of a writer who rails against the notion of herself as simplistic. Describing writing poetry as a new mother, she notes, ‘This was when the I, the I that I know as myself, began.’

It is self-authorship that always gives Croggon her meaning.

Even while Croggon denies being guilty of the acts of spite and neglect of which her sister accuses her, she concedes that almost a decade of her life is essentially lost to her. She has no memory of it. Her late teens and early twenties exist only in flashes: caring for her sisters at too early an age, leaving an abusive relationship with young children in tow, abandoning a promising job to become a skint poet. There is a haze she cannot penetrate.

In his book Picture Theory (1994), W.J.T. Mitchell writes about the gaps that occur in the narratives we create for ourselves in the wake of trauma. While Croggon often rationalises (‘I hesitate to claim trauma’), her sense of victimhood hums through both the text and its shadows of forgetting. Mitchell frames the notion of memory as ‘public, intersubjective’. Croggon’s pain comes from the impossibility of collective recollection with her sister; their testimonies conflict too deeply. There is much that ripples in the dark of this writing, in its lacunae. It is testimony to the limits of narrative, the ways in which any telling is incomplete. This is true of colonial frameworks, and it is true for Croggon. There is much she cannot, or will not, recall.

Sometimes it is in the gulf between what we value and how we act that we are truly revealed. Croggon values Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability’: the capacity to exist in ‘uncertainties, mysterious, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.

Croggon cares deeply about this idea, of sitting with complexity.

She returns to it often in Monsters. And yet, the book is, in its own way, a process of reaching desperately for certainty. In every piece of genealogical detective work, in every rereading of Nietzsche and his critics, in every scorching appraisal of hierarchy and patriarchy, there is a central thought: there must be some explanation. For Croggon, the rift with her sister feels hopeless. It is a narrative whose threads she traces back across generations. She has a fantasy writer’s obsession with causes and consequences.

She writes about curses, about fault. She longs for the kind of resolution that stories bring, the cessation of the narrative, the stilling of change. She aches because resolution seems impossible.

She bears the weight of the past and is crushed by it.

This is a backward-looking book. As a contribution to the literature of decolonisation, its focus is not on future possibilities but on the messy past. Where it does reach for the possibility of healing, it finds it in the power of self-authorship; in rejecting the expectations of others. For Croggon, the legacy of British colonialism is the notion that you can take someone’s story away from them. Monsters fights to reclaim the narrative. g Sarah Walker is a writer, photographer, and fine artist.

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23

Memoir

Out of the shadows

A memoir of hearing loss and identity Andrea Goldsmith

The Shape of Sound

by Fiona Murphy

M

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 297 pp

ore than twenty-five years ago, I wrote an essay on the work of Oliver Sacks (Island Magazine, Autumn 1993). Entitled ‘Anthropologist of Mind’, it ranged across several of Sacks’s books; but it was Seeing Voices, published in 1989, that was the main impetus for the essay. In Seeing Voices, Sacks explored American deaf communities, past and present.

He exposed the stringent and often punishing attempts to ‘normalise’ deaf people by forcing them to communicate orally, and he simultaneously deplored the denigration and widespread outlawing of sign language. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, Sacks showed how deaf people were stigmatised and marginalised from mainstream culture, and he revealed, contrary to prevailing opinion in the hearing world, the richness and complexities of American Sign Language.

I was first diagnosed with a hearing loss at the age of twentyeight. At the time, I was working as a speech pathologist. Any degree of deafness is somewhat of a liability for a speech pathologist, so it was fortunate that my primary passion was fiction.

Owing to my strenuous attempts to hide it, no one knew about my hearing problems, and that remained the case for several decades. All those years ago I welcomed Sacks’s book, as I now welcome Fiona Murphy’s The Shape of Sound.

Hearing loss is perceived differently from short-sightedness, and hearing aids carry a stigma not applied to spectacles. If you can’t hear properly, it is often assumed you cannot communicate.

Until recently, deaf people who did not communicate orally, and even some who did, were described as deaf and dumb. I always wanted to avoid that stigma.

And so did Fiona Murphy.

Murphy was born in 1988. She was, from birth, profoundly deaf in her left ear, although this was not discovered until she was five years old; her hearing in her right ear was within normal range until her thirties when she was struck by the double unfairness of tinnitus (a constant noise in her ear) and otosclerosis in her right ear, a relatively rare condition that leads to loss of hearing.

Murphy’s hearing loss infused her identity from the time she started school. Was she deaf ? Half deaf ? Half hearing? Although given her attempts to pass as not deaf, the specific description is probably immaterial. Murphy, like me, and like so many deaf people, had absorbed the negative associations that prevail about hearing loss.

Murphy was an intelligent, curious child, with a strong desire to communicate. She hid her deafness at school, and believed 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

she was passing successfully; so when someone asked about her accent, she was shocked to learn she had one. It was only when Murphy recalled that she learned to read and sound out words with her Irish mother that the accent became explicable. She was a teenager when her brother, in exasperation, told her to stop talking in fragments. Murphy talked the way she heard, and she heard in fragments: because of her hearing loss, she was picking up only scattered words in an utterance and filling in the gaps herself.

She relied on lip reading, but was unaware of this until she was twenty-seven and set herself a test in a noisy bar. It was impossible to ‘hear’ if she could not see the person’s face (and, I might add, impossible in these days of Covid-19 and masks).

If you can’t hear properly, it is often assumed you cannot communicate In her late twenties, Murphy was fitted with a specialist CROS hearing aid, which would re-route the sound and give her the sense of hearing in her left ear. But the world was so noisy, intolerably so, that she returned the aid after two weeks. I wonder why the audiologist set the loudness level so high. When I was fitted with hearing aids, it took almost two years for the sound to be turned up to the level of normal hearing. Even now, on those rare occasions when I go into the world wearing my aids, I can’t abide the howling wind, the roaring cars, people shouting into their phones.

Few people are totally deaf, many are partially hearing. Murphy shows what it is to live with hearing loss. She trained as a physiotherapist, she worked in a variety of settings, and she managed.

She lived in share houses, she had friends: she managed. She had a loving supportive family: she managed. But life for her had a different dynamic and carried vastly different stresses than for a fully hearing person. For most people, their main energies in conversation go into the engagement, the to and fro of talk, into understanding what is said and responding in a way that moves the conversation forward. For people with hearing loss, the main energies go into actually hearing what is said, and it is exhausting.

And you have to be so adept: you hear maybe thirty per cent of the words, you fill in the gaps, you absorb the meaning, you rummage around for an appropriate response, then you speak – all done without pause. It’s hard work and it’s no wonder that Fiona Murphy, and other hearing-impaired people, embrace solitude and silence.

Murphy’s personal story is one that reaches out to deaf and hearing people alike. It reveals the toils of stigma, the effects on one’s identity, the toll it exacts on social life. However, several times through the book her story is interrupted by far less interesting theorising – about secrets, about the body’s involvement in communication, about stigma itself. The book is at times repetitive, and more attention from an editor would have eliminated the heart pantings and sweaty armpits and other physical twitches that Murphy has substituted for complex actions and emotional states. Similarly, there are some clumsy expressions and the occasional typo.

These issues aside, Murphy shines when she’s writing her

own experience. Her decades-long struggle to pass as not deaf is vividly portrayed, and late in the book she refers to ‘the vast and shocking amount of mental space I devoted to trying to be nondisabled’. She shows through her own personal history what it is to carry a secret that impinges on every single interaction, every single day of one’s life. Also illuminating is her account of the ‘intimacy’ of Auslan (Australian Sign Language), and her pleasure in learning to sign.

These days, deaf children are absorbed into mainstream

schools. Auslan is taught to both hearing and deaf people. One of the few positive features of the pandemic is the presence of someone signing alongside the politicians and medicos during their daily updates. Deafness is being brought out of the shadows and into the public realm. With these changes, and with personal stories like Fiona Murphy’s, deaf children of the future should enjoy lives free of burdensome attempts to pass. g Andrea Goldsmith’s most recent novel is Invented Lives (2019).

Marlin A boy appears at school early to lick the flagpole and speak different.

Scratch the ‘g’ from ‘listening’ like the girl he watches hang her beaded bag from the hook with all the grace he doesn’t know he heaps upon her.

At recess, the boy eats a golden delicious, seed and stem. Each instant a northswept southerner in Nonna’s stories, losing dialect.

Kids jigsaw around him; he stays still faster than they do. The sun sinks into its resin.

Seven bells. The girl he watches untense her hand, as if she almost imitates a marlin, but stops herself – how does she stop herself ? Why does he see her at her bag rubbing lanolin cream from a white jar on the webbing between fingers that understand him now?

This shared language must be rung in.

At lunch, the boy scrapes a beetle off a wattle bush and fills his ear. Screeches down the canal, barbed legs pricking towards the drum.

Anders Villani Anders Villani is a PhD student at Monash University and the author of Aril Wire (2018).

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25

Comment

A plague on all our houses How theatre companies are coping after lockdown

by Tim Byrne

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ames Shapiro, in his brilliant book 1606: William Shakespeare and the year of Lear (2015), notes the general reluctance of the Elizabethan theatre to deal directly with the subject of plague, despite its pressing relevance to audiences of the day.

He asks if this is ‘because it was bad for business to remind playgoers packed into theatres of the risks of transmitting disease or because a traumatised culture simply couldn’t deal with it?’ As our own theatre begins to emerge from pandemic, those twin concerns of risk and trauma loom large over the collective consciousness. Outbreaks that explode like spot fires around the country have sapped our confidence, and the gap between our desire to participate in live performance and our fear of community transmission still seems insurmountable.

It is an issue that national programmers of the performing arts have been wrestling with for an entire year. How can they make people safe – and make them feel safe – cheek by jowl in the enclosed spaces that are central to the theatregoing experience?

Beyond this, what kind of works do they believe audiences will want to see? Is a post-Covid theatre one of distraction and sleight of hand, of shiny sets and marquee names, or are audiences hungry for challenging art that pushes their boundaries – something they’ve never experienced before? This is an environment where the normal parameters of risk have been utterly upended. The theatre has always been a grappling in the dark, but suddenly it feels like a great litmus test – a way out, a way forward.

Before this torch is lit, the sheer scale of the devastation this disease has wrought must be faced. Deemed ineligible for JobKeeper, most workers employed in the industry were simply cut off, both from their livelihoods and from the artistic practice that gives artists’ lives meaning. As Arts Centre Melbourne’s CEO Claire Spencer puts it: ‘As an arts administrator, every ounce of your being is about getting shows on, and getting audiences in, so to take the decision to close, every cell in your body is screaming at you that it’s the wrong thing to do.’ On 15 March 2020, the Arts Centre did just that, closing Volt, the terrific triple bill from Australian Ballet, and Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s Saigon, one of the richest and most memorable productions we’ve seen from the Asia TOPA Festival. ‘It was heartbreaking. It was the only decision to make but it was so counter-intuitive,’ Spencer says, the inflection of grief still present in her voice almost a year on.

There is a palpable sense of anger there, too. Programmers watched in March, along with the rest of the country, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison listed sector after sector that would be receiving government support, without once mentioning the arts – as if an entire economic ecosystem, and the central pillar of our 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

cultural identity, simply didn’t exist. Spencer sounds almost resigned in response: ‘None of us were really surprised, which is the sad thing.’ When asked how she felt about the arts being locked out of JobKeeper, she is as direct as the CEO of a major arts organisation can be. ‘I felt profoundly disappointed, but also fortunate we are in Victoria, where the state government has a different view of the value of creative industries.’

Brett Sheehy, the departing artistic director of Melbourne Theatre Company, doesn’t hold back either. ‘I’ve been doing jobs similar to this for a couple of decades. It was the worst working experience of my life.’ He had to contact 161 artists and tell them the work he had engaged them to do in 2020 had to be cancelled, and that there was little the company could do financially to help them survive the year. ‘Dispiritedness’ is the word he uses. ‘The arts weren’t being mentioned anywhere in government; it wasn’t an industry even worth mentioning, let alone saving’ – all this while households around the nation ‘immediately turned to art – streaming, music, Netflix – without realising that everything that lifted their spirits, and from a mental health perspective literally saved lives, came from artists.’

While this bitterness might take longer than expected to subside, every programmer in the country is focused on the future, on how they can ensure people’s safety and excite them about the ongoing potential of the medium. In some ways, this has meant a rethinking of the role of the programmer and of the relationship between artist and audience. For Zohar Spatz, incoming artistic director of Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre Company, the lockdowns of 2020 enabled a re-evaluation of priorities.

‘A twenty-first-century, post-Covid world is going to need people to think about social value and sustainability, and I believe we [the company and the arts in general] can assist in nurturing creative thinking and empathy.’ Spatz sees a move away from ‘transactional experiences’ towards something ‘that makes people feel they’re a part of a community.’

Where fiscal restraint and rationalisation could be an expected response from the industry, La Boite is opting instead for radical investment, recently unveiling a new ‘artists company’ comprising twenty-two actors, directors, playwrights, designers, and technicians, who will collaborate on a slate of upcoming works. ‘We didn’t want to become a theatre company full of administrators. This way, we’ve become a company full of creative thinkers and makers.’ Spatz talks convincingly of La Boite as a home for artists, particularly local ones, and as a direct response to interstate travel restrictions amid a series of border closures, but also as a way of fostering ‘the ecology of the artistic sector’.

Another incoming artistic director, Lee Lewis – who assumed the reins at Queensland Theatre from Sam Strong in early 2020 – is just as mindful of the duty of care programmers have to the artistic communities from which they draw their talent and inspiration. To this end, she has programmed an entire year of productions, many of them with large casts. ‘We wanted to give opportunities to as many artists as possible, not just those we’d already commissioned in 2020. That was the thinking behind shows with larger casts.’ One of the biggest will be the première of the theatrical adaptation of Trent Dalton’s 2018 novel Boy Swallows Universe, a huge co-production with Brisbane Festival in association with QPAC. It is what Lewis describes as ‘playing chicken with a very big financial truck’, but it also represents that sense of hope, an expansiveness after a year of dearth. This full year of programming with ambitious large-scale work is, she admits, ‘largely a confidence exercise’.

Malthouse Theatre has also opted for radical optimism, mounting a single production of a new play – programmed, depending on the box office, to run over many months – that is unlike anything the company has attempted in the past. Because the Night is an interactive, multi-disciplinary work based on Hamlet (but set in a rural Australian town facing the collapse of its timber industry) that renders the Malthouse complex’s two main stage theatres, the Merlyn and the Beckett, unrecognisable. Thirty separate but interconnected rooms have been built, and two separate casts and crews employed, in what artistic director Matthew Lutton says is a direct response to Covid. ‘Because the Night is only possible because of the pandemic. We wouldn’t have thought of a show that engaged audiences in this way without this, shall we say, unfortunate prompt.’ One of the reasons for this is the limited number of people who can participate at any given time: only sixty tickets are sold for each performance.

‘It’s very much designed with social distancing in mind. In fact it’s become a creative parameter; it’s determined the architecture and the ways in which an audience might move about in it.’

If this notion feels familiar, it might be because it recalls UK company Punchdrunk’s famous site-specific hit, Sleep No More (2011), set in the abandoned McKittrick Hotel in the Meatpacking District of New York City. Lutton acknowledges the influence, even while pointing out that this show is text based, entirely original, and will no doubt fold the global trauma of Covid into its dramatic design.

Not everyone is taking the high-risk approach of La Boite and Malthouse. Spencer says that ‘although your instinct is just to open all the doors at once and tell people to come on in’, the larger organisations can’t as readily do this. Arts Centre Melbourne’s strategy is to reopen gradually and purposefully. ‘We started by opening our café “The Protagonist” out the front of the building.

Then we opened the [Sidney Myer Music] Bowl. Then the indoor venues will start to come back online.’ If this seems cautious, it is largely a question of contingencies, because ‘you have to build in flexibility, and allow room for change or disruption. You can’t do that if you’re running everything at full pelt.’

The level of confidence companies have in reopening depends largely on their location. Sydney Theatre Company mounted its first post-Covid show in September 2020, Angus Cerini’s Wonnangatta, and have since produced a hit production of The

Picture of Dorian Gray starring Eryn Jean Norvill, premièred Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s 1980 time-travel novel Playing Beatie Bow, and renovated its Wharf Theatre. Executive director Patrick McIntyre says the September opening was ‘important because we wanted to be there for the people who wanted us to be there. We felt, weirdly, that we were a part of a historical moment that people would remember. A moment we wanted to mark, in a way.’ This comment is echoed by Lewis, who called her first show ‘a light at the end of a global tunnel’.

One of the greatest dilemmas that has faced programmers – and an area with clear ideological disparity in the approaches taken – is the issue of reprogramming: how do you balance the natural inclination to mount works that were cancelled in 2020, as a way of honouring a commitment to the artists involved, with a desire to tell stories that speak directly to a changed world? If companies stage pre-pandemic work, does this represent a capitulation to the idea of theatre as a moribund art form; on the other hand, if they scrap that work entirely, what message does this send to the artists? It is a dilemma with no easy answers.

Queensland Theatre have brought back a number of shows scheduled for 2020, including Boy Swallows Universe (‘We had to bring that one back. It’s a celebration of our capacity as a theatre company to do a work of that scale’), along with plays like Anchuli Felicia King’s provocative and whip-smart White Pearl and Suzie Miller’s searing Prima Facie, which, if anything, feel more relevant one year on. At Sydney Theatre Company, all but one of the shows cancelled in 2020 will return in 2021. ‘Some of those shows were already in rehearsal and ready to go on stage,’ McIntyre says.

‘Others had sets that were designed and half built and partially rehearsed. It made sense to retain the work that had already been done, not to mention the money that had already been spent.’

In stark contrast, Malthouse Theatre is reviving none of its cancelled shows. Lutton can ‘foresee there are works we cancelled last year that will return, in 2022 and 2023. But we also have to take into account that those years will be very different to 2020.

We have to make sure that what is being programmed are the works of greatest urgency and not museum pieces.’ Theatre has often struggled with this concept of relevance, increasingly so in the age of social media and screen culture, an underlying fear that it may have become a repository for dead ideas. The pandemic – what amounts to a long suppression of the art form itself – seems to have sharpened the consternation.

At Arts Centre Melbourne, Spencer is adamant that none of the shows we will see this year are repeats from a cancelled season.

‘Collectively, we couldn’t think of any projects that are going ahead in 2021 that are a direct reprogramming from 2020.’ Which isn’t to say they are starting from scratch. ‘Artists are incredible in the way they can adapt; they can look at a situation and shift. So even though their project may have been announced, it can still be reimagined and presented in a very different way than when the idea was first conceived.’ Although the majority of artists whose shows were cancelled in 2020 will be returning, the shows they mount will, for the most part, be unrecognisable. ‘Born in a Taxi is a company that had a performance planned for the forecourt of the theatres’ building. That’s been completely changed.

They’re now doing roving zebras at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.’

Sheehy thinks this reconfiguration is perfectly natural, and AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

27

a healthy resetting of the theatrical imagination. ‘Everything is going to have to be put through a lens of social relevance. All of us programming around the country will be more conscious of the work being relevant to the times.’ MTC’s return to the main stage, Hannah Moscovitch’s Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, a charged exploration of power, gender, and sexual politics, is a case in point. ‘We have had two incontrovertible lines in the sand drawn in our culture within three years – Harvey Weinstein was the first, and George Floyd was the second – and neither of them have anything to do with Covid.’ It’s a reminder that, while the pandemic has ground the theatres to a halt, it won’t ultimately define the times. The great social revolutions underpinning the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter will have a far greater impact on theatre’s future concerns.

As for the kind of theatre that will attract people emerging from lockdown, it seems there is no easy answer there either, other than the sense that the pandemic will not become an organising principle. Sheehy remembers the conversations at MTC around this very point. ‘Should the work we do interrogate deeply the idea of isolation, of separateness? Or should we go the other way and program work that’s uplifting and hopeful?’ A survey of subscribers drew thousands of responses. The overwhelming consensus was ‘to do what we’ve always done. Give us the finest comedy, the deepest tragedy. Give us work that challenges us.’

Spatz found something similar when she orchestrated a kind of theatrical outreach program at La Boite, where company members directly called audiences, not just current subscribers, ‘but also those we may have lost along the way. What better time than

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28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

lockdown to have sixty-minute, one-on-one conversations with audiences?’ The results were galvanising. ‘We have a very young audience – most of them under thirty-five – and it was fascinating asking them what they wanted to see.’ Like the MTC audiences, they weren’t prescriptive; they didn’t cite particular writers or show a preference for specific genres. What they wanted was ‘to be part of something bigger, part of a bigger conversation, part of a community.’ Overall, they ‘want to see theatre that reflects what is impacting them right now’. The cancellation rather than mere postponement of their 2020 season means that La Boite’s slate of new work ‘will, by definition, be dynamic and relevant.

I’m excited because what will come out of La Boite in the next few years will be vital theatre.’

As for the ‘pandemic play’ – the piece of theatre that deals directly with Covid, its scale and its impact – are programmers anticipating or dreading it? Lutton is ‘not very interested in seeing a pandemic play that is mere mimicry, that simply plays out what we’ve all just experienced. I’m more interested in theatre that looks at the core undercurrents of the pandemic and finds creative solutions.’ Lewis, too, is far more interested in the idea of the indirect pandemic piece; she mentions two twentieth-century works that dealt with global trauma, in this case the horrors of war, in ways both subtle and subversive. ‘Noël Coward’s Hay Fever [1925] is a play totally informed by post-traumatic stress disorder. There are only old and young men in that play, and the millions killed in the war are tellingly absent. The comedy of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children is only possible when your audience has gone through that very direct trauma. They were sitting in the rubble of Berlin [in 1949] watching that play.’

Perhaps this is the key to Shapiro’s point about plague and the Elizabethans: how much of the dread in Macbeth, the malignancy of Iago, and the Grand Guignol of Titus Andronicus is a manifestation of the collective grief of a society where people were literally dying in the streets? Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet depicts the creation of Hamlet as an elegy to the son Shakespeare lost to the disease. As Lewis says, ‘It doesn’t have to be about Covid to be about Covid.’ McIntyre reminds us that ‘it doesn’t even have to be current. Great writers have looked back to the past to illuminate the present, to show us the world is connected not just through space but through time.’ It is the method Arthur Miller would use to such chilling effect in The Crucible (1953).

If theatre does respond directly to the pandemic, in the way that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1999) did to the AIDS crisis, it seems unlikely to be soon. The fear will naturally subside as theatregoing begins to feel normal again, but the trauma will linger and seep through our creative output for years to come.

In this way, theatre can be an act of communion, something ritualistic and ultimately healing. As Lewis expresses it, ‘art is intrinsically linked to the health of the cities. When the audience breathes, so the city breathes.’ True, but as Lutton says, ‘culturally we’re in shock and shock needs to be processed’. g Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.

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

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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Fiction

Swimming between boundaries Myriad stories from John Kinsella Thuy On

Pushing Back

by John Kinsella

C

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 336 pp

omprising more than thirty works of poetry, fiction, memoir, and criticism, John Kinsella’s prolific output is impressive,and this figure doesn’t include his collaborations with other artists. Here is a writer who swims between boundaries, experiments with form and content, and eludes easy categorisation.

His most recent novel, Hollow Earth (2019), was a foray into science fiction and fantasy, and his most recent poetry volume The Weave (2020), was co-written with Thurston Moore, founder of NYC rock group Sonic Youth.

Pushing Back is a further collection of short stories from the Western Australian writer. In several, the main title resonates: characters rebel in fear or anger. Chafing in non-compliance at the circumstances in which they find themselves, they refuse to resign themselves to the inevitable. Other stories feature stragglers in the thralls of alcohol and drug addiction, their lives in the doldrums because of their dependencies. Kinsella’s exploration of the push and pull of external forces and internal desires often provides the propulsive force of the narrative.

The opening salvo, ‘Having Kittens’, for instance, features a mechanic whose lanky frame and military background spares him the bullying his workmates must endure. When a harelipped bloke cops the brunt of the misbehaviour, the results are as unexpected as they are tragic. The victim’s eyes, never noticed by his tormentors, ‘were storms brewed out at sea, coming in over the coast, bringing mayhem’. Against the casual cruelty there is also a note of grace, the rescue of a drowning kitten from a waste oil pit.

