Australian Book Review - April 2017, no. 390

Fellowships galore

The recent ABR RAFT and Eucalypt Fellowships attracted record fields, and we are delighted to announce the two new recipients, each of whom receives $7,500.

Elisabeth Holdsworth is the 2017 RAFT Fellow. She follows Alan Atkinson, who was the inaugural RAFT Fellow in 2016. In her essay, provisionally titled ‘If This Is a Jew’, Ms Holdsworth – novelist, former intelligence officer and clinical psychologist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor – will explore the nature of progressive Judaism as practised in Australia, Israel, and the United States. Her essay will appear in due course.

Elisabeth Holdsworth is well known to ABR readers. Ten years have passed since her essay ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ won the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize and brought the author to our attention – readers and editors alike. It remains one of the most popular articles every published by ABR – a searing, deeply poignant essay about appropriation and dislocation.

has shown a fascination with Australian landscapes of all kinds, from the Great Sandy Desert and the Barossa Valley to the suburbs of Adelaide. We look forward to publishing his essayistic meditation on the eucalypt in our Environment issue later this year.

The ABR Eucalypt Fellowship is jointly funded by Eucalypt Australia and the ABR Patrons.

Advances notes that of the sixteen ABR Fellowships named to date (several more will follow in coming months), six have gone to South Australians, a continuation of that state’s proud creative contribution to the magazine, which was founded there in 1961.

We thank all the applicants, plus those who applied for the ABR Gender Fellowship, which was not awarded on this occasion. The Gender Fellowship, again worth $7,500, has now been reopened, with broader criteria. Applications close on 1 May. See our website for details.

elegant Fowl

We need all the humour and solace we can get in these trumpacious

from James’s novels, tales, criticism, and travel writing. The Daily Henry James: A year of quotes from the work of the Master ($34.99 pb) was edited by Evelyn Garnaut Smalley and first published in 1911, five years before James’s death.

Michael Gorran, author of the superlative Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American masterpiece (2012), introduces this curiosity, which contains epigrams like these: ‘When Milly [Theale] smiled it was a public event – when she didn’t it was a chapter of history’ and ‘Mr Longdon’s smile was beautiful – it supplied so many meanings that when presently he spoke he seemed already to have told half his story.’

In 1947, Simon Nowell-Smith compiled The Legend of the Master, reminiscences of James by people such as Edith Wharton and Theodora Bosanquet. Infants appear too. Borys Conrad, the four-year old son of Joseph and Jessie Conrad exclaimed, ‘Oh, Mamma dear! isn’t he an elegant fowl!’

The forthcoming ABR UK tour will head to Rye, in East Sussex,

UnUsUal projects

Following our States of Poetry event at last month’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, which featured readings from the six poets in the 2017 South Australian anthology, as well as an impromptu reading and remarks by new Windham-Campbell Prize winner Ali Cobby Eckermann, ABR hosted a party at the Richmond Hotel and a good time was had by all. Among the guests was author Graeme Macrae Burnet, who was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his novel His Bloody Project.

Advances was amused by a recent Facebook post from Brisbane’s Avid Reader Bookshop and Café, which noted that a member of their book club had returned her copy of Burnet’s novel after making an unexpected discovery. Halfway through the historical thriller, the narrative took a surprising turn with the addition of a

Chilcot

and Australia

Dear Editor,

We cannot be reminded often enough of the perfidy that led in succession to the Iraq disaster, the continuing débâcle in the Middle East, the refugee outflow, and even to populism, Brexit, and Donald Trump. Ross McKibbin’s review of the Chilcot Report does this admirably (‘Whatever It Takes’, March 2017).

He doesn’t note, however, that if Chilcot, whose evidence ends at 2009, had been published sooner than 2016, Britain’s subsequent adventures in Libya, Iraq, and Syria would probably have been voted down by Parliament and the world would be different. Moreover, Chilcot was allowed to report the exchanges Tony Blair had with George W. Bush only from Blair’s side, while the agreement between Bush and John Howard, and its date, were not in his terms of reference.

McKibbin compares Blair’s foolhardy deployments with Howard’s risk-averse commitment on the cheap to the Iraq War coalition, and this

section filled with paleo recipes. Visit the Avid Reader Facebook page to see photos of the unplanned pastiche edition – His Foody Project perhaps?

Back to Booktown

The Victorian town of Clunes will once again be transformed into ‘Booktown’ for its annual festival for bibliophiles on May 6 and 7. Apart from sifting through a huge collection of ‘rare, out-of-print, and collectable books’, festival-goers can visit heritage buildings, listen to live music, and watch street performers. There is a writing, editing, and design workshop for budding magazine editors, as well as author talks from Clementine Ford, Kate Grenville, and A.S. Patrić. For more information, visit clunesbooktown.com.au

ann-Marie priest

Ann-Marie Priest, a regular ABR

Letters

was confirmed by an internal Defence report published by Fairfax in late February. But successive Australian governments have refused a Chilcotstyle inquiry, enabling them to dodge responsibility for the meaningless, legally dubious deployment of troops to Iraq and Syria which continues longer than both world wars put together. Unless Australia changes the way governments decide to go to war, more such disasters will follow.

Alison Broinowski, Paddington, NSW

Coffins and covers

Dear Editor, ABR’s coffined March cover is not only the best one I have seen on the magazine, it is one of the best magazine covers I can recall. Chilling is what comes to mind. The brilliance lies in the ingenious way the consequences are portrayed.

Neil Spark, Howrah, Tas.

Kerry Reed-Gilbert

Dear Editor, Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s contribution

contributor, is the recipient of the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Ms Priest will use the $15,000 fellowship to write a biography of the great Australian poet Gwen Harwood, who died in 1995 – a much-needed and overdue biography, it must be said. This year, a special commendation award of $3,000 was created. Suzanne Spunner (Victoria) will use it to develop her biography of Rover Thomas (1928–98), artist and founder of the East Kimberley School.

ABR in hoBart

On Thursday, 6 April, all the poets included in this year’s Tasmanian edition of States of Poetry will join state editor Sarah Day and Peter Rose for a celebration of Tasmanian poetry at the Hobart Bookshop (6 pm). This free event will include readings from States of Poetry and classic works by Tasmanian poets, Gwen Harwood included.

to States of Poetry is a wonderful acknowledgment of an inspiring strong Elder. Her poetry is strong and deep, and her gifts to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders First Nations writers and the local Us Mob writers will be her enduring legacy.

Samia Goudie (online comment)

Kerry Reed-Gilbert, a Wiradjuri woman from central New South Wales, has five poems in ABR’s 2017 ACT States of Poetry, an openaccess online national anthology. Next month we will publish a selection from the thirty poems published there, as selected by state editor Jen Webb. Ed.

Wellington rules

Dear Editor, Margaret Harris (ABR, March 2017) observes that Queen Victoria is ubiquitous in Australia, ‘memorialised … in the names of two states and innumerable other places’. I hope she will forgive me for pointing out that, using [Letters continues on page 5]

April 2017

Elizabeth McMahon

Alan Atkinson

Colin Golvan

Deborah Zion

Diana Bagnall

Dennis Altman

Beejay Silcox

Brenda Walker

Louise Oxley et al.

Letters

Alison Broinowski, Neil Spark, Samia Goudie, Angus Trumble, Andrew Cronin

Literary studies

Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford, and Mark Williams (eds): The Oxford History of the Novel in English Paul Giles

Julianne Lamond (ed.): Australian Literary Studies

Gillian Dooley

Sue Joseph: Behind the Text Tali Lavi

Society

Ann McGrath: Illicit Love Mark McKenna

Patrica Edgar and Don Edgar: Peak Paul Morgan

Poem Paul Hetherington

Religion

Gerard Windsor: The Tempest-Tossed Church

Michael McGirr

Memoir

Bruce Grant: Subtle Moments Alison Broinowski

Judith Buckrich: The Political is Personal Suzy Freeman-Greene

Nikki Gemmell: After Gillian Dooley

Science

Susan Greenfield: A Day in the Life of the Brain

Nick Haslam

Simon Ings: Stalin and the Scientists Mark Edele

A fresh history of New Zealand literature

A novel approach to scurvy

The copyright of Albert Namatjira

Rodney Syme on the good death

Kate Grenville contra perfume

The disposability of political leaders

Paul Auster’s new novel

John Kinsella’s passionate short stories

States of Poetry – Tasmania

Biography

Neil McDonald with Peter Brune: Valiant for Truth

Kevin Foster

Robert Macklin: Hamilton Hume Katy Gerner

Interviews

Critic of the Month Felicity Plunkett

Poet of the Month Paul Hetherington

Open Page Ashley Hay

Fiction

Jane Rawson: From the Wreck Fiona Wright

Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Refugees Kerryn Goldsworthy

Michael Sala: The Restorer Blanche Clark

Roanna Gonsalves: The Permanent Resident Sara Savage

Libby Angel: The Trapeze Act Anna MacDonald

Young Adult Fiction

James Bradley: The Silent Invasion Benjamin Chandler

History

Michael Kulikowski: Imperial Triumph Christopher Allen

Anne Sebba: Les Parisiennes Colin Nettelbeck

Poetry

John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan (eds): The Fremantle Press

Anthology of Western Australian Poetry Geoff Page

Nathanael O’Reilly: New and Selected Poems of Anna Wickham

Susan Sheridan

Law

Conor Gearty: On Fantasy Island John Eldridge

ABR Arts

Susan Lever

Michael Morley

Lee Christofis

Andrew Fuhrmann

Patrick McCaughey

Tim Byrne

Ian Dickson

Peter Rose

Anwen Crawford

Dilan Gunawardana

Andrew Fuhrmann

Fiona Gruber

Richard 3

Adelaide Festival

Letter from Paris

Jeff Sparrow: No Way But This

James Stourton: Kenneth Clark

Silence

Chimerica

Maxim Vengerov

Manchester by the Sea

Satan Jawa

John

The Age of Bones

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 Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, our partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Sydney Ideas

the excellent Geoscience Australia search engine www.ga.gov. au/placename, it is now possible to count the places and geographical features in Australia to which Queen Victoria still lends her name, either directly or by association. The results are fascinating. Of course, it is hardly a competition, but nevertheless the tally by my calculation is Queen Victoria, 148 versus Duke of Wellington, 466.

It is a startling fact that no individual has been and remains commemorated more often in Australia, either directly or by association, than Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, Marquess of Douro, and Earl of Mornington. The map of Australia currently yields twenty-eight places or features named Wellesley; 126 Wellington; three Douro, and fifty-two Mornington. Wellington’s military victories are also directly commemorated: Seringapatam 1 (a reef off the north-west coast of Western Australia); Copenhagen 3; Talavera 6; Corunna 14; Salamanca 3; Nive 21; Pyrenees 7, and, of course, Waterloo 109, and even Hougoumont (a pub in Fremantle). The residences that were presented to Wellington by a grateful nation are likewise marked on our map: Apsley, no fewer than fifty-eight times (for Apsley House in London) and Strathfield Saye or Stratfield Saye or Strathfieldsaye (in Hampshire, which was to Wellington as Blenheim Palace was to the Duke of Marlborough), an impressive total of thirty-four.

Why is this so? Certainly, Wellington had a thirty-year head start on Queen Victoria. He was a brilliant general who did more than anybody else to unseat Napoleon (twice). Many of the Iron Duke’s veterans migrated to the Australasian colonies and made up a hefty proportion of the officer class right up to the 1850s. They obviously did a lot of the naming prior to Victoria’s accession.

Wherever you happen to be in this country, you are never far away from a spot that is named after the Duke of Wellington

Angus Trumble, Canberra, ACT

Tim Winton

Dear Editor,

The first two paragraphs of Peter Craven’s review of Tim Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain (December 2016) surprised me, with the suggestion that he could be ambivalent about the author’s writing; Winton’s prose, he suggested, was ‘sometimes just a bit too self-delighting’. I had never felt that way. Cloudstreet was the first book I read that made me reread paragraphs simply because of how well they were written. In his largely positive review of The Boy Behind the Curtain, Craven showed that he was fairminded (and certainly not fawning). Geoffrey Wells’s response to that review (Letters, January–February 2017) seemed much less fair-minded. To imply that an experienced and often forthright reviewer like Peter Craven was ‘fawning to a fault’ seems quite insulting.

Wells expects a memoir to be personal, yet accuses Winton of rarely going beyond ‘his own outrage and sadness’. Who else’s outrage and sadness does Wells wish Winton to express in his own memoir? Apparently Winton is obsessed with his own personal feelings. As Brian Matthews says in his review of Winton’s other memoir, Island Home (ABR, November 2015), ‘Winton ... has little trouble in finding the words, tone, and rhythms, but even he seems to rejoice at times in the freedom of memoir ... the writer of memoir can be triumphantly personal, quixotic, eccentric, risky, and daring.’ Perhaps it is the quixotic part of this new memoir that bothered Wells?

I don’t think Winton is a ‘sacred cow’. As for the suggestion that devotees of Winton’s prose like it because they don’t have to think, question, and learn: I can only thank Wells for prompting me to go back and reread some of Winton’s work, so that I could stop thinking, questioning, and learning all over again.

Andrew Cronin, Robertson, NSW

Longer versions of the letters by Angus Trumble and Andrew Cronin appear in ABR Online. Ed.

ABR Gender Fellowship

Australian Book Review welcomes proposals for the ABR Gender Fellowship.

We seek proposals for a substantial article on any aspect of gender in Australian literature (any genre). We welcome proposals from writers, commentators, and specialists with diverse interests and expertise.

The Fellowship is worth $7,500

The ABR Fellowships are intended to reward fine Australian writers and critics, and to advance the magazine’s contribution to ideas and critical debate.

Applications close 1 May 2017

Past ABR Fellows

2016 Alan Atkinson

Michael Aiken

2015 Ashley Hay

2014 Shannon Burns

James McNamara

Danielle Clode

2013 Andrew Fuhrmann

Helen Ennis

Kerryn Goldsworthy

2012 Jennifer Lindsay

Felicity Plunkett

Ruth Starke

2011 Rachel Buchanan

2010 Patrick Allington

We thank ABR Patron Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO for her support.

See our website for full conditions and guidelines: www.australianbookreview.com.au

ABR PATRONS

Supporting Australian writing

Australian Book Review warmly thanks all its Patrons and donors for their generosity and for their commitment to Australian writing. Your support has enabled us to increase payments to writers, a process we are committed to maintaining.

‘We love reading across a wide range of areas – it’s as simple as that. We support Australian Book Review as it promotes great writing and, equally, the writers who do so much to nourish our society and the minds and souls of its citizens.’

Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie, ABR Patrons since 2007

Acmeist ($75,000 or more)

Mr Ian Dickson

Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999)

Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999)

Ms Anita Apsitis and Mr Graham Anderson

Ms Morag Fraser AM

Mr Colin Golvan QC

Ms Ellen Koshland

Mrs Maria Myers AC

Mr Kim Williams AM

Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999)

Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie

Dr Joyce Kirk

Mr Peter and Ms Mary-Ruth McLennan

Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999)

Mrs Helen Brack

Emeritus Professor David Carment AM

Professor Ian Donaldson and Dr Grazia Gunn

Ms Ruth and Mr Ralph Renard

Mr Peter Rose and Mr Christopher Menz Anonymous (1)

Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999)

Mr Peter Allan

Hon. Justice Kevin Bell and Ms Tricia Byrnes

Dr Bernadette Brennan

Dr Geoffrey Cains

Professor Glyn Davis AC and Professor Margaret Gardner AO

Ms Marion Dixon

Mr Ian Hicks AM

Dr Alastair Jackson

Mrs Pauline Menz

Mr Allan Murray-Jones

Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck

Estate of Dorothy Porter

Lady Potter AC

Mr David Poulton

Mr John Scully

Mr Stephen Shelmerdine AM and Mrs Kate Shelmerdine

Ms Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO

Anonymous (1)

Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999)

Ms Gillian Appleton (in memory of John Button)

Ms Kate Baillieu

Mr Des Cowley

Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO

Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC

Helen Garner

Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC

Ms Cathrine Harboe-Ree

Professor Margaret Harris

The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC

Ms Elisabeth Holdsworth

Mr Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Ms Su Lesser

Mr Geoffrey Lehmann and Ms Gail Pearson

Dr Susan Lever

Mr Don Meadows

Mr Stephen Newton AO

Professor John Rickard

Ilana and Ray Snyder

Professor Andrew Taylor AM

Dr Mark Triffitt

Mr Noel Turnbull

Ms Mary Vallentine AO

Ms Jacki Weaver AO

Anonymous (6)

Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499)

Mr Peter and Mrs Sarah Acton

Mr David and Mrs Sally Airey

Professor Dennis Altman AM

Helen Angus

Bardas Foundation

Mr Brian Bourke

Mr John H. Bowring

Professor Jan Carter AM

Mr John Collins

Ms Donna Curran and Mr Patrick McCaughey

Mr Hugh Dillon

Sue Ebury

The Leo and Mina Fink Fund

Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick

Mr Reuben Goldsworthy

Dr Joan Grant

Professor Tom Griffiths AO

Ms Mary Hoban

Dr John Holt (1931–2013)

Ms Claudia Hyles

Dr Barbara Kamler

Dr Stephen McNamara

Professor Stuart Macintyre AO

Mr Alex and Ms Stephanie Miller

Dr Ann Moyal AM

Ms Susan Nathan

Ms Angela Nordlinger

Ms Jillian Pappas

Professor Ros Pesman AM

Margaret Plant

Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James

Dr Della Rowley (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011)

Ms Gillian Rubinstein (Lian Hearn)

Dr John Seymour and Dr Heather Munro AO

Mr Michael Shmith

Dr Jennifer Strauss AM

Dr John Thompson

Ms Lisa Turner

Dr Barbara Wall

Ms Nicola Wass

Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM

Professor Terri-ann White

Mrs Ursula Whiteside

Mrs Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (8)

Symbolist ($500 to $999)

Mr Douglas Batten

Ms Michelle Cahill

Mr Joel Deane

David Harper AM

Estate of Martin Harrison

Professor Ian Lowe AO

Ms Patricia Nethery

Mr M.D. de B. Collins Persse MVO

Mr Mark Powell

Professor John Poynter AO OBE

Mr Robert Sessions AM

Professor Janna Thompson

Dr Ailsa Zainu’ddin Anonymous (5)

Realist ($250 to $499)

Ms Nicole Abadee

Ms Jan Aitken

Ms Jean Dunn

Dr Anna Goldsworthy

Ms Anne Grindrod

Mr Michael Macgeorge

Ms Muriel Mathers

Ms Diana O’Neil

Mr J.W. de B. Persse

Professor Wilfrid Prest

Mr Mark Rubbo OAM

Ms Helen Thompson

Ms Natalie Warren

Mr Robyn Williams AM Anonymous (5)

Perpetual Patron

The Hon. John Button (1932–2008)

Corporate Patron

Arnold Bloch Leibler

(ABR Patrons listing as at 21 March 2017)

Help ABR to further its mission

ABR is a fully independent non-profit organisation. It does not have a wealthy owner or a large endowment to underwrite its work. Publishing a quality literary review in a small market is challenging. To further its mission and to expand its programs, ABR seeks donations that will benefit Australian writers and reward bright new literary and editorial talent. Patrons have the distinction of making a tangible contribution to Australia’s independent literary review. Our future is in your hands.

ABR Patrons support

• Better payments for writers

• Annual literary prizes

• Literary fellowships

• ABR Arts

• States of Poetry

• Fiction and poetry in the magazine

• Discounted subscriptions for young readers

How to become a Patron

The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR). All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible. These donations are vital for the magazine’ s future.

To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822

b

Patron of the Month

‘What do I value most about ABR? Comprehensiveness, for a start, in thoughtful coverage of the Australian literary scene in its many aspects. Then heterogeneity, through the mix of longer essays, reviews, and short notices. Perhaps most of all, horizon-scanning, alerting me to otherwise elusive phenomena and practitioners.’

Margaret Harris, ABR Patron since 2010

Australian Book Review

April 2017, no. 390 Since 1961

First series 1961–74

Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

ISSN 0155-2864

Registered by Australia Post Printed by Doran Printing

Published by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Victoria 3006

Editor and CEO Peter Rose Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu Assistant Editor Dilan Gunawardana Business Manager Grace Chang

Development Consultant Christopher Menz

Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members

Patrick Allington, Ian Dickson, Ian Donaldson, Anne Edwards, Rae Frances, Andrea Goldsmith, Lisa Gorton, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder

ABR Laureates Robyn Archer, David Malouf

Editorial Advisers Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Des Cowley, James Der Derian, Mark Edele, Andrew Fuhrmann, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Fiona Gruber, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, Julian Meyrick, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Wendy Sutherland, Craig Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Terri-ann White

Media

Please contact Progressive PR and Publicity: darren@progressivepr.com.au or (03) 9696 6417

Volunteers Duncan Fardon, John Scully

Cover Judy Green

Correspondence Editorial matters should be directed to the Editor; advertising matters to the Deputy Editor; and subscription queries to the Business Manager. Major articles are refereed.

Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters. All letters are edited. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter. Correspondents must provide a telephone number for verification.

Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is the first time that he or she has appeared in the magazine.

ABR Arts Reviews are rated out of five stars () with half stars denoted by the  symbol

Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soybased, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

how to sUBscri Be

www.australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822; Fax: (03) 9699 8803 business@australianbookreview.com.au or post form below

individUal print rates

Current individual print subscribers can access ABR Online for free as part of their subscription. Contact ABR to set up access.

individUals – aUstralia:

One-year subscription (ten issues + ABR Online) Standard: $90

Students/pensioners: $80 25 and under: $49.95

Two years (twenty issues + ABR Online) Standard: $165

Students/pensioners: $150

Five years (fifty issues + ABR Online) Standard: $400

Students/pensioners: $360

individUals – overseas:

One-year subscription (ten issues (airmail) + ABR Online) Standard (Asia/NZ): $130 Standard (Rest of World): $145

Two-year subscription (twenty issues (airmail) + ABR Online) Standard (Asia/NZ): $250 Standard (Rest of World): $280

individUal ABR Online rates

One-year subscription to ABR Online

Individuals (anywhere) – six months: $30

Individuals (anywhere) – one year: $50 Individuals (25 and under) – one year: $25 Individuals (anywhere) – two years: $80

institU tional rates

One year print subscription (ten issues): Australia: $120 Secondary schools (Australia): $100 Standard (Asia/NZ): $160 Standard (Rest of World): $190

One year’s access to ABR Online: All institutions, including schools and municipal libraries, can purchase a one-year subscription to ABR Online for $150, except the following, for which a one-year subscription to ABR Online costs $500: universities; university libraries; government auspices and departments; and national and state libraries and their international counterparts (in terms of status and reach).

To organise an institutional subscription to ABR Online, please contact ABR. Trial access can be arranged on request. Print and online subscription bundles also available. All prices include GST. For more information about rates refer to www.australianbookreview.com.au

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

Subscribe for as little as $25

This month, thanks to Entertainment One, ten new or renewing subscribers will receive double passes to 20th Century Women, starring Annette Bening and Elle Fanning (April 13), and another ten will receive double passes to Denial, based on History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt (April 13).

This issue was lodged with Australia Post on March 28. Cheque or Credit Card: Visa Mastercard

Full name on Credit Card: ................................................................................................................... Expires: ............................. Signed: ................................................................................................... Which issue would you like your subscription to start with? ..............................................................

To subscribe to ABR Online visit www.australianbookreview.com.au or contact ABR .

Name: .............................................................................................................. Address: ........................................................................................................... Email: .............................................................................................................. Amount paid: $ ........................................... Phone: ...................................... Australian Book Review: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Fax: (03) 9699 8803 Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au

Elgar’s Cello Concerto

Enjoy Elgar’s famous cello concerto played by rising Dutch star Harriet Krijgh, one of the most exciting cellists of the new generation. Then, Vaughan Williams’ reflective Fifth Symphony.

KNUSSEN The Way to Castle Yonder

ELGAR Cello Concerto

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Symphony No.5

Robert Spano conductor

Harriet Krijgh cello [PICTURED]

Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique

Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony has such intense beauty it never fails to delight audiences. Latvian violinist Baiba Skride plays Prokofiev’s brilliant first Violin Concerto.

WAGNER Rienzi: Overture

PROKOFIEV Violin Concerto No.1

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.6, Pathétique

Andris Poga conductor

Baiba Skride violin [PICTURED]

Thu 20 Apr 1.30pm EMIRATES METRO SERIES Fri 21 Apr 8pm Sat 22 Apr 2pm APT MASTER SERIES Wed 10 May 8pm Fri 12 May 8pm Sat 13 May 8pm BMW SEASON HIGHLIGHT Mon 15 May 7pm

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘Having its share of time’

A fresh study of New Zealand literature

Elizabeth McMahon

A HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE edited by Mark Williams

Cambridge University Press, $205 hb, 419 pp, 9781107085350

AHistory of New Zealand Literature is a rewarding collection replete with the pleasure of new information that is both strange and strangely familiar. I commend it for both its intrinsic interest and, for Australian readers in particular, as one means of redressing Australia and New Zealand’s mutual ignorance of each other’s literary histories and cultures. Here, I recall Lydia Wevers’s disarming introduction to her 2008 Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture: ‘I am a New Zealand reader of Australian literature. That makes me just about a category of one. The reverse category, an Australian reader of New Zealand literature, is also a rare beast though perhaps there is a breeding pair in existence.’

There are exceptions, of course, though not that many in view of the thriving literary cultures on either side of the Tasman. So I read this collection with a dual lens: one focused on the distinctiveness of New Zealand’s literary history, following its various narratives of ‘invention’ and development; the other calibrating connections and parallels between the Australian and New Zealand experiences. Many are acquainted with the literary traffic between the two countries: Henry Lawson,

Robin Hyde, Jean Devanny, Ruth Park, Eve Langley, Antigone Kefala, to name a few. Perhaps less well known is the connection between the establishment of Australian and New Zealand national literatures in universities. The first university course on Australian literature was proposed and taught by Joyce Eyre at the University of Tasmania in 1947. Eyre originated in Hobart, but, prior to this post, had spent years teaching in New Zealand. Conversely, Winston Rhodes, who introduced the first university courses on New Zealand literature, informally in 1931 and formally from 1951, was originally from Melbourne. However, it is the shared shape of the literary histories and their similar preoccupations and anxieties that most profoundly connect the history of Australian and New Zealand literatures and where the distinctions are truly revealing, as this volume shows.

The collection comprises twenty-five chapters, each of around 4,000 words, divided into five chronological sections spanning from 1760 to 2014, though this colonial framework is also challenged throughout the volume. Part I covers the longest period, 1760–1920,

Katherine Mansfield (photograph from Archives New Zealand Reference: ABKH W4437 NF 316 via Wikimedia Commons)

and includes essays on travel writing and literature in both English and te reo Māori [Māori language]. Three figures are discussed in some length: Hakaraia Kiharoa (?–1852), who wrote down the words of sixty-nine waiata ‘songs’ in 1852; the British novelist Samuel Butler (1835–1902) who, in his mid-twenties, spent five years in Christchurch, where he made his fortune and drafted his satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872); and Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), who is titled a ‘Colonial Modernist’ in a challenge to the boundaries of metropolitan Modernism. Indeed, New Zealand space and Modernist form are inextricable in her writing, where ‘New Zealand figures as the master metaphor for her aesthetic … [T]he image of the misted half-hidden islands only partially and occasionally visible is paradigmatic of her method of apprehending and representing life’.

An Australian reader of

New Zealand literature is a rare beast, though perhaps there is a breeding pair in existence

Part II (1920–50) covers the period akin to the ‘legendary 1890s’ in Australia in the concerted ‘invention’ of both nation and narration in the movement to independence (1947 in New Zealand). In this period, poet Allen Curnow’s introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1945, described by Hugh Roberts as ‘the ur-text of New Zealand nationalism’, called for New Zealand literature to be a ‘real expression of what the New Zealander is and part of what he may become’. Janet Frame (1924–2004) recorded the impact of reading Curnow’s collection, alongside Frank Sargeson (1903–82) and James K. Baxter (1926–72), as a student in Dunedin in 1945: ‘I could read in Allen Curnow’s poems ... about our land having its share of time and not having to borrow from a northern Shakespearean wallet’. This section includes chapters on how land and landscape were re-evaluated through both cultural nationalist and socialist perspectives, and how key literary infrastructure was established, including the magazines Phoenix (1932), Tomorrow (1934), and Landfall (1947); local publishing houses; and the New Zealand Literary Fund (1946). All of the chapters admit to complexities and contradictions within cultural nationalist movement, as we see clearly with two iconic writers of this moment, Frank Sargeson and Robin Hyde (1906–39).

