Australian Book Review, April 2019, issue no. 410 by Australian Book Review

Porter Prize

A capacity audience gathered at fortyfivedownstairs on March 18 for the announcement of the fifteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of the country’s leading awards for a new poem. First, there were readings of poems by Peter Porter. Peter Rose read Behrouz Boochani’s poem ‘Flight from Manus’, which has made such an impression on readers since its publication in the March issue. This seemed germane in the light of the appalling events in Christchurch three days earlier – another example of the consequences of the intolerance, xenophobia, and rancorous polemics that have stranded Mr Boochani and many others on Manus Island and Nauru. Judith Bishop, dual winner of the Porter Prize, spoke on behalf of her fellow judges, John Hawke and Paul Kane. She began by quoting Emily Dickinson: ‘If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ Judith went on: ‘I would like to send my deep thanks to all the poets for their commitment to this art and their desire to share their work with us. The poems I read covered an encyclopedic range of human experience. There were, of course, themes and emotions which recurred. There was anger, sadness, depression, death, violence, and violation. There was a lot of pain, and I want to acknowledge the extraordinary courage and strength that it takes to make poetry

out of pain. The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has touched a chord in many lives, and that was evident in some poems, as was the #MeToo movement and the expression of suffering, injustice, and rage

2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize joint winners Andy Kissane and Belle Ling at fortyfivedownstairs

that underlies it. To decide the winner among these poems was an unenviable task. We didn’t know, until we had made our decision, who any of the poets were. The decision came down to what moved us furthest, what took us to a place we hadn’t been before in poetry – what, in a word, took the top of our heads off.’ Morag Fraser (Peter Porter’s biographer and principal supporter of this Prize) then named the two winners, whom the judges couldn’t split: Andy Kissane for ‘Searching the Dead’ and Belle Ling for ‘63 Temple Street, Mong Kok’. Each poet receives

$3,500, plus an etching by Arthur Boyd. Belle Ling, a Creative Writing PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, is the second Hong Kong Chinese to win the Porter, following Nicholas Wong in 2018. Belle, who flew in from China to attend the ceremony, commented: ‘Winning the Porter Prize gives me confidence in transcending the pristine English boundaries in order to tap into the creative potentials of my own cultural background. Thank you, ABR, for such a precious opportunity.’ Andy Kissane, based in Sydney, remarked: ‘I am honoured to be a joint winner. Although writing is a mostly individual and at times lonely practice, I’m very grateful for ABR’s ongoing support of poetry, which reminds me of the communal nature of art – a value that Peter Porter’s work definitely celebrated.’ Congratulations to all five featured poets.

ABR in Germany

After the success of its sold-out tour in 2018, ABR will head back to Germany in 2020 for its next tour in association with Academy Travel. This time we’ll venture to western Germany, followed by four days in Amsterdam. Highlights include some of Europe’s greatest art collections. In Germany, we visit the Städel Museum in Frankfurt and the Hamburg Kunsthalle as well as collections in Cologne, Bonn, and Düsseldorf. In [Advances continues on page 7] A D VA N C E S

THANKING OUR PARTNERS Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

2 APRIL 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

April 2019

Barney Zwartz Sheila Fitzpatrick Russell Blackford Alecia Simmonds Paul Giles Francesca Sasnaitis Alison Broinowski

Letters

Tony Kevin, John Lowe, Clythe Greenwood, Jo van Kool

38 40 41 42 43 49

Photography

Vanessa Finney: Capturing Nature Philip Jones 13

History

Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster: A History of South Australia Kerryn Goldsworthy Michelle Arrow: The Seventies Zora Simic Kate Legge: Kindred Jarrod Hore Joy Lisi Rankin: A People’s History of Computing in the United States Josh Specht

Deceit and malice in the Vatican Stalin as the master of epistolary admonition The desolation of smug MAFS’ chamber of horrors The original version of Gerald Murnane’s second novel Andrea Goldsmith’s new novel Harmonious or conflicted nation

8 11 17 24 36 39 48

16 21 50

45 56 59

Society & Media

51 52

Literary Studies

Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm (eds): Beyond the Ancient Quarrel Tim Mehigan 26

Politics

Fiona Gruber Lee Christofis Alison Stieven-Taylor Maxim Boon Michael Halliwell

Theatre

Daniel Rosenthal (ed.): Dramatic Exchanges Ian Dickson

Biography & Memoir

Carolyn Rasmussen: The Blackburns Jacqueline Kent Stanley Corngold: Walter Kaufmann Lewis Rosenberg Caro Llewellyn: Diving into Glass Astrid Edwards

Poetry

Louise Swinn (ed.): Choice Words Suzy Freeman-Greene 20 Jason Farman: Delayed Response Alex Tighe 28

Eric Kaufmann: Whiteshift Simon Tormey Ferdinand Mount: Prime Movers Glyn Davis Dominic Kelly: Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics Greg Barns: Rise of the Right Andrew Broertjes Benjamin T. Jones, Frank Bongiorno, and John Uhr (eds): Elections Matter Lyndon Megarrity

Fiction

Peggy Frew: Islands Bronwyn Lea Carol Lefevre: The Happiness Glass Susan Varga Simon Cleary: The War Artist Robin Gerster Miriam Sved: A Universe of Sufficient Size Naama Grey-Smith Alice Robinson: The Glad Shout Jane Rawson Leah Kaminsky: The Hollow Bones Jacinta Mulders

55 57

29 30

Alison Whittaker: Blakwork Leni Shilton: Walking with Camels Jen Webb Jenny Bornholdt: Short Poems of New Zealand Joan Fleming

Religion

Paul Ham: New Jerusalem Paul Collins

Poem

Bronwyn Lea

Interviews

Publisher of the Month: Meredith Curnow

From the Archive

Tara June Winch: Swallow the Air Thuy On

Arts 62 63 64 66 67

Arbus & West Two Feet Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective A View from the Bridge Salome CONTENTS

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Australian Book Review | April 2019, no. 410 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing

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This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program. 6 APRIL 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the Netherlands, the tour includes the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Along the way there will be opera and music – and the usual ABR conviviality. Christopher Menz, former art gallery director and curator and a seasoned leader of European tours, will guide this fourteen-day tour (16–29 September 2020). We advertise the tour on page 15, and the itinerary is now available.

Daisy Utemorrah Award

In this prize-happy country, some of

the worthiest (if not most lucrative) literary awards are for unpublished manuscripts. There is a new one from Magabala Books: the Daisy Utemorrah Award for an outstanding fiction manuscript in the junior and Young Adult categories (including graphic novels). The Award honours the late Ngarinyin Wunambal elder and author Daisy Utemorrah. Entrants must be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander persons. The winner will receive $15,000 and, better still, a publishing contract with Magabala Books. Applications close on April 30. See their website for more information and application guidelines.

Clunes Booktown Festival

The Clunes Booktown Festival has released its 2019 program. The Festival runs on May 4 and 5. Two dozen writers will tackle subjects ranging from climate change and feminism to podcasts and social media. They include Peter Mares, Alice Pung, Robbie Arnott, and Andrea Goldsmith, whose new novel, Invented Lives, is reviewed by Francesca Sasnaitis on page 39. Peter Rose will take part in three sessions, including conversations with John Arnold about ABR and book reviewing, and one with George Megalogenis about AFL!

Letters Putin’s preference

Dear Editor, I enjoyed this review. I would have liked Jeff Sparrow and Russell Blackford, the reviewer of Sparrow’s interesting book Trigger Warnings, to have explored the question of why the Russian political mainstream (that overwhelmingly supports Putin’s elected presidency of Russia) feels more comfortable with the American republican pro-Trump bluecollar right than with the anti-Trump Democrat middle-class liberal left. A viewing of Stephen Colbert’s sarcastic and condescending interview with Oliver Stone on Stone’s ‘Putin Interviews’ television series, when Colbert literally sooled a mocking studio audience onto Stone, will give clues – as will any of Rachel Maddow’s many malevolent diatribes on TV against Russia. Tony Kevin, Gordon, ACT

Australia on his mind

Dear Editor, Congratulations to Text Publishing for adding D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo to its Classics series of iconic Australian books. It reprints the original Martin Secker edition of 1923: apparently, the definitive Cambridge text was unavailable. There is a new introduction by Nicolas Rothwell. He

celebrates the novel for its unprecedented insight into the appearance and atmosphere of the Australian landscape, an achievement too often overlooked. There are, however, two other issues. Rothwell says: ‘Australia was a way-stage for the Lawrences on their long round-the-world journey, nothing more: the destination of the first ship they could find leaving Colombo port.’ However, on the ship from Italy, Lawrence had written, ‘If we don’t want to go on living in Ceylon I shall go to Australia if we can manage it.’ In subsequent letters he confirmed this, using the words ‘probably’ and ‘shall’. In his book D.H. Lawrence’s Australia, David Game meticulously documents Lawrence’s strong interest in the country, which went back to 1907. Australia was very much on his mind. Rothwell addresses the issue of Lawrence’s knowledge of the existing political background, but cites only Robert Darroch. There certainly were similarities between actual organisations and events in New South Wales and those in Kangaroo, but from them Darroch built an edifice of speculation that the major Australian characters were based on real persons whom Lawrence had encountered. Darroch’s earliest book was the first to appear on

the subject, and has been accepted in many quarters as authoritative, overshadowing Joseph Davis’s subsequent D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul. Davis states that one must be ‘extremely cautious’ in considering Lawrence’s possible sources, which ‘mount at an exponential rate’. He mentions several possibilities, concluding that they remain a mystery. John Lowe, Ormond, Vic.

Behrouz Boochani

Dear Editor, This man makes music with words, a symphony from the heart. Clythe Greenwood (online comment) Dear Editor, This is beautiful. Says so much. Omid Tofighian’s translation makes it ring too. Thank you, both of you. Jo van Kool (online comment)

Corrections

In the March issue, Joshua Jackson, not Julian Jackson, was incorrectly listed as the author of A Certain Idea of France: The life of Charles de Gaulle; Michael McGirr’s review of Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall’s A New History of the Irish in Australia had Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hall in conversation in 1832, instead of 1932. LET TERS

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘Fifty shades of gay’

Deceit and malice in the homophilic, homophobic Vatican

Barney Zwartz IN THE CLOSET OF THE VATICAN: POWER, HOMOSEXUALITY, HYPOCRISY by Frédéric Martel Bloomsbury, $34.99 pb, 570 pp, 9781472966247

lmost from the day Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis in 2013, he began denouncing fake devotees, whited sepulchres, and hypocrites at the Vatican. His targets, as Frédéric Martel makes clear, are the high-ranking clergy who vehemently condemn homosexuality while themselves often living the most lurid form of it, with rent boys, prostitutes, and sex parties. ‘Behind rigidity,’ Francis says, ‘something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life.’ This, Martel claims, is disquietingly common, with some eighty per cent of the College of Cardinals gay and most of them sexually active. The two popes most obsessed with crusading against homosexuality, John Paul II “(1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (2005–13), were the most surrounded by prelates leading a homosexual double life. ‘Reality goes beyond fiction,’ a friar tells the author. For example, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, one of the Vatican’s highest-ranked clerics, went around the world preaching so belligerently against gays that he was nicknamed ‘Coitus Interruptus’, but in the same cities he was cruising gay bars and picking up rent boys. Martel, a gay French journalist and researcher who has written many books on gay themes, has no issue with 8 APRIL 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Catholic clergy having an active sex life or breaking church rules. Like Francis, it is the hypocrisy he can’t abide. This is a remarkable book, the fruit apparently of four years of investigation in more than thirty countries, involving 1,500 interviews with forty-one cardinals, fifty-two bishops, forty-five nuncios (Vatican ambassadors), eleven Swiss Guards, and more than two hundred priests and seminarians, aided by some eighty local translators and journalists. An important caveat: although much of the material is on the public record, and Martel has tapes of conversations, the reader still has to take much on trust, something of a challenge given Martel’s tabloid approach. And most of the prelates he names – dozens – are dead or long retired; those still serving are given pseudonyms or nicknames. Of course, not every gay priest is promiscuous. Many have long-term, live-in partners, often a secretary or a ‘relative’, and some resist temptation entirely. Martel identifies five types: the ‘mad virgin’ who has chosen religion to avoid temptations of the flesh; the ‘infernal husband’ who is the most repressed yet also obsessed; the ‘queen of hearts’ who is likely to be in a long-term monogamous relationship; the ‘Don Juan’ who makes passes at everyone, especially seminarians and Swiss

Guards; and ‘La Mongolfiera’, the user of prostitution networks. I began this book expecting to be mildly entertained by a gossipy insider account of hypocrisy and sexual misbehaviour inside the Vatican, and the 570 pages are crammed with that. But I doubt anyone who believes much or most of Martel’s account – and I am persuaded it is mostly true – could finish it and not be enraged and disgusted by the hypocrisy, the sense of entitlement of so many prelates, the abuse of power, and the lack of concern for others. One theme that rings true is Martel’s answer to the question that has mystified, repelled, and offended so many Catholics and others: why is the Vatican so secretive, so obstructive, and so slow to act on clergy sexual abuse and paedophilia? His explanation is the most shocking imaginable: they do nothing for fear that their own double lives will be exposed. ‘Why do the cardinals say nothing? Why do they all close their eyes? Why was Pope Benedict XVI, who knew about many sexual scandals, never brought to justice? Why did Cardinal Bertone [Secretary of State, the Vatican Prime Minister], ruined by the attacks of Angelo Sodano [his predecessor], not bring out the files that he had about his enemy? Talking about others means that they may talk about you. That is the key to the omertà.’ Prelates protect paedophiles not because they are paedophiles themselves – most are not – but to avoid discovery of their own homosexuality. While Martel does not suggest that John Paul II or Benedict XVI were sexually active themselves – rather, they were ‘homophilic’ – their inner circles were at once the most homophobic yet homosexual papal entourages in history, which would be inconceivable without papal toleration. In John Paul II’s circle there were so many active homosexuals – ‘unimaginable levels of venality and corruption. Even around the holy father there was a veritable ring of lust,’ a Curia priest tells Martel. John Paul II, so heroic in standing against communism, surrounded himself with ‘plotters, thugs, and a majority of closeted homosexuals’ who crusaded against gays in public. When it comes to child sexual abuse among the clergy, this newly canonised saint was contemptible. First, he said it didn’t exist, then that it was a media beat-up, and then that it was purely an Anglophone problem. Such meagre compassion as he mustered was reserved for the offenders. Two top-level cardinals under John Paul II – nicknamed ‘Platinette’ after an Italian drag queen and ‘La Mongolfiera’ after the hot-air balloon inventor – regularly hosted foursomes with male prostitutes, while, at the second level of the papal inner ring, three bishops procured for cardinals. Benedict’s was said to be ‘the gayest pontificate in history’, ‘fifty shades of gay’. No pope has been so anti-gay, and no pope has so impotently witnessed such social momentum in favour of gay rights. By fighting the wrong battle – against homosexuality rather than REVIEW OF THE MONTH

paedophilia – Benedict lost the moral campaign. He was He is indeed, but not in the index: there isn’t one – damaged by the Vatileaks of 2012, and horrified by the a serious failure in such an ambitious book. Martel identifies Pell as a leader of the conservative 300-page report by three bishops who investigated the leaks. But what really crushed his spirit, according to faction at the Vatican, which is not as reactionary as the Martel, was a visit to Cuba where he was overwhelmed traditionalists led by Cardinal Raymond Burke because by the amount of sexual abuse and homosexual practice. it accepts the reforming Vatican II council of the 1960s. Pell is also prominent in a ‘Intransigent and shy, he long list of cardinals who had spent his whole life tryPrelates protect paedophiles not frustrate Pope Francis with ing to thwart evil, and here because they are paedophiles them- their inflexibility and hohe was literally surrounded, encircled by homosexual selves – most are not – but to avoid mophobia. Pell,known in the Vatican priests and cases of paedo- discovery of their own homosexuality as ‘Pell Pot’, has the courage philia.’ He decided to resign to speak on the record and barely a week after his reanswers Martel professionally, concisely and humorturn, though he took six months to announce it. Martel details numerous case studies. Let’s men- ously. ‘He is efficient; he knows his files and his music.’ tion three. First is Angelo Sodano, long John Paul II’s Pell acknowledges differences with Francis, but what secretary of state, an eminence noir ‘with a whiff of matters is that the church is united on faith and morsulphur’ whose past was blacker than his cassock. So- als; otherwise ‘let a hundred flowers blossom’ – not an dano was nuncio in Pinochet’s Chile, where he lived in attitude for which he was noted in Australia. But Pell conostentatious luxury, fervently supported the dictator, and cedes that he thinks Francis’s emphasis on ‘peripheries’ and probably even betrayed left-wing priests to the security his empathy for homosexuals are vain, if not erroneous. Francis is slowly tackling these problems by making forces. As John Paul II faded, Sodano became de facto pope. Still alive at ninety-one, he has taken over the the offenders retire, or emptying their jobs of all conluxurious penthouse at the Ethiopian College, to the tent, or removing their entourages and, most effectively, though slowly, appointing his own bishops and cardinals, Africans’ chagrin, and refuses to leave. Marcial Maciel of Mexico, Martel says, is probably more pastoral and less clerical. If the thrust of the book is depressing, there are the most diabolical figure the Catholic Church has raised over the past fifty years. Founder of the Legion pleasures along the way. Notable here is the gossip about of Christ, he carried out a sustained program of violence Chicago’s Cardinal Burke, first leader of the opposition against at least two hundred victims – dozens of chil- against Francis, and known in the Vatican as ‘the wicked dren, whom he liked blond and blue-eyed, and countless witch of the midwest’; also the ‘diva cardinal’ and the seminarians. Maciel was protected for decades by John ‘dandy cardinal’. Burke is another cardinal dedicated Paul II and Sodano because he brought in millions of to his own comfort; his bathroom (which Martel has dollars and thousands of seminarians fanatically devoted visited) boasts luxurious perfumed soaps arranged in Japanese style, and a three-sided mirror. He likes to be to the pope. Colombia’s Cardinal Trujillo, mentioned above, won spoken of in the feminine, as in ‘she works in her home’, Vatican attention fighting liberation theology and be- and wears intensely feminine clothing, such as the bilcame president of the Pontifical Council for the Family. lowing cappa magna, which can have a train up to twelve He also adored ostentation, demanding to be met on metres. Yet he denounces in the name of tradition the episcopal visits with a red carpet and a children’s choir church that has become ‘too feminised’. In this stance, (with freshly cut hair, no blacks). If some church valu- Martel says, he is sincere and iron-willed, a formidable able won his admiration, he would simply take it home. opponent, however ridiculous this seems. Despite the flashes of humour, the Vatican that Long associated with drug traffickers and paramilitaries, he is allegedly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Martel describes – of homosexual factions fighting other progressive priests and bishops. He travelled the world homosexual factions (‘score-settling’ is a prominent moarguing against using condoms to protect against tif throughout the book) but generally homophobic, the AIDS, but may have died of AIDS himself in 2008. constant gossip and politicking, the double lives, deceit, He had an apartment in Colombia to which he took a malice, loneliness, fear, and loss of integrity – is almost unbearably sad, and deeply repulsive. By the end, he has procession of male prostitutes and seminarians. What of Australia’s George Pell, recently sentenced provided an overwhelming case for the axiom he quotes, to six years in prison on five counts of sexual abuse attributed to Oscar Wilde: ‘Everything in the world is against choir boys in 1996–97? At the time of writing, about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.’ g Martel was aware of the trial but not of any details or that Pell would become the highest-ranking Catholic Barney Zwartz worked for The Age for more than convicted of such charges. Naturally, as soon as the book thirty-two years until the end of 2013, the last twelve arrived I went to the index to see if Pell is in the book. of them as religion editor. 10 AP RI L 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Something like affection Stalin as the master of intimacy and admonition

Sheila Fitzpatrick THE KREMLIN LETTERS: STALIN’S WARTIME CORRESPONDENCE WITH CHURCHILL AND ROOSEVELT edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Australian Book Review and the judges congratulate the joint winners of the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Yale University Press (Footprint), $62.99 hb, 676 pages, 9780300226829

oseph Stalin wanted this wartime correspondence published, and one can see why: he comes off best. As the authors comment, ‘the transcript of the Big Three meetings demonstrates Stalin’s careful mastery of the issues and his superior skill as a diplomatist, regularly keeping his silence but then speaking out in a terse and timely manner at key moments’. He is the one with his eye on the ball, always remembering what his main objectives are and keeping his correspondents off balance with his adroit switches between intimacy and admonition. Compared with him, Winston Churchill is impulsive and overemotional, and Franklin D. Roosevelt is lazy. The two Allied leaders were excited about the opportunity to ‘build a personal relationship with the hitherto reclusive Soviet leader’, while Stalin, pleased at being finally admitted to the A-league, looked forward to ‘the challenges of playing against (and with) his US and British interlocutors’. One way of reading the epistolary relationship is that Stalin, feigning a personal relationship because that’s what the others wanted, always remained a cold calculator of his nation’s interest. That’s the way Stalin himself surely liked to see it. But it may not be the whole truth. David Reynolds is a professor of international history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, while Vladimir Pechatnov works at the Russian State Institute of International Relations in Moscow (MGIMO). Their joint book – a fashionably monstrous size, too heavy to hold comfortably in one hand – constitutes a publication in full of the major part of the Stalin–Churchill–Roosevelt

correspondence from 1941 to 1945, showing alterations in successive drafts and accompanied by a detailed running commentary drawing on multi-archival research in the Russian Foreign Ministry and Presidential Archives, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park New York, the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and elsewhere. It builds on an earlier (1957) Soviet publication of the correspondence initiated by Stalin in 1950 with the aim of presenting the Soviet side of the story, notably the decisive military role played by the Soviets. Churchill, of course, pursued a similar aim on behalf of himself and the British with his six-volume memoir-history, The Second World War, published between 1948 and 1964. The long-running drama underlying this correspondence concerns Stalin’s persistent efforts to get the Western Allies to open a second front in France to take some of the heat off the Soviet Union, and Churchill’s attempts to stave him off with promises. Churchill was afraid of excessive casualties (something that rarely bothered Stalin), but he also had his own idée fixe about the advantages of a Mediterranean/Middle East alternative. On this issue, Churchill was the one prevaricating and on the defensive. The authors, like Stalin and Roosevelt, show signs of becoming ‘infuriated by his endless procrastination about “Overlord”, exacerbated in recent weeks [1943] by blatant deception’. The impression left by their commentary is that it would have been to the advantage of the whole war effort, not just Soviet interests, to have opened a second front in France long before the actual D-Day invasion in June 1944.

Belle Ling

Andy Kissane Belle Ling has just completed her Creative Writing PhD at the University of Queensland with a poetry collection. Andy Kissane has published a novel, a book of short stories, The Swarm, and four books of poetry. The Porter Prize this year was judged by Judith Bishop, John Hawke, and Paul Kane. ABR gratefully acknowledges the support of Morag Fraser AM and Ivan Durrant. To read the winning and shortlisted poems visit:

australianbookreview.com.au HISTORY

Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin in Yalta, 1945 (Department of Defense, US National Archives 531340, via Wikimedia Commons)

Ironically, however, it may be questioned in retrospect whether an earlier second front would in fact have served Soviet interests. Ivan Maisky, having lobbied mightily for a second front during his term as Soviet ambassador to Britain, wondered in his diary, after the turning point of Stalingrad, whether the Soviets might not be better off getting to Berlin first, with all the attendant glory and international prestige, than sharing the military victory in Europe. He had a point. It was, rather, the Red Army’s long solitary march through eastern Europe in 1943–45 – in other words, the absence of a second front – that put this region unarguably under Soviet control in the postwar settlement. Churchill would later claim that, ‘Stalin always kept his word with me.’ He was thinking particularly of Stalin’s postwar observance of Churchill’s notorious ‘naughty list’ allocating percentages of Soviet and Western influence in countries of Eastern and southern Europe. Up to a point, perhaps, but he also told Churchill some whoppers. On the Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers, for example, blamed by the Germans (correctly) on the Soviets 12 AP RI L 2019

and the Soviets (mendaciously) on the Germans. Stalin not only lied outright to Churchill but also waxed indignant about the ‘vile fascist calumny’ perpetrated by the London Poles against the Soviet Union. Churchill accounted for any inconsistencies in Stalin’s dealing with him with his theory of ‘two Stalins’, the one who personally liked him, and the other a prisoner of ‘dark forces’ in his Politburo. The Foreign Office was justly sceptical of this, as later historians have been, but Reynolds and Pechatnov do not make the mistake of therefore concluding that Stalin – unlike his Western colleagues – operated in a domestic vacuum. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister and effective No. 2 man in these years, is a vital presence in this account, which illustrates clearly the nuances of interpretation and approach between the two men shown in their respective editing and drafting of correspondence. Discussions on the location of the Big Three’s meetings in 1943 and 1945 provide a remarkable example of Stalin’s ability to get his own way when he dug his heels in. Tehran and Yalta were his choices, based largely on his personal

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

fear of flying, but also on his wish to have the Allied leaders come to him rather than the reverse. With regard to the Tehran meeting, Roosevelt – a sick man, whose polio-induced paralysis was compounded by the arteriosclerosis that would kill him in April 1945 – ‘tried all sorts of ploys to avoid travelling 6,000 miles to the Iranian capital – most of all touting the demands of the US constitution, which he chose to interpret very strictly, but also supposed pressure from his Cabinet’, though never mentioning his own physical infirmity. ‘Stalin simply turned these arguments back on the president – we also have a constitution, my colleagues are equally insistent – and also played his trump card: my war is bigger and more important than yours.’ It was Roosevelt who finally gave in (the meeting followed in November– December 1943). ‘While we are alive, there is nothing to fear. We will not allow dangerous disagreements,’ Stalin assured Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in February 1945. Churchill and Roosevelt may well have exaggerated the success of their own wartime personal diplomacy. On the other hand, as the authors point out, ‘at a basic level, the Big Three’s anti-Hitler coalition worked, whereas the Berlin− Rome–Tokyo Axis did not’. Stalin seems to have genuinely mourned Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, and he retained something like affection for Churchill, even after the latter’s Cold War speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. The three of them had become used to working together during the war, if not with total trust (an impossibility in foreign relations) then at least with a degree of confidence based on familiarity. With Roosevelt dead and Churchill out of power from mid-1945, that was lost – and it was a loss that perhaps exacerbated Stalin’s suspicious intractability towards the West in the postwar years. g Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent memoir is Mishka’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s (2017). On Stalin’s Team: the years of living dangerously in Soviet Politics, was published in 2015. She is a Professor at the University of Sydney.