But the mechanic’s saving of the creature is offset by his failure to intervene when a colleague is persecuted. It is this moral fuzziness (including his ambivalence about life with his new bride) that drives the story. He is the type of fellow who trusted internal combustion motors. There was clarity there; everything else was subject to confusion.

Straining but failing to connect is a common theme in this volume. When an American and an Australian meet on the Patras–Athens train, the reader anticipates a nascent love affair, but although there is a mutual frisson during their meandering conversation, once they alight the travellers’ roads diverge, simply a case of strangers meeting and moving apart. In another story, ‘The Watch’, a man offers his former partner a new watch in order to curry favour. This ticking talisman of good times past serves instead as a reminder of the silences between them, of familiar territory too fraught to be explored anew.

30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

Pushing Back contains thirty-five stories, some previously published. Given this number, it’s not surprising that the quality is uneven. Some tales seem sketchy and inconsequential; others read like sample chapters from a larger work. Others feel more coherent, discrete units. One of the more potent offerings is ‘Little Red Car’, which concerns a horror road trip involving a rag-tag group of city boys who share an interest in drugs and violence (the two are linked in their minds as ‘manifestations of choice and power’). On a whim they decide to head outback to frighten and possibly harm any unfortunates in their path. Over a dozen lines of speed, a few bongs, and lots of beer, they hoon along the highway towards the Nullarbor in their hatchback, which moves like ‘an angry pulse’. They meet their match in the most unlikely of potential victims, a pair of grey nomads with ‘fifty years of marriage, and fifty years of farming together, that carried a knowledge of isolation and the vulnerabilities it carried’. Equally satisfying is the denouement in ‘Barrows’, wherein a teenage girl quick-witted enough to fend for herself against three predatory boys has an unlikely ally: a castrated pig.

Kinsella’s stories in past collections have worried about the mental and physical health of children; here he continues to fret over them. Several tales deal empathetically with schoolyard bullying, while social ineptitude is yet another burden. The young artist in ‘The Purchase’ fails to understand the codes of a rarefied art world.

His mistakes ‘couldn’t be painted out’.

Kinsella is an avid environmentalist whose oeuvre is noted for its depiction of the natural world, of the flora and fauna of the landscape both tamed and wild. Almost every story in Pushing Back is a testament to his sensitivity to and invocation of place, mostly in and around his homeland in the Western Australian wheatbelt. In this book, you can marvel at the red-capped parrots twisting in the limbs of a jarrah tree, at rain falling like silver from granite rock faces, paperbark peeling like sunburnt skin blisters, and trees that ‘pulsate invisibly with heat-insects’. Kinsella’s ornithological interest is on vibrant display here, with many different birds flying between pages.

At his core, Kinsella is a poet who likes constraint and restraint.

Even in his longer works, be they novels or short fiction, there are flashes of imagistic brilliance. Metaphor and simile are deployed with a flourish, the river ‘was like fertility flowing through their marriage’; bats are ‘little vacuums of light’.

Had Pushing Back been winnowed, the stronger stories might have glistened in the light, but there is enough in this collection to solidify Kinsella’s reputation as a stalwart practitioner of the form. g Thuy On’s first book, a collection of poetry titled Turbulence, was published in 2020.

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Fiction

‘Rolling over so easily’ Steven Carroll’s take on Story of O Shannon Burns

O

by Steven Carroll

O

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 308 pp

n the back cover of O, we learn that the protagonist of the novel, Dominique, lived through the German occupation of France, participated in the Resistance, relished its ‘clandestine life’, and later wrote an ‘erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame’, which became the real-life international bestseller and French national scandal, Histoire d’O (1954).

‘But what is the story really about,’ the blurb asks, ‘Dominique, her lover, or the country and the wartime past it would rather forget?’

From the outset, then, readers are primed to look for signs that the occupation of France, as Dominique experiences it, mirrors an erotic novel that foregrounds wilful slavery, humiliation, and torture, and whose protagonist is offered up as a prostitute, apparently for her own benefit. And we don’t have to wait very long: the occupiers of France are quickly identified as dominating presences – the narrator of O calls one of them ‘master’ before Dominique contemplates France under occupation: ‘Rolling over so easily like the whore in the illegal posters pasted up all around the city that call on everyone to rise up and fight: France, a tart with her legs open, gazing up at the sky while a foreign army marches all over her.’ Steven Carroll is not concealing anything here, we think; there is a straightforward connection to Story of O. The question posed on the blurb is half-answered.

A reader who is familiar with Story of O might also know that its real author, Anne Desclos (1907–98), claimed it was written as a kind of ‘love letter’ to the editor and critic Jean Paulhan, who also happened to describe Story of O as a love letter in his remarkable essay ‘Happiness in Slavery’, first published as a preface to the novel. (From Paulhan’s essay: ‘Without doubt, Story of O is the most ardent love letter any man has ever received.’ From Carroll’s novel: ‘And has a man,’ he solemnly asks her, ‘ever received such an ardent love letter?’) The conceit that drives O is that this origin story is only half-true, that Desclos’s novel was also inspired by larger, latent forces.

Across Carroll’s fiction we encounter the imperative to grasp the moment and the world we are tangled up in because they are full of promise and quickly pass us by. Instead of working his way up to this insight, which is his typical strategy, Carroll uses it as a point of departure in O. Dominique sees herself as a ‘forest creature’, conventional on the outside but privately and inwardly wild. She is a cat-like huntress who yearns for the full range of human experience and chases after it boldly. As a young girl, she

finds her father’s stash of erotic literature in his library, which becomes a ‘private cathedral containing all things human: the savage and the sublime in equal measure, and equally mesmerising.

She absorbed it all.’ She believes in the body, in what it knows and where it directs us.

Dominique is an untamed seductress in search of an equal, someone who can return her passion and participate in her fantasies. Enter Jean Paulhan, a prominent literary editor who looks at the world with wonder. They meet under occupation, when time is out of joint and everything is heightened, and they both believe in France and literature. There is an element of the spy novel in these early sections – quick, suggestive dialogue, the double manoeuvre of revealing while concealing – which produces a ‘new intensity’ and ‘urgency’ for the protagonist and serves to drive the novel forward dynamically. Dominique discovers that she has a gift for improvisation and secrecy, for playing serious games that are not unlike the games of seduction she plays instinctively.

For the first half of the novel, echoes of Story of O enrich the action; Carroll uses the language, themes, and imagery of the original to infuse different scenarios with additional meanings.

Dominique experiences the guilt and shame of watching on passively while the occupiers terrify the occupied, and she comes to understand what it’s like to be bound, blindfolded, at the mercy of unknown forces. She decides that ‘We deserve to be bound.

We deserve to be beaten ...’ for failing to act when the masters exert control over helpless, terrified victims. When she asks Paul to beat her, it is in direct response to the guilt and shame of occupation.

Story of O is the kind of bracing novel that compels readers to look squarely at things they’d prefer not to see, or at least not to be seen seeing. Carroll writes an altogether different kind of fiction that is quietly concerned with the power and beauty of ordinary life and the generative power of memory and art, all rendered in sensitive and recognisably ‘literary’ prose. On the face of it, a Carroll novel about the genesis and afterlife of Story of O is a curious prospect, and O lives up to expectations. It’s weird, in good ways and bad: the generic slipperiness (spy novel, love story, historical fiction) enlivens much of the first half – | we don’t quite know what we’re reading or where it is all headed – and the subject offers ample opportunities to gesture at contemporary brands of censoriousness or taking offence with appropriate contempt.

But O suffers from an amplified version of already-prominent elements of Carroll’s fiction: repetition (of phrasing, image, theme, metaphor) and the impulse to make everything explicit. This is a wonderfully inclusive habit, since even the most distracted reader cannot fail to keep up with the action or miss the thematic gist.

But it can also be jarring, and the strategy is badly overplayed in O. From the surprisingly unsurprising final sections to the concluding ‘Notes on the Novel’, we are treated to a rearticulation of something that is obvious from the start. Carroll employs the grammar of swelling music as the novel putters out, extracting as much sentiment as can be mined from the novel’s stellar beginnings, but the effect is much like a protracted attempt to conjure an orgasm that never arrives. g Shannon Burns is a former ABR Patrons’ Fellow.

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Fiction

Addressing identity Stories of present-day Tasmania Anthony Lynch

Born Into This

by Adam Thompson

W

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 210 pp

hen as a boy I listened to football on the radio, I would often hear mention of David Harris, a skilful midfielder who played for Geelong and Geelong West respectively in what were then the VFL and VFA. Harris was mostly known as ‘Darky’, not ‘David’. Recently, thanks to a YouTube interview, I learnt that Harris’s parents were Lebanese Australians. While in the interview Harris did not express offence, one can only wonder about the effect on him of this nickname – one he’d had since his own boyhood – based on the colour of his skin.

I was reminded of Harris when reading ‘Sonny’, a compelling story in Adam Thompson’s début collection, Born Into This. The narrator tells of his Aboriginal friend Sonny, a gifted footballer from Launceston. In a fit of anger one day on the football field, the narrator calls his friend ‘Darky’; to his shame and regret, this offensive term sticks. Worse names – all clearly pejorative – follow, and the longer-term effects haunt both Sonny and the narrator.

Both are diminished by this racist name-calling. The story has implications beyond football (truth-telling, sorrow), but seems all the more pertinent after Eddie McGuire’s extraordinary claim that the leak of a report revealing systemic racism marked a ‘proud day’ for the Collingwood Football Club. As the sorry white narrator in Thompson’s story states: ‘Truth is, it was me who was small and insecure. I was the darky.’

Thompson, an Aboriginal (Pakana) author from Launceston, has written sixteen stories for Born Into This. ‘Sonny’ isn’t the only one told by a character who repents his actions or words.

‘Aboriginal Alcatraz’ and ‘Black Eye’ both have narrators who variously regret their actions or their failure to act. To this we might even add the hardened, unyielding Elder in the opening story, ‘The Old Tin Mine’. Thompson works for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and is a passionate advocate for Aboriginal culture, heritage, and land care. The narrators in the above three stories all hold supervisory positions involving protecting culture and the environment. Their grip on each job is tenuous – one bad error and they’re unemployed. But in each case their main fear is not job loss or, for serious neglect, even jail, but shame when facing down Aboriginal people and community. Thompson’s cutting stories finely articulate responsibilities around cultural load, history, and land care, and fear of failure.

All the stories address Aboriginal identity directly or indirectly, with some tackling the vexed issue of when and how Aboriginality might be claimed. We hear of non-Aboriginal people 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

opportunistically claiming Aboriginal status (‘Descendant’ and the title story), and of families in which one sibling proudly upholds his identity while another, despite having greater material comforts, is in denial (‘Bleak Conditions’, ‘Morpork’).

The title story, ‘Descendant’, and ‘The Blackfellas from Here’ all feature strong-willed women or girls who take on activist roles, promoting heritage and environment or addressing dispossession in their respective stories. ‘Summer Girl’ also has a female protagonist, but here, for the Aboriginal male narrator, she is a well-meaning white girl with limited insight and even less agency: ‘You look at me as a child does a parent, silently begging me to preserve your belief in the good of the world.’ The collection as a whole depicts primarily, and most convincingly, a masculinist world – one of men and boys doing it tough, grappling with identity. Most, nonetheless, have recourse to the riches of culture and heritage, which brings meaning in the face of adversity, and definition of selfhood.

These are potent, revealing stories borne of hard-won experience. A commonality of voice characterises many narratives, with young female protagonists – this may be partly explained by them being more articulate than their male counterparts – given to speech-making. Men and boys tend to be less vocal, sometimes awkward, fumbling for words. This does not, however, preclude effective communication, where a nod, a gesture, a few mumbled words convey all that’s necessary. ‘Aboriginal Alcatraz’ and ‘Time and Tide’ are two excellent examples, with men and boys sharing strong bonds and mutual understanding while maintaining traditional practices such as muttonbirding. The latter story is a particularly affecting portrait of a father and son returning to a remote bay and finding their birding practice undone by climate change and their situation worsened by the greed of an elderly white man – both legacies of colonialism.

With the protagonists often physically isolated – emblematic, sometimes, of dispossession – many settings, particularly those on Bass Strait Islands, bring to mind another Tasmanian-based practitioner: photographer Ricky Maynard.

These are traditional realist stories, closer in form to those of Melbourne writer Tony Birch than, say, to the ‘Aboriginal realist’ (as opposed to the Western notion of magical realist) stories of Ellen van Neerven, in whose story ‘Pearl’, for example, a character literally takes flight with the wind. Thompson’s collection does, however, include the playful story ‘Your Own Aborigine’, set in a near future when non-Indigenous Australians must individually ‘sponsor’ Aboriginal welfare recipients, but the setting is an archetypal one – a group of male tradies gathered around a bar. The language throughout is simple and direct, with occasional (if deliberate) clichés (‘scary as hell’; ‘evil red glow’) offset by vivid similes that ignite the page: ‘stray hairs, like fibres in an optic lamp’; ‘my heritage … bulldozed, smoothed over like warm butter on a crusty scone’.

With Born Into This, Adam Thompson’s stories of present-day Tasmania provide a powerful response to trauma that dates from the horrors of the Black War and continues with ongoing ‘celebrations’ of Australia/Invasion Day. The author has much to say, and I look forward to his next collection. g Anthony Lynch’s books are the short story collection Redfin (2007) and the poetry collection Night Train (2013).

Fiction

The beauty of the ordinary Stories of loss and devastation Elizabeth Bryer

Smokehouse

by Melissa Manning

S

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 264 pp

mokehouse is an engagingly constructed collection of interlinked stories set in small-town, yet globally connected, settler Tasmania. The volume, which is focused on personal crises and family breakdown, is bookended by the two parts of the novella that lends the collection its name. This splicing is an inspired decision: the end of Part One keeps us turning the pages through the subsequent, fully realised short stories; with Part Two we feel rewarded whenever we spot a character first encountered in a story that seemed discrete.

Smokehouse opens with a drive from Bellerive to Kettering, where the landmarks of the characters’ world (Mount Wellington, Tasman Bridge, Hobart Regatta grounds, Salamanca Market) are registered. Nora is dissatisfied with her life and irritated by her husband’s attempts at tenderness. Their decision to purchase land in Kettering, where they plan to build a house for themselves and their two daughters, offers her hope: she wonders ‘who she might become, whether this place, these people, might change things.

Might render this life enough.’

Other stories, including ‘Boy’, ‘Bruny’, and ‘Stone’, feature similarly dissatisfied women, whether as central characters or as the offstage cause of pain in the men they leave behind. They often view their men as unreliable, forever promising to finish projects; the men, for their part, are angry at the unreliable women for leaving.

In this, the stories act as riffs on the same set of circumstances, so much so that at times the echoes are uncanny. While Nora ‘longs to feel the margins of herself ’ in ‘Smokehouse’, in ‘Bruny’ a burnt house is remembered by Arlene as ‘the one place on the island where she felt seamless’, whereas the big city was where she could ‘let her margins blur’.

Being good with one’s hands and with practical tasks is prized.

Nora’s feelings of inadequacy when it comes to building the house contribute to her resentment and imperil her self-esteem.

According to the set of values quickly established in the book, we understand that Ollie, for whom she leaves her husband, is a good man because he sets craypots and bakes bread. He gently initiates Nora’s hostile daughters into these activities, eventually winning them over. Rob, in ‘Chainsaw’, teaches his daughter Hannah to fish, kayak, and whittle things from driftwood. These instances are not only markers of the moral order that governs the world of Smokehouse; they are offered as examples for how to lead a good life, how to be awake to the beauty of the ordinary, of its capacity to ground and centre us.

The fulcrum on which all these stories balance is personal devastation. We encounter characters still in the thick of grief after losing someone, whether to death, illness, or drugs. Often this loss serves as a moment and a perspective from which to survey the rest of life, a way to apprehend time. The nonsequential structures of ‘Nao’, ‘Bruny’, and ‘Chainsaw’ subtly foreground the power of memory, the way grief can mean the past lives on in the present. Always, the focus is on family, so much so that the friends of Nora whom we learn about in Part Two of the novella come as a surprise. It is not that these friendships are unconvincing, more that the expectations set up by the concerns of the other stories make them feel inconsequential.

The stories act as riffs on the same set of circumstances, so much so that at times the echoes are uncanny Throughout Smokehouse and particularly ‘Faal’, it becomes increasingly easy to predict the ruptures that will puncture happiness. Admittedly, this is always a challenge when bringing sole-authored stories together in one volume: while repetition means that certain concerns get a chance to resonate, at the same time it can highlight any author tics. In Smokehouse, the fact that focus is so trained on the personal, on family relationships, is a limitation, especially when viewed in light of characters’ interactions with the setting. People are at liberty to choose where they live ‘for the view’, or they decide to move from interstate ‘on a whim’. While making such decisions is ostensibly reflective of the tree-change settler experience, these characters are also remarkably uncurious about the history of the land they are living on. Kettering, for example, is so close to putalina (Oyster Cove), where Aboriginal Tasmanians who had survived the forced removal to Flinders Island lived after the island settlement was closed, yet Oyster Cove is absent from the collection’s otherwise detailed imagining of this part of southern Tasmania.

This is why the focus on grief feels blinkered. There is no exploration of grief at the level of community, society, or environment; no sense that it can be brought about by causes beyond personal tragedies. It starts to feel like a burying of the head in the proverbial sand. Tellingly, I was most engaged by the final third of Part One of the novella, where the narrative explores the complex dance carried out by various members in the reconfiguration of a family. They subverted my expectations by reaching a fragile happiness. Disappointingly, Part Two did not pick up where Part One left off, instead jumping forward some fifteen years to another moment of high drama.

Yet it would be remiss of me not to emphasise that the personal grief and family breakdown is narrated with emotional maturity. The unfussy prose is an apt vehicle, and there are no false notes. It creates thematic harmony across the collection, making it a meditation on how we cope, or fail to cope, in the face of personal loss; on the complexities of relationships that lead to loss, or of those nurtured in its wake. g Elizabeth Bryer is a writer and translator. Her first novel is From Here On, Monsters (2019).

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Fiction

Taking the temperature Four new novels Anna MacDonald

T

o survey concurrent works of art is to take the temperature of a particular time, in a particular place. And the temperature of the time and place in these four début Australian novels? It is searching for a sense of belonging, and, at least in part, it’s coming out of western Sydney in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots. All four novels are set in New South Wales, three of them in suburban Sydney. Each is concerned with who is entitled to land and the stories we tell while making ourselves at home in the world, sometimes at the expense of others.

The Price of Two Sparrows, by Viva La Novella Prize-winning author Christy Collins (Affirm Press, $29.99 pb, 288 pp), considers who is permitted access to land and to what end. In this book, the disputed site borders a conservation area and becomes hotly contested when the local Islamic community purchases it with the intention of building a mosque. But Collins’s novel, set in an unnamed coastal Sydney suburb between 2004 and 2007, is not a simple story of far-right opposition. Instead, she has cleverly complicated that well-worn narrative and sought to represent multiple sides of the debate. As Julian, a journalist who covers the dispute, says: ‘You can tell a story in many different ways.’

Ornithologist Heico Brandsma first opposes the mosque development because it neighbours a site where he and his colleagues have been monitoring migratory birds. While there is anti-Islamic feeling among some in the community – a feeling that intensifies over the three-year battle, especially in the wake of the Cronulla riots – and while these people (‘suddenly bird-friendly’) do latch on to Heico’s campaign to legitimate their protest, Collins’s focus is elsewhere: on Heico; on Salema, the architect of the proposed mosque; on Nahla, a new member of the Islamic community; and on Julian.

Central to this dispute is the question of belonging. For Heico, himself the son of a migrant, the migrating birds belong here.

Salema sees the architectural project as an opportunity to provide a home for the Islamic community, and her design is intended to reflect the landscape around the new building, to ensure that it too belongs there. For Nahla, the mosque also offers the hope of a home. ‘Without the mosque,’ she tells the local council, ‘we can’t really be here, we can’t grow here, because there is not room for our roots.’ And across these ideas of belonging cut the words of Aunty Jill, a traditional custodian of the land, who gives the long view: ‘The land and the waters will be here when we’re all long gone and that is the lens we need to see this through.’

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lison Gibbs’s novel Repentance (Scribe, $32.99 pb, 304 pp) is similarly concerned with conflicting claims over land ‘ownership’, and like Collins she is careful to view such narratives of entitlement through a wide lens. Set in 1976 in Repentance, a small timber town in the Great Dividing Range, this novel relates the escalating conflict between residents, mill workers, and environmental activists over the logging of oldgrowth forest. Like Collins, Gibbs is committed to presenting all points of view. As Joe Spender, a local saw doctor, says, ‘we all love this place, don’t we, in our different ways’, and Gibbs captures these different attachments to place well.

Much of this novel is narrated from the perspective of two thirteen-year-old girls: Joanne Parmenter, whose family have lived in Repentance for generations; and Melanie Curtis, daughter of one of the ‘hippies’ who have moved into the town and are protesting against a new road that will allow loggers access to parts of the forest, in what mill proprietor Sandy Mitchell describes as a ‘routine management operation’. Joanne and Melanie’s starcrossed friendship sets the tone for the town’s mixed feelings about the forest and who ‘owns’ it. Gerard Ansiewicz, a ‘hippie’ to the locals, is a botanist and militant force behind the growing protest movement. His and Sandy’s attitudes towards the land are wholly at odds. Where Sandy describes trees as ‘carabeens’ or saw logs, and values them according to their ‘grain’, Gerard sees ‘a magnificent tree that was already a century old when Captain Cook sailed past here’. And where both the mill workers and the environmentalists argue over ‘our forest’, the local Aboriginal community speaks of ‘care for country’. ‘Joanne found this an odd thing to say. Whose country: my country, our country?’

But, as Aunty Jill makes clear in The Price of Two Sparrows, beneath all of these different ways of valuing Repentance and its surrounding forest, the land and the non-human creatures that inhabit it persist: ‘All of this continues, whether people are there or not, with or without the Latin labels and the metaphors we apply.’

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t first, it might appear that Stuart Everly-Wilson’s novel Low Expectations (Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 320 pp ) differs from those of Collins and Gibbs, with their community-minded approach to place. Low Expectations is an irreverent Bildungsroman chronicling the coming of age of fifteenyear-old Devon Destri: by his own account a ‘fucked-up faulty body, [with] a rape-victim lying idiot of a mother and rapist father’, who is hell-bent on avenging himself and his best friend, Big Tammy, against ‘pet bully’ classmate Peter Novotny. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is Destri’s favourite book; his motto, borrowed from Joe Gargery, is: ‘On the rampage, Pip, off the rampage, Pip – such is life!’ With his ‘wrathful, seething, sulphurous, molten fury’, Destri is definitely on the rampage, and he sets out to record his story of revenge despite the general assumption that he is ‘hard of speaking’.

The question of belonging and the ability to tell your own story, on your own terms, is narrower in Low Expectations, which is narrated by Destri ‘without any extraneous unnecessary shit.

Like objectivity.’ But despite Destri’s best efforts, his revenge narrative is deeper than he realises, incorporating the lives of his mother, his grandfather, and the now-dead industrial complex of

the brickworks in the western Sydney suburb of Auburn, where the Destris have lived and worked for generations.

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ike Low Expectations, much of Kavita Bedford’s Friends and Dark Shapes takes place around western Sydney (or the idea of it). As in The Price of Two Sparrows, this is Sydney in the aftermath of the Cronulla riots. Bedford and her unnamed narrator – a freelance journalist – seek to contest media representations of the west as a site of ‘gang violence and Islamic radicalisation’. Bedford is writing against the clickbait journalism that sees only ‘conflict’, ‘pain’, and a ‘refugee angle’ in the story of a vibrant Syrian woman who has established her own fashion movement in suburban western Sydney. She complicates any stereotypical ascription of identity, the sort that asks of the novel’s Australian-Indian narrator what it is like ‘growing up’ in Australia but only wants to hear ‘what it’s like being brown and a woman’.

