Australian Book Review - August 2023, no. 456

Jonathan Green The young Rupert Murdoch

Dennis Altman The ALP and Israel

Jennifer Mills Pip Adam

James Ley J.M. Coetzee

The Jolley Prize

Read the shortlisted stories

Advances

The Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,200 entries from thirty-eight different countries. The judges –Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander – longlisted eight stories from six of those countries: France, Japan, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, and Australia. (The full longlist appears on our website.)

Now the judges have shortlisted three stories, and it’s our pleasure to present them in this issue:

‘Black Wax’ by Winter Bel (France)

‘The Mannequin’ by Rowan Heath (Australia)

‘Our Own Fantastic’ by Uzma Aslam Khan (USA)

love story. ‘Black Wax’ is an example of the short story form at its entertaining and artisanal best.

In ‘The Mannequin’, a solitary truck driver, who fossicks for valuables in junkyards, finds a dumped store mannequin outside a roadhouse. The mannequin becomes an ambiguous companion on his journey, provoking troubling memories of his ex-wife and estranged children, reminding him of what has been lost through his intransigence, while simultaneously suggesting the liberating possibility of transformation. A superbly controlled and nuanced story, ‘The Mannequin’ is a haunting exploration of the mysteriousness at the heart of ourselves.

‘Our Own Fantastic’ slips between childhood and adulthood as it follows a young Pakistani woman growing up in the United

Here is the judges’ report:

In a field distinguished by an enriching diversity of voices and styles, the stories submitted for the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize are testament to the vitality of the short story form. Encompassing the cosmopolitan and rural, the fantastical and the dirty real, the lyrical and colloquial, the comic and the deeply felt, the submissions for the prize collectively show how the short story form functions as a broad church, inspiring faith.

The best short fiction does many things at once. Stylistic cohesion and polish matter, but so do curiosity and substance. There is a worldliness about the longlisted stories, not only because they are global in origin, but because they show a maturity of outlook, an understanding of power structures, social context, choice, and implication. The three shortlisted stories are layered and deeply considered, but importantly, they also have plenty to say.

States. In its shadows, its author paints a story of migration, displacement, and loss, a life shaped by the history of Pakistan, by family, and by chance. Beautifully composed with exquisite attention to detail, it shows a fine command of imagery and has a capacious, open-ended feel. The story echoes the architecture it describes, with hidden doors and subterranean emotions. We are offered glimpses of a whole world turning around and through the narrative.

The overall winner will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500.

So who will win? We’ll find out on 17 August, at the online ceremony. First the three authors will introduce and read from their stories; then we will name the overall winner. This is a free event and all are welcome, but please register your interest in attending: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au.

ABR warmly acknowledges the generosity of Ian Dickson AM, who has supported this prize – now clearly one of the world’s leading prizes for an unpublished short story in English – since its creation in 2011. Lovers and exponents of short fiction, like this magazine, have much reason to be grateful to Ian Dickson.

All great short stories are a marvel to behold, but a finely balanced story that is also a joyful one is a rare feat. ‘Black Wax’ tells the tale of a fledgling record company inspired to promote unstereotypical Black American music. This engaging set-up provides the vehicle for a superbly incisive, witty, and uplifting [Advances continues on page 7]

The shortlisted authors (L-R): Winter Bel (photograph by Jaimie Kourt), Rowan Heath (Alice Capstick), Uzma Aslam Khan (David Maine)

Australian Book Review

August 2023, no. 456

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Page 27: Captain Scott’s ship Terra Nova in the Antarctic ice as seen from inside an ice cave, 1911 (photograph by Herbert G. Ponting via CBW/ Alamy)

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ABR August 2023

LETTER

COMMENTARY LAW

UNITED KINGDOM

MILITARY HISTORY

INDONESIA

BIOGRAPHY

EDUCATION

HISTORY

MEMOIR POEMS

FICTION

Clare Wright

Dennis Altman

James Ley

Kevin Foster

Gordon Pentland

Joan Beaumont

Howard Dick

Jonathan Green

Paul Kildea

John Byron

Amy Nethery

Tim Byrne

David Mason

Philip Salom

L.K. Holt

Cassandra Atherton

Jennifer Mills

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Geordie Williamson

Morgan Nunan

Diane Stubbings

The role of Australian Jews in an intractable conflict

J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at forty

Crossing the Line by Nick McKenzie

Untied Kingdom by Stuart Ward

Conquer We Must by Robin Prior

War on Corruption by Todung Mulya Lubis

Young Rupert by Walter Marsh

Masquerade by Oliver Soden

Mind of the Nation by Michael Wesley

Cruel Care by Jordana Silverstein

Did I Ever Tell You This? by Sam Neill and Everything and Nothing by Heather Mitchell

Memoirs by Robert Lowell

‘A Vladimir Taxonomy’

‘Nina in the Hag Mask’

The Hummingbird Effect by Kate Mildenhall

Audition by Pip Adam

On A Bright Hillside in Paradise by Annette Higgs

Be Mine by Richard Ford

Thaw by Dennis Glover

Three new novels

2023 JOLLEY PRIZE SHORTLIST

LITERARY STUDIES

POETRY

INTERVIEWS

ABORTION

TECHNOLOGY

ABR ARTS FROM THE ARCHIVE

Winter Bel

Rowan Heath

Uzma Aslam Khan

Shannon Burns

Morag Fraser

Geoff Page

Paul Hetherington

Felicity Plunkett

Belinda Alexandra

Caroline de Costa

Robyn Arianrhod

Jordan Prosser

Malcolm Gillies

Philippa Hawker

Roger Benjamin

Ivor Indyk

‘Black Wax’

‘The Mannequin’

‘Our Own Fantastic’

Murnane by Emmett Stinson

The Wife of Bath by Marion Turner

Shore Lines by Andrew Taylor

In the Photograph by Luke Beesley

Poet of the Month

Open Page

Tissue by Madison Griffiths

Here be Monsters by Richard King

Cast Mates by Sam Twyford-Moore

2023 Sydney International Piano Competition

Dalíland

Rembrandt at the NGV

Donatello at Wangaratta by Peter Rose

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The ABR Podcast

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

Race,

rights and history

Bain Attwood

The

ALP and immigration

Ebony Nilsson

J.M. Coetzee

Geordie Williamson

Ben Roberts-Smith

Kevin Foster

Jolley Prize shortlist

The three authors

Westminster politics

Gordon Pentland

Calibre Essay Prize

Tracy Ellis

Politics

in India

John Zubrzycki

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

Power, politics, and passion

Beejay Silcox – one of ABR’s most popular contributors, as we know from the magazine’s recent reader survey – has assembled a fine program for her first Canberra Writers Festival as artistic director. The festival will be staged from 16 to 20 August.

No one who has spent more than ten minutes in the company of the irrepressible Beejay will be surprised to learn that the driving theme of the Festival is ‘Power Politics Passion’.

Not surprisingly, given the festival’s location, political journalists are well represented on the program, plus the odd politician. Among them are Barrie Cassidy, Niki Savva, Dave Sharma, David Speers, Michelle Grattan, Stan Grant, and Louise Milligan. Veteran journalist Chris Masters will be in conversation with Laura Tingle about his new book, Flawed Hero: Truth, lies and war crimes, about Ben Roberts-Smith. (In this issue, we review the first book to appear about the recent defamation case: Nick McKenzie’s Crossing the Line. See Kevin Foster’s review on page 11.)

Theodore Ell – winner of the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize – is on the program, along with ABR regulars Astrid Edwards and Kieran Pender.

Visit

Shirley Hazzard

A certain highlight of the festival will be the conversation between Frank Bongiorno and Brigitta Olubas, author of the recent biography of Shirley Hazzard.

Olubas’s decades-long scholarly work on the author of The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire continues. Next year, NewSouth Publishing has just announced, it will publish Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower: The letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham. According to the publicity material, this collection unearths ‘a deep and vexed friendship carried out mostly through letters between two of Australia’s greatest writers. They met by letter and their friendship was carried out mostly through correspondence between Harrower’s home in north-shore Sydney and Hazzard’s apartments in Manhattan, Naples and Capri.’

Readers of Olubas’s biography will recall Harrower’s 1984 visit to Italy, where she travelled with Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. The epistolary record of that, shall we say harrowing, meeting will make fascinating reading. g

‘Hearts full of courage’ Dear Editor, Reading Bain Attwood’s essay ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ (ABR, July 2023), I’m reminded of Professor Anna Clark’s judgement of Australian historians’ complicity in the project of colonisation, and particularly her assessment of the ‘discipline’s striking hypocrisy (‘The book that changed me: I’m a historian but Tony Birch’s poetry opened my eyes to confronting truths about the past’ The Conversation, 29 March 2023). Attwood appears at first glance to offer a dispassionate and reasoned analysis of the differences between the 1967 referendum campaign and the present push for constitutional reform. There may well be validity in his contention that ‘a series of intersecting discourses’ around race and rights has changed in the intervening decades. But the takeaway message from his history lesson is stark and confronting: the current Voice offensive is losing ground because today’s ‘Yes’ leaders (who are largely First Nations) have failed to do what the 1967 campaigners (who were almost exclusively white) did: ‘tell a really good story’. More disturbingly, Attwood sees fit to offer his own solution to the self-styled problem. The federal government, he argues, should ditch the referendum and introduce legislation to create an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament. That is, Attwood’s panacea is the very outcome that the entire Uluru Dialogue process has rejected.

Attwood might have once been considered a progressive scholar, but he is no ally. The upcoming referendum is a political struggle, not a tutorial assignment. Historian Tony Birch has previously expressed his disaffection with the Australian history

profession. Writing of the early 2000s, Birch notes: ‘We had not realised that the history war was a dirty war, a guerrilla war, with no rules and no respect for convention.’ Birch condemned white historians for neglecting to get ‘down in the gutter with the political animals’. (‘The Trouble With History’ in Australian History Now, edited by Anna Clark and Paul Ashton, NewSouth, 2013). Attwood’s timing seems similarly out of tune. What good could possibly come now – four months out from a national vote in an era when the electorate is noticeably volatile and opinion polls are notoriously unreliable – from Attwood’s conclusion that, ‘I find it hard to imagine that the “yes” case will succeed’? Why weigh in with such imaginative parsimony at a time when those tireless First Nations campaigners in whom Attwood has so little faith are calling for ‘hearts full of courage and optimism’? Why indulge in intellectual virtuosity when you could, for example, model some ‘truth-listening’ and hold your tongue until after the referendum? Every white academic with a keyboard and a tenured job is entitled to their opinion, but I fail to see what positive benefit to the project of Aboriginal self-determination Attwood’s intervention serves. Let’s hope that his imagination and his intercession are on the wrong side of history.

Clare Wright

Correction

Maria Takolander was incorrectly listed in the July 2023 Advances as the third Peter Porter Poetry Prize judge instead of Felicity Plunkett. As Advances readers know, Maria was one of the judges of the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Frozen between despair and denial

The role of Australian Jews in an intractable conflict

by Dennis Altman

Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to recognise Palestine as a state. Following a resolution moved by Penny Wong, this became ALP party policy in 2021, and it will almost certainly be reaffirmed at this year’s party conference in August. Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans has written a powerful defence of the policy, which has been assailed, predictably, by the Israel lobby.

Support for Israel comes from the peak bodies of the Australian Jewish community, in particular the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, perhaps the most successful lobby group for a foreign country in our history. It is very active in organising tours of Israel for politicians and journalists, and in winning support from influential non-Jews on both sides of politics. Recently, an explicitly right-wing organisation, the Australian Jewish Association, has emerged with close links to prominent local conservatives1. Sadly, these groups have greater influence than such progressive Jewish organisations as Plus61J and the Australian Jewish Democratic Society.

Recognition of Palestine is largely symbolic, but it would imply a major shift in position by a country that has been one of Israel’s staunchest supporters. Other than Sweden, Western countries have followed the lead of the United States in refusing recognition, even though a majority of other countries do so. At the same time, Western countries remain wedded to the idea of a two-state solution, even as support for it declines in Israel.

As Evans points out: ‘No peace negotiation has much prospect of succeeding if the parties at the table are completely mismatched.’2 Even if the two-state solution is now dead, peace between Israel and the Occupied Territories requires international recognition that the Palestinian people deserve equal status in any meaningful reconciliation.

Australia’s position vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine has been a running sore on the left of Australian politics for fifty years. For Palestinian and Jewish Australians, the issue is particularly fraught, caught as we are as witnesses to a struggle to which there seems to be no end, and in which we are assumed to have a particular stake.

Ihave been to Israel once, more than forty years ago. It felt like a foreign country to me, even though, as a Jew, I could claim the right to live there. Many years later, I wrote a piece

in which I said I could not bring myself to say ‘Next year in Jerusalem’, part of the traditional Passover seder, when Palestinians who were born there were denied the right to return.

It is impossible to be a Jew and not have feelings about Israel. However often one claims to have no emotional ties to the country, it will be taken for granted that you do. For the mainstream Jewish community, support for Israel is unquestioned, and even mild criticism is treated as disloyalty. Antony Loewenstein has written movingly of the opprobrium that descended on him and his parents after he first started writing about Israel3. Too many Jews believe in freedom of speech, except when it comes to talking about Israel.

In the same way, anyone who is Palestinian, Arab, or even Muslim will often be assumed to give unconditional support to the Palestinian cause. Too often this leads to Australian Muslims and Jews regarding each other with suspicion. Yet I have several times enjoyed conversations with Palestinian Australians about our shared Semitic origins and how they set us apart from Anglo Australia.

There is a clear distinction between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel, but in practice the two are blurred, often deliberately, sometimes inadvertently. Both Jews who defend Israel passionately and those who criticise it speak from a shared historical memory, which means that we are always conscious of possible persecution. That one is not always perceived as a Jew makes for a precarity rather akin to being gay. Hannah Arendt drew parallels between anti-Semitism and hatred of homosexuals as far back as 1951. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, she wrote of ‘the complicated game of exposure and concealment … Only one’s Jewishness (or homosexuality) had opened the doors of the exclusive salons, while at the same time they made one’s position extremely insecure.’4

Among non-Jews there are ardent supporters of Israel – some of whom are also anti-Semitic – and there are others, on both the left and right, for whom Palestine is a crucial issue. Among those Australians who care about the issue, views tend to be deeply polarised. As Foreign Minister Penny Wong observed: ‘One of my frustrations and sadnesses is that this issue is so vexed for so many people that we don’t even have a dialogue in Australia between supporters of both halves.’5

Wong is positing a balance between two sides, both of which

need to compromise, which neither Israel’s supporters nor opponents will concede. Given the balance of power between Israel and the motley governments of Gaza and the West Bank, the suggestion is itself problematic. While both Israel and Palestinian groups use violence, it is Palestinian land that is being taken over by Israeli settlements, and it is Palestinians who are subject to constant surveillance and control. We cannot call for dialogue as though there is no distinction between occupier and occupied. Even defenders of Israel struggle to defend the increasing dispossession of Palestinians from more and more of the West Bank.

But Wong is correct in pointing to the deep polarisation around Israel/Palestine in Australia. Both supporters and opponents of Israel believe that their positions are ignored: Andrew Markus could complain of deeply prejudicial coverage of Israel in the Australian media, while John Lyons has documented the extraordinary pressure on him as a foreign correspondent to support Israel.6

While attitudes are changing, the dominant discourse in Australia has been one of deep support for Israel, which is imagined as a fellow democracy struggling in an alien geopolitical environment. Australia played a role in the creation of Israel, thanks to the energies of then Foreign Minister H.V. Evatt, who, as president of the General Assembly, was crucial in winning United Nations support for the establishment of Israel in 1948. Subsequent prime ministers continued that support, with some hesitation from Gough Whitlam and Kevin Rudd. Over the past seventy years, Australia has voted more consistently in support of Israel in the United Nations than almost any country bar the United States, while the Morrison government suggested moving the Australian embassy to Jerusalem, a project of Donald Trump’s that has so far been followed by only three other countries.

For many in Labor there was a deep sense of connection to an Israel which they saw as pioneering new forms of social democracy through the kibbutz, a form of collective living. For conservatives, Israel quickly became seen as an outpost of Western liberalism in an increasingly hostile Middle East, so that Australia was one of the few countries to support Israel when it colluded with Britain and France in the 1956 Suez War. (This was one of the rare occasions where Australia diverged from its reliance on the United States.)

No Australian prime minister was closer to Israel than Bob Hawke. When he first visited Israel in 1971, he seemed to fall in love with the country. He played a role in negotiating with Soviet authorities to allow Jews to emigrate, and he became close to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. When Whitlam moved towards a more even-handed approach to Israel/Palestine he was bitterly opposed by Hawke.7

But as the Israeli Labor Party started to lose support in the 1970s, a more sceptical view developed on the left of the ALP. The Palestinian cause became a major issue within the then Australian Union of Students (AUS), which adopted a series of strongly pro-Palestinian resolutions; these were then repudiated by a vote on member campuses. The first funded research I ever engaged in resulted from my following this debate. Already I was made aware of the complications facing any Jew who is critical of

Israel.8 A decade later, Julia Gillard, then president of AUS, was caught up in similar debates, and supported a two-state solution against those calling for a unified Palestine.

Gareth Evans, who was foreign minister under both Hawke and Paul Keating, was determined to maintain an even-handed approach, recognising that peace depended upon Israel accepting the reality of a Palestinian people and state.9 Meanwhile, proPalestinian voices were becoming more active within the Labor Party. In her 1982 biography of Hawke, Blanche d’Alpuget points to the leading role played by Victorian Socialist Left leader, Bill Hartley. I had my own run-in with Hartley in the late 1980s, when I referred to him on ABC radio as ‘anti-Semitic’; Hartley sued for defamation. He later dropped the case, not before I was assured of considerable legal support through Prime Minister Hawke’s office. (For the record, my comment was based on a discussion with Hartley himself.)

The Howard government was more supportive of successive right-wing Israeli governments, a position which changed when Rudd came to power in 2007. Yet it was under Rudd’s successor, Julia Gillard, that support for Israel led to a major split within the government. After Rudd resigned as foreign minister in 2012, he was replaced by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, whose views on Israel had moved from emotional support to a far more critical stance. (Carr describes the evolution of his views in his memoir, Run For Your Life 10) After a series of arguments, in which Carr was supported by a majority of his Cabinet colleagues, Gillard agreed to switch a crucial United Nations vote from support for Israel to abstention.

The current ALP party platform calls for the recognition of Palestine, which the Albanese government has declined to do. Recognition would be largely symbolic, but it would represent a break with other Western countries – and align Australia with all our ASEAN neighbours. The Greens have gone further, in apparently rejecting the notion of a two-state solution, which remains the standard Western position, even as it becomes less and less viable.

Supporters of Israel like to point to the alleged double standards of those who constantly condemn Israel while ignoring more egregious abuses in countries such as China, Iran, and North Korea. This misses the point that Israel portrays itself as part of the Western liberal democratic world and therefore has to be judged by those criteria. It is also true that Israel has been an easy target for the United Nations and its agencies, while appalling abuses by other states are ignored.

But this argument also ignores the reality that very different understandings of democracy underpin the national ideologies of Israel and Australia. Since the 1970s, successive Australian governments have stressed that ours is a multicultural society, building on the words of Noel Pearson that Australian identity brings together ‘our ancient heritage, our British inheritance and our multicultural triumph’. Israel, on the other hand, defines itself in ethno-religious terms, as the state of the Jewish people, rather as Iran proclaims itself an Islamic republic.

Yet roughly twenty per cent of Israelis are Arab. It is true that they enjoy better living conditions and more political freedom than their counterparts in surrounding Arab states, but theirs is

a limited citizenship in a state which defines itself as ‘Jewish and democratic’. The 2018 nation-state law changed the status of Arabic from an official language to one with ‘special status’, and declared Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people, who had a unique ‘right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel’. Except for one brief period, the parties representing the majority of Israeli Arabs have never served in government.

Too many Jews believe in freedom of speech, except when it comes to talking about Israel

A Jew can come to Israel and claim citizenship; a Palestinian who has been dispossessed, either by the creation of the Israeli state or by the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, cannot. (Some Palestinians living in East Jerusalem do have citizenship.)

At some level, support for Israel in Australia rests upon an unstated, probably unconscious, desire to justify settler-colonialism. Israel was established at a time when most white Australians were ignorant, either deliberately or unwittingly, of the ways in which Australia had been settled. As greater awareness of the situation of the Palestinians developed, so too did the rhetoric that saw Israel as a unique beacon of democracy in the Middle East, and its defence as central to the Western world.

Despite its flaws, Israel remains a more attractive polity than, say, Saudi Arabia or Iran. The Economist’s democracy index rates it as a flawed democracy, sandwiched between Portugal and the United States at twenty-nine (Australia is ranked fifteen). But this measures Israel proper; were it to include the West Bank, where almost a quarter of the population are now Israeli settlers, the rating would presumably drop dramatically.

While Israel’s reputation has declined, this is hardly reflected in the strength of the pro-Israel lobby. Other than the United States, no other country has such a well-coordinated cheer squad, with a number of full-time lobbyists and considerable largesse in the form of trips to Israel. The imbalance between supporters of Israel and Palestine in powerful positions in Australia is very similar to the imbalance between the two nations themselves.

From its inception Israel has struggled to find a way of being both a Jewish and a democratic state; the lack of a formal constitution is largely due to the inability of Israelis to find an acceptable formula to reconcile these two aspirations. The massive demonstrations against Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to weaken the powers of the Supreme Court have underlined this problem, yet, as Joshua Leifer has pointed out, ‘The protesters, it can seem, want to preserve civil liberties for Jews … while preserving the existing infrastructure of Jewish supremacy.’12

This is a fundamentally different assumption about citizenship from that of Australia, which rejects ethnicity or religion as the basis for recognition.

It is hardly surprising that some Indigenous Australians feel a connection with Palestinians, with whom they share a sense of dispossession by more powerful settlers. The shortlived The Sunday Paper (the name reflecting grievances against Schwartz Media) was based explicitly on drawing comparisons between the two experiences. Odder is the argument of Rabbi Ralph Genende, who has written an entire chapter in the book Statements for the Soul claiming parallels between the history of Jewish and Indigenous dispossession without acknowledging the Palestinians.11 It is true that there is a historical connection between Jews and the land that is now Israel that hardly applies to the British settlement of Australia. But to ignore the equal claims of Palestinians is surely an act of bad faith.

At what point does criticism of Israel become anti-Semitism? To its ardent supporters, any criticism of Israel is seen as such, and even many of its critics believe that to challenge the assumption of a ‘Jewish state’ is inherently anti-Semitic. There is particular sensitivity around accusations that the occupation of the West Bank is a form of apartheid, even though that term has been widely used by Israeli critics. But the rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank – with a population now estimated to exceed half a million – makes the prospect of a genuine two-state solution less and less possible. Certainly, the current Israeli government seems totally uninterested, while Palestinian leadership is weak, divided, and corrupt.

At a Passover seder this year, held in the home of a close friend, there was overwhelming sadness at the current state of politics in Israel and the lack of any moves towards rapprochement with Palestinians. In my lifetime I have witnessed what seemed intractable political issues resolved: the Berlin Wall has fallen, and the Soviet Union collapsed; apartheid has ended in South Africa; the once great European colonial empires have dwindled to a few outposts like New Caledonia and the Falklands.

Yet at no point since 1947 has the prospect for a just solution between Israel and Palestine seemed less possible. I suspect that only a major shift on both sides would open the way for some sort of resolution. From the outside, it seems the two peoples

Moshe Sharett, Israel’s foreign minister, is congratulated by Assembly President Dr H.V. Evatt after the Assembly session at which Israel was admitted to the United Nations, 1949 (Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS/Alamy)

remain frozen between despair and denial, without leaders on either side with the moral stature to move forward.

It is here that Australian Jews can play a significant role. While there are a number of small progressive Jewish organisations willing to criticise the Israeli government, the loudest voices come from groups like the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, whose stance is unfailing opposition to any moves that might challenge the current status quo. Those who profess love for Israel have an obligation to call out the basic dilemma: Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic if it continues to deny equal possibilities for nationhood to Palestinians.

Whether that is any longer possible within the framework of a two-state solution is the essential dilemma. On a recent visit to Australia, former Israeli MP Naomi Chazan asked: ‘What’s the state of Israel geographically today? Is it inside the green line? Beyond the green line? Divorce is not practical any longer. We need to learn to share the land.’

Until that reality is grasped, there is no prospect for an end to the conflict. g

Dennis Altman is a Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University

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

Law

Crossing the Line

by Nick McKenzie

Hachette

$34.99 pb, 475 pp

When Justice Anthony Besanko released his judgment on the Ben Roberts-Smith versus Fairfax defamation case on 1 June, there was a lot more riding on his decision than the reputation of the principal parties and who would be landed with the eye-watering legal bills. Had the verdict gone against Fairfax, its reporters, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and, to a lesser extent, Dan Oakes, would have struggled to return to or resurrect their careers. Defeat would have had a chilling effect on genuinely probing investigative reporting. In the face of such a decision, media organisations and editors around the country would have thought long and hard about letting their journalists pursue well-connected and well-resourced public figures, let

Endnotes

1. On the Israel lobby see Bob Carr: ‘The Israel lobby and Labor in Australia’, Mondoweiss, 1 June 2022

2. Gareth Evans: ‘The case for recognising Palestine’, The Conversation, 15 June 2023

3. Antony Loewenstein in Good Weekend, 13 May 2023

4. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, George Allen 3rd edition 1967: 82]

5. Interview with Deborah Stone, Plus6IJ, 22 November 2022

6. Andrew Markus: ‘Anti-Semitism and Australian Jewry’ in G.B. Levey and P. Mendes: Jews and Australian Politics, Sussex Academic Press, 2004: 122; John Lyons: Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism’s toughest assignment, Monash University Press, 2021

7. See Blanche d’Alpuget: Robert J. Hawke, Mandarin, 1994 chapter 15

8. Dennis Altman: ‘A secular democratic Palestine: a new litmus test for the left’, Politics X[2], November 1975

9. Gareth Evans: Incorrigible Optimist, Melbourne University Press, 2017: 180-2

10. Bob Carr: Run For Your Life, Melbourne University Press, 2018

11. Ralph Genende: ‘Words that emerge from the heart’ in S. Morris and D. Freeman: Statements for the Soul, La Trobe University Press, 2023

12. Joshua Leifer: ‘Whose Constitution, Whose Democracy?’ NYRB, 11 May 2023: 23

alone defend their findings in court. But there was more at stake than that. The ‘defamation trial of the century’ was also widely, if inaccurately, regarded as a war crimes trial by proxy. While Roberts-Smith was not on trial for any of the crimes McKenzie and Masters alleged that he had committed or facilitated, had Justice Besanko found that the reporters had defamed him it would have made the pursuit of war crimes charges against Roberts-Smith more unlikely, or more difficult. The sense of relief at Besanko’s judgment was near universal. It not only emboldened the nation’s investigative reporters and their editors but also opened the way for the full and free pursuit of those members of Australia’s Special Forces credibly identified by the Brereton Report (2020) as having committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

Justice Besanko’s courtroom was the cockpit not only for detailed disputation about what Roberts-Smith did and did not do in Afghanistan and Australia. These arguments were also, in part, proxy for long-held, passionately contested myths about the Australian military and the public’s attitudes towards them, as refracted through the media. Hence, Besanko’s judgment also impinged on core matters of national self-image. Since receiving his Victoria Cross in 2011, Roberts-Smith had emerged as both ‘the poster-boy of the nation’s modern military’ and the living link to Anzac. One of his principal champions, former defence minister, Liberal Party leader, and, at the time, director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Brendan Nelson, was especially smitten. Swooning over the ‘most respected, admired and revered Australian soldier in more than half a century’, Nelson accused

‘Just one murder’

Nick McKenzie’s bracing reportage

Kevin Foster

sections of the Australian media of running a campaign against the nation’s Special Forces, wondering what the nation stood to gain by tearing down its heroes. Not that the media ever got to see much of its heroes on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The fourth estate’s perennial quest for better access, freer movement, and greater liberty to report what it saw there had earned it little more than the enmity of the men and women in uniform, who

came to regard reporters as inveterately hostile. As former Chief of Army Peter Leahy noted: ‘The military frequently questions the objectivity and impartiality of many journalists and sets them into camps – only bad stories, mostly bad stories and a precious few worth talking to.’ Had Besanko ruled in Roberts-Smith’s favour, the military and its champions would have pointed to irrefutable proof of the media’s default posture of hostility towards the nation’s armed forces, strengthening the hand of those in Defence and the ADF determined to keep the media off future battlefields and the public in the dark.

McKenzie’s prompt book, Crossing the Line, offers little in the way of startling new facts, though Channel Nine’s eleventh-hour offer to settle proceedings (Nine merged with Fairfax in 2018) was a surprise. It plays principally to the reader’s emotions, successfully evoking what it felt like to build, board, and ride the emotional rollercoaster of the trial. McKenzie’s depiction of the court proceedings and its protagonists is the stuff of pure melodrama as the audience is invited to cheer, boo, and hiss as the opposing legal teams take to the stage. The media’s lawyers are young, brilliant, and, in the case of the original lead counsel, Sandy Dawson, doomed: Dawson withdrew from the case in its early stages when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour that later claimed his life. Largely untested in a case of this magnitude, the lawyers’ caution bespeaks both humility and a painful consciousness of the challenge ahead of them. Their lead counsel, Nic Owens SC, embodies their collective virtues – polite, measured, even a little deferential. His sometimes inconsequential-seeming questions weave a web that neither Roberts-Smith nor his lawyers are aware of until it closes and snares them. In the opposite corner, Roberts-Smith’s legal team are presented as a pair of Victorian villains. Lead counsel, the bombastic Bruce McClintock SC, carries himself ‘like an ageing heavyweight fighter’, full of swagger and aggression. Scoffing at hapless witnesses, jeering at the juniors across the aisle, he also does a strong line in sucking up to the judge. His sidekick, Arthur Moses SC, is more of a sneaking Peter Lorre-style villain. ‘Sneering and supercilious’, barely able to conceal his contempt for the opposing counsel and their witnesses, he fights to rein in his natural tendency towards shrillness and hectoring. Fittingly, as players in a melodrama, both are renowned for their ‘courtroom theatrics’, their mugging and miming, the instant shift from solicitude to stiletto, as they hamact their way, they feel sure, to a historic settlement in favour of their client and the plaudits of their colleagues in chambers and the public at large.

McKenzie is both a player in the drama and a nervous spectator. Highly strung and a poor sleeper, he exercises obsessively to manage his stress, badgers his legal team, catastrophises, and is persistently psyched out by the easy confidence that Roberts-Smith and his lawyers exude. McKenzie is so easily spooked because he, more than anybody, is conscious of the impediments to a successful outcome in the case. He has to convince at least one eyewitness to stand up in court and testify that in April 2009, at a compound near Kakarak, code-named Whiskey 108, they saw Roberts-Smith shoot a prisoner with a prosthetic leg before he ordered another member of his troop to shoot a second, manacled detainee; or that in September 2012, at the hamlet of Darwan, they saw him kick a handcuffed Afghan farmer, Ali Jan, off a cliff before ordering other soldiers to drag him a few yards away and execute him. ‘One murder. Just one murder’, McKenzie chants to himself – less a plea than a mantra. Only this will get the media’s case over the line and prove the truth of their reporting.

The obstacles to securing this testimony are immense. Most notably, Person 4, who witnessed the shooting at Whiskey 108 and the execution of Ali Jan, was also the soldier ordered by Roberts-Smith to shoot the second man at Whiskey 108. He cannot bear witness to Roberts-Smith’s crime without confessing to his own. Hence, he and his solicitor ignore all approaches from the media’s legal team. Other potential witnesses from the SAS are no more responsive to McKenzie’s approaches. They must first face down a campaign of threats and intimidation, orchestrated by Roberts-Smith, before determining how their commitment to the truth measures up against the profound bonds of loyalty fostered by service in the Regiment. McKenzie and his legal team subpoena their witnesses, agonise over whether they will appear in court, and then sweat over their evidence.