Pioneering photography Images from the Australian Museum

Philip Jones CAPTURING NATURE: EARLY SCIENTIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY AT THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM 1857–1893 by Vanessa Finney

NewSouth/Australian Museum, $49.99 pb, 200 pp, 9781742236209

he photographic resources of itself a pioneer in integrating photo- British Museum’s use of photography museums and their archives graphic documentation into its docu- in London during 1858 and having have emerged as key sources for mentary practice. Other Australian mu- participated in the 1856–57 Blandowski studying the natural world and human seums were late adopters; partly through expedition to the Murray and Darling cultures, particularly as those studies lack of funding, but as Finney makes Rivers, one of the first Australian expehave widened to include the techniques clear, the personalities and abilities of ditions to deploy photography. and modus operandi of scientists and naturalist and curator Gerard Krefft Krefft was one of a cadre of influanthropologists themselves. Their and of preparator and photographer ential German scholars and scientists notebooks and field equipment, rang- Henry Barnes were decisive influences. working in Australian museums during ing from collecting jars to cameras, are Krefft joined the Australian Museum the nineteenth century. He was quick now routinely exhibited and published in 1861, having already observed the to see the potential for photographic together with specimens, documentation of natural hisartefacts, sketches, and tory specimens whose form photographs. But while and structure could not be an increasing number of easily maintained once colpublications and exhibilected. Fish were the prime tions draw upon museum example; watercolour drawings archives in this way, less athad been the preferred method tention has been paid to the for recording different species, ways in which photography but this required an artist on entered museum practice hand, and unless they were and ultimately became particularly accomplished the one of its vital methodolodrawings could not be relied gies. In that sense, Vanessa upon. During the 1880s the Finney’s Capturing Nature South Australian Museum is a pioneering work, at employed an artist (August least in the Australian Saupe) to make and colour context. plaster casts of fish, but this was Through her longexpensive and time-consuming. term role as archivist at Despite lacking colour, Henry Sydney’s Australian MuBarnes’s fish photography at seum, Finney has not only the Australian Museum left become familiar with its no doubt as to accurate speimpressive collection of cies identification. Finney has photographs taken ‘in the included a fascinating series field’, but has also been able of his images, crisp and sharp, to concentrate upon those each with their series number images taken within the etched onto the glass negative. museum, from the 1860s There seems little doubt that onward. As she outlines the Australian Museum board, Greater Flamingo, Phoenicopterus roseus. This flamingo skeleton in this beautifully written composed of naturalists such as was presented to the Museum by the trustees of the Zoological Society and illustrated volume, the Alexander Macleay and George of New South Wales (Taronga Zoo) in 1893 (photograph by Henry Barnes) Australian Museum was Bennett, who were themselves HISTORY

avid collectors of Sydney Harbour herself instituted a program to digitise the relationship between scientific ilfauna, including fish, appreciated the the collection, a revelatory process lustration and photography and the introduction of a technique that would which forms the basis of this book and ways in which the early photography allow those fugitive characteristics the exhibition it accompanies. of museum exhibits leads us into an to be instantaneously understanding of the art preserved with such clarof museum taxidermy ity. Significantly, board as practised during the members each received late nineteenth century. copies of the museum’s It is often difficult photographs during the to achieve the right 1860s and 1870s. balance in a book of this Here it is worth menkind, not only in terms tioning that practically of the ratio between imall the images included age and text, but in the in the book were first exposure and detail of generated on glass plates, the images themselves. initially through the ‘wet In all those aspects, plate’ process in which Finney has been well the photographer was served by a fine design required to undertake the team and by the phofull sequence of chemical tographer, James King, steps once a glass plate whose scanning and was exposed. As Finney’s rendering of the origcolleague Vanessa Low inal images take us explains in a clear expodirectly back to the sition, the introduction decisive moments when of the ‘dry plate’ prothe shutter button was cess from 1881 enabled pressed. To me, as the development process a historian tuned to the to occur later, relieving museum subject, this the photographer from is an exciting volume, the necessity of lugprimarily for the ways in ging heavy but delicate which it opens the field equipment wherever they of museum documenwent. Finney doesn’t say tation itself as a vital as much, but it seems element of scientific clear that her careful enquiry. There is a lot and fascinating record more investigation of the Australian Museahead, particularly in um’s internally generated terms of differentiating photography collection the various categories of derives from her archival museum photography After being preserved by taxidermists in an outdoor workshop in 1883, the huge processing of these glass and understanding sunfish specimen entered the Museum via the tallest available opening: an upstairs window. (photograph by Henry Barnes) plates. Similar collectheir respective roles. tions were generated in Ethnographic photoother museums at later times and in The book contains several themes graphy seems to have been skirted several government agencies (survey, and stories beyond that of the docu- a little timorously in this volume, and railway, health, for example), but not mentary role of museum photography. the apologia for its absence seems to rely all of those collections have survived. Finney has broadened the content to a little too much on current orthodoxies, A museum’s own propensity to accumu- include a narrative of the Australian but that is a minor cavil, for this volume late its records rather than superseding Museum’s first curators and technicians, admirably meets its stated purpose: and discarding earlier forms has been in which Gerard Krefft’s own extraordi- capturing nature. g a crucial factor in this instance. The nary biography features. Krefft’s tribulaAustralian Museum’s collection of tions and achievements, and his overt Philip Jones is a historian and museum glass plates survived intact well beyond support for Darwinian theory soon after ethnographer specialising in the hisits first period of use, almost forgotten it reached Australian shores, provide a torical trajectories of objects and images and certainly overlooked, until Finney compelling vignette. She also explores across cultural boundaries. 14 AP RI L 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Another country

The first single-volume history of South Australia in fifty years

Kerryn Goldsworthy A HISTORY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA by Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster

Cambridge University Press, 39.95 pb, 319 pp, 9781107623651

he first volume in this series, and effect among history’s cornerstones: murder were visited on Aboriginal peoBeverley Kingston’s A History of government, society, economics, and the ple in South Australia, especially when New South Wales, was published law are intertwined in the making of they ‘resisted encroachments on their land’ in 2006. Since then another five have history, and this book illuminates their and met white settlement with hostility: appeared, including a book on Tasmania interdependence. by Henry Reynolds and another on VicAs the first single-volume history of [Davenport] complained about the toria by Geoffrey Blainey. Cambridge South Australia in more than fifty years, character of the men who worked for University Press may be proceeding with it questions some well-worn misconhim, and their treatment of Aboriginal its ‘History of Australian States’ series ceptions, honours some neglected figpeople, remarking, these ‘poor beings are at a leisurely pace, but it has secured ures, and shows some shifts in emphasis much shot, and no one sees how to avoid some leading lights among Australian regarding what is considered important. it’. Whatever anguish he may have felt, historians to write it. For example, the authors point out that Davenport openly acknowledges the This history of South violence employed in the Australia, the sixth in the dispossession of Aboriginal series, has been co-written people. In the more remote by two colleagues in the regions … settlers would take University of Adelaide’s the law into their own hands Department of History. and retaliatory raids on AboriPaul Sendziuk and Robert ginal camps were frequently Foster have complementary designed to have a punitive areas of expertise: Sendeffect. ziuk’s work has been in the history of twentieth-century This corrective view of Australia with a focus on the more usual belief that immigration, disease, and the history of South Auspublic health, while Foster tralian settlement involved has published extensively relatively little violence on South Australia’s Indigagainst Aboriginal people enous history. is one of the major features In the writing of hisof this book, and their Bus crossing King William Street, c.1950 (photograph for W. Menz & Co, tory, the facts are there treatment – physical, social, State Library of South Australia BRG 94/124/29) to be found, interpreted, and legal – is a recurrent wrangled, mused on, and set against the much-vaunted ‘no convicts’ claim, topic. The effects of developments and each other in proportion. For this task, while true in the sense that South changes in law and in social attitudes two heads can often be better than one, Australia was never a convict settle- are consistently reported and reprefilling gaps, illuminating blind spots, ment as such, leaves out the fact that sented as a significant part of the state’s and toning down individual preoc- many ex-convicts – and some escaped history: the ‘civilise and Christianise’ cupations. The successful teamwork of convicts – arrived in South Australia views of the earliest days gave way Sendziuk and Foster leads the reader from elsewhere by various routes. to the notion that white Australians down a smooth and easily navigable The book also examines newly avail- should ‘smooth the dying pillow’ of a path, showing the development of able or previously little-known informa- race ‘doomed to extinction’, followed South Australia from its earliest days tion. Chapter 3, ‘Settling and Unset- in its turn by policies of assimilation. and locating its changing fortunes in tling’, quotes an 1846 letter to his father Finally, the book outlines the changes national and international contexts. from settler Samuel Davenport suggest- driven by Premier Don Dunstan, who They also trace the patterns of cause ing the extent to which violence and introduced the first anti-discrimination 16 AP RI L 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

legislation in Australia and rejected the goal of assimilation outright: Dunstan, by contrast, sought the integration of Aboriginal people into white society on their own terms, and recognised that Indigenous people needed the protection of the law, access to their own land, and to be conferred the right of self-determination if they were to prosper.

The charismatic, flamboyant, intellectually dazzling Dunstan is the bestknown of South Australia’s premiers, but he was not the only extraordinary man to lead the state, and neither was ‘Honest Tom’ Playford, to whom Sendziuk and Foster feel that history has, thus far, been too kind. As they point out, a great deal is owed, not only by South Australia, but by the entire country to Charles Cameron Kingston, one of two relatively little-known characters – the other being Robert Gouger – who were leading lights in the State’s history and who are given proper credit for it here. Academically and athletically gifted, choleric, theatrical, sexually overenthusiastic, and, if the sumptuously braided and embroidered frock-coat on the statue of him in Adelaide’s Victoria Square is anything to go by, as sartorially self-expressive as Dunstan himself, Kingston was premier for six years in the 1890s. He was not a Labor man but called himself ‘a State Socialist … a man who recognises it is right for the State to interfere for the good of society’. He introduced a number of major and farsighted reforms, including the matter of women’s rights, while also playing a crucial role in the achievement of Australian Federation. Sendziuk and Foster quote yet another South Australian premier, the late John Bannon, on Kingston’s enthusiasm for the Federation cause: he was, says Bannon, ‘always pushing for progress and action, chiding and appealing to his colleagues, demanding deadlines, seizing initiatives, and generally refusing to let go of the concept of a united nation’. Two of the most intriguing chapters in this book cover the half-century before Federation, when South Australia went through a number of changes in

self-image after initially styling itself a ‘province’. After the establishment of a bicameral parliament in 1856, it was referred to as a ‘nation’ – with the South Australian ‘national character’ described by the South Australian Register in 1887 as ‘brave, earnest, patient, and selfreliant’, which, it must be said, accurately describes the third-generation South Australian who was my own grandfather, born six years later – before the push for Federation changed the focus of the growing nationalistic sentiment. The most significant thing about this book is the quiet way it adjusts or corrects a number of long-held but oversimplified views, especially the rosy

notions that South Australian history features neither convicts nor Aboriginal massacres. And then there is the story of the legislation that decriminalised homosexuality in South Australia, a change for which Don Dunstan almost always gets the credit. But in its original form, this legislation was first officially proposed by Murray Hill, an Upper House member of the conservative Opposition. South Australia is another country; we do things differently here. g Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Editor of ABR, won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’.

The desolation of smug A thoughtful contribution to an urgent debate

Russell Blackford TRIGGER WARNINGS: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND THE RISE OF THE RIGHT by Jeff Sparrow Scribe, $29.99 pb, 300 pp, 9781925713183

hatever benefits it has brought, aggressive globalisation has also dislocated industries, wrecked communities, and fostered social alienation. Large numbers of working-class, blue-collar, and rural voters (these categories overlap) feel abandoned, anxious, and economically insecure, even when they have, as individuals, held on to well-paid jobs. This offers fertile ground to political candidates who claim to be outsiders or antiélitists. Right-wing populists exploit the situation with a rhetoric of scapegoating. They blame marginalised groups. Their language and their stated policies veer towards nativism, xenophobia, and assorted kinds of bigotry. Jeff Sparrow’s Trigger Warnings: Political correctness and the rise of the right is published against this background. Sparrow is understandably concerned about right-wing populism, but he views

the responses of left-wing and liberal thinkers as largely counterproductive. To some extent, if we follow his reasoning, well-intentioned left-liberal people have inadvertently helped the likes of Donald Trump. Aside from some small detours to consider events in the United Kingdom, Trigger Warnings is a comparative study of Australian and US politics over the past fifty to sixty years, drawing parallels but also discussing points of difference. It focuses on the varieties of left-wing activism through this period, examining their effectiveness, or otherwise, in opposing super-rich capitalists and rightwing culture warriors. At the same time, Sparrow examines criticisms, from the right, of socalled political correctness on the left. He absolves the left of almost anything that could reasonably be termed ‘political correctness’ prior to the early years of the HISTORY

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new millennium. He views the furore over political correctness in the early 1990s, instigated by Dinesh D’Souza among others, as largely exaggerated and even dishonest. Many stories about extreme language policing were, he alleges, distorted or outright apocryphal. The remainder can be dismissed as unrepresentative. This is not entirely convincing, but in any event Sparrow finds the left guilty of blameworthy rhetoric and action in more recent years. In support, he identifies several modes of left-wing politics. First, he distinguishes between nonconfrontational ‘palliationist politics’, conducted on behalf of oppressed groups by a courageous, but privileged, élite of middle-class activists; and second, the ‘direct politics’ of mass protest, civil disobedience, boycotts, and strikes. Direct politics gathered strength during the social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. As a third form, he identifies ‘delegated politics’, which began when 1960s radicals achieved positions of power in universities, government bureaucracies, and elsewhere. From those positions, they implemented top-down reforms. Delegated politics doubtless introduced some defensible rules and other changes, but its practitioners could seem – or become – distant, authoritarian, and paternalistic. Sparrow saves his harshest words for what delegated politics became during the George W. Bush era, what he calls ‘smug politics’. At this point, much of the left’s energy, especially in the United States, was channelled into hostility and condescension towards those workingclass, blue-collar, and rural voters who supported conservative candidates. For Sparrow, this condescending attitude is epitomised by the satirical comedy of Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and John Oliver. Here, the humour depends on a self-congratulatory form of groupthink. The intended audience must, that is, ‘already know and already accept the correct [political] position’. But, Sparrow argues, this is self-defeating. It confirms to anyone who falls outside the circle of self-congratulation that left-liberal partisans are hostile to ‘everyday people’: people who have not, for example, immersed themselves

in critical theory and cultural studies. Adding to this problem, practitioners of smug politics deploy a set of concepts, including privilege, identity, cultural appropriation, intersectionality, and (of course) trigger warnings, in ways that are always esoteric and often invert the concepts’ original meanings and importance. Worse still is the spectacle of callout culture, where left-liberal partisans publicly shame individuals – most often one another – for minor or imaginary political transgressions. Coming from Jeff Sparrow, such a harsh message for the left might be more palatable than similar analyses from more conservative or moderate figures. Sparrow’s credentials as a political radical and a socialist are unimpeachable, and his solution to smug politics is more, rather than less, activism. He proposes a return to direct politics, and to trusting the better instincts of the masses. Everyday people might have old-fashioned values, and some of them doubtless exhibit bigotry, but, Sparrow emphasises, they are not stupid. They are willing to learn, if they are treated with respect, and they readily accept the need for solidarity. Where it exists, bigotry is not an indelible mark on their character. Trigger Warnings covers a lot of ground, so there is inevitably much that is contestable. As one example, Sparrow seems unfair to the New Atheist group of writers – Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, and their allies – whom he portrays as indulging in smug politics and facilitating antiMuslim bigotry. Here, the scholarship looks thin, relying on weak sources such as an anti-Dawkins Op-Ed published in The Guardian. Sparrow does not do justice to the individual New Atheists’ theses and arguments, and does not even cite their main books. More important is the swift way that Trigger Warnings glides over the radical left’s record, throughout the twentieth century, of demanding conformity and of attempting to suffocate ‘counterrevolutionary’or inexpedient ideas. Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Mao – among many others – insisted on a ‘correct’ political line.They objected to government censorship under conditions of capital-

ism, but not to crushing the bourgeois press after a successful revolution. Turning to Western countries, we could add a litany of colourful, troubling, and by no means apocryphal episodes that happened well before the presidency of the younger Bush. High-profile cases where left-wing radicals enforced a ‘correct’ line, such as the 1946 Albert Maltz Affair, are the small tip of a very large iceberg. (Maltz was publicly humiliated by fellow US communists for publishing a politically unacceptable essay about socialist aesthetics.) In fact, the radical left has a long and unhappy record of trying to impose social and political conformity on its own membership and beyond. What can be said in its favour, I think, is that the right’s record is much longer and even worse. Trigger Warnings broaches hotbutton topics. It is polemical and inherently controversial, and will draw complaints from all corners of the political compass. That’s not such a bad thing, and there is much to like about this book. It is well-structured, accessible, and beautifully written. It contributes thoughtfully to an urgent contemporary debate about right-wing populism and how best to respond, and its main line of argument merits serious discussion. g Russell Blackford is a Conjoint Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Newcastle. His latest book is The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the future of liberalism (Bloomsbury, 2019). v

Quote of the Month ‘He sought many things from his act of terror, but one was notoriety, and that is why you will never hear me mention his name… He is a terrorist, he is a criminal, he is an extremist, but he will, when I speak, be nameless. To others I implore you, speak the names of those who were lost rather than the name of the man who took them.’ New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaking in Parliament on 19 March 2019 SOCIETY

NOT. AT. ALL.

A grenade of a book in a lolly wrapper

Suzy Freeman-Greene CHOICE WORDS: A COLLECTION OF WRITING ABOUT ABORTION edited by Louise Swinn Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781760875220

osie Waterland was twenty-one, couchsurfing, and working at a cinema when she learned she was pregnant. A hot flush, then a wave of nausea, hit her on the toilet. ‘It was the kind of nausea that takes away any sense of dignity that a person has,’ she writes. She stripped off, lay down on the bathroom floor, and prayed for the feeling to pass. Waterland had met a ‘skinny hipster’ at a Sydney bar. She didn’t know his surname; it was a random hook-up. She was on the pill; they’d used a condom and yet ... An abortion would cost $800 with a general anaesthetic, she was told, or $400 for a ‘twilight sedation’, which could cause ‘discomfort’ but no pain. She would need to wait four weeks for the procedure, to guarantee its success. She went to her alcoholic mother’s house and climbed into a ‘very sad and very, very grimy’ single bed. The next few weeks were spent ‘trying to sleep, waking up, puking, trying to eat, puking, trying to sleep again’. Weak from all the vomiting, she needed help to walk into the abortion clinic. A doctor told her, ‘It sounds like you have Hyperemesis gravidarum. It can be very serious.’ When she woke in the operating theatre the pain was excruciating. ‘I hate saying that, because I don’t want to scare any woman who makes the choice to abort a pregnancy. But that was my experience … I felt like something long, thin and hard was repeatedly being shoved deep into my vagina.’ An hour or so later she was her old, hungry self, planning a trip to Cabramatta to buy ingredients for Peking duck. Does she wish it hadn’t happened? Of course. Does she wish the abortion drug RU486 had been available? Definitely. 20 AP RI L 2019

‘But I do not regret my abortion at all. AT. ALL. I have never felt sadness, or grief, or even conflicted … I only felt relief.’ Waterland’s bleakly funny account of this 2009 termination is one of the best contributions to Choice Words: A collection of writing about abortion. Edited by Louise Swinn, the book has an unassuming, flesh-pink cover, but it is a grenade in a lolly wrapper. Contributors include authors, journalists, activists, a doctor, an actor, and a musician. Most pieces are original, although a couple are extracts from memoirs. Do we need this book? Sadly, yes. In New South Wales, having an abortion is still a criminal act. Around Australia, laws governing abortion vary bizarrely. In South Australia, a woman can only terminate a pregnancy if her mental or physical health or life is at risk. In Victoria, an abortion can be carried out by a registered medical practitioner with the woman’s consent up to twenty-four weeks’ gestation. In Tasmania it can be provided on these terms up to sixteen weeks’ gestation; in the Northern Territory, up to fourteen weeks. In Tasmania last year, Angela Williamson, a senior staffer at Cricket Australia, was sacked by her employer after tweeting criticism of that state government’s abortion policies. Still, we’re lucky compared to billions of women around the world. In Argentina last month, an elevenyear-old girl who fell pregnant after being raped was denied a termination and forced to give birth. In the United States, President Donald Trump is whittling away women’s reproductive rights. Over and over, we hear powerful men pontificating about abortion. The

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

hypocrisy can be breathtaking, most spectacularly the promiscuous Trump trying to stop women dealing with the unwanted outcome of sexual intercourse. There are a couple of male authors

Over and over, we hear powerful men pontificating about abortion in Choice Words, but the authoritative rush of women’s voices here is liberating. Williamson, for instance, writes of being a ‘confident, educated’ career woman, with a loving partner and children aged seventeen, ten, and seven, rendered invisible and ashamed by a surprise pregnancy. An ultrasound reveals she is a month further on than she had thought, almost sixteen weeks. She must fly to Melbourne for a surgical termination. She keeps up a brave face at work and forks out the money: $2,750 to the clinic; $411.50 for flights; $507.45 for accommodation. On the plane home she pays Jetstar $60 in extra baggage fees, ‘because of all the pads I’m now carrying with me’. A suppressed fury informs many of these essays, which explore topics such as the gruesome history of backyard abortions; the long campaign for reproductive rights, and the experience of today’s medical practitioners ‘on the frontline’. There is fiction from Tony Birch, a moving comic by Sarah Firth; and poems by Van Badham and Maxine Beneba Clarke. One of the most thoughtful contributions comes from author Jane Gleeson-White. The waxing and waning of life happens daily in women’s bodies, she writes. ‘Life and death are our domain. That is

why religions and states are so keen to control us and our wombs.’ To change the story, she suggests adopting a metaphor coined by the twelfth-century writer and medical practitioner Trota of Salerno, who called menses ‘flowers’. If menses are flowers, writes GleesonWhite, ‘then when we choose to abort a fertilised egg we are surely just plucking unripened fruit and returning it to the great cycle of life’. At a time when motherhood is often tritely sentimentalised, I was energised by songwriter Laura Jean’s reflections on her decision, at thirtyfive, to end a pregnancy. After googling

images of the foetus at six weeks – laden with mawkish captions about ‘your baby’ – she contemplates her commitment to making music and the struggles of the artistic life. ‘How is this [childless] life less heroic than allowing my body to make a baby?’ she asks. So many themes emerge from this book: the prohibitive cost of abortions; the plight of women in remote Australia, who may have to travel up to 1,300 kilometres to obtain one. The shame. ‘It is not nice what I do, and noone talks about it over the dinner table,’ an anonymous, Townsville-based doctor who performs abortions tells journalist

Gina Rushton. Elsewhere, we learn that only around half of Australia’s nineteen medical schools include abortion in their curriculum. And fewer than 1.5 per cent of Australian GPs are registered to provide RU486. The quality of writing in Choice Words is uneven. Still, it is an important work, one I hope my teenage daughters will read. I wonder, too, about those men like Waterland’s skinny hipster, blissfully unaware of the price women can still pay for the pleasure of having sex. g Suzy Freeman-Greene is the arts and culture editor of The Conversation.

Public intimacies

When the personal became political in 1970s Australia

Zora Simic THE SEVENTIES: THE PERSONAL, THE POLITICAL AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AUSTRALIA by Michelle Arrow NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781742234700

bortion was big news in Australia in 1973. In May, a bill was introduced to Federal Parliament that, if passed, would have allowed women in the ACT to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester. So intense was public interest in this issue that one MP suggested televising the debate. On the day of the vote, activists inside the Women’s Embassy – a tent protest clearly inspired by the Aboriginal Tent Embassy erected a year earlier on the same lawns across from Parliament House – blasted Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem ‘I Am Woman’ on high rotation. No matter how loud they got, the women and their tent were outnumbered and outsized by some two thousand Right to Life protesters and their gigantic marquee. Despite the fact that the majority of Australians supported a relaxation of abortion law, the bill was easily defeated, by ninety-eight

votes to twenty-three. Both major parties had given their MPs – all of them men – a conscience vote, an enduring practice which has meant that women’s reproductive rights continue to be debated as a moral question rather than one of personal autonomy or public health. What happened next – the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, initially interpreted by women’s liberationists as a ‘consolation prize’ for a lack of action of abortion reform – is engagingly explored in Michelle Arrow’s compelling new history The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia. Without making grand claims for the tangible outcomes of the Commission – for the Fraser government barely addressed the recommendations when they were finally released – Arrow aptly describes the Royal Commission

as ‘an extraordinary political event’ in Australian history. Thousands of Australians of all kinds took advantage of various opportunities to tell their personal stories, in public hearings, interviews, and written submissions. They talked about ‘abortion, sex education, marriage, parenthood and relationships’, as well as family violence, poverty, sexual assault, and much more. The sharing of these hitherto private experiences in a government-initiated forum, Arrow suggests, saw the animating principle of women’s liberation – the personal is political – ‘performed on the national stage’. For Arrow, the Commission’s archive is a ‘precious historical resource’, and she should know. She is the first historian to have proper access to it. In 2014, with Catherine Freyne and Timothy Nicastri, Arrow won the NSW Premier’s Multimedia History Prize for the radio documentary Public SOCIETY

Intimacies: The Royal Commission on hu- this book is also or especially pitched personal politics, offering illuminating man relationships (2013). Evidently, the The Seventies makes a strong case that discussion of new genres and formats Royal Commission also inspired the ‘public intimacies’ were a defining and for speaking out, including the ABC larger history of the 1970s, a decade fascinating feature of a decade of Aus- series Chequerboard and talkback radio. only tackled by one historian previously, tralian history that also includes the From this broad range of examples, and clearly ripe for fresh narration and Dismissal – an exhausted episode that some stand out because they articulate examination. Arrow – a seasoned social hardly needs more historical attention, enduringly common problems – such as and cultural historian, whose previous though Arrow dutifully covers it, and in access to affordable childcare – which books include the entertaining history an interesting way too. successive governments have failed to Friday on Our Minds: Popular culture Throughout The Seventies, Arrow properly address. Other examples leap in Australia since 1945 (2009) – plays draws rich detail from new knowledge from the page because they remind us to her strengths in The Seventhat the 1970s was another ties. She offers not a definitive time. For instance, a man who or exhaustive history of the shared his fatherhood experidecade, but one ‘primarily ences with the Royal Commisconcerned with the ways new sion noted that he was the first understandings of gender and father at Parramatta District sexuality transformed AusHospital to be present at the tralia’. Accordingly, she focuses birth of his child. on the women and gay and Arrow’s history concludes lesbian movements, but in a far in the early 1980s, with the more generative and wideelection of a Labor government ranging way than that ostenand the Women Against Rape sibly narrow window might at protests, which quite possibly, first imply. While providing if inadvertently, contributed to necessary information about the ongoing revival of Anzac the origins and development of Day. At this point, Arrow’s both social movements, Arrow occasional and careful reflecis less concerned with the intrations throughout her history politics between each moveof the proximity or distance of ment than she is in tracing the 1970s to our own era come the public impact of each to the fore. The Royal Commismore broadly, including via sion into Human Relationships some of their most highuncovered new and distressing profile spokespeople. They evidence about the prevalence include Elizabeth Reid, the of child abuse and neglect, first women’s affairs adviser to including sexual abuse, but, as a head of state in the world, Arrow notes, at that time, ‘few Liz Goldring at the ‘Women's Embassy’ on the lawn outside given due recognition in a nuwere prepared to discuss it’. The Parliament House, Canberra, 2 May 1973. Goldring and her anced chapter on International more recent Royal Commission fellow activists were protesting women’s absence from the Women’s Year (1975), and into Institutional Responses to parliament during a debate on abortion law reform. Dennis Altman, who was one Child Abuse represents a sig(The Canberra Times, image supplied by the ACT Heritage Library) of several gay activists to stand nificant advance, yet the family up and successfully demand gay generated about the personal lives and home – the most common sites of men and women be included in the terms of Australian men and women, and abuse, Arrow reminds us – were outside of reference for the Royal Commission. their shifting expectations of political its scope. As issues associated with our The pleasing effect of Arrow’s ap- responses to these. Some of this re- private lives continue to be debated and proach is that rather than marginalising vealing material directly emerged from legislated (including in parliaments that feminist and gay activism, she gives it new social movements (such as the remain dominated by men), Arrow’s due recognition as influential, whether Women’s Electoral Lobby’s ground- thoughtful and accessible history will no directly or in a more diffuse fashion, and breaking 1972 survey of women voters), doubt be a valuable resource for anyone evolving. Specialists of feminist and gay while others came from government, interested in understanding how we got and lesbian history can rest assured that including a 1975 survey initiated by here and how far we still have to go. g Arrow knows the key events, debates, Reid, which exposed ambivalence and and players (I was pleased to see Abori- unease about women’s liberation. Arrow Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in Hisginal activist Pat Eatock get a starring also mines popular culture for further tory and Women’s and Gender Studies role), but to the general reader to whom evidence of the new public visibility of at the University of New South Wales. 22 AP RI L 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

