The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, now in its seventh year, is worth a total of $12,500. This year we received nearly 1,200 entries from forty-two countries. The judges –Amy Baillieu, Ellen van Neerven, and Chris Flynn – longlisted eighteen stories (they are listed on our website) before shortlisting three of them: ‘The Leaching Layer’ by Dominic Amerena (Victoria), ‘Butter’ by Lauren Aimee Curtis (New South Wales), and ‘Pheidippides’ by Eliza Robertson (Canada/United Kingdom). They all appear in this issue.
The judges have also commended three other stories: ‘The Man I Should Have Married’ by Catherine Chidgey (New Zealand), ‘The Fog Harvester’ by Marie Gethins (Ireland), and ‘Contributory Negligence’ by SteviLee Alver (New South Wales).
If you are in Sydney on Thursday, 10 August, join us at the Potts Point Bookshop for the Jolley Prize ceremony – always entertaining, if suspenseful for the authors. This is a free event, but bookings are essential: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au
Fay zwicky (1933–2017)
Fay Zwicky always joked about being placed last in anthologies of Australian poetry. Lastness somehow suited her – conclusive, apart, a little unac-
commodating – and she was never omitted from any serious anthology of contemporary Australian poetry. Born in Melbourne and educated at that university, she was a concert pianist before transferring to Perth, where she taught at the University of Western Australia from 1972 to 1987. Isaac Babel’s Fiddle appeared in 1975; Kaddish
and Other Poems – perhaps her most celebrated collection – followed in 1982. She also published short stories and criticism, and she wrote for ABR seven times, from 1987 to 2013. Fay Zwicky died on 2 July, the day after the publication of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWA Publishing), which is edited by Lucy Dougan and
Tim Dolin. We’re delighted to be able to publish a late poem from that volume, ‘Little Fly’ (page 15), about a dachshund called Mužka, which accompanied Fay everywhere, including hospital.
Miles Franklin shortlist
Five authors have been shortlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award: Emily Maguire (An Isolated Incident, Picador), Mark O’Flynn (The Last Days of Ava Langdon, UQP), Ryan O’Neill (Their Brilliant Careers, Black Inc.), Philip Salom (Waiting, Puncher & Wattmann), and Josephine Wilson (Extinctions, UWA Publishing). Each of them receives $5,000 from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. The winner, who will be announced on 7 September, receives $60,000.
Our reviews of the shortlisted books can now be freely read online.
Porter Prize
Entries are now open for the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. This is the fourteenth time we have offered the Porter Prize. Past winners include Stephen Edgar (whose new collection is reviewed on page 42), Judith Bishop, Tracy Ryan, Michael Farrell, and Judith Beveridge.
The Prize is now worth a total of $8,500, and here we thank Ms Morag Fraser AM and all our ABR Patrons for their support. The winner will
Fay Zwicky (photograph by Robert Garvey)
receive $5,000 and an Arthur Boyd print; this year we have created a second prize worth $2,000. The three other shortlisted poets will each receive $500. All five shortlisted poems will be published in the March 2018 issue of ABR.
The judges on this occasion are John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb. Entries close December 3. For more information about the Porter Prize, including entry guidelines and terms and conditions, please visit our website.
conversational calibre
The response to the winning essay in this year’s Calibre Prize has been enthusiastic. Michael Adams, author of ‘Salt Blood’, seems to have given more radio interviews than Christopher Pyne.
This month we have pleasure in publishing Darius Sepehri’s ‘To Speak of Sorrow’, which placed second in the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize. The affinity between the two essayists was obvious when they both spoke at a Calibre Prize ceremony at the University of Wollongong on 1 June. Now, ABR, in association with Sydney Ideas, has much pleasure in presenting Michael Adams and Darius Sepehri in conversation on Monday, 7 August, at the University of Sydney. The event will feature readings from the two winning essays and a discussion of the shared themes of grief and mortality.
This is a free event and all are welcome, but please rsvp to Sydney Ideas. See the advertisement on page 20 for more information.
MeMoirs oF historians
Historians often eschew autobiography, possibly regarding the genre as too speculative or marginal. Interestingly, though, we have a brace of memoirs from two Australian historians.
Sheila Fitzpatrick – a frequent contributor to ABR – is one of the world’s most celebrated Soviet historians. She has written a dozen books on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Russian Revolution, most recently On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015). In recent years she has quietly, deliberately embarked
on one of the most significant projects in Australian autobiography. My Father’s Daughter (2010) was shortlisted for the National Biography Award, and A Spy in the Archives (2013) won the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction.
Now Sheila Fitzpatrick has published Mischka’s War (also with Melbourne University Press). It is a fascinating study of the author’s late husband, Mischka Danos, a Latvian whom she married decades after he survived World War II and went to the United States to pursue his career as a physicist. Forensically, Fitzpatrick examines Mischka’s vicissitudes, his intellectual formation, his many affairs and marriages – and his uncanny mother.
Jim Davidson’s memoir describes a very different war, as his title makes apparent: A Führer for a Father (NewSouth). The biographer of Keith Hancock and former editor of Meanjin writes about his father, also called Jim Davidson (the physical likeness was remarkable too) – a deeply unsympathetic figure, it seems. Bewilderment and fury alternate in the memoir, especially as the paternal insults mount.
We will review both memoirs in coming issues.
aMerican MoMents
Philip Roth – rara avis to the last –may have signalled his retirement as a novelist, but he still publishes from time to time, if only via email (archaic as Gutenberg in the age of the twittering Trumps). The New Yorker of June 5 carried a welcome Rothian scrap, an edited version of a speech he gave back in 2002 when accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Roth – rather more sentimental than some critics acknowledge – recalls his fabled childhood in Newark and his keen sense of apartness as a Jew, ‘a rather typical grandchild of four of those poor nineteenth-century immigrants’. Roth speaks of his reverence for writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and Erskine Caldwell – none of them
Jewish – who gave him a sense of his ‘great ignorance’ of the continent west of Newark, with its Spartanburg and Lost Mule Flat and ‘the titillatingly named Little French Lick’.
Fifteen years prior to the atrocious Trump, Roth wrote: ‘... one is not always in raptures over this country and its prowess at nurturing, in its own distinctive manner, unsurpassable callousness, matchless greed, smallminded sectarianism, and a gruesome infatuation with firearms’ (private firearms seem the least of our worries in 2017). Yet Philip Roth – despite abiding and, it must be said, rejuvenated anti-Semitism – ends with a ringing endorsement of his patriality, ‘irrefutably American, fastened throughout my life to the American moment ... and writing in the rich native tongue by which I am possessed’.
Pillow talk
In his effusive review of the second edition of The Australian National Dictionary (TLS, 23 June 2017), Barry Humphries devotes much space to reminiscences of his decorous family film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. Humphries welcomes the inclusion of subtleties such as ‘pillow biter’, which he ‘managed to successfully promote, especially in Sydney, where few pillows go unbitten’. Humphries ends by congratulating the editors, who ‘have magnificently recorded what must surely be the richest vernacular in the history of human utterance, and if you don’t believe me you can stick your head up a wombat’s freckle’.
Kate Burridge reviewed AND2 –that indispensable reference – in the October 2016 issue of ABR.
changes at ABR
The ABR editorial internships, which date back to 2009, are rare in the industry: fully paid and full-time introductions to the publishing life. We’ve welcomed some outstanding young graduates to ABR, and several of them have gone on to major appointments in the sector. Dilan Gunawardana became the latest intern in March 2016. Now he joins Amy Baillieu (Deputy Editor since 2012) as Deputy Editor (Digital).
August 2017
Tom Griffiths
Bernadette Brennan
Alan Atkinson
Wilfrid Prest
Robert Dessaix
Ceridwen Spark
Darius Sepehri
Humanity’s blindness to disaster
A powerful meditation on war
Mapping history
The prolific Geoffrey Bolton Colm TÓibÍn’s new novel The gift of oblivion ‘To Speak of Sorrow’
Australian History
Nick Horne (ed.): Donald Horne Ryan Cropp
Anisa Puri and Alistair Thomson: Australian Lives Agnes Nieuwenhuizen
Publisher of the Month Louise Adler Open Page Gregory Day
ABR Arts
Morag Fraser
Michael Halliwell
Patrick McCaughey
Anwen Crawford
Ian Dickson
Bronwyn Lea
Ben Brooker
Das Lied von der Erde Hamlet Giacometti
A Quiet Passion
Cloud Nine
Noises Off The Sound of Falling Stars
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 Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, our partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
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August 2017, no. 393
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Hubris
Humanity’s systematic blindness to disaster
Tom Griffiths
THE GREAT DERANGEMENT: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE UNTHINKABLE by Amitav Ghosh
University of Chicago Press (Footprint), $44.99 hb, 196 pp, 9780226323039
The planet is alive, says Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. This is because humans are suffering from ‘The Great Derangement’, a disturbing condition which this book analyses with wisdom and grace. Ghosh foresees that future citizens of a world transformed by climate change will look back at our time and perceive that ‘most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’. So today’s lamentable politics reflects a more general cultural delusion. Willing and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions is certainly a shocking dimension of twenty-first-century life. The Great Derangement is a good title and an apt phrase, for it captures the strangeness, uncanniness, and hubris of our time, when we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species.
Ghosh is the admired author of fiction – such as The Hungry Tide (2004) and the trilogy Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire (2008–15) – and also of non-fiction such as his Egyptian ethnography, In an Antique Land (1992). The Hungry Tide was set in the Sundar-bans, the great mangrove forest of the Bengal delta, a liminal place of silt and water where ‘geological processes that usually unfold in deep time’ can be experienced weekly. When writing that novel in May 2002, Ghosh scribbled the following observation: ‘I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.’
This insight – which has galvanised the field of environmental history since the 1970s – has also challenged novelists and poets to find new forms of storytelling. In the early 1980s, Les Murray celebrated Eric Rolls’s ecological history A Million Wild Acres (1981) for its ‘golden disobedience’, its freedom to sidestep received literary sensibilities and to transcend the conventional boundaries between humanity and nature. That disobedience, declared Murray, ‘seems at the moment to be available to non-fiction writers in greater measure than to other writers of literary texts’. ‘It is even possible,’ he continued, ‘that the novel, a form we have adopted from elsewhere, may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires.’ Murray was describing an Australian style of nature writing in which animals and plants have equal status with humans in the making of history.
Ghosh ponders why humans forgot, in their derangement, that their own lives are bound up with those of other creatures and with the health of the planet itself. For most of history, he suggests, humans have intuited the precariousness of their existence and the dangerous power of nature. How did we lose our sense of vulnerability? How could a nuclear power plant be built at Fukushima where stone tablets from the Middle Ages warn of recurrent tsunamis? Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Ghosh visited the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to write about the impact of the catastrophe. He found that the indigenous inhabitants of the Nicobars lived mainly in the interior and were largely unaffected by the tsunami, but that newer arrivals from the mainland – many of whom were educated and middle class – had settled on the seashore with devastating consequences. Australians
WINTER NIGHT ESCAPES
Pieter Wispelwey plays the Bach Cello Suites
In this special concert at City Recital Hall Pieter Wispelwey performs the complete Bach cello suites.
JS BACH
Cello Suites Nos. 1 to 6
Pieter Wispelwey cello
Beethoven & Bruckner
Simone Young Conducts
The charismatic Simone Young returns to Sydney to conduct Bruckner’s towering Fifth Symphony. She is joined by Imogen Cooper in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.2.
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No.2
BRUCKNER Symphony No.5
Simone Young conductor (pictured)
Imogen Cooper piano
EMIRATES METRO SERIES 17–19 AUG
New World Memories
Robertson conducts Dvorˇák 9
The theme is travel and memory when Chief Conductor David Robertson conducts Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
MENDELSSOHN The Hebrides
MACKEY Mnemosyne’s Pool
AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
DVOŘÁK Symphony No.9, New World
David Robertson conductor
APT MASTER SERIES 23–26 AUG
The ‘Rach 2’
Chief Conductor David Robertson conducts a program of 20thcentury favourites, including Rachmaninoff’s irresistible Second Piano Concerto.
ADAMS The Chairman Dances RACHMANINOFF
Piano Concerto No.2
PROKOFIEV Symphony No.5
David Robertson conductor George Li piano (pictured)
PRESENTING PARTNER
ONE CIRCULAR QUAY BY WANDA 31 AUG–2 SEP
EMIRATES METRO SERIES
Aerial view of the rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica on 10 November 2016. In July 2017 a 1-trillion-tonne iceberg measuring 5,800 square kilometres broke away from the continent (photograph by NASA/John Sonntag via Wikimedia Commons)
might similarly ponder our modern inhabitation of firestorm forests. What is it about our view of the world –and our literary imagination – that pushes the forces of nature into the background?
Ghosh argues that the social realist novel, with its expectation of a moderate and ordered nature as the backdrop to a bourgeois world, is a product of the Anthropocene, the proposed new epoch of earth history that recognises humans as a geophysical force comparable to glaciation, volcanism, or an asteroid strike. As the industrial revolution took off and ‘the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth’, the dominant literary paradigm became radically centred on the human. Even though Ghosh’s own life has been shaped by the sudden interventions of nature (as he explains in the book), he struggles to integrate such startling events into his novels. He believes the genre excludes deep storytelling about the climate crisis, and that the longue durée required for planetary-scale tales is not the territory of the novelist. Nor is it easy to evoke in a novel ‘the urgent proximity of non-human presences’ that he feels are part of the uncanny experience of living in the Anthropocene. These arguments are made powerfully through the author’s deep scholarly reading and also through vivid examples from his own writing life.
‘Writing on the Precipice’, argued that Ghosh’s definition of ‘serious fiction’ was too narrow and overlooks science fiction and other literatures of the fantastic (Bradley’s own novel Clade [2015] projects episodically into the future). But Ghosh has also perceived a truth: that to describe the real violence of nature is to violate the conventions of the novel, and that the realist novel is thus complicit in our derangement – and is emblematic of our complacency.
Today’s lamentable politics reflects a more general cultural delusion
It is unsurprising that an Indian writer should so clearly see that climate change is not just an environmental issue but also one of equity and justice. The Australian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, also Bengali-born and whose work enriches this book, has been on a parallel path, investigating how the climate crisis challenges the conventions of history. Professional history – like the novel, born in the nineteenth century – was founded on a separation of nature and humanity that can no longer be sustained. Chakrabarty and Ghosh also both analyse the relations of climate and capital, nature and justice, and planetary history and global history – categories now in creative friction but which they believe we cannot collapse into one another. Ghosh has a fascinating section on the genealogy of the carbon economy where he argues that the poor nations of the world are poor because imperial powers forcefully prevented them from developing their own fossil-fuel economies. So it is incontestable that the fruits of the carbon economy have not been shared, yet to share them as justice demands is ‘to turn but toward our self-annihilation’. ‘This,’ concludes Ghosh, ‘is indeed the essence of humanity’s present derangement.’
Ghosh admits he is painting with a very broad brush and that the form of the novel has changed over the two centuries since its birth. Novelist Delia Falconer, in her recent inaugural Eleanor Dark Lecture, counters that ‘literature, both fiction and nonfiction, is practically turning itself inside out trying to grapple with these questions’, and James Bradley, in a stimulating essay entitled
The author identifies another paradox: that the very moment, in the 1980s, when it became clear that global warming was a collective predicament of humanity, we turned away politically from the idea of the collective, with dire consequences. In the thirty years since humans first understood the urgency of the climate crisis, total historical carbon emissions from the energy sector have doubled. This is the derangement that Amitav Ghosh investigates, and he does so brilliantly, with eloquence and compassion. g
Tom Griffiths is the W.K. Hancock Professor of History at the Australian National University. His latest book is The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (2016).
Art and responsibility
A powerful hymn for the victims of war
Bernadette Brennan
DRAW YOUR WEAPONS by Sarah Sentilles
Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925498622
‘Thinking is my fighting.’