While the media’s legal team methodically assembles its case, and first one then another witness comes forward to corroborate McKenzie’s and Masters’ claims, the shallowness of Roberts-Smith’s legal position is suddenly laid bare. Confronted by a growing line of witnesses to the fact that, as McKenzie and Masters alleged, Roberts-Smith is a murderer, a bully, and a liar, McClintock and Moses are left to do little more than question the witnesses’ motives and impugn their honesty, insisting again and again that their testimony is false, and their falsehood motivated by jealousy and resentment. It is an argument that gains little traction. When it comes to the treatment of Afghan witnesses, McClintock’s performance is revealingly emblematic of the attitudes that enabled the concealment of the SAS’s crimes for so long. Hanifa, Ali Jan’s nephew, who was with him in the hours before Roberts-Smith assaulted and had him murdered, testifies that his uncle’s assailant was an unusually large man in a wet, sandy uniform. Roberts-Smith had waded across the Helmand River after shooting and killing an alleged enemy spotter before interrogating Ali Jan and was the only SAS man in a wet uniform. McClintock rejects Hanifa’s evidence, accusing him of lying in hope of a compensation payment. ’Twas ever thus. Over the years of the ADF deployment in Afghanistan, countless villagers came forward alleging that Australian forces had brutalised them, destroyed their property, killed their livestock, relatives, or community members. The ADF’s ‘rigorous investigation’ of

The sense of relief at Besanko’s judgment was near universal. It emboldened the nation’s investigative reporters and their editors

these claims, which we now know to have been a pantomime of accountability, invariably rejected them. The accusers were dismissed as liars, chancing their arm in hope of a fat pay-out. Hanifa concluded his testimony with a dignified refutation of this insistently racist assumption, telling McClintock: ‘Look, brother, I am a witness, I am not afraid of anybody, even if I die I will tell the truth. This is the Pashto customs. It is the tradition. And this is the law. If you witness something like a crime, you have to testify about it.’ Amen to that, brother.

The narrative reaches its climax when, in a moment of high drama, Person 4 unexpectedly takes the stand, dealing Roberts-Smith’s case a mortal blow. For all the larger issues at stake here – freedom of the press, war crimes, the nation’s quixotic addiction to a hollow myth of military exceptionalism – it is greatly to McKenzie’s credit that he never loses sight of the real victims of Australia’s war in Afghanistan. We know nothing about the disabled victim at Whiskey 108 whose souvenired prosthetic leg became the drinking horn of choice in the SAS’s alcoholic Valhalla: the Fat Lady’s Arms. His humiliation remains anonymous. But we do know about Ali Jan. He was a poor subsistence farmer with a wife, Bibi Dhorko, and six children. They lived three hours walk from Darwan where Ali tended a small plot of land, bartered some of what he grew, and struggled to make ends meet. He was a peaceful man who took little interest in politics and regarded armed men with suspicion. On 11 September 2012 he had ridden his donkey to Darwan to collect a few basic supplies for the family – flour, firewood, and a pair of shoes for his daughter. He told his wife he would be home for dinner. She never saw him again. When a relative returned his donkey to the family a few days later, the shoes were still strapped to the animal’s side. Some months after his killing, Bibi gave birth to a seventh child. Since her husband’s death, the children have not attended school and have often gone hungry.

As a result of their reporting on Afghanistan, McKenzie and Masters hazarded their reputations and risked their livelihoods. Because of what he did there, Roberts-Smith has lost his good name and may lose his liberty. Ali Jan lost his life. Bibi Dhorko lost her husband. Their children lost a father and any hope for a better future. Wasn’t our intervention in Afghanistan intended to have precisely the opposite effect?

The man who murdered Ali Jan for no reason other than that the frightened Afghan smiled at him has been supported through thick and thin by a coterie of some of Australia’s most influential figures – politicians, media proprietors, reporters, shock jocks, institutional heavyweights – who lauded him as an emblem of Anzac manhood. Even now, after Justice Besanko ruled that, on the balance of probabilities, Roberts-Smith was a murderer, a liar, and a war criminal, dismissing his defamation case in its entirety, a noisy minority continues to reject the evidence and defend him. Every nation needs its heroes and the narratives that celebrate their qualities, and in Australia we have a range of them to choose from beyond Anzac. How, as a people, can we continue to countenance a myth that not only invites us to turn a blind eye to murder but encourages us to celebrate its perpetrators? g

Kevin Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

House of cards

A panoramic view of ‘Greater Britain’

Gordon Pentland

Untied Kingdom: A global history of the end of Britain

by Stuart Ward Cambridge University Press

£30

hb, 700 pp

Two of my favourite images in Stuart Ward’s important new book reproduce black-and-white photographs. One captures the life-sized butter sculpture of the prince of Wales and his favourite Canadian horse, the star exhibit of the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The other shows a group of protesters in London in 1973 contesting European Economic Community restrictions on imports of Commonwealth cane sugar from the West Indies and Queensland. Most of the faces in the picture are obscured, but the body language of a man to the left of the frame, slumped over his hand-rendered ‘Beat Beet. Keep Cane’ placard, communicates depression and dejection.

Together, these two images pull together many of the preoccupations of this formidable volume (which runs to seven hundred pages). The butter sculpture embodies some of the political, economic, cultural, and affective relationships that had underpinned a protean global sense of Britishness across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – or, probably more accurately but less sonorously, ‘Britishnesses’. The dejected protester stands proxy for some of the political, cultural, emotional, and psychological consequences of the slow and often painful unravelling of these relationships in the forty or so years after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and of the end of the British ‘world system’ as a geopolitical reality.

These are important, timely, and admirably ambitious themes. They are rendered more so by the author’s aims to pursue his quarry through a genuinely global lens and to blur any meaningful boundary between centre and periphery within Britain’s empire. Conceptual order is lent to his efforts by the canny use of a refurbished version of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’. This had become a key framework for the late Victorian global imaginary, especially through Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain (1868) and John Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883). Ward’s repurposed version problematises and softens the Victorian trappings of blood and soil patriotism and racial exclusion. Neither Dilke nor Seeley, for example, could readily see India as part of their Greater Britains, however central it was to Britain’s world presence, and however many awkward questions its non-inclusion raised.

In contrast, Ward is concerned to embrace the fuzzy edges and the grey zones of this expansive idea of Britain. All parts of Britain’s global footprint before the later twentieth century are potentially ‘in’, and it is the very imprecision and bagginess of the term which is attractive to Ward, as he adopts a sampling

approach. As the prologue makes plain, different versions of this memetic form of imperial Britishness were developed within, and to suit, different imperial contexts. In spite of its clear racial connotations, its edges were blunted by the perceived need to sustain two important fictions under ‘conditions of active deployment’: first, that empire was mainly about liberty; second, that British understandings of liberty involved the toleration and management of difference and were thus a stark contrast to the ‘bad’, authoritarian, and more ostentatiously racial ideas underpinning empires of less liberty-loving global actors.

Ward is concerned to embrace the fuzzy edges of this expansive idea of Britain

This in turn ensured that Greater Britain – while always ready to surface in exclusive and racialised forms – could also offer languages of rights and citizenship that were theoretically accessible to all subjects. It was a politically usable creation, and Ward shows just how creatively it was used in his fascinating treatment of the 1914 arrival of the ship Komagata Maru in Vancouver. The 376 male Punjabi Sikhs aboard were well aware of the utility of the softer version of Greater Britain: ‘We are British Citizens and we consider we have a right to visit any part of the Empire.’ In another example, the famous Indigenous activist William Cooper was even pithier: ‘We ask the right to be fully British.’

If conceptual inexactness was broadly advantageous before the turning point of World War II, in many ways it became a liability in the decades that followed. In six chapters that form the core of Ward’s multi-sited global unravelling of Greater Britain, forced efforts to pin down or more closely define its central features were conspicuous failures. Vague notions about the rights of British subjects lost out to the more confident language of universal human rights which was sweeping all before it after 1945. When Canada (with some controversy and breast-beating) relegated imperial subjecthood to be a function of Canadian citizenship, or awkward attempts were made to include India as a republican state in the Commonwealth, definitions were required, which threatened to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

Perhaps what is most impressive is that, across his panoramic sweep, Ward redeems his pledge to retain focus on the ‘affective ties’ that nourished Greater Britain and on their fate as it dissolved. The emotional content of imperial trade, for example, frames the images mentioned at the beginning of this review, the consequences of its undoing often most disruptive for those on the edges of the disintegrating world system. West Indian and especially Queensland sugar producers experienced these ‘dying convulsions of a discarded belief system’ acutely. In another fine chapter, Ward begins with Sagana Lodge in Kenya, a lavish wedding gift in 1947 and the only royal residence established outside the United Kingdom. It was an important venue on Elizabeth and Philip’s abortive 1952 world tour, and it is used expertly by Ward, both as a lightning rod for those emotive ideas about ‘home’ which underpinned settler colonialism and to explore their rapid and violent eclipse as the Mau Mau insurgency took off and, in some melodramatically publicised cases, violated these carefully crafted fantasies of domesticity.

Emotions are clear also in the final section of the book, whose chapters fold back in imperial and global concerns to enrich our narrative of postwar Britain and frame it around geopolitical retreat, escalating racial tension, a rich (and richly global) vein of declinist navel-gazing, and serious challenges to the territorial integrity of the UK state. This ‘Break-up of Britain’ – to use the name of Tom Nairn’s trenchant 1977 polemic, an inspiration for Ward, but also a product of the very processes he describes – has often been linked to empire. After all, there are few dissenters to Linda Colley’s influential account, which presented empire as one of the most effective building blocks of Britishness in the eighteenth century. It became almost intuitive to hold that the eclipse of empire helped to explain pressures on those unions and identities it had done so much to sustain. Ward’s great contribution is both to put some meat on the bones of this scholarly common sense and to do it in a way that retains the global focus of his book, rather than just zooming in to Britain’s crises.

Ward’s conclusions are admirably measured. The imperial dimension does not replace or trump existing explanations for the emergence of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s or for the rapid electoral lift-off of separatist nationalisms in Wales and especially Scotland in the 1970s. All of these phenomena are enriched, however, by reading them alongside the painful unravelling of ‘Greater Britain’. Irish nationalism only became unreservedly anti-colonial in the context of the imperial politics of the 1960s, while Ulster unionist politics are illuminated by putting them in conversation with the obstructive Rhodesian empire loyalism, which British ministers were confronting within the same time frame. Such links were supple and multivalent. As Ward points out, the winners of the Carmarthen and Hamilton by-elections (1966 and 1967 respectively), Gwynfor Evans and Winnie Ewing, both received fan mail from Rhodesians, who equated their own struggles with Wilson’s Labour government with these emblematic nationalist election victories.

To point to omissions in a book of this depth and richness might seem churlish. Given its centrality to the forms of imperial Britishness that roared out of the eighteenth century and underpinned ‘Greater Britain’, religion is curiously sotto voce in Ward’s account. Predictably, it looms larger in the chapter on Ireland, but with the eventual evacuation of religion from British public life in the 1960s, even in terms of the broad chronology he traces, it feels like its systematic inclusion elsewhere might have been grist to Ward’s mill.

Finally, in such a large book, the ending, which covers the period from around 1980, is a bit of a mad dash. Even accepting Ward’s central theme that the disaggregation of Greater Britain was largely completed in the forty or so years after the fall of Singapore, I would have loved to read a bit more on what he makes of apparently similar Greater British themes in Brexit. On one hand, the boosterish face of the Leave campaign certainly bore a family resemblance to episodes such as the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign of the late 1960s. There can be no doubt that, from start to finish, the 2016 referendum and its outcome were freighted with, even driven by, emotions. On the other, untying that mess might take another seven hundred pages. At least. g

Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University.

NORTH AFRICA & THE MIDDLE EAST

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Britain in and out of war

The political-military interface

Joan Beaumont

Conquer We Must: A military history of Britain 1914–1945

by Robin Prior Yale University Press US$40 hb, 803 pp

Robin Prior opens this monumental military history by stating that Britain was the only power on the Allied side in both world wars to fight the regimes of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan ‘from beginning to end’. Some might quibble. Was not 1937 the beginning of the war against Japan? But few could doubt that Britain’s sustained war effort in both world wars was remarkable. Even though victory often seemed uncertain and the cost in casualties, human grief, economic dislocation, and financial ruin was immense, the nation continued to exhibit ‘stern resolve’, believing that ‘conquer we must’.

The literature on Britain in the two world wars is vast. Prior, himself, is one of the most acclaimed historians of the Allied campaigns in Gallipoli and on the Western Front in 1914–18. This new book’s claim to originality lies in its focus on civil–military relations: that is, the political and military interface that decided where and how Britain would fight, and what resources it could mobilise for these campaigns.

Prior asks: what, if anything, was learned from one war to the next? Did Britain fight a more efficient war in 1939–45 than in 1914–18 and, if so, was that experience accountable for it? Was Churchill, the legendary wartime prime minister from 1940–45, a beneficiary of World War I when he was unceremoniously removed from office in the aftermath of the bungled Gallipoli campaign?

These intriguing questions are explored largely through an analysis of the strategic debates in both world wars and the battles that Britain fought on land, sea, and air. It is the details of fighting, Prior claims, that enable us to examine ‘how well thought out the original decisions at the [high-level decision-making] summit were, what price had to be paid, and whether the politicians had the will or the means of intervening if these military operations seemed to be going wrong’.

This approach will satisfy any reader seeking authoritative and accessible syntheses of the strategy, tactics, and technology of the operations that British forces fought. As is his wont, Prior is the master of pithy judgements and feisty critiques of politicians and commanders. The first battle at Bullecourt in 1917, in which Australian troops were almost thrown away, he describes as ‘one of the most miserably conceived operations ever conducted on the Western Front’. Yet these battle accounts, tours de force though they are, tend often to relegate the theme of the political-military interface to the margins.

Prior returns to this explicitly in his concluding chapter: ‘If there is a general view about politicians and the military in Britain in two world wars,’ he writes, ‘it is this: in the First World War politicians presided over untrammelled slaughter on the Western Front as they let the military go their own way. In the Second World War, Churchill in particular interfered too much in military matters and was only kept on the straight and narrow by frequent interventions by strong-willed generals such as [Chief of the Imperial General Staff] Alan Brooke. It is possible now to say that both these views are caricatures while containing some elements of truth.’

Unsurprisingly, Prior reserves some of his harshest judgements for the British politicians of World War I. In 1916 and 1917 particularly, they failed to rein in the commander of the British Army on the Western Front, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, as he persisted with the battles of the Somme and 3rd Ypres (Passchendaele) in the face of unprecedented carnage. The latter, Prior concludes, was one of the most lamentable lapses in civilian control of the military in modern British history.

Yet Prior leaves us with the unresolved mystery as to why Lloyd George, who was vocal in his criticism of attrition, abdicated responsibility in 1917 (he reclaimed some control in 1918 with the appointment of the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch as supreme commander of Allied forces). Prior can only suggest that in the end the civilians, who knew that France was the only front that mattered, did not have the internal fortitude to impose their will on the military in such a vital area. Or perhaps Lloyd George and at least some of his colleagues hankered, like Haig, for that ever-elusive knockout blow.

Prior’s judgement of Churchill in World War II is far more generous, though not always so. Much of the account of this war considers the often bitter debates between the British and the Americans about which theatre of operations should be given priority. The real tensions in this war were not within the British political and military command but rather between the British leaders and their trans-Atlantic counterparts. Although the United States became the dominant partner as the war progressed, reducing Britain’s influence over grand strategy, Prior credits Churchill and Brooke with the major achievement of warding off American demands for a second front in 1942. While there might be various views about the viability of a cross-Channel attack in 1943, Prior concludes that an attempted invasion of France in 1942 would almost certainly have failed ‘with consequences that are difficult to imagine’. It is hard to disagree.

Prior also defends the British against charges that they pursued the strategy of war in Italy and the Mediterranean in 1943–44 because of imperialistic designs to consolidate British power in that region at the end of the war. Rather, they fought the Axis powers here because they thought they had a decent chance of beating them in this theatre.

Any book of this scale and ambition will necessarily leave questions unanswered and contested. Take the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and appeasement in the late 1930s. Prior adopts the traditional ‘Guilty Men’ approach that the Munich agreement, which ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, was both ‘morally repugnant and strategically illiterate’. But there is an alternative and persuasive scholarship that argues

that the British economy was not geared for war in 1938; and that appeasement bought Britain critically important years in which vital munitions, such as the Spitfire and Hurricane, came off the production line.

Ultimately, Prior concludes that the two world wars tell us that in a democracy the primacy of politics is essential. Moreover, a little learning by civilian leaders of the art of the military is a good thing. Churchill was able to provide effective leadership in World War II because he was sufficiently schooled in military matters that he had confidence dealing with the military. That said, in the end most civilians lack the depth of knowledge of military matters to be able to intervene effectively when things on the battlefield go wrong.

Beyond this, Prior claims that democratic politicians are as capable as any of waging war with the ruthlessness required to combat totalitarian states. The strategic bombing offensive against

Indonesia

Mirror on corruption

Indonesia’s long war

Howard Dick

War on Corruption: An Indonesian experience

by Todung Mulya Lubis

Melbourne University Press

$40 pb, 263 pp

If the Australian government had banned books about Indonesia, it could hardly have been more successful in removing them from bookshops and library shelves than is presently the case. Even when such books appear in catalogues, retailers seem convinced that the public is not interested.

Lowy Institute polling reveals that Australians’ knowledge of their 270 million Indonesian neighbours is still superficial and often wrong. In 2022, some twenty-six years after the overthrow of General Suharto, only forty-eight per cent of Australians were aware that Indonesia had become a democracy, though admittedly that proportion had doubled since 2018.

One thing Australians do seem sure about is that Indonesia is corrupt. Todung Mulya Lubis – respected lawyer, human rights advocate, and anti-corruption campaigner – agrees that corruption has become ‘the norm’ in parliament, the bureaucracy, police, and even the judiciary. War on Corruption tells the story of how corruption has encroached upon and ‘saturated’ Indonesia’s government over the past seventy years.

Lubis ought to know: his own preface and colleague Tim Lindsay’s foreword relate something of his life experience. Lubis was born in 1949; his life has encompassed almost the full extent of Indonesia’s extraordinary transformation from colonial state to

Germany that killed between 300,000 and 600,000 civilians provides manifest evidence of this.

So far, so good. But Prior also concludes that Britain’s case suggests that, where politicians acted with the support of their populations, they were able to mobilise their states more effectively to fight protracted wars than any dictatorship. Really? How, then, do we explain the remarkable performance of the German army till the end of 1944 at least, and the resilience of the German population as their cities were laid waste? Even more, how do we account for the resistance of the peoples of the Stalinist Soviet Union, of whom perhaps twenty-seven million died? Without the Eastern front, the British would never have defeated Nazi Germany, no matter how firm their resolve to conquer. g

independent democracy, military rule, and, since 1998, democratic restoration (Reformasi). As a young activist lawyer, Lubis began working for the new Legal Aid Foundation. After Reformasi, he became, in his own word, ‘obsessed’ with corruption, as well as with human rights, and became an influential public campaigner on both issues.

There is much in the book that may surprise Australian readers. Lubis suggests that Indonesia, historically, was a patronage society in which corruption was no crime. Indeed, the Indonesian word korupsi derives from English. Nonetheless, Indonesia’s declaration of independence in August 1945 gave rise to expectations of a democratic and just society. Democracy was suppressed by President Sukarno in 1957 and then by military rule until 1998, but the dream never died. In May 1998, a spontaneous popular uprising was galvanised by the demand to end corruption, collusion, and nepotism (Korupsi, Kolusi dan Nepotism, or KKN).

These expectations would soon be confounded. Democracy and political decentralisation spawned new and more pervasive forms of KKN (such as the rise of political dynasties). Public anger led to the formation in 2002 of a powerful and independent Corruption Eradication Commission (known by its Indonesian acronym as KPK). As Lubis recounts, the Commission’s parade of scalps – from local mayors, district heads, and councillors to provincial governors, top civil servants, national ministers, and parliamentarians – has not eradicated corruption but it has cut a swath, though ‘big names remain untouchable’.

Not surprisingly, the rich and powerful fought back. The corrupt police force and the attorney general’s department have waged a ruthless turf war against KPK staff and commissioners. There were legal challenges, misinformation, false charges and even an acid attack. After more and more ministers and parliamentarians had been charged, in 2019 parliament cut back the KPK’s powers and authority in ways that might be familiar to citizens of New South Wales.

There are at least two good reasons to read this book. The first is to gain a more nuanced view of Indonesia. As the 2014 Lowy poll showed, Australians view Indonesia through the lens

Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University.

of threat: security, terrorism, and asylum seekers were seen as the three top priorities in Australia-Indonesia relations, the fourth being trade. Cultural and social interaction did not rate. War on Corruption offers a window into Indonesia that should be a great deal more interesting than the daily journalistic fare of who’s who in the jostling of national politics.

The other good reason is reflexive. Although Indonesia ranked 110 out of 180 nations in Transparency International’s most recent global index, while Australia ranked thirteenth, Australia’s position has been declining over a decade of what Transparency refers to as ‘democratic backsliding’. We can no longer be complacent.

lation, regulations, and policies. Much the same can be said of state parliaments. Lobbyists gain access through party donations and public relations firms as well as their own corporate personnel, who often have backgrounds as parliamentarians or political staffers.

Corruption and the demand for an anti-corruption commission were decisive issues in the May 2022 federal election. Like most Indonesians, Lubis is too polite to tell Australia how to arrange its affairs, but we can learn much from Indonesian experience and have much to discuss with our Indonesian friends.

We may bear in mind that the Transparency results actually flatter Australia, because of the narrow way that corruption is defined. Lubis addresses the concept of ‘state capture’ whereby vested interests reshape the state to their own benefit. He attributes state capture in Indonesia to the interaction of business oligarchies and political dynasties. Those causes do not fit the Australian case, but if the categories are redefined as oligopolies and party machines, the Australian system of state capture immediately comes into focus.

When the federal parliament is in session, Canberra is a termite nest of lobbyists and lackeys seeking benefit from legis-

Evidence of state capture is ubiquitous. Whether in gambling, defence procurement, food standards, mining rights, vehicle emissions, energy policy, prisons, airlines, or banking, private firms make hay at public expense. The ‘beauty’ of the Australian system of state capture – as shown in Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters’s Game of Mates: How favours bleed the nation (2017) – is that the manipulation of government for private gain is simply ‘business as usual’ and falls almost entirely outside the legal definition of corruption. Companies can smugly say, ‘we comply with all laws and regulations’ (which they themselves have helped to formulate). Only in 2023 has a National Anti-Corruption Commission been established. Its remit will not extend to state capture. How is corruption to be reined in? It’s a long war. Lubis points to the need for ‘rule of law’ and ‘bringing more people to the anti-corruption movement’, to maintain public pressure and defend a free press. Indonesians are by nature optimistic. Like the French, they are also willing to pour onto the street in huge numbers. Politicians know that they flout public sentiment at their peril. Cutting across both Indonesian and Australian narratives is the awkward question of how democracy is to be paid for. Elections are ridiculously expensive. So is party machinery. In Indonesia, party members pay minimal dues and there is little campaign funding, so parliamentarians and local councillors live off the land. Australian parliamentarians are much better funded from the public purse, but parties still forage in the private domain, with baleful consequences for public welfare.

A journalist would have written a racier account than this ‘sober’ and forensic one – there is plenty of grist – but readers can bring their own imagination to bear and explore from both Indonesian and Australian perspectives.

It is a ray of hope that this book by an authoritative Indonesian author is being brought out by a leading Australian publisher. May it find its way into bookshops. g

Howard Dick is an Indonesia specialist and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. For ten years he was Southeast Asia Publications Editor for the Asian Studies Association of Australia.

Supporters of Indonesian President Sukarno demonstrate in Makassar, Indonesia (Ron Harvey via Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)

ONE MAN CONTROL

An enthralling study of the young Rupert Murdoch

Jonathan Green

Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire

by Walter Marsh Scribe

$35 pb, 344 pp

There is every reason for wanting to get to the bottom of Rupert Murdoch. It is arguable that he has done more than any modern individual to shape public life, policy, and conversation in those parts of the Anglosphere where his media interests either dominate or hold serious sway. His influence is richly textured, transformative. Beyond bringing a populist insouciance to his host of print and television properties, he is also unafraid of using his reach as a political weapon, a tactic used with such vehement ubiquity that governments pre-emptively buckle to what they suppose is the Murdoch line. Debate is thus distorted and circumscribed. Public anxiety is co-opted as a cynically exploited tool of sales and marketing.

The persistent question with Rupert Murdoch is why? Is he driven by ideology and belief, a desire for profit, or a fluctuating combination of the two? That mix is uncertain, but in the sum of everything he does, Murdoch pursues victory, regardless of the damage to individuals or the broader social cost. There is an old joke: if you buy a dog with Rupert Murdoch, your half dies. He is ruthless.

It is intriguing then to wonder how this man was formed, a man who has achieved such extraordinary, if cumulatively malignant, things. That is the implied promise of this book: Young Rupert: The making of the Murdoch empire. What signs were present in the young man whose opportunity was bestowed by his comparatively minor magnate father.

I was keen for clues. In a way, I am this book’s optimal reader. Born in Adelaide, where author Walter Marsh sets his scene, my godfather, Don Riddell, then editor-in-chief of Adelaide’s The Advertiser, is sacked by Murdoch on page 260. My actual father was an Advertiser reporter and columnist. My first paying teenage job was at the Herald and Weekly Times, the organisation two generations of Murdochs strived to conquer. I was working there as an adult when Rupert finally won. All that was then. By now we all have skin in the Murdoch game.

We begin with inheritance, for the rise and rise of Keith Rupert Murdoch was the specific and stated design of Keith Arthur Murdoch (1885–1952), his father. There was no intricate play of succession here: the only son would have it all. Sir Keith made his hopes clear in his will: ‘I desire that my said son Keith Rupert Murdoch should have the great opportunity of spending a useful and altruistic life in newspaper and broadcasting activities.’

Amassing a potent legacy gave a frame to Sir Keith’s working life of steady media acquisition. ‘I cannot afford to die,’ Sir Keith had told a family friend, ‘I’ve got to see my son established, not leave him like a lamb to be destroyed by these people.’

Marsh’s deep study is bedded in detailed and meticulous research rendered unfailingly lively and enthralling in the telling. In span it takes us from before Rupert’s birth in 1931 to his victory over the British print unions at Wapping in 1986. The narrative is front-loaded to the early twentieth century, giving a vivid account of a formative time in Australian media, when powerful men jockeyed for domination.

They are not without blemish. Sir Keith, self-made journalist hero of the famous, if somewhat fanciful, Gallipoli dispatch –‘a stirring but flawed polemic’, writes Marsh – also seems to have been something of an anti-Semite. His rise – first as managing director, then as chairman of Melbourne’s Herald and Weekly Times Ltd – was, he notes, ‘one time when the Jews met their master’, though he would later struggle to keep that newspaper from the hands of ‘salvaging Jews’. He was a man of physical presence and charisma, the type who inspired loyal, almost besotted commitment. His mentor was the British tabloid baron Lord Northcliffe. A relationship of considerable mutual admiration, it was a formative one for Sir Keith, who was dubbed ‘Lord Southcliffe’ by local wags.

One piece of advice from Northcliffe was telling: an inspiration to Sir Keith, and perhaps also to his son. They are certainly words Rupert would eventually live by. The key to success in the newspaper business was absolute personal power, or as Northcliffe put it in a telegram from December 1921:

FACT YOU HAVE COMPLETE CONTROL / ONE MAN CONTROL / ESSENTIAL / NEWSPAPER BUSINESS / CHIEF

Young Rupert was raised in a climate of ‘loving discipline’ and it was presumably a combination of the two that, on a sea voyage to England, sees his mother, Elisabeth, teach him to swim by throwing him into the ship’s pool and refusing ‘to let anyone help the blond-haired little boy flailing and screaming in the deep end’. A rebellious wilfulness grew in the boy. At Geelong Grammar, he was a ‘polarising figure’, Marsh writes, ‘a loud, if

Rupert Murdoch at the News of the World building in London, 1969 (PA Images/Alamy)

not entirely convincing radical, whose left-wing politics, and rough shambolic manner invited mockery’. He had earned the nickname ‘Comrade Murdoch’.

Still a schoolboy, he would form a relationship with a man who would become his father’s trusted lieutenant and eventually Rupert’s partner in a formative crisis that blended newspapers, South Australian politics and the law, a moment that becomes a central pillar of this book. That man is journalist and editor Rohan Rivett (1917–77), and Marsh has written his story in almost as much detail as Rupert Murdoch’s.

Governments pre-emptively buckle to what they suppose is the Murdoch line

In consequence, there are times when Murdoch is relegated to what is almost a supporting role, lost in the sweep of this detailed history. But that’s both the truth of his early years and the bedding for a moment when the ruthless Murdoch of later life emerges, in an episode of blunt uncaring that announces the arrival of the fully-formed man.

When Rupert goes to Cambridge, Rivett and family follow him as a support troop, sending back dispatches to his sometimes anxious father. The relationship is a little reminiscent of elder brother Brideshead’s brotherly concern for Sebastian Flyte, though Murdoch’s transgressions pale in both scope and severity. The young Murdoch sticks with his socialism, has a bust of Lenin in his rooms, and even attends a British Labour Party conference.

The Rivett relationship also sticks. After his father’s death in 1952, the Adelaide afternoon paper The News is Rupert’s inheritance and the stake on which he will build an empire. Rohan Rivett becomes his editor in chief, and between them they publish a paper of occasionally provocative social conscience, a constant irritant to its staid morning rival, The Advertiser.

It all unravels in 1960 over coverage of the Stuart Royal Commission, an inquiry into the apparently wrongful conviction of Arrernte man Rupert Max Stuart over the murder of a young girl. The News, Rivett, and ‘boy publisher’ Murdoch had campaigned hard while Stuart faced the gallows, sparking the inquiry that would almost be their undoing.

The story is complicated, and takes a goodly chunk of this book to explain, but eventually the Murdoch challenge to the conservative government of Thomas Playford is met with charges of libel, including one of seditious libel, charges that are levelled, contested, and one by one dropped.

Within weeks of this moment of triumph, Rupert Murdoch has sacked Rivett, a friend of almost lifelong standing and a man who has stood by him through thick and very thin. He sacked him by letter, a technique reprised only recently to end his marriage to Jerry Hall. He would sell The News, too, newly entranced by television and Sydney tabloids.

Rupert Murdoch was thus on his way and suddenly recognisably himself. Rivett was left to lament the passing of his share of the dog. g

Jonathan Green has been an editor, writer, commentator, and broadcaster for more than forty years.

Quad strain

Australia’s ambivalence towards our universities

John Byron

Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian life

by Michael Wesley

La Trobe University Press

$34.99 pb, 256 pp

Michael Wesley is an academic and deputy vicechancellor at the University of Melbourne. During the Covid lockdowns, while the rest of us were baking sourdough, he pulled together several related strands of thought about universities and Australia’s complicated relationship with them. Mind of the Nation, the result, offers a survey of where we are and how we arrived here, looked at from a number of different but intersecting angles.

In seeking to understand why universities have not achieved greater traction in public policy, despite their direct relevance today to more Australians than ever before, Wesley advances a provisional diagnosis of several distinct attitudes towards universities harboured by the Australian public: agnosticism (or sublime indifference); aspiration; and antagonism. He argues that these deeply held and co-existent attitudes generate a series of paradoxes at the heart of the nation’s ambivalence towards universities and higher education generally.

He then sets out to demonstrate, or at least to illustrate, these paradoxes through the lens of half a dozen ‘aspects of Australian universities where they sit at tension points of conflicting expectations and pressures in contemporary Australia’, in chapters entitled Money, Value, Loyalty, Integrity, Ambition, and Privilege.

Wesley makes a convincing case for his paradoxes, although at times he elides the distinction between public opinion and political behaviour in order to pull it off. By and large, they ring pretty true. Australians want their universities to be high in quality but inexpensive; to conduct outstanding research and send the bill abroad, while keeping onshore international student numbers in check; to pursue new fundamental knowledge yet commercialise vigorously; to preserve ancient tradition while being practical; to achieve and if possible transcend excellence while eschewing élitism; to be the best in the world while teaching all subjects not too far from home; to defend academic freedom absolutely while avoiding upsetting anyone; to naturally diversify within a uniform funding model; to be the repository of all knowledge but be humble about it.

Refreshingly, Wesley does not lambaste the public or the political class for holding to these paradoxes: he skips over the apportionment of blame (more or less) to the more pragmatic and pressing issue of who is responsible for straightening it all out. Spoiler alert: it’s up to the universities.