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COMMENT

Forced marriage

MAFS and reality television’s chamber of horrors by Alecia Simmonds

erched on the precipice of the Blue Mountains, Leura is both quiet and wild, a place of misty romance, sylvan charm, and middle-class entitlement. I am here because some friends have offered me their house as a writing retreat for ten days so that I can pen a chapter on the history of marriage (1788 to marriage equality) for The Cambridge Companion to Australian Legal History. The house is an arcadia of silence: perfect for a task that I accepted with appropriate academic reverence. There are three hundred pages of typed notes arranged in neurotic chronological order on my desk, and a hillock of books at my feet. The problem is that it’s now day seven and I’ve hardly written a thing. The problem, I’ve realised, is MAFS. Before I left Sydney, a friend suggested that I watch an episode of Married at First Sight (MAFS). I agreed that it would be good to see where marriage was at these days. Has marriage equality queered the institution? Does a show like this demonstrate how trivial marriage has become? Has it shed its historical privileges and status? Now, on day seven, it is MAFS and not my scholarship that I am thinking about. MAFS has sabotaged my chapter. For those unaware of the show, MAFS was the highestrating television show in Australia last year. In some ways it works like most reality television: place a group of attractive, psychologically unstable people together, ply them with alcohol, deprive them of sleep, and then watch them randomly emote, break down, or have sex. The difference here is that rather than searching for ‘the one’, contestants are matched with a partner by a ‘panel of experts’ comprising a neuropsychotherapist and two psychologists. They meet their partner for the first time on the altar (at a non-legally binding ceremony that is staged as a marriage); they exchange vows, kiss, partake in a bridal photography session, and then celebrate at a wedding reception. The couples, ‘fast-tracked’ through a series of marital challenges, return at the end of each week to a ‘commitment ceremony’, which is

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

something in between marriage counselling, group therapy, a Quaker church session, and a Star Chamber inquisition. Here, they publicly share their wedded woes and declare if they wish to leave or stay. As long as one spouse votes to stay, both are forced to endure the experiment for another week. In this respect, MAFS conjures a world before no-fault divorce: exiting a marriage involves moral judgement and collusion between the couple. Individual will is irrelevant. It’s this tension between desire and dictate that I find fascinating about MAFS. Shows about someone’s quest to find the right partner presuppose a person with will and desire; the capacity to choose, seduce, and consent. Since twelfth-century chivalric poetry, the Western romantic subject has been charmingly rebellious, pursuing passion over propriety, defiant of familial, legal, or social constraints. This is why most of our romance stories end with marriage, the moment where women have historically relinquished their autonomy as part of a marital contract whose terms were imposed by the state and which vested formidable power in their husbands. Even today, the language we use is one of discipline – we ‘work at marriage’. Romantic love, by contrast, is frolicsome. What happens when you begin a show with a contract rather than romantic protagonists? And what if this marriage is arranged not according to an individual or a family’s wishes, but by technocratic expertise, by a group of psychologists, one of whom appears in a lab coat? First, the show becomes very #MeToo very quickly. Once couples are within a marital contract (albeit only a performative one), consent is presumed to extend over the period of the show to cover a range of sexual acts with a complete stranger. A successful marriage, we are told by the therapists, requires intimacy. They tell the contestants that this is a sign of ‘progress’, of ‘opening themselves up to love’. Any lack of sexual feeling is pathologised with vastly different meanings for men and women. For instance, Ning confesses to feeling no physical attraction towards her husband,

Mark, and recoils when she awakes to find him naked beside her (‘I don’t usually wake up next to strangers with no underpants on’). The ‘expert’ voiceover has already offered us a different interpretation: ‘She’s now so afraid of being abandoned, she pushes men away.’ When Melissa admits to feeling no chemistry with Dino and turns away when he tries to kiss her for a bridal photo, the expert explains: ‘Melissa has not been intimate for eight years.’ Jess dutifully consummates the marriage after being pressured by one of the other contestants to have sex; otherwise ‘they will end up going their separate ways’. Upon hearing that her husband, Mick, has publicly discussed their sex life, she withdraws, and Mick confides in his friends. They’ve ‘made progress’ he says, but accessing her body in bed is like ‘crossing the Nullarbor’. Jess complains to the therapists: ‘I feel like I give him an inch and he takes a mile. I know that he thinks it’s a joke. But I’m just like, please stop.’ What appears to be a case of sexual harassment is reduced to a romantic dilemma: Therapist: Mick when this was happening in the bedroom are you picking up on Jess’s cues to stop? Mick: Yes, but I sort of do it playfully, and then she says enough’s enough … Therapist: So you know when enough’s enough.

Jess has clearly said that Mick does not know when to stop, yet the scene ends with her agreeing that Mick is just emotionally demonstrative. If you have ever wondered why it took the last state in Australia until 1992 to outlaw rape in marriage, watch an episode of MAFS. When marriage presupposes sex, and consent is assumed to last for an indefinite period of time, your rights to bodily integrity are suspended, or in the least not taken seriously. The story is different when men don’t want to have sex but the women do. Sam, who can only be described as a monster of male entitlement, declares on his wedding day that he prefers petite women: ‘I’ve never really dated someone as big as Elizabeth before.’ He then pursues an adulterous affair with another woman while humiliating Elizabeth for her sexual advances. ‘Matt, the twenty-nine-year-old virgin’, who is always referred to as ‘Matt, the twenty-nineyear-old virgin’, falls for his wife, Lauren, loses his virginity, and then, upon discovering her lesbian history, declares that he is not attracted to her. He explains that he cannot satisfy her sexual appetites. In each instance, the problem resides not with the man but with the terror of a supposedly overly sexual woman who has transgressed the bounds of feminine propriety. The only exception to this is Mel and Dino, where Dino’s cartoonesque Indian identity (he is introduced with sitar music) is seen as effeminising. When Dino explains that he wants to ‘take baby steps’ while on a ‘boy’s night’ at the pub, another husband informs him that Mel has said that she ‘wants to be slammed’. We are then given a montage of Mel laughing about her desire ‘to be slammed once in a while’, after which Dino is advised by the other white men to ‘be a man about it’, to ‘take it’ and ‘give her a slamming’. In a horrifying moment that could be taken

straight from Wake in Fright, they bash their beer glasses on the table and chant, ‘Slam her, slam her.’ No expert tells the viewer that this is anything but romantic playfulness. Of course, there’s little scope for thinking about sexual assault in the show because authority is given to psychologists who apply a supposedly therapeutic lens to the ethics of desire. It’s a modern gloss on a religious anachronism: marriage as a sacrament, a state of grace, whose inviolable bonds are now tended to by therapists rather than priests. The relationship is reified, and individual will or dissent is pathologised. There is no possibility for spouses to exercise ethical judgement of each other because that’s been outsourced to ‘the experts’ who justify moralistic, frankly appalling, pop-psychological advice with reference to ‘scientific research and data’. For instance, when Heidi tells the therapists that she wants to leave Mike – a man who pressured Jess to have sex, callously dismissed Heidi’s stories of childhood trauma, publicly gloated about their sex life, and yelled at her one morning when she had a coughing fit – she is told that the problem is entirely hers. Mike, the expert implies, is ‘a great guy’but unfortunately Heidi has ‘a pattern of pushing men away and of hanging on to things in the past’. The language of ‘patterns’ is behaviourism at its lowest common denominator. The problem is not the fact that Mike is brutish, but rather the ‘relationship’in the abstract and Heidi in particular. The solution? Keep working on the relationship. The idea of a relationship as labour carries problems beyond the effacement of desire. Participants talk about ‘ticking each other’s boxes’ and Mick complains that Jess is ‘operating on Sunday trading hours’ when she refuses to have sex, as though love is a commercial or administrative task that simply requires discipline. On a positive note, this language of work foregrounds emotional labour as labour, and this is possibly the one redeeming feature of the show. In a world where contestants do not engage in paid work, spouses begin to conceive of their relationships as work. When Mike tells Heidi to ‘get to the point’ as she confides in him about her troubled past, he is chastened and seems to genuinely commit to learning basic life skills, like listening to your partner. One of the more interesting aspects of the show is how it cleaves apart the privacy that marriage has always claimed to provide and reveals a chamber of heterosexual horrors. Throughout history, as feminist theorist Heather Brook argues, marriage has been a strangely desexualised zone, often described as a ‘financial, emotional and spiritual bond’, while those outside it have been overly sexualised. Gays and lesbians have been the hypersexualised foil to heterosexuality’s purported decency, its libidinous Other to their ennobled affections. Seeking access to this refuge partly explains desires for marriage equality. MAFS may be one of the first times where marriage acts not as refuge but as revelation; where heterosexuality appears like an object in a scientist’s laboratory, blinking and shivering under the glare. g Alecia Simmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar in law and history at UTS and NYU Sydney. COMMENT

Ways of speaking and living A philosophical look at J.M. Coetzee

Tim Mehigan BEYOND THE ANCIENT QUARREL: LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY AND J.M. COETZEE edited by Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm Oxford University Press, $112.95 hb, 264 pp, 9780198805281

B ‘A fabulous book’

DRUSILLA MODJESKA

An inconvenient heroine challenges society’s norms

‘A remarkable achievement’ ROD JONES ‘Utterly charming’ CLARE WRIGHT

26 AP RI L 2019

eyond the Ancient Quarrel: Literature, philosophy and J.M. Coetzee is a new collection of essays on J.M. Coetzee, perhaps the most important author of imaginative literature in the world today. Unifying the diverse strands of argument animating this thoughtful volume, the book’s editors, noted Coetzee scholars Patrick Hayes and Jan Wilm, link the aims of the collection to the ‘ancient quarrel’ between philosophy and literature in Greek antiquity. In their view, Coetzee’s writing can be taken not only to re-examine this quarrel and the way it was settled (in favour of philosophy and against literature in Plato’s Republic), but also, and more importantly, to break with the uneasy truce that has been deemed to govern intellectual life ever since. In assaying such difficult ground, the volume is enriched by the contribution of several philosophers who use Coetzee either as a foil for an independent investigation or as a sympathetic agent of reform based on what can be known of his commitments. With all this in mind, the reader is not offered straightforward enlightenment of Coetzee’s works and concerns. The collection, indeed, is very much one for the philosophically minded and the specialist – readers well versed in Coetzee’s dense and eclectic worlds of spare prose, unresolved plotlines, and proliferating intellectual complexity. It is not immediately clear why talk of this ancient quarrel should be relevant at this moment. Surely we know well enough what literature is, what philosophy does, and why the terms in which their ancient rivalry was contracted are beyond dispute? That we ask such a question at all can be attributed to the

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

emergence of postmodern philosophy, a new and still heavily contested manifestation of the philosophical enterprise that seeks to augment the protocols of propositional logic with broader, more intuitive, and less obviously rational categories of analysis and understanding. More than any other factor, it is the entry of postmodern thinking into philosophy that stands behind this volume and cues many of its underlying assumptions about a writer who himself has long written in the mixed register of philosophy and literature and whose more recent works lay claim to constituting a species of philosophical fiction outright. If the title of the collection comes across as a surprise, we are soon prepared for a second one: the dawning insight that Coetzee is nowadays better comprehended from the vantage point of this new type of philosophy than of traditional literary scholarship. This is a startling thought about a most literary of literary authors whose high credentials as a writer were acknowledged by the Swedish Academy with the award of a Nobel Prize in 2003. Such a thought leads to the view that Coetzee’s value for the current age lies precisely with the new mixed type of thinking that his fiction pioneers. Coetzee, indeed, is perhaps the first truly great writer who mines the postmodern era for its conceptual preoccupations and its characteristic locutions and yet whose imaginative scenarios effect a movement into something quite beyond such an era. Coetzee, in short, does not leave us with the intellectual and moral confusion we experience so keenly today, but he prepares us for a future in which we are called upon to develop a more

ethically attuned and rigorous understanding of ourselves, our social goals, and our humanity. The essays gathered here, without exception, give valuable clues to such a future. Four subdivisions in the essays provide additional purchase on the complex arguments mounted in the volume, though, in truth, each contribution has its own take on Coetzee’s worlds and their major concerns. The atmosphere the volume creates is accordingly one of Leibnizian ‘compossibility’ rather than mere possibility, which is to say, a rising sense of openness to expanding horizons, rather than any critical or material delimitation of them. And yet, despite this, it is the status of the real and the relation of ideas to what we are obliged to consider the real that is most at issue in the volume. While we are given many valuable leads here, the clearest and most productive approaches in the volume are those immersed in philosophical argument. Among them, Stephen Mulhall’s is the most sympathetically inclined towards the postmodern outlook and the least satisfied with the ‘narrow concept of utility-to-philosophy’ to which the editors declare themselves programmatically opposed in the introduction. For him, as for many contributors in the volume, literature is no handmaiden to philosophy, nor even to ethics. Literature under Coetzee’s pen instead looks like a special occurrence of the philosophical, one that downplays the flatness of normative reasoning, freeing up ground for irregular forms of thought such as solipsism and ‘private language’ (Wittgenstein) and the kind of succession issue the boy David discovers when he abjures the rules of counting in Coetzee’s recent novel The Childhood of Jesus (2013). The gaps in the succession of ordinal numbers, then, become the spaces in Coetzee’s fiction that the volume aims to explore – spaces beyond the strict calculus of reason, but which areperhaps more fertile for a future humanity than anything logic, on a rational model, currently makes available. Where valorisation of the exception above the rule, the rights of feeling states over presumptive conceptual reason, the Levinasian ‘look’ of the

destitute animal over the general look of common humanity finally gets us, however, must be considered – not so much despite this meritorious volume but because of it – an open proposi-

It is not immediately clear why talk of this ancient quarrel should be relevant at this moment tion. If we follow the many productive analyses of Coetzee in this volume, we must content ourselves, for now, with conclusions arising from the ‘event’ of ‘ethical conversion’ (Derek Attridge), the exhortations of eros, though they be ‘morally unreliable’ (Eileen John), and the salutary aspects of an irony reminding us that ‘our ways of speaking and living are not fixed’ (Stephen Mulhall). What we get, then, is something carefully sifted but still weighty, a modest ‘conception of cognitive development’ (Alice Crary) that, like our current modernity, still promises much but nevertheless remains, tantalisingly, an unfinished project. g

What are you reading? We now offer multiyear subscriptions to the print magazine and to ABR Online. Subscribe to ABR and enjoy some of Australia’s finest arts journalism at very competitive rates.

A digital subscription costs One year - $60 Two years - $100 Three years - $140 Five years - $220 A print subscription costs One year (25 and under) - $50 One year - $95 Two years - $175 Five years - $420 Tim Mehigan is editor of A Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee (Camden House, 2011) and The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee (Camden House, 2018). He is Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. v

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LITERARY STUDIES

Waiting

Alex Tighe DELAYED RESPONSE: THE ART OF WAITING FROM THE ANCIENT TO THE INSTANT WORLD

by Jason Farman

Yale University Press (Footprint) $39.99 hb, 217 pp, 9780300225679

‘A

book about waiting’was perhaps a hard sell for Jason Farman to make to his publisher. Waiting, so the consensus goes, sucks. It is the elephant graveyard of time, the dead zone between something and something else. Who would want to spend more time on waiting? It helps to clarify that Delayed Response is not the type of book that presents its topic as life’s panacea (like ‘tidying’ or ‘making your bed’ or ‘LSD’). Farman is not a waiting advocate; he doesn’t think the good life is spent in a queue. Rather, his book is about waiting as one of the telling contours of existence. Far from being the place where time goes to die, waiting is when the passage of time becomes most noticeable. And if you notice that you’re waiting (so Farman’s argument goes), you can start to notice related things: who is making you wait, for example, and what benefit it has for them; how time affects the meaning of messages; the social structures that value the time of some more than others. ‘Looking at the seams,’ Farman writes, ‘allows us to see how things are put together.’ All of which sounds quite abstract; Delayed Response is anything but. Farman dispenses the theory through stories – about pneumatic tubes and the American Civil War and a performance of Waiting for Godot in a prison. Across these stories, Farman’s abiding interest is in the way that the speed of communication alters the felt quality of time. If waiting ‘breaks’ time and makes it visible to the individual, technology has the ability to make time disappear. Here’s something you’ve probably done: in a bored moment, you’ve opened your phone, flicked through your apps, and then closed your phone again 28 AP RI L 2019

without doing anything on it. When the Apple Watch was released, the satirical news website The Shovel published a piece titled ‘Human Life Now Entirely Taken Up with Checking Things’, which featured an interview with a woman relieved that she now had something to look at between checking her smartphone and checking it again. Our devices plug the gaps between stimulation, and when our attention is occupied our time slipstreams away, inconspicuous. Does anybody actually want this? For the tech companies, the benefits of the elimination of waiting are enormous. It is already well documented that the longer our screens can hold our attention, the more money tech companies can make selling that attention to advertisers. A less obvious

The speed of communication alters the felt quality of time fact that Farman highlights is the way that tiny delays have massive effects on tech companies’ profits: on the Amazon website, a uniform delay of one-tenth of a second causes Amazon to lose one per cent of its revenue. Likewise, Google did a study where an extra half-second of waiting caused their traffic to drop twenty per cent. We’re told that waiting is bad for individuals, too – don’t you know that waiting sucks? – and that the acceleration of technology is in our best interests. Farman likens this perception to something like a modern religious tenet: ‘The mythologies of the digital age center around the idea that waiting is keeping you from obtaining what you want and holding you back from living a more fulfilling and productive life.’ Written out like that, it’s easy to see the false equivalence between ‘fulfilment’ and ‘productivity’. (Roughly, fulfilment is found in doing things that have meaning to you, while productivity is doing things that have value to other people.) Yet the idea of productivity being an axiomatic good has passed into the collective unconscious. It shouldn’t have; productivity is good only if it

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

is directed towards some good ends. Productivity for its own sake is morally indistinguishable from waste. The paradox of the digital age has always been the question of how the tools of massively increased efficiency have the effect of making us feel like we have less time, not more. Delayed Response, with its extended focus on time and technology, can be read as an untangling of this paradox. Time is valuable – it’s just that we’re not always the ones who get the most value out of it. Farman is an excellent writer, and Delayed Response rarely reads academically (Farman works as a media scholar at the University of Maryland). In one chapter he travels from Baltimore to Melbourne to study Aboriginal message sticks, and he gives this elegant description of his first day: ‘The train car was full, and the day was bright and sunny, the weather almost perfectly matching the temperature back in Maryland, just swapping out the spring buds on Washington’s cherry trees for yellow leaves falling along Melbourne’s laneways.’ It is the strength of Farman’s storytelling that makes the book cohere. There’s a lot happening in Delayed Response (including a wonderfully geeky chapter on buffering icons), and I suspect the scope of the book’s thinking developed in the writing. Not that that’s a problem; indeed, one of the book’s pleasures is the constant delight of unexpected information. Delayed Response is an original addition to the growing genre of books that want us to be more conscious of our relationships, collectively and individually, with technology. Farman’s novel contribution is that he makes this caase by way of an arguement for greater awareness of the passage of time itself. Reading Delayed Response, I was reminded of the narrator from Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending: ‘We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.’ The narrator could start with Farman’s book. In terms of ways to use the hours, he could do much worse. g Alex Tighe is the ABC / Kidney Health Australia’s inaugural Mark Colvin Scholar.

Whitenicity

More grist to the cultural backlash story

Simon Tormey WHITESHIFT: POPULISM, IMMIGRATION, AND THE FUTURE OF WHITE MAJORITIES by Eric Kaufmann Allen Lane, $55 hb, 624 pp, 9780241317105

n the wake of the unexpected Brexit and Trump votes in 2016, academics and commentators have been scratching their heads trying to work out what these extraordinary events represent. The dominant narrative is that in the wake of recession and financial crisis, those doing it tough have punished the political élites, leading to all manner of populist insurgencies. Compelling though such an account may be at an intuitive level, another explanation has been put forward by a number of influential voices such as David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere (2017), Matthew Goodwin in National Populism (2018), and Charles Murray in The Strange Death of Europe (2018). This explanation is that what we have been witnessing is a backlash by those alienated by globalisation, open borders, and migration on a scale threatening the culture and identity of the majority community. It is a compelling argument, one often heard in Australia. Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift provides more grist to the cultural backlash story, but does so with some interesting twists and turns in what is otherwise a dense, data-packed text. It is also noticeable that he has succeeded in irritating both the right and the left, which is a welcome sign of someone actually trying to say something interesting as opposed to feeding pre-existing positions. Two arguments in particular catch the eye. The first is that white populations in North America and Europe are heading for minority status, literally. Such is the scale of immigration and the superior birth rate of recent arrivals that white people will, in a matter of a few decades, become a minority in

these societies. This is not to say that we are necessarily doomed to increased friction and volatility between ethnicities. What the evidence suggests is that what we mean by ‘white’ is not fixed. It changes over time as minorities come to identify with majority values and ideals, and thereby become ‘white’. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish people and Jews were not recognised as white in the United States. Now they are, not just because of their colouring, but because they have accepted the dominant values and culture of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethnicity. Colouring is important, Kaufmann argues, but it is not everything. Just as important is the interplay between the majority group and those who aspire to join it and who are willing to sublimate their own ethnic or cultural difference for the benefits of becoming part of the dominant grouping. So, rather than these fixed ethnic and racial identities confronting each other, what we witness over time is the dominant ethnicity admitting minority identities into the fold. In effect, ‘white’ means whatever the dominant ethnicity is prepared to recognise as white. It is easy to see why this is an irritating argument for those on both sides of the political divide. For the right, Kaufmann’s argument undermines the idea that what we mean by white is primarily determined by being able to trace one’s lineage back to northern Europe, back to some pristine ethnicity that needs protecting from mixing or méttisage. As far as the left is concerned, it undermines its story about how a dominant ethnicity exercises power

over minorities. In essence, we have a story of a relatively porous ethnicity that enlarges through racial intermixing and the acceptance of formerly minority ethnicities and identities into the majority.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Irish people and Jews were not recognised as white in the United States But there is another twist in the argument to come. Such is the scale of the transformation of our societies that it is now reasonable, in Kaufmann’s view, for us to regard as legitimate the mobilisation of individuals and groups seeking to defend a white identity as a ‘minority’ voice. Instead of seeing such groups as neo-fascist or racist, as they often are by progressive opinion, we should regard their emergence as predictable and indeed legitimate. In an era of identity politics, not to recognise ‘white’ as a legitimate identity is in effect to deny voice to those who, notwithstanding membership of the dominant ethnicity, find themselves doing it tough. Both the Trump and the Brexit votes need, Kaufmann argues, to be seen in this light: as the expression of those frustrated by the lack of means to express the view that white people can be disadvantaged by multiculturalism and are just as deserving of special treatment as others. This, too, is a form of ‘Whiteshift’: the growing self-consciousness among poor whites in particular that they need to play the identity politics game on the same terms SOCIETY

as minority groups. Again, it is not difficult to imagine why such an argument would be irritating to those on the left. The idea that a notionally dominant identity such as ‘white’ should now be regarded as deserving special treatment runs counter to the left progressive Zeitgeist, though, surely, Kaufmann has a point. Just because one group is numerically larger than another doesn’t mean that everyone within that group feels that they are getting a fair deal, and of course they may not be. Kaufmann’s point is less about arguing in favour of the ‘left behind’, and more about signalling to them that their interests and views are legitimate, and need to be framed in terms that we would otherwise accept as a ‘minority view’. In short, we shouldn’t react negatively to the emergence of a distinctive, white, special-interest politics, but rather see it as an understandable development given the scale of immigration in societies like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There does, however, seem to be a tension in the chain of reasoning here. If what we mean by white constantly changes in response to minority groups assimilating to the majority (with the blessing of the latter), then it’s not clear why we should need to treat white people as a special interest group. White is the identity many immigrants would like to take on, and will take on with interracial mixing. Why should we see whiteness as in some sense endangered or needing special treatment? Either we accept that white people are becoming a minority, and thus that they should be granted the same status as any other minority group, or we say that what we mean by white is elastic enough to take on board the steady influx of newcomers such that it will remain the dominant ethnicity. It’s difficult to have it both ways. What, then, really is the takeaway of Whiteshift? Should we be examining our immigration policies and processes to ensure that the dominant ethnicity is protected? Should we be more lenient towards white-interest group politics? If the latter, what are we supposed to make of the rise of the nativist far right, which seeks the expulsion of migrants 30 AP RI L 2019

and refugees, as well as the reassertion of cultural homogeneity as a goal? As far as this text is concerned, the emergence of powerful far-right nativist politics in Europe really is the elephant in the room. The assumption seems to be that legitimating white identity as a special interest will assimilate it to the kind of multicultural identity politics we find in North America. But multiculturalism is of course the object of the nativist critique. It is multiculturalism

that such groups want to eliminate – not legitimate by framing their own needs and demands on similar terms to other minorities. Whiteshift might not have all the answers to these issues, but it certainly raises interesting questions in a way that deserves wide engagement. g Simon Tormey is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney. His new book, Populism: A beginner’s guide (Oneworld), will appear in 2019.