The following three parts of the collection map continuities and resistances to the cultural nationalism of the previous decades as successive generations seek to broaden understandings of New Zealand literature. Part III covers 1950–72, Part IV 1972–90, Part V 1990–2014. Topics include the renaissance of Māori literature with Witi Ihimaera becoming the first published Māori novelist in 1972; the development of contemporary New Zealand theatre; new reading publics; children’s literature; and global markets.

The self-contained quality of each chapter makes the collection ideal for dipping into, and the high standard

of the writing makes each instance especially rewarding. The 4,000-word chapter length ensures some depth, which is satisfying in terms of content and because it also allows the distinctiveness of each critical voice to be heard. There is also much to be gained from reading the collection cover to cover, drawing the threads of recurring preoccupations, drives, and anxieties articulated by both creative and critical writers, and speculating on what might be shared and distinctive habits of thought and language. Perhaps principal among the distinctive qualities is the strong sense of a bicultural literary culture which is not confined to chapters on specific Pākehā (European) and Māori writers but emerges as a wider collective understanding of New Zealand literature and society. This perspective is explicitly considered and embedded in linguistic patterns and rhetorical turns, which we find, for instance, in discussions of metaphor. Considering shifts to promote the distinguishing features of ‘Maoriland’ [an Australian coinage] in the earlytwentieth century, Jane Stafford observes that, as it is ‘[t]oo insecure to stand alone, much of this language works through simile and contrast – nothing is, it is always like, or better than’. Later in the collection, Alice Te Punga Somerville discusses the range of English language and te reo Māori, as well as bilingual and translated works published in the magazine Te Ao Hou/The New World between 1952 and 1975. She, too, identifies the way metaphor indicates the negotiation of place and belonging. In the te reo Māori description of the magazine, it is a marae ‘gathering place’, but when translated into English it becomes ‘like a marae’. In the post-colonial context, this small rhetorical distinction carries the full freight of difference between Indigenous and settler cultures and their respective relationships to home and community.

The title ‘Te Ao Hou’ signals another key theme of this collection, namely a preoccupation with ‘new beginnings’. In numerous ways, this is a commonplace of colonial literatures, as all colonies are, by definition, new beginnings. This is not to diminish the particular and ongoing beginnings of New Zealand writing. The predominant impression of contemporary New Zealand writing and literary culture generated by this collection is one of a conscious interior focus with strong regional networks. Yet this sits easily with its ‘postcolonial postmodernity’ and its myriad, distinctive expressions of an original, fractured worldliness. g

Elizabeth McMahon teaches in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. She has co-edited Southerly magazine since 2008 and, with Brigitta Olubas, is editor of a forthcoming collection on Elizabeth Harrower (Sydney University Press, 2017). ❖

Global tentacles

An accessible study of modern world literature

Paul

Giles

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE NOVEL IN ENGLISH:

VOLUME 9: THE WORLD NOVEL IN ENGLISH TO 1950

edited by Ralph Crane, Jane Stafford, and Mark Williams Oxford University Press, $160 hb, 501 pp, 9780199609932

The latest instalment in the Oxford History of the Novel in English is notable for having one of its editors based in Australia and the other two in New Zealand. As these editors admit in their introduction, this volume is ‘something of a hybrid when set alongside the other eleven volumes that make up the series’, since it is organised partly by historical date, tracing ‘the World Novel in English’ from its putative origins up until 1950, and partly by geography. ‘World Literature’ is a problematic and contested term in today’s academy, but the editors here understand it to mean writing from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Oceania, and Antarctica, as well as parts of the Americas (Canada, the Caribbean) outside the United States, whose fiction enjoys its own dedicated volumes in this series. Thirteen of the twenty-nine contributors to this book are, in fact, based at universities in Australia or New Zealand, and taken as a whole this volume tends to highlight literary production in this part of the world. This might well be regarded as a welcome corrective to similar works in which Australasia has been unduly marginalised, although if I were reviewing this book in Cape Town, I would doubtless be surprised at how South African literature is omitted altogether from the chapter discussing ‘Colonial Gothic’.

Even weighing in as it does at 500 pages, it is clearly impossible to cover every aspect of the ‘world novel’ in a project such as this. Many of the editorial choices of inclusion and exclusion are, however, quite revealing. As I know from having contributed to earlier volumes in this series, the general editor (Patrick Parrinder, at the University of Reading) issued a directive that contributors ‘should aim for a long-term, general readership and should not presume acquaintance with current literary-critical jargon’. The editors of The World Novel in English To 1950 have accordingly chosen to emphasise empirical forms of cultural history, the facts and figures of book publishing, rather than to engage with the more deliberately theoretical approach that characterises, for instance, the two volumes of The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, published in 2012 under the editorship of Ato Quayson.

The first section in The World Novel, entitled ‘Literary Production’, includes individual chapters on ‘Book History’ and ‘Colonial Editions’; this sets the overall tone for the work, which is generally descriptive and impressive more for breadth than depth. The book does cover an enormous range of material, and it contains many nuggets of useful and (to me, at least) unexpected

information, such as the commentary in Ralph Crane’s chapter on ‘The AngloIndian Novel to 1947’ on popular Victorian novelist Philip Meadows Taylor and on how Matthew Arnold’s brother, William Delafield Arnold, published in 1853 under the pseudonym ‘Punjabee’, a novel entitled Oakfield, a fictionalised account of Anglo-Indian society. On the other hand, there is very little extended critical commentary on any of these works, and within the critical surveys that make up the bulk of this volume, discussions of major writers often seem brief and reductive. Xavier Herbert, for example, is dispatched in six lines and Eleanor Dark in one paragraph, while the analysis of figures such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and D.H. Lawrence, whose fiction encompasses many different parts of the world, often seems quite ‘retro’ in its orientation.

The editors were clearly aware of the difficulties involved in trying to balance their book’s multiple coordinates, and they have sought deliberately to counterpoint these more generalised overviews with chapters towards the end that focus more specifically on ‘Individual Voices’ and ‘Critical Contexts’. There are some particularly insightful contributions in these latter sections, particularly Harry Ricketts’s informative and well-written piece on ‘The Persistence of Kim’ and the

WRITTEN WORD

RAISING THE POLITICAL STAKES WITH JEANNE D’ARC

WRITING FOR A NEW KIND OF REVOLUTION?

Monash Arts

Making a difference through research

The unbelievable and controversial history of the medieval French heroine Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) is being brought to life in a new literary work by Dr Ali Alizadeh titled The Last Days of Jeanne D’Arc, due out from Giramondo Publishing this year. Dr Alizadeh’s novel is the result of decades-long literary experimentation, research into the life and character of Jeanne d'Arc, exploration of the questions of love, revolution and war, and the radical potential of Jeanne d’Arc's story in the contemporary world.

Dr Alizadeh’s other books include the collection of poetry, Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011), shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, Poetry; the work of creative non-fiction Iran: My Grandfather (Transit Lounge, 2010), shortlisted for a NSW Premier’s Literary Award; and the novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge, 2008). His last book was a work of fiction titled Transactions (UQP, 2013), long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Dr Alizadeh is interested in political writing and poetry and fiction that explore contentious themes such as history, violence and war. He coordinates literary studies and creative writing units at Monash University. His research is mostly in contemporary writing, especially contemporary Australian writing, but also philosophy, literary theory and Marxism; and he supervises a range of postgraduate research that has an affinity with these areas. We spoke with Dr Alizadeh on his research into Jeanne d'Arc, political writing in Australia today, and its significance to the world at large and our personal lives.

Access the full interview and podcast at artsonline.monash.edu.au/news-events/ jeanofarc-dralializadeh/

Have you considered research?

Research areas

» Film, Media and Communications

» Historical Studies

» Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

» Literary and Cultural Studies

» Philosophy

» Social and Political Science

» Theatre, Performance and Music

Practice-based research degrees

» Creative writing

» Journalism

» Music composition

» Music performance

» Theatre performance

» Translation studies

politics of Rudyard Kipling’s literary reputation more generally. The other individual voices granted the privilege of a separate chapter are Mulk Raj Anand (India), Sara Jeannette Duncan (Canada), Olive Schreiner (South Africa), Marcus Clarke (Australia), Robin Hyde (New Zealand), and G.V. Desani (India), a selection that does seem somewhat arbitrary.

It is noteworthy that the novel since 1950 has been granted no less than three separate volumes in this Oxford series – one on the novel in ‘South and South-East Asia’, another on its life ‘in Africa and the Caribbean’, and a third on ‘Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific’. Such largesse emphasises how the task of compression imposed upon the editors of this ninth volume must have been severe indeed. But they would have faced a further dilemma, involving the definition of the ‘novel’ itself, a generic form that has always thrived on impure associations, not only with romance – Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) is cited as an influence in the chapter on Oceania – but also with popular journalism and pamphleteering, going back to the days of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Again, the editors take a pragmatic line here, declaring in their introduction their intention to omit authors such as Katherine Mansfield, ‘whose work is entirely within the short story genre ... except where they contribute to the development of larger patterns within the novel’. But in Mansfield’s case, this is almost always, and her story ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ is duly (and sympathetically) treated in Angela Smith’s essay on ‘Colonial Modernists’. The law of genre, as Jacques Derrida sardonically remarked, is a law intended only to be broken.

This volume as a whole, then, might be seen as something of a critical hotchpotch, but this also comprises its strength. Because of its general accessibility and the huge amount of material covered by its distinguished contributors, this book will undoubtedly be useful for undergraduates or even high-school students seeking background information on the global tentacles of English-language fiction in the nineteenth and earlier part of the

twentieth century. Oxford University Press, like its Cambridge counterpart, is now heavily committed for financial reasons to encyclopedic projects of this kind, figuring that they can exploit the gravitas of their brand name to sell their merchandise to reference libraries, and in a pragmatic sense readers are more likely to make use of this work by seeking out individual chapters rather than reading it from cover to cover.

Overall, this book contributes impressively to a broader sense of how Australasian literature has intersected over

a long period of time with narratives that have circulated around the world. It does not, though, have much to say about the status of world literature as what Franco Moretti called ‘a problem’ rather than ‘a subject’, a conundrum turning upon complex relationships between centre and margin whose stress points can never entirely be resolved through merely expanding the circumference of global coverage. g

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney.

Pumping for scurvy

A literary approach to scurvy

Alan Atkinson

SCURVY: THE DISEASE OF DISCOVERY by Jonathan Lamb Princeton University Press (Footprint), $66 hb, 328 pp, 9780691147826

Ihave been dazzled and baffled by this book. The variety of learning, showing itself especially in a range of beautiful and apposite quotations, is wonderful. The depiction of scurvy as subjective experience is brilliant and deeply sympathetic. However, parts of the historical argument are very hard to follow, and altogether they suggest that the imagination at play in these pages is more thoroughly literary than historical. This review is written by an historian. Scurvy is a disease which attacks both the body and the mind, and it can be fatal. It is the result of Vitamin C deficiency, experienced over months, say on long voyages by land or sea. Jonathan Lamb is a scholar in English literature, working from Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee; he has previously taught at Auckland and Princeton. In this book he is particularly concerned with the heightened imaginative sensibility brought on by scurvy, in its various stages, and he draws multifaceted connections between scurvy and creative writing.

The approach overall is exploratory and speculative, and the effect is often wonderfully suggestive. However, the book is overburdened with unproven and sometimes unlikely possibilities. Lamb’s use of scurvy to explain curiosities of literary style and insight is surely overdone. If an explorer is apparently obsessed with purposeless collecting, as François Péron was with seashells, it does not prove he had scurvy, and if he offers a minute account of an unremarkable phenomenon, as Nicolas Baudin did in describing an incident with an Australian snake, this can easily be explained by the scientific and scholarly habit of noting detail, even of uncertain significance. When an artist paints over a picture of icebergs with a picture of woodland, as William Hodges did on James Cook’s second voyage, surely the coincidence is too trivial to be proposed as an example of scorbutic nostalgia. The use of double negatives was common to eighteenthand early nineteenth-century rhetoric. It does not prove scorbutic confusion.

Nor does a description of the ocean as green instead of blue.

The Australian historian cannot help being struck especially with Lamb’s penultimate chapter, entitled ‘Australia’ and taking up more than a fifth of the book. Here the author proposes that endemic scurvy played a vital part in shaping creative imagination in colonial Australia. So, he says, ‘scurvy and its satellite formations provided an edge of creative fiction between the evolution of the convict system and what was to end up as the culture of the new colony’. It is not entirely clear what this sentence

Lamb’s use of scurvy to explain curiosities of literary style and insight is surely overdone

means, and the same can be said for the argument it summarises. But clearly the argument turns on a single factual issue, the prevalance of scurvy in colonial life, and of this Lamb has no doubt. He declares that the First Fleet, arriving in 1788, initiated ‘the most inveterate outbreak of scurvy anywhere and at any time’, which ‘afflicted the settlements in Port Jackson, Tasmania and the penal outposts of the new colony of Australia for upwards of forty years’.

This is a remarkably bold statement, and it is at odds with several generations of historical scholarship in Australia. It has to be said that Lamb’s understanding of the British colonies on this continent lacks crucial discrimination as to both place and time. He tends to confuse the penal settlements with the white population as a whole, and he tends to confuse the conditions of the first years, and even the first months, with the experience of decades.

So we are told that from first settlement through the 1830s ‘scurvy was endemic in Tasmania – at Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur – and in settlements on the northern coasts –Moreton Bay, Melville Island, and Port Raffles, as well as rural districts remote from coastal settlements’. Again, citing the Tasmanian scholar Saxby Pridmore (1983), Lamb states that ‘scurvy was the greatest cause of sickness in Tasmania

for the first four decades of settlement’. In fact, his source is much less expansive. ‘Scurvy’, Pridmore says, ‘was the most important disease of the early months, but within a year their settler’s gardens were successful, leaving diarrhoea and influenza as the prevailing diseases.’ In 1829 we hear of ‘[e]very kind of English fruit … in luscious abundance’ (Augustus Prinsep, in Hobart).

As for the mainland, the reference to Melville Island, Port Raffles (should be Fort Wellington), Moreton Bay, and remote rural districts is just as problematic. And yet, it leads to the suggestion that New South Wales as a whole was ‘a pump for scurvy – sucking it in, seasoning it, and sending it out again … [in] a putrid current’. The cause was defective diet on a massive scale, and that in turn was due, Lamb says, to ‘the lawless violence of a delinquent governing class … destitute of any active principle of human community and social good’.

It is not explained how the diet of a population which in 1836 numbered 70,000, two-thirds of them free, could have been so thoroughly controlled, or why a governing class keen to live well itself should have wanted to starve its workforce. In fact, as in Hobart, gardens and orchards were common from the early years – the government printer in Sydney issued a garden guide for settlers in 1806 – and even convict labourers were always much better fed than the poor in England. As for the incidence of scurvy in New South Wales, I quote the medical historian Milton Lewis (Medical Journal of Australia, 2014). In 1788–1792 [at Port Jackson], mortality was very high, due mainly to dysentery, typhus and typhoid … abetted by malnutrition and scurvy. Even at the beginning, then, scurvy was a secondary problem, and in Lewis’s account it thereafter drops from view. So, by the 1820s and 1830s, ‘dysentery was the most prevalent disease, but rheumatism, venereal disease (VD), “dropsy” (oedema), ophthalmia and erysipelas were also common’.

One large question lurks beneath the surface of this book. What does a more detailed understanding of scurvy really add to our appreciation of litera-

ture as literature? I did not know that ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ was about physical and mental degeneration among seamen. But I do not need to know it. From an historical point of view it is a triviality, and from a literary point of view it is a banal distraction. Again, despite its beauty, it is the lack of discriminating argument, and of properly organised priorities, which defines this book in the end. g

Alan Atkinson’s three volume The Europeans in Australia (1997–2014) has been republished by NewSouth. The third volume won the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2015.

Quote of the Month

‘It’s worth remembering that democracy has always flourished not in the citadel of government but in the campaigns to open it up, to make it more than it has been. The dream arises on the outside, but it is about being allowed in. May we pry open the doors, unlatch the windows, let the breeze blow through.’

Rebecca Solnit, from ‘Easy Chair: Tyranny of the Minority’, Harper’s Magazine, March 2017

Fundamental liberty

A highly readable study of miscegenation

Mark McKenna

ILLICIT LOVE: INTERRACIAL SEX AND MARRIAGE IN THE UNITED STATES AND AUSTRALIA

by Ann McGrath

University of Nebraska Press, $63 hb, 534 pp, 9780803238251

In the New England summer of 1825, the residents of Cornwall, Connecticut, built a funeral pyre in the middle of their village green. From a nearby window, nineteen-year-old Harriett Gold watched as the flames leapt into the sky, her heart consumed with ‘anguish’. Among those burning Harriett’s effigy was her brother, Stephen, who, like nearly all of the town’s citizens, had turned against her since the banns of Harriett’s marriage to the young Cherokee Elias Boudinot were posted on the door of the Congregational Church a few weeks

earlier. In the same notice, church elders, many of whom were close friends of Harriett’s parents, openly condemned her flagrant intention to marry across racial boundaries. Although the marriage went ahead, it was nonetheless, the elders declared, ‘criminal’ and ‘evil’, ‘an outrage upon public feeling’. Forced to run the gauntlet of social opprobrium and lynch mobs who eventually ran her out of town, Harriett, as Ann McGrath eloquently writes, was bravely ‘swimming downstream, against the tide of history … against the assumed order of things’.

The harrowing yet ultimately inspiring story of Harriett and Elias, and their determination to marry in the face of overwhelming resistance – they eventually fled south, bringing up their children within the welcoming arms of the Cherokee ‘nation’ – is one of several intimate, ‘transnational’ histories of interracial sex and marriage in nineteenth-century United States and early twentieth-century Australia brought powerfully to life in McGrath’s Illicit Love. McGrath grew up in Queensland in the 1960s and 1970s, where Aboriginal people had been erased from the

Monash Undergraduate Prize

Win up to $5,000 in cash prizes Winners announced at the 2017 Emerging Writers’ Festival Open to all undergraduate and honours students from universities across Australia and New Zealand

emergingwritersfestival.org.au/ monash-prize/ ENTRIES CLOSE APRIL 12

landscape, as if ‘they had never shared the same spaces, let alone fallen in love or gotten married, or lived in our streets, on their land, and among us all’, an experience that shaped the direction of her future work as an historian.

Illicit Love builds on McGrath’s expertise in the history of race relations in Australia, but adds another crucial dimension: the parallel history of those who dared to cross racial and national boundaries in the United States. As McGrath explains, ‘in histories of colonialism, the stories of marriages across colonizing boundaries’ have been ‘razed by a systemic forgetting’. Blurring the ‘dividing lines between Indigenous and settler-colonizer space’, these relationships revealed a countervailing history: Beneath the official tenets of racism espoused by governments, the law, police, and the wider community, countless men and women on the frontier refused to comply with the strictures placed on them. Instead, as McGrath asserts, they sought ‘control of their sexual partnerships and family arrangements’ as a ‘fundamental liberty’, and in the process they remade both the everyday fabric of their social relations and their nation’s destiny.

Illicit Love cuts against the grain of more familiar narratives of settler exploitation of Indigenous people – McGrath shows how Aboriginal women often entered willingly into monogamous and plural unions with white men – adroitly revealing that many of these same women ‘saw intermarriage from inside the world of their own complex system of laws and values’, integrating outsiders ‘into their own systems of family and ways of living in country’. McGrath’s transparent and engaging style (she incorporates the colour and drama of her search in the archives into her narrative, describing library interiors, manuscript presentation, and expressing her frustration when correspondence goes ‘missing’), combined with a chapter structure that shifts effortlessly from broader historical contextualisation to the more finely honed detail and personal drama inherent in the stories she has unearthed, constitute an accomplished example of contemporary historical scholarship. For McGrath, there is no conflict be-

tween scholarship and storytelling.

One of the most telling aspects of the relationships that McGrath narrates in Illicit Love is the crowning hypocrisy of powerful men who, when faced with a choice between adherence to the principles of racial segregation they had advocated in public and satisfying their longing for intimacy, swiftly chose the latter course. McGrath tells the story of the Anglican missionary Ernest Gribble’s ‘illicit’ relationship with Jeannie, a Yarrabah woman with whom he fathered a child in 1908 during his tenure at Yarrabah Aboriginal Mission near Cairns. Gribble, who regularly preached that such unions were little more than ‘vice’ and exploitation (a position firmly in keeping with the Queensland government’s policies of segregation), promoted ‘Christian marriages between Aboriginal couples’. Once his affair with Jeannie was outed, Gribble was banished in shame, shifted 1,000 kilometres away by church authorities, and banned from ever returning. As McGrath concludes: ‘That the authoritarian ideologue Ernest yearned for intimate and sexual companionship across colonizing boundaries revealed a great crack in the many edifices that, brick by brick, he

had painstakingly constructed’.

Like Gribble, John Ross, chief of the ‘Cherokee nation’ and one of the authors of the ‘Cherokee Constitution’ (1827), had spoken against interracial marriage in his community. Ross, however, soon ended up transgressing his own rules when, after his Cherokee wife died, he fell in love with Mary Stapler of Wilmington, New Castle, Delaware. Remarkably, their marriage has been little explored by historians, despite the existence of a cache of correspondence between the two lovers which McGrath exploits to full effect. Given the wealth of primary material here and McGrath’s skilful use of the couple’s letters, this is one of the strongest and most gripping chapters of the book.

It is commonplace for reviewers of outstanding scholarly books to plead that they ‘deserve a wide audience’, as though readers might need more than a little shepherding. I will make the same plea for Illicit Love, a book that amply realises McGrath’s long-standing ambition to ‘write history that people want to read’. g

Mark McKenna’s most recent book is From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories (Melbourne University Press, 2016).

Ship

The abandoned ship was there one morning – a new broken headland –shiny, sitting high on the low tide, with hundreds of windows like blinking oval spectacles. Over months the view became fractured; someone dubbed it the Marie Celeste ‘beached at last’ and a group of us rowed out in a dinghy but could not board the leviathan. After a year it was rust colour and a blue funnel, and had witnessed marriage proposals and one-night sandy flings. It scrutinised our town – as if our future had arrived and never taken us towards its promise; as if something within us was quelled, the hulk growing barnacles at the waterline, beginning to list. ‘Salvage’ remained an echo of its first days when motor boats skimmed its shadow with flurries of optimism. Tourists took pictures; the town council’s new brochure featured it as a local attraction. But summers grew squally; the coastline began to erode, our famous white sand was washed away. Most evenings a few of us would stand on the wooden pier and raise a glass to its stiffening profile.

Paul Hetherington

Paul Hetherington’s most recent poetry collection is Burnt Umber (2016).

The Copyright of Albert Namatjira

by Colin Golvan

You see them driving from Kings Canyon to Alice Springs, the majestic ghost white river gums depicted so faithfully in the paintings of Albert Namatjira. You would think you were looking at a Namatjira painting. And then there is the vista of the craggy hills of the West McDonnell Ranges in their mysterious blue hue – a signature feature of Namatjira’s art.

The ownership of Namatjira’s much-loved works of art has changed hands many times over the years and has generated millions of dollars in sales. No doubt copyright permissions have also followed – I say ‘no doubt’ because the actual course of the management of the copyright is unknown. It is owned by Legend Press, operated today by Philip Brackenreg, following the acquisition of the copyright from the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory by Legend Press in 1983 for $8,500. Over the years, there have been many instances of reproductions of Namatjira’s art in books, cards, calendars, and on objects and garments, as well as auction catalogues – all copyright uses requiring permission and, presumably, payment.

The circumstances of the 1983 transaction are largely unknown. Namatjira died in 1959. In 1957 he had made a copyright arrangement with John Brackenreg (Philip’s father) and received royalties from the use of the copyright. In his will, Namatjira passed the copyright to his wife, Rubina. She died in 1974. The Public Trustee continued to manage the copyright and, it is understood, made copyright payments to family members. Why he determined to sell the copyright in 1983 is unknown, but it did mean that the copyright payments to Albert Namatjira’s relations ceased. Namatjira’s copyright will expire in 2029.

A campaign is now underway to retrieve the copyright. Publicity surrounding the campaign has prompted John Flynn, the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory at the time of the transaction, to comment recently in the media that the 1983 transaction was regrettable and made in error (he says he believed that he was transacting in the rights for seven years only).

It is possible that legal action could be brought to have the 1983 transaction declared a breach of trust. This would have significant implications for dealings in the copyright since 1983, which could include a claim for damages. It is hoped that the copyright can revert to interests representing the Namatjira family without the need for legal action, through a trust set up on their behalf by the social change organisation Big hART.

The events of the transfer of Namatjira’s copyright are remarkable. He was as famous in 1983 as he is today – nearly sixty years after his death – and remains among the most famous Aboriginal artists. The same treatment would never have been accorded to Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, or any of Namatjira’s peer group of well-known Australian artists. A regrettable transaction of this kind is unlikely to be repeated, but redress for Namatjira’s descendants remains the issue.

If the copyright can be secured, a significant form of redress would lie in granting the Namatjira copyright special perpetual status. There is a precedent for this: the copyright of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the United Kingdom is owned perpetually by the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London due to a special act of parliament granting this status in 1988, the year after Barrie’s copyright lapsed.

There are a number of sound arguments for the grant of this status to the copyright of Namatjira for the charitable purpose of assisting the artistic endeavours of the Namatjira family and members of their community. First, the copyright has been lost to the family for nearly thirtyfive years. Second, it would be a very significant national statement of regret and reconciliation, acknowledging the great contribution of Namatjira to Australia’s artistic legacy. Third, it would provide some means of redress in circumstances where Namatjira himself faced immense prejudice and disadvantage in his life. Fourth, it would be an act of symbolic recognition of the importance and enormous contribution of the Aboriginal arts to the visual arts culture of Australia (notwithstanding the circumstances of great adversity in which many Aboriginal artists have practised their craft, and still do today). In that sense, it may be seen as an act of reconciliation going beyond meeting the specific concerns of the Namatjira family.

For these reasons, 2019 (sixty years after the death of Namatjira) would be a fitting year to enact a perpetual copyright in his work, to be administered by the Namatjira Legacy Trust. It would be a significant act of redress for the loss of copyright in 1983 and would be a highly symbolic gesture honouring the work of Namatjira and the Aboriginal arts generally. g

Colin Golvan QC is Chair of ABR and a trustee of the Namatjira Legacy Trust (www.namatjiratrust.org).

Good deaths

Deborah Zion

TIME TO DIE

by Rodney Syme

Melbourne University Publishing $32.99 pb, 204 pp, 9780522870930

Ethicist, physician, and writer Eric Cassell has remarked that it is troubling that patients and laypersons consider the relief of suffering to be one of the primary ends of medicine, yet the medical profession neg-lects it. It is even more disturbing given that we are on a daily basis confronted with images of war, pain, and displacement. Rodney Syme’s book about ending life brings issues relating to suffering close to home. It reminds us about this facet of the human condition, even for those who have, for the most part, led tranquil lives. Increased longevity often entails a difficult expiration. Many of us will die slowly – perhaps of cancer or organ failure – or without dignity, as dementia robs us of what makes us human.

In Time to Die, the suffering and indignity of chronic illness, or a protracted death, are described, and the standard arguments against assistance in ending life, such as the efficacy of palliative care, are examined in great detail. True to the biblical title, Syme returns us to a more holistic view of the life cycle. He challenges the medical and legal imperative to extend life at all costs. In so doing, he asks us to consider what makes for a fully human life, even in the midst of suffering.

Unlike countries such as Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, assisting death – that is, prescribing or administering drugs to end life – is illegal in all parts of Australia. It was not always thus. Between 1995 and 1996, The Rights of the Terminally Ill Act in the Northern Territory ensured that one could receive assistance to die. The Howard government’s reversal of this act in 1997 once again left many with few choices other than painful and often grotesquely ineffective ways of suicide.

Why are changes needed? For many years, the final stages of life were often

transient. Just as life was frequently too short, dying was often sudden. Syme points out the demographic issues that support an imperative for change. An ageing population and increased access to medical intervention bring to the fore renewed questions about what constitutes a good death. In particular, many of the conditions such as pneumonia, once called ‘the old person’s friend’, are now treated aggressively, thus undermining a relatively quick and peaceful end.