One challenge with Mind of the Nation is that there is enough

substance in each one of these chapters for a book in its own right. Wesley has covered an impressive terrain within his word limit, but this has obliged him to keep the arguments brief, brisk, and a little superficial. The result, for the policy professional, is a lot of nuances elided and contestable claims taken as read; for the general reader, it is a lot of dates, data, and dense reasoning. The campaign around academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus, for instance, certainly warrants an in-depth, book-length exploration, but that dishonest attack on universities conducted under the cover of concern for standards is a story that Wesley can really only outline here.

Having said that, the chapter concerning that particular episode of the culture wars – ‘Integrity’ – is the most satisfying passage in the book, because Wesley ventures out of his shell, offering a firm opinion and elaborating a set of standards against which he believes the matter should be judged. In the other chapters he plays a more cautious hand, laying out the history and illustrating his observations, but stopping just short of telling us what he really thinks.

Another frustration is a function less of Wesley’s level of candour than of the nature of the problem he describes. After spelling out his belief that there is a set of paradoxical attitudes towards higher education generally and universities specifically, he leaves us with the final exhortation that universities need to do more, without much in the way of specific suggestions, apart from an impassioned call to unite more effectively. One suspects that’s less to do with Wesley pulling his punches than because this is where the next conversation needs to begin.

In that conception, Mind of the Nation is really a conversation

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starter for university staff, politicians, bureaucrats, and anyone else who can see that the public benefit – or the national interest, if you prefer – is being held back because we as a society have not yet worked out how to get the best out of our universities, and because universities have still not worked out how best to convey to the public and its servants in parliament the contribution universities are already making and can make in the future.

For all the book’s strengths it has several weaknesses, such as the curious choices Wesley makes to support his arguments. He relies far too much on letters to the editors of The Australian and The Age, for one thing. The points that Wesley is illustrating with these inclusions may well be sound, but the collected umbrage of ‘Outraged from Wahroonga’ and his fellow correspondents is not evidence: it is anecdote.

The credibility of some of Wesley’s arguments is also weakened by the partiality and inexpertise of some of the witnesses he calls. He gives airtime to a number of blowhard partisan culture warriors whose sustained firsthand exposure to universities dates back to their own undergraduate days, and little to none to others whose daily toil is concerned directly with the conditions of university life. The Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies are cited generously, for example; the National Union of Students and the National Tertiary Education Union, not at all.

There are a few other conspicuous omissions. A medley of post-Dawkins higher education ministers make no appearance – notably Julie Bishop, Simon Birmingham, Chris Evans, Kim Carr, Craig Emerson, and Jason Clare – despite their radically different but undoubtedly significant contributions to the policy debates and developments considered here. Nor, in the course of a long discussion of the impact of research-based rankings on universities’ public standing and their own behaviour, does our local Australian research assessment rate a mention.

Overall, though, I find this survey both accomplished and reasonably persuasive. It is well written, robustly argued, and intelligently organised. It is a sound contribution to helping us understand the situation Australian universities find themselves in, and a platform for further thinking about how to address it. Higher education policy specialists will certainly appreciate it, as well as university workers with an interest in the history, fortunes and travails of their sector. The general reader should find it accessible and informative, too – if only she can be convinced to pick it up.

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The reach of Mind of the Nation may depend to some degree on defying the very paradox it describes. The publishers must hope it is not adjudged too ‘academic’, or too concerned with an area of public policy in which the broader population – so goes the book’s own argument – can barely muster a passing interest. I hope that’s not the case, and that the book finds the general audience with whom universities must make alliance. If, through healthy sales, Mind of the Nation reveals the public ambivalence towards all things universitas to be less widespread than the analysis therein holds, I don’t suppose anyone will quibble about that fresh paradox. g

John Byron is Principal Policy Adviser at the Queensland University of Technology and the author of The Tribute (Affirm Press, 2021).

How could we do this?

A national reckoning on child refugees

Amy Nethery

Cruel Care: A history of children at our borders

by Jordana Silverstein Monash University Publishing

$34.99 pb, 309 pp

The historian Jordana Silverstein’s masterful new book, Cruel Care, begins with an account of the Murugappan family. Many Australians will remember this family: the hard-working parents seeking asylum from Sri Lanka, and their two Australian-born children, taken from their home in Biloela by the Australian government at five o’clock one morning in 2018. The family was detained for four years in Melbourne and Perth and on Christmas Island. The case was so drawn out that, in the rare photographs released to the public, we saw the children growing up.Their treatment was illogical, unjust, unkind, and expensive, and provoked a sharp emotional response from the public.

Silverstein poses a question that many Australians have asked over three decades of Australia’s harsh asylum policies. We asked the question in the 1990s, when the length of time children spent in detention expanded inexplicably. We asked it again in the early 2000s, when the rescued passengers of the MV Tampa, including children, were sent to Nauru and Papua New Guinea. We celebrated the release of children from detention in the mid-2000s but then once again questioned our humanity when hundreds of children were sent to Nauru in 2012 and 2013. We asked the question when we learned from the Guardian’s Nauru files that over half of the leaked incident reports related to children, and when we heard of the thirty children who, after years of the violence of detention, succumbed to resignation syndrome and gave up on life; and when we added up the millions of dollars the government spent in legal fees fighting their applications for treatment in Australian hospitals.

How could Australia do this to children? More specifically, how could our politicians and policymakers do this to children? Silverstein’s book considers these questions, and offers two answers.

First, Silverstein pinpoints the emotional hypocrisy that politicians engage in when they justify Australia’s asylum policies as being in ‘the best interests of the child’. This phrase, present in law and in political discourse, has dominated debate on asylum seekers for a decade. During 2009–13, Australia experienced the largest number of people seeking asylum by boat, primarily fleeing the violence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Australia’s diplomacy in Indonesia had led to stricter laws and a more ruthless people-smuggling operation; people seeking asylum no longer waited until the safer dry season to journey to Australia. Boats sank, and an estimated nine hundred people, including children, drowned.

Successive governments (Labor and Coalition) feared being punished at the ballot box if they were accused of losing control over Australia’s borders. So they told the Australian public that their egregiously punitive, damaging, and expensive asylum policies were needed, not only to maintain the integrity of borders, but also to save refugee children from drowning at sea.

In order to stop refugee children from reaching Australia by boat, our governments punished those who had survived the journey. Boat turn-backs, indefinite detention, and the removal of all possibility of settling in Australia were the methods by which policymakers could ‘break the people smugglers’ business model’. As Silverstein points out, no child benefits from the policies constructed upon this logic: they drown because there is no safe pathway to protection; those who survive the journey are damaged in mandatory, indefinite, and unsafe detention; and those who remain are trapped indefinitely in countries that do not recognise their refugee status. The only winners are the politicians who profit electorally by repeating the mantra that they have saved children from drowning.

This is a well-trodden analysis, but the interviews and archival research in Cruel Care bring many new insights. Silverstein has interviewed several former immigration ministers, government and opposition politicians and strategists, and key policymakers, and having their views on the record is valuable. A theme repeated by all her interviewees is the difficulty of the asylum policy portfolio. Yet, as Silverstein shows, after all the deliberations are done, policymakers unfailingly come down on the side of ‘protecting the borders’, ‘national integrity’, or ‘stopping children drowning at sea’. All three phrases result in the same policy response. In these deliberations, no attention is paid to the reasons people are forced to flee their homes, or how Australia might provide a safer pathway to protection, or respond more humanely to those who arrive.

This feigned concern about children is the narrative we tell ourselves that allows us to carry on, cultivating a false identity that, beneath it all, we, as Australians, are kind and humane. In response, Silverstein offers her second answer to the crucial question of how we could do this to children. Her blunt appraisal is this: in settler colonial Australia this is how we have always treated children. Not all children, of course, but non-white children whose presence threatens the national identity of the settler colonial state. Violent, racist, and paternalistic policies are enacted against children, and their parents, by the white settlers who know what’s best. At the same time as we devise creative and notorious ways for punishing refugee children, we have the world’s highest rates of incarceration of First Nations children and the highest rates of removing First Nations children from their families. ‘The problem,’ Silverstein states, ‘is the colony and how it governs.’

Silverstein confesses that this second, more fundamental answer forced its way into her book, a second answer overlaying the first. The result is a book in which two complex ideas compete for attention – in some chapters more successfully than others. Where it is most compelling is in the penultimate chapter, in which Silverstein analyses the careers of three public servants instrumental in designing asylum policy. One in particular, Wayne Gibbons, could rightfully claim to be the architect of both the

Pacific Solution and the Northern Territory Intervention. Suddenly, the continuities between asylum and First Nations policy are no longer theoretical.

Silverstein’s argument that asylum policy flows directly from the racialised logic inherent in settler colonialism is one Australians need to address. But it offers little hope for those whose energies are directed towards achieving more humane asylum policies. Is Australia forever destined to respond cruelly to people seeking asylum? Silverstein doesn’t engage with questions re-

Veiled performances

Two evasive memoirs

Tim Byrne

Did I Ever Tell You This? A memoir

by Sam Neill Text Publishing

$49.99 hb, 398 pp

Everything and Nothing: A memoir by

Heather Mitchell Allen & Unwin

$34.99 pb, 295 pp

Despite their proliferation, celebrity memoirs often seem incapable of justifying their own existence: a string of carefully curated anecdotes woven together to approximate a life already lived in the glare of the media. Perhaps because actors are on the one hand concealed by the roles they play, and on the other exposed to the prying eyes of the public, their autobiographies tend to inhabit a paradoxical netherworld of disclosure and obfuscation, cautious oscillations on a back off/ come hither axis. Both Sam Neill’s and Heather Mitchell’s recent memoirs traverse this uneasy ground, feeding us sometimes incredibly intimate details while remaining stubbornly mute on the larger questions of their careers.

Both eschew the camp, bitchy pleasures of a memoirist like Rupert Everett (whose Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins [2006] remains the genre’s high watermark), or of the possibly apocryphal but no less entertaining confessional My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1959) from Errol Flynn. Absent are the droll witticisms that abound in David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon (1971) or Carrie Fisher’s hilarious Wishful Drinking (2017). There are only the occasional titbits of gossip to be found, flashes of behind-thescenes revelation that might satisfy our prurience. Instead, Neill and Mitchell focus on the kinds of upheavals and twists of fate pertinent to any life – births and deaths, illness and health, love and friendship – presumably in an attempt to seem ‘just like us’.

Neill’s Did I Ever Tell You This?, the looser and more casually anecdotal of the two, was prompted by his recent cancer diagnosis. It opens in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, where Neill was born and christened Nigel, to his eternal chagrin. Neill’s father, Dermot, a strikingly handsome New Zealander, was an officer in

lating to the future of asylum policy; she explains that ‘it is not my place as a coloniser on Indigenous land to say precisely what should happen with that land’. Yet we don’t have to look far to find other settler colonies that have been much more generous to refugees. As we tentatively begin the process of Voice, treaty, and truth-telling, perhaps asylum seekers will be unexpected beneficiaries of our national reckoning. g

Amy Nethery is a political scientist at Deakin University.

the British Army, his work taking him from the mountain passes of Austria to a Greece plunged into civil war. His escapades are briefly touched on, but his taciturn nature – ‘He was, as always, slightly distant ... always partly absent’ – means that Neill barely scratches the surface of the man, nor captures their relationship with any vividness or insight. His mother, Priscilla, ‘was very English, very pretty and very brisk’. Although he seemed closer to her, she also remains a rather shadowy figure, elliptical.

Sibling relationships had slightly more impact on Neill’s formative development, but it was really the friendships he made outside the family structure that stuck with him. Bill Nutt –another Nigel who changed his name – was one of the first, ‘the most naturally gifted comic actor I’ve ever worked with (with the possible exception of Robin Williams, but it’s bloody close)’. He was tragically impaired by a car accident after leaving school. Bryan Brown features heavily, the kind of friend who substitutes goading and pranksterism for overt signs of affection, but is also clearly intensely devoted. There is a jocularity about these depictions, a boys-own-adventure mood that is charming or wearisome depending on your predisposition. Certainly, Neill is generous and sincere, although as the work progresses, his disinclination or maybe inability to prosecute or analyse his relationships begins to seem less a case of modesty and more a character flaw. At one point, he says he’s ‘as shallow as a puddle’, and it becomes increasingly difficult to disagree with him.

There are occasional flashes of insight and some juicy behindthe-scenes confessions, just enough to keep the reader engaged. We hear of John Gielgud’s tendency to drop faux pas like bits of tissue; Harvey Keitel’s meanness and obduracy during the filming of The Piano (1993); and Neill’s fractious, and ultimately chilly, relationship with Judy Davis. And yet, overall, Neill seems a reluctant celebrity raconteur – too deferential, too nice. He is happier talking about his pigs and his vineyards, the state of New Zealand architecture and the pleasures of New Zealand art. It is a discursive, pockmarked journey through a life, rendered unremarkable despite Neill’s proximity to fame and fortune.

Heather Mitchell’s Everything and Nothing is a far more considered, penetrative work; her prose is as poised and deliberate as her many stage roles, and her willingness to plumb emotional depths is courageous and bracing. Her opening chapter tells of the death of her mother from cancer when Mitchell was a teenager. In the space of a few deft pages, she manages to fold in complex questions of sexual awakening, mortality, and the

Memoir

ethical responsibilities of a dying parent. There is real skill here, an ability to conjure whole worlds with judicious word choice and germane detail. When her mother is being taken away in an ambulance, the last time Mitchell would see her alive, ‘[t]here was no siren, only the sound of Joan, our neighbour, sobbing near the gate. I wondered why she was there, what she knew and what gave her the right to cry.’ The weight of that ‘right’, its bitterness and incomprehension, is marvellously apt and evocative.

Motherhood – and its concomitant sensations of guilt and responsibility – is a key theme in the memoir, sharpened by Mitchell’s own diagnosis of breast cancer when her two sons were young. That crisis echoes her own confusion at losing a mother she didn’t realise was sick, and raises questions around the ethics of illness; how much should children be expected to bear, and when does the understandable desire to protect and shelter become damaging in itself? Mitchell approaches the subject with an enquiring candour, a willingness to accommodate doubt and ambivalence.

She is equally circumspect on the issue of gendered violence, particularly in a chapter entitled ‘Are You Decent?’, which chronicles various incidents of sexual assault – from a dentist to a stranger on a train – along with Mitchell’s dawning sense of injustice at having her body invaded by men throughout her life and career. While she treads cautiously through this minefield, sidestepping recent high-profile allegations on Australian stages, she does build a strong picture of women who came of age in

the 1970s, desperate to unshackle themselves from the strictures of their parents’ generation but blindly walking into dangerous sexual territories of their own.

What is almost completely missing, even more than in Neill’s book, is a comprehensive portrait of life as a professional actor. Most stage anecdotes revolve around the difficulties Mitchell has had juggling her personal and professional lives, the intersection of career and motherhood. While some of these are astonishing – one involving the surreptitious insertion of a tampon in front of a live audience will stay with me a long time – they often feel subsidiary, as if Mitchell were only incidentally an actor. It is almost perverse: as if a renowned surgeon were to write a memoir that never mentioned a hospital.

Neill’s Did I Ever Tell You This? and Mitchell’s Everything and Nothing share similarities, notably ongoing struggles with cancer and a reluctance to dish the dirt on colleagues past and present. But what really links them is their insistent humility, which seems noble but also veils something: a pathological fear of being thought prideful or pretentious perhaps. Antony Sher may have presented himself as an artistic giant in his diary of an actor’s process, Year of the King (1985), but at least he gave the reader extraordinary access to life on stage and off. Neill and Mitchell prefer us to remain perennial audience members, forever in the dark. g

A Vladimir Taxonomy

If his damage is vertical, it rises as floors do sidescan TVs and tables, shatterwards of beds and chequered bedspreads hanging out among the shrapnel hovering like glass or killer birds. Then falling into gutters. Oh, people, you’ll die. Imagination is horizontal, it levels everything reaching to the Tsar, his sense of time is flat. When he breathes, centuries move backwards. Most of the time he doesn’t. He is impassive, blanker than a drone above the broken ground. Raisin-eyed, a man among men (not women) bare and hairless-chested upon his poor horse yet a mummy’s boy from the first to the last of his Mother Russia: he was born twice over into the 20th … then the 18th century as well. A double case of repetition, there is nothing to see in him, he is the enigma of bad acting: Putin is the personality without a person. Among their medals: loyalty as much as battle weighing them down at the far end of the table, his Generals watch him: cold, pouty as a baby, yet this terrible, unavoidable vice of his lips. Immobile he sits there like a dull Villanelle lobotomised with power: Glabrous Lobotomous

Philip Salom

Tim Byrne reviews theatre for ABR.

The master welder

Fragments of autobiography from Robert Lowell

David Mason

Memoirs

by Robert Lowell Allen & Unwin $79.99 hb, 397 pp

At his death in 1977, Robert Lowell was considered one of the greatest and most influential American poets of the century. He had absorbed the academic formalism of the Fugitives and New Critics, but had gone beyond it with a humanising anger, the suffering visions of a manic-depressive. Among the Confessional Poets – as W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and others had come to be called – he was loftier, more prodigious and prolific. Seamus Heaney, who outgrew Lowell’s influence to become a figure of global importance, called him our ‘master elegist / and welder of English’. Not wielder, but welder. Lowell forged his poems, putting words together like pieces of steel. Another critic called his early style ‘imbricated’ for its packed masonry of sound.

So it is curious to reread Lowell now and consider his fading legacy. As early as 2003, the poet James Fenton observed that ‘the work of the most famous poet of his day has undergone a partial eclipse’. Many readers, myself among them, can admire Lowell’s poetry without really loving it. The work doesn’t move me, as the best poems by his friend Elizabeth Bishop do. His most anthologised poem, ‘Skunk Hour’, feels dated with its reference to a ‘fairy decorator’. I prefer other works, from ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ to ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’ and ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’. His best poem fusing history and social criticism is ‘For the Union Dead’, which ends, ‘Everywhere / giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / a savage servility/ slides by on grease.’ It is Lowell’s Howl – not as funny as Ginsberg’s, but more biting.

Unlike his friend Randall Jarrell, Lowell was not a great critic. A volume of his Collected Prose, edited by Robert Giroux, was published in 1987 but did little to burnish the poet’s reputation. Already it was clear that his prose existed partly to furnish anecdotes and phrases for his poems. His most famous memoir, ‘91 Revere Street’, appeared first in his breakthrough collection of poetry, Life Studies (1959). It recalled an unhappy childhood in Boston – his disappointed mother, ineffectual father, and the more vivid relatives who surrounded them, particularly his maternal grandfather, Arthur Winslow. With this new book, Memoirs, which gathers additional prose that has languished for decades among Lowell’s papers, we can put ‘91 Revere Street’ in perspective. After his first debilitating manic episode in 1954, which resulted in hospitalisation, electroshock treatments, and psychotherapy, Lowell began writing his autobiography. He

worked at it seriously for about two years, then set it aside to compose poems from the same material.

The twenty existing chapters on childhood and family life, some of them fragmentary and unfinished, allow us to see Lowell’s particular way of blending family lore (his relations included poets James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell) with the larger history of his country, or at least the Protestant, Eastern Seaboard part of it. His immediate family was not rich but nevertheless felt entitled, and a certain patrician entitlement remained with Lowell for the rest of his days. He would win his first Pulitzer at thirty and become Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now called Poet Laureate), and he would go on to win every honour an American poet could wish for, short of the Nobel Prize. But the photo of Lowell on the jacket of Memoirs shows him as a bitter, rebellious schoolboy. As a young man, he defied his family’s wishes, left Harvard to camp out in the yard of a poet he admired, Allen Tate, then went to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. This is the same young man who converted to Catholicism and spent a year in jail as a conscientious objector during World War II. He was a rebel who could never forget the genteel snobbery of his family. As he writes of his grandfather Winslow, ‘Looking about, he took satisfaction in seeing himself surrounded by neighbors whose reputations had made state, if not universal, history.’

While there are dazzling sentences in the childhood memoirs, and passages of superb description, the book never gels. The second section of memoirs, detailing his episodes of ‘pathological enthusiasm’ and hospitalisation, is far more harrowing and surreal: ‘No one understood my humor. I grew red and confused. The air in the room began to tighten around me.’ The material here feels fresher, wilder, yet little of that wildness got into his poems, which too seldom escape their origins in prose.

Some of his memoirs of other writers, taking up the third section of this book, have appeared in earlier volumes, but here one finds more of them, and finds Lowell at his best: warm, funny, affectionate. He has beautiful things to say about Tate, Ransom, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and even Ezra Pound. The notes inform us that he began his memoir of T.S. Eliot by admitting that he cried at the news of Eliot’s death. A key memoir of William Carlos Williams elucidates the ‘poetry wars’ of the 1950s between camps of poets Lowell referred to as the ‘cooked’ versus the ‘raw’. Memoirs of John Berryman and Randall Jarrell wonder why these two brilliant men never liked each other, but no one has written more tenderly about their abbreviated lives. Berryman jumped to his death from a bridge in Minneapolis; Jarrell strayed onto a highway near a North Carolina hospital where he had been treated for depression, and was hit by a car. Lowell observes, ‘Jarrell’s death was the sadder. If it hadn’t happened, it wouldn’t have happened. He would be with me now, in full power, as far as one may at fifty.’ Lowell, of course, died of a heart attack in a taxi, aged sixty, still hoping to repair his fragmented life. g

David Mason is the former poet laureate of Colorado and now a permanent resident of Tasmania. His most recent books are Pacific Light (Red Hen Press, 2022) and Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023).

Beginning again

Kate Mildenhall’s powerful third novel

Cassandra Atherton

The Hummingbird Effect

by Kate Mildenhall Scribner

$32.99pb, 320 pp

Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.

Mildenhall alludes to Aldous Huxley’s famous novel in evoking a ‘brave new world indeed’ at the end of the first long chapter, and through her exploration of entropic machinery, controlled reproduction, and tropes of desire and consumption. Mildenhall’s stark postcolonial ecofeminist lens gives the narrative its dark urgency and places women at the forefront of change. Indeed, in the short poetic chapters that bookend the novel, women’s voices are a river in the ‘Upstream, downstream, timestream of always’. The endless flow of water and its many cadences prioritise the natural world over technological advancement and invoke the sublime as essential to humility.

Named after the hummingbird effect, this novel explores ways of understanding how a small innovation may trigger transformation in a future unrelated field. A common historical example is the way the invention of the printing press created a demand for reading glasses, which in turn led to the microscope and the ability to understand the human body as a composition of microscopic cells. In Mildenhall’s novel, Hummingbird is also an AI language model that is asked to ‘list human innovations you would uninvent to make a better world’. While Hummingbird’s items range from nuclear weapons to literacy, the internet, gunpowder, coffee pods, and corn syrup, ultimately it argues, ‘the decision to uninvent any of these innovations is not straightforward, and the complex interplay of different factors must be considered’. In a witty moment, when the AI language model is asked, ‘Can you write me a poem to save the world?’ It turns out to be ‘[t]ruly awful. [The] World has moved past rhyming couplets’ – a topical issue given that ChatGPT remains unable to write convincing contemporary poetry.

The first of the four entwined narratives is a vibrant piece of historical fiction set at the Angliss Meatworks in 1933. Primarily focusing on Peggy, and slaughterman Jack King, Mildenhall problematises their desire by setting it against the abject kill room. The descriptions of killing and skinning animals captures the slaughtermen’s skill amid the horror of killing:

One cut now from throat to arse and then hook between the shins, and peel her down. When it’s done well, it’s a thing to behold, the gentle sucking sound of the skin tearing away leaving behind a layer of white-yellow fat. Off in one, toss the pelt on the belt and off to the fellmongery, and he’s satisfied that it’s a good one, clean and full.

However, with the invention of new machinery, Mildenhall demonstrates in a brutal series of events how the slaughtermen’s livelihood is threatened by a ‘chain’ that ‘runs past … one cut each – until it’s all in pieces at the other end’.

In the second narrative, Mildenhall’s depiction of an erudite older woman in aged care is gut-wrenching. Set in 2022, Hilda is locked in, isolated, and neglected by her carers. She begins to believe that showers are washing away her memories and slowly descends into delirium. Internal monologues map Hilda’s unravelling, despite occasionally enlightened and chastening moments: ‘Why lockdown why medicine why mask why not why not more why are you why aren’t you why was this not sooner anticipated announced predicted what about us about the virus about the economy about the environment.’ Hilda is multifaceted and the depiction of her circumstances complex, but the use of text messages and report templates occasionally detracts from the brilliance of Hilda’s characterisation.

The final two narratives are futuristic. La and Cat are the protagonists of the third narrative set eight years into the future, while Maz and Onyx are characters in 2181. In these stories, Mildenhall depicts a world at the mercy of its ‘WANTS’. This includes an Atwoodian IVF subplot where La feels like ‘some kind of egg machine’ and Maz and Onyx’s role to collect the enigmatic ‘oddz’ because, ‘If the pieces are brought together they combine to become a powerful machine, or a source … to begin everything again.’ It is the sensuality and commitment between La and Cat, and the familial endurance of Maz and Onyx, that drive these narratives. They also provide stirring echoes of the past, such as Cat’s reflection on Angliss Meatworks:

you know they used to bring the cattle across this bridge from the markets to the abattoir. Made them walk themselves to their slaughter … the river carries sounds, they would have spent the night there in the markets hearing the cows or sheep from the day before screaming before they were killed.

The satisfaction the reader feels when they unearth and identify the connections across Mildenhall’s four narratives is a testament to her careful planning and commitment to humanising the hummingbird effect. Her female characters are connected across time and place, illustrated in threshold moments of birth and death. Mildenhall’s evocation of women carrying one another (literally and figuratively) is an exquisite theme, reiterated in various ways throughout the novel. Indeed, as La recounts, when ‘your grandmother was carrying your mother in her womb then you were a tiny egg in your mother’s ovaries’ is mirrored in Hilda’s words, ‘bogong moths are a multivoltine species, breeding often over one season so that there are three generations alive at the same time’. Mildenhall’s The Hummingbird Effect is a devastating novel that exposes the ways the future is seeded in the past. g

Forms of power

A brilliant rendering of traumatic memory

Jennifer Mills

Audition by Pip Adam Giramondo $29.95 pb, 224 pp

Myths about space travel have always been uncomfortably tangled with incarceration and exile. Author Manu Saadia has described the private plans of the current crop of hubristic billionaires as ‘carceral fantasies’. Despite science fiction’s recent utopian turn, there is no reason to believe that space colonisation will be anything but a repeat of the earthly version’s violent history. Giants, too, have a long mythology and once held a significant place in literature, from Atlas to Swift and Wilde; both burdensome and burden-carrying, they often have an outcast sadness. Pip Adam’s fifth book, Audition, brings these myths together.

Three giants are crammed into a spaceship. When they talk, the ship moves. If they are silent, they grow. We don’t know where the ship is going, but we are told that the giants have been sent away. ‘We got too big for Earth,’ one says. It isn’t clear which of them is speaking at first, because the voices of the giants –Alba, Drew, and Stanley – are choral, their thoughts overlapping and identities hesitant. This three-way dialogue, packed with absurdist, Beckettian humour, sets up a startling puzzle; we are stuck in this conversation along with the giants, grasping at memories we can’t quite trust.

Adam has a long preoccupation with troubled embodiments. In her previous novel, Nothing to See (2021), Peggy and Greta share one life and two bodies: ‘All they ever wanted was to be smaller ... They wanted to take up less space,’ the narrator observes. In The New Animals (2017), Elodie upsets others because she ‘dared to take up the space she took up ... She needed to stop being so goddamn big.’

‘This book is about the abolition of prisons,’ Adam states in the acknowledgments. Having worked in prisons in Aotearoa for years, she has a clear-eyed understanding of their complex psychological effects. Scattered through the novel are references to real-world events, from the Black Lives Matter movement’s attention to breathlessness to Syrian prisoners’ experiences of torture. But this book is about more than prisons.

Pip Adam has a short story writer’s playful disregard for realism’s pretences. Her work is daring, clever, and imaginatively dazzling, but none of those back-cover words seem to fit; they are too shallow, too performative, for Adam’s project, which is really – and here, perhaps, most pronouncedly – about justice.

A political writer, Adam is more interested in human-system dynamics than in human-human ones: class, capital, education, technology, and labour. But that description seems reductive. Her

books are profoundly strange and profoundly realistic, about people surviving in institutions and hostile structures. Symbolism matters, but so does humanity; her characters always seem to develop some autonomy. The ship is a prison, but this is just one of the many less visible structures that contain and confine the giants’ lives. The excessive body is both literal and figurative, a way to talk about power, shame, responsibility, and institutionalisation.

Audition is structured in much the same way as the ship: three overlapping parts packed into a confined space, an uncomfortable compression. The set-up feels allegorical; at first I wondered if this might be Adam’s way of distancing herself from the trickier ethics of writing about marginalised people, but that question evaporated in the second part, when Adam turns to ‘the classroom’ and what happened to the giants before they were sent away.

Adam’s prose is stark and direct; though peppered with pop-culture references and memes, it has an admirable steadiness. With less conceptual weight behind it, this style might come across as vapid, but in Adam’s hands it feels inevitable and necessary, the best tools to handle the heaviest material.

Sometimes this directness is devastating: ‘they didn’t need to tell them all the way because they had told them enough times that they told themselves now.’ Sometimes it is bitterly funny: ‘She was making him uncomfortable with her death drive. It was seeping out of her and if she died he’d have more forms to fill in.’ The straightforwardness and humour brush distractions away. This isn’t a display of skill or sensitivity; this is a writer with purpose, getting on with her work.

There are many forms of power in this book, including the power of narrative, the construction of selfhood in story. As the giants piece each other together from clues and fragments, the stories they have been handed are revealed as fictions. The past ‘looks like a collage’. ‘What else have we forgotten?’ they ask. Among other things, Audition is a brilliant formal rendering of traumatic memory.

There is complicity here, even acceptance; the giants are ‘pliant’. But Audition also chronicles forms of resistance, from the smallest allowable transgression to the last available escape. Hope is mentioned, equivocally: ‘hope is the problem’, a mechanism of surrender. Fortunately, Adam has something more transcendent up her sleeve. She dares to cut a hole in the universe, to make a way through. In the third part of Audition, exile turns on its axis, taking on more liberating meanings. As in The New Animals, the body returns to the fore, and there is room for spirit and pleasure, mystery and satiety.

Adam writes for the dystopia we live in: the one where the death of a billionaire in a submersible matters while those of the hundreds of asylum seekers who drowned in the same week don’t; the one where children are kept in solitary confinement day after day; the one in which all our systems seem designed to fail those who need them the most.

Adam’s genius is to balance the real and the unreal, holding them side by side so that their reflections glitter and shift. Reading her work can be like falling through layers of glass, wounding in ways you don’t fully understand until afterwards. When you are back on solid ground, it feels less solid than it was. The best fiction makes reality mutable, makes the unthinkable possible. Adam has that power, and Audition brings that gift. g

Celebrating twenty years of great world poetry!

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

This year’s judges are Dan Disney, Felicity Plunkett, and Lachlan Brown.

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

First place $6,000

Four shortlisted poets $1,000 each

Entries close 9 October 2023

Stories still to tell

Creek baptisms and other family sagas

Kerryn Goldsworthy

On a Bright Hillside in Paradise

by Annette Higgs Vintage $32.99 pb, 310 pp

Anyone who watched the recent SBS survival series Alone Australia will have gained a new understanding of western Tasmania: of how wild it is, and how rugged, and how cold. A hand-to-mouth, hardscrabble life of subsistence farming there would be bad enough today; for the nineteenth-century white settlers of Annette Higgs’s novel it is close to unsurvivable, and indeed some of her most vulnerable characters do not survive it.

On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, winner of the 2022 Penguin Literary Prize, tells the story of a white settler family through three generations. As Higgs explains in a short Author’s Note at the end,

The story of the Hatton family is loosely based on my own family. Eliza Wise was a real person, as was her convict husband Benjamin Walters. One of their daughters married a farmer and settled under the aura of Mount Roland in the Kentish district and raised a large family. They were living there when the Christian Brethren evangelists arrived in 1874 and swept the people up in enthusiasm for revivals and creek baptisms.