SVirginia Woolf
arah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons is one of the most erudite, original, and thought-provoking books I have ever read. A philosophical and moral meditation on pain, torture, and the violence of war – part memoir, part history, even a kind of secular prayer –this book asks us to look at terrible human darkness while also celebrating the ways in which love, connectedness, and the making of art nourish and redeem the human spirit.
Sentilles, an American academic, began writing what was to become Draw Your Weapons after seeing two photographs: one of an old man, eyes joyously aglow, cradling a violin; the other of a hooded prisoner standing on a box. These images derailed her preparation for the priesthood. Rather than complete her dissertation about theological imagination, she left the church and wrote instead on the torture photographs taken at Abu Ghraib.
The old man was Howard Scott, who, as a conscientious objector during World War II, had twice been imprisoned. While incarcerated, and separated from his beloved wife, Ruane, and their baby daughter, Howard set about trying to make a violin. Ruane copied out instructions from Violin-Making (1885), squeezing as much information as possible into the few letters she was permitted to send. Sentilles went looking for Howard and was welcomed into his family. The second major character in this narrative is Miles. He enters Sentilles’s life as a student in her critical theory class, where
she was using the Abu Ghraib photographs as a teaching tool. Miles had been a soldier stationed at the prison after the photographs were taken. Teacher and student become friends. Miles goes on to become an artist, and remain in the military. From Miles, we hear more complex stories about the realities of war, good stories and bad from inside the prison and beyond.
Draw Your Weapons took Sentilles ten years to write. She first tried to shape her material as a novel. It didn’t work. In her essay ‘Cut and Tape: On Writing Draw Your Weapons’ (Powells.com, June 30 2017), she explains that she took her manuscript and ‘shattered it as if it were made of glass’. What remains are hundreds of fragments about ethics, torture, slavery, internment, photography, theology, instruments, music, art; the list goes on. The fragmentary structure
and the brilliant juxtapositions and segues give this book its extraordinary power. Abraham’s potential sacrifice of his son sits in conversation with the evil of all-seeing, god-like drones. The etymology of souvenir leads into discussion of the body parts of saints via a black site at Guantánamo. Sentilles’s paragraphs – some only a single sentence – are written in direct, simple prose. Thoughts, research, scholarly quotations, old letters, verbatim testimony; all are placed strategically on the page. Each entry stands alone, wrapped in the textual silence of blank space. These gaps invite the reader to pause and contemplate the individual entries. They also provide an imaginative space across and through which the reader is encouraged to make their own connections.
Sentilles writes that in being opposed to America’s wars she felt she was somehow ‘off the hook … they have nothing to do with me’. Howard’s letter from prison in the 1940s follows: ‘I remain a part of the crimes committed by us ... And I do not wish to separate myself from society or my group. I need to intentionally make myself more a part of it.’ Meanwhile, Miles is disconcerted when he returns home on leave from Iraq and sees no evidence of war. To read Draw Your Weapons is to understand that we are all implicated in the evils of war.
Sentilles cites Judith Butler: ‘We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.’ This book calls us to be present to, and responsible for, our fellow human beings. Affirming Levinas’s belief in the ‘irreducible alterity’ of the other, Sentilles insists that we must look
Sarah Sentilles (photograph by Gia Goodrich/VEV Studios)
Incisive reads from Text
Independent publishing since 1992
A heart-stopping political thriller set on the high-seas from the prize-winning author of The Rules of Backyard Cricket. A group of Australian surfers encounter a sinking asylum-seeker boat, while, back in Canberra, the government is gunning for re-election with a hardline new policy to stop the boats.
A page-turning survival story from the international bestselling author of I’m Not Scared. In a world where the Red Fever has killed all adults and blue children run rampant, Anna looks after the only person she has left—her younger brother Astor. Until she comes home to find him missing.
How much do we really know about Australia’s second prime minister—a talented, spiritual and complex man who continues to shape politics today?
‘A biography of immense power that will restore Deakin to his proper place in the national imagination.’ David Marr
From the bestselling author of The Fiftieth Gate comes a profound memoir of grief and love. After the death of his wife, Kerryn, Mark Baker wrote an extraordinary portrait of their life together. How well did he know his wife? Did he keep the promises he made to her? ’A courageous and intimate portrait.’ Emily Bitto
Internationally acclaimed climate change expert Tim Flannery presents a detailed and engaging look into new technologies that could provide a sustainable future for our planet. ‘This man is a national treasure, and we should heed his every word.’ Sunday Telegraph
Told in short, cinematic bursts, this is a pulpy, twisted and darkly comic story of police corruption, an urban underworld, masculinity and two very unlikely lovers. Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, Eka Kurniawan is one of Indonesia’s most influential and critically acclaimed young writers.
A stunning collection of short stories from one of Sydney Morning Herald’ s Young Novelists of the Year. The characters in Pulse Points live in small dusty towns, glittering exotic cities and slow droll suburbs; they are mourners, survivors and perpetrators. ‘A master of short fiction.’ Herald Sun
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Written and illustrated by CBCA award-winner Simon Barnard, Gaolbird is the true story of convict, pirate and serial escapist William Swallow, a man who could talk his way out of anything, including the gallows. ‘Wonderfully conceived, surprisingly original, terrifically entertaining.’ Shaun Tan
directly at war, its violence, its victims. Again turning to Butler, she notes: ‘The critique of violence must begin with a critique of seeing.’ As a teacher, she asks her students to look at images of pain. She knows there is ‘no perfect image of pain that might make the viewer feel the urge to enter and put right the world’. She knows that ‘every photograph taken of another’s suffering is insufficient and so too every response’. But she is passionate in her belief that they, and we, must see. When her students ask what
One of the most erudite, original, and thoughtprovoking books I have ever read
they can do in the face of such pain, she replies that she does not know. Yet she knows, having been inspired by Fred Wilson’s installation Mining the Museum, that what is made by humans can also be unmade. She knows that, ‘Words can take away humanity, and words can give it back.’ Her contribution to unmaking the darkness is to write. Howard’s finished violin was sixty years in the making. It was not until 2004 that his grandson found a violin maker prepared and able to put the various mismatched pieces together – to make it whole. The photograph that captured Sentilles’s attention was taken when Howard was first handed the violin on his eighty-seventh birthday. It was the moment just before it was played for the first time. The violin – its genesis, gestation, and fragmentary nature – serves as an apt metaphor for this book. Sentilles’s many fragments, each crafted from disparate material, come together to make something beautiful in the face of violence. The book’s epigraph from Bertolt Brecht reads: ‘In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.’ Draw Your Weapons is a song, a hymn, for the victims of war and equally for all of us who have the potential to make our world a better place. g
Bernadette Brennan is the author of A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (Text Publishing, 2017).
Mapping history
Alan Atkinson
HIDDEN
IN
PLAIN VIEW: THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE OF COASTAL SYDNEY
by Paul Irish NewSouth
$34.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781742235110
Nothing has done more to add to the ingenuity of Australian history writing than the study of Indigenous experience. This book, which concentrates on people living in Sydney and its immediate hinterlands from 1788 to the 1930s, is a case in point.
The impact of such scholarship has been a long drawn-out process, often echoing trends in various areas overseas. In 2001, for instance, James Belich’s book Making Peoples: A history of the New Zealanders, the first part of a two-volume history, deliberately focused on New Zealanders rather than New Zealand, on peoples rather than territory, and on interactions rather than bodies of power. Human beings are all treated primarily as thinking agents. National boundaries, all boundaries in fact, are not just limits to authority but also lines to be crossed, maybe on long journeys. Movement matters more than stasis, and commerce and conversation more than hierarchy. The New Zealand experience lends itself fairly easily to this approach, because both Māori and Pākehā were long-distance immigrants and, as Belich shows, commercial peoples.
In Belich’s book, this equity is thorough but can sound slightly forced, and faintly suggestive of a political agenda. Sixteen years later, in Australia, Paul Irish does the same work more easily and delicately. He leaves more room for variations of personality and moral purpose, and yet he too is forceful enough. Like Belich, he tells a story of intelligent adaptation, insisting on the Aboriginal ‘use of old ways to respond to new realities’. The first inhabitants continued fishing, he says, but for trade as well as survival. They also made full use of ‘relationships with the first generations of Europeans to be born in Sydney’, and, just as he gives a
full account of a good number of Indigenous people, he also names half a dozen influential European men who showed a particular interest in them as individuals.
Historians everywhere have been unfolding new ideas about the relationship between time and space. Horizontal networks matter more now. Irish’s archaeological experience draws him to tangible, circumscribed places, and he also joins in rethinking the nineteenthcentury cartographical revolution. The nineteenth-century love of maps made jigsaws of territory the usual way of categorising human beings. Irish looks back instead to preliterate geo-politics, which preferred movement to and from a centre (like ants with their antheap) to drawing lines around and across two-dimensional spaces. In Australia, Anne Coote pioneered this insight in 2005 (her doctoral thesis), by analysing travel directions in colonial guidebooks. She showed how early guidebooks used the ancient method of getting travellers to look out for landmarks on their way (‘turn right here, turn left there’). The bird’s eye view only triumphed in the later nineteenth century, thanks to cheap and easy cartographic reproduction.
In his book, Irish includes twenty maps (three dating from the period), but the only dry-land boundary lines are those showing the area of study. Seven of the maps have been drawn to show the known movements of identifiable Aboriginal men and women, so as to give an idea of their understanding of country. In that way, the book sketches individual subjectivity, including ‘mental maps’, wherever the historic record makes that possible. It is a subjectivity that depends on settled networks of friendship and kin, and it suggests a sense of space that scholars are starting to understand much better now.
In this book, individual lives come first, from Bennelong at the very beginning to Ellen Anderson, who was born in the 1850s at Unanderra, near Lake Illawarra (her parents are named), and died in 1931 at the Aboriginal settlement at Salt Pan Creek, a tributary of George’s River. Anderson’s known movements were as far south as Kangaroo Valley and as far north as Circular Quay, where an old boatshed was for many years appro-
priated for Aboriginal use. As with all these individualised maps, there is a portrait of Anderson within the larger diagram, enlivening the reader’s sense of her mobile physical self.
Irish makes no reference to Belich or Coote, but he does acknowledge a significant debt to Grace Karskens, one of his PhD supervisors. Karskens’s great book, The Colony: A history of early Sydney (2010), takes a similar approach to networks of movement and memory,
Historians everywhere have been unfolding new ideas about the relationship between time and space
Black and White, though in her case the main story was White. Like Karskens, Irish also makes good use of evidence hidden within the oral cultures of people living today. Gathering evidence from living people is conversational in a large sense. It gives and takes at the same time, because the scholar builds up an audience by his or her own listening. Irish, and Karskens for that matter, does this, not so as to upstage traditional forms of history-writing, but in the best traditions of open-minded scholarship.
There are larger complexities. The national story, well established now, tells of the European wish to displace, confine, and, as some hoped, exterminate the Indigenous peoples. And yet this book, justifiably called Hidden in Plain View, shows some of those peoples living in numbers unremarked at the very heart of European settlement. By Irish’s account, in coastal Sydney they were exempt from the strictures of the Vagrancy Act, they travelled free by tram, their European allies gave them fishing boats and food, and for decades they kept up camps, unmolested, along the Harbour shore. It would have been useful to have had another chapter working out this larger conundrum. The project so far is puzzling, and yet, even so far, it is wonderfully enlightening and wise, and a great delight to read. g
Alan Atkinson’s three-volume The Europeans in Australia (1997–2004) won numerous major prizes.
‘Give it a go’
The many faces of a public intellectual
Ryan Cropp
DONALD HORNE: SELECTED WRITINGS
edited by Nick Horne La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781863959353
The American novelist Richard Yates once remarked to an interviewer that he had the misfortune of having written his best book first. He might have found an ally in Donald Horne, whose first book, The Lucky Country, is perhaps the most widely read piece of social criticism ever written by an Australian. Published in 1964, its famous and often misinterpreted title entered the Australian lexicon and outlived its creator. Its central argument – that Australia’s prosperity was the result of luck rather than good leadership – is a curse that continues to plague the nation’s unimaginative political class. The book’s success haunted the public career and legacy of its author. Though he was, among other things, a journalist, editor, social critic, novelist, academic, polemicist, and self-styled ‘public waffler’, in public memory, he remains Donald Horne, author of The Lucky Country.
Selected Writings is a useful corrective to this one-dimensional picture. Compiled by Donald’s son Nick, it sketches a more detailed and complicated portrait of a man once awarded the title ‘National Living Treasure’. Two chapters of Horne’s most famous work appear alongside a kaleidoscopic range of public writing: critical essays (his preferred mode), prose, memoir, poetry, satire, philosophy, and history. Nick gives structure to Donald’s intellectual and literary trajectory by organising the book into broadly chronological sections under thematic headings such as ‘The Australia Discussion’, ‘It’s All about the Culture’ and ‘The Thoughts of Old Donald’. This variety of subject matter is concrete evidence of Horne’s lifelong credo, ‘give it a go’.
Although The Lucky Country was
only a fragment of Horne’s public output, it was the springboard from which he launched his career as a public intellectual, republican activist, and late-life icon of the political left. Those with longer memories, however, recall a different Horne: conservative firebrand, anticommunist crusader, cultural cringer, and courtier to Frank Packer. In this collection, Nick revives the pre-Lucky Country writing under the banner of his father’s preferred term, ‘Radical Conservative’. Indeed, it is bewildering to witness the future chairman of the Australia Council rampaging against government funding of the arts, or denouncing a form of moderate ‘leftness’ eerily similar to his own politics in later life.
The great riddle of Donald Horne’s life is this potholed journey from right to left. In his memoirs, he explains his political metamorphosis by insisting that his natural optimism was always in conflict with his pessimistic intellectual training. Glyn Davis endorses this interpretation in the book’s biographical introduction: ‘ironic detachment was never Donald Horne’s most plausible persona. He was by instinct an activist.’ Yet the evidence provided in Selected Writings would suggest the reverse. Horne’s best work mixes irony with a winking didacticism. Detachment was his trademark. Confronted in this collection with the full range of his opinions, one senses he tried many of them on like hats.
Presenting Horne’s writing in this way – the unfiltered ‘collected works’ – only amplifies his reputation for shape-shifting. It also divorces political arguments from their very specific contexts. Horne’s denunciation of moderate progressives in ‘The Metaphor of Leftness’, for example, was surely fuelled
by the paranoid political climate of the 1950s, just as the radical nationalism of his ‘Orphans of the Pacific’ would have tapped into the widespread national pride and self-confidence of the mid1980s. This writing cannot be separated from its time. Doing so downplays Horne’s willingness to change his mind, particularly when many of his contemporaries let their opinions solidify like concrete.
The book’s success haunted the public career and legacy of its author
Paying close attention to the way public work is shaped by character and personal experience is the bread and butter of the biographer. In Horne’s case, responsibility for revealing the man behind the masks has so far been his alone. He spent a lifetime chiselling away at his own life narrative, and large chunks of The Education of Young Donald (1967) – easily the best of his five memoirs – are well-chosen inclusions in Selected Writings. But one question plagues the reader throughout: how deliberate was Horne’s transformation from radical conservative to progressive activist? The collection includes the previously unpublished essay ‘Ambition’, in which he writes that biographers ‘tend to judge personalities by the effects of their actions, giving them much more rationality than they possess’. Horne was nothing if not open-minded. It seems much more likely that his political and intellectual apostasy was a gradual response to a radically changed world than it was an opportunistic adoption of fashionable new opinions.
Like many writers of his generation, Horne wrote memoir as national history. ‘I looked in the mirror and saw an Australian’, he writes in an excerpt from The Education of Young Donald. There is some truth to this claim. Horne was a great generaliser. His capacity to explain things in the simplest terms, to distil abstract ideas into a single sentence or phrase, to take the national temperature, to write on any topic; these qualities make his writing a window onto the times. It would be difficult to write a history of postwar Australia without
reaching for a quote from Horne. In this regard, it is unfortunate that there was not space in Selected Writings for his work on 1960s new nationalism and foreign affairs.