Bedford explores the question of belonging, but where Collins, Gibbs, and Everly-Wilson focus their narratives upon one particular place – a development site, a forest, a neighbourhood where old grudges die hard – she takes on a city in its entirety: Sydney. Friends and Dark Shapes turns its lens onto diverse views

of Sydney and reveals a compellingly complex place. From the outset, Bedford’s narrator is inhabiting uncomfortable territory.

A year after her father’s death, she moves into a share house on ‘The Block’, a once-notorious part of Redfern now undergoing gentrification. The narrator and her housemates live precariously according to the laws of the gig economy, working multiple, often freelance jobs, and The Block – with its dark history and shifting terrain – amplifies this precarity. From their shared home, the narrator and her friends feel their allegiances torn between the ‘layers’ of the neighbourhood: the ‘Indigenous community, the housing commission folk, the students, the young professionals’.

But, as Bedford seems to suggest, this layering of community, of histories and identities, of ways of belonging (or not), is not something to be afraid of.

As on the site of the proposed mosque in The Price of Two Sparrows, as in Repentance, as in the Destri family history and for all their Low Expectations, Bedford shows us that it is this very layering that gives a place a language of its own and which is ‘all around us if we choose to read it’. g Anna MacDonald is the author of an essay collection, Between the Word and the World (2019), and a novel, A Jealous Tide (2020).

Literary Studies

Life as a sliced loaf

A masterclass in short-story writing Robert Dessaix

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In which four dead Russians give us a masterclass in writing and life

by George Saunders

‘I

Random House $34.99 pb, 422 pp

consider myself more a vaudevillean than a scholar,’ George Saunders writes cheekily in his introduction to this collection. Yes, he is indeed a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University in upstate New York, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, and a regular in the pages of the New Yorker, but in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain he is first and foremost a vaudevillean: in seven short acts he sings, dances, and acts the comedian.

According to Martin Amis, ‘all writers who are any good are funny’, even Kafka and Tolstoy, and he has a point. Saunders may not be quite vicious enough to qualify as ‘any good’ in Amis’s terms, but he is at least unfailingly sharp and good-humoured.

Each of these seven acts is a masterclass in short-story writing based on a famous Russian short story from ‘the high-water period of the form’ (1830s to the early twentieth century). It’s an outstanding performance, if not quite a dazzling one – after all, he’s not Nabokov and he knows no Russian (and it shows).

Nor is it a flashy one à la Amis, who works the crowd on the very subject of short fiction in Inside Story (2020). (Life, says Amis, is not a novel but a ‘sliced loaf of short stories’.) Yet it’s much more than a simply entertaining performance: every sentence is enlivening. The patter can sometimes be irritating (his American conviction that deep down everyone will want what he wants from a story, not to mention the odd ‘jeez’, ‘fuck’, ‘dang’, and use of ‘per’ to mean ‘in the opinion of ’). However, Saunders usually irritates in a productive, oysterish sort of way: something inside you starts to sparkle as you engage with him.

These classes are frequently illuminating as well, not so much about Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Chekhov, about whom he has little to say that’s new and quite a lot that’s daffy, but about how the best short fiction is made and why it’s the best. (Cocking a refreshing snook at fashionable taboos, Saunders has no more problem with ideas such as ‘best’ than he does with arguing about a writer’s intentions.)

Saunders disarmingly believes in ‘universal laws of fiction’.

In accordance with these laws, a good short story is ‘ruthlessly efficient’ (every syllable advances the story entertainingly), details are specific (the cat in the window is white and asleep, not just a cat), and, crucially, energy is created at the beginning of the story and is transferred, with escalating dynamism, into a different, unexpected kind of energy at the end, ‘like a bucket of water headed for a fire’. It’s the escalation that keeps you turning the pages.

As Saunders remarks, the most urgent question for any writer is what makes her reader keep reading (Saunders always uses the feminine pronoun as the default third-person singular pronoun), eager for the final transfer of energy. This is all bracing stuff.

For example, alone and miserable on a fine spring morning, Marya in Chekhov’s story ‘In the Cart’ is ripe for transformation.

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We have character, we have the bucket of water, we expect story.

Then a happy, unmarried landowner joins her on the road. Is he the fire that will need to be put out? (No, but we read on, agog.)

In ‘Alyosha the Pot’, Tolstoy gives Alyosha (a ‘stick figure’, as Saunders notes) the defining attribute of cheerful obedience.

This will need to be put to the test. When he falls off a roof and lies dying, it is. Cheerful obedience is transformed into another, spiritual kind of energy – unconvincingly from Saunders’ point of view. His political views are close to Tolstoy’s in one regard: the edifice of comfortable living rests on a foundation of human misery (‘the behemoth of capitalism’, with its ‘malformed detritus’ of suffering people), but he is no Tolstoyan in his views on what to do about it. He cannot accept the conclusion he believes Tolstoy wants him to reach at the end of ‘Alyosha the Pot’: that Alyosha was right to live and die without complaint.

Saunders usually irritates in a productive, oysterish sort of way Saunders’ text is peppered with little interrogatory coups de foudre, forcing the reader to ask herself a few Big Questions. Why do we read? Why do we write? Is fiction a moral-ethical tool (as Saunders believes the Russians saw it)? What were we ‘put here’ to accomplish? But ‘the million-dollar question’ is: what makes a reader keep reading? What do we care about? Unless you can come up with some sort of answer to it, there’s no point in your writing.

When it’s put to Bill Buford, fiction editor at the New Yorker, he’s quoted as saying: ‘Well, I read a line. And I like it … enough to read the next.’ That’s pithy, but Saunders actually has much more interesting answers to the question. For instance, he suggests that fiction is ‘the most effective mind-to-mind communication ever devised’. Taken literally, this is deliciously provocative. Might it also be true?

These essays are not scholarly readings of seven Russian stories, but are meant to help us read and write better. Many of Saunders’ insights are inspiring. I would argue, however, that his reading of Gogol in particular is seriously wide of the mark. He seems to want ‘The Nose’ (of all things) to ‘add up’. Gogol’s writing is absurd, grotesque, surreal, an iteration of the Ukrainian folktale – it does not ‘add up’. Gogol cannot be ‘improved’, either, as Saunders avers, by being made less sexist, clumsy, or ‘graceless’.

He will just be made more 2021 upstate New York. Gogol does not imply that ‘miscommunication is … at the heart of all human suffering’, as Saunders would like him to. In ‘The Nose’, Kovalyov’s nose, which vanishes inexplicably from his face to reappear in a barber’s breakfast bun, does not represent his ‘wild inner spirit’ (since he doesn’t have one), but, on the contrary, his obsession with social status. Detached from his face, his nose has a rank Kovalyov can only dream of.

Saunders’ own dream is of a world where ‘there’s a vast underground network for goodness at work in the world’, ‘assholes’ are not allowed to remain assholes (as they are in Tolstoy’s stories), and writers can be taught to find ‘the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves’. He dreams of a world in which any sign of ‘sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

derivative’ attitudes and other moral failings in a story can be eliminated, making it ‘(always) become a better story’. He imagines we all share this dream or would like to. This is heart-warming but will lead to stunted readings of nineteenth-century Russian prose. He’s best, by the way, on Turgenev.

Although Saunders does all he can to get good advice on tricky points of translation, the English-language versions we’re offered of these stories all too often creak and need polishing. All the same, George Saunders has written a marvellously readable and instructive book. He says he hopes it will have ‘lit us up’, although he expects us to rebel against his views. It certainly has lit me up, and I do rebel. And I’m going to read it again. g Robert Dessaix lectured in Russian literature at the ANU and UNSW before becoming a full-time writer. His books include A Mother’s Disgrace, partly set in the USSR, and Twilight of Love, which focuses on the life and works of Ivan Turgenev. His latest book is The Time of Our Lives.

Publishing

‘Objects of readerly desire’ Some very different book editors Susan Sheridan

Literary Lion Tamers: Book editors who made publishing history

by Craig Munro

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Scribe $29.99 pb, 274 pp

raig Munro’s latest book shines a spotlight on the work of some very different Australian book editors. It begins in the 1890s, when A.G. Stephens came into prominence as literary editor of The Bulletin’s famous Red Page. It continues through the trials and tribulations of P.R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen in publishing and radical politics in the interwar period and his internment during the war for his association with the Australia First Movement. Literary Lion Tamers then moves on to Beatrice Davis’s long career as a professional book editor with Angus & Robertson after World War II. It concludes with Rosanne Fitzgibbon, with whom Munro developed fiction and poetry lists at the University of Queensland Press.

These literary editors are lion tamers in the sense that they took on some of the most unlikely manuscripts and turned them into gargantuan novels of unprecedented and inimitable style: Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903), tamed by A.G. Stephens; Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938), whipped into shape by Inky Stephensen, and Eve Langley’s The Pea-Pickers (1942), rescued by Beatrice Davis. They did not so much tame their authors as train them to jump through the hoops necessary to bring the works

of their wild imaginations into the public world of books. For to The Bulletin, requesting publishing advice, Stephens replied instance, Furphy was asked to provide or pay for two typed copies that the book was fit to be an Australian classic and offered of his 1,125 handwritten pages. Hard up as he was, he bought his Furphy detailed information about the practicalities of book own typewriter and spent the best part of a year laboriously typing publishing, asking whether he would share the financial risk of publication. In response to this, it seems, Furphy invited Stephens it out himself in his backyard shed in Shepparton.

Both Stephens and Stephensen had not only to edit massive to reread the manuscript, ‘ruthlessly drawing your blue pencil manuscripts but also to drum up a publisher. Neither of them across every sentence, paragraph or page which offends your went to Angus & Robertson, which was about the only local book literary judgement’ – an open invitation, if ever there was one! publisher worthy of the name in those days. Furphy’s Such Is Life We then learn that the book was finally published in 1903, six years after it first arrived on Stephens’s was eventually published by the Bulledesk, with emendations so significant tin Company, and Herbert’s Capricorthat recent Furphy scholars (quoted nia by a later Sydney journal, The Pubby Munro) judge that it changed the licist, where Stephensen was employed. novel’s centre of gravity and subdued This mouthpiece of the pro-fascist its language (as well as introducing Australia First Movement was owned errors). How frustrating if, like me, you

by W.J. Miles, father of the famous Bea are not a Furphy scholar and know only Miles, the prototype of Kate Grenville’s that Furphy himself removed two long character Lilian in her novels Lilian’s chapters, which were later published Story (1985) and Dark Places (1994). posthumously in book form as Rigby’s Literary Lion Tamers is an enterRomance (1921) and The Buln-Buln and taining story that picks up on dozens of the Brolga (1948). What was Stephens’s additional dramatis personae on its way editorial advice to the author of this through the careers of these editors. anticipated classic? What exactly did There are other authors: Shaw Neilson this literary lion tamer do with his and Steele Rudd were among Steblue pencil? How did Furphy feel phens’s notable discoveries; Stephensen about it? edited and ghostwrote books for Frank Literary Lion Tamers offers an Clune for many years; Davis took on a unusual perspective on the Australistormy relationship with Herbert when an novel as seen through the lens of she took on his second novel, Soldiers’ book publishing history. This is a topic Women (1961), and befriended another about which Craig Munro is vastly eccentric writer, Ernestine Hill, as well knowledgeable, having co-edited (with as maintaining more conventional ediRobyn Sheahan-Bright) Paper Emtorial relationships with literary novelA.G. Stephens, 1906 pires: A history of the book in Australia ists such as Thea Astley. And there are (National Library of Australia) 1946–2005 (2006) and published a various other characters, ranging from J.F. Archibald and Henry Lawson, through Norman Lindsay and history of UQP, as well as, more recently, a memoir of his own his son Jack, to Stephensen’s publishing adventures in London career as editor and publisher there (Under Cover: Adventures in with two literary mavericks of the 1920s, D.H. Lawrence (re- the art of editing [2015]).

Munro has also written a biography of Inky Stephensen, viled for his Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and Aleister Crowley (the a figure of fascination for him since the 1970s, when his own notorious satanist).

Davis’s long reign as the doyenne of literary publishing culmi- encounter with Xavier Herbert and the manuscript of Poor nates in the drama of takeovers that led to her moving to Nelson Fellow My Country led him back to the man who had brought in 1973, taking her most prized writers with her. Closer to the Capricornia into print. The young Munro had hoped to edit the present day, Fitzgibbon’s work with the likes of Peter Carey, Olga latter book for publication, but the irascible author responded to Masters, and Gillian Mears seems smooth sailing in comparison his critical suggestions by taking his book to another publisher. to the wild old days of Sydney publishing. As the first recipient This anecdote is typical of the way Munro has woven his stories of the Beatrice Davis Fellowship, an editorial residency in New together: his personal connection to the stories of his ‘lion tamers’, York, Fitzgibbon (who died in 2012) occupies an important place and sometimes to their authors as well, brings the book closer to in Munro’s story as an inheritor of the Davis tradition, as well the mode of memoir than to history-writing. It’s a most engaging as a representative of the many fine women editors who came to read, bound to send you back to the biographies of these editors, as well as to the massive Australian novels and other works they dominate literary publishing in Australia.

In concluding his story, Munro eloquently describes the brought to print. g work of editors as ‘transforming raw manuscripts into objects of readerly desire’. At times I wanted to know more about what such Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanan editorial transformation involved. Take the case of Furphy’s ities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Such Is Life. When the first-time author sent his vast manuscript Fiction of Thea Astley (2016) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

37

Biography

The pain-eater

The enigmatic life of a loser Alex Cothren

Grimmish

by Michael Winkler

H

Westbourne Books $27.99 pb, 213 pp

ave you ever noticed how boxing matches invariably deflate into two breathless people hugging each other?

In pugilistic parlance, this is called a clinch. It is a defensive tactic, a way for fighters besieged by their opponent’s assault to create a pause and regain their equilibrium. And while it is beyond cliché for books to be hailed as knockouts or haymakers or other emptied expressions of victory, Michael Winkler’s Grimmish is the best literary clinch you’ll ever read. It is the honest account of a writer overmatched by his subject matter and left clinging on for dear life.

On the surface, Grimmish is the biography of one Joe Grim, an Italian who escaped poverty in Avellino for Philadelphia and the professional boxing circuit at the turn of the twentieth century.

Grim transcended an unspectacular win–loss record through his unique ability to endure massive amounts of physical punishment and remain standing. As word of this curious ‘pain-eater’ spread, Grim became ‘a spectacle rather than a fighter’, one who nonetheless managed to eke out a moderately lucrative career. He fought some of that era’s luminaries, including Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion. After pummelling Grim for six rounds and seventeen knockdowns in 1905, only to watch him flicker back to life like a trick candle, Johnson declared, ‘I just don’t believe that man is made of flesh and blood.’

After introducing Grim and his bizarre talent, Winkler zooms in on the boxer’s 1908–9 tour of Australia. For a year and a half, Grim crossed the continent flagellating himself on the gloves of second-rate scrappers such as George ‘Cobar Chicken’ Stirling, before being temporarily institutionalised in a Claremont asylum. The cause of Grim’s fragile mental health is blindingly obvious – try being the heavyweight circuit’s stress ball and see how your cognition trucks along – but the details of his stay are murky. This is because Winkler has only an admission slip and a few newspaper snippets with which to recreate such a pivotal moment in his subject’s life. When the research well dries up, Winkler is left lamenting the ‘many parts of Grim’s Australian adventure that are undocumented and must remain unknown’.

To better spelunk these submerged facets of Grim’s past, Winkler turns to fiction, sprinkling the book with short stories about Grim that vary widely in tone and perspective but that are equally compelling. The descriptions of Grim’s matches are enlivened by Winkler channelling the fruity sports-journo language of the era, with a boxer’s eyes ‘like raisins pushed deep into 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

dough’ and punches landing like ‘a shovel hitting a watermelon’.

There are also quieter moments in which we get a sense of how denuded rural Australia would have seemed to an Italian Catholic, such as when Grim endures ‘a dry husk of a church service.

Not much ritual, no Latin, no magic.’ Elsewhere, Grim recedes into the background as scenes of terrible violence gush around him, most unforgettably during a pub headbutting competition that leaves its participants ‘maroon and puce, livid with battery’.

Even when these stories check realism at the door – one involves the torture of a talking goat – their ruminations on pain connect them back to the real-life Grim.

Maggie O’Farrell recently used this mix of fact and forced invention to transform a haiku’s worth of information on Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, into a sumptuously detailed novel of the same name. For writers like O’Farrell, or Australia’s Hannah Kent, the trick is to blend the known and unknown into one undifferentiated puree. Winkler’s approach could not be more different. He routinely breaks the fourth wall to remind us of his fraud, shouting ‘how pale is this simulacrum? How faint the whisper?’ This metacommentary includes a three-page book review of Grimmish that lashes its own writer for his ‘deliberately rickety storytelling structures’ and ‘the stunt of toppling his mouthpieces into knowingly unrealistic dialogue’. Winkler’s despair at failing Grim metastasises into professional regret: ‘I have spent my allotted years in a room alone writing words no-one wants or will ever read.’

Winkler is an excellent critic – his good work features regularly in these pages – so it’s shocking how off-target the self-assessment is here. His 2016 Calibre Prize-winning essay, ‘The Great Red Whale’, also featured an anxious voice wringing its hands over passages of otherwise imperial prose. What’s Winkler’s deal?

Does he enjoy playing rope-a-dope, pretending that he can barely string a sentence together before bowling us over with another sparkling insight? Perhaps. Or maybe these two brilliant texts are linked by their inability to convey a sensation that has been Winkler’s constant partner: pain. Throughout Grimmish, Winkler opens up about his struggles with depression: ‘I ache until my eyeballs sweat.’ As a result, he admits to being ‘engrossed by the idea of powerful forbearance’. In one scene, Grim contemplates a crucifix, wondering if he could have endured the torture as Christ did; it is easy to imagine Winkler looking at a photo of bloodied-nose Grim and wondering the same. The problem, as Winkler astutely notes, is that the specifics of pain are difficult to conceive, at least until you are the one hurting: ‘it makes no sound, has no colour or smell, occupies no physical space. And yet at its most extreme, pain becomes the only thing of which the sufferer is aware.’

Winkler never does figure out exactly how Grim tolerated ‘exchanging pain for a living wage’. In doggedly dissecting this failure, however, he comes to recognise himself as a sort of kinsman to his hero: ‘Could my unfulfilled writing career, replete with self-sabotage and propensity for mock-heroic failure, be my own version of Grim’s pain pantomime?’ The next time writing punches Winkler in the face, I’ll buy a ticket. g Alex Cothren is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University.

Poem

Clare and Kiribati On Clare’s Skype the beach mixed every coral colour: the sheen, saw George, transforming their soft bedroom in her mother’s Mt Druitt house to a Micronesian dusk. But this South Tarawa Beach was much too empty. They had waited for the Afghani man, Farjaad, now for hours, but the boat that Clare had hired for her old friend Aunty to smuggle him from Nauru was off air.

She said, ‘Maybe the Americans stepped in and snaffled him already, before Australia traded him to them. If that’s so, he may have actually known something he suggested about what did happen to Ayatollah Mike in Afghanistan.’ George said ‘My best information from a Langley bloke in his cups is that Mike’s plane crash was a straight retaliation by Iran for the Soleimani assassination, but that no one knows if Mike still runs the antiIranian section, is in hiding, retired, plucked off home, or dead.’

She said, ‘Well, Farjaad said he knew. He is a nice boy, anyway, and it would be a shame if they Guantanamo him. Aunty said she liked him right away.’ ‘At this stage,’ said George, ‘they might Guantanamo Aunty.’ The beach, built on coral with a crisp palm clump and clinging rusty garbage, remained empty. He was just as anxious as Clare.

He said, ‘By now, could the Chinese be involved? Their pact with Kiribati to dredge the land up against global warning, finance local welfare there in the archipelago not extract cheap labour, like Australia, was the reason Australia stopped Micronesia heading the Pacific Forum, so the five countries left it.’ ‘Including Guam,’ said Clare: ‘really odd, but the Americans must have gone along with the betrayal, even though it was the American Ambassador from Guam who lost his job.

I’d hate to be an American Ambassador. They get shivved as much as the spies.’ ‘It’s a type of operant conditioning,’ suggested George: ‘They think the uncertainty makes them loyal.’ But where was Farjaad?

The fragile beach was empty. George said, ‘Also the new Kiribati leader won’t recognise Taiwan.’ She was juggling three sources on her phone.

‘They don’t know where he is,’ she sounded afraid. But George said, ‘That interference might be Aunty’s boat.’ Indeed, the Skype shook and splintered in archipelagos of stars. When it was steady, The beach contained the Afghani youth and Aunty. Clare was angry with relief: ‘I was too worried. Where were you?’ ‘We had to explain,’ explained Farjaad, ‘but it’s okay now. I’m going to China.’ And Aunty said, ‘You can pay me in Bitcoin. Anyway, I’m going home.’ Even when the Skype was off and Clare and George relaxed slowly together the whole room still dusked with Kiribati’s coral sky.

Jennifer Maiden

Jennifer Maiden’s most recent collection is Biological Necessity: New Poems (Quemar Press, 2021) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

39

Society

Common ground A study of distance Naama Grey-Smith

The Believer: Encounters with love, death and faith Sarah Krasnostein

S

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 352 pp

ubtitled ‘Encounters with love, death and faith’, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer takes on big themes. In this work of creative non-fiction that combines memoir, journalism, and philosophical inquiry, Krasnostein details her meetings with people whose beliefs she finds unfathomable but whom she is driven to understand. Her own guiding faith on this journey is that ‘we are united in the emotions that drive us into the beliefs that separate us’.

Fans of Krasnostein’s first book, The Trauma Cleaner (2017), will find much to admire in her second: her curiosity, her even hand, her focus not on people’s coherence but on their contradictions, her lateral thinking. Krasnostein’s two books are also, in essential ways, opposites – or perhaps counterparts. The Trauma Cleaner uses many questions to explore one person’s story. The Believer uses many people’s stories to explore one question. The Believer is, in that sense, a thesis. It asks the following question: how do we deal with the distance between the world as it is, and the world as we’d like it to be?

The work is divided into two parts, each comprising three intertwined narratives. ‘Part 1: Below’ follows a death doula, a group of paranormal investigators, and the team behind a creationist museum in Kentucky. ‘Part 2: Above’ features a woman incarcerated for the murder of her abuser, a range of ufologists, and members of a New York City community of Mennonites. The two parts are bookended by a prologue and a coda, the former establishing Krasnostein’s narrative ‘I’ and setting out the book’s framework as a study of distance. Krasnostein is especially interested in psychological distance – the cognitive separation between ourselves and other people, events, or times – which she describes as ‘our superpower and our Achilles heel, a way of flying or falling’.

Examining the human need to ‘fabricate bespoke delusions’ to avoid grief, Krasnostein is interested in how we lean into or away from discomfort. For the Creation Museum staff, ‘the heart’s refusal to accept the world as it is’ breeds an emphasis on answers over questions and certainty over accuracy. For the death doula, it’s the opposite: she has spent decades practising ‘the counterintuitive art of moving towards the things that scared her so they became known’. Then there are the ghost-hunters and ufologists, within whose ranks one finds examples of both cautious open-mindedness and megalomania.

As a study in common ground sought at the furthest reaches, the narrator’s distance from her interviewees varies. Krasnostein 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

approaches each encounter with openness, and humanises interviewees by describing their backgrounds, families, and mannerisms. Nonetheless, when speaking with those who believe in ‘the particular flavour of logic promoted at the Creation Museum’ or who claim that transgender people ‘need to be taken to truth’, her sense is that she ‘cannot say that we inhabit a mutually recognisable world’. Here, despite affection, distance remains: ‘Because they believe I am going to Hell and I believe they may already be living in one.’

The most gratifying narratives are, perhaps predictably, those where the distance is shortest. The warmth of Krasnostein’s encounters with Annie, who guides others through grief, and with Lynn, who survived decades in jail with grace, is reminiscent of Krasnostein’s superb first book. In these narratives, which are individual rather than collective, she is at her most penetrating.

This confirms Krasnostein’s observation that ‘to bridge the distance between us, we must get closer, first of all, with ourselves.’

While Krasnostein’s identification as a ‘secular humanist Jewish [woman]’ is discussed only occasionally, it is never far from the surface in her work’s philosophical undercurrents. The scholarship of Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber is often cited.