This family saga tells some of the same stories from five different characters’ points of view, a common-enough but sometimes treacherous narrative technique that is effectively used here. There is little repetition and little authorial intervention: in her exploration of how differently people can perceive the same events and characters, Higgs makes effective use of the rule ‘Show, don’t tell.’

As that Author’s Note suggests, the story focuses mainly on the third generation, children of the ‘large family’, the oldest of whom are all more or less teenagers when the evangelists first arrive. The time and place, and to some extent the backstory of the family, are set up by the sections telling the story from their grandmother Eliza’s and their mother Susannah’s point of view, but the family tension in the story develops after the evangelists arrive and the two older brothers closest together in age, Eddie and Jack, react very differently to the effect these strangers are having on their family and their community.

Their sister Echo, ‘fourteen years old and thin as a stick’ on the memorable night that the evangelists hold their first revivalist meeting in the district, acts as a kind of anchor both to the family and to the story: Echo is both curious and competent, a helpful family member and a thoughtful observer, named partly for the mountain that feels to Susannah like a friend and that stands as

a kind of steadying presence in the life of the farm, and partly for an older child the family has lost, and whose fate is the subject of a well-managed slow reveal.

As happens frequently with novels whose story has its roots if not its actual toes in family history or other verifiable historical events, Higgs doesn’t quite manage her subject matter successfully in the transition from nonfiction to fiction. There are no clear underlying messages from an identifiable authorial position, and no real narrative arc. Another thing I found sometimes unconvincing is the dialogue, and the management of voices in general. It is challenging to represent the way that people from other times might have spoken to one another, and here there are jarring moments in the conversations between characters, and sometimes in the narrative voice itself, where speech habits and patterns sound somehow American, which I suppose could be accurate but is often distracting.

The subject matter, though, is engaging enough to keep the reader going. The story of a white Australian settler family in the nineteenth century, and especially of a family in such a wild and dramatic part of the country, is interesting to many readers in itself, but what really brings it to life here is the dramatic arrival of the evangelical preachers, an event that Higgs wisely puts at the very beginning of her story. From that moment, which gives us significant insights into all five main characters, the story ranges chronologically backwards and forward across the generations.

The way the various family members react to their first experience of a revivalist meeting, strung along a spectrum from full scepticism to full trance-like acceptance, foreshadows the conflicts that will arise within the family. Higgs does a skilful job of showing how strong the attraction of evangelical revivalist Christianity, complete with creek baptisms and charismatic preachers, might be for people living hard lives; the most obvious example here is Susannah, who is entirely seduced by the promise that she will be reunited with her lost child in the afterlife.

‘Seduced’ is the right word, too; there are suggestions, clear but never overdone, of the close parallels between sexual fervour and religious ecstasy. But the two preachers, for all their hypnotic words and voices and the power they wield, are something of a dropped thread here; I would have liked to know more about their true characters and motivations – are they sincere, are they charlatans, are they somewhere in between? – which would also have added some narrative pull and tension.

The forms and conditions of landscape and weather are effectively implied – and implicated – in the rural pursuits and the physical comforts and discomforts of the family, as well as in the acknowledgment of the much older inhabitants and their culture. Higgs’s subject is her family saga, and she uses a brief but focused sketch of only one Aboriginal character, a man of integrity and quiet influence, to gesture towards a knowledge of the way that part of Tasmanian history underpins its settler culture. There are a number of good things going on in this book that provide plenty of food for thought, and it shows that there are still many stories left, in Tasmania and in the nineteenth century, for Australian writers to tell. g

Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism.

Alloys to happiness

never taken the shape he might have wished, wants his death to provide some modest future hope for others.

Be Mine

by Richard Ford Bloomsbury $32.99 pb, 352 pp

When pushed to vote on the bleakest poem among Philip Larkin’s death-obsessed body of work, most would likely stump for his late masterpiece ‘Aubade’, that arid interrogation of human finitude. Yet his ‘The Building’, from 1972, is in many ways a more savage appraisal of individual extinction and the structures we build in an attempt to deny it: ‘Higher than the handsomest hotel / The lucent comb shows up for miles …’ Larkin was referring here to the Hull Royal Infirmary, a modernist pile which loomed over the poet’s hometown after it opened in 1967. Yet the poem could just as easily be translocated to Rochester, Minnesota, where the substantial modern tower of the Mayo Clinic stands: a building around which, too, surrounding streets stand like ‘a great sigh out of the last century’.

The Mayo is the venue on which Frank Bascombe’s latest and seemingly last outing as the American everyman initially centres. It is the place where his surviving son, Paul –whose older brother’s death as a child was the primal loss haunting The Sportswriter (1986), the first Frank Bascombe novel – has gone to undergo experimental treatment for ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, an incurable degenerative disorder.

Bascombe, that well-worn fictional avatar of Ford’s – a short story writer turned sports journalist turned realtor – is now semi-retired. At seventy-four, he is approaching that point in life where death is coming into tune as a personal matter. Despite having lost both his wives in recent years and living at some distance (emotionally and geographically) from his only daughter, Frank has little choice but to take on the role of caregiver to his ailing son.

We meet the pair during the concluding days of their stay in the city of Rochester. The trials which Paul has undertaken are not designed to save his life, or even to extend it. The forty-seven year old, whose existence has

Mostly, though, we see Paul – eccentric in manner, often wheelchair-bound, tending to corpulence – through the imperfectly loving and sometimes troubled eyes of his father. Frank has lost none of the humour and loquacity that made earlier Bascombe novels such a pleasure to linger in. He still sees changing America through lenses at once poetic and sociological, finding delight in strip malls and highway Hiltons, the low mimetic of American modernity built over the most sublimely vast and changeable of landscapes.

Minnesota in full winter is no exception. Frank and Paul have rented a sprawling bungalow in Rochester, where the older man, a New Jerseyan, has ample time to muse on finding himself in this unlikely spot.

Yes, this is a space adequate for doing whatever we think we’re doing. There is a small river. That direction we face is west. The Twin Cities are that way (out of sight, but unmissable). There, are major arteries. There, the first tier suburbs, the second and third. That colossus of glass and steel in the middle ground … that is the Clinic where everything happening is of the utmost import. And that space of leafless maples, elms and oaks just beyond, is where our house sits, barely visible beside a large blue spruce. And beyond all that is prairie. Expanding and expanding.

What Frank is trying to do is to take the great American randomness and arrange it into some explicable order. At ‘some point it is good,’ he concludes, ‘possibly necessary, to set your own coordinates.’

The second half of the novel, which describes a road trip undertaken by the pair, driving a vintage RV to visit that ‘most notional’ of American sights, Mount Rushmore, is an effort to bring interior and exterior coordinates into alignment. Paul is declining with a swiftness unanticipated by his father, discarding significant functions like someone stripping off for a swim.

Time, then, is forcing upon both an accelerated reckoning. Only the smallest and swiftest of pleasures may be wrestled from the time they have remaining. A visit to the gift shop of the Mitchell Corn Palace in South Dakota, say, or brief and phatic communion with a nurse or hotel manageress. Or the endless badinage between father and son, elicited from the vacuum of hours on the road, which occasionally veers from family jokes to the great imponderables. Mount Rushmore, when it is finally approached, disappoints: it is ‘monumental without being majestic’, Paul observes.

The last Frank Bascombe novel Geordie Williamson

Richard Ford, 2002 (Oliver Mark via Wikimedia Commons)

If Be Mine lacks some of the easy grace of the preceding Bascombe novels – Paul is often truculent in his pain, Frank more tart and judgemental concerning the Trumpian squalor afflicting his nation in late 2020 – its final effects are stronger.

Bascombe recalls reading Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography, in which the English author notes ‘that there exists in life a sorrow so great that sorrow becomes an alloy to happiness’. Be Mine is a tougher book because this is an alloy Frank Bascombe has come to know.

The final pages of the novel, which jump forward to describe Paul’s death and its aftermath, is a gleaming instance of this new bond. Frank’s orientation towards death has grown balanced and supple, and he suggests that some art and thought directed towards these matters makes facing them harder than it needs to be.

Frank is referring to Heidegger here, having read the German philosopher in a desultory way throughout the narrative of Be Mine, though he could just as easily be talking about Larkin. That poet, at the conclusion of ‘The Building’, mounts his bitterest condemnation of our situation:

Reframing British Antarctic exploration

Thaw

by Dennis Glover Black Inc.

$32.99 pb, 304 pp

Dennis Glover’s third novel centres on the much-mythologised British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 that saw Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempt to reach the geographic South Pole for the first time in history. Scott and four companions arrived at the Pole too late (five weeks after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) and would later succumb to the brutal conditions encountered on their return journey to Cape Evans. As Glover alludes to in the preface (and dramatises throughout the novel), details of the Scott expedition – possible causes of the tragedy, potential alternatives – as well as its historical, cultural, and/or scientific significance, have long been the subject of voluminous print and broadcast media (both popular and academic) and have fuelled often obsessive and granular debates. Thaw is both a contribution to, and comment on, this discourse.

Structured in eight parts that alternate between dual timelines, the novel depicts the Scott expedition (including its preparation and initial aftermath) alongside a modern narrative that follows Cambridge researchers grappling with the impact of climate change in the polar regions. This duality allows Glover

… All know they are going to die. Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end, And somewhere like this. That is what it means, This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend The thought of dying, for unless its powers Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

Frank Bascombe would readily admit the absolute fact of death Larkin lays down. But he would not regard those ‘propitiatory flowers’ as wasteful or weak. That final, effortful road trip with Paul was a gesture of love, and its memory a balm, of sorts, to an old man who has outlived his son. g

Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011).

to represent the polar party’s disastrous fate (realised in vivid, apocalyptic detail) while also contextualising events with the benefit of twenty-first century scientific evidence and historical findings, ultimately inviting a link to a more contemporary (and uncomfortably familiar) apocalyptic scenario.

In an imagined near-future (the latter half of 2023), climatologists are on edge as reports of ‘extraordinary data’ emerge from remote research stations following a ‘record-breaking summer’ in the Northern Hemisphere. Michelle ‘Missy’ Simpson is a glacial archaeologist and celebrity climate activist whose enviable CV includes regular television talk show appearances and a former role as ‘special environmental adviser’ to the British prime minister. She is currently a University of Cambridge visiting fellow at the British Institute for Polar Studies (a fictionalised version of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute). Missy has been turning heads in the scientific community due to her knack for extracting ‘spectacular finds’ from the world’s melting glaciers and sea ice (40,000-year-old wolves’ heads, Viking horseshoes, coveted shipwrecks). Turning from the field to the institute’s archives, Missy is researching her great-grandfather George Clarke Simpson, the chief meteorologist on the infamous Scott expedition.

This present-day timeline has the makings of an intriguing campus novel. There is an overachieving don, Jim Hunter, who bemoans the current state of higher education: rubberstamping papers submitted for degrees ‘shamelessly offered’ by the university to cash in on the lucrative international student market; the gawking tourists who now see ‘two dons cycling past King’s wearing academic gowns … [as] a couple of extras in a Hollywood movie’. Jim helps Missy to navigate lecture theatres and donor events, and his Polar Medal signals him, much like Missy, as capable of navigating more topographically challenging surrounds. Together with Trudy, the brash and intelligent archivist, and Georgia, the resourceful post-doc meteorology researcher, these characters fill out a fascinating academic niche comprised

‘Scott or Shackleton?’

Morgan Nunan

of people for whom an answer to the question ‘Scott or Shackleton?’ is equal to ‘United or City? Beatles or Stones? Blur or Oasis?’ There is even a brief appearance of a campus figure to rival Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies in Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985): Sir Jonathan, a professor of German history, provides Missy with some useful context on a swastika-bearing dart that was located in the polar regions and gifted to Missy by a mysterious philanthropist, Lady Wilson. It is Lady Wilson and her Nazi dart that soon propel Missy’s narrative arc off campus.

As a survivor of the Scott expedition, George Simpson is not only Missy’s biographical subject but also a key figure within the reframed historical timeline, with many chapters focalised through him, or else featuring extracts from his contemporaneous letters, journal entries, and publications, including his 1923 Halley Lecture, ‘Scott’s Polar Journey and the Weather’. The novel’s epigraph, a quotation from Simpson’s journal, proves to be a central hypothesis: ‘Well, whatever else has failed, the scientific work has not, and that should count for something in the long run.’

Representing this angle in the novel format requires extensive exposition, and Glover goes to great lengths to embed the hefty (though necessary) historical and scientific background in diverse ways: through textual fragments of the kind already mentioned; by varying the locations for expository discussions (museums, libraries, lecture theatres); and by staging minor conflicts between Missy and the novel’s chief antagonist, Christopher Wolfson (a right-wing hack, ‘polar historian’, and climate-change denier). These features serve to contextualise debates that surround the Scott expedition or explain meteorological phenomena that range from basal melting and ice shelf collapse to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. While this content certainly deepens the reading experience, particularly in the devastating coda to the historical narrative (by which time Glover has trained readers to interpret bare weather readings, presented as italicised subheadings), its inclusion can leave characterisation feeling surface-level at times. It also makes for a comparatively thin contemporary narrative, albeit one with a high-tension climax to rival the historical counterpart.

In Glover’s second novel, Factory 19 (2020), an anti-tech activist group, tired of living in a digital and media saturated world, retreats to a simulation of a pre-digital existence. In contrast to this hyperreal setting and the lively, impertinent humour of that novel’s first-person narrator, Thaw features a more distant third-person narration often focalised externally or shifting between protagonists, as well as a more conventional realism (while being partly set within the inherently surreal Antarctic landscape). By supplementing the narration with selective use of historical textual fragments, an approach that resembles the intertextuality of Margaret Atwood’s historical novel Alias Grace (1997), Glover constructs a research-grounded narrative that questions the focus of many previous expedition accounts, successfully reframing a compelling polar discourse to more productive ends. g

Morgan Nunan is a writer based in Adelaide. His story ‘Rubble Boy’ was shortlisted in the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Interdependence

Three new novels

Diane Stubbings

British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.

Three new Australian novels probe this interdependence, each of them concerned with the historical forces that have silenced and confined women, and each of them testing the capacity of their female characters to assert their stories, their selfhood, in the face of a hostile and unfamiliar landscape. Critically, what differentiates the novels is the degree to which their authors discover within these environments a similitude with their characters’ emotional struggle, the landscape not merely adorning the narrative but becoming essential to it.

Emily O’Grady follows up her 2018 Australian/Vogel’s awardwinning début, The Yellow House, with Feast (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 295 pp), an arresting gothic novel set in a remote Scottish manor house.

Alison, an agoraphobic film actress, bought the house for her mother, Frances, when the latter’s health began to deteriorate as a consequence of old age and dementia. Since Frances’s death, Alison has lived in the house with her partner, Patrick, a oncefamous rock musician who now composes film scores. Their lives have fallen into a rhythm that is familiar, if not entirely smooth. There is a restlessness to their days that is aggravated by the sudden arrival of Neve, Patrick’s daughter. Determined to play the doting father, he plans an ostentatious eighteenth-birthday feast for Neve, even extending an invitation to Neve’s mother, Shannon, who lives in Australia.

Lost and awkward, Neve is uncertain what she wants from life. When she inadvertently learns that Alison – already fortyeight and seemingly beyond childbearing – is pregnant, Neve is overwhelmed by an urge to obliterate the baby before it is born: ‘In her head she pictures her hand pressed to Alison’s belly, clawing past the skin and muscle, into the swelling balloon of Alison’s uterus and squeezing it to pulp.’

Wracked with morning sickness, Alison shares Neve’s impulse. The pregnancy seems to her an impossible thing, and she intends to have it terminated. However, events preceding the feast – Alison’s near-obsession with Shannon and the pervasive presence in the house of Elixir, a young neighbour, who simultaneously abhors and lionises Alison – prompt Alison to reconsider her decision.

O’Grady constructs her plot with appreciable skill. As the book’s publicity trumpets, there are secrets waiting to be revealed, but the substance of those secrets turns out to be less consequential than the degree to which they have, over time, festered. A sense of disaster, even death, looms over every page, and each of the relationships is entangled with so many question marks, and laced with so much venom, that it is impossible to predict which one of them will be the first to implode.

A milieu of decay and moral collapse is strikingly realised in O’Grady’s language. Her images reek of rot and putrefaction, embodying the visceral, the organic, the parasitic: ‘She wants to go back … to when she was just a cluster of cells, a possibility, and there was no one burrowed under her skin like a tick, sucking away, sucking away.’ The dour, knotted landscape – riddled with brambles, traps, and the corpses of dead animals buried there when the estate was a private zoo – reflects the characters’ inner lives, leaving them, like the rabbits Alison hunts, skinned and eviscerated.

What is especially satisfying about Feast is the way it cunningly manipulates readers’ expectations. Every time you feel you have the novel’s measure, it veers off slightly. With a lesser writer, the deviations and red herrings might feel chaotic. In O’Grady’s hands, they are purposeful and effective.

It may not come to the blood-curdling climax that the plot and imagery warrant, but Feast is nevertheless a penetrating and tantalising novel.

Jennifer Mackenzie Dunbar’s Missing Pieces (MidnightSun, $32.99 pb, 303 pp) also draws on the mystique of the Scottish landscape. Set largely on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, and inspired by the mystery of the Lewis chessmen – a cache of exquisitely carved medieval chess pieces discovered on Lewis in 1831 – Missing Pieces stresses the importance of women’s stories: ‘Women’s stories must be told … men will not take the time to ask. We must become our own storytellers.’

A novel that wears its heart on its sleeve, Missing Pieces takes what little is known about the provenance of the chess pieces and contrives a plot which situates three women at the centre of the chessmen’s history: Magrit the Adroit, an Icelandic woman referenced in the Norse sagas, who, according to some theories, sculpted the pieces; Morven, a woman from Lewis, who, in 1190, found the pieces after a shipwreck and buried them; and Mhairi McLeod, the wife of the man credited with unearthing the chessmen almost seven hundred years later. Binding these stories is that of Marianne McLeod, an employee of the British Museum, who, in 2010, has been sent to Lewis to oversee a temporary display of the pieces.

In telling the women’s stories, Missing Pieces prods various themes – romance, mystery, the repatriation of antiquities, female empowerment, family tragedy and even Outlander-style mysticism and magic – without fully animating any of them. While Dunbar’s motivation here is admirable, Missing Pieces, despite (or perhaps because of) its cosiness, is predictable and plodding. Nevertheless, it is gratifying to see a version of history in which the vain, self-aggrandising, and at times gormless men who stumbled into the chessmen’s narrative are pushed aside by the gifted and tenacious women the novel imagines.

The plight of women whose stories have been swamped by androcentric histories likewise drives Rachael Mead’s The Art of Breaking Ice (Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 288 pp), which celebrates the life of Nel Law, the first Australian woman to set foot in Antarctica.

A housewife with artistic aspirations, Nel is cooking dinner for her husband, Phillip, leader of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition (ANARE), and one of his colleagues – a dinner comprising roast penguin breast and seal-liver pastries – when Phillip audaciously suggests that Nel stowaway on his forthcoming voyage to Macquarie Island and Mawson Station.

With a surreptitious wink from the government minister in charge of Australia’s Antarctic territories (a cameo from soon-tobe Prime Minister John Gorton), Nel takes her place among the crew sailing south. The predominantly male expeditioners resent the presence of women aboard – not only Nel, but also four female scientists, themselves pioneers, on route to Macquarie Island.

At sea, Nel witnesses an unfamiliar side to her husband, Phillip morphing into an authoritative, work-obsessed figure who demands respect and obeisance from his men and, for the duration of the expedition, also from Nel. Troubled by Phillip’s emotional absence, Nel finds solace in the company of Harris McCallum, an ornithologist. She illustrates McCallum’s penguin studies and is soon mooning over him, flush with desire. The attraction seems to be mutual.

Nel’s artistic insight – her singular perspective on the landscape – is neatly emulated by Mead, herself a poet and one-time visitor to Antarctica. Scenes where Nel gazes towards the horizon, marking the subtle gradations of the light, are dazzling: ‘Just space: smooth and endless … everything glittering as if dusted with diamonds … frozen rivers etched with crevasses in shades of blue she’d never imagined.’ The intimations within the landscape of Nel’s uncertain attitude to her marriage are subtly realised.

Apart from occasional, tenuous moments of self-realisation, Nel scarcely attempts to break free of her husband’s dominion, nor to subvert the fact that on this journey she is seldom anyone other than Mrs Phillip Law. Even her first steps on the ice are more her husband’s victory than her own. Nel may be constrained by history, but the novel offers barely a twinge of ambition thwarted, potential unrealised, or even stoical, if ultimately futile, resistance.

As such, The Art of Breaking Ice seems frozen in time, its sensibility more that of a novel written around the time of Nel’s voyage rather than sixty years later. A thin and transparent framing narrative does little to convince readers – particularly in the absence of the art itself – why Nel’s story is worthy of their interest. You inevitably find yourself wondering what those four female scientists on Macquarie Island are up to, and why it isn’t their story being told. g

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Black Wax by Winter Bel

They met by the smashed call box at the intersection of Homan and 16th, as proposed in her perfectly spelt text message earlier that night.

Her name was Artesia, which Harry would later learn she wrote on her mailbox as ‘Tease ya’. Harry might have guessed that the moment he saw her.

Full-body leather. Tattoo of a honey bee on her neck. A my-body-my-canvas vibe that suggested she had more ink, way more carnivorous, other places too. Most unpromising of all: the Fleetwood Mac T-shirt. (Flamingo-coloured brassiere peeking through, but by this point he was just glad she was wearing underwear at all.)

Harry’s face must have fallen, because Artesia said, ‘Yo, what.’

She had a voice that sounded like she’d been smoking for half an actual century. Maybe that’s why, on the phone, Harry had assumed he was dealing with someone considerably older. In fact, Artesia was in her early twenties, same as him.

Harry didn’t quite meet her eyes, tried to make this as impersonal as possible.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but my ad was ... serious, you know?’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘And I seriously hauled it out here to meet you.’

‘I’m hiring a secretary? For accounting and administration?’

‘I heard you on the phone. I can do that.’

‘Like, your buttoned-down type of secretary.’

Artesia assessed herself. ‘You see any buttons up?’

Zips and rips, that’s all Harry saw.

There was no way she was right for the position. Harry needed someone to cover his weakness with paperwork, to write up what he dreamt up. Beige write it up, the way the world of business seemed to need. On time too – deadlines weren’t his strong point either. This girl looked about as beige and orderly as a dripping popsicle. But as she eyed him through the lousy streetlight, looking righteously pissed, Harry found he couldn’t

bring himself to say, this is pointless.

So he took her to That Boy’s diner, where Aretha Franklin had signed the wallpaper and the waitress wore a tag that said Jesus Saves above her name. Harry bought them both honey cream sodas, and went through the motions of an interview. As Artesia sat weaving her pumpernickel hair around her fingers, Harry gave his speech.

African American music, Harry said, had come to mean one thing in the popular imagination: hip-hop and jazz. Harry’s record label would change that. In the cash-only basement bars, the projects stairwells and the busking aisles of the L train, there were pioneers out there. Lonely as Christmas trees in July, honing other forms of black music. Harry’s vision was to find and champion those overlooked artists, first here in Chicago, then expanding to the nation. Given Artesia’s apparent admiration of other, long-embraced forms of music – here, Harry looked meaningfully at the Fleetwood Mac T-shirt – he would understand if she felt now the position was not –

Artesia raised a finger – one moment – and finished sucking up soda.

She said, ‘Market.’

Harry realised this was a question.

‘Imma make the market,’ he said. ‘People don’t know they want this yet. Like sliced bread. How that wasn’t a thing, until it was.’

Artesia frowned elaborately. ‘So you know they want it, but they don’t?’

He paused. ‘Imma make them want it. Won’t stop till they do.’

‘Kind of rapey?’

‘Say what?’

‘Look.’ Artesia shook her head with amused impatience. ‘Sex and sugar.’

Guess he looked kind of dopey, because she explained. Dear imperialistic asshole (that part she said sweetly), people knew exactly what they wanted. And that was: sex and sugar. One of

those two things motivated the sale of everything. Which one was going to sell Harry’s records?

‘Sliced bread’s a savoury,’ Harry said feebly.

‘You dreaming. The bread people, the car people, the news people, they put sex in, or they put sugar in. And that’s business.’

They were silent, except for the clacking of Artesia’s jewelled nails on her glass.

She had annoyed Harry deep in his gut, as she would many times again, generally for being right.

Harry said, ‘You’re saying my business isn’t viable?’

‘No. I’m saying you’re telling it wrong. You’re leading with the politics. You know why we got to put our pain on placards and yell it through the gate? Cause no one with money or influence wants to hear it. And, not to pre-judge you or nothing, but I’m guessing money and influence is something with which you’ll be needing an assist.’

‘That is ... so.’ (The weird diction was owing to Harry’s reluctance to concede correct.)

‘Of course black folks make all kinds of music. We’re all kinds of souls. But that truth is not a plan. Excuse me.’ Artesia swiped thin air to signal she had a better word. ‘It’s not a profit map. So.’

Harry sat bewildered by the sudden halt. ‘So?’

She blinked like it was obvious. ‘So tell me you’re going to find music that makes people feel horny, or fuckable, or like candy makes them feel. Keep it low that it’s music by black folks. That’s your bathroom-mirror goal, you don’t have to tell it loud and wide.’

‘That’s cowardly,’ Harry said.

‘Nope. The pattern in your client list will make it plenty clear. Our community gets new representation in the end, whether you bullhorn it upfront or no. But money and influence is only going to be lifting your business into actually happening if there’s a ...’

She seemed to have forgotten her own perfect word. Harry prompted, ‘Map.’

‘Right. To more money and influence.’

As Harry absorbed that, Artesia considered her T-shirt. ‘And this ... this I picked up off of the floor after we got topless to protest the senator. No one was too fussed about whose top was whose, cause the police had arrived.’

Harry sat with that for a minute. Where to start?

He finally decided on: ‘Which senator?’

Artesia shrugged. ‘I guess the one that’s a boob.’

‘You do that a lot?’ Harry said nervously. ‘Protesting?’

‘That’s where all my arrests came from, yeah.’

Wincing, ‘Arrests?’

‘Other jobs I’ve tried for, they haven’t liked that so much. But you ... I think you’re different.’

‘How’s that?’

Artesia looked at him from the most knowing depths of her eyes. ‘Cause ten dollars an hour is a joke, but I’m guessing it’s nine more an hour than you got. In no time at all, this could belly-up and I’m back to circling tooth donor ads. So I’m taking a chance on you too.’ As an afterthought, ‘And, hey, I could’ve shown up worse. I could’ve shown up white.’

Harry raised his palms. ‘Nah, you got that wrong, I’m an equal opportunities ...’

He fell silent as she made blabbing motions with her hand.

Their eyes met for a moment. He thought of that perfect spelling in her text message. His smile already hinted in the air between them.

No, Artesia was not beige.

The mistakes she made, in the early days, were spectacular. So much so that they felt like cosmic events – super blood moons, conjunctions of Venus and Saturn – that only the two of them had witnessed. The time she’d mailed their tax return to the Illinois Department of Transport because she’d searched ‘file something the express way’, then hadn’t noticed that Google had given her Did you mean results for expressway The edgy but illegible business cards. The legible but Gothic letterhead. The bargain office chairs that turned out to be garden furniture. The typos that resulted from her listening to his dictation tapes and NPR both at once. (‘N, P, R?’ Harry had exclaimed, tight up in his throat, when she’d unhurriedly diagnosed the problem. The joke among Harry and his friends was that NPR stood for Nana’s Playable Ritalin, because all it did was keep old ladies from napping. Artesia had shrugged and said obviously she was only listening to it in eternal hope they’d play Fleetwood Mac. A smile flickering at the corner of her mouth, where her tangerine lipstick was smudgiest.)

All the same, Artesia learned fast and, in no time at all, became essential to Harry. (Yes, somehow even when spectacularly fucking up, essential.) She had an instinctive sense of priority and proportion, a fierce loyalty to their bottom-line, and a wide circle of scrappily creative friends from the fashion program she’d ‘half-graduated’, all of them ready to lend a hand.

Above all, she was as grounded as a fire hydrant. For months, Harry had pained over potential names for his record label: ‘Night Peach Records’, ‘Gravy Train Records’, ‘CoffeeDup Records’. Artesia dismissed all of these as having the stickily homespun feel of a lemonade stand. Just spit it out, Artesia said, hard and clean, like something you’d yell if someone dangled you upside down from a rooftop.

And so, Black Wax Records was born.

It had a founder, a handful of volunteer talent scouts, and now a secretary. To Harry, that was a business with the ‘dimensions’ investors needed to see to take his vision seriously.

Artesia had dimensions, all right. The bank manager could barely keep his eyes off them. The cream silk blouse, the chocolate pantsuit, the spectacles that vibed trigonometry consultant. She’d bought all this solely for their appointment and returned it to the store afterwards. But the way Artesia wore it, that didn’t come off no hanger. Harry recognised very quickly that, in the particular niche Artesia called her own, she was the real deal.

It didn’t get them a bank loan that day, nor in the four more attempts that followed over the next two years, but every time Artesia made an effort for his business, Harry felt that business was real. Maybe it was the low expectations you learned early as a black man too restless and broke for college. Maybe it was his upbringing in a family of factory workers, where excellence was dependable repetition, and improvisation was frowned on and even dangerous. Or maybe it was still living at his aunt and uncle’s place, where he’d moved after cancer took his mother, the address for which always got lingering looks from administrators.

(‘Is that a storage unit?’ one lady at the SBA District Office had said, openly straining to imagine what else that street was fit for. Harry pointed out that businesses could not legally be registered to storage units, and left it at that.)

For whatever reason, Harry couldn’t shake the feeling of being an impostor in this world of creating your own paycheck.

Harry felt that a little less when Artesia said, ‘That’s a killer idea for another business. But Black Wax Records is a different animal.’ This was in response to a self-proclaimed ‘misfit moneyman’ who had a tiny, deniable office full of time-zone clocks and money-laundering vibes. He’d fund them, he said, if they changed their business plan to ‘finding the black Eminem’. (‘The black Eminem,’ Artesia eye-rolled afterwards, ‘is hip-hop.’)

Black Wax, Artesia would say, was an independent record label that identified under-exposed talent sooner than anyone else thanks to its authenticity-first outreach energies. (They’d settled on ‘outreach energies’ after rejecting ‘outreach program’ – too white – and ‘outreach efforts’, which tended to get them asked what efforts exactly and that was embarrassing: it was Harry and the three volunteer scouts mooking around town, as light-pocketed as birds.) The musicians Black Wax discovered were too sensitive or shaggy for YouTube and SoundCloud, and often too rent-crushed or life-tired for any kind of self-marketing at all. They cared only about performing: that pre-fame true-star integrity. Artesia never exactly said their focus was black voices. She would reject without comment anything not compatible with that focus.

Those moments of sensing Artesia in his corner made Harry work harder. He befriended assholes, high-fived dumbfucks, nodded along with emotional wrecks. All so he could say, ‘Tell me who you’ve heard lately.’ He paid particular attention to the drunks, the tweakers, and the kids who’d barely hit puberty but already had gang tags burned into their skin. Whatever music had registered with them through the apparatus of their selfdestruction was a name Harry wanted to know.

In this way, Harry was the first to hear about Marc ‘Stussy’ Roberson, a singer-songwriter whose bruised folk songs were later compared by the Free Press to ‘dusty candyfloss’. There was also protest pianist Ion and electronic blues group Broken Kite.

Only Broken Kite had a manager. This was an ex-touring saxophonist with a drooping face who only seemed to represent folks he hoped someday would invite him to play with them. Such hoping was all he really did for them. He didn’t appear to notice or care that the Black Wax Records contract was a template Artesia had downloaded during a free trial of Law4U, with one ‘[COMPANY NAME HERE]’ left in there by accident.

The pianist, Ion, was tougher. As he flipped through the cheap printout, Ion noted that the contract’s language on record production and distribution read like hopes not promises. Then he got to the clause that tied all of the foregoing to as-yet unsecured third-party investment. Ion smiled grimly, shook his head, and handed it back without a word.