It would be a great shame if this collection marked the end of the conversation about Donald Horne. Yet remarkably little ink has been spilled chronicling the lives of Australia’s intellectuals, those writers and thinkers whose ideas changed the way Australians think about themselves and the world they live in. Horne’s ideas and public work – original or not – changed Australia. He was, Glyn Davis writes, ‘a man who helped the nation understand itself’. He wrote engagingly on modern Australia’s principal dilemmas: the post-colonial predicament, Asia, the republic, the post-industrial economy, and globalisation. His simple, precise
prose – sprinkled with ‘telling anecdotes’ – ensured that he reached a wide audience. That ill-defined creature, the Australian public intellectual, was largely his invention.
Reading Donald Horne (at his best) is like reading a concise general history of twentieth-century Australia. Selected Writings does justice to a public career spanning nearly sixty years. To the end, he maintained a tolerance, civility, and openness rarely seen in our current public discourse. As Nick writes, his father’s life is ‘evidence that people can, in good faith, change their minds’. ‘Public wafflers’ are a dime a dozen in modern Australia. This book is a reminder of what we should expect from them. g
Ryan Cropp is a Sydney-based writer and historian. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. ❖
Little Fly
After John Bunyan
My Mužka (‘little fly’ in Czech) Goes softly but she goeth sure. She stumbles not as larger creatures do, Her journey’s shorter so she may endure More puissant than do those who further go.
Right at my feet she canny curls, She makes no noise but delicately paws The bony beast appointed for her meal, Feeds quiet, a marvel of containment.
Her modest inch of soul shines clear From liquid eyes, the tail divine wags Neither fast nor slow but sure. Most certain is it that for those who journey so, The victor’s garland they will fast procure.
Fay Zwicky
Fay Zwicky died on 2 July 2017, the day after publication of The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWA Publishing).
‘Quotidian lives’
Intimate histories of fifty Australians
Agnes Nieuwenhuizen
AUSTRALIAN LIVES: AN INTIMATE HISTORY
by
Anisa
Puri and Alistair Thomson Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 440 pp, 9781922235787
Meet Ruth Apps, born 1926 and gleefully proud of her Irish convict ancestry. Her father lost the use of an arm in Gallipoli and was also mentally affected. During World War II he slept in the yard to avoid bombs. Ruth won a scholarship to a selective girls’ high school in Sydney when few girls were educated beyond primary school. She did well and gained work as a stenographer. She loved going to the ‘Saturday arvo flicks’ and family camping beach holidays. She met a railway guard on a train, but was lectured by her mother because ‘Nice girls don’t go out with boys who are not introduced.’ Despite the lack of an introduction, Ruth married Bill and they lived happily. She left work when she fell pregnant. Their first child died shortly after being born with ‘multiple deformities’. There were no scans available in those days. Subsequently, Ruth and Bill had three healthy and successful daughters. Ruth returned to work when her youngest started school and was called a ‘fallen woman’ by some for this. She loved working, was promoted and respected, and managed to win a battle for equal pay. She felt guilty and wondered if she should have had children, despite loving and caring well for her girls. She was an early adopter of the contraceptive pill. In her youth, there were only two ‘foreigners’ living in their street; now there are only two Anglo families on her block in Westmead, Sydney. One of her daughters ‘married a Pole and a granddaughter married a Lebanese man’. Ruth Apps’s story is one example of the quotidian lives and wider experiences finely documented in Australian Lives. This is an impressive overview in terms of ‘age [people born from the 1920s to the 1980s], social class
and educational background, gender, sexuality, disability, region … regional and remote Australia, indigeneity and ethnicity’. The forty-nine other interviewees in Australian Lives were selected from 300 participants chosen from some 700 volunteers for the ‘Australian Generations Oral History Project, a collaboration between historians at Monash and La Trobe universities, the National Library of Australia, and ABC Radio National’. The intention was to produce an ‘intimate history’. In their introduction the authors, Anisa Puri and Alistair Thomson, explain:
Intimate histories illuminate everyday life as it changes across time. Big picture histories often focus on pivotal events of politics, war or industry that are well-chronicled and widely reported. The lives of so-called ‘ordinary people’, and how they are affected by social, economic and political forces, are less well-documented and require novel historical sources.
How readers respond to the lives and voices presented will depend partly on their own ages, interests, and experiences. Despite my being more than ten years younger than Apps, many of her views and anecdotes were immediately and amusingly familiar. Younger readers may be amazed or bemused by the mores and restrictions of her times. Apps first went to a Catholic school where the nuns insisted: ‘You don’t walk on the same side of the street as Protestants.’ Like other teenage girls of her time, she began assembling a Glory Box. How many younger women today would even know what that is?
For a non-academic reader, ne -
gotiating this book could be a puzzle. The organising principle is logical but complex. There are chapters on: Ancestry, Childhood, Faith, Youth, Migrants, Midlife, Activism, Later Life, and a final section titled Telling My Story, detailing the participants’ motivations and impressions of the process. The book is a treat if only for this illuminating and moving section. Chapters have sub-sections. One set of chapters ‘traverses the life-course’ and these are interspersed with ‘thematic chapters’: Each chapter is introduced by a synthesis of what is to come. This can be repetitive, confusing, and occasionally just too much. To gain a comprehensive overview of Apps’s life – and that of others – I chose to read every entry on these ‘across’ the book; quite a painstaking process and perhaps more like reading a memoir than a historical snapshot of times and themes.
The interviews are available to listen to online, and there are extensive notes and links to further reading. Participants were interviewed in various parts of Australia for four hours over two days. There was no television in Ouranita Karadimas’s (born in 1958) home in Albury, but she used to read a lot and remembers loving Gone with the Wind and collecting Enid Blyton books. David Cooper (1959) recalls struggling to read and now thinks he was dyslexic and that this stopped him joining the police force. ‘I remember being yelled at a lot, and … being frustrated and I didn’t like school because of that.’ Whilst some,
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HOW TO TAME A FOX (AND BUILD A DOG)
Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution
Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut
“A story that is part science, part Russian fairy tale, and part spy thriller. . . . Sparkling.”—New York Times Book Review
BEETHOVEN’S SYMPHONIES
Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas
Martin Geck
Translated by Stewart Spencer
“Extremely readable and thought-provoking.”—Neue Musikzeitung, on the German edition
“This aphoristic, scholarly essay offers— precisely because every answer leads to new questions—rich inspiration for hearing Beethoven anew.”— SWR2 Cluster, on the German edition
THE ORIGINS OF COOL IN POSTWAR AMERICA
Joel Dinerstein
“In addition to its nerdy (and convincing) arguments about the subject, the book also lets you simply mingle with some very cool cats, including Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, and Humphrey Bogart. Elvis, Brando, and Sinatra are here too. When have we needed their relaxed calm more?”—New York Times Book Review
PERSONALITIES ON THE PLATE
The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat
Barbara J. King
“A fascinating zoological primer, exploring the social and emotional intelligence of animals. . . . The animal-welfare debate needs more thoughtful, informative and level-headed discussion. Personalities on the Plate is a good place to start.”—Wall Street Journal
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE
Being Led by the Nose
Jane Taylor
“Brave, inventive, and intellectually exciting, William Kentridge not only reveals the playfulness and rigor of Kentridge’s aesthetic processes but manages the rare feat of capturing a certain spirit—one that is normally graspable only when one views a work of art itself or watches a live performance.”—Jessica Dubow, University of Sheffield
UNTHOUGHT
The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious
N. Katherine Hayles
“Unthought marks a brilliant addition to Hayles’s astonishing corpus—and it is surely destined to become part of our conscious and critical thought.”—Rita Raley, author of Tactical Media
like Ouranita, talk about their reading, especially in childhood, and of enjoying specific sports and fishing, bike-riding, drawing, music, and later video games and smart phones, there are no discrete sections on the arts, literature, or even sport and how these might have shaped lives. This seems a significant omission. There is a short section titled ‘Fun!’ where some of these interests are noted. Ben Peek (1976) is devoted to playing online games with people around the world. He thinks: ‘It’s the most amazingly geeky pastime whatsoever but it’s cost effective, and fun.’
Changing attitudes and policies to Indigenous Australians and immigrants are well canvassed. We meet Australians whose origins were in South Sudan, Poland, Germany, Holland, China, England, Ireland, Bosnia, Malta, Greece, and the former Yugoslavia. Surprisingly, there are no volunteers from Southeast Asia. Many of the issues covered have contemporary resonances and iterations: housing, family conflict, domestic violence, homosexuality; shifting attitudes to race, colour, faith, marriage, work, retirement, ageing, death, and living with disability. The extracts have been carefully curated but not overedited, thus capturing and conveying character and voice. The language is colloquial, making the interviews feel natural and authentic. Rhonda King (1965) tells her interviewer: ‘You’ve just asked the questions and let the answers come out however they do come out.’ We become privy to so many rich and varied lives and stories. g
Agnes Nieuwenhuizen is a Victorian reviewer based in Woodend.
TMr History
The prolific Geoffrey Bolton Wilfrid Prest
A HISTORIAN FOR ALL SEASONS: ESSAYS FOR GEOFFREY BOLTON
edited by Stuart Macintyre, Lenore Layman, and Jenny Gregory Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 365 pp, 9781925495607
raditional academic festschrifts often lack coherence and consistency, especially when the honorand’s former students and colleagues, as more or less duty-bound contributors, share little in common beyond that association. A posthumous tribute to a departed scholar can be more successful, not least because the circumstances of its compilation permit a less constrained approach to its subject’s oeuvre. The editors of this splendid collection, which had its genesis at the Perth funeral in 2015 of one Australia’s most productive and prominent historians, insist that they intend no ‘detailed examination’ of Geoffrey Bolton’s life work. Yet what they and their fellow contributors have to say about the man and his multifarious historical activities is at least as interesting as what they tell us about ‘how lines of enquiry that he pursued have been extended’.
Over six decades, Bolton variously studied and taught at ten universities (UWA, Oxford, ANU, Melbourne, Monash, Murdoch, Queensland, Cambridge, London, and Edith Cowan), while publishing fifteen sole-author books, no fewer than ninety-one Australian Dictionary of Biography entries, and the mass of edited or co-authored books, articles, chapters, and lectures detailed in the comprehensive bibliography at the end of this volume. These publications cover topics ranging from eighteenth-century parliamentary politics and British imperial history to the Aboriginal, economic, environmental, local, political, religious, and social history of Australia, plus numerous contemporary public issues. He also found time to serve on the inaugural executive of the Australian Historical Association
(where I recall first encountering his impressively tall, bearded, deep-voiced presence), together with numerous other boards, committees, and organisations, national, regional, and local.
Widely known across this country, and the United Kingdom (where as founding director from 1982–85 he inaugurated the London-based Australian Studies Centre), Bolton’s profile stood tallest in his home state, where he was chosen ‘Western Australian of the Year’ in 2006. Close to the end of his life, the Western Australian government even named a newly created Perth street ‘Geoffrey Bolton Avenue’. Although eventually accepted by the intended recipient, this was not an entirely unambiguous honour. For the eponymous throughfare intersects a parcel of land reclaimed from the Swan River, which Bolton and others had sought to protect against state-backed multi-storey development. Some might even see the title of this collection as referencing not only Bolton’s remarkable span of achievements and interests, but also his aversion to conflict and his preference for compromise over confrontation, unless perhaps in the obsessive pursuit of historical research. This latter feature of her husband’s character was made clear to his widow early in their acquaintance, when, at a party, instead of asking her for a dance, he enquired after the possible existence of her family’s papers.
Complementing Stuart Macintyre’s perceptive biographical introduction, with its fascinating and, in some respects, revelatory picture of the man, his times, and his books, Carol Bolton’s affectionately thoughtful memoir draws on her experiences as an analytical psychotherapist, as well as Geoffrey’s wife for
fifty-seven years. An empiricist who distrusted ‘theory’, he was primarily interested in what happened and why, rather than the emotions and perceptions surrounding ‘real-life’ events, matters on which they evidently agreed to disagree. She notes that he enjoyed writing his books, but preferred the preliminary research: ‘He seldom wanted research assistants, he had such a good time among the source material himself.’
All but one of the following chapters are by eminent denizens of the eastern seaboard, farflung Sandgropers, and some who have criss-crossed the Nullabor in both directions. (Not entirely in jest did Bolton term his lifelong preoccupation with the dominance of the Hume Highway axis ‘a personal neurosis’, and his own historical perspective ‘a view from the edge’). Mark McKenna’s spirited essay on the current craze for Australian political biography unfortunately fails to assess Bolton’s own extensive biographical output. However, Graeme Davison effortlessly integrates Bolton’s role as Western Australia’s ‘Mr History’ with the emergence of ‘public’ or ‘professional’ history during the 1980s, as an outgrowth from and alternative career path to ‘academic’ history, and its practitioners’ subsequent attempts to adapt to changing times.
Revisiting Bolton on John Wollaston, an influential Anglican clergyman in mid-nineteenth-century Western Australia, Alan Atkinson proposes a more positive understanding of the role of religion in Australia’s past, with particular reference to ‘the Tractarian world-view, transported and reshaped for antipodean use’ . The origins, reception, and influence of Bolton’s pioneering environmental history, Spoils and Spoilers (1981), are sympathetically surveyed by Andrea Gaynor and Tom Griffiths. A somewhat more critical Jenny Gregory outlines three urban conservation controversies in which Bolton participated, while Tim Rowse and Elizabeth Watt present a less than wholly eulogistic assessment of his ventures into northern Australian and Aboriginal historiography. Mary Jebb nevertheless concludes her overview of Jack Wherra’s boab nut carvings depicting life and death on the Kimberley frontier by suggest-
ing that Bolton might well have appreciated Wherra’s vision of ‘emotions and relationships within a framework of violence’.
Both the concluding chapters are by former Murdoch University colleagues of Bolton’s. Commending the attention his Oxford History of Australia volume (1990) accords the ageing experience, Patricia Jalland narrates in grim detail the declining years of Vance and Nettie Palmer. A more cheerful final note is struck by Lenore Layman’s extended portrait of the one woman Bolton celebrated among a handful of Westralian ‘bold dreamers’: Deborah DrakeBrockman, aka Lady Hackett, Lady Moulden, and Dr Buller Murphy (1877–1965), society hostess, philanthropist, and mining entrepreneur.
During his lifetime, Bolton witnessed and contributed to Australia’s emergence from the long shadow cast by the British empire. That only a single chapter in this collection focuses on his non-Australian historical writings is itself symptomatic of this great transformation. Yet outside Australia Bolton’s best-known work is almost certainly his 1966 OUP monograph on the Irish Act of Union, and some articles spun off from a never-completed biography of William Eden, Lord Auckland. Furthermore, it is suggested here by Carl Bridge, one of his successors in London’s Australian Studies chair, that Bolton’s unduly neglected account of Britain’s Legacy Overseas (1973) anticipated by twenty years the new ‘British World’ school of imperial and Commonwealth historians. Whether Bolton’s legacy is eventually also seen to include a more comparative and transnational Australian historiography, as he surely would have wished, time alone will tell. g
Wilfrid Prest is Professor Emeritus in History and Law at the University of Adelaide and former president of the History Council of South Australia. He is the author of William Blackstone: Law and letters in the eighteenth century (2008). His edited book Pasts Present: History at Australia’s Third University was published in 2014 by Wakefield Press.
ONCE WE WERE SISTERS by Sheila Kohler
Allen & Unwin
$27.99 pb, 244 pp, 9781782119982
As Nadine Gordimer once mused, ‘Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.’ Sheila Kohler’s site of personal haunting is the murder of her sister Maxine in South Africa more than three decades ago. Once We Were Sisters is not, however, a maudlin memoir. Whilst the book readily enters dark territory, it also resuscitates the writer’s adored older sibling and their interwoven lives with a golden patina of nostalgia.