Whatever one’s views of euthanasia or assisted suicide may be, Syme is by any standards a man of integrity and courage. Now eighty years old and a retired urologist, he became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1964. As such, he has witnessed not just a shift in demography, but also myriad examples of pain and distress. This has motivated him to challenge the law, and in so doing he has frequently risked deregistration and imprisonment by openly assisting the ending of life for those enduring egregious suffering. His advocacy for the rights and dignity of the dying on a recent episode of Australian Story resulted in an investigation by the Medical Board of Victoria into the story of Bernard Erica, an elderly man who was dying horribly of terminal cancer.

Much of the debate concerning assisted dying hinges on philosophical arguments, particularly patient autonomy, the so-called ‘slippery slope’ line of reasoning, through which allowing assistance for those whose decision making capacities are intact will lead to wholesale killing of those whose competence is impaired. Significantly, most assistance in dying in Australia, when it does occur, depends on ‘the doctrine of double effect’. That is, pain relief is legal even if death is a likely outcome, as long as the motivation for treatment is palliation.

In challenging both the legal arguments and the status quo, Syme does something that is much needed when discussing medical ethics. He brings the dry bones of law and policy to life by telling a series of stories that connect us with the human anguish that goes with prolonged illness. He shows us

how advanced incurable illness – often the type for which palliative care, and therefore death by morphine, is not an option – takes over not only the body but the social and emotional spheres of life. Greta’s story, one of many in Time to Die is emblematic. A previously extroverted woman, Greta experienced bowel problems that led to a major operation and the need for a colostomy bag. Incontinent and in great pain, she is no longer able to socialise. She has been advised that there is no possibility of any amelioration in her condition; indeed, she has endured this diminished form of living for fifteen years. While Greta is not dying, her life resembles a living death. When telling her story, Syme asks an important question: should people have to live with unbearable physical and psychological pain, or is it reasonable that competent persons such as Greta can seek assistance for a peaceful death?’ Syme urges us to consider this question, and to act up on it.

It is undeniable that changing the legislation will bring about many complex problems, not least when a patient is no longer competent and family members are left to carry out previously expressed directives. Syme believes that much could be achieved if we started talking about dying to physicians and to our loved ones. He reminds us that at the cornerstone of all good health-care practice is a consideration of each person’s history, and that ‘good communication is at the heart of a good death’. g

Deborah Zion is a bioethicist who currently works at Victoria University, where she is the Chair of the Human Research Ethics Committee, and teaches in the PhD program.

Boomtime

Paul Morgan

PEAK: REINVENTING MIDDLE AGE

by Patricia Edgar and Don Edgar

Text Publishing

$32.99 pb, 274 pp, 9781925355963

We are often told that baby boomers reshaped every stage of life they passed through. They are the most liberalminded, creative, self-assured – and most of all, lucky – generation in history. Pop music, the sexual revolution, environmentalism, the internet – there is little, it seems, they have not been responsible for in the modern world. As they approach their sixties and seventies, however, this generation has become prey to another, unwelcome set of assumptions. They are unemployable after fifty. They don’t understand technology. They hog property, causing housing crises. They use an unfair proportion of health resources. As with all generalisations, there is a teaspoon of truth in these perspectives, but also inaccurate stereotypes by the bucketful.

Peak, by social scientists Patricia and Don Edgar, is an enquiry into the reality of these middle years (which they define as fifty to seventy-five years old). It is also a polemic, arguing that this need not be a period of decline, but one of sustained richness in personal fulfilment and capacity to contribute to society. We need ‘a complete rethink about the nature of middle age’. What holds this generation back, they argue, is a combination of outdated social attitudes (not helped by mischievous media articles about ‘intergenerational war’) and policy blindness in government and

institutions about the contribution older people can make to society.

There are seven million boomers in Australia today, almost a third of the population. Compared to previous generations, they have experienced radical alterations in family relationships. The authors list ‘serial partnerships, sexual experimentation, acceptance of samesex marriage, and LBGTQI identities, as well as increasing numbers of young people not marrying and having children’. Many are also in the ‘sandwich’ of looking after aged parents as well as their own children. Government policy, nevertheless, clings to the outmoded model of a nuclear family. Progress on adapting legislation around parenting, employment, care allowances, and taxation has been glacially slow. Such changes would not only ease the lives of those involved but also promote a more efficient, flexible economy.

Housing and health, are also examined, presenting a wealth of fascinating research to overturn stereotypes of the middle-aged. We are reminded that many are vulnerable renters, not homeowners, and that we need novel solutions such as Homeshare schemes and pooling resources to buy communal property. People in this age group report being more frightened of developing dementia than of dying. They welcome euthanasia as an alternative to a prolonged, undignified death. The majority are also active sexually into their seventies and beyond, confounding earlier assumptions, yet there is little public acknowledgement of this. What a surprise: people over fifty need physical and emotional intimacy!

Peak focuses especially on the challenges of the middle-aged in the workforce. Once again, they have experienced massive changes: the advent of computer-based work; a shift from manufacturing to service industries; anti-discrimination legislation. Despite their experience, eighty-three per cent express frustration that their skills go unrecognised at work. When they lose one job, they find it difficult to find another; men over fifty remain unemployed longer than any other group. The Grattan Institute calculates that not using the skills and experience

of middle-aged Australians costs the country around $10.8 billion every year. Older Australians are also accused of demanding more health and welfare resources than a shrinking base of younger people paying tax can cover (the ‘dependency ratio’). As the authors point out, the latest Intergenerational Report acknowledges that this will not, in fact, be the problem previously anticipated. A major reassessment of the career arc is required for the sake of the economy, as well as for the middle-aged themselves, they argue. In addition to tackling ageism and employment policies, there is an urgent need to innovate work practices, encouraging flexibility and retention of experience and skills through part-time ‘step down’ programs for older employees, such as the NAB ‘My Future’ initiative.

The second half of Peak is taken up by ten biographies of ‘Reinventors’, people who have made new lives for themselves, often after great adversity. They are an inspiring group, albeit from a particular, successful slice of society (one is the architect of the Edgars’ holiday home). This is the least satisfactory part of the book. Not everyone can be a dynamic entrepreneur or restaurateur. Not everyone can retire with a vineyard to keep them busy – and nor should they feel like less of a person because of this. I wish the authors had written more about those who suffer most during their middle years: the huge number with little education and few skills who struggle to find a job after fifty; the thirty per cent who own no property and live in poverty; the growing number who lead isolated, lonely lives. That would have been a different book, however.

Peak is a polemic as well as an overview: an evidence-based call to arms for baby boomers to reinvent middle age, just as they have done with every stage of life since they were teenagers. Patricia and Don Edgar bring a lifetime of experience, expertise, and wisdom to this authoritative and thought-provoking book. In the questions it asks and ideas it canvasses about how we lead our lives, this is a book for people of all the ages. g

Paul Morgan is a Melbourne-based novelist and editor.

Deeper waters

Michael McGirr

THE TEMPEST-TOSSED CHURCH: BEING A CATHOLIC TODAY

by Gerard Windsor

NewSouth

$29.99 pb, 250 pp, 9781742235318

This book came my way at the right moment. I read it in the week that the Royal Commission enumerated the fact that, so far, 4,444 individuals have brought cases of sexual abuse against Catholic institutions in Australia – a staggering number. I know of others who are still struggling to come forward and tell their story. The archbishop of Sydney described the response of church officialdom as ‘criminally negligent’. Yet, so far, not one bishop has been stood down. Indeed, the only Catholic bishop sacked in Australia of recent times, Toowoomba’s Bill Morris, was one of the few who did seem to handle these issues appropriately. There have been endless apologies and statements about needing to change the culture of the Catholic Church. But the culture is profoundly and self-destructively resistant to change. In the very week of much public hand wringing at the Royal Commission, I encountered two cases of ecclesiastical high-handedness and self-importance. Admittedly, both related to far more trivial issues than sexual abuse. But in both situations I was left in no doubt that the church functionary was a superior being and all others needed to know their place.

Gerard Windsor makes an energetic and searching attempt to provide an intelligent response to the question of why anybody would continue to bother with the Catholic Church. The TempestTossed Church is an honest and heartfelt book that is prepared to work at deep questions with humility. Windsor draws on a great deal of personal experience, ranging from chance encounters with neighbours to a wide-ranging interest in philosophers such as the Canadian Bernard Lonergan. This is not a book of aggressive apologetics. Nor is it a polemic in favour of Catholicism, although it

does have some barbed wit for people such as Don Watson who treat religion in a dismissive manner. Often, however, the reader gets the impression that the person Windsor is most trying to reassure is himself. The Tempest-Tossed Church is witness to a lifelong journey. That is what makes it so engaging. It is a mature book, evidence of a life lived in appreciation of both a profound mystery and the difficulty of attaching words to that mystery. There were many occasions on which I breathed a sigh of relief that somebody was prepared to say many of the things that Windsor does. This is a book about being Catholic in Australia that has precious little interest in George Pell. It has far more interesting people to talk about.

One of those people is Joe O’Mara, a Jesuit priest who endured much illhealth before he died in 2016. Windsor says he ‘can respect, even admire, people who are said to have a love affair with God’. O’Mara was one of these. Windsor is reluctant to make the same claim for himself, which is possibly why this book invests so heavily in figures from every corner of history, such as the poet George Herbert, who find their faith a matter that transcends the rigid categories of rational, irrational and even nonrational. George Herbert made a huge impact on the philosopher Simone Weil, moving Weil from an unduly cerebral approach to life into something more mystical. Windsor seems to look at people who make that journey with a kind of longing. He is wonderful at explaining what Karen Armstrong has called ‘the case for God’. He says, for example, ‘the pattern of our living is to grow, to push beyond the initial person we are, to transcend the limited man or woman we are so conscious of being, to expand our horizons and to do so lifelong’. For Windsor, this mundane living brings us to ‘intimations of the Divine’. He continues: ‘I think it’s plausible to believe that there’s some all intelligence, all goodness whom we call God. And Jesus Christ, in some way, is that person. That in summary is the logic of whatever faith I have.’

There is a tentativeness in these words that encapsulates the whole process of this book. Windsor is the first to admit

that he is inclined to default to logic, and, on many occasions, logic serves him well. But then he meets the ailing O’Mara, who wants to talk about ‘the good Lord’, and Windsor feels like a child looking at a window full of goodies he can’t quite reach. I know exactly what he means. I also happened to visit O’Mara in his nursing home shortly before he died. Joe told me that he was having ‘a wonderful death’, just as he had had ‘a wonderful life’. He promised that he would pray for my kids ‘wherever I am’. I went back to the car and cried, overcome by the humility of a man in love with God. Joe never made the news in his life.

The culture is profoundly and self-destructively resistant to change

This book does have its limitations. Its claim that the God described in what Christians call the Old Testament ‘is not a rich and complex personality’ is hard to fathom; I would see The Qur’an in very different terms from those Windsor describes. But this book is full of people like Joe O’Mara. Their names are Augustine and Newman and Stanley Spencer and Caravaggio and Tom Daly and Teresa of Avila and many more besides. They include a Fijian mother of six, Louisa, who cared for Windsor’s mother as she was dying. Windsor has the supreme good sense to listen to all these messengers with grace and openness. I have seldom been as grateful for a book. g

Michael McGirr is the Dean of Faith at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne.

Fragrant rats

Diana Bagnall

THE CASE AGAINST FRAGRANCE

by Kate Grenville

Text Publishing

$24.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781925355956

Kate Grenville’s publisher wasn’t keen on her writing a book about fragrance. He would have preferred another novel from the author of Lilian’s Story (1985) and The Secret River (2005). But some stories won’t give an author any peace. This is one of them. It begins with Grenville, as a young woman, dabbing herself with perfume before going out on a date. She wafts out the door feeling ‘sumptuous and sexy’. Half an hour later her head is pounding and she just wants to go home. It happens time and again. She wonders if she has a phobia about dating. In her thirties she begins to detect a pattern: when she uses perfume, she gets a headache. She loves perfume, but its promise of glamour comes with a higher than usual price tag. She discards all those pretty little bottles. With hindsight she wonders if part of the reason she became a writer was that ‘you don’t need to sit in a cloud of elegance if you’re alone at the desk’.

That is the last we might have heard about Grenville’s sensitivity to perfume if, in following decades, the world had not gone mad – or rather, madder – for fragrance (for which we can thank the chemists who figured out how to simulate the smell of costly essential oils, the basis of parfumerie for 4,000 years, with cheap synthetic substitutes derived from petrochemicals). By her fifties, Grenville

realises that her headaches are triggered not only by perfume but also by exposure to scented products. Life becomes complicated. Fragrance in Grenville’s lexicon is not quite the same as perfume. As I understand the distinction, fragrance is to perfume as muzak is to music: its signature notes are bland, but it is ubiquitous and invasive. Although Grenville introduces her complaint against fragrance with lively sallies against the heavy-handed perfuming habits of individuals she encounters in bookshops and concert halls, the main thrust of her case is levelled against the addition of fragrance to everyday products in industrial quantities – what you might call the ‘fragranced toilet paper’ syndrome. The typical woman, she suggests, is exposed to fragrance in myriad products before she leaves the house. Beyond it she will encounter fragrance in shops and offices, taxis and buses, hotels and airports. She arrives home with second-hand scent on her clothes, in her hair, on her skin.

The prime fragrance villains include air ‘fresheners’ of various descriptions, cosmetics, cleaning products, hair products, scented candles, and so on. Consider also the humble laundry powder which, as Grenville points out, scents the fabric we daily put against our skin in conditions of heat and moisture, ‘the perfect environment for the maximum absorption of fragrance chemicals’. We live in a ‘permanent mist of scented air’, she writes. (I’m old enough to remember another ‘permanent mist’, namely cigarette smoke, and to draw the obvious parallels.)

Grenville follows the fragrance trail with a tenacity and diligence that would do an investigative journalism team proud, though her research was not propelled by any kind of professional urge, she tells the reader. She was just a novelist with a headache who, one night, alone and desperate in a Hobart hotel room, did what any of us might do – consulted Google. ‘I felt as if I’d innocently pushed open a door that I hoped would provide the answer to a simple question: why do I get headaches from fragrance? It had instead revealed a dark and dangerous landscape.’ Then she went exploring and found much to report from the scientific

front, less so from the industrial and regulatory fronts.

Three large US studies conducted between 2004 and 2016 reported adverse reactions to scented products in about one-third of respondents. Research into the harm that undisclosed combinations of hundreds of fragrance chemicals inflicts on the human body, both cumulatively and interactively, is as new as research into smoking was fifty years ago. Already, fragrance is implicated in health conditions like asthma, allergies, and migraines; it is also a suspect in more complex hormonal and carcinogenic scenarios. Yet there is little information available on the materials used in fragrance, and little governmental regulation of the industry. In her darker moments, Grenville posits that the fragranced world we live in is ‘in the nature of an experiment, with humans are the lab rats’.

Some may conclude that Grenville doth protest too much, but her claims are amply backed up in an extensive notes section. She is not prone to overstatement; when she stretches the point she is open about doing so. Her tone is that of rational enquiry rather than persuasion. She aims to ‘balance things out’. Inevitably, this quest involves a discussion of competing rights. Grenville expresses hope though that our society will find solutions to the fragrant violation of personal space based on courtesy and civility rather than on regulation and policy. History would suggest otherwise.

In 2008, a Detroit city planner who was having trouble breathing in her open-plan office asked her employers to implement a low-scent policy. They refused. One day she collapsed and was hospitalised. She was unable to return to work. A court awarded her US$100,000 compensation for her allergy. Many workplaces in the United States and Canada now have low-scent or fragrancefree policies. A similar claim filed in Australia in 2014 failed, but Grenville notes the claimant could not afford a lawyer.

Case far from dismissed. g

Diana Bagnall is co-author of the memoir Destined to Live (2014).

Only connect

Alison Broinowski

SUBTLE MOMENTS:

SCENES ON A LIFE’S JOURNEY

by Bruce Grant Monash University

Publishing $34.95 pb, 448 pp, 9781925495355

Opposite a handsome portrait of him by Louis Kahan, Bruce Grant introduces his memoir of a ‘life’s journey’ by proposing that it is also a biography of Australia, and promising to revisit that on the last page. There, he summarises the plots of ‘Love in the Asian Century’, his recent trilogy of e-books, in which affairs between older men and younger women, Australian and Asian, start with enthusiasm, but are doomed to fail. The metaphor for the relationship between Australia and Asia is overt.

Stories about Australians abroad on what Grant calls a ‘crusade,’ clashing with Asian cultures and identities, and having affairs that end unhappily, are themes that prevailed when he began writing his novel Cherry Bloom (1980). The eponymous young Australian wife of a stuffy British diplomat in Singapore wants ‘desperately to connect’. Knowing no Asian language or history, she finds an American lover and learns about life and ‘ancient Chinese wisdom’, but eventually leaves for home.

In the 1980s the trope of young Australia exchanging its British mentor for an American one was already outdated. Later generations of Australian writers, some with Asian languages, and some born in Asian countries, were unconcerned about Asian inscrutability, the innocence and ignorance of Australians, or Australia’s claim to superior morality. By 1994, older men with Asian brides were satirised in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and by the 2000s readers had acquired a taste for Ouyang Yu’s acerbic double-takes on Australia and China.

A former journalist, foreign correspondent, diplomat, academic, and prolific writer of fact and fiction, Grant, now ninety-two, selects fourteen ‘scenes’

from his life. The first displays his rural childhood in Western Australia, then at selective-entry Perth Modern School. Service in the army and navy produce a novel about his experiences in Darwin. Meeting people who will later be helpful to him, including Casey and Menzies, he studies Arts at Melbourne University, adding the Clarks, the Reeds, ‘Mac’ Ball, Christesen, Ryan, and Santamaria to his politically eclectic list of friends. Apart from ‘the Marxists’, Australians ‘knew little of Asia’, Grant recalls, perpetuating the common fallacy that because the people he knew were Asiailliterate, so was everyone else.

Grant’s scenes then become a semichronological slide-show. He writes for The Age, turns down a job offer at ASIO, and mentions in passing that he has a wife and three children. Next, he writes from London (with the family, but already having ‘personal difficulties’). In the early 1960s he is without them in Singapore, and also covering Indonesia, the subject of his first book, now a classic (Indonesia, 1964). A year at Harvard follows, then Washington. In another slide, Grant meets Joan Pennell in New York in 1959, where she works for Radio Free Europe; she eventually joins him in Melbourne and they have two sons. A prodigious worker, he teaches Australian foreign policy at Melbourne University while still contributing to papers in Australia and the United States.

Grant keeps in touch with Menzies but in 1972 he and sixteen others publicly call for a change of government, and Whitlam makes him high commissioner in New Delhi. After the Dismissal, he joins Citizens for Democracy in support of Whitlam. That brings his posting to an end, and he and Joan return to Melbourne. From 1988 he works with Gareth Evans on their magisterial book on Australia’s foreign relations (1991), establishes the Australia–Indonesia Institute, and chairs it. In 1989 Joan is teaching in China when Tiananmen happens, Grant travels in Cuba and the Balkans with the ‘frolicsome’ Indonesian-Australian journalist Ratih Hardjono. Their brief marriage ends in 1999, when she converts to Islam. Grant would agree with Goethe that an undocumented life is not worth living.

He reproduces testimonial letters about himself from headmasters and professors, and letters of introduction from Casey and Menzies, as well as his own generous obituaries to friends, and Joan’s 1994 ultimatum letter. In a scene called ‘Trusty and Well-Beloved’, he even includes the queen’s letters of credence for his ambassadorial appointments in India, Nepal, and Bhutan, although as a republican he twice declines an ‘honour’. Adept as a fence-sitter, or as he puts it ‘a creature of a gradualist tradition’, Grant writes for both Meanjin and Quadrant. He wants Australia to take ‘independent’ initiatives in our region, but within the US alliance. He is scathing of the espionage and intelligence industry, but won’t blame the CIA for Whitlam’s dismissal. He works with Gareth Evans on eliminating nuclear weapons, but now Australian policy has changed he says the issue is ‘complex’. He names his trilogy after the Asian Century, but neither Kishore Mahbubani’s work nor the 2011 White Paper, Australia in the Asian Century, rate a mention.

At the end, instead of writing more on North Asia or at least on contemporary Indonesia, Grant offers the surprising view that Australia in the UN Security Council was no longer seen as a British protégé or an American proxy, but a multicultural supporter of peace, international law, human rights, nuclear disarmament, public health, education, and women; active on climate change and against racial discrimination. Recently, he admits, he and his Melbourne friends decided ‘something was happening’ in Australian public life, although ‘no-one seemed sure what it was’.

Grant tried to resolve the Australian dilemma in his 1983 book of that name. He still hasn’t. g

Alison Broinowski’s new book is The Honest History Book

Tumbril bucket

Dennis Altman

DISPOSABLE LEADERS: MEDIA AND LEADERSHIP COUPS FROM MENZIES TO ABBOTT by Rodney Tiffen

NewSouth

$34.99 pb, 308 pp, 9781742235202

When Australia’s living prime ministers attended the funeral of Gough Whitlam in 2014, there were considerable difficulties in taking the official photograph. Rather than grouping them in order of seniority, the photographer carefully separated Malcolm Fraser from John Howard; Bob Hawke from Paul Keating; Kevin Rudd from Julia Gillard. Animosities within ruling parties proved more longlasting than those between them.

Few of our political leaders retire of their own volition. Mike Baird won praise when he did so recently, following the lead of Steve Bracks, who resigned as premier of Victoria in 2007 with his popularity largely intact. Most of our prime ministers, premiers, and opposition leaders either face electoral defeat or party coups, the fate of every prime minister since Harold Holt drowned in 1967.

Revolving party leadership has helped make Australian publishers punch-drunk on political books. As the line between politics and reality television blurs, and politics is increasingly reported as a farcical version of the Shakespearean history plays, the personalities and foibles of our elected leaders provide instant fodder for journalists and academics.

Rodney Tiffen draws on the last fifty years of political intrigue to ask why Australia has seen a growing tendency for leadership coups and to examine, at both state and federal levels, the role of the media in such conflicts. He claims that ‘no other parliamentary democracy has had anything resembling Australia’s leadership instability’, a big claim, and one for which he gives no hard evidence. Certainly, he demonstrates that the turnover of parliamentary leaders is accelerating, counting seventy-three suc-

cessful leadership challenges in the major parties since 1970. But he also struggles to account for the turnover. Nor does he demonstrate that changes in the media have been particularly important in explaining these turnovers.

Disposable Leaders gives us an enjoyable romp through fifty years of political chicanery, going back to Gough Whitlam’s crack about Billy McMahon as ‘Tiberius with a telephone’. Tiffen is assiduous in chronicling many of the intra-party coups and cabals, from the post-Holt Liberal governments of John Gorton and McMahon to the recent roundabouts in leadership since Howard. His account of leadership battles at the state level is fascinating political history, even if at times one wants more, as when Joan Kirner was brought in to save a declining Labor government in Victoria in 1990. (There is surely a book to be written on the growing custom of promoting women to leadership at times when governments seem to be floundering.) Political junkies will take issue with some of his accounts, but this is a valuable, if uneven, compendium.

The major coups canvassed, involving all our prime ministers since Hawke (1983–91), have already been widely dissected, and Tiffen relies largely on second-hand material to revisit already familiar territory. Inevitably, he misses some of the relevant material; there is no reference to Norman Abjorensen’s The Manner of their Going (2015), nor to memoirs by Peter Garrett and Bob Brown. But he retells these stories with some aplomb, and the first half of the book is enjoyable reading. That said, there is an unevenness to the structuring of Disposable Leaders that leaves too many loose threads. One example: a subheading in the chapter on ‘iatrogenic spin doctoring’ is ‘The West Wing Delusion’. But we are not told what this delusion was, only that Tiffen lost interest in the program.

Tiffen’s account of the media stems almost entirely from a period when print newspapers and free-to-air television were supreme. He writes as if the domination of the press gallery remains unchallenged; indeed, he reminds us of the role played by reporter Alan Reid in unseating Gorton. The most cited jour-

nalists are veterans Paul Kelly, Michele Grattan, and Peter Hartcher. Electronic media is strangely missing from the analysis, even though it is surely central to understanding the changing nature of politics and media. Tiffen suggests that the line between commentary and reporting has become increasingly blurred, and, rightly, points to the consistent abuse of air time by shock-jocks, including Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt. What is absent is any discussion of the new world of online publications, blogs, posts, and tweets. There are references to the role of programs such as Four Corners and The Chaser, including their pranks during the 2007 APEC summit, when Howard was almost deposed by his cabinet colleagues, but no mention of the ways in which YouTube and other online video platforms have affected the immediacy of political life.

Few of our political leaders retire of their own volition

Tiberius’s telephone is now a smart device, and political leaders have fulltime staffers employed to engage with the virtual world. Tiffen claims that there have been qualitative changes in the media landscape, but his examples are often drawn from earlier periods. Thus he rounds up his comments about spin doctors with a quote from Richard Nixon: apposite but hardly suggesting much has changed in four decades.

In Disposable Leaders, Tiffen makes a convincing case that political parties, and particularly their parliamentary wings, have become increasingly impatient with apparent failures of leadership, and too willing to dispose of unpopular leaders. He fails to explain either their frequency or to fully explore the changing role of the media in intraparty struggles for power. But the cover image, of seven heads caught in a tumbril bucket, is a powerful reminder of the perils of short-term decision making. g

Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University. His most recent book is How to Vote Progressive (co-edited with Sean Scalmer, 2016).

2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of Australia’s leading prizes for an original short story. It honours the work of the great Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007). The total prize money is $12,500. The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. The prizes include:

First prize: $7,000

Second prize: $2,000

Third prize: $1,000

The closing date is 10 April 2017 Entries are

‘Winning the Jolley Prize after being overseas for several years was an immensely bolstering welcome back – all the more so for the honour it pays to one of the most influential and tenacious forces in Australian literature.’

Josephine Rowe, 2016 winner

Full details and online entry are available on our website

www.australianbookreview.com.au

The Jolley Prize is supported by Mr Ian Dickson.

Ripple talk

Nick Haslam

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE BRAIN: THE NEUROSCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS FROM DAWN TILL DUSK

by Susan Greenfield Allen Lane

$24.99, 274 pp, 9780141985046

The youthful genre of popular neuroscience enjoys a few advantages that popular psychology, its older sibling, does not. The general public holds neuroscience in higher esteem, more confident in its scientific legitimacy. The concreteness of brain science – its colourful scans, its focus on a kilogram or so of custardy matter rather than a weightless cloud of mind –gives it a solidity that psychology tends to lack. Crucially, aspiring popularisers of neuroscience do not need to worry about common sense, because the public has few intuitions about how the brain works. Popular psychologists have a tougher assignment. If they violate common sense about mind and behaviour they are disbelieved, but if they uphold it what do they have to offer that a sage grandmother does not?

As science writing goes, then, popular neuroscience has something of a head start. It can tackle the most intriguing questions of experience and behaviour, strike a confident pose of scientific rigour, and expect a level of credulity from non-specialist readers. Its technical language seduces us into belief. How much more impressive it sounds to ascribe a change in behaviour to ‘neural plasticity’ rather than to ‘learning’, although the two concepts are effectively synonymous.

A Day in the Life of the Brain is the latest work of Susan Greenfield, an eminent science communicator. It is a change of direction from her previous book, Mind Change (2014), which prosecuted a case against the growing role of digital technology in daily life. Our reliance on mobile devices and the internet, Greenfield argued, undermines self and society by making us more narcissistic, disconnected, driven by cheap sensa-

tion, and, in extreme cases, autistic. Her new book does not court controversy to the same degree; it turns inward to the mysteries of consciousness rather than outward to cultural critique.

Greenfield is not the first scientist to plumb these depths. Many intellectual giants, including DNA pioneer and Nobel Prize-winner Francis Crick, have tried to explain how consciousness emerges from neural matter. Physicists such as Roger Penrose have also tried their hand, resorting to quantum gravity to account for the emergence of subjective awareness. Greenfield’s approach is more modest. Rather than seeing consciousness as an either-or phenomenon she views it as a continuum, and rather than seeking the key to its emergence she searches for a dynamic brain process that can bridge subjective experience and objective brain structure. Her goal is to discover a neural correlate of consciousness that can be studied experimentally. Dismissing theories that locate the seat of consciousness in particular brain regions or circuits, she argues that it is to be found in ‘neural assemblies’. The shortlived activations of these assemblies vary in ways that underpin variations in conscious experience.