Stussy Roberson was the game-changer. He owned nothing but his guitar and the case he carried it in, which he lined with spare socks, the raw materials for rolled cigarettes, and an in-

creasingly unstitched copy of The Three Musketeers. (‘I can’t decide,’ Artesia said, ‘if it’s better or worse that his one book is not by James Baldwin.’) He was also seventeen years old, with a firescarred face that couldn’t, owing to permanent muscle loss, ever smile. My voice, he said, referring to his limited facial mobility, is a miracle. I gave up everything to follow that miracle. It would be nit-picking to observe that he never had very much to give up in the first place.

Stussy couch-surfed from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, around gigs. He had a cellphone but frequently lost it. He played full-immersion video games for hours, refusing to exit them until he felt inspired again. For this reason, getting the Black Wax contract to him took weeks. When they finally did, Stussy held the contract real close to his face as he read, chuckled fondly a few times, then said, ‘So you cats got no chute either.’

Artesia confirmed: no parachute.

Stussy cast the other miracle of his face – the crisply green eyes – over the two of them, lingering on Harry’s pants, wet by the snow almost up to the knees, a sure sign there was no cab money in these folks. Stussy nodded as though to a long, calming monologue. Stussy signed.

Which bothered Ion. He kept saying, ‘As is?’ then paced around haphazardly while his baby tried to stash his car keys in its diaper. After two weeks of this, Ion went from rejecting their contract to insisting on a six-month renewable version. He also wanted a clause for immediate, no-penalties release if some other deal with guarantees came his way.

With these signings, Black Wax was looking decidedly less adolescent. This time, the bank manager had coffee laid out for them.

‘Decaf after eleven,’ Artesia insisted. Decaffeinated was the one thing not on the tray. Naturally, Artesia had never drunk it before in her life. She was being prickly in the way she felt they’d earned by now.

Harry smiled and requested decaf too.

Sex and sugar. Seven years later, Harry reminded Artesia of those two words in the icy lot of a car rental place at Minneapolis Saint Paul airport. They were heading to Bloomington, the city of Artesia’s birth, for what she anticipated would be a ‘meh tour’ of all the places she’d long outgrown. Standing by their rental car and pretending to read from the rental agreement, Harry told Artesia they’d find the keys on top of the back wheel.

Artesia snorted. ‘They just leave it right there on the wheel?’

‘That’s what it says.’

Artesia shook her head. ‘Thas something else I don’t miss about this place. Always so damn trusting.’

She reached to the back wheel for the keys, and found something else perched on top of it instead. Something else entirely.

She stood with it in her hand, and looked at him.

As Black Wax had grown, it had demanded more and more strategy and stapling. Harry and Artesia had done both together, neither task feeling like it belonged more to one than the other. Fuelled by Nat King Cole, rum cocoa, and cheap, crumbling cigarettes, they worked into the wee hours, when pink neon sprinkles from the 24/7 Bail Bonds sign next door fell between their desks. Meanwhile, they talked small things, then things

so great their voices would break with the weight of them, then great and small things interchangeably because over time, with each other, they forgot the difference.

The bank manager had indeed fetched them decaf that day. Then he’d given them a $50k loan.

‘Big money for baby’s first business,’ Artesia had fumed later. It’s true their hopes had been ten times larger. $50k wouldn’t fund much more than continuation for now. To justify the amount, the bank manager had used NASA words (‘vector’, ‘propulsion’, ‘resistance ratios’) and moved a finger down a long column of ‘scenario outcome yields’. This was pre-printed, however, so can’t have been their specific scenario.

But Harry considered any money at all to be victory enough. Particularly in this, the electronic age. It was perfectly legitimate now for a record label to trade only in digital media. That put their premises, storage, and distribution costs near zero, and meant most of their dollars could go into marketing. The bank’s NASA-veiled fear of black innovation would not hold them back. In fact, they quickly came to appreciate that the kind of money they’d wanted likely would have taken them away from the reasons Stussy signed with them in the first place. That crazybeautiful decision they would need repeated by others if Black Wax was going to make it.

Somehow, it happened: talent did make the same leap onto their list. About two or three times a year at first, before six or seven signings became their norm. More often than not the choice was because of Stussy and the mad respect for him around the city. Them flames left him ugly as sin. Voice like that, though, he all you want to look at. Black Wax heard that a lot as the ink crossed the signature line.

RRbT, a lesbian slam poet whose début album, Trojan War, was about growing up in foster care, sought them out after Stussy name-dropped Harry as his ‘demonwhisperer’ during a Sofar gig. You hush that boy’s demons, RRbT said, maybe there’s hope for me too. Day-Day (aka Danielle Marks) defined herself as a ‘gospel rapper’. That last word hit up against Harry’s reluctance to continue the yoking of black to rap in their client list. But Artesia asked him to reconsider – this, she said, was rap the likes of which had never been heard before. She again asked him to reconsider when singer-and-kettle-drummer Ty Roy created a crowd so big outside the Garfield Park Green Line Station that the police stopped by and not to circulate finger snacks. Harry’s hesitation: Ty was Cambodian. Artesia saw no conflict between representing Ty and their founding vision, as marginalised-because-black was simple paraphrasis of marginalised-by-skin-colour. After that, black voices became voices of colour in their unwritten ethos.

And seven years went by.

The business grew, albeit at a pace so slow that ‘you could almost chalk that up to population growth’, as one grinning Venture Capital man in a Kentucky Derby straw hat put it. (His female fund partner looked nervous and did not laugh.) They paid back the bank loan, then were offered another three times the size and now called a ‘credit facility’. Harry got his own place, where he watched Viking movies in a kimono and missed the continual compromise of a roommate. The Black Wax client list grew to more than twenty and its staff to six, scaffolded by a competitive internship program.

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Their biggest shock came four years in, when they lost Stussy Roberson.

‘LA took him,’ Artesia would say and this expression caught on around the Black Wax office. It was a kind way of telling it. A West Hollywood condo, Lamborghini keys, and a piano signed by Beck was what it took for Stussy to break contract and sign with Universal (who sent an attorney to their office to take a seat, very carefully position his attaché case on his knees, and ask in a silky tone if there was a problem here). More folks might have been straight-up happy for Stussy if it hadn’t been for one particular clause in the Universal contract. It mandated him to wear a balaclava for every performance and public appearance. ‘Urban energy personified,’ his publicist raved, ‘Anonymous and yet entirely himself.’ A black face in criminal get-up was an easier sell, it seemed, than a disfigured black one in the open.

They didn’t expect it to, but Black Wax Records withstood the loss of Stussy. Of the clients that Stussy had passively led in, only one of them left with him – and it wasn’t Ion the pianist. Ion was particularly appalled by the balaclava clause, and composed a jagged response piece called Invisage that got picked up for a TV show teaser.

Throughout it all, Harry and Artesia were partners. Business partners, with equal share ownership. Artesia requested this in year three, and Harry revealed he’d already drafted an agreement.

Artesia always had some sugar daddy. Different name, same dramatically unimaginative gifts (‘Armani,’ she’d announce flatly, the way others might say the day of the week.) Harry, meanwhile, was so caught up in the business that he dated the same way he ate – simply so as not to go hungry, the food itself barely mattered.

Then, one afternoon, while Harry was waiting for the L train, he noticed a man pacing by the safety line. Rumpled suit and clearly under-slept, but that was just another way of saying Chicago. What got Harry’s attention was the man’s palpitating intensity, and the way he seemed to breathe less and less as the ETA of the train ticked down. Their eyes met, and Harry understood, the way you only could face to face, that the man intended to jump in front of the train.

Harry wanted to say something. Some simple words to revive this man’s attachment to life. Music, Harry might say. Listen to some music and then decide. At the same time, he was terrified the intervention of a stranger would backfire and seal the man’s resolve to jump. Before Harry could make up his mind, a group of school kids arrived, and the pacing man came to a standstill. As the kids yelled and laughed and kicked a Halloween pumpkin around the platform, the man stood paralysed, his eyes filming with tears. Again, Harry silently understood. He couldn’t do it with children watching.

After the man had reeled away and taken the stairs up to the street, Harry thought about despair. He tried to remember the last time he’d felt despair – truly felt it. Rather than just feeling weary with the moment and mistaking that for weariness with life. Harry realised it hadn’t been for seven years. Not since he’d met Artesia.

When his train arrived, Harry travelled four stops more than he’d originally intended, to the construction site that had once been his home street. The developer had run out of money, and so here stood the bare bones of urban regeneration, on indefinite

hiatus. Harry walked the razor wire perimeter, missing his mother. She’d always silently nudged him forward at baseball try-outs or barbecue plate lines or the doorbells of sick paper boys whose routes he coveted.

‘The worst rejection of all,’ his mother would say, ‘is not trying. Cause you do that to yourself.’

Coming to where his childhood home once was, Harry stood very still, hanging memories on the scaffolding there now. Knowing the biggest risk of all was still ahead of him.

That night, Harry wrote down his feelings. For two weeks, he worked on what he wrote. Then, on a lunchtime walk, not entirely recognising his own voice, he’d read it to Artesia. A homecoming parade at the high school across the street now and then added whistles and parps from the marching band.

There was silence, then Artesia said, ‘You’re saying you love me.’

‘That you have defined love for me, yes.’

They were waiting on a walk sign. Both turned to look at it, their lungs clenched.

When the sign said Go, neither moved.

Artesia said, ‘It used to hurt so much that you wouldn’t just hurry up and say it. But now I’m glad you took your time. Cause it’s perfect.’

It felt like the world itself grinned then, but probably it was only the two of them. A year and a half later, arranging for the wedding ring to be placed on the wheel of their airport rental car had taken all of Harry’s ingenuity. As Artesia smiled at the small velvet box in her hand, too full of the moment to open it, Harry got down on one knee.

‘Sex and sugar,’ Harry said, summarising what he would give Artesia for the rest of her life.

Artesia looked at him. His knee in the ice.

She said, ‘You know ... I don’t clean, cook or shut up.’

Harry thought about that. Grinned. ‘You always did know how to sell something.’

The next minute, Harry would raise his hand in a signal, and Artesia would learn that he had rented not only this car but the entire parking lot. Hunkered down in its parked vehicles were Artesia’s family, Harry’s aunt and uncle, Ion, and four or five other Black Wax musicians, ready to bust out and celebrate their engagement. (‘Is there a plan for “No”, bro?’ Ion had gently asked. Harry was forced to admit there was no plan for ‘No’, never had been, in fact, in most everything he’d done since Artesia came along. She made ‘No’ feel like a distant problem, nothing to do with him, a streetlamp flickering out on the other side of the city.) The ‘Yes’ plan was Fleetwood Mac covers that Day-Day had reworked as gospel songs.

A child of theirs in the future might ask how exactly they’d known they’d be good together. Harry already knew the answer. If she’s got you in a garden chair in your own office, leaves you with an infinitely tellable tax joke, and puts despair far out of sight, that’s probably your wife. Secretary ... well, he still wasn’t sure. g

Winter Bel is a writer of literary fiction and poetry. Born in England, she now splits time between Paris and Los Angeles. She is presently polishing for publication her début novel, After The Angels, as well as her short story collection Hard Place Rock, from which ‘Black Wax’ is taken.

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The Mannequin

by Rowan Heath

The servo had been upgraded since Paul last stopped in town – new apple-green paint job, new exterior lights –but inside, things were mostly the same. Paul recognised the stubby woman at the register, and she rewarded his memory with a crooked smile.

‘Welcome back, Paul.’

Once she’d taken his order, she said, ‘If you get a chance, check the south corner of the carpark, right up to the fence. It’s become a dumping ground. No idea who started it, but it’s catching. We finally hung up your wheel, too.’ Paul followed her finger past the tables and above the new windows where, next to the clock and a poster encouraging cleanliness and prohibiting violence, a large, aged wagon wheel hung neatly on the wall. ‘If you find more like it,’ she continued, ‘I wanna put up another on the opposite side.’

‘I’ll keep an eye out,’ Paul said, and took his coffee and sandwich to a table where he could look up at the wheel between bites.

When he left the servo, the eastern sky was a deep, dull purple. Over the years, he’d become familiar with mornings like these – copses of trees swollen with dark, the lonely, the unlit streets of country towns rolled open. They weren’t as frightening as they used to be.

Paul meandered towards the south corner of the carpark towards a junkheap as tall as his shoulders. Hands in his pockets, he looked at the heap, cataloguing the few things that caught his eye. Most of it was rubbish: broken kitchen appliances; pockmarked couches; chairs with their legs amputated. There was a Singer missing its handwheel and lever clamp – simple to fix, but not worth his time. He fished out a strip of thin, brown leather –a belt without a buckle – rolled it up and tucked it into his pocket. He sifted through a jewellery box and found a screwdriver that hadn’t seen use, a glossy blue stone, and a handful of nails. He put everything but the screwdriver back in the jewellery box and returned it to the heap.

Paul had visited enough junkheaps to suspect that he found the most interesting things just before he left. He was right again: as he turned to leave, a large, white shape flashed at the back of the heap as if to say, ‘Here I am, don’t leave me.’ Paul climbed through the heap, minding the glass that shimmered at his feet. Reaching for the bright object, his palm met a globe of smooth, dusty plastic. After a minor struggle, Paul had retrieved a featureless, five-foot tall, snow-white human mannequin.

A familiar kick-drum started up in his chest. But why this? The last find he’d been this excited about was a functional, onyxblack Singer from the 1890s, golden sphinxes painted on its sides. He’d given it to his missus. Before that, it was the Moonfighter 2000 buried in a pensioner’s shed, the controls choked with dust but nonetheless working. He’d sold that to an arcade in Sydney and made thousands.

And now this, a plain mannequin whose weight and size spoke cheap, mass-produced, and disposable. It appeared in the antiques cabinet of his mind like a child’s prank. Dust clung to his palms when he touched it. It cultivated mysterious, fuzzy blotches of black or brown or dark green. He ferried it into better light, sure he would find patches of yellow – smoke, age, who knew what else.

The eyes were two impressions like thumbprints, the nose suggested by a simple peak, as though the plastic had been pinched and drawn out. Those, at least, seemed artistic – had he ever seen a mannequin with those features before? Had he ever bothered to look? Did it have nails, wrinkles, toes? And the limbs – would they move?

As he searched for a reason to keep it, circling back to its flat mask of a face, another truck pulled into the servo. Paul froze as the driver disembarked. Once they were inside the servo, Paul hurried the mannequin to his truck.

Placing himself between the servo and the mannequin, Paul

propped it against the driver’s side door, but found that it stood just fine on its own. In the unforgiving wash of the LEDs, Paul found that fine, granular indentations much like sandpaper coursed across its body, swirling around the curves, hands, and feet.

It had to be handmade. He searched for a name or signature. Between the fingers, cupped like a ballerina’s, behind the hills of suggested ears, along the scored ridges of its spine. He wound a torch around the joints, squinting into them, but couldn’t see how the mannequin could possibly be taken apart. The arms could arc across the front of the torso from the ground up to the sky, but no further. The legs, though locked at the knees, had almost the same range of movement as Paul. The head could rotate a full 360 degrees.

‘Convince me I have space for you.’

The mannequin didn’t respond, but picked up another layer of light that both endeared and disgusted him. Before he could fully consider what it meant to care for something he wasn’t sure he wanted, he had reached into his truck for a rag. He held the mannequin’s shoulder steady and got to work scrubbing off the grime. He removed the most offensive patches, the hardest parts to clean being the joints themselves, and worked up a semblance of a craftsman’s pleasure, forgetting the time and staying off the road longer than he’d planned.

Ayoung man had once said to Paul that the best boons granted to truckers in the last fifty years were portable microwaves, AC/DC and hands-free calls. Paul had other

suggestions, but didn’t voice them. He avoided microwaves, preferred Cold Chisel over AC/DC, and found no reason why short calls couldn’t be made when the engine was off and his legs moving around. The younger man said he spent hours on the phone with his girlfriend while she went about her life without him. While on calls, she commuted home from work, went to the gym, showered and made dinner. She would describe to him the minute things she was doing and seeing: the rain splattering the train window, the particular way she shaved her legs, how much garlic she put in the risotto. Video calls were a godsend because they could just talk while seeing exactly what the other was doing.

As Paul headed west, he thought about how he rarely wanted to speak to anyone that badly and for that long. He had a simple mobile phone in the glovebox that he used only in emergencies. What would he say? Here is the crossing where I last picked up a hitchhiker – here is my usual night stop when heading north on this highway – here is where I saw the biggest kangaroo in my life and nonetheless hit it.

He didn’t feel the need to prove he had thoughts to a jury of peers. He was stationary and silent in his working life – and, if he was blunt, his personal life, too – but quiet felt right. Healthy. There was no way, and no reason, to translate the rich experience of his time alone into speech.

This had been the problem with Tania. She said he brought the quiet home with him, that he gave her nothing. Her therapist told her water eventually wears down stone – Tania concluded that Paul must be a slab of metal.

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She was wrong. Paul was fluid. When his ex-wife crossed his mind, particularly over the last two years, she flowed through him like a boat on a stream. He didn’t dwell. He understood her transience in his mind as a sign of cognitive health.

Paul decelerated as a station wagon overtook him. It veered too far right, kicking up orange dust where the road sloped into dirt. When it had passed, Paul found Tania sitting in the passenger seat. Her mouth was a firm line. He opened his palm to show her what it meant to dip into his thoughts and out again. I am fluid. He spoke aloud: ‘See?’

Tania wasn’t listening because she wasn’t there, but at a bump in the road, something shifted behind Paul. The mannequin rolled sideways to slot more snugly between the driver’s seat and his bed. Its face was pressed against the back of his chair.

Paul turned back to the road. On his next long break, he planned to see an old friend. He’d have to fudge his logbook, but this trip would take two weeks, so there was plenty of time to work with. He did the maths in his head as he drove.

Paul met Rolf outside the local pub. Three years left their mark in wrinkles, grey hair, and a missing digit on Rolf’s pinkie finger. Rolf spoke of good harvests and bad ones, broken equipment, grandkids who lived far away.

The pub had been renovated. He thought, Everywhere I go, they’ve torn away the paint and knocked down half the walls. He could barely recognise the place. The past lingered only in the old bar itself, wood spit-shiny with new gloss, a few hundred stubby holders nailed to the wall above it, and some of the bar tables that must have had a particular charm that saved them from a skip. Even the name had changed, though Rolf and Paul used the old one out of habit, stubbornness, and affection.

Paul eventually insinuated that he’d been left by his wife. Rolf nodded slowly.

‘God help the rest of us.’ After a pause, he added: ‘How are the kids holding up? Your youngest would be out of school now.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s he doing? Still studying?’

The last Paul had heard, he’d dropped out of science for a photography course. ‘Chemistry,’ he said. ‘And physics.’

‘Good on him.’

Paul drank. ‘He dropped out.’

‘Why’d he do that?’

Paul leant back in his chair, pushing his palms onto the bar. ‘Wanted to try something different.’

Rolf made a sound with his tongue and his front upper teeth. Can’t stop them. On the television in the far left corner, a pack of greyhounds surged across a track, becoming a leggy grey smear. A young man a few stools down began to complain loudly about his food. Rolf said, ‘And how’s your daughter?’

Paul hadn’t thought about his eldest for some time. Nothing to think about. He wasn’t prepared for what he said next. ‘Gone.’

As Rolf tensed, Paul wished he’d thought about his eldest more often. Maybe then he’d understand why he said that, and why it stunned him as much as it shocked Rolf.

‘Shit, Paul. I’m sorry.’

Paul shook his head. The word had tumbled out of him strange and unexpected, a clump of bloody hair or a translucent

egg. His flesh stuttered, a stone fruit twisting against its pip.

Paul called for a glass of water. Rolf squared his bony shoulders and grew an inch taller on his stool. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Paul.’ His shoulders said, You can talk to me, and his hands flat on his jeans said, I want to know what happened. But he only said, ‘I’m sorry, Paul,’ and watched Paul drain the glass.

Rolf kept drinking. Eventually, he turned to Paul and admitted that he’d seen thin shadows in the bush on the outskirts of his farm. The shadows crept closer to his home while he slept, retreating as the sun rose. He figured they’d always been there, though he hadn’t noticed them before.

‘Keep coming back. Figure they’re cold out there, maybe.’ Rolf was grave, slurred, hushed. ‘They come looking for warmth. But I’ve been sleeping with the fire out even in winter to stop them coming close.’

‘Does it work?’ said Paul.

‘I think it used to. They come closer now anyway. I shone a torch at them and it did nothing. Seemed to attract a few of them. I keep the lights out. Show them it’s cold as a snowman’s balls in the house, so they can piss off.’

Paul was quiet. Rolf continued: ‘You’ll see them. Tonight. You’ll see them looking out of the trees.’

‘All right.’

Paul drove Rolf home in his ute. He left Rolf on the outskirts of his farm, a five-minute walk from his bed. As Rolf struggled with the gate, Paul looked over the still fields and surrounding trees in the gibbous light and saw no unnatural shadows. The house was a blot, distant and out-of-focus. He imagined Rolf descending the stairs in the night and closing the distance to the far fence, the torch in his hand cutting crazed spirals in the grass.

Paul couldn’t tell if Rolf was afraid or just drunk, only that his eyes shone with wetness and his breathing was heavy. They found each other’s palms in the dark.

‘You come visit. Welcome any time.’

Paul said he would. He closed the gate after Rolf and drove the ute back to the pub where he left the keys with the barkeeper. Then he walked back across town to his truck. He opened the door and startled – the fingers of the mannequin’s white hand protruded from behind the driver’s seat, reaching for the dash.

He took out the mannequin and examined it in the weak light of the carpark. He stared into its passive, blank face. He wouldn’t be scared of things he could see straight-on. He challenged it to frighten him again while his pulse settled.

He noticed a strange black spot on its collarbone and rubbed it off with his thumb, then found another spot nearby. He picked through his meagre wardrobe and took out the one shirt he never wore – collared, bright red, punctured with cartoon bananas – and wrestled it onto the mannequin’s unyielding torso.

‘Better?’

The mannequin didn’t respond. The shirt was too big. Paul did up all the buttons to stop it from slipping off.

As he moved the mannequin to the passenger seat and settled into bed, Paul thought about Rolf and how he didn’t see the connection between his haunts and his solitude. Rolf wasn’t a liar. What he’d seen was impossible, but Rolf knew what he knew. Paul guessed it had something to do with his grandkids who lived far

away, or his late missus. The shadows he saw, however tangible they were, were a sign of cognitive turmoil. Paul himself didn’t want to be that isolated at Rolf’s age.

Paul got out of bed to turn the mannequin’s face towards the window in case there was anything it wanted to see. The truck stop was a particularly simple one: dust, gum trees, a forlorn picnic table. Paul scanned the trees, testing his superstition. He saw no unnatural shadows slipping towards him. The dark didn’t make him afraid. Though in the dim light, the mannequin’s glowing features and the angle at which it was propped up made it seem as though something had stunned it into silence.

Within half an hour of setting off the next morning, Paul realised he was wrestling with a cognitive loop. I’m sorry, Paul. I’m sorry, Paul. He checked his left-side mirror and found Tania in the passenger seat, uninvited, looking stern and hurt. He turned on the radio and lumps like golf balls caromed in his chest. He saw the house he built with Tania, their first holiday as a family, the kids’ first steps. He couldn’t grasp the music – he turned the radio off. I’m sorry, Paul. Rolf’s words held him down and shouted horrible, incomprehensible things at him.

Gone. Why had he said that? The kid deserved more. I’m sorry, Paul. And what would he say the next time he saw Rolf? Would he remember the lie in another three years’ time? Would anything change?

‘Would’ve been nice to take the kids out here,’ Paul said to the mannequin, which was tucked behind his seat. His voice was louder than he intended, but steadying. ‘But it was too far. Not worth spending weeks in a car for.’ He could have made another excuse to bring them, might have convinced Tania to visit a cousin out of state or sightsee up north. The kids could have seen the flat plains of scrub, the national parks in bloom, the old, endless night sky so estranged from the skies in the city. Uluru rising from the ground like knuckles for the sun to kiss.

If they weren’t spellbound by that, the ‘West’s Best Ice Cream’ (three years in a row) was only a minor detour from where he was now. The kids could’ve trailed him through the local railway museum and then spent the afternoon eating ice cream in the park.

Not gonna happen. What did he do when Tania refused? ‘What’s wrong?’ she’d ask, and he’d reply, ‘Nothing’. ‘What are you sighing like that for?’ ‘I’m not allowed to breathe now?’ And on and on, until they were both too frustrated to talk further.

Paul addressed the mannequin: ‘If the kids come up here, they’ll probably have kids of their own.’ Though the chances were slim. His youngest wasn’t the fatherly type, and his eldest likely wouldn’t have kids at all. He didn’t know if they still could

Gone. He should’ve said, ‘We don’t talk.’ But it was more complicated than that.

Without meaning to, he pictured his eldest when she was very young. She wore a yellow, smock-ish dress she hated. Her brows wobbled upwards and her lips scrunched into a pucker, a look that used to mean, ‘Seriously?’ Paul had never met a young person with so much attitude. He’d say to her, Where’d you get that face? And she’d give nothing away, not what it meant or what she wanted. She tucked the expression away like some forbidden trinket she brought out only to remind him that she had it and

that he couldn’t take it if he tried.

She seemed to settle into the passenger seat.

‘None of that’. Paul pulled the mannequin into the seat, and his kid was no longer there. ‘Now you be quiet.’ The mannequin made no signs of talking.

As Paul drove west, the sun lit up the rear-view mirror like a bar of gold. Today would be warm. He felt heat already pooling on the top of his head. If he pushed his next long break out a half day, he could stop for ice cream. He looked to the mannequin, whose skull was a golden crown.

You’re a good influence,’ he said. Maybe it’s the practice of talking out loud. He leaned over to straighten its collar. ‘Quietest passenger I’ve ever had.’

The part of Paul that was used to the expressions and speech that came from humanoids sat in expectation of the mannequin’s reply. For a moment, he didn’t think about Rolf or Tania or anyone else.

Do you like ice cream? Paul could have said it aloud, but that was too much, even for him. Instead he said, ‘Need to get you a name.’

In its stillness, the mannequin seemed to agree, as though it had already been thinking about how nice that would be.

Choosing a name posed a problem. Paul searched for sources of inspiration the way he would if the mannequin was a car – Dusty, Speedy, Zippy – but the mannequin provided none. He fixated for hours, and it was only when he considered Manny that he recognised the problem: the ambiguous torso, the slight curves of the hips, the long, slender fingers cupped as if to hold water … He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, and it shivered off every name he chose.

‘Problem child,’ he murmured.

Generating names had been a good cognitive exercise, but as he pulled, yawning, into another dim truck stop, he worried for the state of his mind. He wasn’t the type to obsess. As he cut the engine and checked over his truck, he tried to tuck the issue away for the evening but kept circling back to it. He checked in on the mannequin between tasks, as though it might run away. Each time, he straightened its collar and found another foul speck on its body to scrub off. He left it in the passenger seat glowing like a bright mould, the humanness of its shape blurring with distance and dark.

The stop sprang from a semi-circle of packed dirt where a portion of the surrounding bush had been spooned away. Towards the centre, a simple firepit had been made semi-permanent through the addition of stones and shin-high logs. The first time Paul visited, the fire had played host to six long-haulers, a family with four young kids heading north for a funeral, and two backpackers who had spent three days trudging down the wrong highway. The fire grew to accommodate them. Someone passed around packets of pretzels, the backpackers practised English with everyone, and Paul fished out his newest find, an intricate, handmade checkers board carved from native cherry and white beech, and taught the older kids how to play.

That was a different season. Tonight, the fire was only big enough to sweep furtive, hopeful arms along the edges of the pit, and two people hunched around it with long sticks by their feet,

ready to whip the fire back if it tried to escape. Paul approached slowly and nodded to the figures before popping open his camper chair and taking an empty third of the fire for himself.

Both figures wore beanies and thick jackets. From their positions on the log they shared, Paul got the sense that he had interrupted a fight of some kind or that they didn’t know each other at all, but had sat close together earlier and felt it would be rude to move away now. One figure nodded in Paul’s direction, and after a moment started to talk. His name was Dom and he was taking his child, Kyra, east into the city for medical.

‘Long way,’ said Paul sympathetically.

‘It’s the only place that does what she needs. The first appointment has to be in-person, so we’re going in-person. Then appointments are over the phone or on the computer. I guess they’ll send scripts in the post.’

‘They’ll email the scripts,’ said Kyra. Her voice was taught and light, a balloon filled with too much air.

‘Then we’ll email them back to Melbourne to have them filled and posted home.

‘I can order them in.’

‘Guess I’m just a taxi, then.’ The liquid quality to Kyra’s voice reappeared when she laughed, dipping from low to high, from shallow to rich and back. Paul guessed she was a good singer.

‘Where are you going, Paul?’ said Dom. Paul mentioned his employer and summarised his trip. Dom knew many of the places he’d passed through. He’d grown up everywhere, in over a dozen houses, never closer than four hours from the city. He knew the stops Paul would make over the next few days. Knew his destination depot, funnily enough, and a very nice pub thirty minutes out from the depot that Paul would have to try. ‘I was a truant,’ he explained. ‘I spent a lot of time walking around.’

Kyra slouched on the log as Dom spoke. Paul offered her his chair and with a little prompting she took it, rolled her knees towards her chin and tipped her head towards the fire. She looked no older than twenty. She and Dom shared a nose and the same dark, curly hair.

Dom walked stiffly to the edge of the trees to do his business. Paul tried to check the time, but it was too dark to see the face of his watch. Kyra retrieved a phone from her jacket. ‘It’s half past ten.’

‘Thank you. Almost time to call it a night.’

Kyra nodded and put the phone away. It was dim, but just light enough for Paul to recognise the coloured stripes on her phone case: blue, pink, white, pink, blue. He recognised the pattern, too. He’d seen it around the house for years, oblivious to its meaning. His eldest had used it territorially, on little things like pencil cases and lapel pins. If these things landed anywhere near Paul, they were snatched away before he could touch them.

Paul wanted to say something. Or he wanted to ask something. Or he wanted – he didn’t know what he wanted, just that there was a point between him and Kyra, somewhere atop the fire, that he was reaching for. And that he was thinking of his eldest, who he hadn’t spoken to in years, who used a different name now and who, last he’d heard, was starting to look a lot like Paul when he was a young man.

‘My kid’s going the other way,’ he blurted out. Kyra blinked twice. Four, five seconds passed.

‘Okay.’ She glanced back at Dom, who was heading over. Then she looked at Paul very attentively, her face blank, her eyes sharp. She was waiting to see what he would do next. Paul himself barely knew.

‘We’re out of touch.’

Kyra’s shoulders and head seemed locked into place. ‘Do you want to be?’

He wasn’t sure. ‘No.’

‘Then you should talk to your kid, not me.’

Paul finally recognised her expression. It meant, ‘No more of this bullshit. Figure it out yourself.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right.’

Dom returned to the circle but didn’t sit down. ‘We might call it. Need to start early tomorrow. Bedtime, kiddo.’

Kyra stood up. ‘Thanks for the chair.’

Paul nodded. They smothered the fire and said their goodnights.

Paul climbed into the driver’s seat. He watched the scrub shiver across the clearing. A truck roared down the highway, breaking the quiet of the cabin with a wild, mechanical scream. He fished through the glove box for his phone. The white light of the screen dazzled him. He held it away from his face.

Growing up, his eldest had his eye colour, his eyebrows, his forehead. The same composition of features that made their juvenile pucker distinct. Were those gone now? Had those features changed too much?

If he called, what face would those features make?

Paul squinted into the screen. The mannequin leant towards him in the passenger seat, poised to receive his thoughts. Paul smoothed the front of its shirt, flicked a speck of dirt off the side of its nose. It was owed an explanation.

‘Up and left one day,’ he said quietly, so that only the two hollow creatures in the cabin could hear. ‘Didn’t say goodbye. Didn’t say anything.’ Hadn’t he given his family everything? Hadn’t he tried? ‘Still talks to everyone but me.’

He couldn’t help people from leaving. They moved through him like water. He could only try to make sense of it later.

Paul crawled onto the road at daybreak. The earth grew sparse and patchy. The road thinned. He cracked a window and the cabin inhaled the warm air.