Kohler left South Africa at the age of seventeen, but her rejected home continues to loom large. Like Rebecca and Manderley, the place seeps into her numerous novels through spectres and fantasies. The subject of domestic violence – Maxine was killed by her husband – is addressed in the wider context of colonial violence. There is a chilling disclosure that black servants were sometimes instructed to hold down the female victim by the white master, a double humiliation on their part. Unresolved questions abound, many inflected with guilt.
Travel is on a grand scale; the writer comes from a moneyed and eccentric family. France and Italy provide counterpoints, but don’t prevent Kohler from feeling out of place. Her first husband’s friends, male Yale literature students, are befuddled when she wishes to discuss Plato’s Symposium. It is the early 1960s; she is a twenty-year-old mother and should be concerned with domestic matters. After Maxine’s death, in the United States again but now separated from her philandering husband, Kohler discovers in writing a previously unexperienced agency.
‘A subterranean stream of story runs parallel with reality through all my life.’ Outside of dramatic familial narratives, literature was a source of pleasure and rich intellectual engagement for both sisters. With its bell-like prose, both clear and graceful, Once We Were Sisters achieves poetic salvation for two lost women.
Tali Lavi
ABR Calibre Essay Prize winners
Michael Adams and Darius Sepehri in conversation with Peter Rose
Meditations on mortality, sorrow, and lament at Sydney Ideas
Australian Book Review – in association with Sydney Ideas –is delighted to present the winners of its prestigious Calibre Essay Prize this year, Michael Adams and Darius Sepehri, in conversation with ABR Editor Peter Rose. Both will read extracts from their prizewinning essays, and discuss the themes of grief and mortality found in both pieces.
Michael Adams won first prize for ‘Salt Blood’, a remarkable and highly original meditation on freediving and mortality, which was published in the June-July 2017 issue of Australian Book Review. Darius Sepehri, a PhD student at the University of Sydney, won the second prize for ‘To Speak of Sorrow’, an essay about the many kinds of grief and their different expressions in writing and culture, as lament, testimony, or ritual. His essay is published in this issue of Australian Book Review, on page 53.
Michael Adams teaches and researches at the University of Wollongong, and before that worked for environment NGOs, the national parks service, and Aboriginal organisations. His focus is on human–nature relationships, especially with Indigenous and local communities, and he likes fullimmersion methodologies.
When
Wednesday, 7 August 2017
6 to 7.30 pm, bookings are essential.
Darius Sepehri was born in Iran and moved to Australia at the age of five. He is a researcher and writer, and currently completing a doctoral thesis at the University of Sydney in the International and Comparative Literary Studies Program.
Where
New Law LT 106, Level 1, Sydney Law School Annex, Eastern Avenue,The University of Sydney
Visit ABR’s Events page to register www.australianbookreview.com.au/events
From drone killings to whale poo
George Monbiot’s critical identity
David Schlosberg
HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS? POLITICS, EQUALITY, NATURE
by George Monbiot
Verso, $36.99 hb, 342 pp, 9781784783624
In reviewing this broad retrospective of George Monbiot’s Guardian columns, How Did We Get Into This Mess?, it is difficult to focus solely on the actual content of those commentaries. Yes, we need to understand the problems that illustrate that central question – the clear mess we’re in. From Monbiot’s position, the symptoms range, impressively, from individual loneliness to the ecological disaster of sheep, from drone killings to academic publishing, from the myths of consumption to the lost value of whale poo (really). Clearly, the mess we are in is a big one. Analysing that mess is a complex task, one which Monbiot takes on with a convincing and engaging combination of intelligence, depth, and righteous anger.
But there is more to the collection than what is on the page, broad ranging and persuasive though it is. The other issue in reviewing a collection of commentaries like this, of course, is that of Monbiot’s position as one of the authoritative voices of the broadly defined left. What do we expect of such a critical voice, clearly identified as part of the newly energised ‘resistance’ – and how does Monbiot fare in that role as one of our major social commentators?
Monbiot lays out his task as ‘identifying and challenging power’, or, more thoroughly, ‘showing the world as it is rather than as the apparatus of justification would wish people to see it’. The goal, he argues, is to ‘play a helpful part’ in a mobilisation of resistance. As a powerful editorial voice in what is really the major journalistic effort of the establishment left, the Guardian, How Did
We Get Into This Mess? is as much a statement of Monbiot’s critical identity as it is a critique of neoliberalism.
For Monbiot, the clear core of our dilemma, the ‘how’ of how we got ourselves into this mess, is, of course, neoliberalism. The title essay passionately and successfully weaves together the interests of the ultra-wealthy, critiques of the myth of growth, the vacuousness of consumption, the destructiveness of fossil fuels (and sheep, of course). It culminates in an analysis of the various laws, policies, trade agreements, and more that undermine democracy, destroy ecosystems, exacerbate inequality, and enrich the corporate class.
What is refreshing about Monbiot’s approach is his analysis of the symptoms, the impacts, the very everyday lives that neoliberalism has created. The wellorganised compendium begins with the reality of the isolation, loneliness, dissatisfaction, stress, and depression unleashed upon young and old alike. There is a dedicated section on ‘Lost Youth’ that ranges from kids without access to nature, to university grads snapped up by the lure of the banks, to children killed in drone strikes – all linked, of course, to the needs of capital.
Monbiot offers his critiques in beautifully constructed, concise, and informative essays. It is all crucial and true and devastating and well put, and we should be deeply appreciative of both the depth and consistency of Monbiot’s critical reflections on our current mess, and his prominence as an articulate voice of the left. And, yet, I was also left unsettled in two different ways.
One frustration is that the collection is primarily critique, aimed at providing fodder for further criticism and a delegitimisation of the current neoliberal order. Clearly, Monbiot anticipates this with the choice of title – it is, after all, about the mess, not the cleaning. Still, this makes the vision seem incomplete, missing the more reconstructive moment. It reminds me of one of the best analyses of Jeremy Corbyn’s recent surge in popularity – that things changed when Corbyn switched from trying to be the leader of the opposition to being the leader of the alternative.
Maybe there is a humility at work, with so little focus on the alternative (other than teaching kids how to prepare roadkill for breakfast, or how we might use whales for a more ecological geoengineering). Or maybe Monbiot is setting us up for the pitch, the soon-tocome Out of the Wreckage: A new politics in an age of crisis (Verso, 2017).
The larger frustration, however, is that as broad and encompassing as Monbiot’s critiques are, he unnecessarily limits his targets – and, so, his potential audience. For example, it is crucial to discuss the idea of rebalancing the functioning of the non-human realm – paying attention to the way that ecosystems function, work, and provide for human and nonhuman needs alike. But Monbiot’s approach, ‘rewilding’, is primarily based in a preservationist ideal of the past, and notions of wonder and enchantment. This unnecessarily
limits his audience, in large part, to the well-off white liberal environmentalists accused of reading the Guardian over their caffe lattes and avocado toast. Surprisingly, there is only a single mention of the idea of environmental racism in a discussion of lead poisoning (pre-Flint), but here Monbiot misses the opportunity to link to, or, more importantly, to be an advocate for, an environmentalism that is based in justice rather than
There is more to the collection than what is on the page, broad ranging and persuasive though it is
preservation, in defending one’s home and health rather than being enchanted with a fiction of the ‘wild’.
Related is Monbiot’s advocacy for nuclear power, which has upset many of his readers. While the need to identify a realistic replacement for coal and gas is crucial, Monbiot focuses his vindication of nuclear on the argument that there have been few actual health impacts from existing nuclear power plants, even given major failures such as in Fukushima. This is startlingly naïve, as the health and other impacts of the nuclear industry must include those involved in the mining and production of uranium and in the disposal of spent waste. These impacts of the broader nuclear cycle, especially in the United States and Australia, have come primarily at the expense of the health and sovereignty of indigenous peoples.
There are other examples of this surprising lack of attention to audience –a disconnect from movement discourse, concerns, and action. For someone who began a career focused, in part, on the theft of lands from indigenous peoples, it is quite surprising to see so little on settler colonialism and colonisation in this collection (other than a piece on the right-wing critics of the 2009 film Avatar). An essay on marriage equality does not mention or give credit to gay rights movements; a piece on abortion rights and the church is offered without reference to women’s health movements. Oddly, Monbiot inserts a claim that
his 2007 commentary was the first to advocate for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, while in reality the very first Climate Justice Summit, in The Hague in 2000, made the now longstanding claim that keeping carbon in the ground was a basic demand of climate justice.
While Monbiot offers the lament that ‘we have all become skilled in the act of not seeing’, he unfortunately seems to illustrate the same weakness – again, to the detriment of a broad audience.
What is odd is that I have read most of these commentaries over the years, and have a deep appreciation for the role that Monbiot plays in contemporary political discourse and in the absolutely necessary calling out of the practices and actors behind the mess we’re in. What is on the page deserves all of the accolades. It is only seeing
the broad historical record in one place that allows us to step back and see the range of topics absent, which defines the role of Monbiot as a commentator as much as what is on the page. I am not going to disagree with the glowing cover blurbs from Naomi Klein and Brian Eno; this is indeed a collection from a dazzling, rigorous, and original critic. But it does seem to miss many of the other ‘countervailing’ – and I would add reconstructive – voices that Monbiot hopes to speak to, influence, and join, in cleaning up the mess we’re in. g
David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute.
Some ugly truths
A cautionary tale of faith and its demise
Mark Chou
DEMOCRACY: STORIES FROM THE LONG ROAD TO FREEDOM by Condoleezza Rice Twelve, $US35 pb, 496 pp, 9781455540181
What are the cornerstones of democracy? If you ask Condoleezza Rice who, as the sixty-sixth US secretary of state, was responsible for introducing democracy to autocratic states like Afghanistan and Iraq, her answer would go something like this: the right to speak one’s mind; freedom from arbitrary rule; leaders empowered by popular consent; equilibrium between the three branches of government and between federal and state power, minorities and the majority, state and society. But to this list Rice would add faith and institutions –the underlying threads that, for her, tie democracy’s various strands together. They are democracy’s true genius, and the cornerstones of her new book, Democracy: Stories from the long road to freedom. Rice tells a story from her child-
hood, long before she became America’s most senior diplomat during George W. Bush’s presidency. A child of seven, she was driving home from school one day with her uncle when they passed a long queue of black citizens waiting to vote. This was 1962 Alabama and the segregationist candidate George Wallace was running for governor. The young Condi, who already knew that Wallace was bad news for blacks, having overheard her parents talking about him, turned to her uncle and asked, ‘If all those black people vote, how can Wallace win?’ Her uncle replied that the blacks couldn’t stop Wallace because they were still the minority. ‘Then why do they bother?’ she asked. ‘Because it is your duty to vote,’ he responded. ‘And one day that vote will matter.’
Her uncle was right on both counts.
Wallace did go on to become governor. But the promise that he had campaigned on – ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’ – was soon eclipsed by the civil rights movement, or what Rice calls ‘America’s second democratic opening’. Her family, like countless other black families at the time, participated in this democratic transition even before they had any reason to believe in victory. Their faith, to this extent, was no different from that of the Founders when they first asked the nation to trust in a set of untested institutions. ‘This inexplicable faith in the rights enshrined in American institutions,’ Rice writes, ‘played a crucial role in finally gaining those rights, because it left open a pathway to change the course of America without resorting to violence.’
Readers familiar with US politics will probably detect in these and other passages the unspoken presence of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who travelled through America in the early 1830s and wrote Democracy in America. Rice does cite Tocqueville when describing democracy’s ‘ceaseless agitation’. Yet it is what she leaves unacknowledged – his insights about democracy and faith – that may help readers navigate her book’s real contribution.
What Tocqueville realised during his travels was that democracy operated much like a religion because of how much it was underpinned by faith. People believed in it, entrusted their lives to its institutions, even when all the observable evidence suggested it was destined to disappoint. It didn’t matter that democracy was a political system that often lacked disciplined leadership or political foresight; people remained inexplicably confident in democratic institutions no matter how chaotic or trite things got. For Tocqueville, it was this immovable faith in democracy that gave it the unique ability to absorb and survive body blows capable of knocking autocratic regimes in Europe to the ground.
To understand this point is also to understand why Rice has written this book now – a question interviewers have repeatedly asked her. Hoping to elicit from the former secretary of state a critique of the Trump administration,
most interviewers have come away disappointed by her diplomatic responses. More than any other answer, Rice merely reiterates her book’s key point: let’s have faith that our democratic institutions will continue to maintain the necessary checks and balances, as they always have. But Rice’s calm response belies a deep sense of concern at what is happening both at home and abroad. Having written a book about democracy and faith, she fully understands that keeping faith with democracy’s institutions has become a hard ask, not simply for many Americans, but for countless citizens in Western democracies too. As she writes, there is growing scepticism about ‘the actual practice and
Rice’s calm response belies a deep sense of concern at what is happening at home and abroad
feasibility’ of the democratic enterprise. She is not wrong. Globally, if we look at recent Freedom House data, we see that the five years leading up to 2010 recorded the longest period of democratic decline across the globe in nearly forty years. Studies of the World Values Survey tell us that citizens in consolidated democracies are becoming increasingly cynical about the value of democracy; a finding frequently reiterated by surveys in Australia. In Europe, authoritarian and populist parties like Hungary’s Jobbik, France’s Front National, and Greece’s Golden Dawn have slowly become mainstay political opposition movements. Then there is the rise of authoritarian powers like Russia and China, now busy promoting political norms and institutions within their ever-expanding spheres of influence.
Domestically, for Rice, ‘taking stock of our internal affairs reveals some ugly truths’ as well. Commentators like David Brooks have written about the rise of an anti-political sentiment, harnessed by Donald Trump, which seeks to shut down democratic compromise and the legislative process for ‘bashing and pummelling’. Studies reveal that the overarching trait shared by Trump supporters is their penchant for author-
itarianism. To cap things off, polls reveal that significant numbers of Americans (forty per cent according to one Stanford University poll) ‘have lost faith in American democracy’. In a startling June 2016 Gallup survey, it was found that, whereas seventy-three per cent of Americans had either a ‘great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in the military, only six per cent of Americans had ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in Congress.
Most worrying of all is how decisively the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that Rice writes about –populism, nativism, protectionism, isolationism – today stand as a repudiation of the cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s which, among other things, led to America’s second democratic opening. Proving Tocqueville right, her book is thus a cautionary tale of faith and its demise. When citizens lose faith in democracy, democracy loses its ability to weather the crises it faces. America’s implicit renunciation in 2016 and 2017 of the democratic opening that enabled someone like Condoleezza Rice – a black woman from Alabama – to become the country’s highest-ranking diplomat stands for all that democracy has to lose if what we have seen recently continues to take hold. g
Mark Chou is an associate professor of politics at the Australian Catholic University. His latest book is Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combating civic deficit (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). ❖
THE CIRCLE AND THE EQUATOR
by Kyra Giorgi
UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 205 pp, 9781742589237
‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L.P. Hartley’s now proverbial observation at the start of The GoBetween (1953) functions as a statement of fact and a warning. The writer who wishes to traverse the terrain between a nation’s present and its past must navigate a minefield – linguistic, cultural, and historical. Therefore, when you attempt to navigate not only across time but across nations – say, Angola in 1986, Hiroshima in 1952, France in 1855 –the exercise is fraught with danger. But this is the ambitious task that Kyra Giorgi has set herself in her first book of fiction, The Circle and the Equator, a collection of thirteen short stories.
Giorgi has one advantage in tackling such wide dimensions: she is a historian and brings that knowledge to bear. However, her vocation at times proves to be a burden. She has brought the historian’s discipline of exposition too far into some of the stories and at other times (perhaps sensing this) overcorrects and buries important details too deep in others which can be distracting. The ambition to write beyond personal experience means that the dialogue is sometimes clunky and the narration can exhibit a generic quality where a modern sensibility crowds out a feel for the particular.