How that experience arises from the neural assemblies is explained using a somewhat overworked metaphor. The propagation of electrical impulses through assemblies is likened to ripples in a puddle set in motion by a tossed stone. In this metaphor, an instigating event such as a noise triggers a hub of neural activity, generating ripples whose size depends on features of the event and the puddle. Confusingly, the noise is the throw itself rather than the stone, which is the neural hub. Stronger throws and puddles made less viscous by modulatory neurochemicals produce greater ripples, which are experienced as more intense consciousness. Such a link between the magnitude of neural propagation and consciousness is plausible, but Greenfield’s account has yet to gain much traction among neuroscientists. Their reticence is due to the rather scant experimental evidence for the critical role of neural assemblies in consciousness, and to the belief that it depends less on the activation of single assemblies

than on the reverberation of activations between different brain regions.

However compelling this account of consciousness may be, Greenfield applies it revealingly to many everyday activities and predicaments. Chapters are strung in a line that follows the trajectory of a day, starting with waking from sleep, moving through walking the dog, eating breakfast, going to work, and ultimately heading back to sleep and dreaming. This time-line does not readily accommodate all of the topics Greenfield wishes to cover, so the reader is treated to explorations of colour and taste perception, music, creativity, depression, dementia, pain, and the challenges of open-plan offices along the way.

The treatment of these subjects is generally illuminating and well supported by extensive notes and references. A few questionable claims appear, as might be expected given the range of Greenfield’s conceptual ambition. Late in the book, while allocating a diverse collection of mental states to greater or lesser degrees of consciousness, some of her choices hark back to the controversies surrounding Mind Change Classical music, jogging, and abstract thought entail greater consciousness, rave music and fast-paced sports entail lesser. Children, animals, and people with schizophrenia all have attenuated consciousness: their ripples are smaller.

Greenfield maintains a rapid pace throughout this very readable book. Her avidity as a scientist and thinker is obvious, and even a sceptical reader will be drawn along by her skills as a writer. The neuroscience itself is perhaps secondary to the enterprise of providing an accessible metaphor for how consciousness comes about. The technical details of the science will be beyond most readers, but although they lend authority to the text they are not essential to the story. Fundamentally, the book’s mission is to bring consciousness down from the realm of airy abstractions and into the mundane reality of everyday lives and brains. g

Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches social and personality psychology.

‘Et

tu, Brute?’

Kevin Foster

VALIANT FOR TRUTH: THE LIFE OF CHESTER WILMOT,

WAR CORRESPONDENT

by Neil McDonald with Peter Brune NewSouth

$49.99 hb, 500 pp, 9781742235172

Chester Wilmot was blessed with the professional reporter’s principal virtues, talent, selfconfidence, resilience, and luck. While his skills as a broadcaster took him to the various fronts of World War II, it was luck, as much as planning, that put him in Tobruk, Greece, and on the Kokoda Track at the precise moments to witness Australia’s armed forces in their first critical tests of the war. Yet if luck played its part in gifting him proximity to the action, it was his artistry, his ability to inform and enthral his listeners, to bring them to the ‘tip of the spear’, that transformed his accounts of, respectively, a siege, a rout, and a fighting withdrawal into epic adventures of the nation at war. When, at General Thomas Blamey’s insistence, Wilmot was stripped of his accreditation and sent home from New Guinea in November 1943, he turned this personal and professional crisis into a triumph, resurrecting his career in London where he reported on the fighting in Europe for the BBC’s nightly War Report.

Here he earned lasting fame with memorable broadcasts from, among other places, the D-Day invasion of Normandy, recorded in a glider ferrying combat troops across the Channel; the liberation of Brussels; Operation Market Garden (with its bridge too far at Arnhem); the Battle of the Bulge; and the tent at Luneburg Heath when the German plenipotentiaries signed the surrender documents on 4 May 1945. On hand to record the great events in North Africa, New Guinea, and Europe, Wilmot in his books was among the first influential analysts of its battles, their strategies, and the men who fashioned and implemented them.

For all its thoroughness, this is as

much an exercise in advocacy as it is a work of appraisal. Wilmot emerges from the book as both establishment superman and empathetic everyman. The son of a prominent journalist, he was Melbourne Grammar School Captain and an Arts/Law graduate from the University. In his younger years, Neil McDonald insists, Wilmot was also a committed socialist and the faithful friend of the common man. Not that Wilmot saw much of him. Wilmot was a serial cosier-up to authority, both scion and creature of the establishment. The trusted confidant of men of letters, men of arms, and men of power, Wilmot met and mixed with generals and statesmen as an equal – a big man among big men. His overweening arrogance was almost his undoing.

A witness to and interpreter of history, Wilmot was increasingly convinced that he had the right, and the credentials, to play a more active role in shaping its outcomes. He was a faithful servant of authority when it served his interests, but when it did not he was ready to pick sides and cloak his advocacy in the guise of reporting. When he was caught in the act, confounded in or punished for his scheming, he shamelessly portrayed himself as a martyr to journalistic freedom.

Wilmot’s character flaws were writ large in his legendary run-in with Thomas Blamey, who divided more opinion than he ever commanded. While McDonald’s treatment of these events covers much familiar, highly partisan ground, it also illuminates some pertinent but neglected questions about the legitimacy and limits of press freedom in wartime. While Blamey’s insistence that the media should offer no criticism of the Australian Army in the field was unreasonably extreme (if still popular in some quarters in today’s ADF), Wilmot’s conviction that the freedom of the press not only licensed reasonable censure but also the liberty to advocate on behalf of one military faction or another is no less extreme. It was both naïve and arrogant of Wilmot to believe that, with the assistance and at the behest of disgruntled senior officers, he could play Brutus to Blamey’s Caesar and help bring down the nation’s

supreme military officer.

It was rich for Wilmot to portray himself as a martyr to journalism’s highest principles when in his own naked partisanship and his readiness to cloak factional loyalty as objective appraisal, he consistently breached so many of its core tenets. Wilmot’s treatment by Blamey exposed serious shortcomings in the military command’s tolerance of and readiness to accommodate reasonable criticism. It is not the role of a free press to slavishly support the military regardless of objective considerations.

Wilmot’s overweening arrogance was almost his undoing

However, it also reinforced some inescapable truths about where the power lies at moments of acute national crisis, the proper bounds of reasonable media criticism and the role of the reporter in such a context. Blamey may have been, in General MacArthur’s judgment, a ‘sensual, slothful and doubtful character’, but he was also ‘a tough commander’ and ‘the best of the local bunch’. Crucially, Curtin recognised him as the right man for the job at hand and continued to support him.

Ivone Kirkpatrick famously noted that during World War II the BBC set out to give the public ‘the truth, nothing but the truth and as near as possible the whole truth’. Wilmot was, of course, a key player in delivering on this ambivalent promise of fullish disclosure, and at his best he was a credit to his employers and the great cause they served. That he was not always at his best in managing his relations with the military, nor a paragon of selfless reporting, are important personal and professional failings that the book might have considered in greater detail and thereby rendered a more rounded portrait of a contradictory and compelling figure. g

Kevin Foster is Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His most recent book is Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict (2013).

Which critics most impress you?

Some of Australia’s best writers are also reviewers. I always enjoy the beautifully crafted and perceptive work of Drusilla Modjeska, Mireille Juchau, James Bradley, Lisa Gorton, and Kerryn Goldsworthy, to name just a few. Anwen Crawford is wonderful on music, Kate Kellaway and a.j. carruthers on poetry. I love reading Virginia Woolf’s arch, sharp reviews. I miss Geordie Williamson’s acute reviews, though I’m very happy to see his talents applied to publishing.

What makes a fine critic?

I like J. Hillis Miller’s argument that the critic is both host and guest, and that the ‘reciprocal duties of hospitality’ frame a reading. To pursue the metaphor, I like it when both host and guest are attentive, hospitable, and courteous. I enjoy openness and curiosity in a review, and the pleasure of access to an intelligent encounter between reader and text. Reading reviews involves witnessing the charge and chemistry of that encounter (or, sometimes, the lack of those things). I also like the spark of an imaginative piece of writing.

Do you accept most books on offer, or do you prefer to be selective?

To develop my skills, I began reviewing everything I was offered. I now select work I feel well-qualified to consider. This includes books by writers whose work or context I know well, or work that is formally or thematically of particular interest to me. I also seek to review diversely. In 2015 I chose to review only books by women. I aim to focus on pioneering and ethical work, such as Israeli novelist David Grossman’s extraordinary work of mourning, Falling Out of Time (2011) and Ali Smith’s brilliantly disruptive Artful (2013). I also aim to review poetry, though I don’t currently review contemporary Australian poetry given my role as UQP’s poetry editor. I am fortunate to work with editors who are receptive and imaginative when considering these things.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

I’ve worked with wonderful editors who have improved my work. The generosity involved in improv-

ing another’s writing is something I value highly. And I’m always encouraged by readers’ engagement.

What do you think of negative reviews?

For me, the best reviews are analytical. An attentive, intelligent review that considers a book’s weaknesses as well as its strengths can be a positive review of sorts. A temperate, critical review can be helpful to a writer (speaking from experience as a writer), while an intemperate or clumsy reading with the reviewer’s ego to the fore tends to be disappointing all round.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

After a while, you can know a lot of people in a small literary community. I avoid reviewing books by the people I love. I’d rather be an interlocutor at an earlier stage in the writing, privately. A perception of bias is unhelpful to the author.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

To read well and write well. To read attentively, from a background of wide reading, as patiently as possible in a fast world. To be open to a work’s unique shape and mode, and to try to understand it on its own terms. To craft a review in an engaging way within the confines of the word limit. As Sylvia Plath says of poems, ‘you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals’. To open a work (and a reading) to the reader, and to be hospitable, in J. Hillis Miller’s terms. I read some reviewers for the pleasure of their writing, as much as to get a sense of the text under discussion.

Felicity Plunkett, poet and critic, first wrote for ABR in 2010. Her first collection of poetry, Vanishing Point, won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize. Felicity’s chapbook Seastrands was published in Vagabond Press’s Rare Objects series in 2011, and she is the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011). Her new poetry collection is forthcoming with Pitt St Press. She is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press and state editor of ABR’s States of Poetry – Queensland.

Googly eyes

Beejay Silcox

4321 by Paul Auster Faber & Faber

$32.99 pb, 866 pp, 9780571324637

The American critic Adam Gopnik writes: ‘Nothing is more American than our will to make the enormous do the work of the excellent. We have googly eyes for gargantuan statements.’ Paul Auster’s longawaited novel, 4321, is a gargantuan statement. At almost 900 pages, the sheer physical heft of it is impossible to ignore. When a novel is as thick as it is tall, size is assumed to be a corollary for ambition. The question is whether 4321, seven years in the making, is excellent or simply enormous.

In the administrative fluster of Ellis Island, a Russian Jew is comically renamed in the immigration queue. His grandson, known simply as Ferguson, is born into a postwar America ripe with possibility, so ripe that a single lifetime will not suffice. Rather, Ferguson will live out four parallel lives – a quartet of Bildungsromans: ‘Four different boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances.’As Auster’s title menacingly hints, only one will survive to adulthood, but which boy, and why?

With this fractured conceit, Auster joins a rich literary tradition of repeating lives (a close structural analogue is Lionel Shriver’s The Post Birthday World [2007]), but Auster distinguishes himself by largely avoiding cataclysm. 4321 is not a book of wildly divergent aftermaths, there is no single ‘big event that rips through the heart of things’. Rather, each Ferguson is the quiet product of everyday life – a broken leg, an alchemic friendship, a failing business – played out against the grand tumult of the 1960s and 1970s.

Accordingly, Ferguson’s lives echo one another – the orbits are different, but the galaxy is the same. In every life,

Ferguson inches towards adulthood in the suburbs of New Jersey and cacophonic New York. His mother adores him, and his father’s success (or failure) reverbeates. In every life he loves, and is loved by, the effulgent Amy Schneiderman, in turn lover, stepsister, and cousin. In every life he is compelled to write, but will it be fiction, journalism, or criticism?

How 4321 is experienced will largely depend on a reader’s appetite for minutiae, for the engine of this novel is detail. Auster, once a notably spare writer, is keenly aware of the kind of book he has written, and uses Ferguson’s literary preferences to explain: ‘He tells and tells and doesn’t show much, which everyone says is the wrong way to go about it, but I like the way his stories charge forward.’

Every chapter proffers an exhaustive catalogue of dates, names, places, historical detritus, and elaborate back-stories; we know the scores of every basketball game, the shape of every woman (or man) Ferguson wants, the punchline to every joke. The novel delights in nostalgic digression: the comic virtues of Laurel and Hardy, or the poetry of baseball. Languid sentences abound, two or three pages long. An entire section is dedicated to retelling a short story about a pair of talking shoes called Hank and Frank. There is a distinctly Dickensian sensibility to this enterprise, one that Auster slyly acknowledges. ‘Ferguson’s sole ambition for the future was, as his number one author had put it, to become “the hero of his own life”. Ferguson had read his second Dickens novel by then, all 814 pages of that long circuitous slog through the fictional life of the author’s favorite child.’

A circuitous slog demands a compelling hero. While each chapter of 4321 is divided into four numbered sections corresponding with each version of Ferguson, the detail is so unrelenting, and the pubescent longings so prolonged (the novel ends with Ferguson having barely scraped into his early twenties), that it is hard work to tell them apart. As death comes, there is guilty relief that the reader has one less Ferguson to track.

It does not help that all of the Fergusons are insufferably perfect – not

only morally sound (Ferguson’s liberal politics are flawless in their moderate rationality) but aesthetically impeccable. He reads the right books, sees the right French films, and listens to the right music (only classical and jazz, of course). He struggles against the ‘guileless sort of ignorance that seemed to have been injected into his classmates at birth’. Well-endowed foreign women are impressed that Ferguson knows ‘ten times more than any ten of these idiot Americans put together’. The smartest professors are impressed by his smarts. The edgiest publishers are impressed by his edginess.

Ferguson’s brilliance, combined with his improbable good fortune, reads as alienating and a missed opportunity. Fans of Auster’s work may enjoy playing autobiographical bingo (the precision of Ferguson’s birthday, for example, is no accident), but 4321 feels too enamoured by the author’s passions for Ferguson to function as a convincing everyman.

Auster is an accomplished puzzle builder, and 4321 has the whiff of riddle about it, as every Ferguson seems uncannily aware of the novel’s premise: ‘the torment of being alive in a single body was that at any given moment you had to be on one road only, even though you could have been on another, travelling toward an altogether different place’.

In the final pages of the novel this awareness is explained, but the purpose of 4321 remains frustratingly opaque. Is the novel a simple parable, or an elaborate joke? For all of its prolixity, it does not seem that 4321 has all that much to say. g

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and reviewer.

Cold sweat

Brenda Walker

OLD GROWTH

by John Kinsella

Transit Lounge

$29.95 pb, 254 pp, 9780994395788

John Kinsella’s short stories are the closest thing Australians have to Ron Rash’s tales of washed-out rural America, where weakened and solitary men stand guard over their sad patch of compromised integrity in a world of inescapable poverty, trailer homes, uninsured sickness, and amphetamine wastage. Poe’s adventure stories and internally collapsing characters lightly haunt the short fiction of Rash and Kinsella. Like Rash, Kinsella can write acute and unforgettable stories about threatened masculinity. Kinsella’s latest collection, Old Growth, closely follows his 2016 work Crow’s Breath in subject and design. Although he is best known as a fine poet, these stories add considerably to his stature as a prose writer.

Old Growth is concerned with environmental degradation, small-town contempt for outsiders, and indigenous people, children who need protection from adults and one another, lives lost to compromise, terrible miscalculations of the motives of others, and isolation, particularly the geographical and emotional isolation of women. These stories are not overly concerned with exquisite observation of the natural world; the emphasis falls on the need for environmental protection and the exposure of rural social destructiveness, but when Kinsella turns his attention to nature the results are remarkable:

The jewel beetle rainbowed in the sun and he was, momentarily, caught in its colours, part of its exoskeleton. This is what God is, he said aloud, full of joy. I don’t really get depressed, he told the doctor his mother took him to. I am really quite happy, he insisted. The jewel beetle went to the edge of the leaf like a rhino, clumping across a sponge world, and then amazingly and beautifully angled itself around the leaf’s furry and serrated edge, and was walking upside down in defiance of all, the sun shining through the leaf like skin and lighting the inner life, the shadow upside-down world, the jewel beetle soul.

The child’s unconvincing insistence that he is happy is partly explained by the pleasure he takes in observing the natural world, but it may also be explained by the untrustworthiness of the doctor who his mother hopes will treat him for depression, given that this doctor has his own reasons for failing to listen to the boy’s experiences of degradation and bullying. By the end of the story the boy’s powers of observation seem like traumatic dissociation. Yet we are left with this unforgettable image of the child and the rainbow light that briefly makes him part of another creature’s protective exoskeleton.

Old Growth is deeply concerned with friendship, especially the complicated friendship between siblings. Brothers might be abrasive with one another – one punches his brother’s arm: ‘He wants maximum effect, to tattoo his brother with the sign of his power’ – but their bond is the most constructive thing they have. A shearer walks through the night to the house where his mate’s wife and kids are sleeping, to break the news that their husband and father has been killed in an accident. Sisters who don’t always have reasons to like each other manage to retain their connection. Women friends have a tender concern for one another and for the bush. And then there are mismatches: footy-and-pub friends with nothing in common, blokes angling for leverage by claiming to be a mate, children who are ‘Two best friends who weren’t fully friends, one of whom

had an even better friend, really, and another who preferred the company of a distant cousin’, and a lawyer and his friend who is really a protégé, unable and in the end unwilling to live up to the more senior man’s oppressive expectations. There are more sinister alliances. The final, cliffhanging story, ‘Traps’, is about a theatre director who gets out of his depth in an encounter with a rabbit shooter. Friendship can be dangerous in the world of Old Growth, and the stories represent small and large transitions in relationships, moments of slippage and firm footing, usually in small rural communities.

The communities in Old Growth are largely country towns, where Royalties for Regions funding has built ‘Sports infrastructure. More sports infrastructure.’ Children in gifted streams at school are socially ‘homeless’, teased by other children and actively targeted by sports teachers. It is particularly hard to be a boy or man in these environments, rife with alcohol and conformity. We are told that ‘Guns and sport were the mainstays of the local boys’ in the 1970s, when the fathers of the current generation were growing up. Small wonder that a boy, watching the alcoholic destructiveness of his parents, ‘broke into a cold sweat. A cold sweat. He became a cicada shell with eyes but nothing else left inside.’ There is an emptiness at the core of many adults. The entire collection, with its critique of the state of rural life, seems to be asking the question posed by an Aboriginal family in a supermarket where a Muslim girl is being disparaged. ‘This is an ugly town most of the time, but it can be okay as well,’ says an Aboriginal shearer. His niece, looking at the manager and the customers, says ‘howz it gunna be, people? How is it gunna be around here?’ The stories in Old Growth seem to be showing us the ugly and the okay in rural life, and to unsentimentally celebrate instances of friendship and enlargement of acceptance in a tough environment, where a great deal, including the protection of children and the environment, is at stake. g

Brenda Walker’s most recent book is Reading by Moonlight (2010).

‘Shards and vivid angles’ Fiona Wright

FROM THE WRECK

by Jane Rawson

Transit Lounge

$29.95 pb, 267 pp, 9780995359451

From the Wreck is a deeply ecological novel. It isn’t quite cli-fi – that new genre of fiction concerned with dramatising the effects of our changing climate on people and the world – rather, it is underpinned by an awareness of the connectedness of creatures: animal, human, and otherworldly alike, and narrated in parts by a creature who has fled another planet, ruined by invaders who ‘built machines, giant, and chemical plants’ and poisoned the oceanic habitat of this character and her kind.

The main protagonist is human: George Hills, a ship’s steward who survives the sinking of the steamship Admella off the South Australian coast. This much is drawn from history –Rawson is a descendant of Hills, who survived the 1859 shipwreck – but what saves George in this novel is the intervention of Bridget Ledwith, a strange, tentacled, shape-shifting creature who has assumed the form of a female passenger on the ship.

George is haunted by these events – by the eight days he spent clinging to the remnants of the ship, and by the spectre of the woman who saved him, whom he can neither forget nor understand, and whom he feels has cursed him. Rawson’s portrayal of the effects of George’s trauma is subtle and skilful. In part, this is drawn from the contrast between the brief scenes of George drinking and joking with his shipmates before the wreck – there are some beautifully bawdy double entendres here – and the quiet, anxious, withdrawn man he is shortly afterwards, half-participating in conversations with his family and half-engrossed in his own mind. At other times, Rawson relies on more physical descriptions of George’s

terror; in one passage he suddenly props, ‘breathless yet again, oh yes, that old thing once more, his back against the wall down a side alley off the esplanade, his guts choking him, his eyes spotted blind, his heart a monster in his chest that fought the ribs holding it as though it would tear itself free’. This sense of unresolved injury, the aftershocks of extreme experience, is the greatest strength of the novel. George shares this sense of grief and continuing trauma with the creature he so despises, who is lost, far from home, searching for others of her kind, and unable to communicate with the people she encounters. One of the tragedies of the book is that he is unwilling and unable to understand this. The interest in extremity in From the Wreck is balanced by a concern for respectability, a clinging to decency that preoccupies George in his suburban Port Adelaide life. George’s concern is largely directed at his eldest son, Henry, whose birth he suspects was attended by the same uncanny creature who saved him from the wreck, and whom he regards as a decidedly odd child, interested in death and decay, deep oceans and underwater worlds, and prone to utterances such as, ‘You would have reached into the ocean and grasped them as they fled slippery by.’

Henry is, of course, a touched child – he carries the shape-shifting creature with him in the form of a birthmark on his shoulder, cold to the touch, hungry for meat, and telling Henry ‘things no one else knew’. This accounts for Henry’s precocious intelligence, and his affinity with the natural world, and all that’s sticky and visceral within it; and Rawson’s ability to capture Henry’s voice –imaginative, and simultaneously childish and wild in its logic – makes him a delightful and fascinating character.

Other voices in the novel, though, are less engaging, especially that of the unnamed creature. Her descriptions are often lyrical and fittingly alien (‘there are shards and vivid jangles; shadows smear the outlines of things’), and Rawson’s attempt to create a voice that is fundamentally unearthly in this world is admirable, and very much in keeping with her interest in animality and creatureliness. Horses become

‘the smash-footed creatures, the speed lovers, the grass croppers’, cats are ‘fleet-footed fur’, humans ‘brown uprights’. But at times this voice seems overdetermined. It quickly loses its novelty, especially when the creature’s narrative diverges from that of the human characters.

The main weakness of From the Wreck is structural. There are a number of elements whose purpose within the novel is unclear or that feel somehow incomplete. The most striking of these is the wonderfully ballsy Bea Gallwey, who is George’s neighbour – and Henry’s friend – a widow raising her daughter’s son alone, derided as a witch by local children. Bea is a wonderful character, sharp and incisive (in her best speech, she tells George, ‘I know this is difficult for many men to fathom but not every woman will want to have sex with a man just because he fancies her … Saying no doesn’t make them a, what did you say? A hell spirit from another plane of existence?’), and her inclusion in the novel does add a welcome female voice to the otherwise male cast of characters. But her story is not well integrated.

From the Wreck is an ambitious novel, and it is fascinating for its hybridity, its willingness to bend and blend genres – as well as perspectives and worlds. Animated by deep curiosity and wild imagination, it is a fascinating exploration of what these might bring to the stories we tell about the past. g

Fiona Wright’s essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance was published by Giramondo in 2015.

‘Now what?’

Kerryn Goldsworthy

THE

REFUGEES

by Viet Thanh Nguyen Corsair

$32.99 hb, 210 pp, 94781472152558

In the age of e-readers, this is a book to own in hard copy, because it is very beautiful: a hardback with a dust jacket in the pale frosted bluegreen of a Monarch butterfly chrysalis, with a small bright parrot front and centre, wings outspread, reminding the reader that the word ‘refugee’ has its roots in the Latin word for ‘flight’.

Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Already wellestablished as an academic and scholar, recipient of numerous awards, he made his mark in the literary world when his début novel, The Sympathizer (2015), won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. With the non-fiction study Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the memory of war published last year, he has now, with this latest book, published three books in three different genres in three consecutive years.

Nguyen’s parents moved from North to South Vietnam in 1954 and fled to the United States when he was four, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Settled first in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, the family later moved to California and opened a Vietnamese grocery store. All of these events find their way into these stories; they mirror Nguyen’s own experience but are not directly autobiographical. They are not ‘about him’ but are, rather, about what he knows.

There are eight stand-alone stories,

each with its own theme, mood, and separate cast of characters, but each story focuses on family relations in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as refugee families struggle to come to terms with their fragmentation or with their new life in California. But for Nguyen it is clear that his own experience and knowledge of these matters provide the tangible material details of a more general theme: the book’s dedication reads ‘For all refugees, everywhere’.

Most refugee stories are tales of peril and escape, but almost all of Nguyen’s stories are set in the aftermath, sometimes years later, of such events. The question that these stories ask and answer is ‘Now what?’ Ten or twenty or thirty years from now, where will the asylum seekers currently languishing on Nauru and Manus Island be, and what will their lives be like? Nguyen explores life for his characters in an exiled but peaceful aftermath; he rarely writes directly about the actual experience of fleeing one’s country. When he does, it is devastating, as with the opening story ‘Black-Eyed Women’; the narrator reveals only belatedly and incidentally what happened to her as a young girl on the rickety fishing boat when it was overtaken by pirates. Here as elsewhere, the clear, undecorated, declarative style somehow gives more force to dramatic subject matter when it is directly addressed:

When the little man threw me to the deck, the fall bruised the back of my head. When he ripped my shirt off, he drew blood with his sharp fingernails. When I turned my face away and saw my father and mother screaming, my eardrums seemed to have burst, for I could hear nothing … The world was muzzled, the way it would be ever afterward with my mother and father and myself, none of us uttering another sound on this matter.

The extraordinary cohesiveness and tight structure of this book is not particularly apparent on first reading – nothing about this book is simple or obvious – but each story leads on in some direction from the last. In ‘Black-Eyed Women’, the experience

of the Vietnamese boat people is still very close, with every character having first-hand experience of the escape. In the second story, a young man has made it to the United States and embarks on some very new experiences, but his family has been left behind, their lives only glimpsed through the surface of his father’s careful letter: ‘This summer, your uncles and cousins were reeducated with the other enlisted puppet soldiers. The Party forgave their crimes. Your uncles were so grateful, they donated their houses to the revolution.’

In the third story, the narrator’s parents have established their grocery business in California and are being harassed by a member of their community ‘collecting funds for the fight against the Communists’, despite the fact that it is now 1983, but his mother resists: they are making a hard-won living on the modest mark-ups of their groceries, and they believe, rightly of course, that the fight has been permanently lost. This focus on the exchanges of the material world sharpens further in the next story, in which a fraudulent operation involving cheap brand-name imitation goods is being carried out against the grateful recipient of a liver transplant. The distance in time from the war increases from story to story as its ramifications spread outwards and become more varied, and the children of the refugees grow up.

Against this historical background, which has shaped the lives of almost every character in the book, Nguyen tells tales of private lives and intimate human relationships, especially in families: these are tales of brother and sister, of father and daughter, of husband and wife. Their essence is distilled in the final paragraph of ‘I’d Love You to Want Me’, a story about a younger wife whose septuagenarian husband is slipping into dementia. ‘She wondered what, if anything, she knew about love. Not much, perhaps, but enough to know that what she would do for him now she would do again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.’ g

Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Editor of the magazine, first wrote for ABR in 1985.

Twist of words

Blanche Clark

THE RESTORER

by Michael Sala

Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 352 pp, 9781925355024

Domestic violence is an everyday reality for tens of thousands of women in Australia. Recent horrors and public campaigns have raised awareness of this social scourge. Journalists have written extensively on the subject, yet it is novelists, as Michael Sala shows in The Restorer, that can give us a more acute view of the emotional complexities that bind couples and keep women in threatening domestic situations.

The Restorer begins with Richard sitting outside his front door. A car towing a trailer laden with household goods pulls up outside the dilapidated property next door. Richard observes the new arrivals: a hesitant, slightly built woman; a gruff and muscular man; an awkward teenage girl; a boy kicking a discarded can. ‘Welcome to Newcastle,’ Richard says, only to be greeted with a stare, which causes ‘a prickling unease that reminded him of being singled out at school’.

This is one of two parenthetical chapters told from Richard’s perspective. The others alternate between the mother, Maryanne, and her fourteenyear-old daughter, Freya. The first chapter establishes the outsider’s point of view: that of the reader observing and judging, though powerless to intervene. We are not so much in the heads of Maryanne or Freya as looking over their shoulders, wanting to grab them and drag them from harm’s way.