This was a familiar route. He pointed out notable sights to the mannequin – rock formations like fallen clouds, downed water silos, the white lightning of faraway rivers – but his desire to talk soon faded. The mannequin faced the window. It didn’t care what he had to say this morning. Paul drove in his usual silence. Where he could, he focused on the trees, the passing cars, the horizon, the long, long road. His phone warmed on the dashboard, losing power by the kilometre. g

Rowan Heath is a writer, editor and LARPer living in Melbourne. Their creative work has appeared in In Flux: Trans and Gender Diverse Reflections and Imaginings, Monstrous Appetites, Perspektif, Verge, and Antithesis. Their fiction will be published in Strangely Enough, an ASSF anthology, in late 2023. They have edited for publications such as Farrago, Inkspot, and CAMP. They currently work in the higher education sector.

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Our Own Fantastic

by Uzma Aslam Khan

My father died twenty-eight years ago this December. Each anniversary, I watch a movie that we enjoyed together, or would have. This year, a week before the day, I learn that the hotel his company owned has permanently closed. I’m given this news through an article titled ‘New York City’s historic hotels are owned – and destroyed – by Asians.’

I leave my apartment, hail a cab.

The driver, who’s South Asian, asks which hotel entrance, Vanderbilt Avenue or 46th Street. I cannot remember, so I tell him, ‘The one with the swivelling doors.’

He navigates a memory map of his own. We pull up on Vanderbilt. The building is boarded up. ‘Must be the other side.’ The same on 46th. The shuttering looks final, casketed. The effort to see where the door was, or whether it revolved, strains my eyes.

As the engine putters, the driver leans forward. ‘Wasn’t it here?’

‘It closed.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know.’ I tip him and we both say thank you.

After he leaves, I linger beneath the building’s only recognisable façade, the overhang with the gold trim. I’ve an urge to look up the word façade so I take out my phone. My father would have approved. What I am learning: Ade, a suffix denoting an action or a person or persons acting … blockade; escapade; masquerade.

I walk to Vanderbilt and now a man is standing beside what might have been the entrance, under a no-smoking sign, smoking. I tell him I like where he’s standing. He laughs. I ask if he’s the guard. He laughs again. ‘Would I be dressed like this?’ I consider the grey three-piece suit, checkered grey-green shirt, olive tie, tan dress shoes. My father would have approved. He says he’s a tailor at a nearby shop. On his way to and from work he gets to walk through the hotel lobby and now he’s done for the day.

‘Is the chandelier still there?’

‘It’s all there. Exactly the same. Beautiful.’

‘How can I get inside?’

‘You can’t.’

Istayed there with my father in 1987, after my first semester at college. What I was learning: it was the first hotel in the city to offer a television set in every room. Our suite also had a VCR and tapes. On an art deco coffee table with brass inserts lay a large bowl of mixed nuts. For dinner we ordered room service: jumbo shrimp, white rice, boiled carrots. He gave me twenty dollars for lunches for the month. Twice, I walked around the block, but it was cold and it bothered me that I couldn’t tell the difference between real and plastic Christmas trees, even when I touched them. So I stuck with nuts.

The third week, my grades came in. Straight A’s. I watched 9½ Weeks on the chaise lounge. I wanted a hat. I wanted a white shirt with stiff collars. I took the twenty dollars and my own savings and walked to a salon. The stylist trussed up my hair and began scissoring out French layers. When I told her my father’s company had recently bought the hotel, she was impressed.

‘What company?’

‘An airline.’

‘Where are you all from?’

‘Pakistan.’

She was taking off too much but she was friendly. The hotel was in Wall Street, she said, a movie playing down the street, and had a secret passage leading to Grand Central Terminal. Then she was done. ‘What do you think?’

My face was small inside the big blow-dry and I’d have no savings left but I said thank you.

I re-entered the hotel through the swivelling gold doors and sat in a seat in the shadows in the lobby. People came and went. There was a distinct sound of heels sliding from floor to carpet. I timed their movements to the ring of the elevator bell. I looked up at the two-storey ceiling. The chandelier had too many tiers to count and its placement gave the impression of a continuous pattern of tiering: beneath it lay a plant (real) on a white marble tabletop on a white marble floor with a black seven-point star inside a black circle around which a scattering of small black squares drew the eye toward two immense burgundy carpets, each running up a flight of seven steps, to a ballroom with another chandelier.

It was my second residence in America.

That evening, we watched Fantastic Voyage. We were glad it had Raquel Welch. My father was in high spirits for other reasons, too. What I was learning: the airline had become the first in Asia to run the Boeing 737-300. It had just acquired its first Airbus A300B4-200. The numbers were better known to me than a home address. Next month, he’d head for Malé, capital of the Maldives, to launch a new service. He experienced a rush of emotion before travelling to a new place.

I’d left the old English dictionary he’d given me at college. When I sat beside him with a pocket red Webster, he said, ‘first class’. The bowl of nuts had been replenished. From the back of the video tape box, we learned that the film was made two years after the airline became the only non-Soviet one to fly between Europe and Moscow, and the same year it began offering routes to Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Jeddah, and Baghdad. My father had been present for each inauguration. He didn’t have to speak of these concurrences. I knew how to link our worlds.

In the film, people and machines could be miniaturised. They could travel the human body to save an American scientist who lay comatose with a blood clot in his brain because he’d been shot for uncovering a Cold War secret. That shrunken submarine named Proteus with a miniaturised crew inside – it looked to me like a cockpit. I was the pilot, pioneering new routes!

After a time, my father chin-nudged the dictionary. ‘Look up Proteus.’

‘He was a Greek god.’

‘Look it up.’

I did. ‘He was a sea god who could change shape, personality, and even principles.’

‘Acha!’ His eyes lit up. ‘Yes, one must be adaptable. But never compromise integrity.’

Next, he asked, ‘What is the reason they have to get to his brain through the heart? They would have better luck taking another route.’

‘A fistula.’ My nose was already in the book’s pages. ‘A passage between an artery and a vein. They have to take that detour.’

‘But it makes no sense. Look! All the turbulence is in the heart.’ I looked.

‘Proteus should take them a different way.’ He chuckled, enjoying fistfuls of cashews. ‘They have sixty minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much time has passed?’

‘I don’t know.’

Then I remembered. ‘There’s a secret passage between the hotel and Grand Central.’

‘Acha?’

On screen, a nurse knocked a surgical tool onto the floor. The crash sent Raquel Welch, who was in the comatose man’s inner ear, cartwheeling to his cilia, where antibodies identified her as a virus. She was coated in Y-shaped avenging angels before being rescued by the men.

We uttered a simultaneous ‘Uff!’ followed by a simultaneous laugh.

‘How much time do they have left?’ His voice rose in excitement.

‘I don’t know!’

‘You should know.’

The villain on the team tried unsuccessfully to sabotage the mission. The rest escaped through a tear duct. I rewound the tape to my favourite part: the crew floating inside a body of spectacular luminescence. Despite having little time left – no, because of it –the miniaturised humans gawked, while around them swam jelly fish blood cells of abundant colour, pulsing and shape-shifting in soundless music. I loved that this sequence was slowed.

‘The mind can go anywhere,’ said my father. ‘We each have our own fantastic.’

Achildhood friend visited him later that evening. They drank whiskey and shared stories I’d never heard before. My father moved effortlessly between languages yet in his mother tongue, Punjabi, all his muscles worked without reluctance or strain, as though he danced the tongue.

What I was learning: they grew up near the railway line. My father would chase the trains and run down the tunnel beneath the tracks to escape his parents. ‘They were always dinning in my ears that saying, “If you have to fool around, do so away from your neighbourhood.”’ His friend laughed. ‘Past the tracks were the shops that sold milk and mutton. We could afford just a small quantity.’

‘But you watched closely,’ said his friend. ‘You were always a great observer.’

My father grinned the grin that helped him knock down barriers. With my mother, he did it with flowers. His face was marmoreal. No blemishes, not one. People said I looked like him, though I had scar-prone skin.

More friends arrived. They discussed the airline’s profits, the war in Afghanistan, the General at home. What I was learning: there was no timetable for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. It meant no peace in Pakistan either. But this I already knew. The battle had long ago crossed the border and when it shut down Karachi’s streets, my parents had grown afraid. The war was the reason they’d allowed me to leave them for this country.

‘How it freezes people on all sides, this Iron Curtain,’ my father was saying. ‘One day the whole world will look the way it does because of today.’

A group nod wrapped them all in sadness. Then the conversation shifted to their children, whose successes were listed not unlike those of the national carrier. So-and-so’s child was at Harvard, so-and-so’s had stood first. I was at a no-name college but on a scholarship, making me ‘the first woman in the family’ to receive one.

What I was learning: be a silent bullet point or grab a book and say, ‘Excuse me.’

I hadn’t drawn the curtains so my bedroom was awash with streetlights when I stepped inside. At the window, I saw women in short skirts. One wore a knee-length brown coat. She clasped the collars but kept the coat unbuttoned. It poorly resembled real fur and closely resembled my mother’s, who’d bought hers at a car boot sale when my father was posted in London. Our furniture, too, was used; she had a nose for sniffing out deals. When asked where she bought our clothes and furnishings, she wouldn’t say. The hair of the woman outside was set in a style from the previous decade, like my mother’s.

I lay on the bed, book unopened.

In January, I’d return to weeknights in the college kitchen. The joke was that Third World students were baptised in First World waters through scrubbing one hundred per cent durable extra-large stainless-steel pots. I served inedible meats and greens alongside those who knew me as ‘the one from the Stan-country fighting communism’, assumed I was a doctor’s daughter, and quizzed me on why, like them, I tolerated a boss who rated us according to a knowledge of salad dressing. (When asked where I dipped my carrots, I whispered, ‘Daal’.) I kept my (pre-haircut) savings in the sandalwood box where my mother had kept hers. It had come with a note, ‘I love you. Make us proud.’

The gaps in how we appeared and lived weren’t unknown to me. They made us a family. But only I knew of the hunts around soda machines for coins and the French teacher who laughed about ‘Pakis’ sneaking across every border as though not with suitcases but in them while writing me a cheque for one-third the minimum wage for babysitting her children as I was too embarrassed to say that I had no bank account. This, they wouldn’t want to know. Not in any language.

So where was in and who was with?

My fingers traced the dictionary’s pages. What I was learning: The Iron Curtain once referred to the shutters in theatre houses that kept fires from spreading.

I wanted to tell someone about the cute alum with long hair who ran the Adventure Program and knew about canoes. He frequented my dorm in the Fall. I always sent him away. After the last time I watched him leave, I drew on my wall with a piece of chalk. It was a habit developed years before, in Karachi, when I’d been grounded for struggling at school and had to repeat a year. On Day One of the grounding, my father had handed me a used old English dictionary that smelled of car tyres and said, ‘Look it up.’ Other instructions: for three blistering summer months, leave only for bathroom breaks and meals, and never bring shame again. The room in Karachi had a dark blue wall. When I drew cockpits, always cockpits, the chalk was bright. The room at college had white walls. The chalk was a ghostly impression, easily erased.

I watched women in short skirts under streetlights and saw the girl in Karachi, the woman in America, the daughter in the hotel. What we were learning:

• To struggle was to fool around. This was only permissible away from the neighbourhood.

• The mind can go anywhere. A cockpit was a big cell streaming through the cosmos and I was the pilot, unhemmed and grand, gaping at all the little people outside.

The day before I left for college and my father for Malé, he said to meet him by the hotel entrance at noon. When I arrived, he was grinning. Beside him was a white concierge introduced as Mr Fielding and a brown bellhop who was George.

‘Let’s find this secret passage,’ said my father.

So he remembered. I laughed. We followed the two men.

My father wore a grey suit, white shirt, and tie of maroon and white diagonal stripes. His black shoes glistened. He never travelled without a canister of Cherry Blossom boot polish, horsehair brush, and yellow cloth. It was a daily ritual; I’d seen him shine

the shoes this morning, as always, after his morning tea. The socks had been laid out ahead. While wearing them, his feet had lifted easefully. He and my mother both slipped into their socks with grace, while my feet unravelled threads. His arms had polished the shoes in similarly fluid strokes. He had long limbs and though his dreams were fierce, his movements were light, almost weightless.

We were heading down a flight of stairs that led to a marble hallway below the lobby. Yet, I could hear no elevator bells, nor the chatter of those above us. I heard only four sets of footsteps and three men’s voices and my own thrill at being secreted here. I was in with

According to George, the shops we passed had closed a while ago. He was easy to talk to, so I said that for an abandoned basement it was surprisingly airy. ‘Not for long,’ he replied. My father was nodding and saying little except, occasionally, ‘First class’. He sometimes opened spaces in public, sometimes closed them in private.

Mr Fielding had grown quiet. It occurred to me that my father was his boss. George, who now guided us to an area closed off with yellow tape, seemed to know it too. From a pocket of his beige trousers, he pulled out a torch. ‘Look there,’ he said, and at first the light shone on a line of gold buttons on his red vest. Laughing, he turned the torch around. We leaned forward to see an unfinished area with a door. When George crouched below the tape, Mr. Fielding said, ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ but my father and I followed George.

The door led down a flight of steps, each marked in yellow paint. We turned left, into the tunnel. It was ink black and the air was rank as an old book. ‘It’ll take you to the terminal,’ said George. ‘There’s a gate and you won’t be able to get in but I can get you up to that gate if you want.’

‘We should head back,’ said Mr Fielding.

Now my father hesitated. He suddenly switched from English to Urdu, my mother tongue, to ask what I wanted. Also in Urdu, I told him I wanted to go on.

In the light of the torch, I saw my father gesture toward the dark. Twice, he went ‘Oopsh!’ and laughed, embarrassed, when the ground was especially uneven. George swung the beam in wider circles. There were sounds of scurrying. My father had an extreme phobia of rodents, so I was impressed that he didn’t turn us back. His hand was on my shoulder and wasn’t heavy. ‘It’s like that movie,’ he whispered, in English again.

‘Which movie?’ George whispered back.

‘The one where they go into the man’s body.’

‘Which one’s that?’ asked George.

‘Fantastic Voyage,’ I said.

‘Righteous,’ said George.

I hit something soft with my foot. My father did too. He stopped. His hand bounced off of my shoulder. I reached for the hand – it was always cool, always clean – and walked faster. But after a few beats, he again muttered, ‘Oopsh!’ Again he stopped, now tap-tapping the ground with the toes of his shoes, willing that thing creeping up his leg to leave. ‘It really is very dark.’

‘How much longer?’ said Mr Fielding.

‘Almost there,’ answered George.

In the movie they were in a submarine and tomorrow my fa-

ther would be on a plane and the captain would invite him into the cockpit and I would be on a bus and now we were underground.

‘Remember this,’ he said to me.

‘I will. I’ll look it up.’

The tunnel filled with his laughter.

We reached the gate. There wasn’t much to see but we were there so we looked through it. Then we went up to the street. Mr Fielding left and the rest of us headed for Grand Central, to look through the other side. There were many routes, said George, and most were blockaded, not only with tape but walls. ‘This will be gone soon.’

It was after two pm when we returned to the hotel. As he shook George’s hand, my father slipped him a twenty-dollar bill. Then we walked to the dining area and ordered jumbo shrimp.

In Malé, my father developed a flu-like infection that continued after his return to Karachi. Eventually, he was diagnosed with leukopenia. His white blood cell count had dropped and the neutrophils, vital for fighting pathogens, diminished to below 600 per one litre of blood. It was a condition, not an illness, one he’d likely carried for a time. It caused lingering infections, weight loss, and severe intestinal disorders for the remaining years of his life. The only way we could discuss the neutrophil count was by tagging it to aircraft names, as suffixes: Boeing 777-600 or 500? After it sank to 747-400, I wasn’t able to play.

Doctors said to rest. They said he pushed himself too hard. It would defeat his immune system.

He had to fly.

I’m grateful that he didn’t see the airplanes being grounded when the health of the airline began to decline.

On the day of his death anniversary, I return to the boardedup hotel. The temperature’s in the forties; no longer too cold for me. There’s roadwork on Vanderbilt. I step around it. I find no tailor smoking beneath the no-smoking sign but notice another sign that must have been behind him: ‘Ring the doorbell ONLY for deliveries.’ There’s a plastic button beginning to crack. I still can’t decide if the swivelling door was here.

A ladder is dropped into a manhole and a man with a safety jacket that says ‘Hot Black & Sticky’ is going down it. I watch his descent. I turn my head to the building wrapped in sadness. That physical ache in my eyes from a week ago returns. I cross the street for a different view.

I miss him, the only person who’d understand why it’s so hard.

I’ve seen abandoned houses with plywood nailed to the siding unlovingly and the windows that shatter left behind. I’ve wondered what would be better: Demolish those houses? Never know they were there? On some structures, the boards are torn off, maybe by someone in need of fuel, maybe no reason at all. Then there are those that make any configuration of touch impossible: like the hotel. There is nothing to hold, not even broken glass. The boards are bolted on too tight to pry off. They are given a coating of paint that couldn’t be called any colour. It has no texture or shine. Even mourners dress in light.

When I look higher up: perfect visibility.

Earlier in the year, on a day as clear as this, I saw hot air balloons launched in Central Park. I counted twenty-one colourful

panels as they twirled and it was better than counting the tiers of a chandelier. To float now in a wicker basket on a slow and silent voyage close to sundown in a sky of spectacular luminescence is what I want. More than to watch the movie.

I take out my phone to check if rides are offered year-round but don’t look it up, not yet.

I walk three blocks, then decide it has to be my favourite store. I walk from Midtown to Lower Manhattan. The sun is bronzing the windows of apartment buildings. A bicycle speeds by. Two lovers almost shove me off the sidewalk in that way couples have, with one fist Near a scorched brick wall, someone is pausing without picking up the dog’s droppings.

In sweeping movements similar to my father’s, I welcome him to the neighbourhood: juice bar, bakery, vintage shops, and the new restaurant with the rooftop garden where I work and that I co-own. He stayed with one company, always loyal. I quit several jobs in retail and even a two-star hotel before accepting that I’m happiest around things I can touch. As an entremetier, my task is not only preparing vegetables, but growing them. I’m devoted to that garden. The co-owner is a woman from a corridor of the former Iron Curtain that is now a Green Belt.

What I am learning: border zones and the isolation they create can be an opening. Some will enter through knocking down the barriers. Others, knocking on. Or tap-tapping a toe underground in the dark. I’m unsure when or if I was ever in, ever with. But some days, up on that rooftop, my tongue can unwind. My foot can find its way through loops of tangled thread.

The store is at the corner, abutting the restaurant. I take my time. Even in winter, flowers are abundant. I find purple sweet peas, pink and white camellias, yellow and purple hellebores. There’s a tub of witch hazel from the seller’s own terrace – the ribbons of yellow petals carry a citrus-cinnamon scent straight up my nose – and another of winter jasmine.

It’s almost three o’clock when I start heading back. I know my small and silly act will likely draw abuse, if anyone even answers. This would have stopped me in the past.

I ring the bell of the shuttered hotel. For a while, nothing. Then I hear scurrying. ‘Who is it?’

‘Delivery.’

There is more scurrying and now the sound of keys. I look for a keyhole but don’t see it.

‘Step back. It pivots.’

I appreciate being told. As the door swings out, I look at the floor. White, glossy. The man standing there is brown, in a black shirt and trousers. When he sees the flowers, he looks at my other hand, then behind me and back again, confused.

‘Yes?’ Before I can answer, he adds, in an accent that I cannot place, ‘You can’t come inside.’

‘I’ve already been inside. These are for you.’ g

Uzma Aslam Khan is the author of five internationally acclaimed novels, the most recent of which is The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali, which won Karachi Literature Festival-Getz Pharma Fiction Prize and was included in New York Times’ Best Historical Fiction 2022. Born in Pakistan and now residing in the United States, Khan has also lived in the Philippines, Japan, England, Morocco, and Oceania.

An obscure prodigy

J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K at forty by

James Ley

‘Why should I be expected to rise above my times? Is it my doing that my times have been so shameful? Why should it be left to me, old and sick and full of pain, to lift myself out of this pit of disgrace?’

These are the words of Mrs Curren, the elderly narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s under-appreciated mid-period novel Age of Iron (1990), but it would be easy enough to find similarly anguished sentiments being expressed by the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), or Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), or David Lurie in Disgrace (1996), or the eponymous protagonist of Elizabeth Costello (2003). It has long been apparent that there is a recognisable Coetzeean type, who appears in various guises in his many novels. These characters tend to be educated products of their relatively privileged social positions. They are conscious of the pain and injustice in the world, conscious of their own suffering, and conscious of their impotence in the face of overmastering contexts. Their common instinct is to philosophise about these problems. Many ironies, gruelling and subtle, arise from their desire for redemption and their simultaneous awareness of its impossibility, not least of which is that their penchant for metaphysical high-mindedness has a distinct tendency – on display in Mrs Curren’s lament – to bend back on itself in a way that resembles self-absorption or even self-pity.

Coetzee’s recent Jesus trilogy (2013–19) makes overt a latent feature of this existential angst – namely, that it is culturally if not actually Christian. The moral lexicon of his fiction – the recurring concepts of shame and disgrace, in particular – is at the very least religiously inflected, in that it speaks of an internalisation of a fallen state. It assumes a burden of guilt more onerous than mere personal culpability. The ironic twist Coetzee gives to his characters’ tortuous questioning is that their search for answers is part of their dilemma: it is not possible to think or will your way to a counterposing state of ‘grace’, which is by definition something that can only be mysteriously bestowed.

The movement of Coetzee’s fiction is thus, somewhat paradoxically for such a cerebral writer, towards a renunciation of bootless intellectualising. In the Jesus trilogy, the notional divinity of the precocious child, David, manifests itself in his preternatural idealism, his refusal to be schooled in the constraining laws of earthbound rationality. But Coetzee, for much of his career, has been more inclined to lower his gaze. His work gestures towards a materiality that is prior to language and ideas, glimpsing in this the possibility of an obverse state of grace, often represented by animals, which are apt to appear as embodiments of equanimity. Their positive counterexample is their groundedness, their ability to live within themselves, their refusal to torment themselves with abstractions. As Mrs Curren muses, animals do not compound the indignity of their suffering by trying to find meaning in it.

Coetzee’s fourth book, Life and Times of Michael K (1983), takes on its particular significance in light of this defining conflict. In the context of his long career, it is landmark work. Arriving in the wake of Waiting for the Barbarians – perhaps the greatest of his early novels – it consolidated his international reputation, winning him the Booker Prize for the first time. But it also received some trenchant criticism from no less an eminence than Nadine Gordimer, who suggested that Life and Times of Michael K –a novel steeped in the violence and degradation of the apartheid regime – was avoiding the political realities of the situation by shifting its harrowing narrative into the realm of allegory.

The criticism seems a little odd in hindsight, given how deeply Coetzee’s South African novels are marked by the horrors of apartheid and how explicitly they grapple with the legacies of colonialism. Gordimer’s allegiance to Georg Lukács’s notion that realism is the appropriate genre for the politically engaged novelist now seems dated, even a little quaint. But her criticism hit a nerve, largely because Coetzee does indeed cast Michael K as a strange mythical figure, whose implications are not ‘political’ in any immediate sense. ‘I am not sure he is wholly of our world,’ observes the medical officer who narrates the second section of

the novel. Michael is sanctified as an ‘original soul … a human soul above and beneath classification, a soul blessedly untouched by doctrine, untouched by history’. He is the ‘obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy’.

One way to make sense of these extravagant claims might be to read Life and Times of Michael K as a Rousseauean thought experiment. Michael is an innocent, a kind of holy fool, his nature uncorrupted by society, a condition the novel bestows on him via a combination of ignorance and estrangement. In this, he inverts the familiar Coetzeean perspective. As he navigates his way through a war-ravaged land, he is subjected to a series of trials. The illness and death of his mother at the beginning of the novel severs his only familial bond and exposes him to the symptoms of a broken society: unemployment, civil unrest, an obstructive and opaque bureaucracy, an overwhelmed and dysfunctional hospital system, forced labour, a corrupt military, poverty and vagrancy, an internment camp. These trials sometimes spark his moral conscience (‘Do I believe in helping people, he wondered’) and there are moments when Michael thinks of his ordeal as a ‘lesson’ and an ‘education’. But he gains no real insight into the historical and political forces that have generated his misery, nor does he display any interest in understanding them. For Michael, they are simply how the world is.

This is the conceptual paradox that seems to give teeth to Gordimer’s objection. Michael is enigmatic because he is a concrete depiction of an impossibility. The novel means to test his uncanny innocence against the scourge of reality, yet that innocence is predicated on his status as a simpleton who is alienated from his times, making his political inconsequence something of a fait accompli. The oddness of his character exists in an uneasy relation with the stylised world of the novel, which is at once specific (it is explicitly set in South Africa) and indistinct (the historical context is left vague). The medical officer apostrophises to Michael that there is something significant in ‘the originality of the resistance you offered. You were not a hero and you did not appear to be.’ But the unpalatable form of that unheroic ‘resistance’ is to remain helpless in the face of misery and oppression. Even when Michael tries to establish his independence, attempting to grow pumpkins on an abandoned farm, the Crusoean fantasy of enterprising self-sufficiency ends in failure. His fate is to be caught up again in the war he does not comprehend, dragged back into history against his will. The final section of the novel completes his descent into abjection when he finally succumbs to the corrupting influence of society and takes to drink. With remorseless novelistic logic, Michael’s life is undone by his times. No one can remain untouched by history and doctrine. The idea is absurd.

In this sense, Life and Times of Michael K is rigorous enough to dismantle its own premises, undermine the conceit that Michael is some kind of supra-historical, quasi-religious figure.

His passive ‘resistance’, his ‘presentiment of a single meaning’, and the portentous biblical authority of his declaration ‘I am what I am’ are ultimately harbingers of nothing, or at least nothing of any consequence. The obscure nature of his purported specialness also brings in train a number of retrograde implications – sanctification of pointless suffering, idealisation of simple-mindedness, conflation of virtue and victimhood – which the novel seeks to address via a structural ingenuity. The medical officer’s confession serves a metafictional purpose: it is also the novel’s confession, the point at which its implications and intentions are laid bare. He lavishes his inscrutable patient with significance, describing their brief encounter in revelatory terms in a way that spills over into selfconsciousness. Michael’s attributed meaning becomes so exaggerated, so overdetermined, that it reveals itself to be a projection. Therein resides the crucial ambiguity. The novel ironises the attribution of profundity, but it does not want to disavow that profundity. If a work of fiction can be said to express a desire, it would certainly appear to be the case that, on some level, Life and Times of Michael K wants a trace of revelatory possibility to cling to its emaciated protagonist. It wants us to recognise the pathos and the battered dignity of Michael’s late realisation that there is ‘nothing to be ashamed of in being simple’. It wants to be able to examine a life like Michael’s – a life marred by undeserved misfortunes and cruelties, one stripped back to the most basic imperatives of survival – and find something other than meaningless suffering.

In this, Life and Times of Michael K asks a timeless question that has motivated much of Coetzee’s work: what is the ontological status of moral ideas when the world around us seems to deny them? In what sense, if any, might they be said to inhere in reality? Christian mythology gives us, in the life and death of Jesus, an allegory about the unhappy fate of goodness in a corrupt world. The malformed figure of Michael K is an attempt to bring that myth and the impossible transhistorical hope it represents into contact with history; his story is an attempt to find a literary form that might allow such an idea to be adequately expressed. Part of the unsettling power of Life and Times of Michael K is that this conceptual difficulty is not resolved. It would be another thirty years before Coetzee would undertake to address the same mythical inheritance, creating in the character of David a figure who might yet bear the impossible weight of signification. But it is no small matter that the extraordinary Jesus trilogy is not set in any recognisable reality, but in an imaginatively liberated realm of absolute fiction. g James Ley

First South African edition cover (Raven Press, 1983)

Fade to black

A dramatist of disillusion

Paul Kildea

Masquerade: The lives of Noël Coward

by Oliver Soden Weidenfeld & Nicolson

$34.99 pb, 656 pp

CAST

NOËL COWARD, a playwright, director, actor and composer

IVOR NOVELLO, a composer and actor

GERTRUDE LAWRENCE, an actress

GEORGE GERSHWIN, a composer

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, a writer

VIRGINIA WOOLF, a novelist

CHARLIE CHAPLIN, an actor and filmmaker

IGOR STRAVINSKY, a composer

LAURENCE OLIVIER, an actor

GRETA GARBO, a movie star

JOAN SUTHERLAND, a soprano

PET SNAKE, a reptile, allergic to gin

OLIVER SODEN, a biographer (with a good book on Michael Tippett under his belt)

The action moves from London to New York, Australia, Jamaica, France, Switzerland

TIME: 1899–1973

Part One

You could hardly ask for a better tour guide through the artistic travails and triumphs of the twentieth century. Born as the previous century was closing its shutters, Noël Coward dominated the London stage in the interwar years, butted heads with the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, before wrenching victory from the jaws of disfavour in his final years in a series of stunning revivals.

He knew everybody. In America before the Great Depression, he heard Gershwin play through sketches of his piano concerto, and in 1931 he turned down Stravinsky’s suggested collaboration. In the early 1960s, he helped Joan Sutherland find a chalet near his own in Les Avants, Switzerland. He also retained properties in Jamaica, having discovered the island when holidaying in a house owned by Ian Fleming and where he entertained anyone from Alec Guinness to Winston Churchill. Virginia Woolf wrote of Coward to a friend, ‘He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint’ (indeed he could). Ned Rorem noted that ‘his immodesty is generous’, while Robert Graves distilled 1920s literary England into four major figures: ‘Coward was the dramatist of disillusion, as Eliot was its tragic poet, Aldous Huxley its novelist, and James Joyce its prose epic-writer.’

In the early 1920s, he had been struck by the pace of dialogue

in Broadway plays and brought the lesson home with him (‘Wait till I get back to Shaftesbury Avenue!!’). These were the years just before American talkies changed humour forever, the Marx Brothers in their wise-arsery the most obvious gauntlet throwers. It took Coward a few attempts, but in 1924 he had a knockout success with The Vortex, after which, as Oliver Soden observes, his life changed for ever. In three dense acts, Coward set out his stall: homosexuality, drug use, intergenerational love, and the mores of the Bright Young Things, which Evelyn Waugh would soon skewer with such precision. These were themes Coward never really let go, carefully navigating the fissure between public taste and the Lord Chamberlain’s strictures. Even the play’s central figure, the ageing beauty Florence Lancaster, who takes up with a much younger lover, was a mirror to a generation of women who had lost their husbands and much more besides in World War I. Robert Graves would rip off this bandage five years later in his excoriating Good-Bye to All That, yet, as with Waugh, Coward got there first.

It is impossible to overstate Coward’s hold on the English stage and imagination after The Vortex. Only two year later, newspapers would write of the Noël Coward Era, comparing the playwright (appropriately) to Wilde and (improbably) to Shakespeare. One critic of The Vortex landed on a more apposite comparison: ‘It makes Mr Somerset Maugham’s smart set look hopelessly old-fashioned.’ Coward and his producers mined the works and stories he had been churning out since his teen years (the equivalent of Benjamin Britten’s drawer of ‘early horrors’), and his work was soon everywhere, Broadway included. His musical revue On with the Dance (1925), which he wrote while acting in The Vortex, was birthed only after a twenty-six-hour dress rehearsal, such was his sway and the scale of his ambition.

Part Two

Soden’s section on The Vortex illustrates the considerable strengths and strategic weaknesses of this very fine biography. He is great on the play’s gay subtext, as he is throughout the book on changing attitudes towards homosexuality as the century progressed, and indeed Coward’s role in these changes. (The Oxford English Dictionary lists this line from Bitter Sweet as the second attributable use of the word gay meaning homosexual: ‘Haughty boys, naughty boys … we are the reason for the “Nineties” being gay.’) He is similarly good on the politics of the characters and period too, as he is on Coward’s own reactionary views – all Empire and Tories and great gulps of Churchill worship. (He thought Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 ‘a bloody good thing but far too late’.) Yet Soden follows this astute literary criticism and scene-setting with pages of review excerpts, as if compiled by a publicist’s intern over lunch.

To be fair, he gives us due warning, setting out his stall in a Prologue in which he notes that each of the book’s nine sections is ‘loosely structured as one of the varied genres in which he wrote: plays, musicals, revues, screenplays, short stories.’ ‘Does it work?’ I scribbled next to this early paragraph. Well, it does, though the extent to which you are charmed by his technique will depend on how much you like the structure of this review. Of course, you can ignore the frame and focus on the picture, yet there remain downsides to Soden abandoning his unfussy, careful prose. The

final chapter, for example – of both the book and Coward’s life – is strangely unmoving; here, Soden collages diary entries, quotes from letters, excerpts from other biographies, interviews, and recollections into a postmodernist ‘Late Play’, the author a stone-hearted playwright refusing us an emotional farewell.