Nevertheless, some stories are very effective, notably ‘Visitor from Hollywood’, set in Łódź in 1966. Giorgi has created some nicely delineated characters, establishing a small world beautifully but not mawkishly. ‘Soft Ground’, set in Berlin in 1921, builds through layers of emotional dissonance in the interactions between a shy returned soldier, an artist, and a pimp. Giorgi has a fertile imagination, evokes place efficiently within the limits of the medium and has a nose for an engaging premise. The storylines open up auspiciously but don’t always close as ambitiously. Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable collection of stories and a promising beginning.
David Latham ❖
She who pays the piper
An ex-finance minister on fiscal waterboarding
Simon Tormey
ADULTS IN THE ROOM: MY BATTLE WITH EUROPE’S DEEP ESTABLISHMENT
by Yanis Varoufakis
The Bodley Head, $35 pb, 559 pp, 9781847924469
The blurb on the back of the book describes Varoufakis as ‘the most interesting man in the world’. It is a wonderful epithet and might even be true considering the interest that Varoufakis excites in the press and media. On another reading, he is also the luckiest man in the world given the extraordinary nature of his leap from talented if unheralded academic economist to Greek finance minister to international speaker and best-selling author. This is an important as well as an entertaining work: part diary, part critique of European political economy, and part thriller featuring a cast of villains of whom Ian Fleming would be proud. It is a heady concoction and a gripping read.
Adults in the Room focuses on Varoufakis’s brief tenure as Greek finance minister in 2015, a matter of weeks marked by extreme turbulence on global markets as the international community digested the possibility of ‘Grexit’ or a Greek exit from the EU. Whilst the details of who owed what to whom on what basis can seem bewildering at times, the gist of the issue that confronted Varoufakis and his comrades in Syriza on being elected was clear enough. Greece, quite simply, was broke. The money it had borrowed on the international markets was being used to pay back interest on its loans with the further requirement to flog off saleable assets to make the payments.
As Varoufakis reasonably argues, this was not sustainable. Nor was it sensible for the debtor or the creditors, given the erosion of Greece’s economy that accompanied these measures. Better, he argued, to regard Greece as technically bankrupt, allow it to cut its
losses, and start again with a serious reform process which would promise a return to economic growth with the prospect of being able to service a more reasonable debt. It was upon this analysis that Syriza was elected with the promise to face down the dread ‘troika’ (ECB, IMF, EU) in pursuit of a sustainable and humanitarian solution to the Greek crisis.
The journey we take in the book makes Kafka’s travails with bureaucracy seem trivial. Everyone Varoufakis encounters seems to agree with his analysis, but few are able to say so in public because of the multitude of different agendas to which each is beholden. So why couldn’t something be done?
By the end of the saga, we learn that what really counts in the EU is what the German chancellor and her finance minister agree ‘counts’. If that means taking a stick to small country like Greece pour encourager les autres, then so be it. The era of ‘gunboat diplomacy’ in Europe may be over, but it has merely given way to ‘fiscal waterboarding’, or coercion exercised through fiscal penalties. The effect is the same: the strong discipline the weak, and the idealism of the European project is exposed as a cynical schema for maintaining German hegemony.
So far so sobering, not least for those of us with ‘remain’ tendencies in the Great British Brexit debate. But there are nonetheless some nagging mysteries to this tale. Firstly, Varoufakis tells us nothing at all about how it is that Greece managed to get itself into such a mess. Who is to blame for Greece racking up billions of euros of debt? And what happened to all the money?
The absence of any kind of narra-
tive or contextual discussion is curious. Varoufakis’s book is as much a morality tale as it is contemporary critique, and yet the reader seems lacking vital evidence in order to make up his or her own mind as to where blame lies for the unfolding catastrophe. Varoufakis seems to assume that those who are impoverished deserve favour on their own terms. But the demands of a morality tale are a little more complex than that. Is this truly a tale of a people subject to the exigencies of international finance capital, or is there at least some element of contributory negligence here? One searches in vain for any kind of clue, presumably because this would spoil the sub-plot: the tale of the beastly Euro élites beating up on a small and defenceless nation, the original ‘democrats’ no less.
A second problem is the assumption that in a democracy the people have the right to vote away the inherited debts and obligations accumulated by the state in their name. The argument is repeatedly made that because Syriza was elected with a mandate to swap debt for reform there is some injustice in creditors failing to write down their assets. This is a little too convenient. Simply electing a new government with a mandate to reduce or eliminate debt does not make the debt itself any less real, even if morally or ethically we agree that writing down some of the debt is indeed the right thing to do. Nor does it mean that creditors are not within their rights to expect the new government to respect the obligations inherited from the old. If this were the case, lending would be impossible. Banks would always live in fear that a simple change of government would erase their assets leading to the collapse of the system of finance.
These issues aside, Varoufakis’s book raises important questions about the nature of sovereignty in Europe and the emerging European project itself. Interestingly, one of the few characters who comes out of the book with any credit is Emmanuel Macron, the new French president. Macron repeatedly advises Varoufakis to stand his ground and not give way to the bullying tactics of Wolfgang Schäuble, German minister
for finance. However Schäuble is himself nothing more than a Blofeld-esque nasty in the court of Chancellor Merkel. In a revealing moment, he too confesses that he agrees with Varoufakis’s analysis; but he is both ensnared by, and complicit in, the logic of German hegemony. It is here that the rubbery idealism of Varoufakis, and perhaps Macron as well, hits the tarmac of European power politics. What becomes clear by the end of the text is that the verities of politics as described by Thrasymachus are alive and well: he (or perhaps she) who pays the piper calls the tune, and there is no piper to rival Germany on the European mainland. As long as every other European country spends more than it earns, they will be at the mercy of the political blandishments of Germany, the one major economy consistently able to pay its way in the world. Macron’s hope is that cutting public expenditure in France will see them return to surplus in the near term, and he may not
be wrong. What then?
Varoufakis clings to the dream of a Europe of nations, solidarity between equals, and all the rest of it. This marks him out less as ‘the most interesting man in the world’ than the most romantic, certainly in terms of his reading of the EU’s origins and character. More likely is the consolidation of a strong FrancoGerman core surrounded by vassal states like Greece. Post-Brexit the latter will lack the mediating (and sceptical) presence of the United Kingdom, paving the way for the emergence of a neoCarolingian political construct that will further strengthen the core at the cost of the periphery. If so, this text will be an important historical document marking the moment when the ideal of a Europe of ‘free and equal nations’ was finally revealed as a fig leaf hiding the emergence of a new super state. g
Simon Tormey is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney.
[sanctum sanctorum our windowless attic ...]
sanctum sanctorum our windowless attic candlelit in which trembled my shadow our windowless attic walled round by records trembled my shadow stacks of spiralbound fake books walled round by records there I sat under stacks of spiral-bound fake books in an outsized shirt there I sat under your brass galaxy of notes in an outsized shirt horn like a raised fist your brass galaxy of notes overhead shining horn like a raised fist running my fingers through dust overhead shining how could I be heard running my fingers through dust one rainy evening how could I be heard a dented tuba I found one rainy evening hugged it to my chest a pockmarked tuba I found with red cheeks ballooned hugged it to my chest blew a long low whale-like moan with red cheeks ballooned into the quiet blew a long low whalelike moan whereupon you turned into the quiet told me to think vertically whereupon you turned to your sheet music told me to think vertically or were you talking to your sheet music the rain snare-rolling the roof or were you talking my heart a doomed moth the rain snare-rolling the roof your horn upraising my heart a doomed moth candlelit in which I’m burning to hear you still sanctum sanctorum
Jaydn DeWald ❖
Jaydn DeWald is a writer, teacher, and jazz bassist living in Georgia, USA. He has two forthcoming chapbooks.
The Leaching Layer
by Dominic Amerena
My neighbour has been digging a hole in his backyard for the past few days. The hole is quite large now, big enough to fit, say, a single bed, or – it’s hard not to draw the connection – a coffin.
He begins at dawn and works all morning, shovelling the soil and piling it in a neat mound next to the edge of the hole. Our house is on a leafy Footscray backstreet, far from the Princes Highway. My second-floor bedroom looks directly onto the fence between our houses, and I’ve grown accustomed to waking to the sound of soil falling, the martial clang of his spade striking rock, his grunts of exertion.
It’s just past seven on Tuesday morning and I drink my coffee (caustic, instant stuff) watching the back of his head – grey at the temples, bald on the crown – bobbing up and down in the hole. He is rangy and grave in painter’s pants and a flannel shirt. He has the slow, spare movements of a man who is used to physical work, who knows how to avoid tiring himself out.
I really should be writing – of course, of course, of course – but as he digs I read articles online about the heat wave, about bushfires in the east of the state. I read about tram tracks warping, about elderly people expiring in their homes. It’s the hottest summer on record (as was last year, as was the year before), and it’s hard not to feel that the world, in one sense or another, is coming to an end.
I tell my housemates about the neighbour later that evening, sharing cask wine – diabetes in a silver bladder – in the living room, on couches we filched from hard rubbish. There’s a cool southerly, but we have to keep the windows shut so the mosquitoes don’t get in. The internet told me that this is the worst year on record for mosquitoes.
He’s probably just building a pool, Heidi says, refilling her glass. Or a wine cellar. Just another DIY daddy. Heidi hasn’t been home for days and she’s looking wan and photocopied, with a hacking cough from all the smoke in the air. But she’s still moving with a kind of manic energy, nodding her head to the music (‘I Want Your Love’ by Chic). I’m like a shark, I remember her telling me just after she moved in, I have to keep moving to stay alive.
So this hole is what, some kind of penance for our soon-to-be-divorced daddy, Heidi asks? Our fooledaround-with-someone-he-shouldn’t-have daddy. Forgot-to-delete-text-message-history daddy.
Hit-the-bottle-hard daddy, says Rowan. TVdinners-on-the-sofa daddy. Leaving-voicemailsat-all-hours-of-the-night daddy. They look at me expectantly, waiting for my contribution to our little parlour game. Come on, says Heidi, you’re the writer.
Over the past few days the hole has grown bigger – deeper too. Now my neighbour uses a stepladder to climb in and out. At the bottom of the hole the soil is lighter in colour, and – I can tell even from here – has a looser consistency. The internet tells me that this part of the earth is called the alluvium, or the leaching layer. It’s composed mostly of sand and silt, sapped of the minerals in the topsoil. The word, alluvium, sounds ceremonial to me, vaguely Roman; it reminds me of battlegrounds and blood sports, viscera spilt onto dirt.
I still don’t know what he does with the displaced soil. When he finishes work each evening, there’s a sizeable mound sitting next to the hole. Every morning its edges are scraped clean, like the site of an archaeological dig. The air’s still thick with smoke from the bushfires, and once it gets dark it’s usually pretty hard to see much of anything. There hasn’t been any work all week at the café, and it’s been too hot to venture outside, save for my daily trip to the Little Saigon market to buy vegetables, and if I’m feeling decadent, a tofu bánh mì.
You’re looking a little vampiric babe, Heidi said yesterday, as she passed me in the hallway between our bedrooms. Perhaps you should consider, you know, getting out more.
I’m just trying to stay sun smart, I said. Have you seen how big the hole is next door? She was looking at her phone, her fingers dancing a tarantella across the screen. Please refer to my previous comment, she said, clumping down the stairs.
It’s Tuesday again, or it could be Wednesday and the hole now takes up most of my neighbour’s backyard. The fence between our houses has begun to sag in the
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middle, and the tea trees at the rear of his property are pitching forward into the hole.
Facebook told me this morning that D’s book is about to be published. It’s called Inferno: Field reports from a country on fire and it’s slated, somewhat ironically perhaps, for release at the end of summer. Beside the cover art (a gauzy image of a bushfire sweeping across grasslands) there is a photo of D, looking straight at the camera, her hair matted against the side of her face.
I took that photo of her in my bedroom two summers ago, on a morning even hotter than this one. We were posing for goofy author headshots, staring sternly into the lens, chins in hands, cigarettes smouldering between our knuckles. We dressed in ridiculous outfits: the artists as early-career academics, as nineties slacker rockers, as health goths. She had just taken a job at The Age, and I was still getting the fortnightly stipend for the Masters that I never completed, and probably never will.
We fucked that morning with wet towels on the mattress and desk fans breathing on our backs, doowop blasting full bore to mask the sound. I remember that feeling – which in hindsight probably had a lot to do with the heat – of terrible urgency, of last rites, as if we had both been condemned for some hideous crime. Over the next nine months I used a lot of different words to describe the way we fucked: atavistic, mammalian, deranged. All too rarefied though, too literary. She said it was simple. She said we fucked red.
At that stage, we’d only known each other for a couple of weeks. It was a gossamer time when we seemed to be permanently drunk, when the hours we spent sleeping seemed like the most outrageous waste of time. We swapped books by the writers we loved, and we read them back-to-back-to-back-toback, like a series of sacred texts. She showed me Myles and Nelson, Savage and Gaitskill; molten, tangled texts about bodies crashing against each other; tectonic writing, close to the core. I was more than a little embarrassed by my DeLillo and Perec, by my Wallace and Lerner. The neutered, preening stuff of smart men wanting to be told that they were smart. Our taste in books could be read as a neat metaphor for our relationship, though I’ve always been suspicious of metaphors.
I’m woken by a crash from next door. Still fuggy from sleep, I pad to the window and look into my neighbour’s yard. It’s just past six and the light is smoky and unresolved, lending the scene a certain nightmarish quality. One of the tea trees is on its side in the hole, its roots exposed obscenely, plumes of dirt rising into the air. Shirt open, my neighbour paces around the trunk, prodding it with his spade as if checking for signs of life. His belly is bigger than I had
realised, a downy pouch of pendulous flab. It makes him look vulnerable, marsupial even. I imagine him as a victim of some natural disaster – like the people D spent so much time interviewing last year. He has just returned to his property for the first time since it (the typhoon, the tornado) happened, and this is him, shell-shocked and quietly devastated, picking through the rubble of his previous life, trying to make sense of what happened.
If D had been here she would have leant over the fence weeks ago, called him over with a neighbourly wave, asked him what he was doing. He would have told her about the extensions to the house, the granny flat that he was planning to build. D certainly wouldn’t be doing this – whatever this is – sitting here for hours on end, watching a hole growing bigger.
When my neighbour finishes digging for the day, I begin to read. I read about the deepest hole in the world, drilled into the steppes of north-west Russia. Before it was filled in with concrete, Soviet scientists dangled a microphone down the twelve-kilometre shaft. I’m listening to the sound of the earth, and it sounds – there’s no other way to put it – like a beating heart. I read about the Haidari concentration camp in occupied Athens during World War II. Through a hideous system of trial and error, the SS officers found that the most effective method of breaking the inmates’ spirits was to force them to dig holes and refill them, over and over again.
I’ve been telling myself that all of this reading is research for a story. It would fit within the cycle that I had been writing for my degree; a series of mordant character studies, in the style of the minimalists that I’d weaned myself on as an undergrad. Unnamed couples in outer suburbs, trying to work out precisely why they were so unhappy. The stories contained many a secret addiction, plenty of strained conversations in bed, the occasional death of a beloved pet (in florid detail). Something shocking always happened right at the end, or else the story began in the direct aftermath of a tragic event.
If I was writing about my neighbour this is how it would look:
It begins with the wife and daughter leaving for a month-long holiday to visit relatives in Athens. It’s the daughter’s first time overseas, a present for her sixteenth birthday. The husband couldn’t get time off from his construction job. The wife and daughter call home every day, but over the weeks my neighbour becomes increasingly withdrawn. He answers their questions with mumbles and grunts, if he answers them at all. He makes excuses to get off the line, claiming that he is exhausted from work, that he has been having these terrible headaches.
She knows that something’s wrong as soon as the taxi drops them off out the front of their house. The grass in the front yard is shin-high, the mailbox
overflowing with flyers and pamphlets. There’s a phalanx of unwrapped newspapers on the verandah, the paper faded yellow from the sun. Wait here, the wife says to her daughter, her voice assuming an air of quiet command. The house is dim and stale-smelling, the curtains drawn. Oranges are rotting in the fruit bowl; a bin is tipped over in the kitchen. And dust, so much dust, more dust than it seems possible to make in such a short time. She immediately thinks heart attack, she thinks stroke, she steels herself to find his body, face down in the living room or the kitchen or – please god no – hanging from the ceiling. When she hears the sound of him digging out the back, she almost cries with relief.