Roll-call

An enjoyable assessment of twelve thinkers

Glyn Davis PRIME MOVERS: FROM PERICLES TO GANDHI: TWELVE GREAT POLITICAL THINKERS AND WHAT’S WRONG WITH EACH OF THEM by Ferdinand Mount Simon & Schuster, $59.99 hb, 438 pp, 9781471156007

escribe the twelve most influential thinkers who shaped Western political traditions. Chaos must ensue. Your list will be outrageous, but mine also. Consider whom you leave off the roll-call. Just one woman. No one from Africa or Asia. Only Jesus to represent millennia of Jewish thought. Yet books of lists appeal to publishers. Controversy sells. To call a book Prime Movers with the subtitle From Pericles to Gandhi: Twelve great political thinkers and what’s wrong with each of them just looks cynical. This is unfortunate, for Prime Movers is often enjoyable and insightful. Ferdinand Mount, baronet, Etonian, former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, adviser to Margaret Thatcher, writes with clarity about ideas. His assessment of some big names in political thinking – Pericles, Jesus, Rousseau, Smith, Burke, Jefferson, Bentham, Wollstonecraft, Mazzini, Marx, Gandhi, and Iqbal – can be incisive. Thus Marx is praised in some detail

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for a perceptive reading of English industrialisation, but criticised at similar length for persisting with a labour theory of value. Jesus is not systematic, with no political program. He leaves a church to fill in the gaps, often with inhumane results. Thomas Jefferson proclaims universal principles but acts like the southern politician he was, failing to confront the original sin of American slavery. Mount has particular animus for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who fails to think through the consequences of tearing up familiar institutions, and Jeremy Bentham for reducing human motivation to a simplistic formula and applying it to every aspect of society, from prisons to economies. Did the author have Margaret Thatcher in mind when mounting the cost? Sometimes the sins are personal, not intellectual. This is less persuasive. Mohandas Gandhi may have neglected his family, and Mary Wollstonecraft may have chosen a suitor poorly, but neither traits influence

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their body of work. Perhaps feeling harbour. Though each generation must recognise and share. guilty about recycling Wollstone- make its own choices, these are inSelectivity has hazards. Thinkers craft ’s personal disappointments, formed by endless conversations about who challenge this idea of modernity, Mount offers a careful and sympathetic how to live together. Authors ancient notably French and German intellectuaccount of her work on female rights, and modern speak to one another and als of the twentieth century, are conspictracing how triumph can disguise uously absent. But then, so many the achievement. Wollstonecraft’s voices are left silent in Prime striking originality has become Movers. The project is undercut our common sense, despite her by a structure that allows room profound struggle to be heard, and for only a handful of subjects thus seems less remarkable. and topics. Even then, coherence If there is a theme to the proves elusive – there is only modbook – not always easy to discern est cross-referencing across the – it is the worrying ability of great chapters, and a short conclusion thinkers to encourage disastrous that stresses the incommensurate choices. Yet it seems unreasonable nature of most contributions. to hold Rousseau responsible for Isaiah Berlin is wheeled in to revolutions after his death, nor confirm that life is messier than Jesus because those who followed philosophy, compromise inevitadisappoint. Ideas may sweep a soble in political life. ciety, but many chapters confirm Ideas compete, and politthese prime movers were ignored ies draw on many traditions in their lifetime, praised only when simultaneously. Thus constitusafely dead. Giuseppe Mazzini tions combine democracy (an presses for Italian unity, but so did elected legislature) with oligarchy Machiavelli four centuries earlier; (judges) and monarchy (our head it is hard to credit either with the of state). We listen to Jefferson on eventual outcome. They spoke to liberty even as we accept limits to a wider aspiration, one achieved free speech in the name of civility, eventually by states and armies. The or heed Smith on the efficiency Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by path from idea to action is rarely of markets while recognising ‘the James Heath (1757–1834) after John Opie (1761–1807), simple and never pure. sewage and shanty towns generfrontispiece of Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the So why read the book at all? ated by unregulated free markets’, Rights of Woman, William Godwin, second edition, 1798. The flaws are slyly acknowledged (via Wikimedia Commons) to quote the author. in the opening chapter. Few will Prime Movers deserves a more find the list convincing, and the es- us about enduring political ideas such modest title. This impressive work of exsays are variable, sometimes long and as liberty and equality. They debate the position can stand without exaggerated deeply informed, occasionally sche- best forms of institutions, argue about claims. Mount helps us understand many matic and underdeveloped. Yet Mount what we should value. strands in the conversation across gengives us more than ‘a collection of This is Mount’s ambition – to intro- erations, and adds his voice to that diahatchet jobs’. At his best he can bring duce some of the voices worth hearing, logue. This is reason enough to write. g abstraction to life, finding new things and assess their contribution. Despite to say on familiar topics. For those a subtitle promising to expose failings, traditions Mount finds attractive, such the readings are generally positive and as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, encouraging if clustered around a narwe are treated to a serious evalua- row sense of time, place, and gender. tion of thought and influence, with As Mount observes, he has been heavily a welcome reminder how often seminal influenced by his study of eighteenthideas are misunderstood. Mount also and nineteenth-century political philobrings us figures less familiar, with an sophy while a student at Oxford. Despite argument why the ambitions of Islamic a canvas covering thousands of years poet Muhammad Iqbal deserve more and cultures, ‘half of my chosen Movers attention in shaping the modern world. have been born within fifty years of each The philosopher Michael Oake- other, between 1710 and 1760’. This shott evoked Plato when he described moment may be described as the ‘birth Glyn Davis is CEO of the Paul Ramsay political life as a ship on a boundless of the modern’, notes Mount, meaning Foundation, and Distinguished Profesvoyage with no destination and no safe thinkers who speak to concerns we sor of Political Science at ANU. 32 AP RI L 2019

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Apotheosis of the right Two takes on Australia’s political terrain

Andrew Broertjes POLITICAL TROGLODYTES AND ECONOMIC LUNATICS: THE HARD RIGHT IN AUSTRALIA by Dominic Kelly La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 277 pp, 9781760641092

RISE OF THE RIGHT: THE WAR ON AUSTRALIA’S LIBERAL VALUES by Greg Barns Hardie Grant Books, $24.99 pb, 154 pp, 9781743795422

n the last four decades, a shift has occurred away from the post-World War II consensus around the role of the state. Conservative parties dominated by neo-liberal agendas have surged, assisted by the abandonment of progressive politics by centre-left parties such as Labour in the United Kingdom, the Democrats in the United States, and our own Australian Labor Party. Since the global financial meltdown of 2008, however, an interesting transmogrification has occurred as conservative politics acquired a populist sheen. From the triumph of Donald Trump to the forces that won Brexit, conservative voices have inflamed social and racial tensions by speaking out against the neo-liberal ‘globalist’ agenda, with scholars and journalists producing an enormous array of material to sift through in examining these trends. Of particular focus have been the organisations and personalities behind this shift, who have seized advantage of the post-Global Financial Crisis moment to try and reshape the world in their own image. Works such as Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right (2016) and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America (2017) have traced the impact that right-wing figures and organisations have had in the United States. Two new books bring these issues into the Australian context. Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia by Dominic Kelly

is a cool, forensic examination of the forces that have shaped our political and social debates since the 1980s. Rise of the Right: The war on Australia’s liberal values by Greg Barns is an entertaining, albeit embittered screed aimed primarily at the political sins of the Liberal Party. Of the two books, Political Troglodytes is by far the more comprehensive specimen. Dominic Kelly has established himself as an important new voice in the Australian commentariat. Based on his PhD thesis, Political Troglodytes examines four different organisations that have reshaped conservative politics in Australia: the H.R. Nicholls Society, the Samuel Griffith Society, the Bennelong Society, and the Lavoisier Group. Unlike think tanks such as the Institute for Public Affairs (covered in Kelly’s comprehensive introductory chapters), each group focused on a single issue. For H.R. Nicholls, it was industrial relations; for the Samuel Griffith Society, constitutional issues. The Bennelong Society focused on Indigenous affairs. Bringing up the rear was the Lavoisier Group, with its pathological rejection of anthropogenic climate change. Linking all the groups were the vision and money of two men: Ray Evans and Hugh Morgan. Key players in the Western Mining Corporation, Evans and Morgan – along with ideological partner John Stone – had the money and, most importantly, the time and patience to shift the debate on these key issues. The 1980s were lean times for these organisations in Australia. While great

strides were being made by similar groups in the United States under Ronald Reagan and in the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher, Australia was dominated by the modernising forces of Labor under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Indeed, it was Hawke who dismissed the members of H.R. Nicholls as being ‘political troglodytes and economic lunatics’. They were taking friendly fire as well: In an extraordinary intervention, Brian Powell, the chief executive of employer group the Australian Chamber of Manufacturers, accused members of the New Right of showing ‘truly fascist tendencies that make it harder and harder for us to negotiate change’. Powell’s comments led to a war of words between employer groups, revealing deep divisions between the new radicals and the old guard members of the IR Club. Groups like H.R. Nicholls and the Bennelong Society awaited a political saviour, and one finally came in the form of John Howard and the Coalition government. Howard and his ministers (most notably Peter Reith and former H.R. Nicholls member Peter Costello) moved quickly to halt and roll back the achievements of the Labor years. For the hard right, unwilling to accept the compromises of political process, even major pieces of legislation like Work Choices were too ‘tepid’, with the Liberal government seemingly unwilling to make tough choices and genuinely reform the system.The Bennelong Society, with its neo-assimilationist approach to POLITICS

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Aboriginal affairs and its sponsorship of revisionist historian Keith Windschuttle, fared better, as Howard set a tone resolutely against the progress made during the Keating years. But the nowdefunct Lavoisier Group provides one of the more interesting insights into our ‘post-truth’ world. Dismissed even by those on the hard right as being a fringe group obsessed with conspiracy

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theories around climate change, the Society seems to have been ahead of its time, particularly through its use of the internet and its collaborations with a ‘global web of climate denial’. As climate change accelerates and governments across the world flail in search of solutions, the muddying of the waters undertaken by groups like Lavoisier will have devastating long-term consequences. Kelly, a critical but fair commentator, has interviewed a number of the major players involved in these organisations, including Ray Evans and John Stone. Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics is vital for anyone seeking a greater understanding of how we have reached this point in Australian politics.

hile Dominic Kelly takes a level-headed approach to his subject, Greg Barns achieves the opposite. Some writers have an axe to grind. Barns has a veritable cornucopia of axes and grindstones. At times the reader wonders if Rise of the Right is a genuine attempt at understanding the rise of conservative populism, or merely a prolonged exercise in score-settling. Barns was an adviser to the Liberal Party before jumping to the Australian Democrats in the early 2000s, and later advising the WikiLeaks Party in their ill-fated 2013 campaign. His disgust with the Liberal Party runs deep, making him sound less like an erudite observer and more

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like an embittered former lover. It is a shame, because Barns does make a number of good points. His analysis of the role the media has played, particularly in the resurgence of Pauline Hanson and the relentless attacks on commentator Yassmin Abdel-Magied, is excellent. The Howard government’s cynical and opportunistic treatment of the Tampa ‘crisis’ of 2001 also earns a well-deserved serve: The conduct of the Howard government itself was highly authoritarian. Ignoring the welfare of the asylum seekers, it breached well-known, time-honoured law and convention … the importance of the Tampa incident in plotting the decline of liberal values is self-evident. Australia had deliberately abandoned its obligations under international law.

Less convincing is the alarmism in comparing current events to the 1930s (which Barns quickly backpedals away from with ‘one must be circumspect and cautious in drawing a link between then and now’) and comparing politicians like Fraser Anning to Enoch Powell. There are also a number of minor errors scattered throughout the book (Margaret Thatcher was ousted from power in 1990, not 1991; Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966, not 1965, and so on) and a few questionable assertions. While at times entertaining, Rise of the Right lacks the depth and rigour of Kelly’s work, failing to capture the importance of the political shifts that are upon us. g

Andrew Broertjes teaches history at the University of Western Australia.

Fiction

Gerald Murnane, 2015 (photograph by Shannon Burns)

Paul Giles on Gerald Murnane Andrea Goldsmith

Miriam Sved

Peggy Frew

Invented Lives

A Universe of Sufficient Size

Islands

Francesca Sasnaitis

Naama Grey-Smith

Bronwyn Lea

FICTION

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Back to earth

The original version of Gerald Murnane’s second novel

Paul Giles A SEASON ON EARTH by Gerald Murnane

Text Publishing, $39.99 hb, 485 pp, 9781925773347

Season on Earth is the original version of Gerald Murnane’s second published novel, A Lifetime on Clouds, which appeared in 1976. The story behind this book’s publication is now well known, thanks to interviews Murnane has given and the author’s ‘foreword’ to this edition, where he relates how he reluctantly cut his manuscript in half to fit with Heinemann editor Edward Kynaston’s view of it as ‘a comic masterpiece’. Kynaston was probably trying to exploit the publicity surrounding Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which had become a cause célèbre in Australia after being initially banned in 1970 but then published after its acquittal in an obscenity trial. The ‘sin of self-abuse’ is also central to Murnane’s novel. Towards the end of A Lifetime on Clouds, rewritten by the author especially for that earlier version, central protagonist Adrian Sherd imagines Melbourne to be ‘the Masturbation capital of the world’, but then comes to realise ‘the same problem occurred in every civilized country on earth’. The first two parts of A Season on Earth, like 36 AP RI L 2019

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A Lifetime on Clouds, focus primarily on Sherd’s Catholic schooling and his fantasies of a hedonistic life in America. But the second half of A Season on Earth moves beyond the repressive confines of Victoria in the early 1950s to explore both the possibilities of a religious vocation – in Part Three, Sherd attends a junior seminary run by the Charleroi Fathers; and also, in Part Four, the imaginative potential of literature. Whereas A Lifetime on Clouds was a comic novel in the Roth idiom, with the Catholic environment of Murnane’s suburban Melbourne replacing the claustrophobic Jewish community of Roth’s New Jersey, A Season on Earth manifests itself in its full flowering as more akin to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a Künstlerroman about a boy’s growth in consciousness from adolescence to artistic maturity. Murnane characteristically remarked in an interview that he thought his hero wouldn’t be capable of writing anything by the end of the book, but such a sardonic awareness of art’s inherent limitations has always been integral to the author’s own creative consciousness.

Murnane complains in his foreword about the ‘butchering’ of his original novel and how the Heinemann editors had ‘misread’ it. This reconstituted work certainly has more thematic coherence. Perversion was initially a theological category, designating backsliding from a state of grace – the opposite of conversion, which retains a more explicit religious significance – and the fraught attempts of Murnane’s character to reconcile body and spirit are the axis upon which this entire narrative turns, from the tormented adolescent body of the first section to the fledgling literary intellectual of the last. When Sherd says in the final pages that his ‘perverse human nature seemed to want nothing higher than the contentment of sharing a home ... with a pretty, uncomplicated marriage partner’, it is now easier to recognise this within a framework of ontological perversion, where the limits of the human body necessarily circumscribe any higher inclinations. This is also the source of Murnane’s scabrous comedy, which delights in a rhetoric of bathos and disavows on principle any ‘so-called abstract idea,’ a term he declares in Landscape with Landscape (1985) to be ‘self-contradictory’. A Season on Earth cites Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, and Thomas Merton, and there is a characteristically Catholic distaste here for what became known scholastically as the ‘angelist’ heresy, whereby man’s humanist ambitions would try to appropriate some of the perfectionist qualities reserved in Church doctrine for angelic spirits. Despite Murnane’s explicit disbelief ‘in any gods or angels or demons’, his fiction preserves a distinctive theological infrastructure, whereby religious ideas are displaced into broader cultural forms. Sherd concludes towards the end of this novel that ‘his monastery was wherever he willed it to be’. A Season on Earth negotiates paradoxical spaces in between sacred and secular. The book’s title plays intertexually with Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873) to evoke the attractions and torments of transitory terrestrial incarnation. There are already a number of distinguished novels in the literary canon that exist in variant versions, including Herman Melville’s Pierre (1852), which his editor insisted on cutting drastically after Moby-Dick had been a commercial failure, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934), where the author’s preferred back-and-forth time scheme was initially deemed too complicated for the market to bear. Murnane is now generally recognised as a major literary figure, and the excavation of this work from the author’s archives is important for Australian literary history. Michael Heyward, whose initiative is acknowledged in the author’s foreword, and Text Publishing are consequently to be congratulated on making the work available. There are, however, some oddities about the novel that make it less than totally satisfactory. Whereas in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist Stephen Dedalus’s solipsism is presented with increasing narrative irony and detach-

ment, the reader of A Season on Earth is locked inside Adrian Sherd’s obsessive consciousness, with only the occasional jolt to make us recognise the partiality of his perspectives. At the end of Part Three, for instance, Father Camillus briskly dispatches Adrian from the seminary, saying that the monastic life ‘is not what God wanted of him’; but this alternative angle on Sherd’s inept performance as a seminarian comes as a surprise because we have been following the contours of this protagonist’s imaginative world for so long. Henry Miller is cited here as a potential prototype for Sherd’s own creative work – he wonders if ‘publishers might be interested in Australian stories with a predominantly sexual content’ – but unlike the first-person picaresques of Miller (or Saul Bellow), Sherd’s imagination is framed, indeed boxed in, by various mentors and idealised figures. These range from Denise McNamara, the schoolgirl on the Melbourne train whom he cherishes as his ‘Earth Angel’, to a subsequent series of intellectual types: Matthew Arnold, Francis Thompson, A.E. Housman, and others. (At one point, Sherd decides ‘he would model himself on Housman as far as was possible’.) This renders Murnane’s hero more passive than those of Miller or Bellow, and it also contributes to the odd sense of a continuous present and a flattened mental landscape. Adrian lurches from one scenario to another, failing to bring his life experiences into any kind of conceptual alignment, and indeed giving us the sense that any such alignment would be illusory. The short, chiselled sentences, while reinforcing Murnane’s emphasis on the immediacy of particular experience and the distortions of conceptual abstraction, also reinforce this sense of a radically disrupted discursive flow: ‘Adrian had a hard ride home from Stepney. The wind that had been behind him in the morning was blowing into his face. His stomach ached.’ It is valuable to have A Season on Earth in print, but it is not difficult to understand the reservations of the Heinemann editors when this manuscript was first presented to them. There are many sardonic comic observations here of Melbourne in the 1950s – I particularly liked the report of a man staying up ‘till all hours last night trying to put an extra cupboard in his laundry’ – but what is most interesting about Murnane’s work in general is the way it correlates these social scenes with larger metaphysical questions. Exemplifying an idiosyncratic Australian style of late postmodernism, Murnane’s fiction projects a sliding scale between extension and compression, where larger dimensions are refracted obliquely through parochial perspectives. This is not the greatest work in his oeuvre, but it is definitely worth having. g Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Antipodean America: Australasia and the constitution of U.S. literature (Oxford University Press, 2013). FICTION

Bête noire Bronwyn Lea ISLANDS

by Peggy Frew

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760528744

ccording to the AFP, two Australians under the age of eighteen are reported missing every hour. Most are found alive, fairly quickly, but an unlucky few will progress to the category of long-term missing persons. From the Beaumont children of the 1960s to the more recent disappearance of toddler William Tyrrell, vanishing children have long troubled the Australian imagination. But the nightmare for their families is not one from which they can easily unsubscribe. Denied confirmation of life or death, families are suspended in an immiscible admixture of grief and hope. Peggy Frew’s third novel, Islands, brings a sympathetic eye to this painful subject. At around two o’clock on the afternoon of 9 December 1994, fifteen-yearold Anna eats a bowl of Weet-Bix, grabs her backpack, and leaves the house. She is never seen again. Anna was a sensitive child – a little ‘peculiar’, her father thought – prone to fantasy and tantrums. An undiagnosed anxiety disorder presented as an array of facial tics and touching rituals that yielded, after her parents’ divorce, to a new constellation of destructive behaviours: smoking weed, wagging school, staying out all night, and who knows what else. Her mother, whose permissive parenting style bordered on neglect, assumed that Anna 38 AP RI L 2019

would come home when she was ready. It was three days before her father heard the news and reported their daughter missing. By then it was too late: the police had little to go on and their investigation – hindered by all the limitations of a pre-internet age – is a road to nowhere. The title, in its most basic interpretation, points to Phillip Island off the coast of Melbourne where the Worth family – Helen, John, and daughters Junie and Anna – spent their summers before the split. The landscape is drenched in memories of Anna, whose presence is felt ‘on the beach, in the dunes, in the scrub, in the garden, on wet black Settlement Road at first light, under rows of cypresses, and in spider webs and in waves and in the flights of birds, and in the silent inching open of the moon behind clouds’. A more figurative reading of the title, however, sees the family shattered by tragedy into an archipelago of individuals, each bound by a discrete consciousness and unsharable experience. ‘The world is of our own making.’ the existential narrator tells us. ‘Nobody else can know it.’ Despite thematic similitudes, Islands is not another mystery or thriller to toss on the towering pile of missing-daughter novels. Frew’s literary ambitions can be located in her fashioning of a nonlinear narrative that leaps haphazardly back and forth in time to visit events, from Helen’s rural childhood in the 1960s to Junie’s present-day life as a painter, mother, and hapless wife. Bent on frustrating the narrative, Frew focalises successive chapters through alternating characters and deploys a miscellany of testimonial genres in the telling: diary entries, lists, gallery-wall texts, psychological transcripts, and mental cogitations collapsing syntax into poetry. Such devices, well executed, offer the prospect of kaleidoscopic storytelling, but, in sacrificing intimacy to multiplicity, they can induce detachment and risk disorienting the reader through structural omissions, unresolved tangents, and a general lack of clarity. Inclined toward the latter, as more often is the case in Islands, we arrive at the novel’s resolution without catharsis. One thing, however, is abundantly

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

clear: everything is the mother’s fault. At least her family thinks so. Helen’s principal function, it seems, is to serve as a receptacle for their blame, shame, and animosity – much of which is filtered through misogynistic critiques of the female body and libido. Helen’s sexuality, refusing to be curbed or redirected into a sexless motherhood, becomes their bête noire. Unrepentant, Helen comes in for such a heavy dose of slut shaming that by the end of the novel – despite a notably short list of attractive character traits – she becomes its most sympathetic character. Junie, whose stated life goal is not to be her mother, has a particular hostility for her mother’s body. To her mind Helen’s flesh – ‘lush’, ‘greedy’, ‘shameless’ – is grotesque. She tries to ignore it, she insists, but it’s always there: ‘a hungry soft monster wanting sex’. Junie’s aversion to her mother’s body is so strong that, years later when Helen is old and sick, she still cannot ‘bring herself to touch this creature’. Even John, at one time the beneficiary of his wife’s physical appetites, holds her sexuality responsible not only for the breakdown of their marriage but, less credibly, for Anna’s mental debilities and, ultimately, her disappearance. What is a family to do with memories of a missing child? Do they enshrine the child at the age of their disappearance? Or do they count birthdays – Anna would be forty if still alive today – in the hope that their loved one is somewhere on earth growing older? One of Frew’s strengths as a writer is her inclination not to offer easy answers: ‘Of course I had to move on,’ Helen argues in defence of her record. ‘But giving up, that’s something different. Giving up hope, I mean. You can’t, even if you want to. I’ve wanted to!’ Another of Frew’s strengths is her ability to translate the natural landscape into language. Islands ends with a dark place where Anna liked to go: ‘The sun begins to shine. Everything goes lacy, glossy, and steam comes up from the earth.’ She keeps walking. g Bronwyn Lea teaches creative writing at the University of Queensland and is poetry editor for Meanjin.

‘The common lot’ Francesca Sasnaitis INVENTED LIVES

Andrea Goldsmith

Scribe Publications $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781925713589

ohn Berger describes emigration as ‘the quintessential experience of our time’ (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), and gives credence to the concept that geographic and psychological exile is pervasive to the human condition. ‘No one willingly chooses exile – exile is the option when choice has run out,’ says the protagonist of Invented Lives, Russian-Jewish émigré Galina Kogan. Andrea Goldsmith’s eighth novel opens in Leningrad. It is the mid-1980s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost have been eagerly embraced by the West. Soviet citizens are more sceptical. Shortages and privations remain daily facts of life, and long experience has taught them the value of promises made by those in power. Quickly, before the rules change yet again, Galina and her mother, Lidiya, apply to emigrate. But Lidiya dies, and Galina is left alone to make the decisions they would have made together. Shattered by grief, feeling punished even by the inclement Leningrad winter, Galina stumbles in the icy street. Andrew Morrow comes to her aid. A young Australian mosaicist studying the spectacular Church on the Spilled Blood, he is Galina’s counterpart in this novel, which bristles with pairings and dichotomies. Despite a punishing stutter and inherent shyness, Andrew manages to give her his Melbourne contact details; he is already smitten. Their serendipitous encounter prompts Galina to trade America for Australia as her final destination. The 1980s in Australia might be characterised as the era of Azaria Chamberlain, the Ash Wednesday bushfires, and AIDS. The iconic Grim Reaper advertisement, which appeared on billboards in 1987, will provoke a significant confrontation later in Invented

Lives. Faith in Australia’s immunity to mass violence will be shaken by the Russell Street bombing and the Hoddle Street and Queen Street massacres. The times, they are a-changin’, but Galina understands little of this. ‘Defined almost exclusively by her foreignness’, she experiences the loss of identity common to reluctant exiles, who must reinvent themselves if they are to survive the transition into a foreign language, environment, and culture. Culture, and the clash of cultures, play a crucial role in the narrative of Invented Lives, as do love, transgression, and the paradox of a past both inaccessible and inescapable. Galina is steeped in a history of anti-Semitism going back to tsarist times; with forebears who lived through the pogroms of 1918 and 1919, and the failure of ‘the great socialist revolution’. She has an intimate understanding of ‘the essence of terror … helplessness’ – she lost both grandparents to the Great Purge of 1937–38; her uncle Misha may have been responsible for their arrests. The siblings Misha and Lidiya make another conflicted pair: he, a true believer enamoured of the party line; she, a member of the intelligentsia, questioning and unconvinced by Bolshevik propaganda. Galina cannot begin to explain Soviet brutality to Australians (most of whom don’t seem interested anyway), nor how living in fear has formed her. In Galina, Australians see only ‘an amputated version of who she believe[s] herself to be’. Two years after meeting in Leningrad, long after Andrew has given up hope of ever seeing her again, Galina rings him. She is desperate for the familial connection that Andrew can provide. Coming from a milieu that eschews public displays of affection, Galina is moved by the overtly loving relationship of Andrew’s parents, Sylvie and Leonard. She sees the Morrows as typically middleclass: comfortable, well-educated, cultivated. Later, the reader will find out the extent of the cracks beneath the surface of their happy marriage. The women’s liberation movement seems to have passed Sylvie by, but Sylvie has a guilty passion: she lives vicariously through the letters

of strangers that have fallen into her possession. Leonard has put aside his youthful ambition to be a poet for the sake of a conventional (and convenient) family life. The arts are valued only as recreation, a distraction from the importance of material and commercial success. ‘No one can do everything they want, nor can they have everything they desire. Every choice is another denied,’ thinks Leonard, at pains to deny his true nature.

Culture, and the clash of cultures, play a crucial role in the narrative of Invented Lives Andrew and Galina’s friendship is at an impasse. Galina chooses to ignore the obvious, and any declaration of intent is stymied by Andrew’s self-consciousness. Her Russian soulfulness, loaded with the gravitas of survival, makes Andrew seem lightweight, if not naïve. To her assertion (also the opinion of the author) that art can save lives, he retorts: ‘Bombs kill. Starvation kills. Torture kills. Natural disasters kill. Art never stopped any of this.’ Only privately, can Andrew admit that art has the capacity to stimulate and inspire, to offer solace and spiritual courage. Andrew’s speech impediment and Galina’s emigrant status are Goldsmith’s most obvious isolating mechanisms. For the supporting cast of Kogans and Morrows, isolation comes in the form of secrets, compromises, and the lies that are told to ensure a tranquil existence. ‘I stand as a witness to the common lot, / survivor of that time, that place,’ wrote Anna Akhmatova in Requiem, affirming the duty of a writer to bear witness and the capacity of art to effect change, to nourish and sustain. Goldsmith may not have realised such lofty aspirations with Invented Lives, but her version of the 1980s speaks to a humanitarian ethos that transcends any particular period or culture and is certainly pertinent in the current political climate. g Francesca Sasnaitis is a Perth-based writer and critic. FICTION

Layers Susan Varga THE HAPPINESS GLASS

by Carol Lefevre

Spinifex Press $24.95 pb, 124 pp, 9781925581638

arol Lefevre is the author of two novels and a non-fiction book on Adelaide, all well received and awarded. Yet she is not as well known in her own country as she should be, having spent decades in England. I hope The Happiness Glass will remedy that. This is a quietly powerful book; part memoir, part linked short stories. Lefevre’s own voice is shared with the fictional Lily Brennan, her alter ego, moving forwards and backwards to her own life, allowing the flexibility and relative anonymity of fiction. This makes for delicious reading, as the different forms expand, reflect, and hide each other. The book is in five parts, each with a ‘true’ memoir/essay, followed by Lily Brennan’s story and sometimes a more free-floating story, tied back subtly to the main narrative. What a trajectory it is, singular and universal. Lefevre starts school in 1956 in hot, desolate Wilcannia. The family moves often, to Broken Hill, then high school in Mount Gambier, where Lefevre is forced into the typing stream, her dreams of learning Latin and French crushed. Post-school: a lonely, romantic period in New Zealand, a stint as a barmaid in South Africa, and a job as a nanny in England. She settles into a happy marriage, but soon a harrowing battle with infertility begins. Six years later, the couple adopts a neglected eleven-month-old baby girl from Chile. After years of joyful parenthood, the 40 AP RI L 2019

seemingly happy child begins to move beyond her parents’ reach and eventually severs ties with them. Lefevre’s style is both raw and meditative, a fugue of recurring themes: the growth and interplay of a reading and writing life (Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, Amy Witting’s I for Isobel are key markers); a good marriage counterpoised with visceral bouts of homesickness for Australia – somnolent heat and jacaranda flowers. The irresolvable pain of a family life unravelling. The different forms of exile: bodily, spiritually, and from place. In Part One, the first sentence sets up the territory: ‘In the furnace heat of late summer, 1956, I started school in Wilcannia. It was the year the British government began its bomb tests at Maralinga, and Amy Witting’s first published short story “The Strait of Hellespont” appeared in Southerly.’ For a while this reminded me of a commendable university essay with well-chosen references to worlds outside Wilcannia. But as it turned into a tightly argued, restrained piece, I realised I was in very capable hands. Next we are introduced to Lily Brennan, whose story illuminates many of the same threads. Just one example: the memoir briefly drops in a phrase used by an unnamed drunken neighbour. The short story repeats the same phrase, this time in the mouth of the fictional neighbour, Dorrie Brickle. Both Dorrie and the narrator begin to take on a nuanced life. The Brickles will reappear twice, filling in their complex backstory. Part Two heralds new, darker themes. Lefevre compares her body to a car broken down on a busy highway: Half-a-dozen men lean in close with their bodies pressed against the paintwork, heads under the raised bonnet. The female driver stands mutely to one side and, though outwardly calm … Trapped inside the useless, goodfor-nothing car, her helplessness is demoralising.