Yet there is so much to admire, so much new material to absorb. (It is gratifying to read the sentences on the tenor Hans Unterfucker whom Coward so desperately wanted to cast in anything, if only for the billing.) In many ways, the alienation and decline Coward experienced in the 1950s is more compelling than his great successes in previous decades, and certainly more interesting than his very long war, at least in this telling. But

Literary Studies

Late fictions

Gerald Murnane’s retrospective intention

Shannon Burns

Murnane by Emmett Stinson

The Miegunyah Press

$30 pb, 144 pp

Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press, 1993). Although the two books have different points of focus, they are slim yet substantial studies, each dealing with a distinct period of Murnane’s literary career, and both are eminently readable.

As Stinson notes, Murnane’s late fictions were not influenced by the kind of editorial interventions and publisher’s whims that marked his earlier work and limited his capacity to control his own writerly output. Nor did Murnane have to worry about appealing to a wide readership. Giramondo gave their author almost total control over the finished products, whereas Murnane’s previous writing life was uncertain and chaotic.

Stinson argues that the late fictions – written in these new circumstances – retrospectively reshape and recontextualise the early work and serve ‘to complete, belatedly, his oeuvre and impose some final order on the more contingent and disordered conditions in which his early works were published’. Stinson deals with each book, in four separate chapters, where he subtly extends his central theme, culminating with the concept of ‘retrospective intention’.

Alongside that primary focus, Stinson offers a general analysis

Coward’s work ethic, his ready wit, and the changing societal values leap from every page.

Upon undertaking the project, Soden wrote to one of Coward’s previous biographers, the luminous Philip Hoare, to seek his blessing, hoping that a new biography twenty-four years after his was not too soon. ‘Dear Oliver,’ Hoare replied. ‘Twenty-four years? Of course it’s time!’ Yes, it is time, and Soden has risen masterfully to the challenge. g

Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten: A life in the twentieth century (2013), among other books, and is Artistic Director of Musica Viva.

that highlights important but neglected aspects of Murnane’s fiction. He draws from decades of Murnane scholarship with discernment and lays the groundwork for potential new areas of analysis. Thematically, he emphasises the role of care-giving and domestic responsibility, and the centrality of loneliness (Murnane prefers ‘lonesomeness’) and emotional anguish in Murnane’s work. Formally, he connects Murnane’s writing to the genre of ‘autofiction’ and emphasises its hybridising tendencies.

The chapter on A History of Books focuses on the formal and thematic significance of secrecy, withholding, omission, or apophasis The thrust of Stinson’s argument is that Murnane is at his most autobiographically revealing when his fiction is at its most indirect or secretive. Stinson argues, brilliantly, that the novella ‘obliquely employs books as a mechanism by which both Murnane and his readers can distantly view traumatic events’.

Stinson also draws attention to his subject’s preference for ‘paraliterary reading practices’ that resist the norms of academic literary criticism. This kind of ‘bad reading’ permits readers to speculate wildly about the world of a fiction, to imagine themselves into some aspect of it or explore its hidden territories, to fall in love with characters and conduct imagined courtships, or to obsess over incidental details and convert them into major concerns. Because Murnane favours this kind of reading and is openly hostile to institutional literary criticism, critics like Stinson occupy an awkward position. ‘As a critic of Murnane’s work,’ he writes, ‘I have never doubted my place.’

Stinson capably addresses a few longstanding queries and critiques of Murnane’s work in his concluding chapter. His analysis of the perceived problem around gender representation is strong and concludes with an assertion that has wider implications: ‘Murnane’s artistic project seeks to represent, in great detail, his specific perspective on the world, rather than to represent a diversity of voices or imagined perspectives.’ Readers may be seduced or repelled by that self-imposed limitation, but it is important to recognise its origin. Stinson correctly observes:

The problem, if that’s what it is, is that Murnane’s writing contains no viewpoint characters who are not Gerald Murnane. This would be a limitation for a novelist, but if we view Murnane, instead, as primarily an autobiographical writer, then the question of viewpoint characters seems both determined by and consistent with his genre.

The journey begins now.

$20.99 paperback 978-1-6698-8854-3 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Despite millennia of study, the human mind has remained a mystery to itself, an intimate enigma that even science struggles to explain. Many questions remain, but the answers may be closer than we realize. In Thinking on the Other Side of Zero Part 2, healer and author Alan Joseph Oliver continues his exploration of human consciousness, sharing the ways his practice has led to incredible findings about the nature of memory and the self. Through his stories and reflections, he charts a course towards an inner truth, and offers a source of comfort and strength unbound by the material world.

The decision to focus on the late fiction has much to do with Stinson’s main argument, but it also accords with recent developments in the reception of Murnane’s work and his new status as an international writer. In an interview at the end of Murnane, the author wryly observes: ‘I have written many better books than Border Districts, which won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction after the Americans had discovered me.’ The late books helped stimulate a remarkable reputational shift, led by international enthusiasm, to such a degree that even a comparatively minor novel could win a major Australian literary award when his earlier masterpieces failed to make the shortlists. After detailing the mixed reception of Murnane’s work in Australia, Stinson suggests that Murnane is now an author for whom local opinion is, ‘if not entirely irrelevant, then certainly less significant’ because ‘his reputation will be made globally’.

Murnane’s fiction tends to induce strong reactions for and against. While Murnane is an admiring study, Stinson is not unaware of his subject’s limited appeal. The work inspires mixed reactions for obvious reasons. Murnane’s fiction is inward-looking and focuses on seemingly infinite nested landscapes and fantasy objects that stimulate deep but enigmatic feeling in its narrator–observers. This captivates and astonishes some readers, while others see it as a fruitless or confoundingly eccentric mode of writing. Stinson

notes that ‘Murnane’s work takes imaginary realms very seriously’. This is an understatement. To fully appreciate his fiction, readers must accept that inner events and inner landscapes are vital and substantial in themselves, no matter how disconnected they are from the visible world or a shared reality. Some readers also struggle with its self-referential tendencies. Stinson writes: ‘possibly no other author’s body of literary work is so rigorously and relentlessly autoreferential, recycling and repurposing its own content across books in slightly altered forms’.

Nevertheless, Stinson concludes with a bold claim for the quality and importance of Murnane’s oeuvre:

He is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead. This claim will be hotly contested by many – and perhaps most – Australian critics and readers, but I suspect it will become a commonplace sentiment internationally.

Time will tell if Stinson is right. g

Shannon Burns’s ABR Fellowship produced a profile of Gerald Murnane in August 2015. His memoir Childhood was released by Text Publishing in 2022.

Nina in the Hag Mask

punched through time— outside the kitchen window, when I finally looked up from my homework— like the night before I’d punched through space as a ball that was put by a boy in the footwell of the hotboxed car at 110 for wont of space. The hag’s face was set in a hood, a nosegay of scrambled sight, chopped meat to scrape away with a knife—the method and the tool missing from the lifetime I spasmed for. The white hoodie I knew by sight and smell was suddenly a shapelessness: living water rose in the preserve of the moon. The terror punches through any moment now as I stand years later in a paddock below a bare volcanic hill, its dank shine an algae-like organic creep toward the full moon. I can choose— and I choose Nina in the hag mask over a windscreen fogged to a blind light—the spasm congealed into a dance so literate, of digging down while standing back. The hobble on the spot that’s memory.

Oh shit I say to her spectre. I’m now recalling the story you told of fishing at night in the mangroves up north in a tinnie with a local named Tubs, who held two tinnies like a fractal growth in one hand the open can stacked on the spare. He called his tinnie Tubs, and sat for hours like a fractal growth attached to the outboard motor. As you fished, your sounds had shadows that weren’t echoes but a fore of living water your torchlight overshot then rushed back to, overshot and rushed back to a pre-existing gash in the black, the saltie’s waxen mouth that was blindly open but not impatient. Patient as all hell.

Yes, wide open, you clarified, and no you didn’t feel like you almost died.

Chaucer’s ageless and indelible Alison

The Wife of Bath

by Marion Turner Princeton University Press

US$29.95 hb, 336 pp

In her 2019 biography, Chaucer: A European life, Marion Turner provides a fine-grained social context for the poet’s life – from early days. Young Geoffrey Chaucer, we learn, would likely have been educated in a school such as London’s St Paul’s, with its generously stocked library, and a ‘master’ who ‘sat in a chair of authority, raised up, surveying the room’, and whose pedagogical style allowed for disputation.

I first encountered Chaucer in my convent school in the ‘Library’ that served as the Matric classroom. The room was, to our eyes, rather grand (converted from a nineteenth-century ‘Coffee Palace’) and the ‘mistress’ sat at a high desk, where she read to us in whatever accent the books under study required. She made short work of Chaucer’s ‘th’s’ and feminine endings and participle forms (‘yronne’, etc.), demystifying forever a language that might otherwise have proved a barrier to my rampaging enjoyment. Her name was Mrs Moore. She was austere but had a flinty wit, and she connected a seventeen-year-old girl with a literary world of such astonishing vitality that it has never left her.

The Wife of Bath: A biography is Marion Turner’s second foray into Chaucer’s work, and while her focus in this new ‘biography’ is narrower – on a single Chaucerian character rather than Chaucer’s whole fourteenth-century world and life – her ambition and effect remain consistent. Turner is a builder of contexts and connections – between literature and life, between the medieval and the contemporary, between work and play, culture and politics – sexual or societal.

But a ‘biography’ of an avowedly fictional character? Turner revels in the seeming anomaly of her enterprise, taking full advantage of the six-hundred-plus-year ‘life’ that Alison, the Wife of Bath, has led since Chaucer wrote her. ‘Alison is a character whom readers across the centuries have usually seen as accessible, familiar, and, in a strange way, real.’ But, as Turner grants, as early as the second page of her Introduction, ‘Alison of Bath is not a real woman, nor was she based on a real woman, or created by a woman.’ And, more: ‘She is not even a fully rounded, psychologically complex character in the same way that, say, Dorothea Brooke or Clarissa Dalloway are’. She is a mosaic of sources, many of them male, often misogynist. But she is also rhetorically gifted, unfazed by authority, and, somehow, indelible. Turner acknowledges the seeming magic of this literary conjuring: ‘Chaucer performed some kind of alchemy when he fused his cluster of well-worn sources with contemporary details and a distinctive, personalised

voice, and produced something – someone – completely new.’

It is a large claim, but Turner argues her case, in the context of English literature certainly, with vigour, and a great deal of contextual evidence. The Black Death changed life in Chaucer’s England, and in particular ways for women. Ironically, it afforded them more opportunity, more autonomy in both marriage and work. This coincided with what Turner calls Chaucer’s ‘pioneering way of exploring narratives of the self’.

Elsewhere, Turner argues that ‘[w]hen he was creating Alison as a character, Chaucer’s own skill and inspiration were powered by literary sources and by his historical environment, but the character came to full being in the mind of the reader.’ I wonder. When I went back to reread my battered 1957 edition of F.N. Robinson’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Alison sprang to pulsing life again, in ways that I found as challenging and confronting as I did when I first met her. But it was Chaucer’s poetry, vivid and particular as Giotto’s paintings, his rhythms, that vernacular vivacity and audaciousness, that conjured the irreducible character, the ‘full being’, that is Alison. (And they prompted a minor irritation: in a copiously annotated book, could not the publisher have found space to print ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’? The book is a feast for general readers, but not every general reader has Chaucer on her shelves.)

Publishing quibbles aside, Turner’s ‘Biography’ is an incisive examination of a tumultuous historical period, its literature, and its startling connection with, and importance for, our own time. It is written with a zest and pace that befits its subject. Alison is a provocateur. She is disruptive, she threatens norms and preconceptions – about gender, propriety, religious strictures, beliefs, marriage, rights, equality – even now. (I kept being reminded of Germaine Greer and early responses to The Female Eunuch.)

Alison’s ‘Prologue’ is an unbridled performance piece by a woman who has lived, learned (‘Experience… is right ynogh for me’), worked, travelled widely, married (five times), been widowed, beaten, deafened, who has disputed authorities, been reconciled in love (perhaps) and who has finally assumed ‘soveraynetee’. Her ‘Tale’ is about rape, power imbalances, youth and age, and what ‘wommen moste desiren’. But before she can tell it, Alison is forestalled by a Friar and a Summoner (an official empowered to bring people before ecclesiastical courts). The Pilgrim’s ‘Hoost’ and Chaucer figure routs the pair with a command: ‘Lat the woman telle hire tale.’ And, unbowed, Alison does.

The ubiquity of rape, and the liberty to tell one’s tale, however scandalising: these are not conventional expectations of writing about Geoffrey Chaucer. But Chaucer has always been strong meat, censored, and traduced by writers from Dryden, Pope, and Voltaire to the legions of scholars who have corralled him in philological or other silos. Turner exempts Shakespeare and James Joyce (imagine dinner with Alison, Falstaff, and Molly Bloom), and does us a grand service by highlighting the work of contemporary writers (like Zadie Smith in The Wife of Willesden) who have taken Chaucer’s creation whole, and have set us all dancing again with Alison of Bath ‘in a wild exchange of energy, passion and ideas’. g

Morag Fraser is a former Chairperson of ABR and is currently writing a biography of the poet Peter Porter.

‘Wommen moste desiren’

Morag Fraser

Plover’s lament

A celebration of continuity

Geoff Page

Shore Lines

by Andrew Taylor Pitt Street Poetry $28 pb, 108 pp

Andrew Taylor has been an important figure in the Australian poetic landscape since his first book, The Cool Change, appeared in 1971. Identified with no particular group or aesthetic tendency, he has worked as poet and academic in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and is now retired from teaching and based in Sydney.

At the time of The Cool Change, Taylor looked to be the promising successor to Melbourne academic poets such as Vincent Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. In later decades he was also identified with Adelaide, where he ran Writers Week for several years, and then with Perth, where he also developed his reputation as a critic.

Almost thirty years ago I wrote: ‘Andrew Taylor is now a poet of great subtlety who consistently moves and entertains his readers as very few others can.’ After almost another thirty years, and having now read Taylor’s latest collection, Shore Lines, I find no reason to modify this opinion. There may be just a little more emphasis on ‘entertainment’ these days, but there is still plenty here to be moved by.

The book is divided into six untitled thematic sections, with the first and the penultimate ones focusing mainly on family history and the central two ranging over various landscapes, particularly their wildlife and weather. ‘Section IV’, like a series of watercolours perhaps, is confined to Coogee, the Sydney beachside suburb where he has lived for the past few years.

In his eighties now, Taylor is understandably interested in what remains and what has vanished of his family’s history in Warrnambool, his birthplace. Something of the dominant feeling here is captured in the opening lines of his poem, ‘Home Town’: ‘The cliffs I rode my bike along / are gone now. Sandstone’s so soft / they’ve crumbled into the surf / that pushes at them from Antarctica.’ After noting the transience of various buildings, Taylor circles back to the sea: ‘relentless, cold as ever / slapping the sand, grinding away the cliffs.’

Another poem in this opening section, ‘Where Are They?’, interestingly begins with an issue mainstream Australian poetry often bypasses: ‘Where are they / who left these shells centuries / thousands of years on this slope / above the rich rock shelves / at the river’s mouth?’

Unfortunately, this approach also has a way of underestimating how successfully ‘those who left the shells’ have survived what was done and continues to be done to them. There is an almost

Tennysonian ring to the final stanza: ‘Where are they / whom we hear in the plover’s lament / in the wind’s whisper and the distant / insistent rumour of surf / on the empty beach?’

The next section starts rather differently with a clever poem on ‘Weather’ (‘weather is a shape of waiting / that’s forever on the move like the wind …’) and ends with an even cleverer one, ‘The Engineer of Clouds’. Here Taylor posits a kind of weather god who is ‘grounded firmly / in the physics of turbulence’ and whose ‘favourite painter is Constable’. Understandably, this ‘engineer’ likes to ‘stand drenched in a downpour / fingering the rain drops as a cloud / comes down to embrace him’.

In the book’s third section is a number of more ‘serious’ poems, several of them elegies. They include a tribute to Peter Porter (‘Visiting Peter’, first published in ABR), which begins playfully enough: ‘I should have seen / all those words crowded at the door / of Peter’s apartment when I slayed with him – / so many jostling verbs / outstretched adjectives / nervy adverbs all / rubbing shoulders with those little ands and buts and ors etc.’ A few lines later, Taylor affectingly shows the poet at work: ‘until with patience / and a homemade miracle / their jumble would subside / and they would converse with him / and later, on the page / with us.’ It’s a light touch that Porter himself would have enjoyed – and so often employed.

‘Visiting Peter’ is immediately followed by ‘Lycidas Adieu’, which some might resist as ‘yet another poem about poetry’. To this reader it nicely embodies the ambivalence that most poets feel about their work and its destiny. It opens with ‘What a relief! having no poems to write’ and then goes on to add: ‘I’ve left my words / back on the beach’ and rejoice in the feeling of ‘Sheer blessed emptiness’. ‘These waves will float me out to sea and all my books / will follow me into oblivion.’ Of course, the reader knows that the poet almost certainly doesn’t think this. He expects that a handful of his poems will survive in anthologies for a hundred years or more, but the mood, along with Taylor’s evocation of it, is persuasive enough.

Happily, like its predecessor, this third section also balances a ‘lightness’ with more moving poems, one of these being ‘Sydney to Lima’, where the poet would appear to be telling the story of how he flew to Lima to bring home his wife who had become almost fatally ill there. Affectingly, he does not mention the relationship explicitly, thus helping to give the poem a universality it mightn’t otherwise have had.

Other stressful events in the book which deserve mention are the 2019 bushfires and the Covid lockdowns which began not long after. Almost all Australian poets at the moment have their poem or two (if not whole chapbooks) on these events. Some, but not many, are compelling. Most of the latter, like Taylor’s, demonstrate the value of understatement and indirection. His ‘From the headland’, for instance, ends on an optimistic note: ‘Yet today on the headland, banksia / melaleuca and spidery grevillea / are shaken by honeyeaters / and I can see the whales, their white / exuberant flotilla, forging / north, as they always do, to breed.’

In a sense, almost the whole of Shore Lines is a celebration of such continuity. g

Geoff Page edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015.

Snap!

Making the familiar truly strange

Paul Hetherington

In

the Photograph

by Luke Beesley Giramondo $26.95 pb, 144 pp

For a long time, Australia has had a conservative poetry culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when modernist poets in Europe, Asia, America, and –somewhat belatedly – the United Kingdom revolutionised international literature, Australian poets continued writing mainly conventional verse.

Modernism brought poetry and prose together as more or less equal partners. Notably, in France, these developments were foreshadowed by the 1842 publication of the book of proto-prose poetry, Gaspard de la Nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, by Aloysius Bertrand. The modernist order was subsequently ushered into France through the publication of works such as Charles Baudelaire’s ground-breaking prose poetry collection Le Spleen de Paris (1869), and two radically brilliant collections of prose poetry and poetic prose by Arthur Rimbaud: Une saison en enfer (1873) and Illuminations (1886).

These works spread like a slow earthquake across the international literary world, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a politically and culturally backward Australia felt barely a ripple. Then, after the catastrophe of World War I and surrealism’s arrival in the 1920s, many Australian poets decided that the unconscious mind and surrealism’s tenets were undeserving of serious attention.

Now, in 2023, Australian poetry is dominated by an often ‘confessional’ free verse at a time when even the slow-to-move poetry culture in the United Kingdom is becoming increasingly radicalised. This radicalisation is marked by the rise of various forms of literary hybridity, much of which extend the innovations introduced by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernists.

In Australia, various poets have demonstrated a serious commitment to hybrid or prose-poetical forms. Among them are Gary Catalano (1947–2002), Vicki Viidikas (1948–98), Ania Walwicz (1951–2020), joanne burns, Samuel Wagan Watson, Prithvi Varatharajan, Cassandra Atherton – also an international scholar of prose poetry – and Luke Beesley. Indeed, in his new volume, Beesley comments on the literary developments mentioned above, writing: ‘Snap. The twig collapsed under the pressure of handwriting – that word insignia at the beginning of the 1920s, the birth of Surrealism, the lips of the trees and the textured wind pouting, pressure in my left hand’ (‘The Shoot’).

Although marketed as poetry, Beesley’s author note says his works began as ‘short fiction’. He refers to his finished works as ‘poems’, but many of them still read like short fiction, microfiction,

or poetic prose – partly because a good number extend over two, three, or four pages. The international consensus about a prose poem’s length, as summarised by United Kingdom scholar and prose poet Jane Monson, is that it should be ‘no more than a page, preferably half of one, focused, dense’. Beesley’s works in this volume tend to dilate – a departure for a poet whose previous prose poetry is mostly shorter.

The volume’s exploration of a hybrid poetic prose is characterised by sometimes light-hearted surrealistic gestures that disrupt narrative expectations, along with a pursuit of ekphrastic modes. It demonstrates a sophisticated awareness of the absurdity of domestic and quotidian life. And the best works make the familiar truly strange, asking readers to recalibrate their perceptions.

Beesley is fascinated by how observation connects to the imagination, and how this may – or may not – be communicated in language. For example, in ‘That Landscape Again’, a taut and compelling prose poem, he invokes an evening scene as a painting; or a painting as an evening scene, problematising the idea of ekphrasis even while making an ekphrastic work:

When he looked back to his balcony, he could sense a party. Night Lights was the painting. Frozen, crouched, arms forward, hands relaxed, dipped forward, too, head turned, looking at the viewer, caught, mouth open, shocked intake of breath, single bristle of the brush, blue in the blackish lips, appreciation of chalk (white) to bring the bright light, chiaroscuro, revealing the width of the brush the artist used.

In the Photograph is continually preoccupied with the performative play of language, and with troping on life imagined as literature or art, and vice versa. Many of its allusions are to literary works – and to films, musicians, visual artists, and poets. Numerous linguistic sidesteps create a persistent sense of narrative disruption and disjuncture, including punning word associations. One of Beesley’s primary techniques is the non sequitur, ensuring that there are no reliable narratives available. Such techniques constitute an often deftly constructed quizzing of narrative’s resources.

However, the purposes of such destabilisation are not always readily apparent beyond literary playfulness. Although Beesley mentions dreams a good deal and conjures with the names of writers such as André Breton, his work is not surrealistic in the manner of the Europeans of the 1920s, simply because he does not attempt to unify reality and dreams into a surreality. Even when he says in ‘Accurate Paper Aiming’ that a scene he evokes ‘was a scene of genuine Surrealism’, he immediately makes a complex pun about this assertion, writing, ‘I began to have the idea of what might be called the life of animals in the inanimate.’ Such techniques have the hallmarks of the postmodern, and the works in this volume may be read as neo-surreal – twenty-first century riffs and variations on the idea of the surreal.

In North America, many writers, including Anne Boyer, Charles Fort, and Claudia Rankine, have been stretching the boundaries of the poetic through sophisticated hybrid and prose poetical modes of writing. Although In the Photograph’s literary self-consciousness is sometimes distracting, nevertheless it makes a notable contribution to these emerging literatures. g

Poet of the Month with Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her books are A Kinder Sea, Seastrands, Vanishing Point, and the anthology Thirty Australian Poets (as editor). Her recent essays are ‘Plath Traps’ for the Sydney Review of Books and ‘Strange Territory: Poems as “gifts to the attentive”’ for Australian Book Review. She was an ABR Fellow in 2015 and 2019.

Which poets have influenced you most?

The first poet I read closely, and have read for decades, is Sylvia Plath. Writing this list, I hear her comment in an interview: ‘It is presumptuous to say that one is influenced by someone like Shakespeare: one reads Shakespeare, and that is that.’ In that spirit, I’ve been profoundly enriched by reading Paul Celan, Tracy K. Smith, and Alice Oswald, and by the poetry and mentorship of Dorothy Porter.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Craft carries inspiration into the poem.

What prompts a new poem?

David Lynch describes ‘a tiny little piece’ that leads to a constellation of ideas. A lit window seen from a dark street. Disquiet. Quiet.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Uninterrupted time to listen to a poem’s inklings. A room of one’s own. Paid bills. Reading poetry. Fortunately, most poems are generous enough not to insist on ideal conditions.

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

The process of cultivating patience and attentiveness is different for each poem. Putting aside defining a draft (I tinker with a word or phrase countless times), allowing a poem to find its shape can involve many drafts.

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

I’d like to ask Sappho about burnt words, Yi Lei about courage, and Carl Phillips about mystery, Latin, and stamina. Luckily, reading is a conversation, and I get to talk to poet friends, especially Stuart Barnes and the splendid poets I mentor and edit.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Gwen Harwood’s Collected Poems (edited by Alison Hoddinott and Gregory Kratzmann).

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? Solitude.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

I love reading generous poets on poetry. Carl Phillips’s My Trade is Mystery, Jane Hirshfield’s prose, anything by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Lisa Gorton, Denise Riley, Simon Armitage, Terrance Hayes, and emerging poet–critics including Luke Patterson, Terri Ann Quan Sing, Kerry Greer, and Alexis Lateef.

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

I’ll answer this impossible question by selecting the book I’ve spent the most time with: Paul Celan’s Selected Poems (translated by Michael Hamburger).

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant—’ (Emily Dickinson)

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

Poetry’s readership could be expanded by creating opportunities to listen to poets read and speak and by making poetry available in libraries and bookshops. Often, poetry’s just not there, and you can’t regard something that’s erased. More support for poet–critics who illuminate others’ work, having poets teach poetry, and appointing a generous and well-read Poet Laureate would help. g

As it’s seen and felt

The ontology of abortion

Caroline de Costa

Tissue by Madison Griffiths Ultimo Press $34.99 pb, 311 pp

As an abortion provider for more than forty years, and an advocate for abortion law reform and improved abortion services for more than fifty, I approached this book with alacrity. Around one hundred thousand abortions are performed in Australia every year, yet abortion is still not easily talked or written about. I felt that a non-fiction work of nearly three hundred pages on the topic, by a person who had experienced abortion, would be a welcome addition to existing literature, something that other people, contemplating or experiencing abortion, might absorb themselves in.

The author’s own abortion, in the early weeks of her pregnancy, using the medications mifepristone and misoprostol – this was during a Melbourne lockdown in 2021 – is front and centre of every chapter in the book, finishing on page 286, seventy-six weeks after the procedure. It took all that time for her to come to terms with her emotions before, during, and especially after the physical act of abortion. As she travels, she bestows her thoughts on a great many other topics – her childhood, her family, her education, anorexia, gender identity, love, the meaning of pleasure, masturbation, painful sex, joyful sex, many sexual relationships, climate change, overpopulation, her career as a tattooist, the internet, privacy, the Covid pandemic, and more – and relates these as best she can to her central topic of abortion.

There is a fair bit to like in all of this. The Prologue is an enticing beginning, well crafted and acknowledging that unintended pregnancy, and therefore abortion, are matters for everyone on the planet with female genitalia. The chapter ‘On Redness’ explores the bloodiness and messiness of abortion, and the significance of red for both birth and death, and thus for artists, but equally for opponents of abortion who ‘in many parts of the world use the image of blood … to confront those being ushered out of their cars toward the clinic doors’. Bleeding, blood, and redness punctuate many of the later chapters. ‘Abyzou’s Legacy’ explores the idea of guilt projected by a patriarchal society and its supporters onto a person undergoing an abortion. Guilt at the unwanted pregnancy, guilt at the abortion itself. Guilt at not conforming to the narrative of being a ‘woman’ – Abyzou was a female demon blamed in medieval times for miscarriages. In the following chapter, the

author reveals that she has sex with people of all genders, and states that queerness and abortion share the trait of ‘unwomaning’ a person: that is, making them fail to conform to stereotypical and conservative norms of behaviour and sexuality. The author points out, rightly, that ‘there is a strong correlation between states trying to restrict abortion rights and those targeting transgender and non-binary people’. So far, so good.

A chapter on the digital world and abortion, which describes some of the author’s Tinder encounters, examines how the internet can both help spread accurate information about abortion services to people needing them and hinder those people’s efforts when their data is collected, since it may be used as evidence of criminal intentions or actions in places where abortion is illegal. I found this the most interesting chapter (the reader can, if they wish, skip the paragraphs reporting Tinder sex) and would have liked more research and detail. The internet is providing valuable information to pregnant people in the thirty-four US states where laws are ‘non-protective’ of abortion, while bodies providing that information, such as the Guttmacher Institute, are meticulous in not collecting data that might identify those searching for help. However, the author’s focus here, as in other chapters, is not so much on what abortion and the internet might mean for other people as on her own experiences and conclusions about abortion.

Two later chapters on pleasure (masturbation, drugs, painful sex, vaginismus), and on love (with references to the author’s mother and to several of her own most important sexual relationships), while linking to abortion generally and the author’s abortion in particular, largely deal with her own life experiences, her reading of a diverse range of literature, and her thoughts on these two life-affirming topics. As I wended my way through them, I had to keep remembering that this is a book about one person’s views of their abortion and its relations to the rest of the world, and not a history or a guide for others undertaking abortion.

Early on, the author acknowledges that she is fortunate to live in an inner suburb of Melbourne where, even during lockdown, she could access a safe, effective abortion she could afford to pay for, but she does not dwell on her good fortune or how it came about. Nor does she have much to say about the lack of safe abortion services for a vast number of people experiencing unintended or unwanted pregnancy in other parts of the world. Readers seeking that sort of book will need to look elsewhere.

‘Love’ is the final chapter of the main text, in which the author concludes that the writing has itself been an act of love. As there is a prologue, there is also an epilogue, and here the author explains that she ‘wanted to understand the ontology of abortion, how marvellous and terrible it felt to have one’. So there you have it: the author wanted to examine the intrinsic nature of abortion, as she saw it and felt it, and in this she was successful. g

Caroline de Costa is an obstetrician and gynaecologist and professor at the Cairns Institute of James Cook University, and a crime writer.

Madison Griffiths (Athina Wilson via Ultimo Press)

‘Uncanny to ourselves’

How much technology do we really need?

Robyn Arianrhod

Here Be Monsters: Is technology reducing our humanity?

by Richard King Monash University Publishing $32.99 pb, 248 pp

Back in the day, I was wary about making a career in science. It wasn’t just the lack of women; it was also a sense of moving into alien territory. After all, I had absorbed feminist critiques suggesting that modern science had been shaped by (male) scientists’ urge to ‘penetrate’ nature by reducing it to its parts – an urge that had blinded them to the power of the whole. And I was all for the whole – for Gaia, the whole Earth, not for atom splitting and nuclear bombs. But it was Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) that offered the most famous argument against reductionism. Carson pointed out that when scientists developed pesticides to kill specific insects, they didn’t take sufficient account of the knock-on effect on the environment, including the starved or poisoned birds whose absent songs would manifest in increasingly silent springs. Half a century on, we are aware of many examples of the damage reductive thinking can do, especially the burning of fossil fuels to produce electricity, changing the whole climate in the process. In Here Be Monsters, Richard King deftly explores another area of concern, which he calls ‘technoscience’, a mix of science, technology, and neoliberal capitalism that reduces everything to its parts –to genes, bits of information, and individual consumers, losing sight of the whole person and their whole community.

Carson’s concern wasn’t pesticides themselves but their indiscriminate and excessive use; similarly, King knows that, like appropriately used pesticides, our digital devices bring us great gifts. But he does want us to understand the neoliberal mindset that led the ‘tech bros’ to build all this stuff in the first place. It was a mindset that led social media developers to exploit our biological reward systems with the shameless aim of monetising our attention, which, he implies, is egregiously ironic given the way that social media distances us from biological contact – from the touch and eye contact we have long assumed fundamental to meaningful human interaction. Many studies show the power of touch and shared conviviality to flood our brains with feel-good hormones, and King notes that we witnessed the reverse of this during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Digital technologies played an important role in keeping us connected through those difficult times, and yet, asks King, ‘Would social media have been invented at all in a society that accorded greater value to physical community life, or one less in thrall to performative individualism?’