Krasnostein’s legacy as a descendant of Holocaust survivors means that avoiding the question of meaningless suffering was never an option. To the narrator, ‘the real ghosts’ of her childhood are not cranky poltergeists; they are the gaps in her family tree.

The personal component of Krasnostein’s narrative is deeply moving. At times I found myself wishing, in the book’s second half, for more of the ‘Sarah’ of its first half. What does it mean for Krasnostein, I wondered, to speak with people who, while perfectly hospitable, commend to her the lectures of anti-Semitic alien conspiracy theorists? Is she ever tempted to close (or slam) the door on conversations where common ground feels eclipsed by the harm of the views held? This is a perennial problem most people will be familiar with, more relevant than ever in the era of misinformation, clickbait journalism, and social media platforms that reward intemperance and monetise division. Krasnostein, in a restrained approach reminiscent of Chloe Hooper’s journalism, lets her interviewees’ beliefs speak for themselves.

A highlight of The Believer is Krasnostein’s imagery. Questions and answers in a church discussion are like ‘an awkward high-five, they never quite match up’. A husband and wife on a sofa ‘lean towards each other like a pair of old boots’. In one hilarious description from an otherwise perturbing scene, the narrator strokes a ‘hairless cat, Lilith, who feels under hand like an enormous dried apricot’. Krasnostein’s narrative voice – a blend of insight, authenticity, and journalistic skill – is like a slow-cooked Shabbat cholent, rich and wholesome, every flavour running into the other.

The question that echoes beyond the pages is, ‘Could the key to seeing clearly ... lie less in calling each other out on our magical thinking, and more in focusing on why we are all compelled to do it from time to time?’ But Krasnostein loves contradictions.

Concluding her prologue, she writes, ‘One of the lies writers tell themselves is that all things should be understood.’ The implications of this line’s inclusion in a work that attempts to understand distant others are worth contemplating. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor and critic based in Fremantle.

Interview

(Tim Grey)

Publisher of the Month with Kent MacCarter

Kent MacCarter is publisher of Cordite Books and managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review. He is author of three poetry collections: In the Hungry Middle of Here (Transit Lounge, 2009), Sputnik’s Cousin (Transit Lounge, 2014) and California Sweet (Five Islands Press, 2018).

What was your pathway to publishing?

In the waning days of the Italian lira, I accidentally left a new velvet jacket – pockets stuffed with an early mobile and gobs of cash – in a café in Florence, en route to pay school tuition.

1999. Gone. That forced me to return to Santa Fe, then to Chicago where a friend shoehorned me into a role at the University of Chicago Press. There I dabbled in poetry with Thom Gunn and Mark Strand, and in abstractions with Robert von Hallberg and Julia Kristeva. Initial glimmers. I headed to Melbourne to hopscotch my finance degrees with an English gong with Tony Birch and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. I worked for Thomson Learning and Curriculum Press and was treasurer of Small Press Network. In 2010, I became managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review. I started Cordite Books in 2015.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Between four and six: in poetry, a front list is important, but not at the backlist’s expense. I am dedicated to both. Our free eBook anthology/catalogue is accessed constantly and adopted into academia. Books are offered as a Cordite Poetry Review journal contributor payment option, constantly drawing new eyes. A few artefacts per year works well.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

All of them. Relentless work and perseverance get me to the starting line of a poetry publishing opportunity. I am proudest of reimagining an ad hoc online journal into a non-profit, ROCOlisted charity that is a fixture in Australian letters. Twenty-five years have passed; my tenure has been the latest eleven.

Do you edit the books you commission?

I commission, structurally edit, typeset, and market. Bella Li, now an associate publisher, does the same.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

I seek début authors, authors departing in style from their previous work, and writers who have been overlooked, undervalued, or who have gone unpublished for years. From there, let’s talk.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands is a perfect book: typography and design supercharged by saudade and whim.

Collected Poems of John Forbes, Ed Dorn, and Lorine Nie-

decker are canon. The byzantine puzzle that is Kit Williams’s Masquerade and Rube Goldberg’s alternative physics were childhood influences. I do voluminous work-related reading and prefer the company of ghost gums or the din of sushi trains – no tamagoyaki! – in my free time.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

When a book tumbles into the public record and global conversation, it’s there forever. Producing that work of art to its zenith is both. And essential.

Do you write yourself ? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?

I began this poetry caper as an author, and I understand the emotional razzmatazz from both sides of the author–editor relationship. Each book is a collaboration, and I must earn the author’s trust.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire (from any era)?

I admire Rachel Bin Salleh, Jessica Wilkinson, Felicity Plunkett, and John Tranter’s Jacket. Graywolf Press, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Granta, the erstwhile Sleepers, and Dalkey Archives – all terrific lists. Kenny Leck at Math Paper in Singapore has admirable chutzpah.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?

I circumvent these forces by publishing one title per author instead of stable-building. Many D&Ms with authors occur about where to place their next books – I absolutely care about their careers – and what poetry-friendly options exist. This allows the press to pursue – creatively, financially, doggedly – authors in the career stages I’m after from the constrained and cobbled-together jalopy of arts funding, philanthropy, and sales.

On publication, what is more gratifying: a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?

Unquestionably, a happy author is the goal.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

Vertical, bright, and dynamic. g

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

41

Poetry

Springboards

Three new poetry collections Gig Ryan

of thought’ (‘One of several attractions’) to the unexpected structuring in ‘Lines for a poem #7’, which piles up with fracturing, dream-like images using slightly changing or expanding lines: ‘when the snow came sheltering down; nothing so much as; not yet choked by the blistering; when at last; this is an hour; and this is an hour’.

I O

liver Driscoll’s note on his first book I Don’t Know How That Happened (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 74 pp) praises the inclusive flatness of David Hockney’s still life paintings, and it is to this inclusiveness that his poems and prose pieces aspire. Droll reported speech creates a comic atmosphere but also moves into Kafkaesque alienation where nothing seems to follow any pattern. Sometimes these casual observations feel undercooked, but at times the flatness works as cool satire: I read an extract about a piece I wrote about Sarajevo and Bosnian literature at a small university panel event. At the end of the event, an audience member asked if I was of Bosnian heritage. No, I said.

The man beside me on the panel said, ha, yeah, we used to be able to do that, right, claim other people’s suffering. The piece is kind of about that, I said, how we see and think about other people’s trauma.

Right, he said, as though he’d won something fair and square.

Reminiscent of Oscar Schwartz’s often hilarious The Honeymoon Stage (2017), which recounted social media interactions and emphasised both lack of affect and passionately pursued crazes, the humour and intention in Driscoll’s work are more slippery.

Although his writing displays this lack of demarcation between intellect and trivia, public and private, which modern communications encourage and many poets exploit, some of the best poems transcend that mire and concisely provoke a less ironised disturbance, such as ‘Unsettled and’: Another time we entered the country Had the effect of being ...

The years had the same The effect of being cautioned.

In time, we grew accustomed To the quiet and the generosity.

The walls were whitewashed And we owned a cat.

Driscoll’s simple diaristic observations and interactions strain towards a cohesion that is always elusive, and remain both offhand and melancholy beneath the surface humour, ‘I wanted the crane to make a sound but it never did.’This is a varied collection of shifting styles and often concise imagery, from the airport’s ‘terminus 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

n Mags Webster’s second book nothing to declare (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 94 pp), many poems springboard from other poems, some thoughtfully refined, such as ‘Sinister’ (after Tracy Ryan), or ‘Inside the Ghost Mind’, which conjures Emily Dickinson: ‘Then her fingertips / brush past my brow, // and she slants her small / curved smile. I’m Nobody she / whispers – Who are You? ’ Other poems are unable to resist or respond to the original. These include ‘Mrs Batman M.D, Msc, Psych. D’, which, though inspired by Carol Ann Duffy, echoes Gwen Harwood’s tone. So many allusions to and echoes of other poets can be stifling and distracting rather than stimulating, but Webster mostly retains her own carefully descriptive style: ‘you lie coffined / sessile // in night-camouflage / you mimic / death’ (‘Sleeper’).

Possibly influenced by Christina Rossetti’s ‘In An Artist’s Studio’, other poems reprise a feminist trope, such as ‘Bonnard beauty reveals all’: I recede into a wash of stipple and blur, as if he’s swabbing all the woman from the frame.

When I take the towel from his outstretched hand, it’s the only time his eyes can meet mine.

An underlying theme is the Persephone myth of death and rebirth, which continues outside the specific poem ‘Digging up Persephone’. Interestingly, in contrast to Jo Pollitt, who sees poetry as an extension of her dance practice, Webster offers a profound distinction between mind and body, the Cartesian dualism illustrated in many poems, sometimes amusingly. The body in Webster’s poetry is both a site of complaint and of pleasure, perceived almost as a soporific appendage or millstone that is outside the self, the mind. This is perhaps more through the perception of others rather than any narrator, most obviously in ‘Autopsy’ and ‘Scan’, where medical science reduces the speaker to body parts, but also in ‘Eating together, eating alone’, which describes a bulimic person’s quarrel with herself: ‘The fridge / my altar.’

J

o Pollitt’s The dancer in your hands < > (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 128 pp) experiments with typography and design, mingling poetry and prose, and seeks to replicate movement. There is a breathlessness in her imitation of dance that graphically choreographs the explosions of migration, love, and sexuality.

This is a dancer hidden into writing, found, palm size, in your hands,

folding, inside outing both pressed one third at a time comma time one third at once comma this is a dancer comma borrowing a qantas plane comma ... My teacher, the great ballerina Lucette Aldous, was clear about what it takes to stay on your legs; one to think, one to spin, one to think, one to spin ...

This book-length poem is generated by a percussive style that acknowledges its influences as Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. One particularly Beckettian section echoes his ‘Try again.

Fail again. Fail better’ (‘Worstward Ho’): ‘Hide better // Bite harder / Hide better / Bite harder // Bite harder // Press harder / Bite better / Hide pressure.’

Pollitt’s style is determinedly mottled, as if tearing the long poem from any confinement, deploying concrete poetry, recorded speech, ellipses, narrative, lines representing a heart monitor, paragraphs composed of slashes, words clinging to the right margin, numbered lists. But an emphatic use of repetition, as in scoring a single word over several pages, can become an exhausted mannerism. At other times, Pollitt’s repetitions are apposite, an

embodiment of feverish yet hollow cathexis, a Saint Vitus dance of obsession.

What if her hand tears down my typography what if it can’t be read what if the language is not my own what if the covers forget their contents what if it’s impossible to disappear, what if in years, after another war, someone in a gallery clicks the X to expand the letters arranged for your seeing, what if you don’t remember reading me what if your fingers find colour what if you become the writer

In attempting to twin dance with lyric, Pollitt’s writing circles in frenzy, a type of expansive onomatopoeia in which words parallel movement. But the theme of love’s encounter becomes over-extended, even monotonous, through gymnastic repetitions of language. g Gig Ryan’s next book of poems is forthcoming from Giramondo in late 2021.

Poetry

‘May every kiss be a coastline’ New collections from three assured poets Rose Lucas

T

hese three new poetry collections are works by established poets at the top of their game in terms of poetic craft and the honing of insights into both life and art.

These are voices developed across a significant number of previous collections, allowing for an emergence of innovation, confidence, and ease of style and mood.

Bill Manhire is a much-published New Zealand poet and a former poet laureate. His new collection, Wow (Victoria University Press, NZ$25 pb, 88 pp), pivots on the two great pillars of human experience: pleasure and loss. This tension is evoked in the cover image, an archival tracing of a now-extinct bird whose presence is evoked, even as its absence is acknowledged.

The opening poem of the collection, ‘Huia’, signals the beauty of this vanished bird as well as the exploitations that have led to its disappearance: I was the first of birds to sing I sang to signal rain… …

Where are you when you vanish?

Where are you when you’re found?

I’m made of greed and anguish a feather on the ground.

This inscribing of what was – and the trails and legacies it brings into the future – is emblematic of the overall poetics of Manhire’s work: that the present is a complex tapestry ghosted by what has gone before, and that poetry is one of the strategies by which that past can be re-inscribed, its textures stitched back into what we are seeing and experiencing now.

While there are serious poems and themes in Manhire’s work, there is also a sense of playfulness and humour. The amusing romance of ‘He Loved Her Lemonade Scones’, the ‘Lazy Poet’ who is endlessly distracted by the cricket, even the minimalism of ‘Reverse Ovid’, where a running woman is described as ‘once the last pine tree on Mars’: these indicate the wide emotional palette that Manhire uses as his poems draw us into engagement with the observed world.

As the title poem suggests, this work emphasises the ecstatic ‘wow’ of the baby emerging into life – a sound and an emotion that soon moves into the complexity of what is ‘also’ and finally into an echoing, exhausted sigh. Ultimately, this kind of openness to life, the beginner’s mind embracing both the actual and the possible, is what is celebrated in this book. Even the concluding incantatory lines of ‘Little Prayers, 15 March 2019’, written in the aftermath of the Christchurch attacks, finds hope and compassion among the ‘pain [which must be] felt and … felt again’: May the rivers and lakes and mountains shine May every kiss be a coastline May we sign once again for the first time May the children be home by dinnertime May the closing line be an opening line.

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J

ennifer Maiden’s new collection, Biological Necessity (Quemar Press, $20 pb, 80 pp), demonstrates the ways in which a prolific and successful poet can develop not only continuity of style and theme, as with a collection of short stories with recurring characters, but also a kind of intra-textuality. This ‘micro-climate’ in Maiden’s work includes a focus on contemporary socio-political experience within neo-liberalism as well as a distinctive poetic voice – a familiar, informed, and insistent voice that enjoins the reader into a series of pressing conversations.

The collection’s title references Aneurin Bevan’s provocation that ‘socialism is a biological necessity’ – thus setting in train the kinds of topics and characters to be encountered: Mrs Macquarie in earnest conversation with Donald Trump’s mother, ‘whose soul is sore / from worry like a salt wound from seawater’; Gore Vidal observing Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison, his mirth ‘as tempting as a razor’; the sinister dealings of ‘Blackwater’.

In some ways, the collection can read almost like a stream of consciousness or the pent-up urgency of political imperative – run-on lines that suggest a fast-moving form between prose poem and essay. There is no spacing between stanzas/paragraphs.

This heightens an impression of intensification, almost a poetics of buttonholing, although this is moderated by some familiar Maiden strategies. The use of the ‘diary poem’, with its reflections and self-deprecations (‘I would tell you I am always a quiet sleeper, but after my / last essay, it could have connotations of spying’), creates irony and breathing space. Similarly, the return of George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, whose complex story has built over several of Maiden’s collections, gives another view of the current moment; we now see them in the ‘second week of their Covid quarantine’ as well as ‘skyping with President Trump / on Election Night, 2020’.

Focused on the current moment with its cross-hatching of issues, Biological Necessity concludes with commentary on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the shifting of weather patterns. This is a collection immersed in the structures of the world – natural, political, impelled by cruelty and greed as well by generosities.

The final poem, ‘La Niña’, concludes, ‘The tempest / outside my house has many mansions, / erratically peaceful in patterns’ – perhaps not such a bad prospect, considering its dark alternatives.

M

elbourne Poets Union’s new Blue Tongue Poets series aims to produce high production-value chapbooks from established poets. Kevin Brophy’s beautifully curated In This Part of the World is the inaugural title. Again, these poems have the clarity and stylistic confidence characteristic of a senior writer such as Brophy.

The poems are arranged into three seemingly simple delineations: ‘Here’, ‘And There’, ‘And Back’. While the central section moves us in place to the landscapes and history of Italy – Palermo’s ‘rubbed walls / of once-homes bombed seventy-five years ago’ or cycling ‘beneath the pine trees deep / among deer and wolves’ – overall the collection is grounded in the specificity of an Australian home and perspective. Just as the small details of daily event and interaction accrete in ‘Unremarkable Day’, Brophy’s poetic takes the everyday as its point of focus and imaginative departure. In ‘Back Yard Ladders of Surrender’, the trees of a suburban garden ‘reach up and out / their tree-hearts beating / to the small songs seedlings taught them’; the stones of a city path are ‘so blue in the night / listening to the steps we take’. The quiet persistence of birds also features in important ways, literal reminders of unglimpsed worlds: ‘the kitchen window glass [that] stops / a rare azure kingfisher in its flight’; the butcher birds ‘looped … into their other selves / where alpine ash whisper to them in a blue high tone’; the small finch who ‘knows how to live / in joyful fight and fret’.

There are also poems concerning deep connections between men – the complex reaches of friendship, the ways in which a conflicted love for a father might deepen and broaden with time, ‘tempting my lake to stretch itself / … and join up with an ocean’.

Things otherwise at the edge of unsayability can find a space here, ‘because [they are] said / in a small poem / placed obscurely / in a prestigious chapbook’ – challenging us to listen closely.

These are beautifully crafted and evocative poems, full of compassion, quiet attention, and the insight that marks poetry at its best. g

Rose Lucas is an academic at Victoria University, Melbourne.

Her third poetry collection, This Shuttered Eye, will be published

by Girls on Key Press in 2021.

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Comment

The keys to the castle Restoring a sense of the primacy of science

by Claudio Bozzi

P

resident Joe Biden has given cause to hope that the position of Science Advisor to the President of the United States might be returned to a position of influence after years of neglect under Donald Trump’s presidency. Biden nominated Eric Lander of MIT and, for the first time, elevated the advisor’s role to a Cabinet-level position. Lander will also sit on the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which coordinates science and technology policy across the various federal research and development agencies, and which is chaired by the president.

Trump took more than nineteen months to appoint a presidential science advisor (twice as long as any other president), and left the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) – an advisory group of private sector experts that has provided reports on scientific and technological developments to the president since 1990 – unappointed and unstaffed until 2019. He then stacked it with representatives of private industry, appointing only one academic scientist.

The hopes attached to the science advisor’s return to centrality in devising policy may be based on the unrealistic expectations of a position whose function as ‘house intellectual’ is more mythical than real. Lander assumes a role that has long been demoted, and heads a council that has become isolated and largely silenced on policy matters through successive presidencies.

The office, first occupied by James Killian, was established by President Dwight Eisenhower at the height of the Cold War. Despite the fact that the United States emerged from World War II as the only global military power, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite forced it to question its relative technological advantage. Sputnik handed Killian the keys to the castle, involving him in matters of national importance and providing the technical guidance for significant policy decisions.

But the glow of that dawn has faded. Donald Hornig, science advisor to Lyndon Johnson, was of the opinion that science is ‘not a thing’ in government. Like economics, it was pervasive but neither an object nor an instrument of policy. And most scientific advisors have been kept resolutely outside the circle of close presidential advisors. It is arguable that federal science policy is nothing more than the management of the science budget.

Certainly, the office as re-established by Congress during Gerald Ford’s presidency (President Richard Nixon had terminated it in 1973) had that mandate, and management of the budget has been a key indicator of its success.

The contradiction in the science advisor’s role is that as science permeates every function of government, the advisor is rarely involved in wider White House decision-making. Science issues with technical content are dealt with by agencies – each one with its own science office and advisor, with their own specialisation – and only filter through to the higher levels of government through the budget process, where the science advisor discusses them with other senior White House staff. The nature of modern government, which has become increasingly reliant on an army of experts rather than on the polymath capabilities of any individual, suggests that the science advisor may no longer have a scientific role.

The science advisor’s role is shaped by political priorities, and science advice cannot step out of the political framework. John Marburger, advisor to George W. Bush, recalled that he began every day of his tenure in meetings with senior White House staff discussing current salient matters, and that science was never one of them. What is salient to the president and to senior White House staff is the success of the presidency and securing re-election.

Nixon wanted (but did not succeed in getting) the Apollo 16 and 17 missions rescheduled, concerned that an accident would harm his chances of re-election in 1972. In a different vein, President Jimmy Carter ignored his science advisor’s opinion that a national target of twenty per cent of energy from renewable sources was unachievable, concluding that there were good political reasons for adopting the target, despite the technical evaluation.

In the ice bath of Washington politics, what some consider a war on science others accept as a continuation of politics by other means. The Clinton administration fired a Department of Energy official whose views on climate change differed inconveniently from those of Vice President Al Gore. Administrations on both sides have imposed strict controls over agency scientists’ relationships with the media and Congress. The Obama administration in particular aggressively pursued government employees AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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responsible for leaking classified or confidential information.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) criticised the George W. Bush administration for, among other things, publishing false information alleging a connection between breast cancer and abortion, and for altering an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on climate change, linking each of these actions to the influence of conservative interest groups seeking industry deregulation. President Clinton’s science advisor John Gibbons dismissed accusations that the Bush administration conducted a systematic ‘war on science’, saying that its actions were more a matter of ‘good government’ than an abuse of science. That is, they fell arguably within the boundaries of legitimate political self-interest.

What sets the Trump administration apart from even the most extreme prior examples is the systematic rejection of scientific method, scientific findings, and the scientific framing of problems. In 2018, the EPA proposed the ‘Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science’ rule, requiring it to use only studies whose underlying data was publicly available. The rule mistook transparency for the basis of scientific rigour, and excluded data sets – including clinical trials providing confidentiality to participants by law – that formed the basis of existing and effective environmental regulations. The UCS called the rule ‘a trojan horse … that serve[d] no purpose other than to prevent the EPA from carrying out its mission of protecting public health and the environment’. Another eminent scientist described it as ‘a direct assault on epidemiology’. The rule was finalised on 6 January 2021, as an angry mob stormed the Capitol Building.

While other administrations have been selective in their use of scientific authority, the Trump administration sidelined expertise altogether. The Science Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Board of Scientific Counselors, on which the EPA relies for scientific advice, have not had their membership renewed, have removed researchers, or have terminated advisory panels undertaking reviews of standards for air pollutants. At the same time, the EPA’s Office of the Science Advisor was terminated by merger into the Office of Research and Development, a move that the UCS has likened to its burial.

The EPA also barred recipients of EPA grants from serving on its advisory committees, purportedly to avoid any appearance of compromise to its independence and objectivity. The effect of this ban was to prevent academic representation and to increase industry’s presence on committees that consequently received advice from representatives of industries with a financial interest in deregulation.

The Lancet has characterised the Trump administration’s actions and policies as demonstrating a ‘disdain for science’ and a promotion of corporate interests over public health and safety.

Leaving the EPA in the hands of climate change deniers such as Administrator Scott Pruitt, whose career as attorney general for Oklahoma was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, have increased the likelihood of climate change-induced mortality.

Covid-related deaths would have been avoided had Trump consulted and implemented evidence-based public health measures instead of taking a stubbornly and dangerously anti-scientific position, rejecting Covid-19 as a ‘hoax’, saying it would disappear on its own ‘like a miracle’, and promoting the anti-malarial drug 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

hydroxychloroquine for ‘use immediately’ as a treatment, despite there being no evidence of its effectiveness.

While marginalising science does not observe party-political lines, efforts to dismantle the regulatory state underpinned by good science are now a peculiarly conservative objective. The historical politicisation of science is reflected in changes to the relationship between conservative and scientific institutions. In the United States, science has been transformed from a vehicle for the pursuit of national interests – such as Eisenhower’s awakening to the launch of Sputnik and John Kennedy’s single-minded pursuit of the space program – to an ideological fault line, enlisted to support political alternatives. Political identity has become a matter of choosing between a scientific and a competing authority.

What complicates the picture is that while the decline in trust in the scientific community among political conservatives is well established, the attitude towards scientific research itself remains almost universally positive and stable. Pew Research shows that seventy-three per cent of liberal, conservative, and moderate Americans view science and technology as having a positive effect on society, while eighty-two per cent expect greater future benefits. This inconsistency is explained by a conservative ideology that preserves the value of science while dismissing scientific authority perceived as politically biased.

Science remains a crucial battlefield for waging and winning ideological contests. Conservatives have not so much abandoned the scientific field as raised standards against scientific authority.

In fact, the federal budget for research and development under the Trump administration represented some of the highest historical spending on scientific enterprise, even after accounting for inflation. Scientifically literate conservatives are selective in their rejection of science, or scientists, that upset religious credos (e.g. creationism) and political positions (climate change), or that seek to explain morality on scientific grounds. The Trump administration did not conduct a war on science as such but on regulatory science – the synthesis and application of science to social problems by regulatory agencies.