In the Lily story, she is a loving nanny to three children. Their mother ignores them while having an affair. Lily, who is reading To the

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Lighthouse, tries to write in the small breaks from her duties. She identifies with Woolf ’s Lily Briscoe: ‘Dust gathering on her fountain pens, and between the pages of her notebooks, while she, like Lily Briscoe sitting alone among the clean cups at the breakfast table, could only go on watching and wondering.’ In Part Three, To the Lighthouse figures again in a layered reflection on the meanings of home and on homesickness, ‘some unspeakable disease’. The other cultural markers here are two painters, the American Edward Hopper and the Danish Vilhelm Hammershøi, the former evoking the loneliness of public spaces, the latter the stillness of quiet domestic spaces. Then a lovely riff on the singer Dr G. Yunupingu, whose unearthly voice is ‘nostalgia condensed’. Lily, the alter ego, is with her thirteenyear-old daughter on a trip to Australia, leaving her husband, Tom, behind. She wonders whether ‘she left her husband for a jacaranda tree in flower’. In this story the daughter is a normal rebellious teenager – no hint of what is to come. The memoir’s focus tightens on adoption in Part Four. The small family returns to Chile, trying to ward off disintegration. The twinned story is chilling. On the last anxiety-filled day, the girl disappears at the airport. Part Five begins with a quote from Carol Shields’s Unless: ‘Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry on your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang onto it, and once it is smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.’ There is no hint of the student essay here, just a beautiful and complex disquisition on pain and loss, Lefevre moving with grace across a wide range of references. It is almost a relief to return to fiction in the final story, relishing the macabre nursing home scenes where Lily is trapped after a minor stroke. These scenes are worthy of Patrick White. There are many pleasures in this short, cunningly crafted, deeply felt book, not the least of which is consistently good writing. g Susan Varga’s most recent novel, Headlong, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award.

Stresses Robin Gerster THE WAR ARTIST

by Simon Cleary

University of Queensland Press $29.95 pb, 304 pp, 9780702260346

t’s virtually axiomatic: ‘war can fuck you up’. This pithy observation, made by a veteran in The War Artist, Simon Cleary’s new novel about the travails of an Australian soldier during and after a tour of Afghanistan, goes to the heart of what we now understand about the impact of battle and its psychological aftershocks. Before PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) became an identifiable diagnosis in the 1980s, they used to call it by the cruder term ‘shell shock’, that cluster of symptoms experienced by soldiers who continue to suffer after they have left the battlefield. This was a largely invisible injury that was not taken as seriously as more visible war wounds. The British World War I poets famously wrote about shell shock; it is less evident in the writing of their Australian contemporaries, who tended to be more intent on celebrating the exploits of the characteristically extroverted Diggers. A notable exception is the neurasthenic protagonist of Leonard Mann’s Flesh in Armour (1932), who resolves his sense of unworthiness at not living up to the heroic ideal by committing suicide. But the corrosive psychological legacy of war has rarely been as graphically fictionalised as it is in The War Artist. The novel begins with Brigadier James Phelan flying back to Australia from Afghanistan, like a maimed Odysseus returning from the Trojan Wars (an impeccable reference point in the novel). He is accompanying the body of a soldier named Beckett, killed by the Taliban. Phelan had risen to a senior rank without having experienced much active combat. Aged fifty years, he yearned to prove himself, and thus ‘staunch’ his ‘hunger for respect’. Phelan had ill-advisedly decided to accompany a patrol to an isolated base in the Uruzgan

badlands for a meeting with local elders. His presence is unnecessary, impelled by a personal need to show solidarity with men who can barely conceal their disdain for him. The unusual presence of a senior officer in the neighbourhood inspires a Taliban ambush, leading to the pointless death of Sapper Beckett, whose dying moments Phelan intimately observes. Back in Australia, Phelan cannot escape Beckett, in part because he has his name inscribed on his shoulder on the day of his homecoming, in a studio in Sydney. He enjoys the briefest of flings with the tattooist, Kira, who reappears (with her young son) later in the novel, on the run from her threatening boyfriend, Flores. Shamed and guilty, Phelan returns to Brisbane to a troubled marriage to a woman named Penelope, as befits the wife of an antipodean Odysseus. A prolonged mental breakdown ensues, followed by a slow and incomplete rehabilitation towards the objective of ‘living honourably’, largely undertaken on a hobby farm in southern Queensland, to which he and his wife repair after his discharge from the army. How can the war experience be described and inscribed? It is a question to which Cleary has evidently given some thought. In The War Artist he references Homer, Hemingway, and the British war poets, and he provides Phelan’s own thoughts on war poetry as a response to trauma. Perhaps the novel is too self-consciously ‘literary’ for its own good. Though ‘no war poet’, Phelan starts writing verse as a kind of therapy, and his poem ‘Waiting for Beckett’ is taken up by a local newspaper (the young soldier’s name happened to be Samuel). Nonetheless, The War Artist provides a bracing retort to the self-deceptions of Australian military culture. Having escorted the body of Beckett home, Phelan goes through an exhausting official ritual of ‘ceremony and obligation’, articulating empty words like ‘honour’ and ‘sacrifice’and ‘loyalty’– the traditional patriotic shibboleths of war lampooned by generations of war writers, but which continue tenaciously to survive in the Australian public sphere. The press coverage of the event was equally specious. ‘Mateship and egalitarianism’

formed a theme, along with the idea that the Australian army is ‘different’ from all the others. Traditional language failing to capture what it means to fight and die in a war, maybe other forms of inscription do the job rather better. After Kira reappears, she undertakes a painstaking process of tattooing Phelan’s back with initialled poppies, each denoting a comrade who died in (or because of ) Afghanistan. This is both a tribute and a form of atonement. His back a ‘platoon of tattoos’, Phelan himself becomes a kind of living commemorative text. It is an inventive and utterly contemporary way of suggesting how modern warriors might proclaim to the world what they have endured. Yet The War Artist is more than a book about military PTSD; in a way it is not even about war and soldiering at all. The novel also describes the stresses faced by civilians, including, and perhaps especially, women, on the battlefields of their own lives. Recovering from breast cancer, Penelope is facing a challenge of her own, and Kira has to deal with the vengeful Flores. In the novel’s denouement, these two strong female survivors stand together, ‘enfolding each other’. Clearly, bravery and indeed ‘mateship’ are not exclusively male virtues. The War Artist is far from perfect. The writing at times succumbs to portentousness, and to this reader the action becomes increasingly implausible as the novel moves helter-skelter towards its melodramatic conclusion. Nevertheless, it is a daring and disarmingly entertaining venture into testing fictional terrain. g

Robin Gerster is Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. FICTION

Order in chaos Naama Grey-Smith A UNIVERSE OF SUFFICIENT SIZE

by Miriam Sved

Picador $32.99 pb, 314 pp, 9781743535127

t the front of Miriam Sved’s A Universe of Sufficient Size is a black-and-white photograph of a statue. The cloaked figure holding a pen (‘like a literary grim reaper’, reflects one character) is the statue of Anonymous in Budapest, a significant setting in the book. Its inclusion is a reminder that the novel draws on the story of the author’s grandmother, mathematician Marta Sved (née Wachsberger). Like Marta, the novel’s protagonist is a member of a close-knit group of young Jewish mathematicians locked out of work in the 1930s by the Hungarian government’s anti-Jewish laws. Another notable member of the real-life group, celebrated mathematician Paul Erdős, is recognisable in the brilliance and eccentricity of fictional character Pali Kalmar. Sved’s fictional set – Eszter, Ildiko, Tibor, Levi, and Pali – are vividly drawn characters whose fates the reader comes to care about. Survivors’ testimonies remain the most important writings we have on the Shoah. Nonetheless, the novelisation of Holocaust narratives in the respectful hands of capable authors can be an important way of engaging with the memory, and legacy, of the horrors. In this, publishers and authors have a special responsibility to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. This Sved does in her acknowledgments; she is careful to detail connections to the real-life Anonymous statue group members but 42 AP RI L 2019

also the comparison’s limitations, noting ‘some of them are inspirations for characters in this book, although not with any straightforward adherence to real life’. Picador’s media release uses the phrase ‘inspired by a true story’ rather than ‘based on’. Sved has selected biographical details from her grandmother’s life to tell a fictional story. Her prose has the nuance and sensitivity required to support such a task. The plot unfolds through intertwined storylines. The pre-war narrative is told in epistolary chapters set in Budapest in 1938. These alternate with a contemporary narrative set in Sydney in 2007, which follows Illy Hughes, her children, Josh and Zoe, and her elderly Hungarian mother. When Illy’s mother gives her a mysterious notebook, the connections between the two narratives begin to emerge, with Sved expertly controlling the story’s pace. While the 1938 narrative holds the mystery, the 2007 study of family dynamics is often in the foreground. Despite the Hughes family’s challenges, moments of humour and tenderness abound. University student Josh relates to his Nagymama, or grandmother, through a shared love of mathematics, but the reader is also aware of a parallel between the chaotic love triangles in each of their lives. Meanwhile, rebellious Zoe’s activism, sexuality, and tattooed comrades from a women’s circus concern her mother, but the reader is also privy to Illy’s doubts about her own suburban life. Mathematics play a key role in the novel, and offer a vehicle for Sved to explore its themes. The mathematicians’ ‘upper limit problem’ – their search ‘for meaningful order in what at first appears to be random chaos’ – is rich in symbolism: Sved’s characters repeatedly face moments of upheaval in a world whose shape is no longer familiar. For Eszter, this happens at Hirig Simon, a ritual beating of Jewish students in Hungarian universities. When Eszter’s classmates turn on their Jewish peers, she reflects: ‘so this is what the world is. This was there all the time, only loosely restrained by some semblance of civilisation.’ Similarly, when Pali Kalmar tries to share his mathematical insights with a Viennese professor who ‘wanted to talk Jews in-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

stead of mathematics’, Pali is ‘wrenched out of his beautiful abstract world into the harsh light of reality’. Sved relates these paradigm shifts back to the central metaphor of seeking patterns in randomness, meaning in chance, order amid chaos. The novel’s title is a reference to the theory that complete disorder is impossible given a large enough set. Though Sved confesses to having a ‘mathsless brain’, she excels in evoking the beauty and wonder of mathematics. Technical passages could easily have been laboured in the hands of a lesser writer, but Sved (with the help of mathematician Tony Guttmann) resists the temptation to over-explain, instead offering brief, relevant, convincing references. The result is a story that bristles with the joy of mathematical inquiry. Along the way, Sved weaves insights into the role of art in understanding the world around us. Zoe is a photographer, and Illy harbours a dormant passion for sculpture. When Illy’s husband summarises the metaphorical meaning of her artwork in a single line, Illy wonders: ‘if what she’d experienced as a clamour of disparate feelings could be trussed and nailed so easily, then what was the point of it really?’ It’s a poignant reminder that the power of art is experiential, not didactic. When Zoe questions her grandmother about the past, wanting ‘a label, some ordering classification’, her Nagymama resists easy answers and reflects inwardly that ‘There is a sturdier order than names underlying things, an identity known in the skin.’ So it is with Sved’s reimagining of her own grandmother’s past. Sved rejects neat delineation, instead offering many types of chaos in which identity is fragmented and multiple. In the book’s dedication to the memory of Marta, ‘who loved mathematics and also stories’, Sved hopes that her grandmother ‘wouldn’t mind the liberties I’ve taken with both’. There is a sense of care, custodianship even, in Sved’s reimagining of the story that inspired it, in making it her own while honouring its essential truths – its sturdier order. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor and critic based in Fremantle.

Elegy and warning Jane Rawson THE GLAD SHOUT

by Alice Robinson

Affirm Press $32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781925712650

U action:

nusually for literary fiction, Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout opens right in the thick of the

Jostled and soaked, copping an elbow to her ribs, smelling wet wool and sweat and the stony creek scent of damp concrete, Isobel grips Shaun’s cold fingers and clamps Matilda to her hip, terrified of losing them in the roiling crowd.

Isobel and her family are escaping a terrible flood that has destroyed Melbourne. Holed up in a stadium – perhaps the MCG – Isobel has no idea what is left of her beachside home or whether there are any plans for anyone to help her or the hundreds of other evacuees now trying to survive amid the bleachers. Although it has some of the trappings of speculative fiction – a fast-paced opening and a disastrous, dystopian future setting – it quickly becomes clear that The Glad Shout is a novel about families, or, more particularly, about mothers and daughters and their oftenfraught relationships. Marooned in the stadium, Isobel grows increasingly angry with her husband, Shaun, for devoting himself to good works among the evacuees, rather than to protecting his wife and three-year-old daughter. The disaster only emphasises a feeling she’s had ever since their child was born: She wishes that he had more time to pursue his passions, that he was free to spend days writing and reading and getting out to volunteer with the charity … but now they have Matilda it seems those days are behind them … At the same time she longs to shake him. What on earth did you expect our lives would be like?

A parallel narrative follows Isobel’s life, especially her relationship with her mother, Luna, from infancy until the time of the flood. Isobel’s father has left – this is a novel of missing men – and Luna is raising Isobel and her brother Josh alone. Isobel often feels Luna loves interior decoration more than she loves her daughter. Again and again, Robinson returns to the theme of the painful love and deep resentments between mothers and daughters, turning it this way and that, refusing to sentimentalise the relationship: ‘After an interminable childhood coloured by wanting more of her mother than she was capable of giving, Isobel is painfully aware that she is wasting the time they do have together now wishing Luna away. Is that just what mothers and their children are destined for? To live trapped in a perpetual state of longing?’ This is also a story of the lengths mothers will go to protect their children when times are tough. Luna spends hours at work, trying to give Josh and Isobel a decent standard of living as the city crumbles. All Isobel wants is her mother’s time and approval. As disaster strikes, Isobel is repeatedly faced with the choice between helping others or helping her daughter, supporting her husband or supporting her daughter. Robinson’s novel is an unflinching investigation of not just the sacrifices, but also the vast protective selfishness that motherhood can bring, where family must always come first. For Isobel, helping others would mean betraying her daughter: it’s not something she is prepared to do. The Glad Shout is also a novel about climate change and about the ways we cope with the end of the world. Parenting in a time of climate change is not a new theme for novels – see also Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015) – but Alice Robinson has dedicated her writing career to exploring this interface. Her Stella Prize-longlisted début novel Anchor Point (2015), and her brilliant essay ‘Aching for the Apocalypse’ in The Lifted Brow (2015) both investigate the issue. It is something Robinson takes very seriously: she has spoken

and written about the tension of understanding the terrible realities of climate change while raising two very young children. In both threads of this novel, we see Melbourne and the rest of Australia collapsing under the weight of multiple climate-change disasters. Isobel’s brother flees to Tasmania before it becomes a militarised state. As Isobel struggles to survive in the evacuation centre, she is offered a chance to escape that means abandoning people she truly loves. Isobel’s life is full of huge losses, but also tragic small ones. ‘I would have loved to make fresh pesto for youse,’ Nonno sighs and murmurs, stirring the salsa made from tinned tomatoes on the stove … [he] mutters something about basil and Parmesan cheese, their absences. Isobel catches the sorrow in his face.

Robinson’s grief for the world we risk losing is palpable but always delicate, never didactic or overwrought. The Glad Shout is an immensely sad book, an elegy, but it is also a warning to all of us to prepare. As Robinson writes: ‘Isobel can’t help but feel that some of the hardship she is facing now, in the water, is her own fault. She hadn’t paid attention; hadn’t cared enough to realise that she was being forewarned.’ We should be thankful that Robinson has been brave enough to write this strongly felt, finely crafted novel, laying her own fears and misgivings on the page. g

Jane Rawson has written two novels: A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) and From the Wreck (2017), which won the 2017 Aurealis Award. v FICTION

Theatre with ears

An alternative account of the National

Ian Dickson DRAMATIC EXCHANGES: THE LIVES AND LETTERS OF THE NATIONAL THEATRE edited by Daniel Rosenthal Profile Books, $49.99 hb, 416 pp, 9781781259351

hat exactly is a National Theatre for? What is its purpose? What form should it take? National theatres come in many configurations. There is the fourhundred-year-old Comédie-Française serenely presiding over French culture from the Salle Richelieu. The Habima Theatre of Israel, which mirrors the history of many of its countrymen in its journey from imperial persecution in Białystok to its transplantation to Palestine in 1928 and its final recognition in Israel in 1958. Then there is the more recent National Theatre of Scotland (2006), which proudly declares itself to be a ‘Theatre Without Walls’, and has no home playhouse, preferring to play in all sorts of locations. The National Theatre of Great Britain, though much younger than many of its brethren, has achieved much in its fifty-six years. In Dramatic Exchanges, Daniel Rosenthal, the author of an exhaustive if slightly stolid history of the National (2013), has compiled a fascinating collection of letters, notes, emails, and countless first-night cards to create an alternative narrative, not as comprehensive perhaps as his history but much more immediate. It is fascinating to read these alongside the various autobiographies and diaries of those involved. Here we have the rough drafts that are often considerably smoothed out in their memoirs. At the same time as Laurence Olivier took on the task of founding the National, the exceedingly ambitious twenty-nine-year-old Peter Hall was staking out a claim for his Royal Shakespeare Company in London by taking over the Aldwych Theatre. As they circle each other, their correspondence de44 AP RI L 2019

generates from the polite to the terse. ‘If your new empire is going to set out to kill Stratford and my Company,’ Hall writes plaintively, ‘then what will have been achieved except the usual British waste?’ ‘You know very well that I do not want and never would allow anything to “kill” Stratford except over my dead body,’ Olivier replies, ‘and you really mustn’t throw up words like “Empire” to me, not you with Strat., Aldwych and now Arts … At the moment [taking on the National] looks to me like the most tiresome, awkward, embarrassing, forever-compromise, never-right, thankless fucking post that anyone could possibly be fool enough to take on and the idea fills me with dread.’ Apprehensive he may have been, but Olivier assembled a dazzling group of actors, mixing the already renowned, like Peter O’Toole and Michael Redgrave, with those who would become stalwarts of the profession, like Derek Jacobi, Lynn Redgrave, Michael Gambon, Robert Stephens, and Colin Blakely, whose early death deprived the theatre of one of its greats. Olivier developed a complicated relationship with Maggie Smith, who, until she joined the company, was known mainly as a West End comedienne. Although relishing the éclat her increasing fame brought to the company, he also appears to have been wary of her growing star power. His prompt scheduling of William Congreve’s The Way of the World, the play Smith most wanted to perform, the minute she took a break from the company and giving the part of Millamant to Geraldine McEwan was an act of bastardry that elicits from the anguished Smith one of the most powerful letters in the collection. Dame

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Maggie compensated by bestowing a magnificent Millamant on the lucky audience at Stratford, Ontario. A continuing theme during both Olivier and Hall’s stewardship was the luring of the skittish Paul Scofield to the National. Their persistence triggered at least three great performances – for Olivier, Wilhelm Voigt in The Captain of Köpenick and Leone Gala in The Rules of the Game; for Hall, Salieri in Amadeus.

Apprehensive he may have been, but Laurence Olivier assembled a dazzling group of actors Olivier’s company performed at The Old Vic while the new building was being erected, but, like Moses, who never reached the Promised Land, much to his fury Olivier was denied the chance to lead his team into it – though equating Denys Lasdun’s forbidding concrete bunker with the land of milk and honey is perhaps a step too far. Peter Hall, with his formidable drive and proven administrative abilities, was an obvious choice to take the company from a building with one theatre to a building with three. One of the continuing themes of the book is the way directors confronted Lasdun’s awkward spaces, adapted to them, and finally conquered them. After a decidedly shaky start, Hall’s regime came into focus, but critics were always ready to attack. Peggy Ashcroft came to Hall’s defence when the Evening News attacked him under the heading, ‘A National Disaster’: ‘It is a sad thing in this country we should be

so ready to blame, criticise and never to celebrate achievements. It would amaze many foreigners and dismay our own theatregoers … to have [the NT] labelled “a National Disaster.” Fortunately they know better.’ One of the major triumphs of Hall’s tenure was Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but Shaffer must have come to rue the perils of success. He is the recipient of an incendiary letter from the originally chosen director, the acerbic John Dexter, with whom he fell out over the matter of royalties. Later, after the enormous success of the play, he becomes the target of Peter Hall’s wrath when the play’s actual director discovers he will not be the director of the film version. Throughout the book it is perhaps the relationships between directors and playwrights which fascinate most.

Richard Eyre’s championing of David Hare’s massive state of the nation trilogy, Trevor Nunn’s shepherding of Tom Stoppard’s equally ambitious The Coast of Utopia, and Nicholas Hytner’s bantering relationship with Alan Bennett have produced works that, whatever success they have had elsewhere, needed the impetus of the National to launch them. It is good to see this sort of relationship continuing with Rufus Norris, the present director, and Carol Ann Duffy. Dramatic Exchanges, as its title suggests, concentrates on the artistic side of the National and leaves us unaware of the ways in which the directors, Hytner in particular, attempted to branch out to as wide an audience as possible. Hytner brought in outside companies, made cheap tickets more widely avail-

able, and introduced NT Live. Norris, who persuaded Duffy, Britain’s poet laureate, to adapt Everyman for him as his inaugural production, later worked with her on a collaborative piece based on extensive interviews from ordinary people around the country. My Country: A work in progress was the result: it played the Dorfman Theatre at the National and then toured, and the correspondence between Norris and Duffy ends the book. Norris’s National Theatre may not be a theatre without walls, but it is at least making attempts to break out from its concrete mausoleum. g Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales, and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee.

A couple of radicals

Rescuing the Blackburns from other people’s footnotes

Jacqueline Kent THE BLACKBURNS: PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC AMBITION by Carolyn Rasmussen

Melbourne University Press, $44.99 hb, 400 pp, 978022874457

f you were young and energetic and a believer in a range of progressive causes, Melbourne in the first three decades of the twentieth century was an exciting place. It was even better if you were in love. Doris Hordern and Maurice Blackburn, the joint subjects of Carolyn Rasmussen’s deeply researched and absorbing new biography, understood each other’s dedication to radical politics from the time they met in February 1913, introduced by the influential leftwing journalist and propagandist Henry Hyde Champion. Maurice, the chief support of a widowed mother, was struggling to make a living as a barrister, mostly for unions and workers: as he told Doris, he ‘could not shut

his eyes to suffering and oppression’. Doris, trained as a teacher, was also Vida Goldstein’s campaign secretary in the latter’s unsuccessful bid to enter federal parliament as an independent in 1913. Doris was chronically suspicious of marriage, declaring, ‘I do not trust men as I do most women.’ Nevertheless, after an eighteen-month engagement they married with very little money at the end of 1914. Both were strong feminists, possibly because they were brought up by their mothers. Maurice joined Goldstein’s Women’s Political Association and began providing notes on law and politics for her newspaper The Woman Voter. Even though he was male and an active member of the Australian Labor

Party – Goldstein was firmly against political parties – his willingness to help the cause made him the WPA’s ‘pin-up boy’. Relations frayed, however, when he and Doris became increasingly reluctant to follow Goldstein’s separatist line. Both Blackburns were also out of sympathy with the WPA’s opposition to compulsory military training with the outbreak of World War I, and Doris found the Women’s Peace Army much too confrontational. Doris became involved in raising a family, taking on a supporting role to her husband. At this point, Rasmussen inevitably gives centre stage to Maurice’s impressive legal and political career. His juggling of the law and politics was not always successful; it T H E AT R E

was once said of this rather intellectual, bookish man that he would walk his own path, even if other people were moving in the same direction. His son once observed that Maurice was ‘one of those people who stuck to his guns and

a popular and successful state and later federal MP. His constituency was inner Melbourne, and he pursued a great range of local initiatives, especially on behalf of those less fortunate. He was president of the Victorian branch of the ALP and Speaker of the House of the Victorian Parliament, and became a federal MP in 1934, where he remained until he was defeated for preselection nine years later. R a s mu s s e n goes into necessary detail about Blackburn’s career, but sometimes her description of his trajectory is not easy to follow: she occasionally jumps backwards and forwards in time, giving the results of certain initiatives before the processes that created them. However, the history of Australian labour relations is a complicated and of ten fr aught one, and she gives a clear picture of the conflicts Doris Blackburn with her administrative assistant Gloria Canet involved. She is (National Library of Australia) always persuasive if people didn’t like it, well, he would go about the beliefs that drove Blackburn, his own way’. Not an organisation man, and his actions. then, which hampered his career in the She is on more straightforward Australian Labor Party. ground when it comes to Doris BlackMaurice was often in conflict with burn. Rasmussen gives us a portrait of the ALP. His support for compulsory a woman of ‘boundless physical exuberarmy training cost him state preselec- ance’ who, among other things, liked tion in 1917. Though a socialist himself, rowing a small boat in a strong current he opposed the party’s socialist objec- against a headwind – an excellent metative. (He eventually succeeded in hav- phor for a professed political idealist if ing it modified, and it became part of ever there was one. Doris did not much the party platform.) However, he was enjoy domestic life or motherhood 46 AP RI L 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

with growing children, and she was less demonstrative than Maurice. She cherished literary ambitions; Rasmussen quotes some of her sweet, heartfelt verse, including one or two poems that hint at thwarted ambition. As time passed, Doris and Maurice Blackburn drifted apart: though both took an active part in the interwar peace debates, Maurice largely occupied the masculine world of the labour movement, which Doris never found congenial. Nineteen thirty-one was a horror year; a newborn daughter, Doris’s father, and her favourite sister all died. In trying to cope with her grief, she shut Maurice out; she also invited Frank Murphy, an old friend, to live with the family for three years. Rasmussen passes lightly over this, but it does cry out for more discussion of Blackburn family dynamics and relationships. After Maurice’s death, Doris, aged fifty-five, achieved an exceedingly satisfying goal of her own. In the 1946 election she won her husband’s old federal seat of Bourke, becoming the first woman independent MP in the Australian Parliament, forty-three years after Vida Goldstein made her first attempt. She was a lonely figure, shunned by her ALP colleagues (partly because she loathed Arthur Calwell and the White Australia policy, which she said had been formulated to exclude Asians). She stood firmly against the Woomera rocket range and nuclear testing in peacetime, and developed a strong and lasting concern for Aboriginal welfare and equal rights. She lived to see the passing of the 1967 referendum granting full citizenship to Indigenous Australians. In her introduction, Rasmussen states that one of her goals in writing this joint biography was to release Maurice and Doris Blackburn from other people’s footnotes. In presenting this fleshed out, likeable portrait of two vital, influential people who deserve to be more famous than they are, she has succeeded admirably. g Jacqueline Kent’s latest book is Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook. She is currently working on a biography of Vida Goldstein.