As Freya helps move the family’s few possessions into the house, we observe Roy’s desperate enthusiasm for the potential of the house that he plans to restore and Maryanne’s wariness after a year’s separation and her concern for eight-year-old Daniel, who appears to have a learning difficulty. Tension pervades the book, a sense that Roy or someone else is going to snap. For Freya,

that tension extends beyond the house to the jeers she endures from boys in passing cars and the threat of violence from bullies who pick on her friend Josh. Later, her anger at the hypocrisy of adults and her lack of control over her circumstances will manifest themselves in drug-taking, shoplifting, and truancy. Sala also gives weight to Freya’s teachers, balancing their influence against that of her friends and family. There is a moment of comic relief when the English teacher Mrs O’Neil delivers a humorous lecture on how hormone-addled teenagers shouldn’t trust their instincts.

Sala’s prose is precise and evocative, and his descriptions of the weather and the state of the house are often linked to characters’ emotions. For example, when a storm cuts the power to the house, Freya is hypersensitive to the sound: ‘The rain sounded like it was crashing down on her skull.’ Maryanne feels like something in the house is set against her. ‘The house loomed over her, its edges growing vague against the sunless sky, but the blistered paintwork on the windows, and the saltpitted brickwork, the roof with half its gutter hanging loose, were easy enough to make out. She could imagine it all collapsing on top of her.’

Roy is presented as a charming, good-looking man who is also insecure, hot-tempered, and rigid in his thinking. It is not a sympathetic portrait, but it is clear what provokes and annoys him, particularly Daniel’s carelessness. The family barely acknowledges Roy’s meticulous restoration of the floorboards, and windows, which adds to his frustration. More nuanced is Maryanne’s love for Roy and the behavioural patterns that cannot be erased by a new location. These patterns go back to Roy’s father and Maryanne’s rejection of her mother’s domineering manner, and project forward to Freya’s outburst in class and her attraction to a local hooligan.

The era the novel is set in becomes apparent when Freya and Josh play video games on a Commodore 64 and the Tiananmen Square protests lead television news reports. Newcastle’s history, too, is woven into the narrative, giving the novel a strong sense of place. Freya and Josh swim in the Bogey Hole, a convict-built ocean swimming pool,

and Maryanne works as a nurse at the Royal Newcastle Hospital, its tenuous future also part of the novel’s fraught tone. (The hospital was demolished in 2014 and replaced by a hotel and apartments.)

Richard, a gay neighbour, is not so well drawn. He seems superfluous for half the novel, until the family’s painful secret is revealed and his role as Maryanne’s confidant becomes clear.

Freya and Josh’s dialogue is contrived at times, but Sala is masterly with his construction of Maryanne and Roy’s arguments. The loss of control is articulated through Maryanne’s memory of one fight.

She couldn’t even remember why, did not know so much the substance of the exchange that had led to the fight, only its shape, the sudden twist of words that had opened something beneath them, and there they’d been, sliding into it.

Sala’s début novel, The Last Thread (2012), was a fictionalised account of his childhood in the Netherlands and Newcastle in the 1980s and the traumatic incidents that influenced his adult life. (It won the 2013 NSW Premier’s Award for New Writing and was the regional winner [Pacific] of the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize.) In The Restorer, Sala again delves into the legacy of childhood trauma, but there is a new immediacy and assured cohesiveness in the construction of this novel.

The dichotomy between the suppressed first half and the dramatic second half may deter readers looking for more consistent action. But Sala’s use of realism emphasises how the threat of violence can be as destructive as the actual violence. g

Blanche Clark is a journalist and former Herald Sun books editor. ❖

THE PERMANENT RESIDENT

by Roanna Gonsalves

UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 285 pp, 9781742589022

There is a moment in ‘The Skit’ – the second in a collection of sixteen short stories by IndianAustralian author Roanna Gonsalves –when the writer protagonist, upon reading her work to a group of her peers (‘the Bombay gang’, as she describes them, ‘still on student visas, still drinking out of second-hand glasses from Vinnies, and eating off melamine plates while waiting and waiting for their applications for permanent residency to be processed’), is met with the incorrect assumption that her writing is autobiographical. This early on in The Permanent Resident – Gonsalves’s début book, though by no means her first reflection on migrant identities in Australia – it feels like a surreptitious wink from the author, whose voice hums sotto voce beneath a chorus of characters seldom represented (at least not so intricately) in twenty-first century Australian literature.

Like so many of her subjects, Gonsalves, who herself moved to Sydney for university in the 1990s, is originally from Mumbai and is of Goan Catholic background. These parallels shouldn’t matter, but are hard to ignore in the author’s complex and tender attention to detail in so many of her characters with similar trajectories. American author Jhumpa Lahiri is the obvious comparison, though that may discount Gonsalves’s distinctive vantage point and approach, rich in empathy even for some of the book’s most tragically flawed characters. (Also unmistakable, among all the talk of migration and resettlement, is the author’s profound respect for Australia’s First Peoples.)

‘A.K. Ramanujan had once said that a story is cathartic for the teller in the tale,’ she writes in the aptly named ‘The Teller in the Tale’. Whether or not this is true for Gonsalves, The Permanent Resident and its tales of newness and belonging, of shifting privileges, and of identity across borders is certainly valuable, if not cathartic, for anyone keen to breathe in their surroundings with a fresh pair of lungs.

Sara Savage

THE

TRAPEZE ACT by

Libby Angel

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925355925

An epigraph from Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected lectures (2012) sets the tone of Libby Angel’s novel, The Trapeze Act ‘what is the moment but a fragment of greater time?’ This book is composed of fragments, which, taken together, capture the desire for a complete understanding of history and the impossibility of satisfying that desire.

A well-written and entertaining début, The Trapeze Act is narrated by Loretta Lord and set in an unnamed southern Australian city – one proud of its free-settler establishment and, by the late 1960s, home to the highest murder rate in the country. The novel moves across time and space, shifting between Loretta’s memories of her trapezeartist mother, with her exuberant accounts of the Dutch Rodzirkus; her barrister father and the notorious murder cases by which he made his fame and fortune; and the found stories of her great-great-great-grandparents, who in 1858 emigrated to the colonies in search of elephants and their ivory.

Underlying Loretta’s narrative is a hope that by telling her story she will be able ‘to dump [her] inheritance’ (something her mother also attempts by disposing of her personal possessions: ‘Zo, she said. There goes history.’) Nevertheless, Loretta understands the difficulty of separating oneself from one’s past. For her, ‘Even if we are not awake to them, our forebears possess us.’ Loretta is possessed by the past, but desires the freedom to choose her allegiances. Discovering her grandparents’ journals, she determines that ‘the manuscripts were mine … [t]hey spoke to me’. Thus, the desire for one separation – from her mother – leads to another inherited alliance.

The scope of this novel is ambitious; although it at times falls short of this ambition – the framing narrative of a meditation retreat, for instance, seems forced – it is a pleasure to read Angel’s poetic prose.

Anna MacDonald

THE

CHANGE TRILOGY: THE SILENT INVASION by

James Bradley

Pan Australia

$18.99 pb, 283 pp, 978743549896

The Silent Invasion, James Bradley’s first Young Adult novel and the first in a trilogy, begins in generic post-apocalyptic fashion. Humanity crowds into restricted safe zones, hiding from an intergalactic plague that infects living matter with the mysterious Change. Adolescent protagonist Callie’s younger sister Gracie is infected; to prevent her demise at the hands of Quarantine, Callie flees with her sister to the Zone, an area beyond Quarantine’s control in Australia’s far north that is overrun with Changed flora and fauna.

Bradley’s constant out-of-thefrying-pan style of storytelling pulls the reader through this tense pageturner. The pace is relentless, leaving little room for character development. Despite the first-person narration, there is a detachment between Callie and the reader that is unusual in YA fiction. Bradley seems reluctant to delve into his protagonist’s inner life. Even the loss of her virginity does not register in any significant way on Callie or the reader.

Callie’s true enemy is unclear throughout, an ambiguity unresolved in this instalment. ‘Something about the creatures had unsettled me on some visceral level, a sense of wrongness,’ Callie recalls of her first direct contact with Changed creatures. But while the reader is told often that the Change is evil, Callie sees the Zone as a safe haven and isn’t repulsed by the Change in her sister. There are hints early on, including in the prologue, that the Change may be benign. The truth will doubtless be revealed in a later book; left unexplained here, it confuses this novel’s tone. Is this a horror in the tradition of The Day of the Triffids (1951), or is it an indictment of humanity’s treatment of the environment like James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)? The lack of any clear resolution in the first book frustrates more than it intrigues.

Benjamin Chandler

The vagaries of Stalinist science

Mark Edele

STALIN AND THE SCIENTISTS: A HISTORY OF TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY 1905–1953

by Simon Ings Faber

& Faber

$49.99 hb, 527 pp, 9780571290079

The relationship between science and power is central to many struggles of the present. Politics impinges on science when funding is allocated to ‘applied’ or ‘fundamental’ research, when decisions are reached about what should be taught in schools, when governments determine if people can be forced to vaccinate their children, what kinds of interventions into reproduction are allowable, or if we should accept the consensus view of climate scientists about the effects of fossil fuel consumption. The Soviet Union provides a particularly intriguing case study. A state with a large scientific establishment, it was ruled by a party which itself claimed a ‘scientific worldview’: Marxism–Leninism. Stalin was hailed as a ‘corypheus of science’ with a far-ranging mandate to set the agenda.

Under such leadership the politics of science moved between two extremes. On the one end was evolutionary biology, which was taken over by a crank with excellent political skills: T.D. Lysenko. He managed to convince the dictator that his odd concoction of Lamarckism (the theory that acquired characteristics could be passed on), half-understood Darwinism, peasant wisdom, and Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism was more ‘materialist’ and therefore more ‘true’ than the ‘idealist’ and maybe even ‘fascist’ theories of modern genetics. The victory of this pseudo-science in 1948 wreaked havoc on Soviet biology in a field which turned out to be one of the sciences of the future. This story has been covered by a large number of studies, beginning with Zhores Medvedev’s dissident The Rise and Fall

of T.D. Lysenko, smuggled abroad and published in English in 1969. Other classics include David Joravsky’s The Lysenko Affair (1970) and Loren Graham’s Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (1972). Graham returned to the topic in Lysenko’s Ghost (2016), conclusively debunking the notion that Lysenkoism might have been a precursor of epigenetics.

If the Lysenko affair showed the destructive effects of politicians meddling in science, physics under Stalin exemplified the other extreme. Lavish funding, privileged living conditions, excellent research environments, and the freedom to explore any theory, ‘idealist’ or not, led to physics reaching world standard. The reason for this government largesse, of course, was the atomic bomb, which Stalin needed in order to retain the superpower status the Red Army had won for him in the Second World War. Leave the scientists alone, the dictator ordered his underlings – ‘we can always shoot them later.’ As a result, the Soviet Union got not only the atomic bomb, but also a crop of dissidents used to thinking on their own, most prominently Andrei Sakharov. This story has been told in detail by David Holloway in his path-breaking Stalin and the Bomb (1994).

Stalin and the Scientists adds little to this well-established narrative. The book is largely based on English-language secondary sources. Ings, a science writer and novelist, has not been to the archives to discover new sources on the behindthe-scenes machinations of scientists and politicians during the Stalin years.

What can we learn from his narrative? Quite a lot, argues Ings. ‘We are all little Stalinists now,’ he writes. We are ‘convinced of the efficacy of science to bail us out of any and every crisis, regardless of what science can actually do, impatient of anything scientists might actually say’. As an interpretation of our own predicament, this statement seems wide of the mark. Today, aggressive campaigns are fought on the basis of established scientific conclusions, but with the goal of limiting the destructive consequences of our own actions. One could mention here the attempts to restrain the use of antibiotics to slow the further development of superbugs or

to check global warming by concerted international action. Among believers in science, only a minority advocates muddling through on the assumption that our ingenuity will eventually save us. The problem is not ‘Stalinist’ naïveté, but growing anti-science denial that anything might indeed be wrong, or a cynical after-me-the-deluge-as-longas-profits-are-right mentality.

As a popular history of Stalinist science, Ings’s book fails on another level. The general historical context is laid out so shakily that non-specialists will be easily misled. Readers could be excused if they come away with the notion that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 began with the Battle of Tsushima in 1905 and that this battle led to the revolution of 1905; that the 1921–22 famine started in 1922; that Stalin ‘ousted’ Lenin in 1922 and henceforth was pulling the strings of Soviet politics, implementing his master plan; that the great famine of 1932–33 preceded dekulakisation; or that the Soviets occupied all of Finland in early 1940. The narrative of Stalin’s rise is imprecise, to say the least. The recurrent claim that Russia, ever since Peter the Great, had lacked ‘any civic life worth the name’ runs counter to a little library of books on the late Romanov empire, handily summarised in Wayne Dowler’s admirable Russia in 1913 (2010).

Stalin and the Scientists, then, cannot be recommended. Readers are better served with the classics mentioned above or the excellent wider studies which emerged after the Soviet archives were opened: Nikolai Krementsov’s Stalinist Science (1997), Alexei Kojevnikov’s Stalin’s Great Science (2004), or Ethan Pollock’s Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (2006). Graham’s What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (1998) answers the ‘so what?’ question much better than Ings’s long-winded narrative. g

Mark Edele has been teaching history at the University of Western Australia since 2004. From July 2017 he will be serving as Hansen Chair in History at the University of Melbourne. He is currently completing a history of the Soviet Union.

Balancing acts

Situating Rome in a broader Eurasian context

Christopher Allen

IMPERIAL TRIUMPH:

THE ROMAN WORLD FROM HADRIAN TO CONSTANTINE

by Michael Kulikowski

Profile Books, $59.99 hb, 385 pp, 9780674659612

Mary Beard’s new history of Rome, reviewed here in March 2016, ended at the point where Edward Gibbon began his great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in what he called the happy age of the Antonines. That is also where Michael Kulikowski takes up the story in this book, the first of two intended volumes, although, as he admits, he will not follow Gibbon all the way to the

may be recorded in inscriptions, but numismatics is a particularly precious resource: thus coins recording a claim to imperial status are confirmations, and sometimes the only evidence, of attempts at usurpation.

Even the happy second century, as Kulikowski shows, was far from perfectly serene. The Empire had by now reached its greatest extent, but its many borders required permanent vigilance.

Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the second Rome, in 1453.

Kulikowski demonstrates impressive mastery of a vast and complex field, made more complicated by the chronic tendency of leading Romans to change their names for various political reasons, and the surprising lack of reliable historical texts from this period. Names, outlines of biography, and some events

No state had ever had a more efficient system of command and communication or such a highly organised military to maintain peace and order: and not only in the Antonine period, but for centuries afterwards, Rome did generally guarantee the security of its subject populations.

The external threats were many however, from tribal peoples in the north – gradually becoming more sophisticat-

ed through contact and exchange with Rome – to Persia in the east. This was the only comparable and rival imperial state with which Rome had to deal, first in the post-Hellenistic centuries of Parthian rule and then with the return of ethnically Persian rule with the Sasanians, who gave the Empire far more trouble. One of the virtues of Kulikowski’s book, indeed, is the way it situates Rome within a broader Eurasian context: this is less necessary in the earlier periods of Roman history, but indispensable in these later centuries.

There were also fundamental flaws in the Roman political system, the first of which was that the role of emperor – a figleaf used to avoid the hated word ‘king’ – had never been constitutionally defined. The ambiguous role of princeps as ostensibly a first among senatorial equals allowed Augustus to rule as a monarch while making a show of preserving republican traditions. This delicate balancing act, however, made a legal and thus legitimate process of succession impossible by definition, since the role of the princeps itself was inherently extra-legal, although, as Kulikowski shows, it was in practice composed of a package of special powers granted by the senate. At first it was assumed in a purely de facto way that the role would be hereditary through the Julio-Claudian family, but after that line failed it eventually came to be accepted that the senate could validate the claim of a sufficiently capable candidate.

Naturally, this arrangement was always going to work best when times were reasonably peaceful and when one competent emperor could prepare the way for an equally competent successor, a process that we see working reason-

Hadrian’s Wall near Caw Gap, 2008 (photograph by Andrew Smith for the Geograph project via Wikimedia Commons)

ably well in the second century. When, in the third century, times were harder and the Empire was straining under wars or other crises on several fronts at once, and when an emperor died with no generally acceptable successor, it became common for multiple claimants to arise, nominated and backed by massive provincial armies. Episodes of civil war would ensue, often ended when one army decided their man was not going to win after all and murdered him. The average life expectancy of any candidate for imperial power in the middle of the third century was thus extremely short.

In contrast to this instability at the top, the general Roman system for promoting governmental officers was very effective, and tended to ensure that the most able reached the highest levels of responsibility. The cursus honorum was the name for the series of administrative offices or magistracies which had to be held in a defined order, from relatively modest office jobs to the consulship itself, in turn followed by proconsular appointment as a provincial governor as well as by a seat in the senate.

Certain offices could only be held by members of certain classes, but those classes could also be entered by a combination of successful service in lower positions, wealth, and patronage. In practice, the Roman system was extraordinarily open to new talent, to such an extent indeed that the upper classes of Rome underwent a constant evolution throughout this period: capable citizens from provincial lands became consuls, senators, and even emperors; and Roman citizenship was regularly extended as a reward to loyal non-Roman cities throughout the Empire, until finally Caracalla’s edict of 212 ce granted citizenship to all free men within the imperial territory.

Just as important as changes in the ethnic composition of the Roman élite is what Kulikowski calls the equestrianisation of the Empire: although certain important and prestigious positions remain restricted to members of the senatorial class, more and more power falls to the equestrian order. And whereas the senatorial order were trained in the civic values and generalist skills required for

the successive offices – whether military, legal, or administrative – of a great career, the new equestrian officials became a class of specialists: career soldiers, legal officers, and bureaucrats.

This is the new imperial system that culminates in the reforms of Diocletian and his successors. Kulikowski intriguingly suggests that Roman attempts to suppress Christianity might have been as much a consequence of a new centralising and universalising way of thinking as of any inherent hostility to the new religion. Persecution of the Christians, indeed, was abandoned when it was clear there were simply too many of them; and in due course Constantine, as we come to the end of this volume, finds that endorsement by the Christian god can be advantageous; the new centralised and bureaucratic state now becomes the vehicle for the spread of Christianity throughout the Empire. g

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

Over west

Geoff Page

THE FREMANTLE PRESS ANTHOLOGY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIAN POETRY

by John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan (eds)

Fremantle Press

$34.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781925162202

The need for this book is selfevident in a way that a similarly historical anthology for New South Wales or Victorian poetry would not be. From many perspectives, Perth is one of the most remote cities in the world and there is no doubt that the state’s uniqueness is captured in this extensive, though tightly edited, selection. Despite its comparable treatment of Aboriginal people, Western Australia’s nineteenthcentury history (with its brief experience of convictism and its relatively late gold rush in the 1890s) is different from that of the eastern colonies, about which Western Australians continue to feel a mild, justified paranoia.

Of course, Western Australia occupies about half the Australian continent, so there is also considerable regionality (likewise reflected in the selections here). John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan’s introduction to all this is suitably comprehensive and informative (if, occasionally, a little dramatic in its claims for the international status of some its poets).

The poems are arranged by their author’s birth dates (as far as they are known), so the reader begins, somewhat laboriously, in the mid-nineteenth century. There is little here to challenge the best of Lawson or Paterson, but by the 1890s there is a considerable momentum in the ‘Goldfields’ poetry of the pseudonymous ‘Crosscut’, ‘Dryblower’, and others. These poems give a vivid sense of the social and industrial life in

1890s Kalgoorlie, and have more than sufficient technique for their purposes. By the 1920s the reader begins to encounter the relatively numerous Aboriginal poems in their original languages (with English translations) that Kinsella and Ryan have scattered judiciously throughout the text. They provide a nicely different aesthetic to the ‘European’ poems through which they are dispersed. They are interesting, too, for the relative enthusiasm with which their authors have often taken to European technology. A stanza (in translation) from Yintilypirna Kaalyamarra’s ‘The Coastline Looks Strange to Me from Out Here’ is a good example: ‘We’ll follow the wind, with the bow pointing east, / as the boat heels perfectly to match the change of course. / We cut the spray and turn it to tiny droplets, / the timber of the boat shakes / from the successive pounding of the waves.’ It makes an instructive contrast with, say, a stanza from ‘Acaster’s’ stereotypical ‘O’er a Native’s Grave’ published about forty years earlier: ‘No more with spears, and weapons rude, / Shal’t thou roam thro’ the woodland dell, / No more midst festive scenes shall sing / The wildsome songs you loved so well.’

The editors’ selection from the interwar years also gives a sense of the richness to come in the 1950s and 1960s. There is a fine, very specific political poem, for instance, by the World War I veteran Oscar Walters, about the socalled ‘land fit for heroes’ as Western Australia went into the Depression of the 1930s. Well-known poets such as Kenneth ‘Seaforth’ Mackenzie (1913–55) and William Hart-Smith (1911–90) also feature, though the editors’ choices from the latter sell him a little short (none of them quite as good as ‘Baiamai’s Never-failing Stream’, for instance).

The real breakthrough, however, occurs with Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002). In poems such as ‘In Midland Where the Trains Go By’ and ‘Once I Rode with Clancy’, we encounter the fearless energy (even recklessness) that eventually made Hewett one of our most admired poets. ‘O once I rode with Clancy when my white flesh was tender, / And my hair a golden cloud along the wind, / Among the hills of

Wickepin, the dry salt plains of Corrigin, / Where all my Quaker forebears strove and sinned.’

Another high point is obviously Randolph Stow (1935–2010), whose poems about the pastoralists’ unease with Aboriginal dispossession have rarely been equalled (perhaps only by Judith Wright). Along with Stow and Hewett, however, are gratifyingly good poems by poets who may well be unknown ‘over east’. These would include poems by William Grono (just the one), Griffith Watkins, Ee Tiang Hong, and Brian Dibble, among quite a few others.

In line with the editors’ decision to give proper space to Indigenous poetry, there is also a considerable quantity of more recent Aboriginal poetry in English. A few of these are close to how Oodgeroo Noonuccal once described her own poetry: ‘sloganistic, civil rightish, plain and simple’. Others, however, such as Jack Davis’s ‘John Pat’ and ‘The First Born’, Sally Morgan’s very simple ‘Janey Told Me’, and Charmaine PapertalkGreen’s ‘Blinding Loyalty’, are not easily forgotten. The same can be said for Robert Walker’s ‘Solitary Confinement’.

As is the case with most anthologies, the editors’ personal beliefs and predilections have an effect on their choices. Thus we can often have good, if slightly atypical, poems which show a poet’s greater-than-usual concern with ecopoetics. A reader familiar with the editors’ own work – and that of the poets being sampled – may find a knowing but notdissatisfied smile cross his or her face.

One example of this is the choice of Andrew Taylor’s eight-page sequence, ‘Swamp Poems’ when he may have been better exemplified by four or five separate poems. The same is not true, however, of Fay Zwicky’s ‘Kaddish’ which also runs to eight pages but shows the poet at her most powerful and quintessential.

For anyone interested in the highways and byways of Australian poetry generally – and in the development of our poetic culture over the past couple of centuries (or sixty millennia) –Kinsella and Ryan’s anthology is mandatory reading. g

Geoff Page has published more than twenty collections of poetry.

‘No sacrificial I’

Susan Sheridan

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF ANNA WICKHAM

edited by Nathanael O’Reilly

UWA Publishing

$29.99 pb, 171 pp, 9781742589206

Rhymed verse is a wide net Through which many subtleties escape. Nor would I take it to capture a strong thing Such as a whale.

This manifesto for free verse comes from a poet whose associates at the time included Harold Monro, Richard Aldington, and D.H. Lawrence in London, Harriet Monroe and Louis Untermeyer in New York, Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris. Anna Wickham (1883–1947) mixed with the modernist writers and artists of her time on both sides of the Atlantic and was widely admired for her early books, The Contemplative Quarry (1915), The Man with a Hammer (1916), and The Little Old House (1921).

Yet subtleties were not her strong point, and she often fell back on rhymed verse to make the challenging feminist statements for which she is best known, ‘strong things’ such as: ‘I married a man of the Croydon class / When I was twenty-two / And I vex him, and he bores me / Till we don’t know what to do!’ and, indeed, for her signature poem, ‘Note on Method’: ‘Here is no sacrificial I, / Here are more I’s than yet were in one human, / Here I reveal our common mystery: / I give you woman. / Let it be so for our old world’s relief / I give you woman, and my method’s brief.’

Wickham was a modernist poet who wrote mostly in conventional verse forms, and whose imagery is as often fin de siècle as it is modernist. She was a mass of contradictions, which are reflected in her poetry: a free thinker who remained deeply marked by her Catholic education, a woman artist torn between the exemplars of her rationalist father and spiritualist mother. She was a feminist in thrall to the idea of heroic motherhood of sons, a passionate woman

capable of infatuations with women as well as men, who stayed married to her husband (a London solicitor and amateur astronomer), though she hated his chilly demeanour and his upper-middleclass manners.

She belonged to that remarkable generation of literary women, modernists in life if not always in poetic technique, who were social and political radicals, supporting the women’s suffrage movement and various experiments in free love and communitarian living. They had much in common with the women of second-wave feminism, who often included Wickham in their anthologies of women’s poetry. In 1984, Virago brought out a selection of her poetry and prose, edited by R.D. Smith, to mark the centenary of her birth. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, editors of the Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986), considered Wickham one of the historical poets who was ‘closest in mood and subject matter to contemporary poets who form the bulk of the anthology’.

Wickham appears in various Australian anthologies because she had a significant Australian connection: the only child of restlessly emigrant English parents, she grew up in Queensland and Sydney in the 1890s, returning with them to Europe at the age of twenty. Hence her appearance among the historical poets in UWAP’s series (along with Lesbia Harford, John Shaw Neilson, Dorothy Hewett, and Francis Webb).

This edition of her work, New and Selected Poems, edited and introduced by Nathanael O’Reilly, includes 100 previously published poems and 150 more chosen from the more than one thousand unpublished poems that exist in manuscript. Frustratingly, given the massive task he has undertaken of reading and selecting from the British Library manuscript collection, the editor offers no commentary on the principles which guided his decisions. There is only the briefest of introductions, sketching the circumstances of Wickham’s life, and a note on his editorial decisions (mainly involving restoring the poet’s original punctuation in the poems previously published in the Virago edition). There is no mention of the manuscript collection held in Paris, which appears to

contain yet more unpublished poems, mostly included in love letters to Natalie Clifford Barney. Perhaps there is an important distinction to be made between poems Wickham chose to publish and those she intended to remain private.

Since the 1980s there has been a significant feminist rescue operation aimed at extending the borders of modernist literature to include work, like Wickham’s, that is formally conventional but expresses radical views, especially attacks on patriarchal restrictions on women. This is presumably the context which allows O’Reilly to claim Wickham as ‘one of the most important female poets’ of the first half of the twentieth century and ‘a pioneer of modernist poetry’. But without any elaboration of that context of feminist literary studies of modernism, such claims seem overblown. Wickham’s poetry is fierce and crude and often comic; it has little in common with the feminist modernism of, say, HD or Mina Loy.

Subtleties were not Wickham’s strong point

Just as Wickham’s attitude to ‘private’ or ‘public’ poetry is unknown, so too we know little about how she regarded herself as a poet. She once retorted to a gallery owner, who objected to her loud expressions of dislike: ‘I may be a minor poet but I’m a major woman!’ The woman who canvassed support for a manifesto titled The League for the Protection of the Imagination of Women with the slogan World’s management by entertainment is unlikely to have taken herself too seriously as a public figure. She appears to have been larger than life –a physically imposing woman, and a selfmythologiser.

It is no simple matter to estimate her importance to women’s writing, or to twentieth-century poetry more generally, but it is good to have this generous collection of her work, which can be complemented by recent biographical and critical studies. g

Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the school of Humanities at Flinders Univeristy. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016).

Which poets have most influenced you?

In the 1980s I read Emily Dickinson’s poetry intensively, and I suspect that her superbly compressed work is ingrained within me. In late adolescence I loved the musicality of W.B. Yeats, and later I grew to admire W.H. Auden’s complexities and clarity. I dwelt for a while in the evocations of New Zealander Lauris Edmond. Recently, I have been reading the tensile work of Tusiata Avia with great enjoyment. Many Australian poets, including Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson, have influenced my writing.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Poems are mainly the result of hard work and craft. Some poems seem to come easily, from who knows where, perhaps as a form of inspiration. If there are gods of poetry, I am happy to pay homage to them in this painfully materialistic age.

What prompts a new poem?