Science advisor Lander comes to the role favoured by the potent combination of presidential collegiality and historical crisis. Killian had Sputnik and a superpower’s ideological slumber.

Lander has a global pandemic and its disproportionate effect on the United States. Biden has signed executive orders to reverse many of the Trump and earlier administrations’ worst actions, directing agencies to base decisions on science and data and protecting agency scientists from political interference, and he has prioritised the pandemic and climate change as targets for scientific responses. Long-term structural change will require legislation, the reorientation of political settings, and a reinvention of the public meaning of science. History, however, shows that the affection of government for science is at its pleasure: Killian’s swearing-in ceremony was ‘unusually brief ’ – the president (like others before and after him) had a golf game to attend. g Claudio Bozzi is a barrister and a lecturer at Deakin University.

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

Science

Haunted history The BAAS’s 84th congress Diane Stubbings

A Trip to the Dominions: The scientific event that changed Australia edited by Lynette Russell

F

Monash University Publishing $29.95 pb, 160 pp

ounded in 1831, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) sought to redress impediments to scientific progress that arose in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, determining that the BAAS would ‘give a stronger impulse and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry … [and] promote the intercourse of cultivators of science’.

Not quite a hundred years later, on the eve of World War I, several hundred scientists travelled to Australia to attend the

details not only of its agenda but also of the logistics involved. For example, three ships were requisitioned to transport 155 scientists from Europe to Australia (two of which were commandeered as naval troop ships soon after the scientists’ arrival, complicating their return journey). The outbreak of war curtailed the itinerary of the congress and led to a handful of scientists being briefly detained as enemy aliens. But to judge by the crowds that came to the open sessions – 2,000 people attended in Melbourne – and by the response of newspapers, which printed entire lectures in broadsheet supplements, the venture overall was a tremendous success.

Christopher Morton, Head of Curatorial, Research and Teaching at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, augments our understanding of the quotidian characteristics of the congress with his evaluation of the diary kept by archaeologist Henry Balfour. Put together in ‘the manner of a holiday scrapbook’ and extending to three volumes, the diary collates menus, tickets, political cartoons, and sketches with entries recording encounters with Aboriginal Australians: ‘Saw some boomerang throwing … After lunch the natives gave a corrobborrie [sic] dance … The dancers were painted in white stripes.’

Scientists journeyed to an Aboriginal mission in Western Australia ‘where they met, observed, recorded and measured the

State reception in the grounds of the University of Queensland for visiting members of the BAAS, Brisbane, 31 August 1914 (The Queenslander, September 5, 1914, p. 24).

BAAS’s 84th congress, an expedition funded by the Australian government at a cost (in today’s money) of several million dollars. The delegates ventured across the continent ‘[engaging] with Antipodean physical and social scientists, industry, cultural institutions, and Indigenous cultures’. A significant facet of this engagement was a ‘serious consideration [of ] both Aboriginal history and the place of Aboriginal people in the colonial present’.

A Trip to the Dominions, a collection of five papers originally workshopped at London’s Royal Anthropological Institution in 2014, focuses on the congress’s contribution to the flourishing of Australian anthropological studies and a consequential shift in perceptions of Aboriginal culture.

Lynette Russell, an anthropological historian at Monash University, provides an overview of the congress, offering striking

mission inmates’ and made plaster head-casts of Aboriginal men, women, and children, marvelling at the ‘perfect freedom’ of those Indigenous peoples who were living under the care of the state.

Russell stresses that the congress occurred at a time when, due to the White Australia policy, Indigenous Australians were largely invisible to the majority of the population: ‘[i]n a mere 80 years, the streets of Melbourne had largely been vacated of an Aboriginal presence … [and] traditional ways of life … had been irrevocably disrupted’.

The prevailing view was that Aboriginal culture had ‘changed little over the ages’, and Indigenous occupation of the continent was regarded as ‘relatively shallow’. In this context, a lecture arguing that the ‘“Talgai skull” … the oldest human skull to have been found in Australia … pointed to a deep history of Aboriginal presAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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Science ence in Australia’ was of particular note, the finding being ‘the first step in establishing the antiquity of Australia’s Indigenous peoples and hence their claims to a long occupation of the continent’.

Assessments of Aboriginal Australians in this period were dominated by the theory of salvage anthropology, which advocated for the cataloguing of the traditional knowledge and culture of peoples who were ‘deemed to be rapidly coming extinct’, a paradigm which included no imperative to ‘stem [the] impacts’ of the colonisation threatening Indigenous populations worldwide.

As Ian McNiven, Head of Indigenous Archaeology at Monash University, demonstrates in his appraisal of Alfred and Kathleen Haddon’s fieldwork among Torres Strait Islander peoples, studies embracing salvage anthropology were wont to misread the evolving nature of Aboriginal culture and its capacity to adapt to the ravages brought by colonial expansion.

The Haddons’ documentation of their work (some of which is reproduced in an appendix) nevertheless furnished evidence of ‘cultural continuities between past and present’ subsequently used to support native title judgments.

In a diffuse argument that takes in au pair Elsie Masson’s memoir about working in the Northern Territory (published in 1915 as An Untamed Territory) and anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer’s administrative role overseeing Aboriginal Australians, University of Western Australia historian Jane Lydon investigates the relationship between governance, particularly policies of assimilation and control, and ‘modes of knowing’ that depict Indigenous peoples as ‘preserving an early stage of human development’.

Leigh Boucher, a historian at Macquarie University, also examines the relationship between knowledge and power in the provision of ‘colonial management’, cogently tracing connections between the influential field guide Notes and Queries on Anthropology and an objectification and infantilisation of Indigenous Australians that marked them as ‘incapable of surviving settler modernity without … protection’.

Written predominantly for a specialist audience, A Trip to the Dominions is nevertheless accessible to a general readership. It encompasses stories of our past that demand to be disseminated beyond the bounds of academia.

With respect to his own country’s encounter with imperialism, Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland, recently wrote that it is only by both remembering and understanding our past that ‘we can facilitate a more authentic interpretation not only of our shared history, but also [of the] possibilities for the future’.

In her account of the BAAS itinerary, Lynette Russell comments regarding an excursion to the Coranderrk Aboriginal reserve that ‘[t]he response of the Kulin people housed at Coranderrk is unrecorded’. These undocumented Indigenous voices haunt A Trip to the Dominions, just as they haunt our own history. The swell of First Nations writers and artists beginning to fill this void is a vital step in the realisation of our own more authentic narrative. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. She is currently undertaking practice-based graduate research at VCA, University of Melbourne, investigating intersections between science and theatre.

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Intellectual mystery tour A maverick view of science Robyn Arianrhod

The Knowledge Machine: How an unreasonable idea created modern science

by Michael Strevens

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Allen Lane $49.99 hb, 368 pp

f you have ever wondered about the imaginative, wondrous side of science – for instance, how Einstein used maths to predict the existence of gravitational waves, or how a metaphor led to the astonishing discovery that the spinning earth drags space-time around it like molasses around a spoon, this is not the book for you. But if you want to know why scientists had the patience to keep refining their experiments until they detected this barely perceptible rippling of space-time, or why they have the kind of grit made legendary by Marie and Pierre Curie, sifting through tonnes of pitchblende for a speck of radium, you will find an intriguing, bold, and controversial answer in The Knowledge Machine.

‘Science is boring,’ proclaims Michael Strevens airily, setting a maverick tone. Then he tells a story about rival endocrinologists Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally, who mashed up tonnes of animal brains in their mission to isolate a milligram of the thyroid-stimulating hormone TRH and to unravel its molecular structure. Like the Curies, they won a Nobel Prize for their labours, although Strevens emphasises the labour rather than the glory, because his response to why scientists have such superhuman tenacity is the scientific method’s demand for empirical evidence. But there is an ambitious project behind this deceptively simple answer: Strevens thinks this demand for evidence is so remarkable, so ‘unreasonable’, that it merits a new thesis to explain why modern science works so brilliantly, and why it took so long to emerge.

A philosopher rather than a scientist, Strevens takes a long and winding road to his destination. Scientists will likely get there much faster, for they have the advantage of hindsight. It takes someone with a philosophical bent to unravel that hindsight – that habitual way of thinking that for most of human history wasn’t obvious at all – and to ask deeper questions. Yet The Knowledge Machine is accessible to non-specialists, offering a cornucopia of interesting snippets – historical, biographical, philosophical, and scientific – within an overarching quest to understand what makes science such a powerful method of enquiry.

In fact, says Strevens, it’s more than a method: it’s a ‘knowledge machine’ with the unparalleled ability to generate new knowledge.

To demonstrate just how ‘unreasonable’ the scientific method is – for in his view it takes all the humanness out of it, all the philosophising, theologising, and artistry that people naturally bring to pondering the nature of the world – Strevens begins by showing that not even the famous philosophers Karl Popper and

New Guinea Thomas Kuhn captured its secret. He often makes his arguments through counter examples, such as the 1919 eclipse expedition led

by Arthur Eddington and designed to test Einstein’s prediction that gravity bends light. Strevens wants to show that Popper’s concept of ‘falsification’ – that empirical evidence stringently weeds out false theories – is compromised by scientists’ subjective interpretation of that evidence, and he accuses Eddington of selecting the eclipse data to favour his own personal and intellectual agenda.

(Unfortunately, Strevens’s principal source for this unfair accusation is a 1980 book that scientists have repeatedly challenged.)

Strevens does ultimately build a terrific account of how the scientific method melds scientists’ natural subjectivity with the objectivity demanded of their published research. But it’s a pity he takes such an adversarial approach, not only to Eddington but to science as a whole. True, he is deliberately provocative: often, it’s clever, as when he builds cases only to undercut them to make his points; but sometimes it feels too clever, undercutting so much that it’s difficult to know what he’s on about. Strevens’s quest assumes that science is extraordinary, and he makes a significant contribution by establishing that those who argue that science is inherently subjective confuse the process of doing science with the rules ensuring that evidence is found and written up objectively.

But he doesn’t seem to like scientists very much or to understand the joy that many derive from doing science. He cherry-picks quotes, such as E.O. Wilson’s ‘So many scientists are narrow, foolish people’, and thinks science is mostly inhumanly dull work that succeeds because its explanations are ‘shallow’ and its modern practitioners rarely ‘think outside the box’: their emphasis on empiricism ‘starves’ them of all other meaning, ‘clamping’ their minds, ‘sucking the air out’ of them like a ‘merciless’ experimenter proving that a bird dies without oxygen. Some of this antagonism is rightly directed at the elevation of STEM over humanities; he also strikes a suitably ambivalent note about science’s role in today’s climate-changed, hyper-technological world. Still, I wonder how many scientists Strevens has actually met. Although he is writing a popular book, I would have preferred less hyperbole, more nuance and context.

That aside, there is a lot that is both fascinating and informative: the philosophy, the debates over the age of the earth and the nature of heat, how quantum theory can be so inexplicable and yet so practical, and much more. He sets up ingenious thought experiments, inviting readers to imagine how they would decide which of two rival theories to accept, or how they might determine the best approach to understanding nature. In this way, and by discussing thinkers from Aristotle to Descartes to Murray Gell-Mann, he gradually builds up his thesis. It is essentially Isaac Newton’s thesis, as Strevens eventually acknowledges, but he aims to generalise it, teasing out the hidden assumptions in various experiments, taking selections from the history and philosophy of science in order to divine its enigmatic power, and exploring why it arose when and where it did.

Philosophers like to challenge our thinking, and Strevens certainly does that. But there’s much else to enjoy in this unique intellectual mystery tour. g Robyn Arianrhod’s latest book is Thomas Harriot: A life in Science (2019).

Australia’s nearest neighbour A beautifully illustrated book on New Guinea Peter Menkhorst

New Guinea: Nature and culture of Earth’s grandest island

by Bruce M. Beehler, photography by Tim Laman

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Princeton University Press $49.99 hb, 376 pp

ustralia’s nearest neighbour, the fabulous New Guinea, is one of the least developed and least known islands on earth. The largest and highest tropical island, it boasts extensive tracts of old-growth tropical forest (second only to the Amazon following massive destruction in Borneo and Sumatra), equatorial alpine environments, extensive lowland swamp forests, and huge abundances and diversities of orchids, rhododendrons, forest tree species, frogs, freshwater fish, and leeches.

The fauna, exotic as well as diverse, include the richest radiations of tree kangaroos, echidnas, birds of paradise, and bowerbirds.

Human cultural diversity is equally remarkable with 1,100 documented language groups (twenty per cent of the world total).

Biogeographical analyses indicate that the first human colonisers of New Guinea have histories of similar length to those of the First Nations peoples of Australia. Few other nations have such a high proportion of the population continuing to live traditional, self-sufficient, village lifestyles, based on shifting agriculture with staples of sweet potato and pigs in the highlands, and yams and fish in the lowlands. New Guinea is also likely to have been the site of domestication of bananas, sugarcane, taro, and yams.

New Guinea is also the richest island on Earth when it comes to mineral resources (notably gold, silver, and copper). These are being exploited by Western mining conglomerates with dubious long-term benefits to the indigenous people and, in some cases, massive environmental damage (e.g. the shameful Ok Tedi disaster, which caused biological degradation along 1,000 kilometres of the Ok Tedi and Fly rivers).

Australia has a long and intimate connection to New Guinea.

Both ride on the Australian tectonic plate, and New Guinea has taken the brunt of the slow collision between the Australian and Pacific plates, throwing up the massive Central Cordillera mountain range and numerous younger and smaller, but nonetheless rugged, ranges to its north, including past and recent volcanism.

During Pleistocene glacial periods, when sea levels were many tens of metres lower than today, New Guinea and Australia were joined for thousands of years by a broad plain across today’s Torres Strait, allowing considerable exchange of flora, fauna, and people.

Thus, in a biogeographical sense, New Guinea is as much a part of Australia as is Tasmania.

The eastern half of New Guinea was an Australian External Territory from 1906 until 1975, when its independence was formalised by the Whitlam government, to become the nation AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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concise and precise sentences. All chapters are approached from the viewpoint of an evolutionary ecologist, resulting in a text that weaves the biogeographical and cultural threads into a very satisfying whole. The impacts of geological processes, notably plate tectonics, on topography and climate are made clear, as are the consequential effects on the diversity and distribution of flora and fauna, and on human culture and economics. For example, in many districts the brutal and unstable topography and massive rainfall combine to make prohibitive the costs of building and maintaining roads and bridges, limiting cultural integration and economic development.

Beehler’s writing is mostly detached and factual, but he makes an exception for what he terms cultural conservation.

He laments the loss of cultural knowledge and traditions as thousands of ancient knowledge systems and cosmologies were actively dismantled by Christian missionaries during the twentieth century. He describes this process as a tragedy and a crime against traditional humankind, one that led to degradation and squalor in the lives of many. However, other serious social problems that are A mother Huon Tree Kangaroo (Dendro lagus matschiel) and her young peer down from evident even in traditional village a mossy limb in mountain forest of the YUS Conservation Area of the Huon Peninsula of ENG, where this species is endemic. (Photo by Tim Laman. © Tim Laman 2020) communities are glossed over.

These include shocking gender the Central Cordillera. A mere seventy to eighty years ago, they inequality, poverty, the heavy hand of the Indonesian military in were among the first Westerners to encounter dense populations the west, and lawlessness in provincial towns and along highways of highland people thriving in New Guinea’s interior upland in the east. The latter impedes development of a nature-based valleys. The high human population densities in these upland tourism industry, potentially a major source of sustainable income valleys were made possible by the introduction of sweet potato for local communities within this remarkable region that has and pigs, along with nitrogen-fixing Casuarina trees, centuries so much to offer ecotourists. Ecuador and Botswana offer fine examples of how this can be achieved. before the arrival of Westerners.

Given our shared history, shared cultural and natural values, This beautifully illustrated book focuses on the natural and cultural values of the ‘grand island’. Bruce M. Beehler is an and the fact that Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone extends ornithologist who has devoted his life to documenting the birds to within a few kilometres of the coast of Papua New Guinea, of New Guinea, and his zoological and ecological expertise is surely Australia should be more actively assisting the sustainable evident throughout. Tim Laman is a skilled nature photographer, development of both Papua New Guinea and Indonesian New the only person to have photographed all thirty-nine species of Guinea? Recent reports of Chinese plans to build a major port bird of paradise in the wild. Together, they form the perfect team on Daru Island in the Torres Strait, a handful of kilometres from Australia’s EEZ, highlight Australia’s recent neglect of our nearest to produce this book.

I cannot think of a similar compilation that brings together neighbour with its fabulous natural and cultural values that are so brilliantly and thoroughly the natural and human history brought to life in this beautifully crafted book. The recommended of any region. Chapters cover geology, climate, terrestrial and retail price offers remarkable value. g marine flora and fauna, human history, modern human culture (including village life), and a concise summary of the many Peter Menkhorst is a zoologist with the Victorian government. looming ecological threats such as industrial-scale logging and He has jointly produced field guides to both the mammals and palm oil monocultures. Throughout, Laman’s photographs of the birds of Australia, most recently The Australian Bird Guide environments, plants, animals, and people bring to life Beehler’s (CSIRO Publishing, 2019).

Papua New Guinea. The western half is part of Indonesia (the provinces of Papua and West Papua), having been relinquished by the Dutch in 1962, under pressure from the Sukarno regime and via an agreement brokered by US diplomats. Between the two world wars, Australian kiaps (patrol officers) were prominent in the exploration by Westerners of the towering mountains of

50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

Politics

‘The world’s deadliest frontier’ The callousness of the EU border regime Tom Bamforth

Where the Water Ends: Seeking refuge in fortress Europe

by Zoe Holman

F

Melbourne University Press $29.99 pb, 319 pp

acing the ‘global refugee crisis’, politicians in Europe and Australia claim they are protecting their countries from the arrival of untold multitudes. Yet the ‘crisis’ is not global but highly specific. In 2019, seventy-six per cent of refugees came from just three countries (Congo, Myanmar, and Ukraine), while eighty-six per cent of refugees are hosted in a handful of countries in what is known as the Global South (especially Turkey, Jordan, Columbia, and Lebanon). Despite the significant contribution of Germany to hosting refugees, only ten per cent of the global refugee population live in Europe, comprising 0.6 per cent of the continent’s total population. There are 2,600,000 refugees in Europe today, compared with 11,000,000 at the end of World War II. The European Union’s challenges can scarcely be said to be at ‘crisis’ levels.

Even the word ‘refugee’, which was designed to provide basic rights to people who faced a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ in the words of the 1951 Refugee Convention, is being redefined.

In Europe, an unfounded fear of refugees has come to dominate politics and the politics of identity. Governments there have all too often learned from Australian ‘innovations’ in refugee deterrence and incarceration. For the refugees themselves, the two questions most often asked on arrival at Europe’s borders are: ‘Where are we?’ and ‘Are there guns?’

In Where the Water Ends, Zoe Holman, an accomplished journalist and poet with a PhD in Middle Eastern history, has written a remarkable book that traces the experience of refugees seeking passage to an increasingly fortified Europe. The European Union, she writes, has become the world’s deadliest frontier. Since the organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 for ‘the advancement of human rights’, more than 20,000 people have died or disappeared trying to reach its member states. Its border protection budget for 2021–27 is now €35 billion (about $54 billion). There are more fences and walls along its borders than was the case during the Cold War. This seems disproportionate to the actual scale of the ‘crisis’. In the words of one of Holman’s interviewees, if all those confined to camps in Greece were suddenly to be placed in an Athens suburb, ‘no one would notice’.

Where the Water Ends is a compelling account of life in the transit zone of asylum by those who are forced to live it. It documents the daily struggle of people fleeing war only to face a denied humanity on the borders of Europe in camps, prisons, or legal limbo as asylum claims are mired for years in ‘leaden bureaucracy’, and

in the face of brutality from a militarised European border regime.

Just as remarkable as the stories themselves is Holman’s empathy. She travels along Europe’s borders staying in camps, visiting prisons, urban squats, and NGO-run centres. Fluent in Arabic, she focuses on the experiences of refugees from Middle Eastern countries where she has lived. In relating narratives of lived experience, Where the Water Ends builds not just a grim picture of the plight of refugees themselves but an unsparing picture of the EU’s political trajectory as a razor-wire curtain descends across a border region between East and West, which was, until recently, still one of cultural fluidity and exchange.

Katina, a Greek woman Holman meets, likes to show the Syrians her passport, which gives her birthplace as Aleppo. This was where she, along with thousands of Aegean islanders, fled to escape the Nazi occupation of Greece. Similarly, population exchanges between Greece and the newly established nation state of Turkey after World War I produced the apparent irony of Turkish-speaking Greeks and Greek-speaking Turks. Seeing the refugee boats arrive now in Greece is ‘like a mirror to the past’ recalls a turkosporoi who also faced stigmatisation on arrival in Greece. Elsewhere, Syrian refugees observe similarities in food, culture, language, architecture, and landscape. Certain moments in Athens are ‘Damascene’. Boundaries between East and West are never as clear as nationalists like to imagine. Throughout her journey, Holman unpicks this ‘confounding knot’: these unexpected, embodied conjunctions of religion, language, citizenship, defying the ethno-nationalist prototypes we’ve been programmed to recognise. But really, it is simple: they are all just people from here. The other classifications – citizen, nation, Greek, Turk – came later. These are the falsifications, the anomalies.

Yet these are precisely the classifications, the search for a ‘clean nation’, that are being reinforced with EU funding. In defiance of international law, masked crews on unmarked vessels repel boats. Asylum seekers are stripped of possessions in Hungary, and beaten in Serbia. Amnesty International has protested about the Croatian border police tactic of breaking people’s legs to prevent them from returning. In Greece, refugees must run the gauntlet of ultra-right Golden Dawn supporters, many of whose leaders were put on trial for murder in 2015 in the biggest trial of fascists since Nuremberg.

The witnesses in Where the Water Ends tell of an endless transit between points of incarceration. ‘A transit situation is not only about a place or a length of time,’ observes Nasim in conversation with Holman. ‘It is much more about what you want and expect and cannot get. Transit is a status.’ When Moria refugee camp on Lesvos burned down, one activist observed that it is ‘not a tragedy but a policy, it is not an accident but a decision. Because Moria is an ideology.’

Part long-form journalism, part oral history, part politically engaged travel writing, Where the Water Ends is an outstanding achievement. The humanity of Zoe Holman’s work powerfully exposes the callousness of the EU border regime, whose ethnonationalist trajectories have yet to run their course. g Tom Bamforth is an aid worker currently working in Syria.

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Migration

‘The shame of not belonging’ A rich, enlightening anthology Merav Fima

The Penguin Book of Migration Literature edited by Dohra Ahmad

‘E

Penguin Classics $26.99 pb, 352 pp

xile is a profound stimulus to the human anxiety for literary representation,’ writes Harold Bloom. Whether voluntary or involuntary, this impetus is the driving force behind the works in The Penguin Book of Migration Literature.

Salman Rushdie, in his 1991 essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (not included here; instead he has a short story), asserts the right of migrant writers to draw on their ethnic roots as inspiration for their art, affirming that the geographical distance from their homeland may provide new angles with which to investigate reality. This seems an apt source of inspiration for the three dozen international authors – some household names, others not – featured in this slender yet ambitious volume. While not all pieces may appeal to every taste, read in sequence the book forges a memorable impression. As migration is a ubiquitous human experience, readers, regardless of background, can relate to the simultaneous representation of historical hardships and the accompanying moments of compassion that make such stories so compelling.

As Rushdie argues in ‘Imaginary Homelands’, the artistic explorations by migrant writers are necessarily politicised, as is, surely, the delicate task of curating a collection of texts intended to convey a balanced global perspective on the intricacies of migration. While editor Dohra Ahmad acknowledges in her introduction that the selection is subjective and incomplete, the omission of certain countries, authors, and narratives is striking. For instance, the current Australian refugee crisis is overlooked (an excerpt from Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But The Mountains [2018] would have been a welcome inclusion), as are migrants to and from the State of Israel (Ayelet Tsabari’s 2019 memoir The Art of Leaving would have been an appropriate choice). The juxtaposition of works by authors from different times and places, however, draws a continuum between diverse experiences, exemplifying Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory, which suggests that establishing a link between the Holocaust, colonialism, and slavery – all of which are represented in this book – may validate other marginalised groups’ demands for justice.