Middle way

On the nation-shaping importance of elections

Lyndon Megarrity ELECTIONS MATTER: TEN FEDERAL ELECTIONS THAT SHAPED AUSTRALIA edited by Benjamin T. Jones, Frank Bongiorno, and John Uhr Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 294 pp, 9781925523157

he atmosphere among Australian electors lining up to cast a vote at a school, hall, or similar institution is generally relaxed and informal, a ‘vibe’ enhanced by the friendly banter of local party members handing out ‘How to Vote’ cards. But the casualness of the Australian way of voting cannot disguise the fundamental importance of each local, state, and federal poll. As the authors of Elections Matter generally agree, elections matter and voters matter: their collective decision-making has shaped the political, social, and economic nature of the Commonwealth of Australia since 1901. Elections Matter is an edited collection of essays on ten federal elections that presented the electors with clear choices between different public policy approaches, styles of governance, and key personalities. Through compelling evidence and discussion of major electoral themes, each author generally makes a strong case for the inclusion of ‘their’ federal election as a pivotal moment in Australian political history. While the contributors vary in their conclusions, a general picture emerges of an Australian electorate that seeks to be represented somewhere near the comfortable centre rather than at left or right extremes. On the other hand, the book indicates that voters also don’t want to feel ‘behind the times’, which has often meant that a clever politician such as Labor’s Andrew Fisher (1910) or the Coalition’s John Howard (2001) can create an image of himself as the leader most ‘suited to these times’. Many readers will be surprised that some key federal elections did not merit inclusion in this volume. The 1949 election leading to the Menzies

era, the 1975 poll in the wake of the Dismissal, and Bob Hawke’s first victory in 1983 are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, the book is marked by analysis of less commemorated electoral contests, which, as the authors point out, are more historically significant than one might assume. Elections that consolidate policies and political perceptions are prominently featured. Richard Reid’s focus on the 1969 poll highlights the fact that although the ALP did not win, their strong showing under the modern leadership of Gough Whitlam reflected, without a doubt, that Labor was back from the electoral wilderness of just a few years before. Elsewhere, Frank Bongiorno argues convincingly that it was the 1987 election that ‘bedded down’ the Hawke–Keating policy mixture of dry economics, a social safety net, and ambitious policy initiatives. The electoral result was a partial rejection of the even more doctrinaire economic focus of the Howard Liberals and confirmed the electoral preference for a ‘middle way’ in public life. Understandably, the role of the prime minister as the ultimate representative of an incumbent government is emphasised in most essays included in this collection. Alex Millmow provides an entertaining portrait of Stanley Melbourne Bruce, that most British of Australian prime ministers, whose overconfidence in 1929 led him to make electorally unwise decisions, such as the introduction of an ‘amusement tax of five per cent imposed on the gross receipts of all theatre and entertainment’. Isobelle Barrett Meyering’s chapter on the 2010 election is notable for its thoughtful treatment of the politics of gender,

which has become so prominent within the public sphere. The author includes discussion of then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s attempts to change his ‘hypermasculine’ image in various ways, including public acknowledgment of the ‘strong women’ in his life such as his wife and his daughters.

Many readers will be surprised that some key federal elections did not merit inclusion in this volume Jill Sheppard provides a sound analysis of the 1996 election in which John Howard’s Liberal–National Party Coalition defeated Paul Keating’s government. The author is on sure ground when she implies that a majority of voters in that year responded more positively to Howard’s rhetorical emphasis on pre-serving Australia’s social fabric than to Keating’s focus on social change. However, Sheppard contentiously states that ‘Keating’s ALP had promised a new vision for Australia: a confident, outward-looking socially progressive national identity’. Clearly, such a stance was by no means novel: Whitlam in the 1960s and 1970s was a key exponent of such a vision. Further, the Keating ALP’s ‘big picture’ ideas were often built on the work of previous governments in areas such as multiculturalism, Australia’s relations with Asia, and Aboriginal affairs. The general tone of Elections Matter implicitly celebrates and values the collective will of the electorate: there is even a useful appendix on the evolution POLITICS

of electoral processes and administration by Michael Maley, formerly of the Australian Electoral Commission. Nevertheless, some essays could have paid more attention to acknowledging the fact that, in many instances, major political and policy shifts are forced through without reference to the electorate, including savage budget cuts, replacements of prime ministers, and restructuring public services. Election results have frequently been manipulated by governments to claim

somewhat spurious mandates for their ideological hobbyhorses. If the electorate is as conservative as the elections covered in this book often suggest, perhaps it is because caution at election time is the only potent protest against imposed societal changes. These observations notwithstanding, Elections Matter has much to commend it. Each chapter is highly readable and showcases high standards of historical scholarship. Discussions of electoral processes and political campaigning are

generally balanced by the contributors with biographical and historical context, which helps the general reader care about each individual election. It will serve as an effective reference work for political science students and for readers interested in the development of the Australian style of politics and democracy. g Lyndon Megarrity is the author of Northern Dreams: The politics of northern development in Australia (2018).

Right about Japan Harmonious or conflicted nation?

Alison Broinowski JAPAN STORY: IN SEARCH OF A NATION, 1850 TO THE PRESENT by Christopher Harding Allen Lane, $59.99 hb, 515 pp, 9780241296486

ur tutor in Japanese conversation at the Australian National University in 1968, rather than listen to us mangling his language, used to write the kanji for all the political factions on the board, with a Ramenlike chart of connections looping between them and multiple interest groups. Within each one were mainstream and anti-mainstream factions, he told us, whose seething contestation with one another was fiercer than with their political enemies. This was not what we absorbed from most English-language histories, which, as Peter Carey wrote in Wrong about Japan (2004), misled many with the dominant Western narrative. It might begin with the arrival of Francis Xavier in 1549, and record that Japan, unified in 1600, was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns for three centuries in almost complete peace, secluded from the world apart from limited Portuguese, Dutch, and Russian contacts. Japan’s recent history was said to have started when American Black Ships arrived 48 AP RI L 2019

in 1853 and 1854, opening up trade and establishing unequal treaties. The Tokugawa retreated, imperial rule was restored, and Japan’s rapid transformation into ‘modernity’s poster-child’ began. Apart from the years when Japan aggressively sought an empire of its own in the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia, the nation made peaceful progress. It became the world’s second largest economy in the 1980s, officially crediting that success to its unique identity. So why do we need another ‘Japan story’? Christopher Harding shows that the story of Japan’s peaceful Westernisation and democratisation misses a lot: it should include the nation’s protracted wrestling match with itself, and the influence of individuals on the contest. Rebels, ultranationalists, and political thugs, inheriting a belief in righteous conflict, variously responded with ‘Japanese spirit’, wakon. Many of their names are not in our standard histories, and several were women.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

One who certainly had wakon was an early feminist Kageyama Hideko, jailed for her part in the 1885 ‘Osaka Incident’ involving incitement of armed rebellion in Korea. In 1913, after her release, Kageyama proposed a ‘Solution to the Woman Problem’: communist revolution. Another feminist, Kishida Toshiko, campaigned against the precept, ‘Respect men, despise women’, which persisted into the Meiji era. The author Yosano Akiko wrote a famous poem imploring her brother to defy the emperor and not join the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Evincing wakon of a different kind, Kanno Sugako conspired to throw a bomb at the emperor, and she was hanged for it. The Special Higher Police were empowered after Kanno’s 1910 assassination attempt to tackle ‘thought crimes’ against the state, such as a boy’s letter addressed to ‘Dear Stupid Emperor’, and references to His Majesty Hirohito as a ‘stupid bastard.’ National emergencies had repeatedly been invoked since the 1850s, but

as economic conditions worsened in the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese saw themselves as misunderstood and threatened from east and west. Some blamed the rush to adopt European enlightenment ideas. Others took the guilt upon themselves for the national confusion. General Araki Sadao banned the words ‘retreat’, ‘defence’, and ‘surrender’ in army literature, and claimed Japanese spirit, wakon again, was central to the army’s past and future success. Junior army officers from his Imperial Way Faction encircled the Diet and Army Headquarters with a thousand troops in 1936. Opposing this, a Control Faction argued for negotiating first, if only to give the weapons industry time to prepare for war, and Japan diplomatically achieved its occupation of French Indochina. But war began anyway against China in 1937, and ended in 1945, ‘not necessarily to Japan’s advantage’, as Hirohito, the ‘stupid bastard’ put it. Necessity mothered invention, as Harding shows, with heartening examples of postwar wakon. Jazz pianist Akiyoshi Toshiko paired up with American star Hampton Hawes to make a living, giving concerts for the Occupation troops. Physicist Morita Akio made crude magnetic tape and a clunky tape recorder, and his colleague Ibuka Masaru, after a struggle to get finance, bought the US patent for prototype transistors, which they combined by 1955 into the Sony Walkman. Harding could also have mentioned Ishibashi (‘stone bridge’) Shōjirō, who, after inventing rubber-soled workmen’s footwear, moved on to make car tyres, and in 1931 established Bridgestone. Such success didn’t come easily: in the 1960s a senior executive at Japan National Railways said that reviving a 1930s high-speed train project was ‘the height of madness’ and ‘destined to fail’. Then came the Shinkansen, which now reaches most parts of Japan. Young Japanese were sharply divided from their elders in the 1960s and 1970s about US military bases and the United States–Japan security treaty. Mass protest demonstrations were met by club-wielding opponents, some

supported by rightist leaders and even, according to rumour, the CIA. Ishihara Shintarō’s novel and two films about the ‘sun tribe’ of rich young Japanese behaving badly caused public panic in the mid-1950s. But youthful rebellion morphed into mature conservatism, and Ishihara, a denier of the Nanjing Massacre, went on to represent the establishment as governor of Tokyo. Environmental issues also caused contestation and mistrust. Hundreds of thousands were irradiated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and so were a Japanese fishing crew in 1954 by fallout from American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll: yet Japan relied on nuclear power and

Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns for three centuries in almost complete peace, secluded from the world American nuclear weapons. The effluent from a fertiliser plant was found to cause ‘Minamata disease’, yet the evidence was suppressed for years by the company and the government. Similar cover-ups preceded and followed the Fukushima ‘triple disaster’ of 2011. The slogan for Osaka’s International Expo in 1970 was ‘Progress and Harmony for Mankind’, but disgruntled citizens displayed a one-word banner, ‘Bitterness’. Claims of social harmony and racial homogeneity are disputed; arguments go on about Japan’s ‘no-war’ Constitution and whether immigration is desirable to offset an ageing population; people question the worth of work. Harding’s wide-ranging psychoanalysis of the complex contest between mainstream and anti-mainstream is right about Japan, and brilliant. g Alison Broinowski has lived, worked, and frequently travelled in Japan. She was Australia’s cultural attaché in Tokyo in the mid-1980s and has recently contributed a chapter, with Rachel Miller, on the history of the Australian Embassy, to a book on Australia–Japan relations edited at Deakin University.

THE HOLLOW BONES

by Leah Kaminsky

Vintage $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9780143788911

eah Kaminsky’s novel The Hollow Bones focuses on Ernst Schäfer, a German who was sent to Tibet by Himmler in the late 1930s, outwardly to collect plant and animal specimens; secretly to ‘search for the origins of the Aryan race’. Himmler’s abhorrent obsessions are not focused on – indeed, Schäfer’s expedition only makes up the final third of Kaminsky’s book. The first two-thirds concentrate on Ernst’s relationship with his young wife, Herta, and his deepening involvement with the SS. Intended to interrogate the moral slip of a man who took advantage of the Reich to advance his career, The Hollow Bones does not have the emotional resonance of Kaminsky’s début, The Waiting Room (2015). That novel – told from the perspective of a daughter of Holocaust survivors – is fluid with the movement of memory, exploring grief with sensitivity and depth. It is warm and funny, detailing its characters and their milieu with tenderness and buoyancy. This authorial affection does not extend to The Hollow Bones, whose characters feel condemned from the outset. Ernst’s loosening grip on his ethics and himself lacks the expected nuance, difficulty, and grit, particularly where it is the pivotal point in the drama. The signals of his changing temperament feel rigid and fall readily into the usual manoeuvres of represented Nazi behaviour. This, coupled with narrations of taxidermy and Ernst’s pleasure in killing animals, makes the work occasionally feel pantomimic. This could have been tempered with a closer focus on character, but one gets the feeling Kaminsky is not interested in making us feel sympathy for her protagonists. The true hero, the one that is lingered over and mourned, is nature: rendered beautifully in the birds, forests, and flowers near Ernst and Herta’s childhood homes. Here, the author sets out an irretrievable idyll we can all relate to – one which, in this story, Nazism removes access to for good. Jacinta Mulders J A PA N

Nature’s lap, nature’s book The Weindorfers on Cradle Mountain

Jarrod Hore KINDRED: A CRADLE MOUNTAIN LOVE STORY by Kate Legge

Miegunyah Press, $44.99 pb, 256 pp, 9780522874518

arly on in Kindred: A Cradle Mountain love story, the journalist and walker Kate Legge dwells on an ‘extraordinary coincidence’ that took place over Christmas in 1903. While the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria were on excursion to Mount Buffalo, the itinerant prophet of the National Park movement, the Scottish-American John Muir, was also in the mountains of Victoria. On Christmas Day, Muir plunged into the valleys around the Black Spur to verify optimistic claims of eucalypts ‘as high as the Great Pyramid’. He was soon disappointed by how these mountain giants compared in height and age to the redwoods of the Sierras, but he was charmed by the seclusion and intimacy of Victoria’s forests. Just a few hundred kilometres away, Gustav Weindorfer and his future wife Kate Cowle were among those sampling the ‘rich pickings’ of the Buffalo Plateau. Among the granite boulders, the party of naturalists collected orchids and asters, beetles and birds’ nests. Other adventurers picked their way through gorges to look upon swirling mists and sublime vistas. Muir moved on quickly, though, and missed the naturalists by a few days (just as Muir himself glanced by Henry David Thoreau in Wisconsin in 1861). Despite this, it’s clear they were swept up in the same movement. They were settlers enamoured by the monumentality of remote landscapes and the complexity of the natural systems found therein. Legge shows that this new attachment to nature was about a holistic appreciation of aesthetic, scientific, and social value. Preserves of ‘wilderness’ then became valuable resources for tourists, scientists, and artists. As newly50 AP RI L 2019

weds, the Weindorfers blazed a trail into the wild central highlands of Tasmania and established a base under Cradle Mountain. This ‘wilderness’ was an ‘El Dorado for botanists’, a ‘sculpture garden of rock and cliff and tree’ for photographers, and (increasingly) a ‘valuable asset’ for the state. Legge shifts between these dimensions by considering the historical foundations of Tasmanian nature leisure in a series of chronologically informed but mostly thematic chapters. The book pivots on a timely question: what happens as the enthusiastic activities of privileged amateurs are scaled up? This question emerges out of a narrative concerned with Gustav and Kate Weindorfer. These disciples of Thoreau’s mountain-top god – one Austrian and the other Tasmanian – worked singlemindedly between 1909 and 1932 to build a home for nature lovers in the Cradles. Kate’s inheritance and connections in Tasmania made early expeditions possible, and at the critical juncture of 1912, when Gustav spent extended periods in the Cradles building Waldheim, Kate’s labour on the farm at Kindred was essential. Making home in the Cradles involved more than just the construction of comfortable lodgings. It also required a constant absorption in Nature’s book. There was botany, geology, and topography to understand, but settlers and visitors also drew on the more intangible ways that humans appreciated the natural world. There’s a romance here. In Kindred, the real love story is that which develops between the Weindorfers and the Tasmanian highlands. They came to know nature through an attentiveness to its presence, energy, and even agency.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

It is clear that the social aspects of nature leisure were important, too. Ironically, solitude was clearly best experienced alongside others. From the 1910s a group of high-country locals, visitors, and eminent scientists that Legge memorably dubs ‘the Giants’ banded together to lobby officials, build connections, and patronise the lodge. This bore fruit in 1921 when the Cradles were classified as a National Park. Legge’s telling of this story reminds us that building the infrastructure of nature tourism was a communal project that appealed to the settler state. In the words of the promoter Evelyn Temple Emmett, this was about ‘capitalising scenery’. As with many of the early National Parks, it was the ‘untouched’ nature of the Cradles that attracted visitors. To a certain extent, this was a grand fantasy. Despite the tone of promotional material, it’s clear that the environs of Cradle

They came to know nature through an attentiveness to its presence, energy, and even agency Mountain were very much a working landscape when the Weindorfers first encountered them in 1909. Van Diemen’s Land Company surveyors charted the territory in the 1830s and 1850s, photographers were active from the 1880s, and trappers, loggers, and farmers were all present in the early twentieth century. The illusion that ‘walkers’ were ‘on their own’ in the highlands was sustained by the Weindorfers, who assembled and promoted a wilderness. The ignorance of settler heritage in the Cradles compounded a thorough reluctance to explore Indigenous history. Legge skirts this question in early chapters but deals with it explicitly in the fourth. Like many settlers, Gustav was aware of Indigenous dispossession – he had read James Bonwick, was in the orbit of Alfred William Howitt while in Melbourne, and Kate collected Aboriginal flints – but nevertheless he often reverted to the language of eternity, absence, and ‘virgin territory’. Despite their curiosity, the Weindorfers weren’t cognisant of this fundamental conceit at

the heart of their appreciation of nature. Like other settler wilderness enthusiasts – John Muir especially – there was little room for an Indigenous history of scenic and scientific landscapes. Finally, this book provides new contexts for recent controversies in the Tasmanian highlands. Far from the sparsely populated space that the Weindorfers encountered in 1909, Cradle Mountain is now the destination of some 280,000 tourists a year. It’s an engine for the Tasmanian economy. As a journalist, Legge has recently investigated plans to develop an eco-tourist lodge within the Walls of Jerusalem National Park. Kindred explains how these still-contested sites were initially encountered, belatedly appreciated, and eventually held up as paradigms of settler environmental management. Though the Weindorfers might have been horrified at the sight of so many tourists flowing off buses or by the notion of them dropping in on helicopters, they would probably also see a fulfilment of their original ambitions. The highlands are still a laboratory for science, but they are also a source of inspiration for tourists and other visitors. It is as if the evangelism of wilderness advocates still puts them in complicated positions. This contradiction hung over the Weindorfers at Waldheim and clearly haunts nature lovers still. g

Jarrod Hore is a historian from Sydney. He teaches and researches at Macquarie University and specialises in environmental and settler colonial history. He is currently working on a book about settlers, nature, and wilderness thinking in late-nineteenth-century Australasia and California. v

Political poetics Two new poetry collections

Jen Webb BLAKWORK by Alison Whittaker

Magabala Books, $24.99 pb, 179 pp, 9781925360851

WALKING WITH CAMELS: THE STORY OF BERTHA STREHLOW by Leni Shilton

UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 150 pp, 9781742589701

lison Whittaker’s début collection, Lemons in the Chicken Wire (2015), introduced a genuinely new voice to Australian poetry: that of a Gomeroi woman, a Fulbright scholar, and a poet who can bend and blend forms with the best of them. Her second collection of poems, Blakwork, places her firmly in both the broad community of celebrated Australian poets and the celebrated Aboriginal writers in Magabala’s lists. Like Lemons, Blakwork is packed with wit, image, and sensibility; with views that surprise, excoriate, charm, and amuse, by turns. It revisits and reviews conventional Myths of Oz: the poem ‘not one silent lamb’, for example, shifts the story of a country that rides on the sheep’s back to one of a country that is simply a ‘grass-fed mine’, carrying on its back the ‘trespassing sheep’. (It also offers a phrase that is new to me, a brilliant and economical characterisation of white settlers/invaders, as ‘them nullius men’.) Then there’s that popular myth, the Picnic at Hanging Rock, retold in ‘MANY GIRLS WHITE LINEN’ (winner of the 2017 Judith Wright Poetry Prize), where Whittaker contrasts those fey, white/whiteclad schoolgirls with the ‘blak girls’ who in that same place ‘hang / nails hang out picking / them hangnails’. And yet another: ‘a love like Dorothea’s’, which reprises and revises Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘I love a sunburnt country’. Whittaker adopts fragments of Mackellar’s often sentimental lexicon while observing – wryly, tragically – how that story of

Australia delimited the modes of love for country, excluding Aboriginal ways of inhabiting the land: ‘I loved a sunburnt country, won’t it / gingerly limp back? / I can’t get past the concrete and my blak tongue’s gone all slack’. It’s probably a miscategorisation to name this collection a book of poems. Individual pieces are image-oriented; ‘scissors anchor pistol’, for instance, is all emojis, while ‘exhibit tab’ is a heavily redacted collection of lines from the inquest into the death in custody of Ms Dhu. A number of poems are set landscape on the page (‘cottonononon’, for example), requiring the reader to swivel the book, and thus doubling as a metaphor for different ways of seeing. There’s play with language, too: the making up of words, or clustering of letters in unpronounceable combinations in ‘fieldwork’, a sequence of letters that remind the ear of the word ‘attack’ – ‘Gatcctccat attacaacggt atctccacct caggttga don’t tctcaacaa ggaaccattg ccgacatgag actagttaggt mind’ (et cetera) – are punctuated by recognisable words that together become a sentence beginning ‘don’t mind me I’m just here …’ Other sections again are not poetry at all, but prose life writing. ‘The abattoir’, for example, is a sequence of short pieces about family, the business of meat, and the need to ‘adapt, always mediators of the squeamish line between life and the lives we have to take to keep living’. This is a political book, one that extends and enhances poetic diction in Australia, but it is never didactic. Full of image, pulsing rhythm, and (sometimes) HISTORY

rhyme, it rollicks along, critiquing, teasing, reflecting, calling its readers in. It never takes its eye off the history of post-invasion Australia and what this means for Aboriginal people, of how law fails to function appropriately when its subject is black, and of the mismatch between white and Aboriginal ways of being and living in this country. Yet there is no sentimentality, no mere complaint: rather, it is a nuanced, critical, felt, and poetic account of being, and of Australia, with all its complexities and its passions.

hile it is probably fair to say that all poetry is, strictly speaking, a type of nonfiction, biographical poetry has particular features not shared by other poetic genres. The scholarly literature suggests that, as biography, poetry has uncertain value, but nonetheless poets do write in this form. From the story of the king Gilgamesh (c.2100 bce), right through the millennia and across all major cultures, verse biographies appear. Leni Shilton’s new work adds to that vast body of literature the story of Bertha |Strehlow, a woman who exists in history primarily in her husband’s shadow, her contributions to his work barely acknowledged. Walking with Camels is the product of Shilton’s doctorate, ‘Giving Voice to Silence’ (2016), in which she calls the work both a ‘verse novel’ and a ‘biography in poetry’. This double identity is perfectly reasonable: it is, after all, a collection of individual poems that stand as poems in their own right, but together form a narrative arc; and, as the endnotes show, they are deeply embedded in, and emerge from, the archival documents held in the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. Shilton effectively straddles the different demands of poetry, history, life writing, and an imaginative embodying of that life and the country in which it was lived – no easy task given that each mode comes with different demands and trajectories. The balance is achieved in part by the substantial endmatter: a timeline of Bertha’s life, a contextualising note for each poem, and a bibliography. The poems are organised chrono52 AP RI L 2019

logically, from Bertha’s first meeting with her husband Ted, to the moment of her death, and vary from monologue to imagistic lyric to a kind of reportage. The poem ‘Alice Springs’, for example, is quite prosaic, and seems to be there largely to locate the Strehlows and move the story along to the next stage of their lives – Hermannsburg and then into the desert, which inspires some of the more lyrical and imagistic poems in the collection. See ‘Rain’, for instance: The day darkens, turns to rain. We walk in fine mist, the sand deepened to blood red, until we are wet through.

These lines take on the quality of a haiku: close attention to the natural world and the human experience of momentary transformation, along with the magic of light, texture, and colour in a land that exists independent of human presence. Bertha, who exists in the historical record principally as Ted Strehlow’s wife, is here a vibrant, sympathetic, and entirely believable presence. Ted comes to us primarily through Bertha’s account, which is loving but not really

admiring: someone whose moods need to be managed (in ‘Camel Memories’, for example: ‘when Ted grew stern, / serious, / even hateful, / I’d remind him of our desert time / … and slowly / they would bring him round’). The book is Bertha’s: her story, her perspectives, her deep respect for land and its traditional owners; and her growing attachment to her children rather than her husband. The voice is disarmingly simple, but Bertha’s curiosity, along with her openness to adventure, compassion, and resilience, ‘gives voice to silence’. g

Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research in the Faculty of Arts and Design.

‘Alone we are born’ Distillations in nine lines or fewer

Joan Fleming SHORT POEMS OF NEW ZEALAND edited by Jenny Bornholdt

Victoria University Press, $38.95 hb, 175 pp, 9781776562022

new anthology of bite-sized New Zealand poems is freshly out from Victoria University Press. VUP is the Wellington-based publisher closely associated with the University’s renowned creative writing school, known affectionately (or pejoratively, depending on your affiliation) as ‘The Bill Manhire School’. The anthology is edited by former NZ Poet Laureate Jenny Bornholdt, a softly spoken

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giant of New Zealand letters who has been writing lauded poems of deceptive simplicity and depth since she first took Manhire’s class in 1984. Bornholdt’s self-imposed rules for the anthology were to select poems of nine lines or fewer. Six lines felt too restrictive; ten, somehow, too roomy to be ‘properly short’. What is it, then, that a short poem can accomplish, that longer poems can’t, or don’t?

A fine short poem has superior snapshot capabilities. It can be an atmosphere capsule, like Denis Glover’s perfectly morose portrait of ‘Wellington at 5 O’Clock’, only four lines long: Where they might stand and throw Applecores down ships’ funnels, People walk dully home Up steps, or go through tunnels.