She stands on the back step, appalled by what she sees. She calls out to him, but my neighbour gives no indication that he hears her. For a minute or two she thinks it’s a game. She claps her hands to get his attention, stamps her feet, totters along the edge of the hole, saying things like, Okay now, show’s over, and, Stop mucking around. Eventually she scrambles down the stepladder into the hole.
The daughter is still on the front verandah, crosslegged on an overturned suitcase, imagining the worst.The suitcase is stuffed with food and presents for her father – a bottle of raki, a pair of leather sandals, a Panathinaikos football jersey (I’ve been googling).
The wife prods her husband in the back, grabs him roughly by the shoulder. Him! The man she’s been married to for half her life, the only man she’s slept in a bed with. This man, who’d peel potatoes at the sink at dinnertime, humming along – horribly out of tune – to his daughter practising piano in the living room. The man who brought his wife breakfast in bed – poached eggs and cucumber and roast tomatoes, a fingerbowl of green olives – every morning for two months when she’d had post-natal depression after their daughter’s birth.
She begins to hit him, but my neighbour continues to dig, oblivious to the fists thudding into his back. Another tea tree barrels into the hole and she falls with it, lies flat on her back incanting his name over and over (what would it be? Alex perhaps, maybe George is better; something softer, innocuous). Without warning he drops the spade, looks down at his wife with sad, sleepy eyes and levers himself to the ground. And that’s how the story would end, with the two of them lying next to each other, the tips of their toes touching the trunk of the tea tree, and the sky blooming pink above them.
Would I write myself into the story of the hole, I wonder, the nosy neighbour, watching everything unfold from his window. I’ve never been particularly good at blending the real with the imagined; I’ve always liked to keep them strictly separate, compartmentalised. But I suppose there’s a first time for everything.
Of course this is only a sketch, but reading over
it, the final section doesn’t quite work (if any of it does). All of my fiction has tended to end in a similar fashion: with a darkly opaque moment or image, suggestive of something sinister and unsayable. What exactly that is, is anyone’s guess.
I’ve often wondered why I find myself gravitating towards these scenes of domestic melancholia. Perhaps it’s a reaction to my parents’ three decades of stolid matrimony: their nightly one-and-a-half bottles of red, their Sunday morning cryptic crosswords, their annual holiday to the same camping ground in Port Fairy.
We’ve really done a number on him haven’t we, my dad said, a couple of years ago, after I’d shown my parents a story that had recently been published.
It was about a wife who, over the course of a week or so, is driven (temporarily?) mad by her husband’s incessant snoring, and ends up trying to smother him with a pillow. Though I remember very little of it, I believe it ended with an almost identical image to the story I sketched above; husband and wife lying side by side, in the eye of the storm, not knowing what to say to each other.
I don’t snore do I, my dad had asked. Well, not like that anyway, my mum said. It’s not about you Dad, I said. Well who’s it about then, he was starting to sound perturbed.
I had no idea. The characters I had been creating (and killing off) had very little basis in reality. They were cadged and cribbed from characters I had discovered in other books, blurry composites leached of life.
I’ll put the kettle on, my mother said after some time, taking the journal from the coffee table and sliding it carefully into the bookcase. My father called out after her, Just make sure you wake me up if I’m ever snoring like that.
I am just drifting off when I hear crying through the wall, coming from Heidi’s room. I pull on a kimono (one of D’s old ones that she never picked up) and shuffle down the hall. Heidi’s door is wide open, and she’s propped up in bed, headphones on, wearing a T-shirt and boxers. Her eyes are covered as if she’s playing a game of peekaboo, her body trembling with sobs.
Late one night at the end of last summer, Heidi found me trying to jimmy open the living room window. Apparently I had vomit down the front of my shirt and cuts on my elbows and my house key was nowhere to be found. Apparently I was so drunk that Heidi couldn’t understand anything I was saying. She sat me in the shower with my clothes on.
I had been with D at the Reverence. When she arrived I had been sitting in the beer garden, nursing a Coopers longneck (my fourth) and reading a book that I’d hoped would impress her (The Argonauts perhaps, or something by Claudia Rankine?). It was
the first time that we’d seen each other for over two weeks. She had been posted to the newspaper’s rural desk and had been on assignment covering the bushfires. She’d managed to get the Invasion Day long weekend off, but was heading back to the country the following Monday. She was still in her work clothes when she arrived, her hair clipped primly away from her forehead. When she leant in to hug me, I remember her hair smelt faintly of cinders.
It felt like an awkward first date; we talked over the top of each other, or we didn’t talk at all. She told me about the towns she had been visiting, the fireblackened lunar landscapes. She showed me a photo of a koala with the pads of its paws burnt off. She spoke about the good works of the volunteers from the CFA, the RSL, and the Salvos (I sneered internally when she referred to them as heroes). It’s horrible out there, she said, but I’ve never felt so alive.
She’d been sending me recordings of the interviews she’d conducted with victims of the bushfires. I’d given them a cursory listen, but had always found myself switching them off after a couple of minutes. There was something about the recordings that made me feel uncomfortable, the rawness of those broad, broken voices, the way the syllables sounded like they were being torn at the seams. There was something grossly intimate about them; it was like listening to strangers having sex. They made me jealous of her for the first time in our relationship.
My plan is to collect them into a book, D said, an oral history kind of thing. Have you ever read any Svetlana Alexievich? I shook my head, went to the bar to buy a jug.
It went on like that for another hour or so. She told story after story, and I said very little in reply. We both got progressively wasted. At the end of each of her anecdotes she would pause and wait for me to say something, but I was continuously, embarrassingly, drawing a blank. When the conversation faltered for what felt like the hundredth time, she reached into her bag and produced a printout of a story I’d sent her, the margins crawling with red ink.
It was about a couple whose teenage son had left to Syria to fight with ISIS. A sombre, sexless thing, it comprised of little more than the two of them pottering around their Brisbane home (there tended to be a lot of pottering in my stories), poring over old photo albums and school reports, trying to work out how any of this could have happened. Of course I know next to nothing about parenthood or ISIS. I’ve never even been to Brisbane. Between Wikipedia and Google Street View, I can usually fake my way through most scenarios, but something in this story felt especially confected.
D gave me a thin-lipped smile and began to read. I’ve long deleted the story, so besides a few phrases I have no idea what she said that night. But
I remember her chilly smile, the dramatic inflections she used while reading the dialogue, as if she were acting in a pantomime. Mercifully, she stopped after a page or two. It’s just so depressing, she said. Are you aware of that?
Good writing is supposed to depress the comfortable, and comfort the depressed, I replied.
Where did you pick that one up from? She rolled her eyes. I just can’t see any of you in here, she shook the pages like she was wafting away an unpleasant smell.
It was an argument we’d been having in various iterations since we had first gotten together, but tonight was the first time that there was any real venom in it. D felt that fiction was great fun, but that it was basically a distraction, a form of escapism; a system of pretty lies. She thought that fiction was never as interesting as the stories that could be found in real life. I on the other hand thought that journalism was the domain of unimaginative plodders. To me, the desire to interview and record, to construct an exact replica of what really happened, was not only impossible but also tedious.
I bet you’ve never kept a diary, have you, she asked. She didn’t even wait for me to shake my head. I don’t think you’d have any idea what to write in it, she said, you’re completely petrified of real life.
But real life is boring, I said, cutting her off. She waited for me to say something else, but I stared her down until she looked away.We simultaneously drained the rest of our drinks. If you think real life is boring, she said standing up, you need to get out more.
I thought she was going to the bar or the toilet, but after twenty minutes she still hadn’t come back. I stayed in the beer garden until closing time and the next thing I remember is cold water hitting me full in the face and the figure of Heidi looming above me, yawning with one hand, while she hosed me down with the other.
I tiptoe into Heidi’s room, sit at the end of her bed. She tenses up as soon as she feels my weight on the mattress. She still has her hands over her eyes, though I can tell that she’s looking at me through a chink in her fingers. In the half-light of the room, I can make out the words printed on her T-shirt, I BATHE IN MALE TEARS.
I’ll ask her what’s wrong, and she’ll tell me the whole sordid story (drugs, boys/girls, something along those lines). I’ll talk to her about D and our neighbour and the story that I’m planning to write. I’ll walk her through the plot points, workshop the ending with her. I’ll tell her that I write these kind of stories because I’m trying to invent the drama lacking in my own life; that deep down I think people are only interesting when they’re falling apart (though I’ve only ever witnessed it in books, on screens). I’ll tell Heidi that my stories are not unresolved because they’re gesturing towards some deeper meaning, but
because, for the most part, I don’t have anything to say. Perhaps I’ll be crying by this point (though probably not). If I am, maybe she’ll let me wipe my eyes with the hem of her shirt, and I’ll make a joke about the slogan written across it.
What’s wrong Heidi, I say, squeezing her foot, do you want to talk about it? She hits me hard in the wrist. Don’t fucking touch me you creep, she hisses. Get out of my room right now or I’ll scream.
The clock beside my bed says 8.37. I listen for the sound of my neighbour (George?) working. I hear cars moving down Nicholson Street, and the sparrows flitting about in the trees behind our house. Feeling strangely apprehensive, I walk to my window and open the blind to find the backyard next door completely empty, save for the hole of course. It now takes up the entire area from the back fence all the way to the concrete path that leads away from the rear of the house. The tea trees are arranged in the middle of the hole, as if in preparation for a funeral pyre (obviously a big no-no in this kind of weather). My neighbour though, is nowhere to be seen.
I stump down to the kitchen, feeling disappointed, and – I have to admit – a little abandoned. So there’s to be no resolution, no dramatic ending, at least none that I’ll be privy to.
I’m in gym shorts and D’s kimono, waiting for the water to boil, when I hear raised voices coming from the front of our house. I slip on a pair of thongs and go outside to find people milling about in the street, in their dressing gowns and pyjama bottoms. They’re holding their hands to their mouths, pointing towards the centre of the suburb and a tower of black smoke billowing into the sky.
Rowan’s out there too, taking photos. Come on man, he says, ushering me over, let’s move in for a closer inspection. He skips along, occasionally stopping to hurry me up. We turn onto Nicholson and there, a few blocks down, is the Little Saigon market on fire. Its façade is a slumped, smouldering wreckage, and there’s a charnel smell in the air. A fireman is drizzling water onto the roof, though by now the blaze seems to be pretty much extinguished.
The police have cordoned off the area at Coward Street. They stand behind the tape shooing away onlookers and saying, Kindly return to your homes, and (really!), This is not a drill. It’s hard not to think that it’s like something from a movie. I wonder if that’s what the police are thinking too; I wonder if they are trying to act the part.
Some of the bystanders (stall owners presumably, or particularly avid shoppers) are huddled together, crying and hugging each other. Everyone else is filming the fire on their phones. I wonder if anyone died, Rowan says, waggling his eyebrows.
Heidi is leaning against a gum tree across the road,
smoking a cigarette. I start to approach her, my hands stretched in front of me, as if to say, I come in peace, but she gives me a withering glare, makes her fingers into a crucifix, like she’s warding away evil spirits.
Eventually the crowd begins to disperse. I stay for a while longer, watching the families sitting on curbs, staring stony-faced at the markets. I try to remember the recordings that D sent me last summer, the way that those people described the fire: It was like the world being ripped open, said one. Towers of flame, like the apocalypse. We lost everything that day, everything that we’d worked for, everything we held dear. But I realise that I’m inventing again, that these words are mine, not theirs. I head back home when I feel the back of my neck starting to burn.
Our front door has expanded in the heat, and is jammed fast in the frame. I’m about to walk round the side of the house to get in through the living room window, when I notice that my neighbour’s front door is wide open. I’m not thinking anything when I walk through his front gate, past the thigh-high grass and the mailbox overflowing with flyers. From the front door the house smells wet and earthy, like being underground. After the hallway, the house opens onto a large living room, the same room I had imagined in the story that I drafted yesterday (was it yesterday? last week?): there are the same pale wooden floors and the high ceilings with Victorian cornices; the same claw foot couch upholstered in green velvet. But in this version the room is completely buried in soil. It’s piled almost to the ceiling, over the couch and the coffee table in front of it.
If I keep walking I will come to the kitchen and the door opening onto my neighbour’s backyard. To my left is a white door, with a set of footprints pressed into the soil in front of it. Something tells me he must be in there.
I can feel the weight of the soil, pressing up against the door, and I have to lean hard to get it open a few inches. My leg sinks in up to the knee as I edge into the room. I wonder how long it will take me to find his body, how long I will have to scrabble around on my hands and knees, siphoning through the dirt until I feel an ankle, an ear, his belly.
But in real life my neighbour’s sitting up in bed, one leg folded over the other. He is still in his painter’s pants and flannel shirt, both stained a dusky brown from the dirt. He is looking at me with that sad, sleepy smile I’ve thought so much about. He pats a space on the bed beside him, sending a puff of dirt into the air. Come in, he says, in a voice that sounds nothing like what I’d imagined, I’ve been waiting for you. g
Dominic Amerena is a writer, editor, and researcher from Melbourne. His short story ‘Help Me Harden My Heart’ was commended in the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ❖
Entries are now open for the
2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Australian Book Review seeks entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is now worth a total of $8,500. English-language poets from all countries are eligible. Online entry is available via our website.
First prize: $5,000 and an etching by Arthur Boyd
Second prize: $2,000
Three other shortlisted poems: $500
Judges: John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb
Entry Fee: AU$15 for ABR subscribers or AU$25 for non-subscribers (the latter includes a free four-month subscription to ABR Online)
Closing date: 3 December 2017
‘I am deeply honoured to have won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. My sincere thanks to ABR for continuing this prestigious prize, which is a great support for poets.’
Judith Beveridge, 2015 winner
Full details and online entry are available on our website
www.australianbookreview.com.au
ABR gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Ms Morag Fraser AM.
‘As fleeting as breath’
Robert Dessaix
HOUSE OF NAMES by Colm Tóibín Picador
$29.99 hb, 262 pp, 9781760551421
House of Names is a grim book, as any retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia is bound to be. It is a tale to harrow up your soul, to make your two eyes start from their spheres – or at least, it is until ten pages before the end , when Elektra cracks the book’s first joke and the tone becomes a touch mellower.
Nothing is more à la mode in contemporary letters than retelling old stories: from first-time novelists to literary luminaries such as Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, writers across the globe are busy plundering the classics in search of great plots to refashion and breathe new life into. Why do we do it? Whether resetting the story closer to home or just hanging a reworded version of it on the original skeleton, what are we hoping to do? Rescue an archetypal story from oblivion? View contemporary society or recent history afresh through a classic prism? Are we losing faith in our ability to invent meaningful fictions? For instance, in House of Names, has Tóibín got his eye on the Irish Troubles? Or is he casting light on a much broader theme, central to the Oresteia: how to establish a civilised society once the old gods have begun to fall silent? The myriad answers to this question furnish our newspapers with their headlines every day.
Tóibín goes about the task of
reworking Aeschylus with his accustomed flair. In the dazzling opening chapter, Clytemnestra recounts her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to Artemis to secure fair winds for his departure with his troops to Troy. The prose is not just ornate, but at times positively ambrosial. As a rule, only playwrights permit themselves this kind of departure from the way people actually speak and write, and, indeed, this work often reads more like a performance piece than a novel. It is not quite Racine or Corneille, although it’s arguably more affecting. As in Greek theatre, not only the setting but also the faces and costumes of the participants in the drama are left to our imagination.
Even at this early point in the narrative, there are hints that some of the characters are beginning to wonder why the virgin goddess would demand an innocent young girl’s life in return for agreeing to change the direction of the winds. Is making the wind blow from the south instead of the north so very much to ask? Once you question sacrifice, you’re staring into the abyss.