My poems are often prompted by a rhythm, a phrase, a word, a feeling, an intuition, or something I’ve read.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

I like to write poetry anywhere at any time. When I was younger, I often sought out a few hours to myself and dawdled intensely with poems in a notebook. Now I often draft new works in the Notes function on my iPhone.

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

I produce anywhere from two drafts to more than a hundred. I work at poems until they seem right. Sometimes this happens over the course of weeks; sometimes over a passage of years.

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

I’d like to talk to the original Gilgamesh poet to better understand that work’s weirdness, or Sappho because of her brilliance at registering the true weight of intimacy, or Thomas Wyatt, who thinks so beautifully in his poetry.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

I’m not sure that poets need a coterie, although in my case sympathetic friends, fellow poets, and trusted confidantes are a wonderful antidote to solitude – and such people are sometimes generative of new work. I certainly need solitude, and continue to search it out.

What have you learned from reviews of your poems?

Some reviewers read my poems in ways that are more interesting than my own readings of them. Some reviews are quirky and enjoyable for their ‘slant’ view of what I have written. Some have taught me about the querulousness of humanity.

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

Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Do you have a favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

I have many favourite lines or couplets. One is: ‘It will not stir for Doctors – / This Pendulum of snow –’ (Dickinson)

Is poetry generally appreciated by the reading public?

Poetry touches people immediately and powerfully at weddings and funerals, and many people continue to read poetry. Although contemporary poetry is often marginalised, it continues to rejuvenate and enliven our language and its meanings, and resist banality.

Paul Hetherington is head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) at the University of Canberra and a founding editor of the journal Axon: Creative Explorations He has published eleven collections of poetry, along with five chapbooks. He won the 2014 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards (poetry), was shortlisted for the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize and commended in the 2016 Newcastle Poetry Prize.

Poetry in Tasmania

Welcome to States of Poetry, a major project intended to highlight the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry. Funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, this is the first nationally arranged poetry anthologies published in this country. All states and the ACT are covered with separate anthologies, each of them edited by a senior poet. The state editors choose six local poets actively publishing new work (up to five poems per poet). The state anthologies appear free of charge on our website, with introductions from the state editors, biographies, and remarks from the individual poets, recordings, and other features. A mini-anthology (one poem per poet) also appears in the print edition. Sarah Day has selected the inaugural Tasmanian anthology. Here is the mini-anthology to accompany the online selection.

Reply from the Women of Tangier

after Brett Whiteley’s The Majestic Hotel, Tangier (1967)

So secretly together do we wear our separateness, we’re so complete he gives us the white stare.

Easy to see decay and disrepair in the spittle and hashish-ruined streets. But secretly together we all wear our place and time, our rightness here, our journey from antiquity. He gives us the white stare and calls us names: the Olive Mafia. We hold our desert gaze, defeat his envy, and secretly together bare our hennaed hands, our loosened hair, our thighs for marriage rites, our feet. He gives us the white stare,

but cannot penetrate the haze, can’t bear our vapour-of-midnight eyes, our heat. So secretly together do we share ourselves, he gives us the white stare.

Louise Oxley

❖

Note: ‘so secretly together’, ‘the Olive Mafia’, and ‘vapour of midnight’ are Whiteley’s phrases, from his Tangier notebooks.

Waking

Note the passive voice in that last line, the denial implied. ‘People were shipped out.’

The agent with a conscious brain linked to a hand with a pen or a gun felt his own grip all along the neural pathways.

Some noises we can sleep through but even the softest can be an alarm. Sailboats in the calmest water are still not swans, not even, despite voyages and size, albatrosses. This can only, however,

be a dream resurgent after eighteen years. Too awake for anything but analysis, a brain will cling in turmoil to whatever rock of clarity presents. ‘This is not happening’ is not a valid option. Imagine:

not the slow comfort of waking from nightmare but its opposite. The colours of no apparent ceremony covered not only skin but politics, history. Most of all they hid the will to act.

Tim Thorne ❖

kangaroo grass

ramayana puppet angled, spare

you gesture with sharp fingers beckoning insistent

eloquent as a mime artist nodding your body

to shadows in weak light each seed head pared

you lure the breeze tethering sky to earth a binding that is pure theatre

Adrienne Eberhard ❖

Bill and Gwen

In Swiftian mood, insisting that The human race would never learn, Was hopeless, doomed, Bill Harwood, pure Logician and philosopher, As well as spouse of poet Gwen,

Proposed a universal ban On sex to end our sorry ways And brought our threesome’s talk on how The world was going to a halt Of the socially awkward kind.

Then magically, as tension grew, As though specifically she knew This impasse would arise, she whipped A book up from her lap and showed, Spread open at the very page,

A photo of a rationalist And his divinely inspired wife, Of Abelard and Heloise, Their mediaeval counterparts As sculpted on a column in

The Conciergerie, Paris, His castrated parts cupped by her Protectively as in a nest, Their stooped backs turned forever on Each other in a bed of stone.

Graeme Hetherington ❖

Where am I?

I am desperate for connection. I must have hit a black spot. The sun is glaring at me and blinding my display screen. All I can see is my own face. Coarse sand has crept between my toes. I have wandered too far. I need to google a map, text someone who will reconnect me. This shell, this sand, the smell of rotting kelp. I poke at dead things with pieces of driftwood. This strange salty wind, seagulls and whale lookout. How can a message washed up in an old bottle compare to my new slate black iPhone?

Karen Knight ❖

On World Heart Day

I notice your scars more than usual –life-saving stuck zippers.

I want to plant kisses like votives along each one:

along the delicate ribbon of light between your extroverted nipples, along the scythe shaped slash de-freckling your right calf.

Hospital flowers bloomed, petals fell in the sterile-fresh air that day.

I wove endearments like chainmail across the terrible divide as miracle drugs fought to save you, leaving demons in their wake.

Somewhere in your addled brain a small piece of trust remained and you gave it to me –love’s indefatigable radar homing in.

That first night home we read Postoperative Delirium over beer and ice cream the way we once read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

With no more to wish for we fell asleep to the tick of your tin man heart.

But they cracked open your breast bone and I cannot think too long on this.

The pressure it took. The precision. The stillness of your heart and lungs.

The machine that breathed for you. The one that brightened your blood.

And the tunnel, that anecdotal tunnel you say you never saw coming

returning you to me like fortune, my light-scarred Lazarus love.

Jane Williams ❖

AUSTRALIAN LITERARY STUDIES edited by Julianne Lamond Available online: www.australianliterarystudies.com.au

Until 2015, Australian Literary Studies was still a printed artefact. It appeared in the mildly erratic pattern endemic to Australian humanities journals, which depend on busy people finding time for the rewarding but often unrewarded task of editing. Nevertheless, despite rising production costs and increasing competition from the online world, it remained impressively extant, with a good number of articles and reviews in each issue. An issue of Australian Literary Studies in 2015 contained about ten articles, probably 100 to 150 pages. The focus of my review then would have been on the content: the editorial choices, the standard of scholarship, the range of topics.

Reviewing an issue of ALS now is quite a different matter. The editor, Julianne Lamond, wrote in early 2016: ‘In taking ALS online, we are doing quite belatedly what many journals have already done.’ They are ‘taking extreme liberties with the definition of a journal issue’. When a couple of articles, or a themed special issue, are ready, they are published online and are available free for at least a month. Thereafter, only those who pay the modest annual subscription (or whose library has subscribed) have access to all 1,000-odd articles from the journal’s fifty-three-year history. ALS can now do things that websites do well, like creating ‘spotlight’ topics and searching across past issues, although the browsing reader can still get lost in a virtual dead end, or stuck in a loop.

And the content? The latest issue, Volume 32.1, has just two articles: Ann-Marie Priest on Gwen Harwood; and Peter Mathews on Tim Winton. They are both readable, well-researched and scholarly. 31.6 is an impressive special issue with a dozen substantial articles on Christina Stead. There is ample proof that the move online has had no adverse effect on editorial standards.

Gillian Dooley

Long shadows

Colin Nettelbeck

LES PARISIENNES: HOW THE WOMEN OF PARIS LIVED, LOVED AND DIED IN THE 1940s by Anne Sebba

Weidenfeld & Nicolson

$32.99 pb, 480 pp, 9781474601733

The eminent French historian

Annette Wieviorka, in The Era of the Witness (1998, English version in 2006), analyses the difficulties arising, in writing historical narratives about recent times, from the exponential growth in the number of people wanting their stories to be heard. Wieviorka, whose field of specialisation is the Shoah, traces the trend of what she calls the ‘democratisation’ of history back to the Eichmann trial of 1960, following it through other celebrated war crimes trials such as those of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and Maurice Papon. Her historiographical point is that, while eyewitness testimony is crucially valuable, it poses inevitable and serious problems in terms of its historical reliability; and when it reaches the volume represented by, say, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archives or the Spielberg Visual History Archives, the task of any single historian mastering the accumulated data becomes simply impossible.

Anne Sebba, in this book whose title pushes every button a literary publicist could possibly desire, has not, despite her own historical training, taken these issues into account. The result is an untidy, frustrating mixture of historical surfing, thoughtfully recounted and pertinent stories, and journalistic gossip. There can be no doubting the author’s passion, nor the work that she has devoted to her project. She draws on a huge range of sources. There are reputable existing historical accounts, including that of Hanna Diamond, whose Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and constraints (1999) has very much the same perspective and time frame as Sebba’s. There are diaries, letters, memoirs, newspaper reports, internet

sites, interviews conducted by the author, and, more rarely, actual archival materials. Such variety is not in itself a problem: what is missing is the critical distance and the careful cross-checking necessary to mould such materials into a consistent, historically convincing overview.

Sebba has the broad lines of the history right, but on the level of detail there are many flaws that raise questions about the solidity of her knowledge. This is particularly obvious in her inadequately informed portrayal of the French cinema industry during the Occupation; and her account of the French government in exile in Sigmaringen is quite misleading. She also, perhaps even more tellingly, given her emphasis on Jewish matters throughout the book, quotes significantly contradictory figures on the percentage of Jews deported from France (pages 197 and 383). Nonetheless, the fiendishly complicated life of the French under Nazi rule is generally well-illustrated and documented: the tangled tensions between the occupied and ‘free’ zones; the attempts to promote, through salons, the arts and fashion, a sense of life going on as usual, despite a climate permeated by fear, material need, and denunciation; the ambiguities of relationships between French women and German soldiers; the shameful French State complicity in the ever-tightening web of humiliation, spoliation, and destruction of France’s Jewish community; the underworld of black marketeers and Gestapo-helpers; the conflicts among different movements of the Resistance; the unassuming courage and sacrifice of many ordinary French people, especially women. Her evocation of the postwar period is patchy, but contains some important insights into why this period remains so fraught in the collective memory of the French: the rush and brutality of the purges, for example, and the encounter between deportees returning to Paris and a resident public unwilling or unable to hear or comprehend the death camp experiences.

Although not the first to draw attention to the ways in which, under Charles de Gaulle and afterwards, women were elided from the early histories of the

Occupation years, particularly in respect to the Resistance, Sebba has drawn together an impressive cast of female figures. It is a significant achievement of her book to remind her readers that all these people belonged to the same world as de Gaulle, Pétain, Jean Moulin, Pierre Laval, and all the other canonical heroes and villains of the time. Some are famous, like Chanel, Piaf, Arletty, Némirovsky and Geneviève de Gaulle. Others, such as Corinne Luchaire, Suzanne Belperron, Violette Morris, Odette Fabius, and Rose Valland, may be less known to readers, but Sebba makes a strong case that their lives should not be forgotten.

All these stories make for a breathless narrative, which often becomes less compelling through its failure to discriminate between hearsay and historical evidence, and between the important and the trivial. Insatiable curiosity about the minutiae of people’s lives does not necessarily lead to historical accuracy or well-balanced books, and Sebba does not help her claim to offer greater understanding by giving more space to Duff Cooper’s Paris dalliances than to the Marshall Plan.

For me, the most engaging and original section of the book is the epilogue, where Sebba reflects on the obstacles to making moral judgements about the period. She notes things still passed over in silence, such as Jewish families whose survival depended on their economic or industrial contributions to the German war effort. She notes the unintended injustice of the French legal distinction between ‘resister’ and ‘victim’ deportees: the latter, mostly Jewish, receiving less respect and less compensation. She notes the nobility of Geneviève de Gaulle’s postwar work with Father Joseph Wresinski in founding the ‘Fourth World’ movement to eradicate world poverty. All this takes her, and her readers, beyond the learned history and the gossip, into a meditation on the deep ambivalences of human nature and the terrible, long shadows of war. g

Colin Nettelbeck is an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisholm Chair of French.

Antipodes

Suzy Freeman-Greene

THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL: A 20TH CENTURY MEMOIR

by Judith Buckrich

Lauranton

Books

$30 pb, 420 pp, 9780994250728

It is rare to read a memoir as joyfully insouciant about sex as Judith Buckrich’s The Political Is Personal. She describes the delicious state of discovering it, at seventeen, as ‘a sex haze’. At nineteen, she has an intense, darkeyed boyfriend but is also sleeping with Morry, whose chief merit is his staying power in bed. ‘Once, to prove the point, he read a book while fucking me,’ she writes. ‘Somehow we both found this hilarious.’ A year later, when she is engaged to Charles, her friend David climbs into bed with them, ‘wearing a new pair of red flannel pyjamas that left a red stain forever on our sheets.’

Marriage is a far less pleasurable activity. She weds Charles, a handsome American, in April 1970, in Melbourne. By October they have split up. Her second marriage in 1988, to a Hungarian social worker, has the air of a train wreck before the vows are exchanged. ‘As the date of our wedding drew closer,’ she confides, ‘I really wondered if I had lost my mind.’ It happens anyway and Buckrich falls pregnant. Later, she learns that while she was in hospital recovering from their daughter’s birth, her husband was sleeping with another woman.

Buckrich has had a peripatetic life, writing plays, journalism, and nonfiction books; teaching and translating.

She has lived in Budapest, Chicago, and, mostly, Melbourne. Her Hungarian-born father, Anti, emigrated to the United States in 1929 and became a communist. He returned to Hungary in 1948, after advertising for a wife. Her mother, Erika, who answered the ad, was a young Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. The two married, had Judith in 1950, and moved to Melbourne when she was eight.

Their first year in Australia was ‘terrible’. Erika left Anti for another man. (They later reconciled, but the marriage was unhappy.) Judith, who spoke no English, was punished at school for not knowing the answers to questions. Throughout her childhood, Anti drank too much. ‘I was very young, probably only three-years-old,’ she reports, ‘when I first stepped in front of Erika to stop Dad from hitting her in a drunken rage.’ As Judith grew into an exuberant young woman, she increasingly lived a double life, especially after Anti slapped her during an argument.

Buckrich tells us she never really knew her father. Nor, unfortunately, does the reader get much of a sense of him. The first section of the book, outlining her parents’ stories, is strangely unmoving. Part of the problem is that it lacks their voices. We read, for instance, of a postcard Anti sent to his sister, but there are no direct quotes from it. Later, we are told, ‘my mother says that I was a sweet little girl’. Clearly, Buckrich has interviewed Erika, so why don’t we hear more from her? Instead, the author rushes from one event to another. Potentially poignant scenes are not fleshed out.

Buckrich’s brisk, confessional tone works better when depicting her own adventures in the 1970s and 1980s. Things pick up for the reader when she moves to Chicago in 1971 to stay with her cousin. Her portrait here of a trusting young woman from suburban Melbourne thrust into Chicago’s Near North Side is compelling. The pair live near a tavern where gunshots are sometimes heard. She goes swimming in Lake Michigan: it contains dead fish and broken glass. She is scared all the time. There is a dreadful account of

Buckrich learning that her cousin has been raped.

Back in Melbourne, Buckrich studies drama and media studies at Rusden State College and helps organise public consciousness-raising sessions called ‘Sexuality and Ourselves’. A feminist who finds monogamy overrated, she plunges into new liaisons, jobs, households, creative projects, and political activities. In contrast to her father’s generation, she writes, ‘we considered our enjoyment part of changing the world’. I enjoyed the glimpses of 1970s counter-cultural life here: from Gembrook hippies in their ‘dull brown jumpers of raw wool’ to the image of Buckrich and the pale, thin writer–musician Sam Sejavka (another lover), wandering naked on the beach at Koo Wee Rup.

In 1978, Anti dies. Buckrich describes learning of her father’s death, and farewelling his body, in one paragraph. (‘His jaw had been tied closed, and he was very white and cold.’) For the amateur psychologist, the most memorable aspect of this account is the photo she has chosen to place beside it in the book. It is an image of Buckrich that was projected on a screen in her first show at Carlton’s La Mama Theatre, the following year. She is naked, save for a pair of silver, knee-high boots and a silver strap criss-crossing her torso.

After a lively section on her return to Budapest and a segue into the writing of her books (mostly local histories and the biography of a science fiction writer), The Political Is Personal peters out with an account of Buckrich’s recent travels as chair of the PEN International Women Writers’ Committee. It is disappointing that the memoir of someone who advocated so vigorously on the part of authors is so uneven. It could have used a tough editor: someone to urge Buckrich to play around with the linear narrative, more fully describe key moments, and axe the chapters on her holidays. Still, Buckrich’s intimate, unsentimental voice is appealing. There is something bracing about her company when she’s living at full tilt. g

Suzy Freeman-Greene is the Arts and Culture editor of The Conversation

Besieged

John Eldridge

ON FANTASY ISLAND: BRITAIN, EUROPE AND HUMAN RIGHTS

by Conor Gearty

Oxford University Press

$38.95 hb, 256 pp, 9780198787631

Although easy to miss amid the commotion of Brexit, Britain’s Human Rights Act (1998) is locked in a fight for its life. Besieged by a hostile press and beholden to a government that has pledged its repeal and replacement, its days are almost certainly numbered. It is against this fraught backdrop that Conor Gearty’s On Fantasy Island: Britain, Europe and human rights comes to the Act’s defence. In a spirited and wide-ranging rejoinder to its critics, Gearty restates the case for the Human Rights Act and explodes the myths that have fuelled its unpopularity.

Exploded too are the stifling conventions of legal writing. In opening with a clear-eyed account of the injustices sanctioned by the courts prior to the Human Rights Act, Gearty takes aim against a lecture delivered by John Finnis, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford and one of the storied eminences of modern jurisprudence. Gearty’s gently irreverent treatment of Finnis sets the tone for what is an energetic, conversational foray into law and politics, unmarked by the heavyhanded deference to which lawyers are too often prone.

On Fantasy Island is divided between an examination of ‘fantasies’, ‘facts’, and ‘future’, but it is at its best when putting paid to the misconceptions which have grown up around the Human Rights Act, and it is to this first task that Gearty devotes the bulk of his attention. Many of these myths stem from the apprehension that the Act has effected a judicial usurpation of Parliament’s power for the benefit of criminals and terrorists, and, accordingly, Gearty is at pains to give an account of the Act’s true scope, including the limited powers it has conferred on judges.

In their strongest form, human rights instruments empower courts to strike down legislation which is found to infringe protected rights. Instruments of this type – an exemplar of which is the Bill of Rights enforced by the Supreme Court of the United States – confer a great deal of power upon judges, inevitably at the expense of other branches of the state. As Gearty explains, however, the Human Rights Act belongs to a different category. The Act confers on British judges the responsibility to interpret legislation, so far as is possible, so that it is compatible with the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, but it withholds from the courts any power to strike down Acts of Parliament. In fact, if a court is presented with legislation which cannot be made to yield a rights-compatible meaning, the only step available under the Human Rights Act is to make a ‘declaration of incompatibility’, the issuing of which has no effect whatsoever on the legislation’s validity. As Gearty highlights, the gap between the true state of affairs and the contentions levelled at the Act by its detractors could hardly be more stark.

Australia is, of course, no stranger to debates on the subject of human rights. Among the many initiatives of the frenetic early years of the first Rudd government was the National Human Rights Consultation, chaired by Frank Brennan and charged with investigating means by which human rights might better be protected in Australia. Though the Consultation’s final report recommended the adoption of a federal Human Rights Act, Australia today still lacks a national human rights instrument, and commentators remain divided on the need for one. For those who believe Australia ought to introduce such a reform at a national level, the developments recounted by Gearty may well prove disquieting. Yet there are good reasons to doubt that an antipodean human rights instrument would have the same fate as its British cousin. Perhaps the most heartening evidence is the fact that there are already human rights instruments operating in Victoria and the ACT, both of which share some features with the Human Rights Act, neither of

which has been met with the popular backlash witnessed in Britain. Part of the difference may lie in the role which the Human Rights Act accords to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The fact that British judges are required to ‘take into account’ the decisions of this European court when applying the Act may well, as Gearty suggests, sit uneasily alongside the nowprevailing mood of Euroscepticism.

If On Fantasy Island has a weakness, it lies in Gearty’s unduly optimistic prediction as to what would follow in the wake of the repeal of the Human Rights Act. For Gearty, the Act ‘may well have been the ladder that allowed the common law to ascend to its current ethical heights but it is not necessary to it remaining in the lofty position it now occupies’. Though it is doubtless true to say that courts would do all they could to fill the void left by the Act’s repeal, there are – as any Australian lawyer can attest – real limits to what judge-made law can achieve in the field of human rights protection.

Gearty’s uncommon gift for the distillation of complex legal ideas, allied with a deft and engaging style, make for an eminently readable account of an important point of public policy. This is a perceptive, humane book; it ought to be read by anyone with a concern for the practical protection of human rights. g

John Eldridge is a Lecturer at the Sydney Law School, University of Sydney. He has worked in the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law. ❖

BEHIND THE TEXT: CANDID CONVERSATIONS WITH AUSTRALIAN CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITERS

by Sue Joseph Hybrid Publishers

$29.95 pb, 270 pp, 9781925272475

What’s in a name? Academic Sue Joseph interviews eleven Australian non-fiction writers, a varied group which includes Paul McGeough, Doris Pilkington Garimara, and Kate Holden. Joseph is on a quest to uncover whether Australian ‘creative non-fiction’ exists here, as it does in other countries, and to understand what the term signifies to her subjects.

Either way, she has been warned off. Three notable writers of what Joseph would argue constitutes this genre disagree with its existence and declined the invitation: David Marr, Helen Garner, and Chloe Hooper. Indeed, many of her interviewees reject the label. But Joseph strives to be a ‘champion’ of this area.

Throughout the book Joseph employs traditional features of the genre; inserting herself into the text and outlining geographic context. Greg Bearup says of his travel memoir Caravanastan (2009), ‘it couldn’t have just been us driving around and interviewing people ... we had to be characters in the book’. Whilst the author of Behind the Text does not resile from asking personal questions, one has the sense that she is somewhat reticent about revealing herself in any substantial way.

One of the book’s highlights is a conversation with acclaimed non-fiction writer and journalist Margaret Simons; a skilled ‘meta-narrative’ such as Joseph espouses. Both Simons and John Dale, identify the book’s main audience by noting that the creative non-fiction label resonates chiefly for the academy and its students.

Other readers might be actively dissuaded from approaching this collection because of the central argument regarding nomenclature and its usage of a particular footnoting style. That would be a pity: there is a plethora of life and writing experience contained within these pages, enough to engage a diverse audience.

Tali Lavi

AFTER by Nikki Gemmell Fourth Estate

$29.95 pb, 300 pp, 9780999162316

In 2015, Nikki Gemmell’s mother, Elayn, took an overdose of painkillers. Gemmell’s new book, After, chronicles the difficult process of confronting her mother’s death and resolving the anguish it brought to her and her children. It is also an impassioned appeal for changes in Australia’s laws on the right to die.

As the book begins, Gemmell and her brother prepare to identify their mother at the morgue. The tone is intense and immediate, apparently written close to the event: ‘So I write, in an attempt to understand … I can do nothing else … right now.’ We follow Gemmell through every stage of this painful journey. She recounts her dealings with various officials and counsellors (mostly female) with gratitude. The memories of a fraught relationship with her mother are harder to confront. Elayn perhaps lacked the gift of motherliness. She was uncompromising in her determination to be true to herself, but had trouble allowing her daughter the same freedom. The decision to end her struggle with unremitting pain without involving her family can be, and is, seen in many different lights: an act of bravery, or a betrayal; selfishness or self-sacrifice. She had consulted Philip Nitschke, so Gemmell contacts him to find out more about her mother’s last wishes. She comes to realise her mother’s solitary death was dictated by Australia’s laws: ‘If the … family cannot, by law, be involved … you’re condemning that person to a horrendously bleak and lonely death.’Gemmell devotes twenty pages of her book to responses to one of her regular newspaper columns, all sharing similar experiences. Short sentences, short paragraphs and sentence fragments convey Gemmell’s struggle to deal honestly with this distressing subject. After a while, the mannered rhythms of her prose begin to irritate and to leach it of its initial impact.

Gillian Dooley

HAMILTON HUME: OUR GREATEST EXPLORER by

Robert Macklin

Hachette

$32.99 pb, 352 pp, 9780733634055

Robert Macklin is a great admirer of Hamilton Hume (1797–1873). He paints a vivid, scholarly picture of one of Australia’s lesser-known ‘currency’ explorers: a man who spent his youth hiking in the bush, with his brother and an Aboriginal guide, as often as his mother would allow. Hume was a successful farmer, able bushman and an expert on Aboriginal customs and languages. It was these skills that led to Hume’s being invited on expeditions to find arable land. These journeys were successful: land and water were found, and Hume’s teams returned alive and without the bloodshed which occurred in later expeditions, where the leaders lacked Hume’s linguistic skills and cultural understanding.

Macklin has researched his topic thoroughly and has woven fascinating details about the expeditions into the biography, including the convict who lay in the dirt to avoid continuing on; the fellow explorer who took Hume’s tent; the stock the teams took with them; the insects that bit them; and the methods they devised for crossing water. Macklin also provides fascinating detail of the events in Hume’s lifetime, such as the Gold Rush and the bushranger period.

I had only one quibble with the author: the use of the word ‘discovered’ throughout the text, especially the subtitle, ‘the man who discovered Australia’s greatest rivers and richest farmlands’. To discover implies that the places were previously unknown. They were most definitely known to the Aboriginal people who lived in or nearby them. Perhaps ‘located’ would have been a better choice of words. Hume found the lands because he, being a remarkable linguist of Aboriginal languages and culturally sensitive, consulted with the people who lived in the lands he was travelling through.

Katy Gerner

ABR Arts

Michael Morley at the 2017 Adelaide Festival

Theatre

Ian Dickson

Chimerica (Sydney Theatre Company)

Film

Anwen Crawford

Manchester by the Sea (Universal Pictures)

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.

Theatre

Susan Lever

Richard 3 (Bell Shakespeare)

Rachel Healy, Barrie Kosky, and Neil Armfield at the 2017 Adelaide Festival (photograph by William Yang)

Richard 3

by Susan Lever

The stage is open – a glossy art deco drawing room with plush velvet chairs and a chaise longue, cocktail glasses, and champagne for a party. An engaging young man, dressed formally in a three-piece suit, steps onstage and begins the famous speech: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York ...’

Of course, the young man is played by a woman, but that is forgotten in an instant as Kate Mulvany looks us in the eye and invites us to conspire with Shakespeare’s manipulative villain. At the end of Richard’s declaration of intent, the other players come on stage dressed for a formal party, some of them shaking frenetically; they sit or stand still in tableaux until their time comes to act. For the rest of the play they will be trapped on the stage, stepping forward to speak as one or other participant, re-arranging the coffee tables for Henry VI’s coffin, shifting the chaise longue so that Clarence can be murdered there, making marginal adjustments to their costumes to indicate the shift from courtier to murderer or lord mayor.

This is Richard III as a parlour game, and it draws out the game-playing at the heart of the play. Richard performs himself or, rather, a woman performs a man at a party playing Richard, who performs any role that will suit his purposes. The audience is privy to the game from the beginning, and Richard keeps us informed of his strategies. There is one moment when the roles are stripped back, as Mulvany takes off her shirt, jacket, and trousers, revealing to the audience the evidence of the spinal deformity she shares with the original Richard. It is a material sign of Richard’s sense of deprivation, of illstarred birth, cutting through the layers of performance with a touch of reality. Then we notice that the black busts on shelves along the back wall are moulds of this back.

As the actors double or triple their roles, you realise how many characters are dispatched in this play; others may enter only to perform the dispatching. Only Richard, Buckingham, and the queens – Margaret, Elizabeth, and the duchess of York – remain stable. While Mulvany relishes every witty line given to Richard, and delivers

them with gusto, it is Sandy Gore as Queen Margaret who stops the show. For most of the play she sits quietly watching the party, but her cursing speech in Act I takes one’s breath away. Gore delivers it slowly and deliberately, making sure that every vicious word hits home. Richard’s attempt to laugh it away fails dismally.