Admittedly, it is difficult for me to separate this poem’s oppressive atmosphere from my own lived experience as a public servant, stepping out the front door of the Department of Internal Affairs to an early dark in a damp and quietening city. It is one of many poems set in concrete in the walkway along Wellington’s waterfront, and I probably trod it many times on that gloomy walk home. A handful of the anthology’s most famous poems will be well-known to those who have lived or studied in New Zealand with at least one ear tuned to the literary world. One poem I feel is ‘mine’ – mine, and every other New Zealander’s – is James K. Baxter’s ‘High Country Weather’: ‘Alone we are born / And die alone …’ I might run out of fingers if I tried to count the times I’ve heard this recited aloud. Baxter’s poem is a moving meditation on life, death, and surrender. It’s a tall order for a short poem, and there aren’t many of this ilk. C.K. Stead’s pithy punch of wisdom in ‘On Turning Seventy’ comes close. Lynley Edmeades’s ‘East Belfast’ manages to accomplish a layered meditation on big themes of history and forgetting, and Michael Harlowe’s ‘Not less by dreaming more’, among others, rewards rereading. Most of the short poems, however, are little bursts of language in the mouth, to be popped in and quickly swallowed. Some of the short poems are pure jokes, with punchline intact, like Bernadette Hall’s ‘Cromwell’ and Murray Edmond’s ‘Cookbook’. Frances Samuel’s ‘Anorexia’, a mere five words, is a dark joke that turns on rhyme: ‘electric doors / don’t sense her’. Are these mere jokes? Hall’s poem expresses feigned confusion at encountering a statue of Oliver Cromwell outside

Westminster Abbey, when all the speaker knows of Cromwell is the name of her hometown. The poem might seem wilfully ignorant, but it’s a joke about ignorance, about cultural relativism, parochialism, and New Zealand’s isolation from the rest of the world. Edmond’s poem ribs, not without fondness, the myths of Sunday school by punning on the subtitle of the baking cookbook every New Zealander knows: ‘At Sunday School / I rose to read: / Sure to Rise.’ Beneath the joke is the awareness of religion’s diminished power in our current moment, compared to its centrality in the time of our grandparents. What else is distinctively New Zealand about the anthology, besides being a bunch of poems from New Zealand? Despite ongoing arguments about the negligible cultural differences between Kiwi and Aussie culture, this is not a collection of poems that could have been assembled anywhere else. A Rob Hack poem is titled ‘Bring your camera ay?’, summoning the unique cadences of Kiwi speech. The poems are threaded with the specificity of place names: towns and beaches and mountain ranges. There are recognisable lowculture icons, like Ian Wedde’s paean to ‘Tony’s Tyre Service.’ Te reo Māori, the Māori language, is present throughout, composing entire poems or seamlessly integrated into the dominant English. Māori and Pasifika writers like Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Albert Wendt, Hone Tuwhare, John Pule, Tusiata Avia, and Hinemoana Baker are in attendance. There is also the proximity of all the poems in the anthology – like all the towns and cities of New Zealand – to the sea. An environmental consciousness arising from a close attention to the natural world is found in the short poems of great-grandparent figures like Ruth Dallas, as well as contemporary elders and caretaker-poets like Dinah Hawken and Brian Turner. Grief at the disintegrating environment is surely a natural response to New Zealanders’ love of beach trips, tramping, and time in the bush. The intelligence of Bill Manhire, of course, is generously represented. His ‘My World War I Poem’ is less a haiku, an image stilled, than it is a circling

metaphor: ‘Inside each trench, the sound of prayer. / Inside each prayer, the sound of digging.’ Manhire stands out as the rara avis who manages to complicate and freight a short poem, for example, with ‘The Elaboration’ – although

Six lines felt too restrictive; ten, somehow, too roomy to be ‘properly short’ Ashleigh Young is a fierce contender, well-placed on this facing page. Still, the nine-lines-or-fewer rule does not allow for the unsettling genius of Manhire’s swift code-switching, or the dreamlike childhood houses that his speakers walk into, all questions and opening doors. This anthology is a treasure. In beautifully designed hardcover, it makes for a thoughtful gift for anyone who loves poetry, or hasn’t discovered it yet. Yes, some of the poems are ‘so laid back they’re lying down’, as the old joke about New Zealand poetry goes. Younger, more irreverent, hot-blooded New Zealand poets aren’t present, and there isn’t much space within these pages for knottiness, weirdness, or sustained philosophy. A tone of sweetness and prayerfulness predominates. However, though the poems are small, they are not slight. This is an anthology packed with significance and thought. g

Joan Fleming is the author of two books of poetry, Failed Love Poems (2015) and The Same as Yes (2011), both published by Victoria University Press, and the chapbook Two Dreams in Which Things Are Taken (Duets, 2010). POETRY

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Anabaptists Paul Collins NEW JERUSALEM

by Paul Ham

William Heinemann $45 hb, 375 pp, 9780143781332

he link between fundamentalist religion, violence, and madness is well established. The conviction of absolute truth becomes especially toxic when believers are convinced that the end of the world is nigh. This is exacerbated in times of major socio-economic change and political instability, such as during the Protestant Reformation. Paul Ham’s New Jerusalem vividly illustrates this. It tells the bizarre story of the most radical of the Reformation’s reformers, the Anabaptist sect that seized the city of Münster between 1534 and 1535. What started as a peaceful apocalyptic movement transmuted into a religious monstrosity. Much more than a heretical sect, they ‘stoked civil unrest’ and were, as Ham says, ‘a deeply subversive political and economic movement’, which helps explain the ferocious vengeance that was afterwards wreaked upon them. Often in such situations, opportunists seize control. In Münster it was an astute, sociopathic Dutchman, John Bockelson, ‘King John’ of Leiden. As king of the ‘New Jerusalem’, he was to rule the world until the second coming of Christ. However, his kingdom was always small. When he seized power in the city, there were only about nine thousand people in Münster, including five thousand women, two thousand children, and about sixteen hundred combat-capable men. Drawing on apocalyptical literature, the Anabaptists believed that the end of the world was approaching. They repudiated Catholicism and Lutheranism, believed in adult baptism, and called for a radical, almost communistic sharing of goods and possessions as described in the Acts of the Apostles. Believers must be prepared to fight the ‘godless’ to prepare for the end times. All books were to be burned except the Bible. To

increase fertility, male believers should have multiple wives who must submit to their husbands’ sexual demands. Despite this, many women were attracted to Anabaptism because it gave them a sense of spiritual liberation. This can probably be traced back to the late Middle Ages when many nuns and laywomen – like Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and later Tereza of Avila – found agency through commitment to a deeply personal spirituality leading them to exercise considerable influence in the church. Ham, drawing on fascinating primary sources, tells the Münster story brilliantly. He clearly outlines Anabaptist beliefs and explains why Catholics and Lutherans held them in such contempt, seeing them as ‘barely literate zealots and crazed heretics’, lower-class nobodies who ‘proclaimed that the whole of Christendom had erred for more than a thousand years’. Luther particularly felt compromised by Anabaptism because he was primarily responsible for ‘the confusion and fragmentation’ incited by his 1517 revolt against the papacy and his attempt to reform Catholicism. Reading New Jerusalem, it struck me that perhaps the medieval church was right in restricting access to the Bible. Anabaptists are a good example of what can happen when everyone becomes their own biblical interpreter, especially of apocalyptic books like Daniel and Revelation and prophets like Ezekiel. This is coded, symbolic, poetic literature written for times of persecution, literature aiming to provide hope for oppressed Jews and Christians by emphasising that the powers that struggle against them will be finally routed in the end times by God. Taken out of context, apocalyptic texts are open to all types of bizarre interpretations. That is precisely what the Münster Anabaptists did: wrench the texts out of their context to give them meanings that suited their purposes. Münster fundamentalism was essentially religion gone mad, an assault on reason, and a distortion of mainstream Christianity’s attempt to hold faith and reason together, fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking to ground itself in understanding and human experience,

as philosopher–archbishop Anselm of Canterbury said in the eleventh century. The core issue of Anabaptism is adult baptism. They argued that in the New Testament and the early church all converts were adults because conversion required a mature commitment to faith. Infants couldn’t make this commitment. In fact, the earliest unequivocal reference to infant baptism comes from the third century. However, since then it’s been a constant part of Christian tradition. Infant baptism was reinforced by Saint Augustine’s pessimistic and literal theology of so-called ‘original sin’ and of the need for baptism to counter that. The term was never used in the New Testament or by Saint Paul, who talked more about humankind’s vulnerability, weakness, and inclination to selfishness. The end of the kingdom was terrible as the siege tightened, Münster descended into starvation, and King John into ever-deeper madness. The Lutheranleaning Prince-Bishop of Münster, Franz von Waldeck, was consumed with the desire for revenge, having been humiliated by his failure to stamp out the sect. There was to be no Christian forgiveness here. Many of the townspeople were slaughtered, and King John and the other leaders were executed with exquisite cruelty, having challenged the foundations of church and social order. The sect, however, survived through the efforts of the gentle former priest, Menno Simons, who led the extremist Anabaptists out of millennialist madness and violence into a mainstream, moderate, almost-pacifist group, the Mennonites, the remote forerunners of today’s Baptist Church. But Anabaptist Münster was the symbol of what was to come. It is not that peace-loving people had not tried to preach tolerance. Luther’s humanist disciple Philip Melanchthon and the Venetian Cardinal Gasparo Contarini had tried to build bridges, but in the end the hardheads were determined to fight, leading to the madness of the religious wars as Lutherans and Catholics fought each other until the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Twenty per cent of the German population was killed in the process. g Paul Collins is a historian and writer. HISTORY

Does humanism still matter? An elegant biography of Nietzsche’s rehabilitator

Lewis Rosenberg WALTER KAUFMANN: PHILOSOPHER, HUMANIST, HERETIC by Stanley Corngold

Princeton University Press (Footprint), $89 hb, 758 pp, 9780691165011

y favourite image from Stanley Corngold’s Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, humanist, heretic is set in Berlin as World War II concludes. Young Walter Kaufmann, a German Jew forced to flee the National Socialist regime to the United States, has returned to his native land as part of the occupying forces. Kaufmann is steeped in a German intellectual tradition of Bildung, meaning education or culture. This humanist tradition sees philosophy and literature as serving to liberate, challenge, and cultivate the self. In occupied Germany, Kaufmann sees the tradition of Bildung humiliated and degraded by the inhumanity of Nazism. Some of the canonical texts are accused of harbouring proto-Nazi ideas. Others have been claimed by Nazi ideologues seeking to fashion an intellectual foundation for the fascist regime. In a bookstore, Kaufmann discovers an edition of the works of a writer tarred more heavily with the Nazi brush than most – Friedrich Nietzsche – and is absorbed. On his return to the United States, Kaufmann commences an immensely productive career as a philosopher, translator, poet, and photographer, drawing upon and indefatigably defending this German tradition. Corngold’s ‘philosophical biography’ portrays Kaufmann as a fascinating, admirable, and flawed character. After a brief biographical chapter, Corngold takes us through Kaufmann’s intellectual journey from his first book to his last. The detailed discussions of Kaufmann’s individual works, supplemented by an array of philosophical and literary references, are balanced and rich, although they expand the book to what might be considered an intimidating 56 AP RI L 2019

size. Corngold aims to assess Kaufmann’s contribution and the potential of his books to ‘educate’ us through agreement or disagreement. For Corngold, Kaufmann is by no means right about everything, but he is a provocative and, at times, brilliant thinker. Kaufmann is praised for his unfailing effort to draw upon the humanities to address crucial concerns of human existence, such as suffering, ethics, autonomy, and meaning. While Corngold admits that Kaufmann’s efforts are not always convincing – indeed, for Corngold, they are sometimes hasty or haphazard, particularly later in Kaufmann’s life – the treatment of them is largely sympathetic. Corngold admires Kaufmann for his humanist ethical vision. Throughout his works, Kaufmann holds human capacities in high regard. In reflecting on Nietzsche, Freud, poetry, tragic theatre, religious texts, and more, Kaufmann articulates a compelling ethical vision of ‘self-overcoming’, focusing on the relentless pursuit of self-knowledge and self-improvement. An interesting subtheme of Corngold’s book is its meditations on reading. Corngold admires Kaufmann’s approach to reading, which sought to combine rigorous and clear-sighted criticism with generosity. Kaufmann considered himself a heretic; he prided himself on posing radical questions and maintaining his independence from any particular school or doctrine. But he also went to unusual lengths to identify what is insightful in the views of those with whom he disagreed. Corngold rightly admires this quality in a time where empathetic treatment of opposing viewpoints seems rare, both in scholarly debates and in everyday life.

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Kaufmann believes that even those with whom we disagree can be our ‘educators’ if they are read critically yet generously. Corngold’s own readings of Kaufmann admirably live up to this standard. He draws out the lessons Kaufmann’s writings offer with subtlety, erudition, and empathy, while remaining attentive to his shortcomings. Another aspect of Kaufmann’s practice of reading is his sense of the practical significance of the humanities. Philosophy and literature have the power to help us deal with existential concerns. The point of studying them is not to decide questions of scholarly curiosity

For Corngold, Kaufmann isn’t right about everything, but he is a provocative and brilliant thinker but to ‘change your life’. This makes Kaufmann hostile to overly scholastic approaches to philosophy. Kaufmann’s verve is refreshing for readers concerned about the embattled state of the humanities in today’s corporatist universities. Arguably, Kaufmann’s most famous book is his first, entitled Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, Antichrist (1950). This work is widely acknowledged as pivotal in challenging the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche and rehabilitating him as a philosopher worthy of study following World War II. But lately the fashion in Nietzsche scholarship is to criticise Kaufmann for going too far and for whitewashing some of Nietzsche’s more disturbing themes to make him inoffensive. In Corngold’s view, this criticism misrepresents Kaufmann. Eager for a straw man to attack, the critics have not followed the practice of generous yet critical reading espoused by Kaufmann (and Corngold). Opinions about how to receive Kaufmann’s work on Nietzsche, and his whole opus, will differ. This question can be situated in a broader debate about the future of humanism. In the twentieth century, critiques of humanism emerged from a number of angles. Critics argue that a problematic essentialist notion of humanity undergirds humanism. They purport to identify links between

humanism and colonialism, sexism, or abuse of the natural world. They see promise in Michel Foucault’s suggestion, in The Order of Things (1970), that the prevalent understanding of the human could be surpassed, so that Man as we know him ‘would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of a sea’. Perhaps a ‘posthuman’ future would follow, inaugurating new understandings of subjectivity free from the supposedly problematic presuppositions of humanism, like that proposed by Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013). Contemporary work from this perspective locates Nietzsche as a precursor of postmodernism, ambivalent about humanism. Such work is inspired by interpretations of Nietzsche by such writers as Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, another twentieth-century French thinker. This angle of attack on Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is neglected by Corngold. For example, he does not discuss Deleuze’s influential Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962), although that work’s depiction of Nietzsche’s philosophy as completely anti-Hegelian jars with Kaufmann’s assessment that the two have a certain kinship. Corngold sympathises with humanism. In a previous work, The Fate of the Self: German writers and French theory (1986), he defends a broadly humanist concept of selfhood derived from the German philosophical and literary tradition from postmodernists like Foucault. I think this is why Corngold sees Kaufmann’s humanist interest in Bildung as so worthy. The debate about the value and future of humanist ideals is very much open. I for one think that we have a great deal to learn from humanists like Kaufmann, although I think the critics have a point. Corngold’s empathetic and insightful treatment ensures that Kaufmann’s contribution to these questions will not be lost. Whether or not we agree with Kaufmann’s positions, the integrity, energy, and intellect of his writings, conveyed elegantly in Corngold’s book, mean that either way he has much to teach us. g Lewis Rosenberg studies philosophy at Flinders University, focusing on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. ❖

Lost World Sonnets 1 In my mind he is always half the age I am now as he stands on a green shelf of Razorback mountain. I will wait for him forever in the backseat of a car, my chin numbing on the window ledge as I study his black hair shuffling the void between earth and dark sky. My eyes walk him back from the edge. What does he know of life which as yet is still a question. His wife at home breastfeeding and reading industrial relations texts as we hunt for geodes

along the river – chalcedony, bloodstone, sardonyx – I’ve found, he says, a place to die. 2 Night crawlers writhe violently in a tin. He washes his hands in dirt and tries to pull one from the tangle. Hold it still, he tells me. His hands are shaking. I squint as he spears a worm with a hook and slides it up to the line. My eyes open as he threads another. He drops my line in the waterhole and ties a blue tarpaulin to a tree. You’ll never be a full citizen of this family, she said before we left. I reel in a catfish. He pins it with a knee and rips the hook from its mouth. Half of me disappears and the other half falls to a hard foundation I wasn’t sure he was holding. 3 The scream of a wet diamond blade bisecting stone cannot hope to drown the ancient rhythms and repetitions of the marital argument I have learned by heart. I drive the rock into the blade. My wrists are splattered with slurry. It greys my hair and coats my tongue. The language I inherited is not yet large enough for the work I have to do. Our last night in Lost World I heard him sobbing by the fire and years later I am abducted by a poem as if carried off by a hawk. When the rock cracks open there is nothing inside but rock.

Bronwyn Lea

Bronwyn Lea’s most recent collection is The Deep North: Selected poems (George Braziller, 2013). PHILOSOPHY

‘Hello, World!’ Josh Specht A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE UNITED STATES

by Joy Lisi Rankin

Harvard University Press (Footprint) $64.99 hb, 336 pp, 9780674970977

ccording to most accounts, the history of computing is a triumph of enterprise. This story starts in the 1950s and 1960s with commercial mainframe computers that, one stack of punch-cards at a time, assumed business tasks ranging from managing airline reservations to calculating betting odds. But the public’s day-to-day life looked much the same. Then, in the mid-1970s, geniuses like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates pioneered home computing. Personal computers, and later smartphones and the internet, became the defining technologies of our age. Nerdy men, often in their garages, had remade the world. An appealing story, but it leaves out a lot. In fact, it might leave out the key parts. People were sending electronic messages all over New England in 1968. Around that time, professors and students at Dartmouth College pioneered the BASIC programming language, innovative for prioritising clarity over efficiency. Soon it was the lingua franca of hobbyists and students worldwide. In the early 1970s, the People’s Computing Company organised low-cost classes, school visits, and circulated publications that featured computer programs readers could copy, modify, and redistribute. This social world was the fertile soil from which personal computing grew. Joy Lisi Rankin’s A People’s History of Computing in the United States is the story of teachers, students, and programming evangelists. Rankin’s bottom-up history focuses on an important early technology known as ‘time-sharing’: individual users worked at terminals connected to a central mainframe that divided its time among them. These systems privileged accessibility over efficiency as users executed relatively simple programs rather 58 AP RI L 2019

than the resource-intensive tasks mainframes performed in a business setting. Advocates for this technology viewed these systems as a digital commons in which users shared a resource akin to a public utility. Time-sharing networks both broadened the base of the computer literate as well as pioneered the userfriendliness necessary to make the computer a mass technology. In telling this story, Rankin buries what she calls the ‘Silicon Valley Myth’, which draws a line from the mainframe to personal computing through the garages of entrepreneur–geniuses like Gates and Jobs. Though Rankin’s book celebrates the largely forgotten world of timesharing, she notes that it was not a utopia. Chapter Two, ‘Making a Macho Computing Culture’, traces how Dartmouth College’s computing world became intertwined with the school’s football culture, and how the computer labs quickly became male-dominated spaces, even if women had been (and remained) important to its development. Older sexist assumptions – such as the characterisation of women’s work as either insignificant or maternal – were imported into an emerging culture that went on to develop its own kinds of stereotypes, such as the figure of the woman who ‘can’t take a joke’ on the computer network. On a happier note, the importance of games and human interaction is a theme throughout. Chapter Five, ‘How The Oregon Trail Began in Minnesota’, explores the computer game The Oregon Trail, in which seemingly every American school child from about 1980 to 2000 steered a group of settlers in a fun, if highly sanitised, recreation of the settling the American West. Working on a time-sharing network linking Minnesota high schools, several teachers developed the game in the early 1970s and it would become a key driver of early digital literacy. Games got children excited about computers and helped transform computing from an acquired skill into a native one. Rankin similarly notes that communication drove the spread of computing as much as machine efficiency. About ARPANET, the internet’s precursor, Rankin observes that because it ‘had been created to connect and share the

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valuable resources of computers, most people did not immediately consider the possibilities of sharing human resources. Rather, users valued ARPANET only after they created an unplanned use for it: electronic mail. ARPANET’s ‘smash hit’ was its role as a ‘communications medium’. The implication here is that though some of the big developments in computing were driven by concrete business or defence needs, the popularisation and personalisation of the computer was about people trying to interact with each other and even have fun. A People’s History of Computing in the United States provides enough evidence to bury the Silicon Valley Myth. That is not to say that the story told in the myth is not important, but rather that it is incomplete. Nevertheless, it is seriously unlikely that the Silicon Valley myth is going anywhere, particularly in the public imagination. This is because of the political and ideological work it does. A story of innovation and enterprise underpins a belief that our greatest achievements are exclusively the work of business and the profit motive. And the myth of the lone genius – usually male – helps elide the contributions made by women as well as non-élite actors. I would have been curious to hear more about Rankin’s thoughts on the power of the Silicon Valley myth and the possibilities to which her alternative account could be put. Rankin’s study is a major revision of our understanding of the history of computing as well as our assumptions about the relationship between the general public and technological development. The book is also a delight to read. In one memorable passage, she describes how a computer program works, intertwining the BASIC programming-language commands with a prose explanation of each step. It is clear enough for a luddite, but for me it brought back delightful memories of sitting in my elementary school computer lab and bolting upright with excitement as a computer, one I had programmed myself, displayed the grand proclamation: ‘Hello, World!’ g Josh Specht teaches American history at Monash University.

Citizens Astrid Edwards DIVING INTO GLASS: A MEMOIR

by Caro Llewellyn

Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9780143793786

emoirs of illness are tricky. The raw material is often compelling: dramatic symptoms, embarrassing public moments, and unavoidable relationship pressures. The challenge is to share that raw material in a new way. Not every memoir needs to turn on the conceit that illness is an obstacle that must be overcome. Full disclosure: I have multiple sclerosis. I approached Caro Llewellyn’s memoir Diving into Glass with excitement and a healthy dose of cynicism. Excitement, because reading about the symptoms and experiences of another person with MS is fascinating. There is a potential common bond when someone I have never met describes the exact feeling I have been trying to communicate to my neurologist. Those of us who are ill need a common language. I also approached the book with a certain cynicism. I am not just looking for stories, I seek prose or insight to illuminate my condition. Richard Cohen, the American journalist who has lived with MS for three decades, calls those of us who are chronically ill ‘citizens of sickness’. I’ve read many memoirs about illness. There are sub-genres to explore – not just misery-lit and sick-lit, but memoirs of alcoholism and addiction, of recovery from trauma, of grief, of living with mental illness, and, finally, of terminal illness. As a citizen of sickness, I read such memoirs because I want to find someone who has had an experience or a symptom like mine. Llewellyn opens with quotes from Joan Didion. Didion is the most famous writer to live with multiple sclerosis, though she has chosen to stay silent on the disease for decades. Llewellyn is not silent, but aside from the prologue, where Llewellyn shares her experience of her

first relapse and subsequent diagnosis, MS is barely mentioned until Chapter Thirty-Seven. While the work is marketed as a memoir of Llewellyn’s experience of MS, in reality it is a reflection on her experience growing up with her father Richard’s severe disability. We are given a first-hand tour of what it was like for a healthy young man to contract polio in the 1960s in Australia, a time before equality and accessibility became something we talk about. Diving into Glass is a work about a father and daughter, two individuals with experience of illness and disability. She writes, ‘my body – from the outside at least – still looked more or less like it always had. My father’s body, on the other hand, inside and out, showed every sign of the massacre that besieged him.’ Her father’s experience made a lifelong impression on Llewellyn. She recalls her father’s grace and dignity when confronting stigma and discrimination, as well as the pressures his disability brought into his relationships and the way his disability impacted his physical ability to parent unruly children. It is also a work recounting Llewellyn’s impressive arts career. How many people can count Salman Rushdie as a former boss and the late Philip Roth as a friend? It is also a nod to her future goals. Llewellyn is by no means done making her mark. This is not a literary exploration of illness in the manner of Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance (2015) and The World Was Whole (2018). But it is a memoir of disease – both Llewellyn’s MS and her father’s polio and subsequent disability. Diving into Glass is a reflection on disability and how we as a society have changed – and not changed – in our attitudes towards what makes a good life. Llewellyn does not shy away from sharing instances of stigma and shame about her father’s disability in her own family (especially her maternal grandmother). The work is also a reflection on the relationship between parent and child. Llewellyn often recounts the ingenious (and not always successful) means her father developed to discipline and protect his children, even though he

could not raise his hands or manoeuvre his own wheelchair. Memoirs teach us about the world and force us to consider how we would react if we found ourselves in different circumstances. They are a way to share the human experience, and to experience what is beyond our own lives. But Diving into Glass is more biography than memoir. The majority of the work is devoted to Richard Llewellyn’s life and the impact he had on his daughter. Much of the rest is devoted to her career, with her experience of multiple sclerosis bookending the work.

She recalls her father’s grace and dignity when confronting stigma and discrimination At several points in Diving into Glass, the language is troubling. Llewellyn refers to her father’s illness and disability as a ‘tragedy’ (as does the blurb). I’m not convinced anyone – even a daughter – should refer to another’s situation as a tragedy. But my reading of Diving into Glass is influenced by my own experience. Others, perhaps other citizens of sickness, may react differently. This is a work for those interested in exploring life with disability, as well as how the discussion of ableism and discrimination in Australian society has evolved, in most cases for the better. It is also a work for those interested in a career in the arts, for Llewellyn has world-class tales to tell. g

Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing. She teaches professional writing at RMIT University. MEMOIR

(Photograph courtesy of Penguin Random House )

Publisher of the Month with

Meredith Curnow

What was your pathway to publishing?

After studying literature, my first role in books was with the Australian Publishers Association. It gave me a good overall view of the industry, here and abroad. I was then the director of Sydney Writers’ Festival for its first five years. This put me in contact with writers, publishers, editors, and the book media; it was wonderful and exhausting in equal measure. Since then I have been a publisher at what has become Penguin Random House. After sixteen years I continue to feel privileged to do what I do.

How many titles do you publish each year? Anywhere from twelve to twenty.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

I am very proud of most of the books I have published. Some that stand out include Kate McClymont and Linton Besser’s He Who Must Be Obeid, which involved us all in a world of pain, but also instigated the case against Eddie Obeid. Working with Julia Gillard on My Story was rather special, and last year I published Rusted Off from Gabrielle Chan. I do believe this book could influence politician’s behaviour at the next election. And every novel I have ever published, of course.

Do you edit the books you commission?

I do the structural edits on all my books, but not the line edits. One of the advantages of moving to an open-plan office has been the ability to behave like a meerkat and pop up and check in on edits frequently. I stay very involved.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

the confidence, ambition, and dedication it takes to continue to write, publish, and promote. To have the honour of listening to and working with these enormous hearts and minds is inestimable. Managing expectations and disappointment is a challenge.

Do you write yourself ? No way.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

Anything that takes me out of my world: into a quiet space (I have just started The Friend by Sigrid Nunez), or somewhere big and noisy that I could never possibly experience myself such as Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, or those books that blow your mind and make you more active in the world like The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?

All of my peers are outstanding, competitive, and generally lovely.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties? Individuality can be the unique selling point that helps a book or author stand out.

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

A launch is the bottom of this list. Generally, rapid sales lead to a satisfied author, but I do have a tendency to look to, and be proud of, strong reviews.

Sometimes you buy a manuscript without having any contact with the author, and it is generally the manuscript or proposal you first engage with. You hope for respect, an engaged mind, and a preparedness to listen to ideas and suggestions.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

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

fiction at Penguin Random House and is a board member of Express Media, an organisation that develops, supports, and promotes young writers.

Writing is a tough business. I admire enormously 60 AP RI L 2019

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Positive! My peers and I are always looking for new writing that stands out above the rest.