The traditional gods are not exactly dead in Argos (or our world), but nowhere in evidence, except in set expressions. ‘I live alone,’ Clytemnestra confides in us, ‘in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed.’ All she has left, like so many of us, is ‘the leftover language of prayer … What had once been powerful and added meaning to everything was now desolate, strange … Now our words are trapped in time, they are filled with limits, they are mere distractions, they are as fleeting and monotonous as breath.’
The fading of divine lawmakers who care leaves the Greeks (and us) with a problem: what are we to do about the tyrants who will pop up to replace them? What is there now to break the chain of sin and vengeance? In the Greek trilogy, on his return from Troy, King Agamemnon’s wife and her lover in turn kill him (and, for good measure, his concubine), thereby outraging their son Orestes, who, with his sister’s connivance and after a lot of dithering, kills his mother. What can be done to bring light into the darkness enveloping not just the House of Atreus, but the whole city and even
lands beyond?
For Aeschylus, the answer lies in just laws: not gods, but democracy. From his vantage point in the mid-fifth century bce, only in a state governed justly can the trail of vengeance be halted. In Tóibín’s novel, this advance towards reason and justice (for men) in the later pages is simply not theatrical enough to keep us riveted to our seats after the operatic opening. Orestes and his sister Elektra now come across as too ordinary to be swept up by it, too like us. To be plausible they need to grow in Argive
Are we losing faith in our ability to invent meaningful fictions?
soil. Once their ancient Greek identity starts to wear thin, so does our engagement with their fate.
For example, on a less dramatic level, while the totally invented episodes where the boy Orestes is kidnapped and then escapes with two other boys to live for some years in an isolated farmhouse are grippingly told, his growing sexual bond with one of these boys, Leander, seems rooted in a sexuality alien to the Greeks, if not to Tóibín. So do the ambisexual night excursions of Clytemnestra’s lover around the sleeping palace. These sorts of homosexual couplings between equals no doubt happened, but not typically, and not in Greek tragedy. Ancient Greeks weren’t gay. If this sort of modern sensibility is inserted into an ancient story, there will be consequences: some things are just not going to make sense. Orestes turns into someone it’s hard to recognise as either Greek, neoclassical, Shakespearean, or, for that matter, truly modern. It’s like Clytemnestra calling a middle-aged man ‘hysterical’ (which she does).
However, the delight in reading a great master of the English language remains. There is no doubt that Colm Tóibín has brought something disturbingly, intoxicatingly to life. Exactly what, though,it’s not easy to put your finger on. g
Robert Dessaix is a broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His latest book is The Pleasures of Leisure (2017).
Park/plaque
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
TABOO
by Kim Scott Picador
$32.99 pb, 271 pp, 9781925483741
When a new novel from Kim Scott appears, one feels compelled to talk not only about it as a work of fiction by a leading Australian writer, but also about its cultural significance. In this sense a Kim Scott novel is an event, and Taboo does not disappoint.
Scott’s novels Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010) each won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and each dealt with a core element of Aboriginal experience. Benang was a spiralling treatment of the mechanisms and psychic effects of the assimilation policies of the twentieth century. Its narrator, Harley Scat, hovers up and away from the archive of his mangled ancestry, only to be repeatedly brought crashing down. The novel, like Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), fell within the international mode known as magical realism, albeit adapted to the particular traumata of Indigenous Australia. Harley’s problem was to discover exactly how it was that he became the ‘first-born-successfully-white-manin-the-family-line’ and how the hell he could ever escape that success.
That Deadman Dance took place on the south coast of Western Australia in a fictionalised Albany called King George Town in the early, and relatively peaceful, years of settlement. The contact communities of King George Sound become a kind of experiment in which we glimpse the historical opportunities that were lost as a more determined colonial avarice set in.
In Taboo, we move firmly into the here and now. If Benang was the great novel of the assimilation system, and That Deadman Dance redefined the frontier novel in Australian writing, Taboo makes a strong case to be the novel that will help clarify – in the way that only literature can – what reconciliation might mean.
The novel’s action is centred on the opening of a ‘Peace Park’ (or ‘Peace Plaque’, no one seems to quite know) in the fictional town of Kepalup on the south coast of Western Australia. The park/plaque was a reconciliation initiative of Janet Horton, who belonged to the historical society and was the wife of a local farmer, Dan Horton. Janet has recently died, and her grieving and religiously devout husband wants to honour her memory by bringing the park/plaque to reality. Horton has had his farm passed down to him through his ancestors and it is in the river valley that runs through this property that a massacre of local Noongar is said to have occurred in the 1870s. The massacre happened after the murder of one of Horton’s ancestors. How many died is not known, and Horton would prefer not to use the word ‘massacre’. It is a ‘hurtful’ word to his family, he explains.
The main thrust of the novel comes from the other side, from the descendants of the original owners, the Wirlomin people, the Noongar grouping with which Scott identifies. Early in the novel, a bus weaves its way through the more dilapidated neighbourhoods of King George Town (Albany), picking up the various Noongars whose kinship is to the Wirlomin people. Mostly middle-aged or older, they are travelling to a cultural retreat being run by some Wirlomin elders at the caravan park in Hopetoun. They are also going to attend the opening of the Peace Park at Kepalup.
Amongst their number is a young woman, Mathilda (‘Tilly’), who is in her last year of high school. Only recently has she met her father, Jim Coolman, a Wirlomin man. Coolman, dying of cancer, was in jail, where he had spent the majority of his life. Tilly’s mother was a white woman who suffered abuse in her short relationship with Jim. When Tilly met her father, he had drawn belated solace from reconnecting to his Noongar language as part of a prison program. He urged Tilly to make contact with her Wirlomin relations.
How the novel then unravels the complications of reconciliation is something I found utterly compelling. As with other Scott novels, the cast of Aboriginal characters in Taboo are
not angels. Drug abuse and domestic violence are part of their lives. This clear-eyed approach to the social world is a recurrent feature in Indigenous writing, going back to foundational writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Jack Davis. No one is quite what they seem in Taboo, for better and for worse. It is an important feature of the novel that the exact nature of the massacre is not known and can’t be known. At least, not known in the ways that we expect
A Kim Scott novel is an event, and Taboo does not disappoint
knowledge to exist for it to be relied upon in Western knowledge systems. The climactic encounter between the Wirlomin descendants and Dan Horton at the site of the massacre deserves be read and reread. It is not a set-piece in which the virtues of the Indigene are lined up against the vices of the colonist. It is a raw working through of wounded memory.
In South Africa, as is well known, there was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the apartheid years. In Australia, the truth of colonisation cannot call its dead witnesses to appear, nor offer them amnesty in exchange for honesty. But reconciliation in Australia depends on us evolving more profound mechanisms for coming to truth than the ones we have come up with so far. Counting the bodies in the historians’ footnotes is not going to get us there.Taboo is a powerful novel that offers something more than this. g
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is a senior lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.
Safe harbour
Miriam Cosic
ON THE JAVA RIDGE
by Jock Serong
Text Publishing
$29.99 pb, 312 pp, 9781925498394
Arich vein of political writing runs through Australian fiction. From the early days of socialist realism, through the anti-colonialism of both black and white writers, to tough explorations of identity politics today, we have struggled with concepts of justice and equality since Federation.
The rejection of asylum seekers who arrive by a certain means of transport is the latest topic to galvanise fiction and non-fiction writers. In non-fiction, books have included many accounts of individuals’ perilous journeys fleeing repression and physical horror, historical surveys, and political analyses. In fiction, a monotone has arisen, though specific instances can be marvellous: a melange of sympathy towards refugees; anger with the ungenerosity of those refusing them; and a slightly patronising take on exotic otherness among Australian-born writers; and an explanatory focus on otherness by migrants, often romanticised, as they work to raise both consciousness and acceptance among old Australians.
Jock Serong has tried something different in his new novel, On the Java Ridge. It is ambitiously written in three concurrent, interleaving parts, with three protagonists: a nine-year-old Hazara girl, Roya, who has fled Afghanistan with her pregnant mother and is attempting the last crossing from Indonesia to Australia in a smuggler’s boat; a feisty counter-cultural Aussie, Isi Natoli; and Cassius Calvert, the Australian minister
for ‘Border Integrity’.
As the book opens, Calvert is holding a press conference. First, he announces that the Indonesian navy has agreed to vet all vessels leaving Indonesia so that Australia will know the status of every ship or boat entering its waters. Then he lobs a bombshell. Australia will no longer recognise maritime law and custom: the duty to rescue those in distress at sea. Although he is a Cabinet stalwart, expertly spinning the government’s line on immigration to Australia, Calvert, we soon discover, is disliked by his vulgarly aggressive prime minister, and is suffering increasingly from blinding headaches.
Natoli, a competent skipper and no pushover, is nonetheless struggling with bolshie clients, who take advantage of her male partner’s absence to push their own agendas. Her two Indonesian crew are calm and expert backup. Strangely, given his multicultural agenda, Serong doesn’t let the crew into the many mini decision-making discussions that ensue when disaster strikes. The boat carrying Roya and a polyglot mob of fellow refugees from across the Middle East is ploughing south, the smugglers ignoring existing Australian regulations and unaware of the draconian measures just put in place. We get to know some of them, mostly the men: the violent smuggler boss; the religious misogynists who push back against Roya’s intelligence and curiosity.
While the political aftermath of Calvert’s announcement unfolds in Canberra, and he is made increasingly uneasy by intel silence on the unnamed Indonesian boat heading for Australian waters, the two vessels are overtaken by a storm. Natoli puts into safe harbour on an uninhabited island before the bad weather arrives. The paying customers enjoy a spot of fishing and swimming while the water is still calm, before everyone hunkers down in tents on land. The Indonesian boat, heading for the same island, doesn’t make it in time. The chapter that describes the shipwreck is brief but terrifying. Serong uses straightforward description, and, by not interpreting the fear for the reader, manages to make it more immediate. In the next chapter, he veers back to Natoli.
The first sounds to reach her were the voices.
For a time – Isi couldn’t tell how long – the voices were merged in her dreams, irrational and ghostly. But now they were becoming real, taking form. Cries.
They were cries. Male and female, deeper and higher in pitch, but frightened. Pleading. That was what woke her, dragged her mind from the fog. The rain was much heavier now, and the cries wove in and out of its roar.
Thus the three stories collide. Calvert’s headaches worsen, he is increasingly under the prime minister’s gun, and he begins to think the unthinkable about the elusive boat. Natoli organises a search for survivors among the floating bodies, and discovers unknown strengths and weaknesses among her passengers. Roya comes into her own as further drama ensues on the high seas. Calvert’s denouement comes as a genuine shock.
Serong’s writing is compelling, despite some quirks. He doesn’t maintain an authorial voice across the chapters, for example, but changes tone with his characters: choppy and sweary for Calvert in Canberra, offbeat for Natoli, lyrical for Roya. It can be distracting at first, thwarting the suspension of disbelief that makes fiction immersive. By the time of the shipwreck, however, there is so much emotional investment in the characters and the unexpected swerves in the narrative are so inventive that the shifts in storytelling voice become irrelevant.
A feminist or a multiculturalist could nitpick. Why is Natoli disrespected in the way her partner wouldn’t be? Do those Pashtun men have to be portrayed as quite so misogynistic? But this is the way the world actually is. The prime minister is unreconstructedly appalling; his motivation could have done with some fleshing out. But as we know from real life, this generation of conservative Australian politicians, who uncharacteristically wear their religion on their sleeves, haven’t given Serong much in the way of political or moral argument to work with. g
Miriam Cosic is a journalist and critic.
New from Intellect
THE HOLLYWOOD WAR FILM
Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq
Daniel Binns
Looking at depictions of both World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the major conflicts in the Middle East, Binns reflects on representations of war and conflict, revealing how Hollywood has made the war film not just a genre, but a dynamic cultural phenomenon.
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THE ARTIST AS CULTURE PRODUCER
Living and Sustaining a Creative Life
Edited by Sharon Louden
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PICTURING THE COSMOS
A Visual History of Early Soviet Space Endeavor
Iina Kohonen
Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.
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TRANSFORMATIONS
Art and the City
Edited by Elizabeth M. Grierson
The contributors to Transformations explore the interactions between people and their urban surroundings through site-specific art and creative practices, tracing the ways in which people inhabit, imagine, and shape their cities.
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Deathbed tales
Shannon Burns
THE LOST PAGES
Marija Peričić Allen & Unwin
$29.95 pb, 276 pp, 9781760296865
Alan Bennett once wrote of Franz Kafka: ‘One is nervous about presuming even to write his name, wanting to beg pardon for doing so, if only because Kafka was so reluctant to write his name himself.’ Even so, Bennett gave us Kafka’s Dick (1986), which – alongside a sputtering stream of demythologising critical interventions into Kafka studies – partially undermined the sainted version of Kafka that had held sway for decades. In Bennett’s comedy, the existential anguish registered in Kafka’s fiction, letters, and diaries is as much the product of his diminutive penis as of artistic sensitivity or probing intelligence.
One of the more entertaining elements of Kafka’s Dick is Bennett’s dramatisation of the relationship between Kafka and Max Brod, his literary advocate and – according to some – betrayer. Bennett’s Brod resents the shadow that Kafka casts over his own work, and he is jealous of the amorous female attentions that his friend enjoys: ‘It’s always the same,’ says Brod. ‘As soon as they meet him it’s good-night Max.’ Brod is also (rightly) frustrated by the widely held belief that Kafka asked him to burn his work from his deathbed. ‘It was not his deathbed,’ says Brod. ‘It was prior to his deathbed. He was around for years after that.’ The comic tension of Kafka’s Dick hinges on Brod’s attempts to conceal his failure to honour Kafka’s wishes, and Kafka’s attempts to hide the source of his metaphysical anxieties.
Marija Peričić’s The Australian/
Vogel’s Literary Award-winning début novel also dramatises the relationship between Kafka and Brod, amplifying the latter’s (strikingly similar) jealousies and the former’s egoism in the process. The Lost Pages takes the form of a translated, faux-scholarly edition of ‘lost memoirs’, attributed to Brod and replete with editorial accoutrements.
In a fictional ‘foreword’, Professor Wendall Persson writes: ‘As the story goes, when Kafka lay in bed dying of tuberculosis, his friend Brod at his bedside, his last words were, “Burn all my work – everything – and spare none of it.” Thankfully, Brod defied the instruction.’ Even before it properly begins, then, it is clear that the version of Kafka that The Lost Pages has in mind is mythic or invented,with only the faintest connection to real-world figures and scholarship.
I found it difficult to embrace The Lost Page’s fictional conceit. For much of the novel I wondered why Peričić had chosen to use Brod and Kafka at all; they come loaded with so much baggage that it is impossible to gauge their significance to the narrative. Peričić’s formal strategies are similarly hard to embrace, not least because the prose style is often awkward (‘It was no longer the display of my ruined body to those appraising faces that was the source of my anxiety …’ or ‘This became joined by the hissing whispers of Elsa and Sophie’), flecked with repetitions and redundancies (‘… her reaction was justified and even warranted’, or ‘Completely irrationally, I instinctively ...’), and occasionally vague (‘… the swinging skirts of the women corresponded in some musical way with the swaying of trees …’).