As a whole, the anthology offers an enlightening and enriching read. Some highlights include pieces by young writers with whom I was unfamiliar, whose evocative language and imagery remained with me long after I had moved on to other parts of the book. This includes Canadians Shauna Singh Baldwin and Djamila Ibrahim, as well as London’s inaugural Young Poet Laureate, Warsan Shire, who writes: ‘I do not know where I am going, 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory.’

Mena Abdullah’s stunning short story ‘The Time of the Peacock’, which explores how the narrator’s Indian heritage informs her identity and world view as a young Australian-born child, stands out, as does Zadie Smith’s brilliant engagement with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127 (‘In the old age black was not counted fair’) through the eyes of a black high-school student, in the excerpt from her novel White Teeth (2000).

While the blending of literary genres varies the pace and provides a broader range of responses to the complexity of migration, the fact that the genre of each piece is not clearly indicated is confusing. It might have been more effective to organise the pieces by literary genre rather than under Departures, Arrivals, Generations, and Returns. Given the current fluidity of genres, it may be a testament to the quality of the works when fiction is so vivid it reads like non-fiction and non-fiction is as beautifully rendered as fiction.

The anthology concludes with ‘A Conversation’ by Pauline Kaldas, recounting a conversation between a husband and wife who migrated to the United States from Egypt in their youth.

Forty years later, the husband tries to persuade his wife to return to Egypt. Sceptical, she responds: ‘These are dreams. No one lives like a king there. You remember only the beauty of things … you follow a dream that no one else can see.’ This statement resonates with Gaston Bachelard’s understanding of the ways in which memories of our first childhood home contribute to our poetic imagery, as articulated in his Poetics of Space (1957): The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams … The house … furnished the framework for an interminable dream, one that poetry alone, through the creation of a poetic work, could succeed in achieving completely.

This constitutes the ultimate contribution of The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: the poetic works it contains give expression to deep-seated memories and feelings, such as nostalgia for one’s homeland and a sense of never truly belonging despite great efforts at assimilation, while documentary studies by historians and social scientists can only ever allude to such emotional weight.

In her foreword, Haitian-born American writer Edwidge Dandicat quotes Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize lecture, which encouraged writers to reveal ‘what it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew.’ The authors included in this collection have embraced this mandate, offering works that forcefully contend with this critical and timely subject matter, bringing the issue to the forefront of public consciousness. The Penguin Book of Migration Literature should promote empathy for the plight of migrants worldwide, reducing the anguish experienced by those undertaking such fateful journeys in future. g Merav Fima is a PhD candidate at Monash University.

Military History

Martial arts The influence of war Rémy Davison

War: How conflict shaped us

by Margaret MacMillan

‘I

Profile Books $39.99 hb, 328 pp

f you want peace, prepare for war,’ Vegetius wrote in a fourth-century ce Roman military manual. From the classical world to the twenty-first-century Sino-American cold war, Margaret MacMillan’s book is broad in its sweep. Judging by the content, one might gain the impression that war is a purely European invention, but that would be erroneous; it is only because Europeans spent 2,400 years carefully archiving their literary, artistic, and technological endeavours in ‘the art of war’ that so much survives – except the victims. The soldiers and civilians are long gone, their names largely forgotten; what lives on is the representation of war in text, the visual arts, cinema, and oral history.

Every country has fought wars. Even the Swiss, traditionally neutral, ‘were the terror of Europe’ – for those who could afford them. Hitler wondered aloud about invading Switzerland, its vaults laden with gold, but thought better of an assault on a country surrounded by mountain peaks, where the national sport was sharp-shooting.

Modern Europe had its foundations in the end of a war.

The Peace of Westphalia (1648) not only concluded decades of religious genocide, which saw Europeans attempt self-extermination, but also heralded the formal recognition of states’ borders and the mutual recognition of sovereignty. The French revolutionary wars, which largely invented conscription and massed formations on battlefields, brought conflict into sharp cultural contrast. Jacques-Louis David’s propagandist painting Napoleon Crossing the Alps depicts the First Consul as a Byronic hero on a white charger, which bears little resemblance to the mule Bonaparte actually rode, led by a guide. Eight years later, across the Pyrenées, the Peninsular War inspired Goya’s The Third of May 1808. French soldiers, faces hidden, aim their muskets at Spanish insurgents, one in angelic white. One hundred and twenty years later, it inspired Picasso’s Guernica.

MacMillan argues that culture, technology, and war are so interdependent that it is difficult to discern which influences which. Of course, some of the greatest literature and cinema was inspired by conflict, from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to War and Peace and Apocalyse Now. Anti-war bestsellers from Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (1909) to Smedley Butler’s War Is a Racket (1935) influenced generations, although if one were to read Pride and Prejudice, set in 1813, one would barely know a war was on, if not for the food shortages wrought by the Napoleonic blockade.

Austen’s characters prefer ‘tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once’ rather than listening to gruesome sagas of mud and blood.

In 1925, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany signed the Locarno Treaties, renouncing war. The following year, Abel Gance was filming his silent epic, Napoléon, in the French countryside. As the red, white, and blue-uniformed actors marched past, grasping their eighteenth-century Charleville muskets, a farmer called out to Gance, ‘Who are we fighting now?’

‘The Italians,’ Gance replied.

‘Ah,’ said the farmer, ‘I knew this Locarno business would come to no good.’

When Napoleon returned from Elba for the Hundred Days, overthrowing the Bourbons, Europe’s sovereigns declared war, not on France but on Napoleon himself. This act, together with the Concert of Europe (1815–1914), marked the beginning of collective security organisations, culminating in the League of Nations (1920–45) and the United Nations. Concert diplomacy ultimately compelled Europeans to formalise international law to limit human-rights abuses on and off the battlefield, exemplified by the First Geneva Convention (1864), which reflected the increasingly horrific toll of organised warfare. The 1929 Geneva Conventions that governed rights in World War II were at least partly respected, even by the Nazis, when it came to prisoners of war, although the Germans routinely ignored Geneva’s strictures when it came to Jewish and Slavic peoples, and hid the Holocaust from international observers. The 1949 Conventions broadened protections further, although it was not until 1977 that Geneva’s Second Additional Protocol appeared, protecting peoples in civil conflicts. Few non-state combatants observe its principles.

‘When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote. The gulf between blue bloods’ enthusiasm for war and their citizens’ revilement has contemporary resonance. Before the Great War, Edward VII, Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II (the son and grandsons of Queen Victoria) discussed a disarmament conference that Nicholas had tentatively suggested. ‘Conference comedy,’ said the Kaiser. ‘Nonsense and rubbish,’ grumbled Edward VII. Their loyal subjects demurred. In the UK, the Women’s Co-operative Guild peaked with 72,000 members in the early 1930s, and supported the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom , which had chapters in fifty countries. After the war, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Women of Greenham Common received global support. In Australia, ‘Save Our Sons’, founded by women, organised protests against Menzies’ conscription as early as 1965. In Germany, Reagan’s deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles in 1983 fomented the German Green Party, which entered a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party in 1998 and resolutely opposed German participation in the 2003 Iraq War. No German government has supported any international conflict since.

There remains an uneasy juxtaposition between the commemoration and condemnation of conflict. Arrondissements in Paris are saturated with the names of soldiers and battlefields.

One can navigate Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors viewing paintings of France’s major battles in chronological order. But attendance by the general public at war museums and commemoration services in Britain, Australia, and Canada decreased markedly from the 1980s, only to experience a remarkable resurgence as Great War AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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Poem anniversaries took place in 2014–18.

Accounting for this revival, Margaret MacMillan argues, ‘Left’ university history departments ‘would prefer not to teach about war at all unless it shows the folly and wickedness of the past’. Conversely, conservatives ‘decry the teaching of history which … concentrates … not enough on great victories’. Brexiter Nigel Farage endorsed Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk (2017) as symbolic of ‘Britain standing alone’, ignoring the French troops protecting the British escape, as well as the dozens of allied pilots flying British Spitfires and Hurricanes. The same applies in Australia; narratives emphasise the heroism of the Gallipoli Anzacs, and only a professional pedant would mention that Australians had the worst record among Allied troops for drunkenness, desertion, and syphilis; or that there were much larger British and French armies a few kilometres away.

Generals are always fighting the previous wars. This leads to pushback against new technologies, despite their obvious lethality.

Knights on horseback resisted their inevitable obsolescence arising from the vulnerability to, first, longbow men, then gunfire. Italian forces relied explicitly on machine guns during World War I, a weapon their allies thought not quite cricket. French military manuals stressed courage and will power; yet, how could these qualities combat poison gas? US commander John J. Pershing believed the superior riflemanship of American Doughboys on the Western Front in 1918 would overcome the Germans’ defensive trench warfare, despite his French and British allies’ experience to the contrary. The kaiser’s forces responded, ‘regretfully’, as one soldier wrote, by machine-gunning 7,000 Americans each week until Pershing, suffering 120,000 casualties in short order, conceded reluctantly that his allies were right.

From the 1980s, the ‘revolution in military affairs’ signalled the ‘technologization’ of warfare. War had entered the digital age.

Officers in Langley, Virginia, could play as important a role as commanders on the battlefield. In the assault on Baghdad in 2003, a geographical information system on a single laptop computer directed bomber crews to their targets with pinpoint accuracy.

Drone strikes on Iranian generals and insurgents in Afghanistan are now embedded as military tools of trade. Autonomous robot soldiers are in prototype form. Since the US’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, there are no legal barriers to the militarisation of space. Donald Trump’s much-ridiculed Space Force is merely another platform through which Washington plans to maintain ‘full spectrum dominance’ in military affairs.

MacMillan concludes that we must think about how to avoid war, even as technology overtakes it. But although war between the great powers has become obsolete (there have been no major power conflicts since 1945), killing fields from Syria to Yemen show that bloody civil wars did not disappear with the twentieth century. States still fight proxy wars in other countries, intent upon attaining through force what they cannot obtain lawfully, aided and abetted by politicians and desk generals. ‘War,’ as the Prussian military officer Carl von Clausewitz wrote, ‘is the continuation of politics by other means.’ g Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University.

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Second Circle Diamond Beach

Heads down and shoulders hunched, we set off, trampling The footstep-gripping sands of Diamond Beach, Into the flat refusal of the gale, Squinting into a distance we would fail, Surely, ever to reach, However far we trudged, like Charlotte Rampling In that French film – what was it? – Sous le sable, Running, and yet not getting anywhere, Towards the yearned-for phantom of her dead lover.

Massed clouds that seemed too ponderous to hover, Depending on thin air, Loomed over us, like sculptures made of marble.

The wind, as though inhabited, howled past, Like history re-enacted in blown scraps And moments, formless figures and events, With the grand claims they make in the future tense Even as they elapse.

And fictions too, with their invisible cast.

Francesca, clasping Paolo, came to mind, Whom Dante looked with pity on, and wept, In turmoil, whirlwind-driven round the second Infernal circle. And she told when beckoned The story that had swept Their souls away. A tern zoomed from behind And past our thwarted progress with a flair And effortless finesse, as to rescind Without a sideways glance all trace of those Phantasmal settings and scenarios.

The wind was just the wind, The air the wordless and inhuman air.

Stephen Edgar

Stephen Edgar’s most recent book is The Strangest Place: New and selected poems (Black Pepper, 2021).

Memoir

The pastures of youth An uneven poetic memoir Aidan Coleman

The family scrambled in and I took off, but I was driving into a whiteout. I couldn’t see where I was driving. The children were crying. One of them asked their mother, ‘Mum, are we going to die?’

I drove slowly, trying to feel the road beneath the tyres, listening for the faint pummelling sound.

Walk Like a Cow: A memoir

by Brendan Ryan

‘T

Wednesday: A Memorial’, in which the author details in vivid and moving prose the unfolding tragedy, his brush with death, and his heroic rescue of neighbours:

Walleah Press $25 pb, 256 pp

he first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary,’ Arthur Schopenhauer remarked in The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. While the timespan is different, the proportions are similar. Brendan Ryan’s Walk Like a Cow, which focuses predominantly on the poet’s first twenty-five years, has been written over roughly two decades. The memoir features twenty-seven largely self-contained chapters and nine previously published poems, in a roughly chronological narrative.

More than half the book focuses on the author’s childhood and teenage years. One of ten children, Ryan grew up on a dairy farm in western Victoria. These chapters balance the rhythms of rural life, the bonds of community, and the beauty of nature against anti-pastoral elements – the brutality of farming and the monotonous drudgery of the work – together with examples of bigotry and social conformity, with the balance tipped toward the latter.

It’s three parts Henry Lawson to one part Banjo Paterson. The descriptions of farm machinery and the routines of work are invariably interesting. An early chapter, ‘The Killers’, presents the slaughter of a sheep in harrowing detail: Once the knife was sharpened and warmed in hot water, the next job was to prise apart the lice-ridden folds of wool, cut the neck and lean my weight onto the sheep to steady the death tremors. To make sure it was properly dead, the sheep’s neck had to be broken by pulling its head back against my knee until the neck bones cracked, the eyeballs rolled back and the gagging ceased.

From the author’s early teens, there is never a hint that he will remain on the land or continue in the Catholic faith. The subject to which the writing returns most often is boredom and the dream of escape. Posters of rock stars, for Ryan and his brother Mick, were ‘like prayers that we returned to each night, and which gave us more meaning than the rosary could ever give’. The author’s experiences of a Catholic high school in Warrnambool were mostly unhappy, and the Christian Brothers failed to convince him of the value of education. He sought solace in watching speedway races, organising discos, playing footy for his local club – here the book comes closest to a paean – and underage drinking in country pubs. This section of the book is peppered with family history, including the story of Ryan’s grandmother, who cared for the writer Alan Marshall. The most compelling of these chapters is ‘Ash

Ryan reflects on the devastation in the hard-edged poem ‘The Morning After’, in which dead cows are bulldozed ‘ten at a time, sideways, headfirst thudding / into place amongst the flies’.

The concluding third of the book, which concerns Ryan’s drift from job to job, his nascent writing, a lot of partying, and visits to (and reflections on) his place of origin, lacks the verve and ironic distance that make the likes of Peter Goldsworthy, Craig Sherborne, and Clive James such readable memoirists. But the final pages are redeemed to a degree by the eloquent titular chapter and a memorable portrait of the poet John Forbes.

The essays originally written as stand-alone pieces for Heat and Southerly tend to be the sharpest. I wonder if Ryan’s craft benefited from this focus, or if these pieces were edited with greater rigour. In many places the book is mired in the quotidian and inconsequential: For many years, Mum preferred velvet soap and Jex soap pads to wash up with. The steel wool soap pads become smaller and smaller the more they were used and the grey hairs often congealed to a small bun from use. While Annie or Theresa might wash up, Kathryn, Mick or I might wipe. Tea towels were flicked at each other’s legs while we waited for a plate to be washed. Sometimes it took nearly an hour to wash up, but if Mum was washing, a lot of things could be talked about in that time.

Some of the chapters read like first drafts, suffering from unnecessary redundancy and cliché. Many sentences are laboured, or lose their way along the short distance they have to travel (‘The bedrooms that siblings share are often essential to the growth of brothers’; ‘Harrison’s brothers didn’t turn up at the school and by the next week the incident was forgotten by some, but not my reputation within the class’). The use of terms like ‘reflect’, ‘think’, and ‘remember’ serve as warnings of some superfluous explaining, and many of the offending sentences bookend the author’s reflections. To this extent, Walk Like a Cow doesn’t do Brendan Ryan the poet proper justice.

As social history this memoir is a valuable document; as a family history it will be of great interest, as it will be to those with geographical associations. But in terms of literary merit the book is one of the most uneven I have read. While some chapters are gripping and eloquent, I couldn’t recommend delaying an encounter with Ryan’s poetry by reading this book from cover to cover.

The leaner, polished work that might have emerged from a more rigorous edit: that book I could have recommended. g Aidan Coleman has published three collections of poetry, most recently Mount Sumptuous (Wakefield Press, 2020).

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Interview

Open Page with Mark McKenna

Mark McKenna’s most recent book is Return to Uluru (Black Inc., 2021).

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

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

George Orwell’s 1984. Not only Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism but his portrayal of the relationship between Winston and Julia.

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

In my twenties, travelling in Europe and Africa, I read just about every Hermann Hesse novel. Today, I can’t bear to read him – or the writing of my former (1980s) self for that matter.

Suakin, the former Ottoman trading port on the Red Sea coast of Sudan. I spent time there in the early 1980s and I’m planning to write about it in the near future.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

What’s your idea of hell?

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Living without books and music.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Patriotism.

What’s your favourite film?

I don’t have one, but I do have favourite scenes from films: Dustin Hoffman lying face down in his parents’ pool in The Graduate (1967); the opening scene of Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005); David Gulpilil encountering two lost schoolchildren in the desert in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971); virtually any scene from Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy (1993–94), Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013), or Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (2017).

And your favourite book?

Probably The Rings of Saturn (1995) by W.G. Sebald. But given that I’m a compulsive book-buyer, it’s probably a book I haven’t read.

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

Manning Clark (whom I never met). William Clark (a shipwreck survivor who walked 700 kilometres from Lakes Entrance to Sydney in 1797). And there must be another Clark out there who would like to join us.

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

Royal personage – and an Australian Republic.

Who is your favourite author?

Impossible! But here’s a shortlist: W.G. Sebald, Robert Macfarlane, Janet Malcolm, Hazel Rowley, and Thomas Bernhard.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Nick Carraway.

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer?

Powers of observation and storytelling. Feeling. Humour.

Imagination.

56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

I haven’t had time for podcasts lately. I prefer to listen to music or read.

The absence of a deadline. Enjoying distractions. Not being able to talk about my work with friends who understand what I’m trying to do.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Honesty. Fairness. Respect for the author’s intentions. Genuine engagement with the book under review.

Which ones do you enjoy reading?

There a few: James Wood is one of them.

How do you find working with editors?

I’ve been fortunate to work with talented editors like Sally Heath (formerly with MUP and now with Thames & Hudson) and more recently with Chris Feik and Kirstie Innes-Will at Black Inc. I’d be lost without their close reading of my work and their suggestions for improvement. As Chris says, skilful editing helps to make any book the best version of itself.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I’ve just returned from Adelaide Writers’ Week. It was uplifting to see people not only in conversation but also physically in one another’s company. It’s completely free and much more relaxed than most of the other major festivals.

Are artists valued in our society?

If, by ‘valued’, you mean generally appreciated, then yes.

As much as cricketers, footballers and military heroes? No. Enough to secure levels of government funding similar to those found in many European countries? No. To the point where it’s broadly understood that creative and intellectual endeavour is ‘work’? No.

What are you working on now?

I’m going to experiment with the idea of writing a memoir/ history of my first twenty-five years, narrated through three formative experiences: growing up in Toongabbie in Sydney’s western suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s; travelling in Sudan in 1982; and living in East Germany (on and off ) in 1983–84.

Like all experiments, it might not work. I’m also a biographer in search of another subject. g

A R T S

Film

‘I’ll see you down the road’ Leaving Empire for a wanderer’s life Valerie Ng

Frances McDormand as Fern in Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)

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ife in the Nevada town of Empire has become extinct: the town’s plant has been shut, the houses emptied, the postcode eliminated. Fern’s (Frances McDormand) husband has died recently, and when we meet her at the start of Nomadland, written and directed by Chloé Zhao (The Rider [2017], Songs My Brothers Taught Me [2015]), Fern’s sole earthly anchor is a small van in which she has packed all her remaining belongings. She cuts herself loose from the last of Empire’s residents with a firm hug and a tight smile, then drives off into a vast, frozen landscape. Untied from the comforts and constraints of a stationary life, she navigates a difficult freedom, relying for her livelihood on the fortuity of sporadic employment, free parking spaces, and human decency.

Leaving Empire, Fern coasts from place to place. She brushes paths with the same clapped-out drifters and moves through low-paying jobs with ease. After ending a seasonal stint in an Amazon fulfilment centre, she finds refuge in a caravan rendezvous in the Arizonian desert, cleaning toilets in an RV park, dishing out canteen food, then hauling potatoes, and on, and on, and on.

The simplicity of a life unmoored from financial and geographical stability lulls Nomadland into a pacifying but propulsive pace. Moments of great emotion are brief, and time flows ruthlessly through the seasons. The film meditates on the rhythm of life’s passing and the inevitability of change, necessitated here by Fern’s vagrancy, the freedom of her compass. Overhead, Ludovico Einaudi’s warm melodies infuse Fern’s itinerant journey with a melancholic dignity.

It is this holistic angle of Nomadland – Zhao’s eschewal of a constructed narrative, choosing instead to snatch at random aspects of Fern’s post-Empire existence – that lends it a sense of authenticity, the sense that Fern’s life, world, and friends are all utterly tangible. The film itself is adapted from a non-fiction text: Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the twenty-first century (2017), which examines older recession-hit nomads who travel across the States in campervans, seeking employment. The 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

documentarian nature of Joshua James Richards’s reverent camera, as it moves almost ponderously across panoramic lands and time-swept faces, imbues the film with the sort of meaning that enriches a life otherwise prosaic. With the exception of David Strathairn (who plays a charming drifter rendered slightly facetious by Straithairn’s celebrity), Fern’s companions are all played by non-professional actors.

These individuals comprise Nomadland ’s modest heart. Fern befriends many characters, with some of whom she shares a few precious, soul-baring moments. She exchanges a gift, a cigarette, a name, a tête-à-tête. She meets a septuagenarian woman by the name of Swankie (who plays a fictionalised version of herself ).

Swankie’s cancer having spread to her brain, she has less than a year to live. She resolves to spend her last days in Alaska, where she saw sights of nature that rendered her life meaningful and complete. Swankie’s storytelling, as she reflects on a personal history beyond our reach and understanding, is bracingly raw.

People like Swankie rise without warning into the foreground of the film, then fade away without fanfare. Throughout Nomadland, it is impossible to tell whether we will ever see these people again, or whether the rest of the film will pass their lives by.

Paired with the randomness of Fern’s experiences on the road is the immutable trajectory of her journey deeper into her years, further away from her life at Empire. Nomadland depicts the process of recovering from the loss of a loved one and an entire community. The tragedy of Fern’s vanished life is marked by the solace she finds in various objects – her van, named ‘Vanguard’; a collection of plates gifted by her father; worn-out photographs of people we do not recognise. In one of the first shots of the film, Fern holds a weathered denim coat to her chest, face crumpling.

But her past is something we are never allowed to see, though it overshadows everything. The effect is haunting but frustrating; we are following a person’s reaction to a tragedy without having seen the tragedy itself, and it is sometimes difficult to fully empathise. Frances McDormand, however, expertly sustains Fern’s rugged pathos; the hard steel of her spirit is something to behold.

The circularity of the film’s structure – as Fern seeks the same companions, the same rough work, the same modest spans of peace – digs at something universal: the comfort of life’s thematic mainstays. Zhao’s film is backed by its enormity of theme – the unsullied grace of a wanderer’s life, upon which uncertainty, resentment, and tragedy play their part, but so too do beauty, companionship, solitude. Its hard-boiled sentimentality is captured by the words of goodbye with which the nomads in Nomadland part, uncertain of the paths of their comrades. ‘I’ll see you down the road,’ they say – be it in this life or the next. These are words that capture the calm acceptance of the drifters, who take everything in their stride and still carry on.

It’s impossible to leave this film with anything but a bolt of awe, a disbelief at the yawning breadth of our world, and the richness of the people within it. g Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures), 108 minutes, directed by Chloé Zhao.

Valerie Ng is an arts writer based in Melbourne. ❖

Opera

Escaping Bluebeard Bartók’s opera as a #MeToo thriller Malcolm Gillies

Daniel Sumegi as Bluebeard in Bluebeard’s Castle (Prudence Upton)

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éla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle premièred in the chaotic, final months of the Great War. Its lugubrious symphonic mood, grim libretto, and static set gained respect rather than favour from its first anxious audience. A century on, now freed from the shackles of copyright (Bartók died in 1945), the opera invites new approaches, arrangements, and settings.