Meredith Curnow publishes fiction and non-

Arts

Meryl Tankard as Olga Spessivtseva in Two Feet, 1998 (photograph by Regis Lansac, donated by Gwen Slade to the Performing Arts Collection, Adelaide Festival Centre)

Lee Christofis on Two Feet Opera

Photography

Michael Halliwell

Alison Stieven-Taylor

Salome

Ballenesque

Theatre

Arbus & West

Fiona Gruber

ABR Arts is generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons. Visit our website to read the full range of ABR Arts reviews. ARTS

Arbus & West 

‘M

Fiona Gruber

ary Pickford may have been America’s sweetheart,’ Mae West is recorded to have said, ‘but I’m their wet dream.’ At the start of Stephen’s Sewell’s new play, Arbus & West, West, in her late seventies, wisecracks with audiences around the United States and jibes with her long-suffering dresser and personal assistant, Ruby (played with poise by Jennifer Vuletic). As she rests during interval, the famous actress and singer’s witty sense of being irresistible seems undimmed, until Ruby tells her that the photographer Diane Arbus has committed suicide. West is rattled but feigns indifference. Stephen Sewell has based this deftly crafted play on the real-life encounter between Arbus and West that happened seven years earlier. An exploration of what really drives these two women from different generations and very different backgrounds, Arbus & West maintains tension and suspense, though some elements of the story are well known. Show magazine commissioned the New Yorker to photograph the legendary star at home in Santa Monica. Arbus, who had cut her teeth in commercial and fashion photography, was breaking into an edgier world of greater creativity and had won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. This cuts no ice with West, in her floating frothy peignoir and her plush, white drawing room. She’d been expecting a man. Expecting a man is what she’s famous for. Arbus, played by Diana Glenn, is an androgynous beatnik in scruffy black leather and jeans. She is a jarring note from the start, a scuff on the carpet, a rip in the upholstery. ‘Why all the white?’ she wants to know. ‘I just like seeing where I’ve been dirty,’ says West. The American star of stage and screen is both a gift and a hindrance to a playwright; with her welter of famous bons mots (or ‘motts’ in West’s honking Brooklyn drawl, reprised in all its knowing swagger in a fine portrayal by Melita Jurisic), she is guaranteed all the best lines, and she delivers them with perfect timing. But she is a caricature, a medley of swaying derrière and curling lip, hand on hip and shocking riposte. You expect a drum roll after each aphorism. In contrast, Arbus is famous for what she captured on film, not for what she said. We know she was prone

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to depression, had a brilliant eye, and was attracted to freaks and misfits. She was also interested in capturing, according to her biographer Arthur Lubow, ‘those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort’. Sewell has drawn heavily on Lubow’s work, but it’s debatable whether the Arbus we see on stage was as poised or calculating in real life. The inference that Mae West is also trapped, a central tenet of the play, is also questionable. Is her frank pursuit of erotic fulfilment a front? And is it liberating or a form of entrapment? This is one of the questions posed by Arbus, in a play that explores feminism from different ends of the spectrum. It is intriguing, in the current climate of #MeToo, to be reminded of a woman who called all the shots and who boasted (whether true or not) about a libido that could screw any man under the table. Spoiler alert: West’s mementoes included casts of her lovers’ erect penises. She showed them to Arbus, a scene recreated here. In a man, such braggadocio would be offensive. But while she was no fan of what she termed ‘bra-burning’ feminists, West is still seen as a pioneer of strong womanhood and sexual liberation. The two-day photo shoot became a time of shared confessions and camaraderie, but when West saw the published images and accompanying text, she threatened to sue the magazine. Renée Mulder’s set and costume design faithfully and cleverly recreate many elements of these photos. Looking at them today, they seem full of life and candour, with Mae West playing up to the camera and gently mocking her overblown public image. But Arbus’s shtick was to probe beneath the image and bare what she termed ‘the flaw’. This is apposite territory for Sewell, whose exploration of the American idea of itself and its fragilities include Myth, Propaganda and Disaster in Nazi Germany and Contemporary America, and It Just Stopped. Flaws are what he’s interested in too – huge, political, and philosophical ones, and the sort that convince you, at seventy, that you are an ageless sex bomb. Under Sarah Goode’s direction, the pace of Arbus & West is at times slow. While Jurisic’s West is compelling, Glenn’s Arbus is too diffident and mousy. A greater sense of nervous energy and vulnerability is needed as a foil to the shellacked bravado of one of the twentieth century’s great stars of stage and screen. But this is, despite these cavils, a compelling piece of theatre and a delicious if challenging three-hander for three very accomplished actors. g Arbus & West was performed by the Melbourne Theatre Company at Arts Centre Melbourne from 22 February to 30 March 2019. Performance attended: February 28.

Fiona Gruber is a Melbourne-based journalist and producer.

Two Feet 

Lee Christofis

his year’s Adelaide Festival opening night was one for standing ovations, and the revival of Meryl Tankard’s Two Feet, danced by internationally acclaimed Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova, certainly earned one. Commissioned for Brisbane’s World Expo 88, Two Feet launched the festival’s dance element in great style. Two Feet, one of Tankard’s most personal dance theatre works, reveals the struggles ballerinas endure to meet their teacher’s expectations, and the cost of their own obsession with perfection. The program describes the production as a Kunstler drama, in which an artist is a protagonist, and its purpose is to realise the artist’s self. In this case, it has two protagonists and unfolds through nineteen related but disjointed episodes of eccentricity, comedy, ritual, and tragedy. Essential to the production’s tonality and magnitude are the settings – vibrant, atmospheric projections, parades of historic photographs and new images by Tankard’s visual designer and partner, Regis Lansac – lighting by Ben Hughes, and a musical collage of new, old, and fragmented music, sometimes even down to single notes. The production was a breakthrough work for Tankard, one that enhanced her reputation as a principal dancer of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, and as a choreographer. Over two acts, Two Feet tells the story of Mepsie, a sparky Aussie kid trying like crazy to perfect her work independent of her maddening teacher. She ties one foot to the opposite knee, learns to do a ‘Shrimping Dance’ with bucket and net, and flings her body into malformed pirouettes. In sharp contrast, Two Feet traces the superlative talent and tragic decline of Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva, universally acclaimed for her soulful Giselle. On tour with the Imperial Russian Ballet in 1934, she walked out of Sydney’s Theatre Royal and into a lifechanging nervous breakdown on a distant road in the bush. After another breakdown, in 1943, Spessivtzeva disappeared into an American asylum. But in Two Feet she first appears suspended in the air as the beautiful Columbine, then at the barre, then centre stage as Giselle, and periodically as a cloaked, grey shadow walking across the stage. In this new iteration of Two Feet, Osipova, a commanding principal of the Royal Ballet and a Giselle,

dances Tankard’s roles. If Osipova was nervous on opening night, there was no sign of it, although it was hard, initially, for anyone who saw the original Two Feet to forget Tankard’s idiosyncratic sense of humour, and her exaggerated girlish outrage at her suffering for dance. But this is now Osipova’s show, and Tankard draws on stories of Osipova’s schoolgirl tricks – tying her leg to the bedpost overnight to stretch it, for example – for some of the comedy in Act I. More delectable and affecting were two film passages: one of the child Osipova in her Russian ballet class, already achieving perfection, and old monochrome stage footage of a lissome Spessivtzeva performing Giselle’s mad scene. In Act II, Osipova left youthful issues behind to represent the era of Olga’s fame, not in any purist sense, but symbolically, opening the act in a majestic solo, the ‘Blue Divertissement’, a tribute to dancer–choreographers Vaslav Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava, perhaps, or to the pioneering women of early modern dance, from Isadora Duncan to Martha Graham. Dressed in a long split sheath of midnight blue, one oblique strap over one shoulder, Opisova made this dance a ritual of fall and recovery, of deep extension, torsion, and impeccable musicality to the ‘Largo’ from Handel’s Xerxes. Osipova’s performance became more and more clearly an act of dedication and abandonment to the potential dangers of dancing ‘badly’, and of acting from the gut and the heart. But she had already, early in Act I, cemented into the viewer’s mind the intensity of Olga’s face at the barre, fixed in gloom or transformation, it was impossible to tell which. For some minutes, Osipova revels in Olga’s fame in a variation on Anna Pavlova’s sugar-sweet Dragonfly solo set to Kreizler’s Schoene Rosemarin, but Olga’s mind is elsewhere, and she scatters the stage with red roses, angrily, distraught, as rain begins to fall and flood around her. To the last fragments of music from the graveyard act of Giselle, when her lover Albrecht must dance to death, she flies like a whirlwind into his music, before falling, shattered, to the floor. This was a magnificent performance from a ballerina who has a huge repertoire of Romantic and Classical ballets, and, in recent years, many theatrical challenges dancing the Royal Ballet’s great twentieth-century dramatic roles and Wayne McGregor’s twenty-first-century contemporary ballet Woolf Works. During the curtain calls, Tankard looked as proud as Punch to have worked with such an artist and a good sport. On another happy note, one must acknowledge Maina Gielgud, former artistic director of The Australian Ballet, for recognising the potential of Tankard and Osipova collaborating on Two Feet, and bringing them together. May it all happen again. g Two Feet, produced by the Adelaide Festival, was presented in the Dunstan Playhouse. Performance attended: 1 March 2019. (Longer version online)

Lee Christofis is a Melbourne-based writer on dance. ARTS

Ballen’s pictures draw focus on those ostracised by poverty and mental illness, and express ideas about alienation from our inherent connection with nature to challenge the values of contemporary society. The visual tropes of untamed spaces, shadow worlds, and wild animals found in Ballen’s photographs are redolent of the primitive relationships that humans once had to their environment. These edgy, confronting works are founded on the concept that ‘the animal is deep inside … we come from the animal’, explains Ballen. This is an idea he says that Western society has largely subjugated, and his images are designed to contest what he describes as modernity’s antiseptic existence. Today, Ballen is considered one of the most revolutionary and important image-makers. A defining feature of Ballen’s aesthetic – known as Ballenesque – is the use of drawings, paintings, and sculptures in photographs, some of which are made by the artist himself, and others by those pictured. To enter Ballen’s ‘shadow world’ oger Ballen’s art is not for the faint-hearted; it (he doesn’t like the negative connotations of the word is confronting, haunting, and at times repellent. ‘dark’) is to accept an assault on the senses. This work, It is also fascinating, brilliant, and jaw-dropping. with its palpating energy, chaos, and confusion, depicts These images seethe with malodorous discontent, bizarre scenes where human beings and animals interact menace, and psychosis. The in scenarios that are both best way to experience his absurd and frightening, photographs is to surrender where sanity and madness and to resist the desire to collide, where anything read the images literally, for can, and does, happen. it is in the hidden recesses While these pictures of the imagination that feature real people in Ballen’s images come to life. situ, that is where the Born in 1950, Ballen documentary aspect of was exposed to photograBallen’s work ends. This phy at a young age, growing is a theatrical interpretaup in what could be considtion of reality, a fusing of ered the inner circle of New fact and fiction. Crafted York’s photography scene. in collaboration with the His mother opened one subjects under the direcof the first photographic tion of Ballen, his intenart galleries in the United tion is to create work that States in the 1960s with ‘straddle[s] the strange Magnum Photos’ André vague line where illusion Kertész and Henri Cartierbecomes delusion, fact is Bresson. Ballen came to fiction and the conscious photography after experimerges with the unconHeadless, Roger Ballen, 2006 menting with drawing and scious’. (photograph supplied by GAGPROJECTS) painting, but it wasn’t until Ballenesque is also he was in his fifties that he the name of the retrospecleft behind a career as a geologist to reconnect with his tive recently on show at GAGPROJECTS (formerly artistic soul. Greenaway Art Gallery) as part of the Adelaide FestiFor more than thirty years, Ballen has lived in South val. The exhibition featured twenty-three images from Africa. It is the encounters he had with those living on Ballen’s widely lauded bodies of work Outland, Shadow the margins of society, first in Hopetown and later JohanChamber, I Fink U Freeky, Asylum of the Birds, and Boardnesburg, where he resides, that had a profound impact ing House, as well as rarely seen pieces. on his photographic practice. Instead of photographing There were also several of Ballen’s short films on what he could see on the outside, Ballen turned his gaze a loop – No Exit (2018), Ballenesque (2017), Outland inside and inward, literally and metaphorically. (2015), Asylum of the Birds (2014), and I Fink U Freeky

Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective

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(2012). In a dark, curtained-off room, guests on opening he has postponed shooting, the atmosphere so fraught night sat or stood in silence transfixed by the black-andas to be physically threatening. white films that brought many of the images on the The multiple ways in which one can respond to the walls to life. Seeing these people animated adds to the work is what makes Ballen’s approach so interesting. unnerving nature of Ballen’s work. The films also show Each image is an enigma. The trick is to try and not solve how Ballen interacts with his subjects, the collaborative the conundrum he presents but to embrace its boundaryassociations he forms, and the trust these outsiders have less form and engage instinctively, not intellectually. It in this man who lives in a world as far removed from seems pointless to expect resolutions to the existential their reality as theirs is from his. questions his photographs pose when Ballen admits his Using photography as a frame, Ballen transforms the pictures have ‘no answers’. space depicted through a union of artistic elucidation, Ballen’s body of work has evolved over a long period theatrical rendering, and visual documentation in black of time and has involved ‘a lot of hard work, strugand white, in shades gle, concentration, of gray. As you open a lot of time and your mind to Balmoney, and a lot len’s bizarre and of passion’, he says. at times grotesque ‘All these things realm, you discover have contributed that these compoto what I do. sitions, which at I don’t do work first may confuse, for other people, amuse, or frighten, I don’t think about are meditations on other people. the human condiI hope other tion. Maybe that is people are affected why the reaction to in a positive way, his pictures can feel but I’m not trying so visceral: what to out guess the we are seeing is at market, or figure once foreign and yet out what will sell, strangely, perhaps what will do this subconsciously, faor that. I just do it miliar. for myself … I am Many of the not creating art for settings in which he commercial purshoots are defined poses. I think the by decaying archiday I do that I will tecture, windowless quit.’ rooms, and walls Ballenesque Tommy, Samson and a Mask, Roger Ballen, 2000 covered in graffiti does what art is (photograph supplied by GAGPROJECTS) creating dramatic meant to: outrage, backdrops for his c h a l l e n ge, a n d sets. Animals often appear in his images and in his provoke. Ballen’s images and films resonate at a deep short films: ‘dead or alive, wild or tame … in places emotional and psychological level. Knowing that this they don’t belong’. Humans interact with these creashadow world is real yet hidden from most of us is tures in crazed, chaotic scenarios. In the film I Fink U disconcerting. In illuminating its existence, shadows are Freeky, rats crawl over a young woman’s semi-clad torso cast across our bright, urban lives making us question our and between her legs; in Asylum of the Birds, chickens own values. Ballen suggests that ‘the light comes from lose their heads while others are cuddled as pets. In the dark’ and that by engaging with these confronting this turmoil is a compelling proposition that asks the images we may learn something about our own humanity. viewer to confront what it is they are most frightened It’s an interesting proposition. g of seeing. Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective was part of the Adelaide Ballen says he thrives in environments ‘characterFestival and closed on 31 March 2019. ized by chaos and confusion’, but he is also aware of the Alison Stieven-Taylor is an international commentator dangers that come with working on the margins in spaces and journalist specialising in photography and specifiwhere humans are ‘fragmented’, animals roam free, and cally social documentary. lucidity is often absent. He also reveals that on occasion ARTS

A View from the Bridge 

Maxim Boon

he plays of William Shakespeare have the dubious honour of being the most reinvented, reimagined, dressed-up, dumbed-down, and generally meddledwith works ever staged. To a less prolific extent, the same is true of the Classical canon of ancient Greece. In unskilled hands, countless injustices have been inflicted on these texts by pretentious or gimmicky interpretations. And yet, with a theatremaker of vision at the helm, these plays still have fresh truths and unseen revelations to share, hundreds or even thousands of years after their conception. It seems telling that the most potent muses of Arthur Miller – that titan of American theatre – were the Greek Classics and the Bard. Miller’s plays seem to have centuries of discoveries hidden within them, all waiting to be unlocked by visionary directors. In his stark and streamlined production of A View from the Bridge (1955), Iain Sinclair demonstrates this in action. Though less cherished than Miller’s two most famous plays, Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), it may well be the work that most succinctly epitomises Miller’s creative inspirations, making explicit connections to the Classical masterworks he so revered. Indeed, the first iteration of this twentieth-century Greek tragedy was penned as a verse epic. (Responding to a tepid reception, Miller later revised it into its current, more conventional form.) It is the mid-1950s: in the immigrant communities of New York’s Red Hook, where the dock-working longshoremen labour under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, we meet Eddie Carbone (Steve Bastoni), a no-nonsense, proudly blue-collar man for whom loyalty, respect, and family are sacrosanct. Alongside his wife, Beatrice (Daniela Farinacci), he has raised his orphaned, eighteen-year-old niece Catherine (Zoe Terakes). Now he is about to welcome two more relatives under his roof: Beatrice’s cousins Marco (Damian Walshe-Howling) and Rodolpho (Andrew Coshan). These are no ordinary houseguests. Smuggled in via the docks, the two men are illegal immigrants fleeing the economic turmoil of postwar Italy. Their arrival will light an unstoppable fuse that burns inexorably towards a cataclysm that is plain to see and yet impossible to avert. Miller’s taut, high-stakes narrative exists in a kind of liminal flux, at once inflexibly specific, exploring a story of exacting culture, time, and place, and yet laced with themes that are timeless and universal. A director could be drawn to one end of this polarity or the other, rooting a production in 66 AP RI L 2019

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historical naturalism or in a more experimental vernacular. Sinclair achieves something far rarer: a setting that simultaneously channels both the naturalistic and experimental in equal measure. The result is extraordinarily powerful. Sinclair possesses an implicit understanding of Miller’s intent, and this profound awareness reveals another duality: an account that honours the essence of its source while being unexpectedly bold in its execution. The stage is more an abyssal plain than a theatrical construct, adorned by a single prop: a simple wooden chair. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the stock-standard MTC affair, which more often than not opts for extravagantly realised and overengineered sets. The rest of the stage is a seamless black box, the actors emerging then retreating into infinite shadow. Just a handful of subtle yet highly effective lighting and sound cues marshal the passage of time and recollection. Such a bare setting, stripped of the usual theatrical trappings that might distract an audience from any less-than-perfect performances, offers nowhere for the actors to hide. It also creates a wonderfully uncluttered space for a director to unleash the full range of his cast’s talents while investigating the most complex undercurrents of the text. Sinclair does both with disciplined restraint and great sophistication, making nods to certain contemporary resonances without slathering on unnecessary social or political commentary. At the centre of it all, Bastoni’s Eddie manages to find the perfect balance between the archetypal man’s man – a paragon of toxic masculinity – and a subtler individual rendering that increasingly seethes with internal conflict. His mealy-mouthed chicanery, as he desperately tries to evade his unspeakable desires, both incestuous and homosexual, could easily become hokey and caricaturish. Bastoni navigates these potential pitfalls masterfully in one of the most assured turns I’ve seen in any recent MTC production. The entire cast is superb; the actors submit to the intense emotional demands of this play with near-masochistic commitment. In this high-calibre ensemble, Zoe Terakes stands out. Terakes was impressive in last year’s production of A Doll’s House, Part 2. Here, with a far richer role to tackle, she showcases abilities that hold the promise of a very bright career in the future. If there is a shortcoming in this production, it is that, at times, Sinclair exalts Miller’s Classical fascination to the exclusion of more direct storytelling. In the Greek tradition, the audience is shielded from the story’s fatal climax, save for a jumble of anguished voices. This may well be Classically authentic, but in a play so weighed down by tragedy, a moment of simple pathos, sentimental as it may be, might well have summoned a glimpse of the catharsis that Eddie so desperately craves. g A View from the Bridge is being performed by Melbourne Theatre Company at the Southbank Theatre, the Sumner, from 9 March to 18 April 2019. Performance attended: March 14.

Maxim Boon, an arts and culture writer and editor based in Melbourne, is the new classical music critic for The Age.

Salome

foregrounds the many subtleties of instrumental phrasing in this most evocative music. He is a genuine singers’ conductor, alive to all the dramatic nuance on stage. But one does  lament the fact that the size of the Opera House pit prevents some of the sonorous lushness of the score to emerge. Salome is essentially about power: Herod’s as King; ny production of the Richard Strauss’s opera Salome Jokanaan’s inflexible and absolute conviction; and Salome’s (first performed in Dresden in 1905, and based on self-consciously flaunted sexuality, successfully employed to Oscar Wilde’s French play) emerges from a per- manipulate Herod, but spectacularly failing with Jokanaan. formance history of widely varying approaches, and Gale Gale Edwards places the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ as the Edwards’s version for Opera Australia (first seen in 2012) central symbol of many aspects of these power relationships. steers a middle course between those that tread carefully This scene often causes embarrassment in terms of the inaround the most confronting aspects of the story, and those adequacy of the performance, or a moment of confronting that revel in every aspect of its perversity. Central, of course, sexuality, but this production finds an ingenious ‘solution’. is the role of Salome, which makes almost impossible Edwards stages seven images presented by a pair of dancers, imaginatively choreographed by Kelley demands on the singer, vocally and physicAbbey, to suggest aspects of male – and ally; Strauss described her as a ‘sixteenfemale – fantasy and mutual manipulation. year-old Princess with the voice of Isolde’. These include some spectacular acrobatics Lise Lindstrom delighted audiences with on a pole and dangling rope, culminating her Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Ring (Melin the iconic image of Marilyn in billowbourne, 2016); and the American soprano ing white dress astride the entrance to brings all the requisite attributes to this Jokanaan’s cistern. role. Hers is a voice with a steely core at However, there are some major inconthe centre of a full, burnished tone and a sistencies, particularly in the representation remarkable clarity of diction. The variety of the ‘relationship’ between Jokanaan and of colours in the voice allows the mercuSalome. Essentially, there can be no physicrial nature of the character to emerge fully, al contact between them, thus thwarting rising to Wagnerian proportions in the Salome’s desires and pushing her over stupendous final twenty minutes. She also the edge into the moral abyss. Likewise, has a striking, lithe physical presence, and Jokanaan will not look at her – denying her her extended scene with Jokanaan revealed the male gaze that she craves, and through her remarkable histrionic abilities – the which she manipulates Herod. Her complete singing actor. final utterances regret the fact that he did Jokanaan is in many ways a difficult not look at her. The dynamics of their rerole to characterise – some of his music is lationship are muddied earlier in the persung offstage – and his scene with Salome Lise Lindstrom as Salome (photograph by Prudence Upton) formance with a Parsifal–Kundry moment is predominantly pitched on one emowhere Salome cradles Jokanaan’s head – it tional level. Russian baritone Alexander Krasnov possesses a dark voice of great power with the just does not work in this opera. Visually though, it’s a treat – Brian Thomson’s stark heft and metal to ride the orchestra, but he lacked some of the lyrical quality and sheer vocal beauty necessary yet opulent, predominantly red-and-black set, with its for his pronouncements on the coming of the Messiah. disturbing backdrop of animal carcasses, provides a striking Herodias, Salome’s mother, is something of a caricature, frame for Julie Lynch’s vivid mélange of often deliberately but Jacqueline Dark, in an over-the-top costume with anachronistic costumes, all expertly lit by John Rayment. tottering heels, commanded the stage in her scenes with a Despite the visual updating, the stage pictures leave a classic, sumptuous voice, frequently in conflict with her husband, timeless impression. Salome continues to be a confronting opera. With her Herod, sung with great vocal incisiveness and remarkable textual articulation by German tenor Andreas Conrad. Their ‘sister’, Berg’s Lulu, the depiction of the feminine has seldom scenes were full of the requisite spite and antagonism – two been equalled and surely never surpassed in later opera. vocally and histrionically outstanding performances. Paul The unfathomable mystery at the heart of Salome fascinates, O’Neill as Narraboth and Sian Pendry as the Page were challenges, and often repels us, yet the allure of the opera reboth excellent, while David Parkin’s sonorous Nazarene mains. Salome has certainly not performed her last dance. g was impressively moving. Salome was performed by Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera Conductor Johannes Fritzsch is completely at home in House in March 2019; it will be repeated in Melbourne in November. this music and is in command of the large forces, allow- Performance attended: March 6. (Longer version online) ing the voices to emerge from the frequently dense web of sound that Strauss demands from the orchestra, while Fritzsch Michael Halliwell is a singer and academic.

Michael Halliwell

ARTS

From the ABR Archive

Tara June Winch’s novel Swallow the Air was published by University of Queensland Press. Thuy On reviewed it in the June–July 2006 issue of ABR.

wallow the Air won the 2004 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers. Judging by this slender volume of work, the choice was a judicious one. Thematically, Tara June Winch’s début effort travels along the well-worn path of fiction based on personal experiences, with the protagonist propelling the narrative through a journey of self-discovery. In this respect, Swallow the Air nestles snugly in the semiautobiographical framework favoured by first novelists, but the sophistication and subtlety of the prose belie Winch’s age; she is twenty-two, but writes with the élan of those much more accomplished. Swallow the Air can either be read as a novel with short chapters or as a series of interlinked short stories. After the death of their ‘head sick’ mother, fifteenyear-old May Gibson and her older brother Billy are left in the care of their aunt, who, though loving and well-meaning, is nonetheless imprisoned in a spiral of gambling and alcohol abuse. Her predilection for brutal men also causes much grief in the otherwise happy household. A nasty altercation one night with the latest ne’er-do-well beau finally shatters the family, and the siblings are left reeling in its wake. Billy resorts to mind-numbing drugs to escape from his own private hell, while May leaves home and begins her peripatetic wandering. Hitchhiking across the land from the east to the north coast, she is on a mission to trace the footsteps of her ancestors. With a black mother and a white father, questions of self-identity and heritage continually plague her. Long abandoned by her father, and separated from her mother, May is doubly bereft; though part of both cultures, she belongs wholly to neither. Winch herself has an intriguing mix of Aboriginal, Afghan, and English blood; her background not only provides the raw material for Swallow the Air but also invests May’s feelings of rootlessness and belonging with a degree of verisimilitude. It is this desperation to reclaim a sense of pride in her identity that leads May to seek out the more remote branches of her family tree. In between prose of unvarnished vernacular, Winch offers lyrical sentences that delight in startling metaphorical allusions. May and Billy are shuffled outside by their mother ‘like two jokers in her cards’; random speech shoots about haphazardly like the ‘tearing open [of ] birthday cards’, and a dead stingray looks like ‘a fat man in a tight suit after a greedy meal’. There is a singsong, rhythmic tilt to some of the sentences, with Winch

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favouring a fragmented, elliptical approach. The resulting prose has a poetic resonance that begs to be read aloud: ‘Uncles drinking, thinking under bread and butter. People giving their whole dole to the bowl that is empty, that they turn right over as if they got plenty.’ It comes as no surprise to discover in the biographical notes that Winch has indeed been a spoken-word performer. Stories about Indigenous communities mired in a cycle of abuse and familial dysfunction are never far from the news, and Swallow the Air presents a composite image of some of the current problems facing those dispossessed. Home for the Gibson family is within Housing Commission flats, ironically called Paradise Parade. One of those neighbourhoods beloved of shock jocks and current affairs shows, it is full of sulking, skulking teenagers, unregistered cars and pawnshops; the sort of place where the stale air of boredom and menace never dissipates. And yet, in one of these ‘slices of scum’, May finds a supportive family during one of her stopovers, even if the social infrastructure of Redfern is about as broken and wretched as they come. To leaven the potentially depressing focus on scraping together a life on the fringe, there are some lovely episodes of joie de vivre where brother and sister are playing on the beach, searching for pipis in the sandy foam and ‘drunk on salt air and laughter’. It is as though an unspoken permission exists for Billy and May to frolic like carefree children if water were added. However, a sense of poignancy and sadness underlines these moments, not only because of their ephemerality but because they are inevitably overshadowed by the crushing dark forces of drugs, poverty, racism, and violence. That the siblings fear the ocean after their mother’s death reflects their loss of trust and a new-found sense of the fragility of life. The book is highly respectful of the power of the elements. Air, land, water, and fire are described with a sense of awe. Sensitive to the beauty of the environment, and inspired by her mother’s own stories, May often indulges in imaginative spiels, her dreamings enabling her to avoid ugly realities. Though reconnecting with her past doesn’t provide her with the answers she expects, May ultimately comes to an understanding of the interconnectedness of the cycle of life: ‘we come from the sky and the earth and we go back to the sky and the earth, bone and fluid’. Tara June Winch is a talent to watch. g