And so Richard’s plotting and planning encounters Margaret’s curse, a rival narrative that ultimately outlasts him. The vengeful women, lamenting their lost husbands and sons, win out against the childless man who feels no bond to anyone but himself. But at what a cost! Meredith Penman’s Queen Elizabeth moves from glamorous hauteur to dishevelled despair as she rails against the murderer.

This is Richard III as a parlour game, and it draws out the gameplaying at the heart of the play

Most modern productions of Richard III find it necessary to cut this long play. Here, the cuts are to the number of children at stake – only Prince Edward (not his brother and cousin) is sent to his fate in the Tower. There is no playful scene where Richard acts the fond uncle, teased by his nephews, before his heartless instructions for their murder. Instead of a sudden moment when the audience must abandon any residual sympathy for Richard, his movement into damnation is a steady progress. While the audience may laugh at his outwitting of Lady Anne, or his deception of his brothers, his cunning grows more appalling and more insidious as his power grows. Remember how amusing Donald Trump was until he came to power?

Peter Evans’s decision to dispense with set changes and to minimise stage business leaves us with the language and abundant imagery of this rich and ever-renewable play. Every actor delivers the lines clearly, with an understanding of their meaning. Like the wonderful reading of The Great Gatsby performed by New York’s Elevator Repair Service a few years ago, this production shows how quickly the immediate world can be transcended by committed and confident performance of some of the cleverest writing in the language.

Much of the publicity about this production has centred on Kate Mulvany, her lopsided spine, and the rarity of a woman playing Richard (though Pamela Rabe did it for Benedict Andrews’s War of the Roses in 2009). Richard III has been a ‘star’ vehicle for the likes of Laurence Olivier, Antony Sher, and Kevin Spacey. In this incarnation, it becomes an ensemble piece for a group of talented actors. Mulvany leads them with unflagging energy. It is spell-binding. g

Richard 3 (Bell Shakespeare) continues at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Sydney until 1 April, Canberra from 6–15 April, and Melbourne 20 April–7 May 2017. Performance attended: 2 March.

Susan Lever is a Sydney critic.

Adelaide Festival

by Michael Morley

If one accepts the aptness of the old adage ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’, the range of pictorial delights offered by Barrie Kosky’s production of Handel’s oratorio Saul (1739) () would test my editor’s word limit.

The stage teems with vivid tableaux: one moment, swirling crowds of chorus and soloists; the next, stark, austere images of isolated characters in a deserted, Learlike or Beckettian landscape; the next, exuberant juxtapositions of quasi-Hollywood dance numbers choreographed for a wonderful sextet of dancers and an astonishingly well-drilled large chorus. And it all contributes to an unforgettable evening of music, and musical theatre, the like of which – apart from Robyn Archer’s two festivals (1998 and 2000) – has rarely been seen in Adelaide since, well, Kosky’s own festival of 1996.

Back then, audiences marvelled at the Batsheva Dance Company; the haunting and evocative Whirling Dervishes; the exuberant theatricality of the Maly Theatre’s Gaudeamus; and the spell-binding combination of music and image in Hotel pro Forma’s Operation Orfeo. It is not drawing too long a bow to link the distinctive yet complementary qualities of those productions with Kosky’s own fondness for, and command of, a theatrical language which combines all their elements.

The opening twenty minutes of this production are worth the price of admission on their own. After three linked overture numbers, performed in darkness, a spotlight gradually illuminates downstage centre a large object that turns out to be the severed head of Goliath. Then, suddenly, the stage explodes into life with an unforgettable image of a large, stage-spanning white table upstage occupied by the chorus, stands of flowers, and the odd carcass of slaughtered animals – all contributing to the swarming festive atmosphere.

The State Opera chorus has seldom been seen, or heard, to better effect. They play a central role in Kosky’s staging of the work, being required to perform drilled movements, hieratic gestures, expressions of attitude to the events swirling round them, and, oh yes, of course, sing as well. I am sure it’s not giving away a directorial

secret when I say that one of the major instructions to the chorus from their director was that they deliver the text ‘like golden bullets’.

Charles Jennens’s (at times somewhat recalcitrant) text is certainly one of Kosky’s major focuses – not just its delivery, but its translation into stage action, attitude, and gesture. To be sure, some of the singers handle this more confidently and idiomatically than others: foremost here being Christopher Purves’s superlative Saul, Christopher Lowrey’s spirited David, and the High Priest/Abner/Amalekite/beruffled quasi-conferencier figure of Stuart Jackson.

But for all the unexpected departures from the original biblical story that Handel’s intriguing adaptation incorporates, and the difficulties his text must have posed for the director, the production only rarely betrays its original, somewhat static oratorial origins. There are moments in the first half when the quasi-domestic scenes between Saul, his daughters Merab and Michal (the first of whom he offers to David in reward for his defeat of the Philistines, only for her to scorn him, while David himself is much more attracted to the other sister), and his son Jonathan threaten to outstay their da capo welcomes.

Elsewhere in the production, Kosky’s and his inventive choreographer, Otto Pichler’s, handling of these hallmark ingredients of baroque opera never resorts to camp or overcooked bits of busy business, but always accommodates the musical essence of the scenes. At one moment the chorus sing so many alleluiahs that one expects the massed choirs of the Lord’s angels to wake and join them on the Festival Theatre stage: but the staging of this moment (and so many more like it) takes the breath away in its attention to the theatrical and musical realisation.

And while the eye is captivated by Katrin Lea Tag’s astonishing set design – which essentially amounts to not much more than the abovementioned long table (which turns out to be two) and a carpet of black-grey artificial dirt spread over the entire stage – and her ravishing costumes, which look as if they have sprung from a series of scenes from a Hogarth flipbook as they might have been coloured in by, say, Watteau, the ear revels in the realisation of the score in the hands of baroque expert Erin Helyard and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Among the soloists, Purves and Lowrey stand out for their musicianship and shaping of the line: the latter’s delivery of the two words ‘O King’ offers the most beautiful, powerful, and penetrating sound I have heard on an operatic stage from a counter-tenor since the days of the great James Bowman. Mary Bevan’s Merab is forceful and stylishly sung; Taryn Fiebig produces the notes beautifully, though I was at times left wondering whether she was singing in another language; Kanen Breen excels in his cameo as The Witch of Endor; and, while Adrian Strooper copes well enough with the middle and top of Jonathan’s demanding vocal line, he is too often barely audible in the lower register.

What this production offers the audience is an astonishing series of images, always linked to the music and the stage action, never blandly repetitive: the first act opening with its accumulation of what another theatre composer has called ‘colour and light’; the second presenting a stage dotted with dozens of candles piercing the blackness; and throughout, an orchestra always responsive to the music’s requirement of crisp rhythms, clear textures, and carefully gauged shifts of mood and tempi.

Along with the spectacular offerings at this year’s Adelaide Festival, there are a number of smallscale, one-person shows which, in their concentration on the essence of theatre – what Eric Bentley describes as ‘A impersonates B while C looks on’ – can, perhaps, engage the audience’s imagination even more powerfully.

Foremost among these is Danny Braverman’s touching, gently humorous, and captivating Wot? No Fish!! () which presents the tale of his great-uncle’s astonishing collection of lost art: dozens and dozens of sketches and cartoons, drawn on pay packets during his working life as a shoemaker in the East End. I saw this show previously at the Sydney Festival and was determined to catch it again, just to be reminded of how authenticity and (only seeming) artlessness can, through a brilliant performer, present theatre which charms, moves, and, yes, inspires.

In essence, and along with all its other qualities, this show is a masterclass in how to combine the performer’s two basic tasks: storyteller and actor. And what stories: from the hilarious images from the early years of his uncle’s and aunt’s marriage; through the deeply moving account of one of their son’s long internment in a mental asylum; to the final, haunting portrait of them walking into the distance. Braverman’s deft use of the stage space, his casual occupying of, and shifting between, two basic performance areas, and his careful presentation of pictures from several lives, is something to marvel at only later. At the time, we are just enchanted by the journey.

join other, previous subjects on the hawker’s tray he carries at his waist as he goes from village to town, offering his travelling exhibition.

Once again, Gerling’s ability to establish a persona is remarkable. He speaks English throughout – fluent and idiomatic, and seemingly off the cuff: actually it’s carefully, deftly scripted, without ever appearing so. And as he places the flipbooks under a projector and thumbs through them to give the impression of a monochrome cartoon or silent film, the audience starts to believe that they may know the subjects almost as well as he does.

And what subjects, what photos: the beautiful young Swiss girl with freckles and her anxiety about them; a shot of a man in a hat revisiting a railway track where, decades earlier, as a child, he buried a dead white mouse. In this case, the pre-publicity has it absolutely right: ‘art could not be quieter, simpler or more beautiful’.

There is another, essentially one-man show featuring prominently at the Festival: unfortunately, it could be described in none of the terms above. Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III (), which naïve theatregoers might think a large-scale play, is here reduced to an over-the-top, one-man turn from Lars Eidinger. Oh, there is a supporting cast of eight, some of whom double, and a drummer, who brought noise levels in the theatre to new heights of pain and suffering.

Christopher Purves as Saul at the 2017 Adelaide Festival (photograph by Tony Lewis)

Ostermeier is on record as declaring that he ‘finds this play to be more about the power of language than [Richard’s] cruelty or physical violence’. Hard to equate this with one of the more non-iambic textual moments of the performance. When it popped up on the surtitle screen, I must confess I did spend a second scrolling through my own recollection of quotes from the play before deciding it had to be an add-on. Those of a gentle and Shakespearian disposition should read no further: from memory the lines run: ‘You look like shit. Have you eaten any pussy today?’ And, of course, the audience was invited to join in. I think that’s called appealing to the groundlings. g

Which is also the case with Volker Gerling’s equally, (apparently) unassuming journey through Germany, and his engagement with an array of figures whom he encounters on the way. Since 2002, when he set off on a summer walk from Berlin to Basel, Gerling has been making photographic flipbook portraits of the people he meets. Over the course of the relaxed yet beguiling seventy-five minutes of Portraits in Motion (), he introduces them to us, and to his own accounts of how he persuades his subjects to agree to have their photos taken, and to subsequently

Saul , composed by George Frideric Handel and directed by Barrie Kosky, was performed at the Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre from 3 to 9 March 2017. Performance attended: 3 March. Wot? No Fish!! ran from 3–7 March at the AC Arts Main Theatre. Portraits in Motion ran from 5–19 March at the Radford Auditorium, Art Gallery of South Australia. Richard III ran from 3–9 March at Her Majesty’s Theatre.

Michael Morley is Emeritus Professor of Drama at Flinders University.

Letter from Paris by Lee Christofis

The idea of visiting Paris to see six exhibitions and two repeats in five days may seem excessive to some people, but Paris’s museum offerings this northern winter were so impressive it was impossible to resist. At Frank Gehry’s lofty Fondation Louis Vuitton, hordes lined up in temperatures of five below, to see Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection from Russia. It was much the same at the Centre Pompidou, which is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year with huge retrospectives of Cy Twombly and René Magritte, fifty exhibitions and performances in forty French cities, and its single outpost, Malaga. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, thirty-somethings when they designed the Pompidou, are now international icons.

The trigger for this journey was Bakst: des Ballets Russes à la haute couture at the Palais Garnier, a charming exhibition honouring the 150th birthday of Léon Bakst (1866–1924), the first famous designer of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Bakst’s most celebrated ballets are the erotic, Oriental fantasy Shéhérazade (1910) and the sun-dappled L’Après midi d’un faune ( Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), both starring the incomparable Nijinsky. At the première of Shéhérazade, with its jade-green curtain splashed with musk roses, and dancers dressed in an avalanche of jewel-coloured silks and tissue of silver, Bakst became an overnight star. Poet D’Annunzio said Bakst was ‘a magician of colours’, and couturier Paul Poiret promptly offered Bakst twelve thousand

francs for designs for twelve gowns. Bakst accepted with gleeful incredulity.

A colour theorist, portraitist, and illustrator, who first worked with Diaghilev on Mir Isskustva (World of Art) magazine in St Petersburg while he designed classical Greek plays, Bakst was not allowed to live permanently in Russia; he was Jewish, and from Belarus. Thanks to an aristocratic patronage, he went to Paris to study. There he met the Nabis painters, whose Symbolist interests and fragmentary, flat-colour grouping greatly influenced his designs for ballet, theatre, pantomime, interiors, and fashion. Bakst’s success with Shéhérazade was exceptional, as was his Faune design; Nijinsky asked him to condense the ballet to the front of the stage, in order to create the impression that his Faune ballet was a moving frieze. The result was magical. It was disappointing, then, that no attempt was made to explain just how Bakst’s flat, gorgeously painted set pictures were technically translated for the stage, a significant aspect of Bakst’s craftsmanship. Two film clips were not enough. Even more disappointing was the flimsy content illustrating Bakst’s influence on fashion; it felt like an afterthought, or a promotion for the handsome, generously illustrated catalogue.

My choice at the Pompidou was Cy Twombly, cleanly laid out across half of the museum’s top floor; René Magritte occupies the rest. Cy Twombly was intellectually exciting, and tantalising in the sense that Twombly’s art is an inner life writ large, even when his subject matter seems inscrutable. The first room shows the early 1950s Lexington paintings, creamy house paint scored by wax crayons. A strong sense of order-in-chaos here implies Twombly’s ‘arrival’, a status that gives way in the next room to the humbler, intrinsic practices of childhood. First up, in the student work Still Life ( Black Mountain College ), 1951, is a simple arrangements of objects (à la Morandi) on a dusty shelf, captured in six monochrome photographs. Next is a series of joyously coloured crayon loops on graph paper, Untitled (Grottaferrata), 1957; and last, fields of lanky figures drawn with incredible freedom, on brown wrapping paper. These early works represent fundamental practices of Twombly’s life’s work, along with the rough scribbling, graffiti, cryptic scrawl, and scraping pencil marks that made him an

Léon Bakst, program for the seventeenth season of the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1912 (BnF, département de la Musique, Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra)

undefinable figure from the start. Twombly’s adoption of oil paint led to energetic layering and, in his last years, ebullient colour used on a monumental scale.

Twombly told one interviewer that painting for him was not so much a conscious intention but an experience. He described sitting for hours looking at a canvas, smoking lots, forgetting to eat, until in one bound he would throw himself into work for hours, until he couldn’t stand up. This sounds like method acting, physical theatre, or, in current parlance, embodied theatre, where mind and body are one.

Such energy is palpable in the 1962 work Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus, and its companion, Vengeance of Achilles, drawn from Homer’s Iliad, which Twombly revisits for the series Fifty Days at Iliam in 1978. In another thoughtfully lit, colonnaded space, silence prevails over canvases inscribed with genitals, blood, and lists of names of all the players in the Trojan War. They look like defaced, bloodied posters, or vandalised grave stones, alarming in their rage and grief; you could almost feel Twombly operating as a dramaturge, leading us to revisit the script, to feel the repetitious rhythms of history.

A parallel series is Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), based on the psychopathic Roman emperor Aurelius Commodus. The mostly turbulent expressionist pictures on grey ground created in the unsettled period after John F. Kennedy’s assassination brought New York’s critics down on Twombly’s head; they accused him of artistic regression in the face of Minimalism and Pop Art, and of disloyalty to the United States. Twombly retreated to Rome, immersed himself in centuries of European literature, and embarked on an iconic fifty-year career.

A new spring of energy dominates Twombly’s final decade’s works (he died in 2011) – exuberant canvases, some many metres high and long, loaded with bright red or green paint, circle upon circle, blossom upon blossom, affirming life in his self-confessed optimistic way. The entire show is hypnotic and surprisingly moving. The catalogue is excellent, and will be available in English later this month.

Before going to see Arnold Schoenberg: Peindre l’âme (Paint the Soul) at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism in the Marais, I spent the misty morning at the Musée Rodin with the ‘plasters’ of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, and the twisted figures from The Gates of Hell, their charred, metal infrastructure poking through. Later, looking at the ‘final’ bronzes in the gardens, we decided we needed warmth.

Arnold Schoenberg, this most intellectually agile, Jewish-Viennese composer and theorist, taught himself to paint at the age of thirty-two. His fame and infamy grew out of the clashing contrasts between his late Romantic works like Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), the modernist song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, and his creation of the twelve-tone or atonal music method of composition. Consistent belligerence from Viennese critics, and unmasked anti-Semitism, created a situation

so demoralising that Schoenberg moved to Berlin in 1901, where he found more sympathetic audiences and colleagues. At the age of forty-two he began to paint self-portraits as part of an existential investigation; but increasingly, in the face of despair, and his wife’s infidelity, his practice became psychoanalytical.

Supported in this most gemütlich and satisfying show by portraits of relatives, friends like Schiele and Kandinsky, documents, recorded music, and cartoons lambasting music critics, Schoenberg’s self-portraits are shocking. At their darkest, he is just a half-profile on the edge of the canvas; a small face lost in a cloud of grass; a head almost buried in the ground. Often the eyes are luminous, bloody, or sulphurous with pain and terror. In sunnier later pictures, he appears restored, healthy, but watchful. Schoenberg and his second wife escaped to Los Angeles after Hitler came to power in 1933. Schoenberg’s music was among the ‘degenerate art’ Hitler was determined to eradicate.

Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy St Petersburg textile merchant, also had to flee the worst waves of antiSemitism that flared up in their later years. Having amassed his collection of 275 works of art between 1898 and 1915, Shchukin quietly closed up his home, the Trubetskoy Palace, and escaped across Europe to Paris in 1918. The Soviet authorities ‘nationalised’ his collection along with that of the Muscovite Ivan Morosov. After the death in 1953 of Stalin, who wanted the two collections destroyed, they were divided haphazardly between the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, where they now reside.

Since it opened last October, an appropriately festive atmosphere seems to have pervaded Icons of Modern Art at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and rightly so: many of the 175 works on show have not been seen outside Russia since Shchukin bought them. It is impossible to comment on them all here; suffice it to say that luxurious immersion in seven major Monets, wonderful Pisarros, Bonnards, and Cézannes, and rooms devoted to Picasso, Gauguin, and Matisse (about half of Shchukin’s thirty-eight works by the artist), make the experience almost too much to take in. Unpretentious wall texts and life-sized photographs help us to understand how the collection was created and hung in Shchukin’s home, ‘improved’ by Matisse himself. From 1908, Shchukin opened his home gratis to the public on Sunday afternoons, personally and happily showing the visitors around.

A surprise addition to my list was a small, exquisite example of curatorship – Rembrandt intime (Rembrandt in Confidence) at the elegant Jacquemart-André house museum – built around three important pictures in its own collection. Quietly illustrating the stages in Rembrandt’s growth as an artist, this show reminded me that no one can ever know enough about any artist. g

Lee Christofis writes on dance, music, and design.

Searching for traces

A new life of Paul Robeson

Andrew Fuhrmann

NO WAY BUT THIS: IN SEARCH OF PAUL ROBESON

by Jeff Sparrow

Scribe, $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925321852

Is it surprising that Jeff Sparrow should write a book on Paul Robeson, the great American singer who was also a civil rights activist, a man of the left, and the most celebrated Othello of the twentieth century? Sparrow is a broadcaster and columnist, but he is also the immediate past editor of Overland, a literary journal dedicated to a mixed diet of – as Billy Bragg might say – pop and progressive politics, a magazine where reports on workers’ rights sit next to think pieces on Kanye West and the 2020 presidential election.

So why not write about Paul Robeson? He was, after all, at one time the most famous African American entertainer on the planet: almost the Kanye of his generation. Indeed, Robeson’s excess of talent still boggles the mind. The son of an escaped slave, he was a football star, a formidable orator, a virtuoso linguist, and a singer and actor of immense power. He fundamentally changed the way the world looked at black performers on stage, and to a lesser extent, on screen. When he played Othello in London in 1930, opposite Peggy Ashcroft, it was the first time that a non-white had played Othello in London since Ira Aldridge in 1825. He reprised the role in 1943 on Broadway with Uta Hagen in a production that still holds the record for the longest-running Shakespeare production in the United States. He was also an impassioned socialist with an instinctive sympathy for the underdog. He campaigned tirelessly for racial equality and the rights of working men and women everywhere. He was an uncompromising opponent of fascism,

and toured Spain during the Civil War, singing for Republican troops at Tarazona and in hospitals at Murcia and Benicàssim.

To tell this story – or partially tell it – Sparrow scampers around the world, visiting the places Paul Robeson visited, using key moments in the great man’s life to reflect on a clutch of contemporary hot-button political and cultural issues. From Harlem to London, Cardiff to Barcelona, and then Moscow, Sparrow stays in the same hotels that Robeson stayed in and walks the same streets, searching for traces of a lost spirit, as if there were salvation in emulation.

He visits Robeson’s childhood home near Princeton and discovers that the

area no longer seems so run-down or poor. Much has changed for African Americans since Robeson was a boy, but some changes have only ensured that things stay the same. In 1850 there were nearly 900,000 adult men enslaved in America; today, almost one million African American males languish in jail.

‘To put it another way,’ writes Sparrow, ‘more black people were deprived of their liberty in the twenty-first century than at the height of slavery, a comparison absolutely astonishing and deeply depressing.’

Sparrow stays in the same hotels that Robeson stayed in, as if there were salvation in emulation

In Wales, Sparrow meets a woman who teaches local schoolchildren about Robeson’s special relationship with Welsh mining communities and culture. He admires her project, but is disappointed that her students are not also taught about the socialist ideals Robeson subscribed to. What a shame, he sometimes seems to say, that today Robeson is celebrated for his accomplishments as an artist rather than for his commitment to collectivity. There are moments in this book when Sparrow does not seem on top of his material. To take just one example among many: he declares that Othello is ‘the one Shakespearean role marked as nonwhite’, despite the fact that there is a long interview here with Hugh Quarshie, who played Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but also played Aaron the Moor in the BBC Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (1985).

Slips and misunderstandings like this add to the impression that Jeff Sparrow is more interested in his own anguish over challenges facing the left than he is in Robeson or his historical context. This book takes its place as part of a broader wave of retrospection and soul searching among veterans of the left who are struggling to comprehend activist movements where

Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Theatre Guild Production, Broadway, 1943–44 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 via Wikimedia Commons)

identity categories loom large, the politics of privilege-checking dominates, and where working-class perspectives are withered away to nothing.

It is against this background that Sparrow points his lesson. After World War II, Robeson became a victim of anti-communist paranoia in the United States. An impenitent Soviet sympathiser, his career was curtailed for more than a decade. For Sparrow, this is the inspirational high point of the Paul Robeson story. The most successful black man of his generation sacrificed it all for the sake of his principles and his vision of a better future, refusing to compromise or concede or in any way scrape for the government bullies.

No Way but This finishes on a melancholy note as Sparrow tours Russia, attempting to fathom Robeson’s admiration for the Soviet system. It is remarkable to think that in 1938 Robeson enrolled his son in a model school in Moscow, where he studied alongside the daughters of Stalin and Molotov. As Sparrow wanders in his heartfelt, gloomy way around the ruins of old gulags, he muses on continuities between Russia then and now.

In the end, Sparrow finds solace in Robeson’s firm belief in a better world to come. He must have started writing this book at a time when it seemed as though America’s first black president would be succeeded by its first female president. Instead, we have Donald Trump, a president whose admiration for Vladimir Putin is an ongoing puzzle. In this context, Sparrow’s final gestures of uplift and hope seem rhetorical.

Robeson may have been blinded by the legacy of American racism and by the monumental sacrifice of the Russians in World War II. Still, it is baffling that he did not denounce the Communist Party in 1956 over Hungary, like Overland ’s founding editor Stephen Murray-Smith. It is also terribly sad that in the early 1960s, when black actors like Sidney Poitier were finally conquering Hollywood, Robeson, who should have been their patriarch, was lost in a maze of mental affliction. g

Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre.

‘Crackers about Clark’

The nine lives of

Kenneth Clark

Patrick McCaughey

KENNETH

CLARK: LIFE, ART AND CIVILIZATION

by James Stourton

HarperCollins, $64.99 hb, 496 pp, 9780385351171

Kenneth Clark had a life like no other art historian or critic, gallery director, arts administrator, patron, collector, or presenter on television. Whatever he touched, he left a sheen of brilliance. He was handsome, charming, and debonair. And he was rich, spending his last three decades as the lord of Saltwood Castle. His father, the raffish and boozy Kenneth McKenzie Clark, had made a fortune in cotton reels. K., as Clark was universally known to friends and acquaintances, was an only child. He was witty and self-deprecatory. Who can forget the opening of his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974)?: ‘My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”… in that golden age many people were richer, there can be few who were idler.’ The reverse was true of K. He worked incessantly in all his nine lives. The great merit of James Stourton’s new biography, quite the best account we have ever had, is that he provides a detailed picture of each phase.

Born in 1903, mercifully too young for the Great War, K. went up to Oxford in the early 1920s and belonged to a glittering generation which included Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and the chilly Anthony Powell, who thought Clark ‘ruthless’ in his social ambitions. Two Oxford grandees, John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra, Wardens of All Souls and Wadham respectively, would become lifetime friends. Bowra spent every Christmas with K. and his glamorous if dipsomaniac wife, Jane. K. would complain that ‘Maurice just wants to talk – 16 hours at a stretch’.

Although Clark took ‘a steady second’ in the Schools, his ability was quickly recognised. C.F. Bell, Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean – ‘the old

spider’, as Roger Fry called him – took him up, accompanied him to Florence for a fateful meeting with Bernard Berenson and, generously, handed over his research materials on the Gothic Revival. Clark turned them into a lively book published in 1928, when he was twenty-five. A year later he succeeded Bell at the Ashmolean. His flair as a museum man quickly shone. He acquired Piero di Cosimo’s A Forest Fire for £3,000. Stourton briskly notes ‘… having no purchase money, Clark paid for the picture out of his own money and then appealed to the National Art Collection Fund which reimbursed the entire price’. The Ashmolean was desperately short of space. Clark lent the funds required for the extension and was again reimbursed.

The Great Clark Boom began in 1934 when he and Jane returned to London on his appointment as director of the National Gallery. That year the Gallery became electrified and made possible the extension of its hours. K. was a thoroughly modern director. He established the conservation and the photography departments. More than that: he saw the general public as his audience rather than the hitherto narrow band of scholars, connoisseurs, and collectors. On the day of the FA Cup final at Wembley in 1938, he opened the Gallery at eight am so that ‘the provincial supporters of the finalists … up early for the day in London might have an opportunity of seeing some famous exhibitions instead of wandering the streets’. Neil MacGregor, the other great twentieth-century director of the Gallery, called this ‘a dazzling populist touch … that did a great deal to put the gallery right at the heart of the nation’s affections’.

Early on, Clark made some brilliant

acquisitions, such as the seven panels by Sassetta of the Life of St Francis, Bosch’s Christ Mocked, Rubens’s Watering Place, and Constable’s Hadleigh Castle. The Trustees loved him. Sir Philip Sassoon, his wealthy chairman, confessed to being ‘crackers about Clark’. The staff was less happy: he rarely consulted them and they disliked the popularising of the Gallery. Philip Pouncey, the ablest of them, Neil MacLaren, and Martin Davies, later director himself, should have known better. Their antagonism came to a head over Clark’s impetuous purchase of four pastorals believed to be by Giorgione, the Holy Grail of all European museums. They cost twice the annual purchase fund. The National Art Collection Fund promised to underwrite them, provided the Gallery stood behind the attribution to Giorgione.

This acquisition, with its dubious attribution, mushroomed into a colossal public row. Clark’s enemies and wouldbe friends came out of the woodwork to attack him including the old spider, C.F. Bell. At the Trustees inquiry as to the origins of the acquisition, the Keeper, a nonentity called Harold Isherwood Kay, complained to the chairman: ‘They [the Curators] did not know what was happening and, instead of being treated as junior partners in a firm, were looked down upon as porters and servants.’ Moreover, the director’s policy ‘seemed to be to popularize the Gallery, whereas the prestige of the Gallery could only be enhanced by its becoming an institute of scholarship’. The four panels, rarely shown, are now ascribed to Andrea Previtali – Pouncey’s attribution at the time – pleasant enough, but in the B team of northern Italian painting.