There is even now an annual Hungarian opera festival, where the duke and his latest wife are presented everywhere from night bars to spa baths.

Opera Australia, on March 1, unveiled its short Sydney season of Bluebeard’s Castle, as a #MeToo-era thriller. As associate director Priscilla Jackman explained to me in an interview, as our latest Parliament House scandals broke: ‘No opera could be more important at this moment.’ Jackman and the director, Andy Morton, have sought to put aside the misogynist ‘museum piece’ of 1918, and to reframe the story to confront 2021’s difficult subjects: sexual violence, consent, coercion, and victimhood. Indeed, they wanted to bring the violence they heard in Bartók’s music directly onto the stage.

Bass-baritone Daniel Sumegi (Bluebeard) and mezzosoprano Carmen Topciu ( Judith, his fourth wife) equalled the especial challenges of this new production. Carefully, even with some understatement, they reveal what lies behind the first four of the seven forbidding doors of the Castle, closely following the opera’s original dramatic constraints. The orchestra, skilfully slimmed down from Bartók’s large ensemble by conductor Andrea Molino to fit the inadequate pit of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, still conveys the Bartókian sense of menace as the blood-soaked secrets of Bluebeard’s torture chamber, armoury, and even the more radiant treasury and prolific garden are unfolded. It is, however, with the apparently innocent question of ‘Who waters the garden?’ that this Sydney Bluebeard turns to the more explicit on-stage violence denied to Budapest audiences in 1918.

Moving towards the climactic fifth door, the Kingdom, Bluebeard initiates a slap, a Trumpian grope, and a couple of struggle sequences. Judith, in return, kicks him down the stairs and later stabs him. The directors have read Béla Balázs’s libretto and the music carefully, however; these actions still fit plausibly with their ambit. Both singers pull out their bigger musical stops, playing to Topciu’s magnificent soprano strength, while Sumegi (who will perform the role of Wotan in Opera Australia’s Ring cycle later

this year) makes more of his hitherto under-exposed bass sonorities to reinforce the intimidatory side of Bluebeard’s character.

The following Lake of Tears scene was a highlight. The explicit new tensions of the Kingdom are maintained through shimmering lake effects and the masterly ‘silent, white, smooth and unearthly’ atmosphere, created by lighting designer John Rayment. These devices further the expectation of Bluebeard’s surrender of the last door key to a freshly empowered Judith.

The opera’s final scene pushes way beyond the enigmatic ending conceived in 1918, where it is even unclear whether the three wives revealed behind this last door are alive or just living on in Bluebeard’s mind. For the libretto is still Bluebeard’s story.

He reverently celebrates his beautiful former wives, before the reluctant Judith joins them as the fourth, and last: the Lady of the Night. The night’s stage action, however, told an altogether different story, of wives held hooded and in bondage, who are liberated thanks to Judith, and then mete out to Bluebeard his own abusive treatment, leaving him, presumably, dying. In a powerful new vision, all four wives leave the stifling castle, walking silhouetted towards the bright light of hope.

The surge and repose of the ‘mystery play of the mind’ intended by the librettist Balázs has, in Morton’s and Jackman’s hands, become a thriller of escalating power right to the end. The very vividness of Bartók’s music, originally focused upon Bluebeard’s loneliness, effectively underscores this alternative on-stage ending.

As Jackman states: ‘Bluebeard may finish the opera, but they [the directors] see the opera as Judith’s.’

Does this transformation from implicit to explicit, from mystery to thriller, have a price to pay? Well, yes, if you follow the precise yet subtle expression of the libretto, and the matching supple orchestral symphony, into which the two vocal parts fit like fingers in a glove. A parting of ways is evident during the final three scenes, particularly the last one, between the violence on stage and the meaning of the words the two protagonists actually sing.

Nowhere is this divergence more telling than in Bluebeard’s vignettes of his former wives and the growing apprehensions of the fearful Judith at joining them.

The risk, evident on Monday night, is that this #MeToo thriller of 2021 removes the orchestra from its central musical role in progressing the drama. It becomes more a mood backing track to the stage action of this new adaptation. The orchestra is also the essential vehicle for portraying the third listed dramatis persona of Bartók’s opera, the Castle, which sighs, weeps, and perspires, and has its own personality (of which Bluebeard warns Judith to beware). The opera’s title is not just a location of the drama – it is the drama. There are good reasons why it was not entitled simply Bluebeard and Judith, as, for instance, with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Or, as in this Judith and Bluebeard production by Opera Australia.

And the masked audience’s reception of this première?

Applause all round, but we older men looked worried. g Bluebeard’s Castle was performed in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, in March 2021.

Malcolm Gillies, a Canberra-based musicologist, has authored or edited half a dozen studies of Béla Bartók.

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Art

An invitation to slow down Celebrating the art and culture of the Tiwi people Kelly Gellatly

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oday, our screen-filled lives both encourage and condition us – through our collective, incessant scrolling – to dip in and to consume; a modus operandi or malaise that affects both exhibition-making and the viewing habits of audiences that are increasingly enticed and rewarded by contemporary art as spectacle – art that is immersive, often participatory in some way, and that looks great on Instagram. TIWI, a major survey of Tiwi art at NGV Australia over summer, stands in stark contrast to this phenomenon. It invites us to slow down in order to absorb the stories, connections, and extraordinary sense of cultural continuity that reverberates across the exhibition. It was at once a celebration and a joy to experience.

The exhibition opened with a display of vibrant ceramics in the gallery’s third-floor foyer. These conveyed Tiwi ancestral stories such as Murtankala (who created Melville and Bathurst Islands) and aspects of modern life. The elegant cases that house the works set the tone for the airy and seemingly light-filled spaces that greeted the viewer within the galleries, invigorated by the works’ characteristic Tiwi pwanga (dots), marlipinyini (lines), and turtiyanginari (ochre colours). The works seemed to jostle and dance against the backdrop of the traditional white cube (or as close to it as the interior of LAB Architecture’s gallery spaces got). This was an experience enhanced and guided by exhibition design, not overwhelmed by it. The way in which the display architecture led us through the space encouraged a physical as well as intellectual engagement with the art, one that also managed to foreground the importance to Tiwi culture of the songs and dances of the kulama and pukumani ceremonies, which respectively mark the coming of age and the passing of members of the community. As curator Judith Ryan writes in the exhibition publication: Tiwi art retains its intimate connection with song and dance and with jilamara, the idiosyncratic painted designs with which performers celebrate kulama and conceal their identity from mapurtiti in pukumani ceremonies. For Tiwi people, kawakawini-mi youi-mi jilamara-mi (to sing is to dance is to paint) or, as artist Chris Tipiloura phrased it, ‘nginingilawa jilamaram nginiyi parlingarri pirripapukiya turti-yanginari (painting is about painting oneself with ochre)’. A painted design on any surface has deep associations with singing and dancing and elements of Tiwi language and culture that are non-verbal. Dancing in ceremonial contexts suggests complex understandings of time, causation and kinship connections. It summons up participant and spectator energy, choreographing and negotiating the public space, geographic location, land, spirituality and embodiment.

With works spanning from 1911 to today across a range of media (painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, textile design, and video), the exhibition was not chronological, allowing one to move between the past and present and to comprehend, as Ryan notes, the way in which Tiwi ‘emphasise and value innovation and independence in carving and painting, rather than reproducing 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

inherited and encoded totemic designs that accord with lines of descent or kinship systems’. As the extraordinary ‘signature’ works of well-known artists such as Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Timothy Cook, Kutuwulumi Purawarrumpatu Kitty Kantilla, and Pedro Wonaeamirri attest (to name but a few), artistic individuality and stylistic ingenuity are prized and celebrated.

As Wonaeamirri explains, individual artists create work that is nginingilawa, which means ‘mine and no-one else’s. It belongs to me and is all from me.’

This sense of an interconnected but unique vision is also witnessed in the exciting work of relative ‘newcomer’ Johnathon World Peace Bush. Bush’s large-scale paintings combine figuration, gesture, and Tiwi lines, circles, and cross-hatching in compositions that meld Tiwi iconography with that of the Catholic Church.

This is a poignant reminder of the impact of the establishment of missions at Wurrumiyanga in 1911 and at Pirlangimpi in 1940; the latter housed Indigenous children of the Stolen Generations.

While Bush’s paintings embody the inherent tension between these ancient and introduced belief systems, the two coexist for many Tiwi today, exemplified by the Christian crosses that often populate the landscape alongside tutini (burial poles) at pukamani sites and the symbolic presence of Christian crosses and haloes in the paintings of artists such as Timothy Cook.

The history and legacy of collecting Tiwi work plays an important role in the exhibition and the accompanying publication.

The inclusion of a selection of significant early tunga (stringybark containers once used for carrying food and water) and tutini from Museums Victoria, collected by anthropologist (and later, honorary director of the National Museum of Victoria) Walter Baldwin Spencer on two separate visits to the Islands in 1911 and 1912, and of the stunning group of barks and tunga collected

by C.P. Mountford in 1954 and now housed in the South Australian Museum, enables the viewer to see connections between the bold jilimara (painting and design) of these early works and those of contemporary artists. Far removed from community, and primarily accessed through reproduction, these historic works simultaneously act as both a vital point of connection and as a springboard for new interpretations. Indeed, examples from the Mountford collection influenced the suite of prints colloquially known as the ‘Mountford Project’ that were created by artists Maryanne Mungatopi, Janice Murray Pungautiji, and Pedro Wonaeamirri at the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne in 2000 after they had studied the works in storage in the South Australian Museum. As Johnathon World Peace Bush states: Parlingarri is the past, the memory of the past, the history of the past and is everything that makes up our story. All the experiences of our ancestors, the goddess and the moon man: everything that came before makes the present, the now and us people.

Important shifts in museological understanding, and consideration, and appreciation of these objects as art, are also represented by the group of tutini commissioned by Dr Stuart Scougall and artist and deputy director Tony Tuckson for the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958 (which comprised the first display of Indigenous cultural objects as a form of artistic expression in an Australian art museum) and by the group of tutini displayed at the

opening of the National Gallery of Victoria a decade later (which were formally acquired in 1970). From this relatively modest and comparatively late beginning, the NGV cemented its now longstanding commitment to the work of Tiwi artists through the commissioning of fifty-five paintings on bark by eighteen different artists from Jilimara Arts in 1991.This impressive body of work is now the cornerstone of the Gallery’s more expansive Tiwi holdings.

Accompanying TIWI is TIWI: Art and Artists, a major publication that brings together a number of perspectives and expert voices. Elegantly designed, lavishly illustrated, and very readable, it will serve as an important reference tool for many years to come.

TIWI, the last exhibition that Judith Ryan, Senior Curator of Indigenous Art, will curate at the NGV, marks the end of an era.

As the future of this significant collection is rightly handed over to First Nations curators, the Gallery’s outstanding collection remains a testament to Ryan’s commitment to Indigenous art, its scholarship and dissemination, over her forty-plus years in the role. g Tiwi: Art and Artists (NGV, $69.95 hb) is edited by Judith Ryan.

Kelly Gellatly is an experienced arts leader, advocate, curator, and writer. ❖

Art

A wealth of iconic paintings Stellar works from London’s National Gallery Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

Four scenes from the Early Life of Saint Zenobius by Sandro Botticelli c.1500. (© The National Gallery, London. Mond Bequest, 1924)

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t is hard not to marvel at the logistical challenges that must have faced the production of the National Gallery of Australia’s current blockbuster exhibition, Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London. Amid a global pandemic that has effectively brought international travel to a halt, the NGA has made it possible for Australians to view some of the most important paintings in the history of Western art – paintings only ever seen in London. Without having to board an aeroplane, the visitor is transported to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, which is currently closed because of the pandemic. Visitors to Botticelli to Van Gogh are given the precious opportunity to stand – socially distanced, of course – in front of sixty-one works by artists such as Titian, Hals, Velázquez, Turner, and Monet.

There is a wealth of iconic paintings on display at the NGA, making the show well worth visiting. These are the kinds of works of art that, in a pre-Covid world, people travelled to Europe to admire. Starting with the first room, which is devoted to the Italian Renaissance, Carlo Crivelli’s The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius (1486) and Tintoretto’s The Origin of the Milky Way (c.1575) stopped me in my tracks. Works by Domenico Ghirlandaio and Titian offer supreme examples of the development of perspectival painting and naturalism, and put us on a trajectory towards the

Impressionist paintings presented in the exhibition’s final room.

Incidentally, in both the first and final rooms there are pictures of dragons being slayed: Paolo Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon (c.1470) and Ingres’s Angelica Saved by Ruggiero (1819–39).

The history of Western art is, after all, as much about recurring tropes as it is about formalist progress.

In the room featuring ‘Dutch Painting of the Golden Age’, Rembrandt’s Self-portrait at the Age of 34 (1640) draws the viewer into an intimate encounter with an artist known for his considered yet candid self-representations. Brushwork that gives texture to flesh, fabric, and fur, along with the artist’s skilled rendering of light and shadow, make this painting a showstopper. The room devoted to ‘Van Dyck and British Portraiture’ reminds us of the institutional underpinning of the exhibition – that this is the British National Collection, with representatives of the British School, including Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Thomas Lawrence, recalling the motivations behind the establishment of the National Gallery in 1824. Following a side adventure with Canaletto on the Grand Tour, we progress to Spain and the work of Goya, Velázquez, El Greco, and Murillo. The landscapes of Claude Lorrain and those working within the picturesque tradition are displayed, before the exhibition concludes in France with the Impressionists. If the single work by Botticelli (Four Scenes from the Early Life of Saint Zenobius, c.1500) fails to inspire, the sole work by Van Gogh – Sunflowers of 1888 – is bound to attract attention, if only for its luminous yellow.

Beyond the display of iconic works of art, wall panels offer interactive activities for children. For adults, however, this exhibition does little to deepen our understanding of the art on display.

There is a glossing over of the economic and political conditions under which the art was commissioned, made, sold, and collected.

Slavery, war, and revolution go largely unmentioned. Images of women – from Ghirlandaio’s Madonna in the first room to Degas’ ballerinas in the final room – are plentiful, but not a single female artist is represented. Looking at the landscape room, you would be forgiven for forgetting that some of these pastoral scenes were produced against a backdrop of industrialisation.

One of the final paintings on show is a portrait of Mrs Robert Holland (1851) by Ary Scheffer. The Victorian female writer and philanthropist in Grecian drapery, as depicted by Scheffer, rests her cheek on her hand and angles her head pensively towards AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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the exit of the exhibition. Beyond Botticelli to Van Gogh, visitors to the NGA will encounter a wall of portraits and self-portraits of Australian women as part of the exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now. It is as if Mrs Holland is wishing she were hanging in their company. Does the Know My Name exhibition exempt us from dealing with questions of exclusion in Botticelli to Van Gogh? In this precarious and stationary time, it is a treat – even a tonic – to be transported from Renaissance Italy to nineteenth-century France, via England and Spain, from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra to the

National Gallery in London. But let us not forget that there is more to the story of Botticelli to Van Gogh than meets the eye. g Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London continues at the National Gallery of Australia until 14 June 2021.

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory in the School of Art & Design at the Australian National University.

Art

What Domenichino knew

A long march through five centuries of art history Christopher Allen

A History of Art History

by Christopher S. Wood

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Princeton University Press $59.99 hb, 459 pp

he history of art history in the West over the past five hundred years is rich and complex and yet rests on clear historiographical foundations, themselves grounded in inescapable historical realities. Authors and artists in the Renaissance looked back to the civilisation of Greco-Roman antiquity, all but lost in the catastrophe of the fall of the Roman Empire and succeeded by centuries of dramatic cultural regression. They sought to regain the greatness of antiquity, and the bolder even hoped to surpass it.

This is the basis of Vasari’s three-stage account of the rise of Renaissance art (1550), the first beginning with Giotto, the second with Masaccio, and the third with Leonardo. Vasari considered the greatest of his contemporaries, Michelangelo, to have equalled the ancients, but a later generation came to believe that the sixteenth-century Mannerists had lost their way. From the early seventeenth century, therefore, the model was extended to include an interval of decline before the new impetus beginning with the Carracci, and this process continued in academic debates about line, colour, and what we now call the Baroque.

Christopher S. Wood’s A History of Art History should thus have no trouble building an intelligible narrative. In fact, while offering an abundance of facts and names and dates, it is oddly lacking not only in clarity but in much else we might expect from a book about art history. There is hardly, for example, a single perceptive remark about any work of art; the paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer are characterised in the most perfunctory and banal way. Nor does the author seem to have much understanding of the art theory that accompanies early modern 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

art-historical writing, or the humoral system that underpins the biographical genre from Vasari to Bellori.

The introduction contains a number of interesting observations – and at this stage in reading a book one is giving it the most sympathetic attention possible – but Wood’s attempts to build some kind of overall conceptual structure flounder in terms like ‘annalistic’ and ‘typology’, which are used in a vague and inconsistent way. The theme of ‘relativism’ is raised early but never properly defined (it is possible to judge different art traditions by their own standards but still clearly assess achievement within each tradition). Nor is there any critical framework for understanding art within its social and cultural history while also appreciating its capacity for transcendent or perennial meaning.

These themes echo through the book, never resolved.

What follows is a long march through five centuries of art history in which arbitrary historiographical discursiveness drifts like a fog above a world of facts – of individuals, of works of art, of social contexts, of theoretical debates – that are too often poorly understood or referred to in the superficial way that facts of all kinds can be instantly found on the internet. Time and again, I felt that I would have gained a sounder idea of unfamiliar individuals from simply looking up their Wikipedia pages; in cases that I knew well, on the other hand, the discussion turned out repeatedly to be either facile or defective.

Wood fails to explain Vasari’s historiographical vision, and thus chides him for not showing greater appreciation of Giotto.

But his own account is full of odd contradictions and gratuitous assertions: ‘Vasari lifts art out of world history: art now has its own history’; ‘Vasari may multiply the discriminations, but in the end he is just an annalist’; ‘How poor Vasari’s literary soil is, how uninspiring and unpoetic his comments on art’.

Wood himself, as I already mentioned, has little to say about art, but this doesn’t prevent him from making surprisingly cavalier assumptions about the intentions of artists. On page 116 alone, he writes: ‘Domenichino asserted’, ‘He was aware’, ‘He believed’, ‘Domenichino is saying’, ‘Domenichino was proposing’, and ‘Domenichino knew’. His discussion culminates in this unintelligible passage: ‘The contest between typology and authorial performance is now the dramatic content of art. Contradictions become the matrix of artistic achievement. Artistic beauty engulfs the beauty of bodies.’

A little further on, he seems to have no idea of what the biographer and theorist Gian Pietro Bellori owed to such predecessors

as Agucchi, and how this helped to shape his judgment of Caravaggio and the Carracci, nor any awareness of the fundamental book on this subject by Sir Denis Mahon, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947). This apparent ignorance allows him to declare breezily that Bellori’s doctrine is ‘simplistic’.

Roger de Piles, another notable figure and a crucial theorist in the age of Louis XIV, is mentioned without an adequate discussion of his relations with the Académie Royale de Peinture – first as its nemesis and finally as its spokesman – and with no mention of his starting point as a theorist in the translation of CharlesAlphonse Dufresnoy’s centrally important De arte graphica (1668). Once again, with so little awareness of context and meaning, we are hardly surprised to encounter the standard clichéd response to de Piles’s late Balance des peintres, a tabulation of the virtues of the great artists of the canon, whose real point was to achieve reconciliation between the partisans of line and colour.

Baudelaire is briefly quoted and then misinterpreted on the following page – ‘The implication, spelled out by Baudelaire, is that the modern artist [...] has no will to counteract the intrinsic fictionality of the image.’ But no: if Wood had troubled to read Baudelaire’s writing on art in any depth, he would realise the passage is making a familiar point about the role of the imagination, which the poet calls la reine du vrai (the queen of truth).

The discussion of Morelli follows a kind of mannerism which we saw already with Vasari, of successively declaring someone a pioneer and then a dead-end. Walter Pater appears without ade-

quate context and with an almost breathtaking failure to recognise his unique impact on the modern appreciation of art, as the man who not only made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world but also created the popular mystique surrounding Botticelli and Giorgione – and indeed perhaps even Winckelmann. Pater himself would have winced at the misspelling of a Greek word on page 264.

Generally, Wood is more at home with the Germans, but even here the lack of a broader grasp of art history and theory is a hindrance: how can we appreciate the significance of Hildebrand without understanding both the Renaissance and Baroque paragone between painting and sculpture (as well as the debate between casting and modelling) and the dramatic transformation of the canon of ancient sculpture that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century?

By chance, I reviewed Daniel Thomas’s collected writings, Recent Past, a few weeks ago for The Weekend Australian. The contrast between the two books could not be greater. In every page of Thomas’s book there are moments of insight, glimpses into the intimate meaning of a work, the mind of an artist, or the changing social environment of artists and museums. Here, unfortunately, it is too often clichés and even errors disguised by the congested but loose-knit abstractions of academic waffle. g Christopher Allen is the co-author of a critical and annotated edition of Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy’s De arte graphica (2005).

Music

Free music

A subtle volume with poignant depths David Pear

Distant Dreams: The correspondence of Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross, 1946–60 edited by Teresa Balough and Kay Dreyfus

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Lyrebird Press $40 pb, 199 pp

ompiling a selection of letters for publication is a vexing task. Inclusions and exclusions tend to satisfy only the editors. Specialist readers will inevitably find their particular interests inadequately represented, while others will find material included to be offensive or inappropriate. The success of this volume has been secured partly because both editors have worked on books of Grainger letters before: Teresa Balough with Comrades in Art: The correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger, 1957–61, and Kay Dreyfus with her ground-breaking volume The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger, 1901–1914. Also, only 181 letters between Cross and Percy and Ella Grainger were available, which minimised the scale of the

cull. The editors chose to exclude seventy letters, the quotidian content of which immediately flagged their redundancy.

Included in the volume are seventy-six letters from Percy Grainger to Burnett Cross, a musician, science teacher, editor, and writer who lived not far from Grainger’s White Plains home, in Hartsdale, New York State. Thirty-one letters from Cross to Percy were included, and four from Ella to Cross. These constitute Part 1 (‘A Very Happy Occupation’) of Distant Dreams. The second part (‘A Man of High Intelligence and Lively Imagination’) presents nine ‘interviews, lectures and other writings on Free Music’ by Cross alone. Together these writings bear witness to innovative – if at times rather Boy’s Own – musical adventures, as Cross and Percy attempt to fulfil the composer’s lifelong ‘distant dream’ of a truly ‘free’ musical form unrestricted by melodic, harmonic, temporal, or physical restraints. How they built the equipment to do this is ingenious, sometimes amusing, often confusing, but always impressive. A tip for the prospective reader: Cross’s 1978 document ‘Free Music’ and Warren Burt’s excellent foreword together serve as an outstanding ‘user manual’ for the letters and other articles, so read them first. The struggle that engulfed the Graingers and Cross – just how to construct mechanisms that would play such music – will make much more sense if you do. Immediately, Grainger’s colourfully named ‘Kangaroo-Pouch’, ‘Estey-Reed’, or ‘Electric-Eye’ ‘tone tools’ will become familiar devices you understand, not eccentric fantasies that are hard to appreciate.

Distant Dreams is more than a history of musical instrument building, however advanced such instruments might be. It is AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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a subtle volume with poignant depths. The letters reflect the American world view of the 1950s, highlight the role of science in society and education, and attest to a relationship between the three correspondents of profound quality and stirring richness.

We witness the reconciliation of Grainger’s mercurial enthusiasm and Cross’s flat-lined cautious, logical methodology. A fusion took place, in which two characters, two traditions, worked together, not simply side by side but as complements to one another, shoring up each other’s work and standing in when the other stumbled; or in Grainger’s case, could barely even stand. Cross, we read, was ‘motivated by a lively curiosity, and an absolute absence of fear of failure’. Cross wrote to Grainger on 8 June 1959, describing his latest reading, The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler, which examined the work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, among others. Cross noted that they endured wrong turns and dead ends, but kept going because ‘the actual path of discovery ... is more like sleepwalking than a logical progression’. By contrast, Grainger, despite his musical fame, was wracked by fear – a fear of performing, of police scrutiny, of war, of disease, of burglars.