Evidence of harm from social media alone is, in fact, unclear. But King (author of On Offence: The politics of indignation [2013],

with an MA in cultural discourse) discusses such things as rising rates of depression and studies showing loss of empathy and authentic, non-transactional communication. While he naturally marshals evidence that suits his thesis, it’s a compelling one: instead of ‘trying to build societies that engender happier human beings’, the techno-capitalists want to ‘design human beings that fit into the society which has emerged on its watch’, one that prioritises individuality and frames freedom largely as consumer choice; a society flirting with technological ‘enhancements’ beyond cosmetic surgery and airbrushed Instagram photos to brain-boosting drugs and implants, designer babies, and ‘transhumanism’ – all in the service of some unhuman ideal of perfection. Others have critiqued the techno-capitalist model, but King goes further than most. For him, it risks transforming us into something so different from the communal, diverse humans evolution produced that ‘we become uncanny to ourselves and one another’ – just like Frankenstein’s ‘monster’.

This is a bleak view compared with, say, Saul Griffith’s argument (The Wires That Bind [2023]) that Australians still have a community-based culture, which could help us pioneer community-based ‘green’ solutions to climate change. King agrees with local climate solutions and hopes for future public ownership of many key technologies. Meantime, he wants a ‘radical humanism’ that pushes back against the idea of people ‘as machines to be rewired or recalibrated in line with the dominant ideological world view’. Currently, this is a reductionist ideology, he argues, illustrated also by the self-help boom and the pharmacological approach to depression: treat (and monetise) the individual and their brain, not society.

He is well aware, however, of 1980s cyborg feminism and today’s xenofeminism, which theorises a liberating tech-enhanced alienness that erases biological determinism, seeking gender fluidity and an end to gendered power imbalances. He agrees that our ability to use tools has always shaped the way we have evolved and the societies we have created. But ‘black box’ technology that externally automates physical and mental labour takes away our agency, and emphasising tech over social solutions betrays too much faith in ‘progress’ (an argument that King also directs against those who see technology as the solution to climate change.)

The issue of agency and de-skilling is critical. Perhaps, though, the term ‘technoscience’ is misleading, a proxy for what’s wrong with our current form of capitalism. Experience taught me that science itself is not the alien, purely reductive enterprise I had feared, especially when done with a feminist and post-colonial awareness. (Which is King’s point, really, as it was for those early feminist critics: we need to critically understand not just science’s discoveries but their socio-political context.) Perhaps current fears of ‘black box’ tech such as artificial general intelligence will also prove too alarmist. Some insiders already say yes. King, too, believes it’s not so much rogue AI we should fear; rather, it’s thinking of ourselves as like smart machines, as things ripe for redesigning by techno-capitalists, that is ‘monstrous’.

It is an intriguing thesis. Either way, King is right to urge readers to think techno-critically about how much tech we really need – and he does so with such breadth, brio, and audacious wit that Here Be Monsters is not just challenging and thought-provoking, it’s entertaining, too. g

Open Page with Belinda Alexandra

Belinda Alexandra is the daughter of a Russian mother and an Australian father and has been an intrepid traveller since her youth. Her love of other cultures is matched by her passion for her home country, Australia, where she is a volunteer rescuer and carer for the NSW Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service (WIRES). She is the author of twelve books, including ten historical novels and two works of non-fiction. Her latest book is the memoir Emboldened: On finding the fire to keep going when all seems lost (Affirm Press, 2023).

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

A round trip from Paris to San Francisco to New Orleans. I love those cities for their literature, architecture, history, and the charisma of their inhabitants.

What’s your idea of hell?

The supermarket meat department: all those poor animals who have died in myriad horrible ways, and human beings walking around selecting which leg, liver, or kidney to eat as if that’s completely normal and not macabre.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Being overly agreeable. It makes me think the person doesn’t stand for anything or that they might explode with passiveaggressive rage at any moment.

What’s your favourite film?

Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty, 2013). The plot is a bit all over the place, but it is spectacular.

And your favourite book?

Great Expectations.

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

My Russian grandparents and my great-stepfather. My mother told me so many stories about them, but I never got to meet them in real life.

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

‘Prudence’ (dislike intensely). ‘Henceforth’ (would love to use this in speech as well as the written word).

Who is your favourite author?

Charles Dickens.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Jo March.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Compassion.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs. It gave me a lifelong love of Australian fauna and flora.

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

I couldn’t stand studying Jane Austen novels at school. Now I appreciate her astute social observations and her wicked sense of humour.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I am eclectic in my podcast listening. I do like Stuff You Missed in History Class and Stuff You Should Know and other podcasts along those lines, for story inspiration. Although I don’t write crime novels, I confess to sometimes gravitating towards true crime podcasts. I am well aware that monsters walk among us, but for some reason I feel the need to remind myself of that fact.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Hunger – everything else I can more or less ignore.

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

I like a critic who engages with all the elements of a work and writes in an engaging, conversational style. I like to feel that the critic is aware they are writing for an audience, and not just themselves.

How do you find working with editors?

The editing stage is my favourite part of producing a book. I like the collaborative effort to make the book the best it can be. I’ve had good relationships with all my editors. I felt they were all sympathetic to what I was trying to achieve.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

It’s fun to engage with readers and other writers. All the ones I have attended have been well-organised and had a buzz of excitement about them.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes – and no! Everybody wants to be one, but few people want to pay professional ones for their talent and time.

What are you working on now?

A novel set in postwar France, where a young woman is trying to defend her father against the accusation of selling a valuable artwork to Hitler’s dealer during the occupation and murdering the rightful owner in order to obtain it. g

(Paul Wesley Photography)

The long shadow

Australian cinema’s fealty to Hollywood

Jordan Prosser

Cast Mates: Australian actors in Hollywood and at home

by Sam Twyford-Moore

NewSouth Publishing

$34.99 pb, 320 pp

Aconfession: I was a child actor. Never a child star, although certainly that was the intention. For years I endured the three-hour drive from Canberra to Sydney, preparing for my five-minute meeting with some Surry Hills casting director, whose first question would inevitably be ‘How’s your American accent?’ The zenith of my career was a thirty-second commercial for the orange-flavoured soft drink Mirinda, a merchandising tie-in with the release of Spider-Man 2, shot at Fox Studios on a full-sized replica of a New York subway carriage. On the soundstage next door, Baz Luhrmann was directing Nicole Kidman in their famously extravagant campaign for Chanel No. 5. There we all were: Australians in Australia, pretending to be Americans for America. Even at that early age, I sensed that Australian cinema existed in the long shadow of Hollywood, and that there has always been, as Sam Twyford-Moore expertly describes in his new book, ‘some kind of psychic gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles’.

So I might be uniquely primed to engage with TwyfordMoore’s group bio-history Cast Mates: Australian actors in Hollywood and at home, which I gleefully devoured as though it had been algorithmically concocted specifically for me. In its pages I found a deep resonance with my own artistic ambitions, and profound reflections on the conditions that continue to shape the Australian arts. While Cast Mates may prove too dense or too niche for the casual reader, those on Twyford-Moore’s wavelength will find it superbly researched, fiendishly funny, and achingly astute, as entertaining as any of the cinematic outings it weaves into its exuberant journey.

History’s all about how you slice it, and Twyford-Moore has hit upon a winning formula: rather than committing to an indepth biography of a single actor or attempting to cram a nation’s cultural history into a single tome, he spotlights four pre-eminent Australian performers whose overlapping careers span a full century of cinema. Tracking their commonalities and contrasts, he paints a rich portrait of Australia’s relationship to its own cultural output in the process. These actors’ ‘lives – and migratory patterns – can trace the story of how a nation’s film industry was founded, then faltered and failed, before finding itself again’.

After a whip-smart prologue framed around Russell Crowe’s 2018 ‘The Art of Divorce’ Sotheby’s auction (which included ‘a dinosaur skull … traded, over vodka … with Leonardo DiCaprio’), Cast Mates kicks off with Errol Flynn. Once revered but now rightly maligned by history, the Tasmanian Flynn may well have

‘served as [Americans’] introduction to the Australian accent’. As prolific an actor as he was a drinker, abuser, slaver, and ephebophile (he first laid eyes on his eighteen-year-old wife-to-be outside the courtroom where he was being tried for the statutory rape of another teenager), Flynn paralleled the cultural growing pains of Australia through his storied career (and sordid personal life); he was ‘an emblem not necessarily of great classical acting, but the misdeeds of a young nation’.

From here, Twyford-Moore turns to the infinitely more palatable (and talented) Peter Finch, whose posthumous Oscar for 1976’s Network and famous ‘mad as hell’ line delivery belie a fascinating career that spanned mediums and continents. Finch went from co-founding Australia’s own Mercury Theatre to having fiery encounters with the likes of Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh, and Elizabeth Taylor. He worked abroad during the driest spell in Australian cinema (‘just 25 films were made in the 1950s’), following a precedent many actors still adhere to. In the words of director Ken G. Hall, to leave Australia then ‘come back with American experience … greatly enhanced your stocks and market value’.

Next is David Gulpilil, the legendary Yolŋu actor who broke out internationally in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) before returning to work as a stockman in Arnhem Land, waiting many years for the industry to catch up with him. Twyford-Moore rightly assesses that ‘the story of Australian cinema has always been one about who exactly gets to make movies’ – but it is also one shaped by close calls and missed opportunity. Cast Mates contains as many tantalising alternative histories as it does real ones. Some are the stuff of pub trivia fever dreams – like Nicole Kidman and Paul Hogan nearly co-starring in Ghost – while others represent ‘stinging losses’, such as Gulpilil’s unrealised dream project, the cowboy epic Billy West and Lightning Thunderboy. One can only imagine what Gulpilil’s career, and Australian cinema by extension, might have looked like if Billy West had been the country’s breakout hit of the 1980s instead of Crocodile Dundee (1986), ostensibly made through ‘juicy tax concessions’ legislated only months after Billy West’s funding collapsed. Instead, we are left with actual history; Hogan snaps up properties in Malibu while Gulpilil, his Crocodile Dundee co-star, is rendered ‘practically homeless’. (The book’s extended detour into Hogan’s career is a bitter pill indeed; he is no Errol Flynn, but he’s no ally, either.)

Lastly there is Nicole Kidman, who brings Twyford-Moore’s history from the 1980s, through the heightened excesses of the millennium, and into the present day, where our finest actors have turned to television and the ghosts of silver screen titans haunt the content libraries of streaming services. Twyford-Moore reflects on Kidman and Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) as the cumulative endgame of a century of national cinema, in both its casting (‘an Australian New Wave answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’) and its marketing (‘film and tourism campaign together in one package’). Twyford-Moore is fully clued into the damning paradox at the heart of moviemaking: it is as much ‘soft diplomacy’ as cultural expression. But in its elegiac closing stretch, Cast Mates imagines an Australian cinema freed from its ‘servitude to the American film industry’; one designed not merely to ‘sell an idea of Australia to the world’, but one that might help us better understand ourselves. g

Piano lessons

The judges strut their stuff

Malcolm Gillies

At last, ‘The Sydney’ is back. Not since 2016 has the city given a live welcome to one of its most distinctive artistic events: the Sydney International Piano Competition. After frustrating years of virtual activity, planning insecurity, and structural rethinking, Piano-Plus (Piano+) has emerged as the umbrella body for presenting a wide range of competition, festival, touring, and educational activities. As its chair, Virginia Braden, said at the Opening Gala on 5 July, under these new auspices there will be musical opportunities ‘for everyone, young and old’. But the Competition remains its central feature.

Over the ensuing fortnight, thirty-two contestants would pass through solo, chamber music, and concerto tests in pursuit of two dozen well-endowed prizes worth nearly a quarter of a million dollars. They all hoped to carry off the Ernest Hutcheson First Prize, or, perhaps, to win over audiences’ ears and thereby gain the Rex Hobcroft People’s Choice award.

The Gala, however, was not about this year’s competitors. It placed the jurors on stage, as they publicly strutted their pianistic credentials before taking the vow of silence expected of any impartial judge. The Gala, presented at the Sydney Conservatorium, also gave them the chance to test out some of the instruments, acoustics, and (not to forget) audiences that the competitors will be confronting in the coming weeks.

Now, pianists have a particular challenge that competitions only sharpen. Unlike at flute or violin competitions, piano contestants are not allowed to bring their own instrument. So which make or model will they be allowed to, or want to, play from among the Competition’s three approved providers: Steinway, Kawai, or Fazioli? After much thought, a rigorous system has been developed so that competitors will need to perform, at some stage of the Competition, on each provider’s instruments. But what about the jurors in their own Gala performances?

Well, the pianos were in direct competition at the Gala, with piano switches occurring between nearly all items.The evening began with Kawai’s Shigeru, ended with a Fazioli, and more daringly paired the magnificent Fazioli with a Steinway in the evening’s only two-piano work. To my hearing, it was more a Fazioli and Kawai night than a Steinway. But I am sure audience members, as well as the piano firms, will be carefully mapping the complex matrix of repertory, piano make, competitor, and different hall acoustics.

This rather long Gala gave the seven jurors the chance to craft a truly varied program, eschewing the more trivial processions of over-practised encores that often dominate a festival’s gala night. Over its couple of hours, we really could glimpse the very different musical personalities behind the steely technique or confident interpretations.

Several of the jurors played pieces with which they have a personal connection. These items provided the more introspective corners of the evening, because of the pianist’s unique insights. Xiaohan Wang exquisitely performed two of his own

Impromptus, inspired by two leading Chinese visual artists of the seventeenth century. Uta Weyand played a delightful neoromantic Sonatine pour Yvette (1962) by one of her own mentors, the Spanish-Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge. And Tanya Bannister chose as her item Leoš Janáček’s four-movement In the Mists (1912), which, as her website shows, has perhaps become her signature work.

This same depth of personal insight emerged clearly, but just a little less cleanly, in the performance of the Romance and Tarantella movements of Rachmaninoff’s Op. 17 two-piano Suite by Competition artistic director Piers Lane and Kathryn Stott. This Suite closely resonates with his Op. 18, the famous Second Piano Concerto. (The First Concerto is one of the Competition’s set pieces.)

Then there were the more avowedly iconoclastic performances, placed strategically at the main crossroads of the Gala’s program. It is a telling statement of our times that these cornerstone works were performed by two pianists born in the Soviet Union (Alexander Gavrylyuk in Ukraine; Konstantin Shamray in Russia), but now both living in Australia.

Gavrylyuk was the evening’s final actor, presenting Rachmaninoff’s ever-popular Vocalise, in a sparkling arrangement by the late Zoltán Kocsis but in a somewhat more mellow mood than Kocsis himself played it. The following Tarantella, from Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli, was powerfully presented, never pulling back from the devilish – even rough and relentless – texture, that in its day made people wonder how many fingers or hands Liszt actually did have. It was a rousing culmination to the evening, and the audience loved it.

At the other end of the evening, Shamray had opened proceedings with two short Rameau pieces, demonstrating his superb filigree fingering, before launching into the Gala’s most intense demonstration of keyboard musicianship, Scriabin’s Seventh Piano Sonata, the ‘White Mass’, at which even Scriabin specialists sometimes blanch. Its single movement calls for not just a consummate level of pianistic technique but also a consistent intuiting of the mystical meanings within Scriabin’s craggy sonata. Under Shamray’s strong fingers and subtle pedalling, the Shigeru Kawai rose magnificently to the occasion.

Shamray’s lighter musicianship was called upon in the five-minute ‘encore piece’, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Figaro Concert Rhapsodie (after Rossini), which signalled the end of the Gala’s first half. Presented alongside Sydney violinist Andrew Haveron, it was very much an equal duo, rather than, as sometimes, a piece for violin with piano accompaniment.

This is the same Shamray who, fifteen years ago, won the Sydney Competition, and, uniquely among Competition winners, also gained the People’s Choice award. Yes, competitions such as ‘The Sydney’ do help to make the careers of the maestros of the future, though do spare a thought for those whose aspirations are not affirmed by such gruelling contests. g

Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist and emeritus professor at ANU.

The 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition Opening Gala took place at the Sydney Conservatorium on 5 July 2023.

Party time

Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dalí

were very different. Her vivid first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), is the story of Valerie Solanas, radical feminist and aspiring playwright, who shot Warhol. Dalí and Warhol knew each other, and, as it happens, there is a crossover moment in Harron’s Warhol film, in which Andy mumbles to Solanas that he can’t stop and talk to her, because he is going to a party that Dalí is throwing at the St Regis hotel.

Dalíland – written by Harron’s husband, John C. Walsh – is in some ways a generous vision of its subject, even as it acknowledges his declining reputation, his taste for distraction, his cupidity, his gift for and vulnerability to manipulation, not to mention the more brutal and abusive aspects of his tormented relationship with Gala.

The central performances are strong. Kingsley, as Dalí, highlights frailty as well as excess; it is a precisely observed rather than extravagant interpretation. As Gala, Sukowa (who began her career in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder), brings a contrasting energy, an explosive abruptness and volatility: brief, spiky outbursts of rage, handing out slaps and throwing objects, as well as disconcerting moments of tenderness or reflection.

In January 1957, Salvador Dalí appeared on US television in What’s My Line, a game show featuring a segment in which blindfolded panellists tried to work out the identity of a mystery guest by asking only yes-no questions. Dalí did not make it easy for the panel or the host: he answered ‘yes’every time, not only to ‘Are you a performer?’ and ‘Would you be considered a leading man?’ but also to ‘Do you have anything to do with sports?’ In his mind, he was famous for absolutely anything and everything.

This footage is incorporated into the opening scene of Mary Harron’s Dalíland, a film about the artist’s life that focuses on a chaotic period in the mid-1970s. It’s a neat way to introduce the notion of the artist as celebrity, as self-mythologiser, as ‘a misleading man’, as one of the panellists suggests. The original footage is shown, then images of Ben Kingsley, who plays the older Dalí, are artfully inserted into it.

This footage is part of a news report on the artist. It is 1985, and a young man is watching television and remembering. We are then taken back to New York in 1974, when this young man, James Linton (Christopher Briney), newly employed as an art gallery assistant, is dispatched to deliver a large sum of money to the artist at the New York hotel where he has been spending several months every year since 1949.

‘Welcome to Dalíland,’ says Dalí’s secretary, Captain Peter Moore (Rupert Graves), as he opens a hotel room door onto a scene of the artist holding court in a room full of the beautiful, the elegant, the young, and the extravagantly dressed. This is his first glimpse of twenty-four-hour party people, Dalí-style.

For the wide-eyed James, ‘Dalíland’ is not exactly Wonderland, although it has a capricious queen at its centre: Dalí’s wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), who plays the role of a muse, mother, and monster. Dalí asks James to become his assistant: the gallery owner agrees, as long as James focuses on making sure that Dalí produces work in time for the opening of his show, three weeks away.

Harron has explored a legendary figure of the art world at a moment of crisis before, although the outcome and emphasis

Dalí and Gala, seventy and eighty respectively, both have an appetite for youth and beauty that affects them in different ways. Gala, who had taken lovers throughout the marriage, had become besotted with Jeff Fenholt (Zachary Nachbar-Seckel), a young singer who was appearing in Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway. She is spending a fortune on him, partly in the belief that he has an extraordinary career ahead of him. ‘His songs will change the world,’ she says confidently; it’s as if she has found her new muse project. This infatuation irks and distresses Dalí, but she is still available to manage him when she’s needed, subject to negotiation.

The film also seeks to show us, in somewhat awkward fashion, Dalí and Gala in the bloom of their youth: their first meeting; the time when Dalí painted a key work; and a moment when Dalí realised, as he tells James, that he had found his other half. In these scenes of flashback recollection, as described by Dalí, the younger pair are played by Ezra Miller and Avital Lvova.

Unfortunately, these brief diversions are heavy-handed; worst of all is a literally cheesy scene in which Dalí is inspired to paint what is presumably his 1931 The Persistence of Memory, as implied by point-of-view shots of a melting camembert and a wall clock. There are no actual examples of Dalí’s work in the film, but this is not the way to manage its absence or suggest its presence.

The figure of James also weighs heavily on the film, despite his insubstantial nature. Unlike many of the characters who appear, often fleetingly, in Dalíland, James is fictional. A composite, perhaps, of handsome young men who were in the Dalí orbit. He starts out as a naïve, non-judgemental enthusiast, but functions as a narrative device, a figure whose curiosity and straightforward questions, as well as his gradual disillusionment, are a means to channel information or interpretation to the viewer. Ultimately, this dilutes rather than heightens Dalíland; as people confide in him or explain themselves or Dalí or Gala to him, we somehow end up with less rather than more. g

Philippa Hawker is a film and arts writer. She is working on a book about French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud.

Philippa Hawker

Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dalí (photograph courtesy of Kismet).

Etched with feeling

A luminous Rembrandt exhibition at the NGV

Roger Benjamin

Unlike his compatriot Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn was never forgotten. Like a Beethoven of visual art, he has always been a beacon and has always inspired later artists. Famous for his biblical storytelling on a symphonic scale, he was also a supreme portraitist and master of the self-portrait in oils (he made more than forty). Public familiarity with Rembrandt’s oeuvre in the centuries before photography came from his unmatched mastery of the artist’s print. Just as Albrecht Dürer took copper-plate engraving to unequalled heights, so did Rembrandt in the new medium of etching, which allowed free fine-line drawing and the most subtle plays of shadow and light.

As with Dürer, the National Gallery of Victoria holds a comprehensive collection of Rembrandt’s graphic work, and about once in a generation the public gets to enjoy it in full. In 1891, the embryonic NGV had the foresight to buy eleven major prints from a British connoisseur. Fifty-three etchings arrived in one fell swoop in 1933, bought from the remarkable Australian peintre-graveur Lionel Lindsay, a devotee of Rembrandt.

For children of the digital and televisual age, the fascination of traditional artworks is, as the late Betty Churcher said, ‘that they do not move, they are unchanging’. There is something miraculous about the way a story unfolds in a Rembrandt sheet when viewed from twenty centimetres away. I spent two hours in the Rembrandt – True to Life exhibition (closing 10 September), but so did many others. The exhibition’s very installation produces a euphoric feeling of Gezelligheid – the untranslatable Dutch word that evokes the warmth of familiarity and fellow-feeling that animates Rembrandt’s art.

Curator Dr Petra Kayser has had the walls and ceilings of the several galleries painted a dark brown. The effect of this ‘black cube’ aesthetic (as opposed to the ‘white cube’ of twentieth-century fame) is to promote concentrated looking. Light is low (for works on paper), but adjustable rectangular spotlights are used, giving accuracy to the edge of the paper. It leads to an intensification of looking, to a focus upon the image.

This is in complete contrast to the much-criticised installation that poor Bonnard’s ghost endures across the NGV’s great court. In Pierre Bonnard, designed by India Mahdavi (sic) the décor of giant screens – patterned with digital splodges in colours borrowed from Brunetti’s gelato bar – has the opposite effect. These vast expanses of bright pattern leach attention from the images; they scatter and disperse the gaze. It is the opposite of an ‘immersive’ experience (in spite of the superb collection of Bonnard’s works assembled). As if the painter alone were not enough, giving billing to a decorator seems an insult. The NGV has apparently forgotten the farce of 1993 that was its Shell Presents Van Gogh (sic), which garnered international ridicule for allowing the sponsor’s grandstanding.

Picasso (who was obsessed by Rembrandt) said to Paul Klee in 1937, ‘you are the master of the small, and I of the large’. Rembrandt mastered both, from the stamp-sized self-portrait etchings of his youth to his powerful oil The Mill, lent from Washington. Through the admirable wall panels written by Kayser, we learn much of the mysteries of Rembrandt’s printmaking, how he improvised new technical solutions in etching and drypoint. The NGV’s compendious holdings allow Kayser to display paired ‘states’ of several prints, such as The Three Crosses: one brightly geometric, its successor cast in sombre deep shadow. Rembrandt inherited the game of luminous contrasts from Caravaggio, but here he makes it a vehicle for tragic feeling.

There has never been a more penetrating portraitist. The poet Huygens, visiting the studio of the twenty-two-year-old, marvelled that ‘a youth, a Dutchman, a beardless miller, could put so much in one human figure and depict it all!’ Rembrandt was always a champion of the older person, and of the common folk whom he ennobled rather than excluded.

In one respect this Rembrandt exhibition is unique: it features a room with three large vitrines that embody the ‘Kunst Caemer’ or cabinet of curiosities that Rembrandt assembled during the halcyon years of his success in Amsterdam, then a great mercantile and colonial capital. Using the inventory of Rembrandt’s household (made for his sorry bankruptcy case in 1656), Kayser has assembled ‘animals, shells, corals, exotic textiles, Chinese porcelain, Indian Mughal miniatures, Turkish weaponry, helmets, glassware, busts of Greek philosophers … medals and books’. A treat for the eyes and mind, these objects connect the twentyfirst-century viewer to Rembrandt’s world in vivid material ways.

The accompanying catalogue, Rembrandt: True to Life (edited by Petra Kayser, NGV Books, $59.95, 258 pp), is a beautiful book. It perfectly marries information and imagery, is easily navigated, and is graced with essays by eight experts from the Netherlands and Germany, as well as four NGV specialists. The book’s footnotes are sprinkled with recent publications in four or five languages, so we can be sure Rembrandt – True to Life brings the very latest in scholarship (including, in Laurie Benson’s essay, on our two great oil paintings, Two Old Men Disputing and Portrait of a White-haired Man). Etching is beautifully served here by fine reproductions, with numerous double-page, close-up spreads, and the Hundred Guilder Print as a frontispiece. The NGV has not stinted in supporting this magnificent album of its collections. The book is a serious contribution to scholarship, and a triumph of dissemination: the NGV working at its very best. g

Self-portrait in a cap, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, 1630 by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

From the Archive

In 1998, Helen Daniel was the Editor of ABR when Peter Rose released his third poetry collection, Donatello in Wangaratta. In the November issue of ABR it was reviewed – closely, keenly – by Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk under the title ‘Wangaratta’s Cavafy’. Indyk saw poems marked by paradox, incongruity, theatricality, impossibility, a tension of the kind anyone familiar with both Donatello and Wangaratta might feel on encountering the collection’s title. Hesitancy and doubt produce constant movement: ‘self-conscious artifice’ becomes ‘a form of embellishment which questions the very value of what it seeks to express’.

Don Anderson’s description of Peter Rose’s previous collection as having a fin de siècle mood to it, is surely appropriate to his new collection too. There is an air of decadence to Rose’s poetry, but while this may have much larger social implications – it is the end of the century after all – the decadence seems to me to have a more definite testament to offer. Rose’s is a starkly personal vision – focused on the emotional and moral failure of individuals rather than on the failure of the culture as a whole.

Nevertheless, his view of things is highly theatrical. Typically, his landscapes combine elements of desire and romance with those of violence or death. They gesture with an intensity that tends towards allegory, providing suitably evocative settings for his emotional dramas, while at the same time presenting those settings, and the emotions they embody, as staged, enacted, highly wrought and – to that extent – false. Certainly, the sense is there, of deceit or detachment in even the most intimate and romantic situations –

Last night I wandered in these rooms, found two vases of gorgeous blooms, weighting the console where you left them, leafing the strangeness where you set them, you whom I never believed …

The scene may be a bar, or a railway carriage, or a hotel room, expressing the transience of the romantic encounter, its moment of passing or recrimination. In ‘Arguments of Rain’, the setting is the garden of a block of flats, garnished with sodden blossoms and a dead possum, where a lesbian couple remonstrate with each other in the death throes of their relationship while, in a flat looking down upon ‘the horrible comedy’, the poet and his lover, ‘aggressively naked’, ‘listen in silent sympathy / befitting our first night, first morning’. The poem is very clear, that the end of their own relationship is implicit at its beginning. In each of these instances the relationship – anticipated, regretted, or resented – is a homosexual one. The sense of decadence in Rose’s poetry really has its source here, in the ambivalences, the evasions, which complicate homosexual desire, rather than in the decline of civilisation, though it might take that prospect as one of its settings. What strikes one most in Rose’s presentation of these relationships is their impermanence, the mixture in them of longing, betrayal, opportunism, and loneliness. There are, of course, moments of sublimity too, no less theatrical in their framing, as in ‘Aubade’, which begins, ‘And I felt something of that old breeze / sloping through aquatints of morning / wielding comb-like implements of dawn’, and then settles on the figure of a house

painter, ‘loping through silken depths of morning, / aware of part of himself, choric and unattainable’. Here, the very fact of distance, of the unattainable, or unretainable, aspects of desire, is given a spiritual dimension. But there’s usually, even in such moments, some element of self-chastening, or worse. Against the sunrise of ‘Aubade’ we might put the sunset of ‘Sitting Ducks’, ‘Glamorously the sun disappears, / though we expect more, always, / and copious moons to filigree doubt, / doubt that haunts like a mohair self.’ Not quite a hairshirt, but close.

This doubt inhabits Rose’s theatricality too, for in its selfconscious artifice, it is essentially decorous, a form of embellishment which questions the very value of what it seeks to express. There’s a similar point to be made about his use of metaphor and emblem, which often, in quite a deliberate way, denies the integrity of the object that is to act as a metaphor in order to make it stand for something wilful or wayward or purely negative in its connotations. In ‘James Merrill’, the poet finds himself somewhat put off by the idea of death. Searching the street for ‘consequence’ – that is, something that might stand as significant in the face of death – he lights on a group of Jewish students ‘pristine for the first day of school’, waiting for their bus. He looks at them and he sees a funeral, which is a grim way of looking at a gathering of schoolchildren, whether they are Jewish or not. But the poet, having offloaded his gloom into his metaphor, feels happy again. ‘I orbit the flat, itinerant as light.’ One is left to wonder what other denials this persona has had to perform in order to remain ‘itinerant as light’.

Rose can be scathing in his character portraits, though it’s always by implication, in the tone of voice, the choice of image, the setting of the scene, so that you find yourself immersed in a point of view that you find more and more uncomfortable – somewhat in the manner of Robert Browning’s creepier monologues. Except that in Rose’s case the portrait is more likely to be of one who presents himself as a victim rather than a perpetrator, a figure who is deceptively torpid in a self-interested way, languid and yet avid, regretting disloyalty but inconstant himself, determined to keep up an elegant front, though constantly reminded of his own lack of worth. In ‘Georgian Dream’, he is someone who, when accused of promiscuity, ‘regrets only the manner of his syntax’. In ‘Domestic’, he is an isolate who finds refuge from the ‘mortal terror’ which has dogged him from childhood, in ‘halva and a good book’. He is an aesthete, in other words, one who savours sensation but refuses the responsibility it might bring in its train. What Peter Rose does in his poetry is use the aesthete’s means to explore the aesthete’s moral limitations, and none more persistently, than the refusal of responsibility. g

ABR ’s unique critical archive

1978 Sara Dowse reviews Anne Deveson’s Australians at Risk

1979 John McLaren reviews Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair

1980 Rosemary Creswell reviews Shirley Hazzard ’ s The Transit of Venus

1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite

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

1983 Leonie Kramer reviews Ken Inglis’s This Is the ABC

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

1985 Laurie Clancy reviews Peter Carey’s Illywhacker

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

1987 Elizabeth Jolley reviews Glenda Adams’s Dancing on Coral

1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History

1989 Paul Carter on the speeches of Patrick White

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

1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism

1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley

1993 Hazel Rowley reviews Ruth Park’s Fishing in the Styx

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

1995 Bernard Smith reviews Joan Kerr’s Heritage

1996 Peter Steele on Dorothy Porter’s Crete

1997 Geoffrey Blainey reviews Grace Karskens’s The Rocks

1998 Ivor Indyk reviews Peter Rose’s Donatello in Wangaratta

1999 Peter Craven reviews Peter Porter’s Collected Poems

2000 Chris Wallace-Crabbe – an obituary for A.D. Hope

2001 Martin Duwell reviews Gwen Harwood’s Selected Poems

2002 Neal Blewett reviews Bob Ellis’s Goodbye Babylon

2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers

2004 Peter Porter’s essay ‘ The Observed of All Observers’

2005 Mary Eagle on Grace Cossington Smith

2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

2007 Brian Matthews on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht

2008 James Ley reviews Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap

2009 Brenda Niall reviews Peter Conrad’s Islands

2010 Brigitta Olubas on Shirley Hazzard

2011 Margaret Harris on rediscovering Christina Stead

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

2013 Helen Ennis on Olive Cotton

2014 Lisa Gorton reviews David Malouf’s Earth Hour

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

2016 Alan Atkinson on the Australian national conscience

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

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

2019 Peter Rose reviews Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook

2020 Jenny Hocking on the Palace Letters

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

2022 Kieran Pender on the Bernard Collaery case

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