World War II, ironically, gave Clark his finest hour at the National Gallery. The collection was dispatched from Trafalgar Square to the salt mines of Wales for safekeeping. The empty rooms of the Gallery would become the venue for the famous lunchtime concerts and recitals instigated by Dame Myra Hess and enthusiastically carried out by Clark. Hess suggested a concert every three weeks. Clark, according to Stourton, retorted: ‘No, every day!’ They were a spectacular success. More than 1,200 people turned up regularly and

queued patiently for admission. Queen Elizabeth brought the young princesses and once King George VI, no culture vulture he. With these recitals, Clark created an island of peace, hope, and civilisation in war-shattered London. Hess played Jesu, joy of man’s desiring as her encore, like a benediction.

‘Towards the end of the 1930s Clark embarked on a new course that would characterize the rest of his life: he started being unfaithful to his wife’, so Stourton bluntly states. He deals with Clark’s many misalliances, amitiés amoreuses and outright mistresses without salaciousness. Unlike the baneful Meryle Secreste, he never sensationalises K.’s infidelities. He makes good use of K.’s correspondence with Janet Stone, his longstanding extracurricular lover, wife of the typographer and graphic artist Reynolds Stone. Cumulatively, it fuelled Jane’s alcoholism and her explosive rages.

The years 1939–56, from the monograph on Leonardo – E.H. Gombrich claimed it as the best single book on the artist in any language – to The Nude, his A.W. Mellon Lectures in Washington, DC, were his best, most productive period as an art historian. The Nude, for all its mannered style, is still remarkable: the art of classical antiquity is discussed in the same critical voice as the art of later periods.

Stourton gives extended coverage to K.’s celebrated television series, Civilization (1969). Much of the background is fascinating. Clark was shabbily treated by the BBC, despite winning it a worldwide audience. When they sold the television rights to an American broadcaster for £250,000, Clark’s share totalled two hundred and fifty-seven pounds, ten shillings and tenpece. He never worked for the BBC again. It used to be standard among the chattering classes to mock Civilization. The mandarin tone, the Burberry look, the upper-crust irony, the National Health Service teeth, and the inevitable omissions and simplifications. Looking at the series again, two elements struck me with renewed force: Clark’s empathy with artists across all periods; and his steadfast belief that art is the agent of the deepest beliefs and feelings of men

and women, and that every man can enter the house of art. We cannot talk about art, Clark claims, without talking about ‘inspiration’. Shamefully, such views could not be more at loggerheads with contemporary art history with its unbreakable belief in art as social construction. Any other way of talking is romantic fantasy.

Whatever Clark touched, he left a sheen of brilliance

Clark’s last years were sad. He married Nolwen Rice the year after Jane died in 1976. She owned a handsome seventeenth-century chateau in Normandy and proved to be occasionally charming, even dazzling. She cut K. off from his children and his closest friends. The girlfriends were sent packing and were devastated. She was avaricious, wheedling some of Clark’s finest possessions from him, such as the Seurat landscape, Sous-Bois (now in the Metropolitan) and Samuel Palmer’s masterpiece, Cornfield by Moonlight with Evening Star (now in the British Museum). Both had been promised to Clark’s daughter, Colette. At the end, Clark took Communion from an Irish Catholic priest to the surprise of his friends. Henry Moore rose swaying from his wheelchair to throw the first handful of soil on Clark’s grave. g

Patrick McCaughey is a former director of the Yale Center for British Art. He once met K. going up the outside stairs of the Hayward Gallery to see a Bridget Riley retrospective. Jane Clark complained: ‘It’s so ugly, K.’ ‘It’s supposed to be,’ was the enigmatic reply.

Silence

by Tim Byrne

Unlike Martin Scorsese’s previous forays into the subject of spiritual faith, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997) – both of which used intense, almost delirious musical compositions to evoke a sense of religious fervour – his new film has no score at all. An adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, it opens on the intensifying sounds of nature, the buzzing of gnats or crickets, abruptly cut off by a hefty silence. Or is it the silence of the void? This question haunts the two Portuguese Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver), who have been sent to mid-seventeenth-century Japan to stoke the dying embers of a Christianity under merciless attack by local authorities.

They have also come to discover the whereabouts of their mentor and apparent apostate, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson). The idea that their most revered spiritual leader would publicly renounce his religion is abhorrent to these two firebrands, and a determination to clear his name seems folded into their missionary zeal. When they arrive on the shores of Japan, guided by a rather unsavoury-looking young man by the name of Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), they find no trace of Ferreira, but plenty of evidence of brutal oppression.

The local Christians are living on the outskirts of their humanity. They seem to have only a rudimentary grasp of their religion, mispronouncing key terms and confusing key concepts. It is initially something that troubles Garupe more than Rodrigues, but it will eventually open veins of doubt in both men, and play a role in the explication of Father Ferreira’s downfall.

These early scenes – as Rodrigues and Garupe cower in a tiny wooden shack in the mountains and the local villagers scamper up to receive their benediction – are incredibly moving; there is a kind of nobility to the furtiveness, and the risks they are all taking is palpable. The terror and the determination are depicted as different sides of the same coin, and the result is a highly convincing representation of religious belief. Scorsese’s ability to hold conflicting ideas in play, to tease out the paradox of faith and doubt, gives the film its particular psychological tension and also

means the villains, when they come, are rendered with nuance and depth.

When Rodrigues and Garupe split up, in the hope of finding word of Ferreira as much as widening their missionary scope, the film opens out both visually and intellectually. Garfield’s luscious hair gives him a distinctly Christ-like profile, and for a while it looks like the film itself might become merely ecclesiastic or doctrinaire. But any suggestion that Scorsese might be trying to ‘memorise another Golgotha’, to luxuriate in the gory imagery of the Passion in the way Mel Gibson would, is eventually displaced; the Japanese authorities reveal a deep knowledge of Christian thought, and the arrogance of a culture attempting to exert its beliefs in a foreign land begins to trouble the viewer.

Nothing is simple in Silence; conflicting ideologies are given equal weight, and the supplicating devices of resolution and catharsis are constantly withheld. Even the act of apostasy itself is treated with ambivalence: the Inquisitor (Issei Ogata) merely requires his prisoners to step on a tile depicting a Christian scene in order to satisfy the government. ‘It is only a formality,’ he coos. But it is impossible to see this act as anything other than a momentous betrayal, not just of one’s personal belief but of one’s fellow believers. Only the debased and denatured Kichijiro manages to consistently apostatise before crawling back to Rodrigues for absolution, and he is depicted as utterly lost, the fly in the frankincense.

Of all the fascinating relationships Rodrigues endures throughout the film, it is this niggling and distasteful Judas figure that comes to define the man. Kubozuka is outstanding as the doe-eyed humiliation, in a film of superb performances. Driver is brilliantly pained as the fellow priest, and Ogata is extraordinary as the prim, deadly torturer. Neeson brings a weary sense of loss to the great carapace that is Ferreira. But it is Garfield who has to incorporate all these encounters into his character. He is at turns appalled, delirious, wrenched, and noble; it seems perverse that the awards buzz has been for his work in Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge and not for the profoundly supple and moving performance he delivers here.

No one other than Martin Scorsese could have brought this film to fruition. Endō’s sparse and deeply felt novel needed a fellow believer, certainly, but one alive to the despair and doubt that lurks in the heart of all religion. As far from born-again revivalism as can be imagined, the film is instead a troubling and uncompromising masterpiece. It is long, serious, and repetitive, which may explain the Oscar snub, but it is also achingly beautiful and compassionate. Scorsese’s tendency to dazzling cinematic technique is underplayed (the rococo excess of production designer Dante Ferretti dialled way down), and the insistence of his vision almost muted. It leaves more room for nature and silence. g

Silence (Transmission Films), 165 mins, directed by Martin Scorsese. Adapted from Silence (1966), by Shūsaku Endō.

Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.

Chimerica

by Ian Dickson

Lucy Kirkwood, the present darling of the British critics, is a playwright who is not afraid of tackling momentous subjects. Her new play, Mosquitoes, to be presented by the National Theatre in July 2017, apparently deals with two sisters and the Large Hadron Collider –Chekhov meets Stephen Hawking. Chimerica, a neologism originally coined by Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, is about the convoluted relationship between China and the United States. The play opened in London in 2013 to uniformly ecstatic reviews and won practically every award going. The response when it was performed in the United States was considerably less enthusiastic, and I imagine it will be a long time before it gets a production in China.

Chimerica is a branching out from Kirkwood’s earlier work, which includes a slight but trenchant exploration of the objectification of women, NSFW (2012), which Red Stitch presented in Melbourne in 2013. Clocking in at roughly three hours with a huge cast, and moving rapidly between the United States and China in 1989 and the present, there is nothing slight about Chimerica. The play revolves around the iconic image of the young man confronting a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square the day after the massacre of 4 June 1989. Twenty-three years later, Joe Schofield, the fictional young photojournalist who took the picture, is led to believe that the man who stopped the tanks is alive and living in the United States; the play follows his quest to find him. Schofield persuades his editor that the story is worth pursuing and drags his friend, the sceptical reporter Mel, along with him. In the process he loses his job and Mel’s friendship. Schofield’s girlfriend, the British market researcher Tessa, unwittingly betrays his closest Chinese companion Zhang Lin, and Schofield ends up selling his soul along with his photographs in a fashionable Manhattan gallery.

ABR Arts sides with the British critics. In an astonishing way, Kirkwood has taken a huge topic and turned it into a riveting thriller. It is true that the major Western characters seem to come from stock. We have met the harassed editor, the idealistic, obsessive photographer, and the cynical journalist before. But Chimerica covers so

much territory, contrasting the social, political, and economic aspects of the two countries, exploring the ethics of photo journalism, indeed of all journalism, highlighting the plight of undocumented aliens in America and throwing in a doomed love affair for good measure, that even with a running time of three hours there is not much room for character development. But Kirkwood’s punchy, witty dialogue gives the actors something to latch on to, and this cast certainly makes the most of it.

Kip Williams’s production is quite simply breathtaking. It is not just that he has choreographed the play superbly, with each scene flowing inexorably into the next. Of course, every director’s job is to support the text with their staging, but Williams’s work here amplifies Kirkwood’s already powerful creation to an extraordinary degree. To take an example: Tessa is given the eleven o’clock number, in this case a PowerPoint presentation to a credit card company in which she explains to her Western clients that anything China takes from the West will be absorbed and subverted into something rich and strange. The east is still inscrutable. Without giving too much away, Williams’s presentation of this scene sums up the whole tragic irony of a nation that has sacrificed freedom for economic development.

David Fleischer’s set, Renée Mulder’s costumes, The Sweat’s music, and above all Nick Schlieper’s lighting combine to present an experience that is as beautiful as it is engrossing.

The cast, augmented by NIDA’s Musical Theatre students, is faultless. Mark Leonard Winter imbues Joe with a vulnerability that allows the audience to empathise with an otherwise somewhat dislikable character and thus get caught up in his obsession. Brent Hill has fun with Mel, and Geraldine Hakewill is a strong presence as Tessa, exploring the ambivalence of a person who subjugates her social conscience to the demands of her career.

The moral centre of Chimerica is Joe’s Chinese connection, Zhang Lin. His naïve hopes for a free China crushed in Tiananmen Square, Zhang Lin now teaches English to the children of the nomenclatura, but his reforming spirit has not died and he attempts in vain to avenge the death of his neighbour, poisoned by Beijing’s toxic pollution. His quixotic attempt to publicise the government’s obfuscation of the pollution levels coupled with Joe’s thoughtlessly incriminating messages lead him to destruction. But even he is morally compromised. His implacable stand imperils his brother Zhang We, who loses his job and is forced to flee to the United States. Jason Chong makes a heartbreaking Zhang Lin.

Kirkwood’s ingenious plot turns continually challenge our assumptions. The final revelation, which drew audible gasps from the opening night audience, though it stretches credibility, is overwhelmingly powerful.

Chimerica is a triumphant start to the nascent Kip Williams’s regime at the Sydney Theatre Company. g Chimerica (Sydney Theatre Company), written by Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Kip Williams. Performance attended: 4 March 2017.

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.

Maxim Vengerov

by Peter Rose

Russian-born violinist Maxim Vengerov – long recovered from a shoulder injury that stopped him from playing for five years – has been a welcome visitor to Australia since 1999. That year, in Melbourne, he gave a brilliant recital and also performed with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under Markus Stenz. Sixteen years later he returned in a recital that featured a mesmeric reading of the Chaconne from Bach’s Partita No. 2. In February he opened the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s 2017 season with a rendition of Brahms’s Violin Concerto that was memorable from the first movement, when Vengerov replaced Joseph Joachim’s wonted cadenza with his own longer, Bachian one.

Later in February, before a capacity audience in Hamer Hall, Vengerov was the soloist in a Russian Gala. After a cringe-making promotional video, we went straight into Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Here, all of Vengerov’s strengths were on show: crisp articulation, controlled but stirring vibrato, daring rubato, incredible harmonics, and those phenomenal trills. Vengerov was at his most dauntless in the outer movements, yet the Canzonetta was hushed and refined before the monumental Finale. His encore, as in Sydney, was the Sarabande from Bach Partita No. 2. Rarely has a Melbourne audience responded so warmly to a violinist; people knew they had just heard the greatest virtuoso of our day.

Manchester by the Sea

by Anwen Crawford

Aman steers a fishing vessel through grey-blue seas off the coast of wintry Massachusetts, while another man chats with a young boy in a life jacket. The camera keeps its distance, the three figures aboard the boat framed by a wide horizon, but we soon perceive that the boy is son to the man at the boat’s helm, and nephew to the other man. ‘If you could take one guy to an island with you,’ the uncle asks his nephew, ‘if it was between me and your father, who would you take?’ An almost aggressive need – pick me, pick me –runs like a current beneath the question. Of course, the boy chooses his father.

Manchester by the Sea is the third feature from American screenwriter–director Kenneth Lonergan, and it is a scrupulous drama of familial intimacy and loss. The uncle is Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), and between these early outdoor scenes and others where we watch him taciturnly unblock toilets and fix taps inside a series of cramped apartments – he’s a janitor, in Boston – we perceive not only that years have passed but that something has gone wrong, something has severed him from love. There is a remoteness in Lee’s eyes that is like a lid clamped over a seething pain; his jaw and shoulders are set rigid. Sometimes he punches men who annoy him at the bar where he huddles after work. That seems to be his only way of touching anyone.

It is hard to discuss the plot of Lonergan’s film without giving away too much of its careful, non-linear construction. Even the flashback scenes, like those on the fishing boat, feel interior to Lee’s memory rather than external to it. Suffice to say that Lee’s relationship with his fisherman brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) and his nephew Patrick (played as a teenager by Lucas Hedges) will continue to shape him, especially when Joe’s sudden death propels Lee back to the small coastal town of Manchester. As lots of well-meaning folk in town are constantly reminding him, his brother was a warm, loving, friendly guy. Lee isn’t friendly, and yet one’s heart goes out to him as Affleck, in a remarkable performance, burrows ever deeper inside his character’s loneliness. There are few close-ups in this

The MSO Gala was conducted by Benjamin Northey in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne. Performance attended: 28 February 2017. Foxtel Arts will broadcast this performance on 12 May.

Peter Rose is the Editor of Australian Book Review.

Vengerov conducts the MSO (photograph by Daniel Aulsebrook)

film, and several long shots; Affleck seems oblivious to the camera but is attuned to it at every moment, using it like a steady, silent witness.

Each of Lonergan’s films has dealt with the aftermath of a death, or deaths. You Can Count On Me (2000) focused on two grown siblings whose parents died in a car crash when they were young. Margaret (2011) starred Anna Paquin as a volatile Manhattan teenager involved in a bus accident. The film was tangled up for years in post-production legal disputes between Lonergan and the studio, but the 2012 extended cut, released on DVD, is worth seeing. None of Lonergan’s characters is noble in the face of tragedy, or even very likeable; the truth of his films is that grief arrives in the midst of ordinary circumstances, and that it tends to make us weaker, not stronger. There is dark humour, too, in our collective failure to rise to the occasion: in one key flashback during Manchester by the Sea, we watch paramedics struggle to load Lee’s wife – now ex-wife – Randi (Michelle Williams) into the back of an ambulance. Clumsiness of action, and of feeling, is of more interest to Lonergan than is grace.

Williams has only a few scenes, but makes her mark in all of them. We come to understand that, although Randi’s marriage to Lee was never entirely happy, it was adequate. But Randi wants to Lee to confide in her, which is more than he can bear – he does better around his nephew, perhaps because Patrick, like most teenagers, is concerned primarily with himself. It is a marvellously self-absorbed characterisation by Hedges, and Patrick has several richly awkward scenes, not only with Lee but with his own officious girlfriend, Silvie (Kara Hayward), and with his estranged mother’s new partner, Jeffrey, played in cameo by frequent Lonergan collaborator Matthew Broderick.

Manchester by the Sea has some parallels with this Oscar season’s other fêted ensemble drama, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. Both films are centred on male characters who are afraid of how much they feel and thus choose to contain themselves relentlessly. Both directors make the most of their different coastal settings – Lonergan in Massachusetts, Jenkins in humid Miami – and both trust their viewers to be patient and to pay attention. Moonlight is the more formally distinctive, the more perfectly realised of the two films, but Lonergan’s film is haunting in its own way.

Whether it delivers Affleck the Oscar for best actor that he probably deserves is another question. The film’s critical success has led to renewed scrutiny of sexual harassment claims made by two women who worked with Affleck on his ill-received directorial début, I’m Still Here (2010). The claims were settled out of court, but the taint lingers. The actor, like his character, might find that he cannot escape his past. g

Lonergan. Distributed in Australia by Universal Pictures.

Anwen Crawford is the music critic for The Monthly.

Satan Jawa

by Dilan Gunawardana

If a single word could sum up the world première of Satan Jawa, it would be ‘bewitching’. Indonesian Director Garin Nugroho’s black-and-white silent film combines mime and dance to relate a Faustian tale of love, sacrifice, and agony, rooted in Javanese mysticism. A twenty-piece Indonesian gamelan orchestra accompanied the film in collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; they produced a hypnotic score.

Satan Jawa tells the story of Setio (Heru Purwanto), a lowly villager who falls for Asih (Asmara Abigail), the daughter of an aristocratic family. When Setio is violently spurned by Asih’s mother, he ritually invokes Satan (Luluk Ari Prasetyo) – a spirit who was imprisoned and tortured as a child – to bring him material wealth and win Asih’s hand.

Setio’s descent into madness (and Asih’s own torment) was told through a series of striking images; fog rolling across fearsome stone gargoyles; children with faces painted white holding skulls to their chests; Asih writhing in a bathtub in the middle of a forest while a demon cavorts behind her; dancers gambolling grotesquely, clutching topengs (masks) to their faces. Close-ups of an odd-looking soft-shell turtle stole the show. The overall effect of all these elements was deeply unnerving, surreal, and sensuous in equal parts.

Satan Jawa drew much applause from its enraptured audience; it is a shame that it played for just one night.

Dilan Gunawardana is the Assistant Editor at ABR.

Manchester by the Sea, 137 minutes, written and directed by Kenneth

Satan Jawa was performed at Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne as part of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Arts (Asia TOPA). Performance attended: 24 February 2017.

Soloist Peni Candra Rini performs to Satan Jawa (photograph by Mark Gambino)

by Andrew Fuhrmann

What a mysterious and delightful play is American playwright Annie Baker’s John (2015), a meditative comic drama full of exquisite detail and suggested psychological insights. Sarah Goodes directed with sensitivity and imagination for the Melbourne Theatre Company, and the fine cast, led by Helen Morse and Melita Jurišić, performed it with much grace and expert comic timing.

Set in a quaint bed and breakfast in out-of-the-way Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the story centres on a young couple – Elias (Johnny Carr) and Jenny (Ursula Mills) –and their unravelling relationship. Elias, struggling with depression, isn’t sure if he really loves her. Jenny can’t help telling fibs, occasionally large ones, sometimes for no reason other than restlessness; but, having invested so much effort in the relationship, she is unwilling to let it go.

The hospitable owner of the establishment, Mertis (Helen Morse), watches on, disinterested but sympathetic. She has decorated the house with cartloads of kitsch, and stays busy watching the birds and trying to describe the sunset in her diary. Like Jenny, Mertis also seems less than honest. She is caught once in an outright lie, and there are hints that it might be pathological. There is even a suspicion that her invalid husband might be an invention. Occasionally, her friend Genevieve (Melita Jurišić) visits, blind and bit dotty, but full of warmth and a warped kind of wisdom.

As so often with Baker, the rhythm and dramatic flow of this play is reminiscent of Chekhov, although the tone is not the same. As with Chekhov, it seems as though the drama comes from the silences in the dialogue; but Baker is more attentive to the sustaining mysteries of life than its disappointments.

Peculiar things are happening in this ancient house, which once served as a field hospital during the Civil War. There is a string of faulty Christmas tree lights which torments Jenny, and a pianola which may or may not be possessed. Genevieve is sure she can hear the

As Genevieve says, everyone knows someone called John

ghostly rustle of wings settling over them. Sarah Goodes and set and costume designer Elizabeth Gadsby use three small revolves to twist the walls and the furniture around during scene changes, giving the impression that the house is capable of any supernatural deformation.

Throughout, the spirit of American dark romanticism is teasingly invoked. Elias reports on a ghost tour in a local cemetery; Jenny indulges her love of spooky stories; and Mertis wants to know if her guests have ever felt as though a spirit were watching over them. At one point, she reads a long section of H.P. Lovecraft in a manner suggesting a prayer meeting.

This is not, however, an uncanny tale, although the mysterious John referred to in the play’s title might be a distant or symbolic relation of Cthulhu. Ostensibly, John is Jenny’s ex-boyfriend, who is not quite out of the picture; but he is also Genevieve’s ex-husband, the man who drove her mad. As Genevieve says, everyone knows someone called John. Perhaps this dreamy play is about the way we cling to these troubling spirits,

Johnny Carr as Elias Schreiber-Hoffman, Helen Morse as Mertis Katherine Graven, and Melita Jurišić as Genevieve Marduk (photograph by Jeff Busby)

and let them linger in the mind?

Gadsby has designed a spread-open house where the trinkets seem to be creeping out of the proscenium and taking over the theatre. Every surface is draped, pillowed, laced, or otherwise occupied with some folksy amusement. It is amazing that so much attention and time has been lavished on these little decorative bits and pieces, but what is the point? Is this a new wrinkle in Baker’s affection for marginal and backwater places, and the easily bruised souls who inhabit them? Is there a connection between Mertis’s tchotchkes and Christmas gewgaws and, say, the soon-to-be obsolete analogue reels in The Flick (2013), or the thoroughly unfashionable theatre exercises in Circle Mirror Transformation (2009)?

John draws on a wealth of humour and wit as well as compassion. Although all the characters have strange quirks and unlikeable qualities, no one is mocked, and they are all redeemed, or might be, as human beings.

Morse and Jurišić act their roles expertly. Their portrayal of these two old friends, with their many pensive and regretful inflections, is profoundly moving. These performances are eloquent and deep, with subtle shifts and half-hidden lights, and are utterly effortless in expression. Their comic timing is superb. As the houselights come up for the second interval, Genevieve suddenly leaps up and launches into a very funny story about the seven stages of her madness. Morse, meanwhile, can raise a laugh simply by the way she switches off the lamps.

Perhaps Johnny Carr and Ursula Mills could have been more immediately sympathetic as the young couple. As Elias, a drummer from Brooklyn, Carr seems unnecessarily hostile at first, sniping from behind the shelter of his thick beard and even thicker glasses. Similarly, Mills is sneakier than she needs to be. Still, the longer this very long play – three and half hours, including two intervals – goes on, the more they appeal, even as they do and say things that should make them less appealing.

The performances are all playful, but there are few broad strokes. The lines of characterisation are welldrawn and natural. The pace is necessarily slow but never leisurely. In this semi-rural setting, a large house in winter in Pennsylvania, the emotional fractures between the couple seem like subtle flaws in the cosmos itself. As a writer, Annie Baker is persuasive enough to look at her characters objectively, from the outside, and still manage all their desires and withdrawals, putting them in service of a larger metaphysical uncertainty. John is a captivating play. g

John (Melbourne Theatre Company), written by Annie Baker, was directed by Sarah Goodes. The season at the Fairfax Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne ended on 25 March 2017. Performance attended: 16 February 2017.

Andrew Fuhrmann is a Melbourne theatre critic.

The Age of Bones

by Fiona Gruber

Sandra Thibodeaux’s play The Age of Bones – Jaman Belulang centres on the story of Ikan, a feckless youth who lives with his poor but loving family on Roté, in the Lesser Sunda Islands. When he fails to return from a fishing expedition, his parents are not alarmed; unlike many fishermen, Ikan can actually swim. As the days pass without any news, his parents fear, and gradually accept, the worst. One day they receive a call from an Australian lawyer who tells them that their son had been entangled in a people smuggling operation. The lawyer hopes to find evidence of Ikan’s age in order to secure his release from jail.

A garrulous but revered old villager narrates the action, which moves from Roté to the sea and to the underworld of an Australian prison and courtroom. His comic sidekick – and this is a play full of humour and whimsy, despite the subject matter – is the dalang or puppeteer, who steps out from behind a screen and testily responds to the old man’s teasing questions about the plot and the magical silhouettes behind the scrim. Whales, coral, divers, and vessels full of voyagers dance across a set made of sails; these are combined with dazzling projections of the islanders’ world on land and sea. The sails also act as a canvas for the surtitles that accompany the dialogue between Ikan and his parents. Australian officialdom is represented by a duo of brass-helmeted deep-sea divers; they are a pair of lumbering buffoons who, as in all tales of sea monsters, are ultimately defeated.

The Age of Bones belongs to the tradition of Indonesian folk tales, fantastical storytelling, and shadow puppetry. This co-production between Performing Lines and Satu Bulan works because of its flight from naturalism; didactic theatre rarely succeeds, but this piece charms and seduces as it devastates.

April. Performance attended: 23 February 2017. Read the full version of this review online.

The Age of Bones was performed as part of Asia TOPA at the La Mama Courthouse, Melbourne, and continues in Parramatta and Darwin until 9

Fiona Gruber is a journalist and producer.

(Photograph by Sarah Walker)

Why do you write?

It’s a hopeful or optimistic thing, I think, to try to catch bits of life, large or small, and explore them, understand them, then offer them up to readers who might also connect with them or for whom they might make sense.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

At the beginning and end of projects. In the middle I tend towards either the insomniac or the comatose.

Where are you happiest?

On a beach staring at a horizon – which might be my topographical equivalent to a blank page.

What is your favourite film?

Truly, Madly, Deeply

And your favourite book?

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

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

Hilary Mantel, Thomas Cromwell, and Ben Miles, the actor who played Mantel’s Cromwell in London.

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

I dislike the word ‘like’ when it’s, like, used as punctuation. ‘Umbrage’ has some potential as a more nuanced alternative to today’s more automatic ‘rage’. Similarly, I’d like to get back to ‘fact’ after our recent dalliance with its ‘post-’ relative.

Who is your favourite author?

There’s never only one.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

Elephant and Piggie, from Mo Willems’s series of books. I’m probably more like Gerald the Elephant but I aspire to the bouncier world view of Piggie.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

The veracity that gives any genre of writing its truthfulness.

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

I didn’t understand Jessica Anderson or Jane Austen when I had to read them in Year Twelve. With all the certainty of being seventeen, I felt that neither Tirra Lirra by the

River nor Pride and Prejudice had much to say. Now I reread them both regularly and am contemporaneously inspired and retrospectively abashed.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? That I am unfortunately still not in possession of Hermione Granger’s Time-Turner.

How do you regard publishers?

I feel incredibly fortunate that my words have found the publishers they’ve found, and incredibly grateful for the resources they invest in those words.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

There’s a fantastic line about musical compositions in Zoë Morrison’s Music and Freedom: ‘in order to interpret a work correctly, you need to get to the spirit of the composer, their moods and intentions’. If you substitute ‘writer’ for ‘composer’ in that sentence, I think it hints at the way the most constructive critics somehow augment a piece of writing through their exploration of it.

And writers’ festivals?

I’ve had some amazing conversations with writers at writers’ festivals, and I love being part of a dedicated writing and reading community for a few days. The best festivals are like an escape from the real world.

Are artists valued in our society?

I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t intersect with a range of different artists’ works every single day, through what they read or listen to or look at or watch or wear or use or live in. This mightn’t speak to recognition or reimbursement, but it underscores how essential artists are to how everyone marks out their own distinct life.

What are you working on now?

I’m back inside a new novel, hoping to remember all the things I was trying to do the last time I was there, and seeing things I hadn’t seen before that might help it to make its own sense.

Ashley Hay was the 2015 ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. She has published several books, including Gum: The story of eucalypts and their champions (2002), and The Railwayman’s Wife (2013). Her new novel is A Hundred Small Lessons.