Cross was deeply committed to the integrity of scientific method, and wrote about it for his teaching peers. Grainger knew nothing about science but placed his faith in art, music, and humanity itself as sources of universal good. Both were driven by evangelistic zeal.

The initial correspondence began in the months following the end of World War II. The tone is formal, mildly distant, and mutually respectful. Cautiously they got to know one another, until an affection and commitment to their shared aims was established. Often Percy complimented Cross effusively in their exchanges, while Cross regularly calmed Grainger, without indulging in his maudlin introspection. By the end of July 1950, Percy begins to sign his letters no longer with ‘Yours ever’, or just ‘Percy’, but with variations on ‘Love to all from Ella and Me’.

On September 2 that year, Cross signed off with ‘My love to you both.’ Within the month, Elizabeth Burnett, Cross’s mother and music director of the First Baptist Church of White Plains, began organising a concert of Grainger’s music.

This friendship came at a crucial time. Over the next fifteen years, Grainger’s prostate cancer increasingly sapped his energy, his medication and pain challenged his concentration, and problems of continence demoralised him. The letters show how Cross stepped up, taking a lead and providing the support that enabled Free Music to become a reality.

The photographic records in the book are excellent, and add a crucial dimension to the work’s clarity (page 20, and pages 152–53 are good examples of this). Cross undertook a number of photographic assignments for Grainger, including those of various composers’ eyes, to support some of Grainger’s racial views concerning blue eyes, ‘Nordic’ origins, and genius (there is no evidence Cross shared such views). Grainger was not afraid to declare the importance of this work, writing in a letter to Cross dated 27 May 1953: ‘But the securing of the eye photos is so important that I greatly rejoiced when you declared yourself willing to do it & I don’t greatly care whom I incommode in the matter – including your dear self.’

The composers subjected to this (Walton, Vaughan Williams, and Bax, among others) were more amused than incommoded.

When a composer did not seem to have the requisite blue eyes, 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

Grainger blamed the light, or other elements. So when Vaughan Williams’s eyes betrayed some purple and hazel, Grainger declared to Cross (13 June 1953), ‘let us rescue as much Nordicness out of V. Williams’s eyes as we can, say I!’ From a structural viewpoint, Lyrebird Press has produced a stunningly elegant volume. Its robust dimensions help to do justice to the lush collection of illustrations. The print is easy on the eye, ensuring that editorial notes on the letters are provided at the corresponding side of the text to which they refer. This means the notes get read: unlike endnotes and footnotes, you actually want to read these side notes; they are not at all labour-intensive, although at times they are perhaps a little too discursive.

Despite Grainger’s many fears, he impressed Cross as a brave man in his commitment to the belief that Free Music was the way music must, in time, go. ‘When that time comes, I think Percy Grainger’s achievement as a pioneer will be fully recognised and saluted.’ Distant Dreams helps make that happen, and the distance a little less. g David Pear edited Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger with Malcolm Gillies and Mark Carroll (OUP, 2006). ❖ Art

‘They love you still’

Cy Twombly and the spectre of antiquity Patrick McCaughey

Cy Twombly: Making past present edited by Christine Kondoleon with Kate Nesin

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MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston US$65 hb, 264 pp

f you were fortunate enough to take Franz Philipp’s course in Medieval and Renaissance Art at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s – the old Fine Arts B – you would have quickly encountered Erwin Panofsky’s masterpiece, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960). It set forth authoritatively the argument that from the Carolingian revival in the eighth century through the Ottonian and Romanesque survivals, culminating in the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento and cinquecento, Western art was haunted by the spectre of antiquity.

Admiration for its mighty surviving works throughout western Europe turned steadily towards emulating them.

To a callow youth, this argument presented a commanding view of the Western imagination. It was a ‘deep state’ theory of the sprawling mass of Western art. It was easy to see it working its way through the seventeenth century – all those vigorous reworkings of the Belvedere Torso by Rubens, to say nothing of Poussin and Claude. To be sure, it gradually became codified in

the schools and academies of the eighteenth century. It had its moments of absurdity, such as Goethe tearing through Assisi intent on seeing the Roman Temple of Minerva and skipping the early Giotto cycle of the life of St Francis in the Upper Church of San Francesco. Eventually, the impulse of the antique calcified in the Salons of Paris. The triumph of modern art compelled antiquity to relinquish its grip over the Western imagination.

But that makes one feel queasy. The guiding inspiration of Western art for two thousand years dismissed at the shake of a brush? A moment’s reflection and you will bring to mind James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose frame is provided by Homer’s Odyssey.

Keep musing and you will recall Picasso’s Vollard Suite, with its artists and models in continuous dialogue with classical gods and goddesses. The post-and-beam architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe owes its poetry to the proportion and measure of classical architecture.

Now in our lifetime we have Cy Twombly’s sustained enquiry into, argument with, and homage to antiquity: its gods and heroes, its myths and history. Nobody could doubt Twombly’s avant-garde credentials. Indeed, his scratchy, improvisatory method of working, his cryptic allusions to persons, events, and poetry, have from time to time challenged taste. And not just that of the Eltham Daubers but the likes of Donald Judd who, in 1963, said of Twombly’s Nine Discourses on Commodus: ‘There isn’t anything to these paintings.’ The present catalogue, invaluably, provides the fullest account of Twombly’s classical impulses.

No major American painter since the nineteenth century has immersed themselves so fully in the environment and mores of the classical past. In 1957, he left America for Rome, which remained his base until his death in 2011. He lived for a period in Gaeta in southern Italy and spent most of his summers in a palatial villa in Bassano in Teverina, an hour’s drive north of Rome, buried in the lushness of Lazio green. He collected antiquities, some notable Etruscan works as well as Roman statuary and portraits, and placed them prominently in his Rome house and at the villa.

They were his household gods.

The fragmentary nature of so much classical art and the fragmentary quality of Twombly’s paintings and sculpture form an intense connection. An explosion of paint can break into fragments that scatter across the canvas like a meteor shower.

Inscriptions, often hard to read, elusive rather than illuminating, can break off or be erased by Twombly. They retain what Roland Barthes, a shrewd observer of Twombly, called ‘the bait of meaning’. We are led into this world, made cohesive by the sheer energy of Twombly’s markings, be they brush marks, scribbled writings, collaged elements, random splashes of paint. We never doubt his intensity of feeling.

Twombly once observed that ‘to paint involves a certain crisis – a crucial moment’. There is always in his facture a sense of the pent-up being released. Professor Mary Jacobus of Cambridge and Cornell quotes Theodor Adorno to good effect: ‘the fragment is a philosophical form which, precisely by being fragmented and incomplete, retains something of the force of the universal.’ She rightly says that Adorno could be paraphrasing Rilke’s marvellous ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’. Although headless ‘his torso / is still suffused with a brilliance from inside / like a lamp … otherwise / the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could / a smile run

through the placid hips and thighs / to that dark center where procreation flared’. The poem gathers to its triumphal conclusion ‘… for here there is no place / which does not see you. You must change your life.’

Twombly, an avowed admirer of Rilke’s, seeks that intensity of engagement, particularly when approaching the divinities. The names of gods and goddesses are painted assertively across the surface or scrawled in graphite. A whole painting comprises Aphrodite in rubbed orange paint above her origins, Anadyomene, the one who rises fully human from the sea. The painting is like a weathered epitaph. It is we the beholder who speak the god’s name, involuntarily, evoking him or her, making them present.

The catalogue takes its epigraph from C.P. Cavafy: ‘Because we smashed their statues all to pieces, / because we chased them from their temples / this hardly means the gods have died / O land of Ionia they love you still …’ Twombly’s written deities keep them alive in the mind of the viewer.

There are mythologies like MoMA’s convulsive Leda and the Swan, a seething mass of force and resistance, of revelation and erasure. Did Rilke’s Leda play a part in Twombly’s creation of this coupling of god and girl: And she, all openness, already guessed Who it was coming in the swan knew that The thing he asked of her dazed resistance Could no longer hide from him. A swoop, And his neck butting through her hands’ weak hindrance …

The most powerful of Twombly’s encounters with the antique is unquestionably the ten-painting sequence, Fifty Days at Iliam, purchased by the Philadelphia Museum of Art for $2 million in 1989 and permanently on display in a room that the artist partially designed. ‘Iliam’ is Twombly’s idiosyncratic way of spelling Ilium (Troy). The ‘a’ is meant to recall Achilles to the mind of the viewer.

The subject of the series is the conclusion of the decade-long Trojan War, a foundational event in Western consciousness. The room has only one entrance/exit, no windows – the effect is tomb-like.

The series parallels the antagonists. The Heroes of the Ilians balances a complementary Heroes of the Achaeans. There are large, savagely drawn and painted battle scenes for each army. The end of all this is the huge (490 centimetres long) summoning of heroes: Achilles, Patroclus, and Hector. They are represented by swirls of paint. Hector is commemorated in neutral tones; Patroclus by gray-black pigment shot with traces of red crayon; Achilles, heart-shaped in red pigment, reads like a pool of blood. One shudders involuntarily before it.

When the series was first purchased with all the accompanying news about how it would have a dedicated space within the museum, there was much uncertainty about the wisdom of the acquisition. So much money on one living artist, given such unprecedented attention within the museum. Naturally, that all died down a long time ago. The Twombly room reads like a memorial for the dead in all wars. g Patrick McCaughey is former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut, and the Yale Center for British Art. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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Theatre

In Beatie’s footsteps

A new adaptation of Ruth Park’s classic Polly Simons

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Sofia Nolan as Beatie Bow and Catherine Văn-Davies as Abigail Kirk in Playing Beatie Bow (Daniel Boud)

uth Park’s novels were as much about Sydney as the people who live there. In Park’s famous The Harp in the South trilogy, the slums of Surry Hills are almost as lively and characterful as the Darcy family, whose story it relates. In Playing Beatie Bow, the changing face of The Rocks underpins every part of the narrative.

The Rocks is constantly in flux. In 1980, when Playing Beatie Bow was published, it was already under threat, as historic buildings were razed to make way for high-rise developments. Now, four decades later, little has changed. Rereading the novel, it’s hard not to wonder what Park would make of recent changes: the clearance of the Millers Point community to make way for the Crown Sydney casino, for example, or the transformation of the Hungry Mile into glittering Barangaroo. So it’s fitting that it should be a new stage adaption of Playing Beatie Bow that launches Sydney Theatre Company’s The Wharf, located just around the corner in Walsh Bay and newly back in business after an almost threeyear refurbishment.

Most children in Sydney will be familiar with Park’s book, a highlight of Australian Young Adult literature since its release.

Generations of children have tramped around The Rocks on school excursions, following Beatie’s footsteps.

The story follows the coming of age of sixteen-year-old Abigail Kirk (Catherine Văn-Davies). Recently arrived in The Rocks after the separation of her mother, Kathy (Lena Cruz), from her beloved father, Weyland (Tony Cogin), Abigail is angry, frustrated, and deeply hurt. One day, while watching the neighbourhood children play a game they call ‘Beatie Bow’, she notices a ragged-looking girl watching from the sidelines. She follows her through the twisting streets and finds herself in The Rocks of 1873, whisked into the world of the real Beatie Bow (Sofia Nolan) and her family, who emigrated from Scotland’s Orkney Islands years before. The Bow family matriarch, Granny Tallisker (Heather Mitchell), is convinced Abigail has arrived to ensure the family ‘gift’ is passed to future generations. Abigail just wants to go home.

Kate Mulvany is no stranger to Park’s works, having also adapted The Harp in the South into a glorious, award-winning epic for Sydney Theatre Company in 2018. Somehow, that same magic for Playing Beatie Bow never quite takes off.

Mulvany wisely chooses to update the play to current-day 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

Sydney, complete with laptops and mobile phones, as well as Covid jokes and social distancing. But with changes in time also come shifts in attitudes and understandings: about race, women, and, most importantly, the recognition that Australia was inhabited long before Europeans arrived. Park’s original novel is almost exclusively white: with the exception of two Chinese laundry workers, there are no characters of colour whatsoever.

By transplanting the story to the twenty-first century, Mulvany takes the opportunity to broaden the novel’s scope and address this historical lack by foregrounding Indigenous experiences and allowing in new perspectives.

Abigail is now played by Vietnamese-Australian actor Catherine Văn-Davies. Watching the constant questioning her character receives as to her origins is a poignant reminder that immigrants have always been the heart of The Rocks. Mulvany has also introduced an Indigenous character, Johnny Whites (Guy Simon), a First Nations man mourning the forced removal of his children.

The recounting of Johnny’s experiences and the use of snippets of Gadigal language bring into sharp focus how European settlement and the concept of Sydney as ‘home’ is predicated on the obliteration of Indigenous culture and the dehumanisation of its inhabitants.

STC Artistic Director Kip Williams directs the cast at a cracking pace that often prioritises the conflict of the characters over the play’s quieter moments. As a result, the audience never quite gets the chance to absorb the lessons the play has to offer. Nonetheless, the cast do an outstanding job, sharing multiple roles across both centuries. Particular credit should go to Heather Mitchell, who doubles as wise Granny and Abigail’s twentieth-century grandmother, Margaret; and to newcomer Ryan Yeates, who steals every scene he is in as Beatie’s sickly brother, Gibbie. Văn-Davies, capturing the character of Abigail beautifully, balances her spikiness with hints of vulnerability and a child’s yearning for things to be made right in the world.

Likewise, newcomer Sofia Nolan is outstanding as the stubborn Beatie. She battles to have the same access to education – and hence to a legacy – as her brothers.

David Fleischer’s set is spare but effective, conjuring up the essence of 2021 and 1873 with little more than a street lamp, a window, and a table. He is ably assisted by Nick Schlieper’s atmospheric lighting. In one particularly fine scene between Abigail and Beatie’s older brother Judah (Rory O’Keeffe), the vast sweep of Sydney Harbour is recreated through the unrolling of a single large piece of canvas.

Music, courtesy of composer Clemence Williams, choral director Natalie Gooneratne and others, is threaded through the production with care: the unearthly sing-song of children’s games is the vessel through which the audience is transported from one era to another, while the addition of shanties, songs, and lullabies – sung in English, Gadigal, and Vietnamese – add layers of meaning beyond the possibilities of the text.

The result is a production that should be lauded for expanding a beloved story to encompass all that it could and should be.

Playing Beatie Bow was already a twentieth-century Australian classic for a reason. Now it fits the twenty-first century, too. g Playing Beatie Bow (STC) is at The Wharf until 1 May 2021.

Theatre

Hunger and defiance

Patricia Cornelius’s fierce and fiery new play Tim Byrne

laughing warmly. But somehow, Wilks shifts gear a third time and the cry becomes something entirely different, a complex howl of horror at the inequity of life. All these shifts in a single wail.

Dee sometimes feels like the only director good enough to bring this playwright’s work to fruition, and again she demonstrates her power over the text and the actor’s body. Sequences of levity punctuate the more aggressive provocations in the script, which gives a lilt and bounce to the pacing, but then nothing is allowed to impinge on or obscure Cornelius’s dramatic intentions.

When the play turns violently towards agitprop, and Wilks confronts the audience directly, Dee lets the implications sink in.

Again, it shows a refusal to flinch from the central idea, which recalls Lear’s epiphany on the heath, his determination to ‘expose thyself to feel what wretches feel’.

RUNT is a political beast, a work of seething anger at social injustice and marginalisation Nicci Wilks in RUNT (Pier Carthew)

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low circular wooden walkway. A large canvas sack hanging from the ceiling. One sickening second to realise someone may be inside that sack, before it plummets to the ground. This is how Patricia Cornelius’s new play, RUNT, directed by long-term collaborator Susie Dee and starring another long-term associate, Nicci Wilks, opens: a thudding coup de théâtre that immediately establishes the work as incitement, as agitprop, as uncompromising sucker punch.

It will come as no surprise to audiences even casually familiar with the work of these three women that RUNT is a political beast, a work of seething anger at social injustice and marginalisation. Their collaboration on the 2016 play SHIT, which had a return season in this same theatre in 2019, dealt with women at the bleakest fringes of our cities. Dee and Wilks’s collaboration for InFlux at Theatre Works in 2016, Animal, also shares some DNA with this show, in the intensity of the physical movement, in the refusal to flinch in the face of brutality.

Wilks’s unnamed runt, scrambling to escape that sack like a kitten at the bottom of a well, sucks in great mouthfuls of air on release, complaining that there is nothing else for her to suck, no maternal nourishment, no love left for the last of the litter.

What follows is a painfully funny listing of all the siblings who came before. ‘Boy. A basher. Boy, boy, twins. One who won’t shut up and one who won’t say a word. Girl. Pretty. Curls. Boy. A great big boy. A basher.’There must be twenty or more of them, before the penultimate child, ‘born with teeth’, who recalls Richard III. Then finally the runt, small and ugly and useless.

It is a superb performance, full of jutting jaws and wide-eyed anguish, alternating wildly between desperate hunger and coiled defiance. Wilks is particularly good at tonal control, an ability to shift the mood of a moment at whim, and the effect is highly unnerving. One sequence in particular demonstrates this skill, and it involves nothing but a wail. It begins with pathos, a genuine note of grief, but soon it morphs into the forced, manipulative bawling of a needy child. It is hilarious, and has the audience

The simple set design by Romanie Harper, with its suggestion of a nineteenth-century anatomy theatre, is effortlessly effective, and Jenny Hector’s lighting design is precise and supple. Kelly Ryall’s sound composition is – like his work on Animal – profoundly unsettling, throwing up images of trains rumbling underneath the floor of the theatre, or great plagues of insects humming in unison, or flies buzzing around a corpse. Every aspect of the mise en scène is highly considered, proof of a strong dramaturgy and unity of vision.

There is a crystallisation of thought and intent occurring between these artists that is thrilling to watch, but there are new elements too. Cornelius has honed her talent in a way that has paradoxically freed her up: her mastery of cadence, of the rough-hewn poetry of Australian slang, is well established, but in RUNT she seems to be experimenting with formalism, playing with rhyme and repetition in ways we have not seen from her before. It doesn’t blunt her advocacy; if anything, it underscores it.

Portraying this young woman as someone preternaturally gifted with language, a sage of rhetoric and allusion, makes her somehow more powerfully aggrieved. It is rare to see Australian socialist theatre stray so far from naturalism – RUNT is worlds away from Daniel Keene’s oeuvre, for example – but it is wonderful to watch.

Make no mistake, RUNT is as fiery and fierce a work of activism as any of Cornelius’s previous plays. The central character may be a cipher – standing in for all the marginalised, the impoverished, and the forgotten members of our society, those we kick and belittle and ignore – but under Dee’s electric direction and an utterly vivid performance by Wilks, she also feels lived in, like someone we might meet or avoid on the street. At one extraordinary point in the play, she turns all her rage and hunger, her resentments and disappointments, onto us, insisting ‘I want what you’ve got. I’m coming to take it.’ She mentions the cars and the houses, the ‘Dolces and Gabbanas’, but the choices and the opportunities too. ‘The foot in the door.’ The runt may want what the rest of us have, but her needs are more basic still.

Nourishment. Love. Attention. Is that so much to ask for? g RUNT was performed at fortyfivedownstairs in March.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2021

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History

From the Archive

Leading Australian historians have always written for ABR – from elders like Manning Clark and Geoffrey Bolton to contemporaries such as Meredith Lake and Frank Bongiorno, both of whom appear in this issue. In this month’s From the Archive, Don Watson (who appeared in the first issue of the second series, in 1978) reviews a book by the Geoffrey Blainey (who appeared in ABR’s very first issue, in 1961). The book was The Blainey View (Macmillan, 1982), based on the ABC television series of the same name. Watson’s review, which appeared in the December 1982 issue, is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – an unrivalled critical resource accessible by ABR subscribers.

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eoffrey Blainey must be Australia’s bestselling historian by a very long way. His audience is far wider than Manning Clark’s for instance: and far less critical. Clark is periodically savaged by packs so frenzied they often seem unable to recognise the nature of the quarry. The difference, of course, is a matter of both style and substance. Clark, as an early critic once said, is ‘full of great oaths and bearded like the pard’, and he has not changed his fundamental spots. Blainey’s picture is inserted in the barren landscape on the front cover of this book, all warm and friendly; not a Jeremiah, but a kindly tribal elder who will unravel your historical landscape sotto voce, and with perfect equanimity.

You can step into your past with Geoffrey Blainey and know you’ll be safe. He’s just about the friendliest historian imaginable.

His accessibility is no vice. Blainey made comprehensible to countless Australians who might never have read a book of Australian history the material circumstances of their past. He gave historical significance to the lives of ordinary people. It required both imagination and courage to tackle the animal, vegetable, and mineral of society in days when Fernand Braudel was scarcely heard of, and capitalism was as unfashionable as material life. Without Blainey’s work it is hard to imagine books like David Denholm’s The Colonial Australians (1979), or Eric Rolls’s A Million Wild Acres (1981), getting the hearing they deserved.

His work gave the breath of common life to the Australian experience.

That common touch also pervades the television version of The Blainey View, almost self-consciously so. The professor fossicks around the historical landscape like any digger, except he knows where the relics are. Not a toff, but Graham Kennedy, provides the commentary, speaking at a measured bedtime story pace, seemingly compelled to round his vowels for the ABC. When the producers seem to get their way, and Blainey finds himself gingerly crossing South East Asia on a studio floor map, he looks about as comfortable as Robert Hughes in a cowshed.

Blainey’s style is too democratic for television – it’s not folksy, not macho, not kinky.

But there is a problem with this book (which no doubt will be sold by the hundredweight) not deriving from either presentation or subject matter, but seemingly from pitch. Sometimes in the search for Everyman, Blainey seems to have found twelve-yearolds. And he becomes a very patronising elder. We are told that the Depression was ‘really a reluctance to spend’. We are told very little else about its causes, but we are told that it continued until the ‘house needed a new roof, the children wanted new shoes, 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2021

the bicycle had broken down’, and our miserly mums and dads coughed up out of their savings. Out of the political agonisings, machinations, and deceits of the day, Blainey draws only the conclusion that ‘most Australians preferred unemployment to the loss of individual freedom, to the loss of a few privileges, to the loss of a little icing on the cake, to the loss of their ideology’. No one could agree on how to share the sacrifice he says. True enough.

But there was also a debate about how to share the wealth.

The text contains a good deal of patronising populism. It takes Paul McGowan, ‘a farming consultant who lives in the district and has given agricultural advice to governments as far apart as China and East Africa’, to tell us that the soil in Kelly country was poor in Ned’s day, and to deduce from the old slab sheds that the trees thereabouts had been big. Gristly old codgers wander in and out of the text with reminiscences. It’s nice to meet them, but it would be nicer still to be offered a bit of the gristle of Anglo-Australian relationships (not to say sexual relationships), Australian racism, Australian religion (which surely helps to explain the inexplicable deeds Blainey describes), or Australian capitalism. Blainey must have considered it too tough for the general audience.

Something has gone wrong in the prose. In writing ‘down’, the text is often reduced to fatuousness and prolixity. A discussion of the tyranny of distance leads to the remark that the ‘length of the voyage, and the uncertainty about when the ship would reach an Australian port, were unavoidable’. Australia’s relationship with Britain before 1938 is judged to be successful largely on the grounds that there were ‘surprisingly few tensions and quarrels’.

But surely it fell down in 1938 precisely because there had been ‘few tensions and quarrels’.

There is a Panglossian character to The Blainey View that hides the significance of many of his ideas and puts exploration of central and contentious issues in the country’s development out of bounds.

A novice might come away feeling that he has learnt many things but not the one big thing, albeit there would seem to be a good chance that sooner or later something will be invented to get rid of the problem altogether.

There are, of course, some brilliant photographs: Max Dupain’s Depression studies; a hair-raising portrait of a Tasmanian woodchopper in full swing; the famous ones of Isaac Isaacs in governor-general’s regalia, looking like the product of a union between Daisy Bates and a Kadaitcha man.

But the television is better, for all its faults – if only because you can hear that Anglicised voice on the newsreel telling Australians that Singapore is impregnable and the Wirraway is just the greatest thing in the air. g