Peričić’s Brod is a cartoonish version of a Kafka character, who reiterates his feelings of shame over and over again: he is ashamed to be caught watching people without their knowledge, ashamed of his jealousies and sexual desires, his body and literary failures, and so on. There is typically at least a page between each appearance of shame or disgust, but not always: ‘And even if I somehow managed to steel myself against my shame, there still remained the problem of Franz. I did not wish Anja to be a witness to my shameful unmasking.’ Even Saul Friedländer, for whom Kafka is a
‘poet of shame and guilt’, would be dazzled by Peričić’s devotion to the theme. From the very beginning, Brod appears to be psychologically unhinged. His response to Kafka’s fiction – and to Kafka himself – is senseless and extreme. At times he seems to believe that Theodor [‘Brod’s publisher’]has room for only one author in his publishing stable. He says of Kafka:
I could tell you that I felt pleased and proud to bring his work to light, but it would be a lie. All I felt was the sick poison of jealousy, and the panic of self-preservation, and a determination to stop Franz at all costs. To show these stories to Theodor would have meant certain death for my literary career …
In Kafka’s major novels and stories, the reader is typically left wondering whether the fictional world is mad, or the protagonist is mad, or both. In The Lost Pages, Brod is clearly untrustworthy; there is no ambiguity and, consequently, little readerly investment in his account, which severely undermines the power of its denouement. It is like knowing that the narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) is delusional, instead of merely depressed and alienated, from its opening paragraphs. The Last Pages is occasionally funny, and Peričić is at her best when underscoring the connections between Brod’s physical deformities and Kafka’s fiction – particularly the Metamorphosis – but that represents a small fraction of the novel. Some readers may find the transposition of Kafka-like qualities onto Brod clever enough to sustain their interest, and there certainly are sizable chunks of enjoyable weirdness in the second half of the novel, but to my mind it disappoints on too many levels: the formal conceit is creaky, the attempted parody is superficial, the prose is underwhelming, and the narrative tension is needlessly diluted. Perhaps there is a deeper meaning, satirical thrust, or readerly pleasure to be found beneath the surface, but I failed to locate it. g
Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
Butter
by Lauren Aimee Curtis
We met him in a park down by the derelict part of the harbour. It was just an oblong of yellow grass and some lopsided play equipment. We used to go there at night and drink cheap, fizzy wine we bought from the lady who owned the Chinese market nearby. This man was standing by the water taking photos of the bridge. He told us we looked mature for sixteen. We told him butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths. Later that night, after we accepted the little blue pills he gingerly placed on our tongues, we warmed to him. Arms linked, we followed him to his home.
That was fifteen, maybe eighteen years ago. This is how we remember that long summer: lying together in one of our beds, the afternoon sun making us sweat and the sour fruit smell of digested wine heavy in the room. We were thin back then – six of us could fit into the one bed if we lay on our sides. Feeling each other’s breath hot on our backs, we would laugh about our friend from the park. He was old and he was ugly. We thought his head looked like a pink fleshy prune. One of his knees turned inwards so that he walked with a slight limp. We were careful not to look directly at his face.
He lived in a studio apartment with a toilet shower and sink combination in the corner. It was dark inside with the blinds always drawn and it smelt like piss. There were photographs sticky-taped to his wall: black-and-white prints showing a beach or a sunset or a dead bird. Some of my old work, he told us. We could tell that he considered himself artistic, old school, gentlemanly. He had a picture of Frank Sinatra wedged into the corner of his mirror, and he whistled old Dean Martin songs none of us knew. His speech was peppered with words like dollface, honey, and wildcat. It was embarrassing to listen to. He owned a small collection of blues and jazz records. He wore red silk shirts and a fedora.
We had nothing else to do that summer with
no jobs and no school, and so we spent hours in his apartment with our cheeks flushed red, chewing the insides of our mouths.
Sometimes we danced for him in couples – a head cradled on a shoulder, a hand at the bottom of the back – doing a slow box step. He liked that. Sometimes we lay on his bed in one long line, spooning while he sat on his little stool watching us, one foot tapping manically to the New Orleans Jazz Band, his pupils glowing like two dark moons. He liked the way we laughed and he liked our baby fat. He told us this. What else he liked we did not say out loud, but we could guess. Whenever he greeted us, he would kiss us hello on both cheeks. Like the French, he’d say.
His apartment block was yellow brick with sticky carpet inside. It was full of single men and it was cheap. Most of them were divorcés and dealers, but there were travellers too, people just passing through. They were tanned and built and from places like Colombia or Brazil. Sometimes they stood in the hallways smoking with their shirts off. When we walked past them they’d wink or make kissing noises and we’d blush. If we were with our friend he would puff out his small chest and hurry us into his room. When we were alone, he would hiss at us: Please, girls, don’t talk to the men around here. He called them a bunch of bad cats. But we did talk to them, we even flirted with them, and they told us that the police were watching the apartment building – that they knew all about our friend. The implication seemed to be that no one cared; there were bigger fish to fry. How humiliating, we’d said to one another. Because now we knew that even the police considered him a loser.
We were nice suburban girls – which is to say that we weren’t very nice, not at all. We knew we could be cruel and we thought we were ugly. We were ashamed of our lanky bodies. Ashamed of our small breasts and our freckled legs. In our families, there were a few drunks and a few absent parents, the usual
stuff. Nothing to make a big deal about. Nothing to make us more cautious. We were bored, sheltered, and hungry. We wanted to be other people. We wanted to look like the pictures of dressed-up Japanese girls we’d seen on the internet.The night we met him we were wearing little tunics and bobby socks, plastic pearls and too much make-up. He had his old Nikon camera with the large lens. He pointed it in our direction.
That night in the park he said he wanted to show us something and off we went. In that shitty room, he pulled out a black leather photo album from underneath his bed – his nudes. Inside were pictures of models. Women with small breasts and non-existent hips, crouching on the floor or bending over slightly, looking back at us. Eyes lowered and lips parted. And although it’s true that later in the evening we let him take our picture, we knew all along that these nudes were not his nudes It was more likely that he’d found the images online and printed them onto photo paper. We remember how he traced the outline of the bodies in the photographs with his index finger, how he told us he was especially proud of the shadows and of the intensity the photographs evoked. Very powerful, we all agreed.
For the rest of the summer we were drinking orange soft drink with something he’d mixed into it, or we were swallowing little lumps of white powder he administered from a key, the chemical taste
coating the back of our throats. We were walking down city streets with arms linked while he sulked behind us because we would not let him join the chain. He’d wear his red silk shirts, suspenders, that fedora, and sunglasses – even at night – and we were secretly happy about this because we thought at least it hid his ugly face. Under broken disco balls and behind stained velvet curtains, we felt unknown levels of sophistication and this was a combination of the little white lumps of powder and the thrill of breaking the rules.
When we remember all of this we laugh, but our bodies still recoil whenever one of us actually utters his name. We try to forget certain things he said; how often his hands wandered all over our legs. Or those muddled nights and mornings where, for a few hours, everything went black. We don’t talk about the times he took us to high-rise apartments where there were other groups of young girls – all of them sitting on the knees of their older male chaperones. Those other girls – they could’ve been our sisters! The way they all held hands, the doe-like looks they gave us. But we never talked to them. We didn’t so much as smile in their direction. It was a reflection we didn’t want to see. And when the six of us were alone in one of our beds laughing at the amalgamation of nights and days that had come before, we would imitate all the stupid things we’d heard these other
Join us at the Potts Point Bookshop for the announcement of the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize worth a total of $12,500.
There will be readings from the shortlisted stories before a special guest names the winner (who receives $7,000) and formally launches the Fiction Issue, in which the three stories appear.
Jolley Prize ceremony
Where: Potts Point Bookshop 14 Macleay St, Potts Point Sydney
When: 6 for 6.30 pm, Thursday 10 August, 2017
This is a free event but reservations are essential: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au
ABR gratefully acknowledges Mr Ian Dickson’s generous support for the Jolley Prize
Dominic Amerena
Lauren Aimee Curtis
Eliza Robertson
girls say in absurdly high falsetto.
Stupid things. We rode in cars with strangers and we drank whatever was put in front of us. Once, we swam naked in the harbour near that derelict park, coaxed on by the fizzy wine and the dare of the water –blue-black and rippled and opaque, like a piece of silk. There were sharks in there, we all knew that. And we screamed and laughed when one of us held up her palms to the moonlight and they were cut from the sea urchins on the rocks. Her blood was mixed with sea water and streaming pink-red all the way to her elbows.
Stupid things. We would stand next to payphones in the city and tell the suits walking past that we needed small change to make a call. Our pockets jangled when we walked, our fingers always smelt metallic. We paid for our cigarettes in towers of silver coins. Whenever we called our friend, we were supposed to speak in code, but we didn’t. In fact, we rarely called him at all. When we wanted to see him we simply showed up.
During that summer, the idea of him softened in our minds. It’s true that our disgust turned into mild affection, though it was something like love for a little brother. We wrote him little notes with poems and pictures, and once we even made him a playlist of songs. We felt sorry for him and how he looked sitting on his bed in his shitty little apartment. And it was around this time that one of us opened up the back of his camera after he’d slipped out for a bottle of something and found what we had long suspected – that it held no film.
So why did he pretend to take our photograph? We suspect it has something to do with the way women are framed; with how badly we wanted to be desired. The way we instinctively knew how to imitate an expression we’d been aware of our whole lives. We saw it everywhere. It was in Renaissance paintings of women, on billboards, and in shopping catalogues. It was in the magazines our fathers hid. Eyes lowered and lips parted. We know now that the photographs were a way for him to encourage nudity under the guise of art. Look back at the camera, he used to say, that’s marvellous, pull your shirt down, just a little.
We never confronted him about the camera. It gave us a funny feeling we wanted to ignore. And anyway, it was soon after we’d found out that one of our brothers caught us with him in the city. Our arms were linked and he was in the middle, his two hands casually placed at the bottom of our backs. We saw the brother and he saw us. None of us were supposed to be there. And that look he gave us – we can still remember it. What it so clearly denoted. Shame. There were different rules for sons and daughters, we all knew that. What did it matter that the brother was high himself, surrounded by boys his own age, all of them standing in front of a club with a neon sign
that read Girls! Girls! Girls!
Who the fuck is that? the brother said and we walked straight past him. One of us began to cry. We were scared to go home. We turned off our phones. We stayed out with our friend until the night turned into morning and then night again. More pills were gingerly placed on tongues. He made long lines the length of our arms on his dirty glass table and we licked them clean. We danced for him. We slapped each other’s face. We wrestled. On the second morning, he slipped out for a bottle of something and one of us stole money from the little case he kept in his kitchenette and had forgotten to lock. Put it back, the rest of us begged but she wouldn’t listen. At first, she began to count the money out on the floor, laughing manically as the pile got larger. We watched her silently. We chewed at our lips. She stopped counting and threw the money in the air. Then, all of us were running around the room, plucking the notes off the ground, shoving them into our pockets, shirts, and underwear. One of us heard him whistling in the corridor, she waved her arms and we froze. It happened in less than three seconds. He opened the door. He looked at the kitchenette and then he looked at us and we could feel it in the air – a danger that had not been there before. We ran out of his apartment. We practically bulldozed him out the door. We ran down the stairs and out of the building and onto the main road. We ran barefoot with money falling from our clothes. Cars were swerving and beeping, and we were screaming and laughing, while he, on his damaged leg, tried to follow but could not keep up.
Sometimes, even now, we see him around the city and our breath stops short before we realise it’s not him. Sometimes, we think that even if it was he wouldn’t remember who we were. Because there must have been so many of us. So many different groups of young girls – parading through the hallways of his apartment building, spending a summer in his room.
This all happened so long ago. Long before our babies were born and before those bad romantic experiences that some of us have never recovered from. Before one of our hearts gave out completely and we became wary of the expression died of a broken heart – so saccharine and inaccurately used.
Now we are fat, our eyes are tired, we are happy but anxious, we eat oysters – we have become something like our mothers. g
Lauren Aimee Curtis lives in Sydney where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Technology. Her work has appeared in Catapult, The Atlas Review, The Lifted Brow, Cordite Poetry Review, The Canary Press, and elsewhere. In 2014, she was runner-up in the Overland Story Wine Prize. She is currently writing a novella. ❖
Undulations
Geoff Page
TRANSPARENCIES
by Stephen Edgar Black Pepper
$24 pb, 89 pp, 9780648038702
After Stephen Edgar’s nine collections of poetry, the last seven of which are distinguished by an extraordinary control over metre and rhyme, a reviewer feels bound to ask how this new book, Transparencies, differs from its predecessors? There are at least two answers: the recurrent spirit of the poet’s mother, Marion Isabel Edgar (1922–2015), to whom the book is dedicated, and the poet’s elegant conviction that the universe lacks any meaning beyond that which we arbitrarily impose on it. A third concern – not entirely new – is the unreliability of our senses, particularly our vision, and how our perception of the world tends to be layered rather than completed in a single ‘take’.
The well-designed cover of Transparencies features a painting by Judith Martinez called ‘Rumours of Light’. A woman in a wind-flounced dress stares across what seems to be an estuary. Littoral views like this are recurrent in Edgar’s verse, and a smaller monochromatic version of the painting is used to separate the book’s three sections.
‘Jupiter’, the first poem of the first section, is an introduction to the book’s twin preoccupations (and to Edgar’s poetic techniques for readers who may be unfamiliar with them). The first two lines are vintage Edgar: ‘The harbour’s
idle undulations slew / And swill their slicks of glaze to make ...’ A businessman on a ferry is absorbed with calculations and ‘risk too intricate for even Lloyd’s / To cover’. Meanwhile, the poet and his reader merely ‘watch the slurs / Of gloss and shifting craquelure’, before both are reminded that ‘They say / It’s Jupiter’s / Vast mass that draws off, and may hurl our way, / A terminating hail of asteroids.’
That last sentence certainly puts things into perspective, not only for the businessman with his complex calculations, but also for the rest of us. The sardonic rhyme of ‘Lloyds’ and ‘asteroids’ on either end of the stanza is also a typical Edgar touch – as is the use of ‘craquelure’, a word many readers will need to look up, only to discover that, though metaphorical, the term is used accurately. It is characteristic too (but not universally the case) that ‘Jupiter’ is written in a complex stanzaic form of Edgar’s own making, with line lengths varying from dimeter through to pentameter. The device (along with a rhyme scheme to match) creates a sense of complex inevitability even while it also risks being a distraction.
It is notable, however, that Edgar’s best poems always end in a powerful image which tends to erase memories of difficulties experienced along the way and thus leaves us with an awareness of the poem as a resonant whole. ‘A terminating hail of asteroids’ is certainly an arresting last line.
Another poem of comparable impact is ‘Forest Doxology’. Here, Edgar takes advantage of zoological research by Jane Goodall and programs by filmmakers such as David Attenborough to present a disturbing parallel between chimpanzees and human apes. Like us, the chimpanzees murderously hunt in packs; like us, they can stop to admire a waterfall without quite knowing why. The paradox is that chimpanzees contrive to do both ‘Without the power of speech’. At the poem’s end, after the waterfall viewing, Edgar notes (with a wry nod to Wittgenstein) how: ‘At length they make their way, / Holding a picture memory replays, / Whereof they cannot speak.’
Among the most satisfying poems
in Transparencies are those which evoke the poet’s mother’s final months and days. Here, in poems such as ‘Mother’s Day’, ‘On the Beach’, ‘The Sense of an Ending’, and ‘The Art of the Fugue’, we encounter the usual technical expertise, but, on these occasions, see it harnessed to more direct emotions. Edgar remembers, for instance, in ‘The Art of the Fugue’, how ‘Nurses, as ever, came and went. / Small groups of relatives stood round / Their proper beds and by a mute consent / Were mutually and thoughtfully ignored.’ It is these poems (and a number of comparable ones) that persist individually in the memory, like the best poems of, say, Philip Larkin or Robert Lowell, rather than being just a part of a more general impression of extreme accomplishment.
In Transparencies, as in other recent collections by Edgar, there are also a few poems which don’t rely on a strict rhyme scheme. It is interesting to ponder their relative effectiveness. Is Edgar letting himself off too easily here and ‘playing tennis without a net’, as Robert Frost argued free verse does? The truth is that Edgar’s verse is never ‘free’. The unrhymed poems still have strict stanza structures, adhere to an iambic metre and feature the same metaphorical density as the others.
‘The Returns’, for instance, is in tercets with a trimeter in the first line and pentameters in the second and third and with virtually no rhyme. It is about citizens returning to a city after being forced to flee by war. ‘The city is still there, / Of course – or rather, another city now, / Which occupies that name as it does the ground, // And people in whose mouths / A speech still recognizably the same / Sounds not quite right, like a fluent foreigner.’
In the few poems where this relative openness appears, the reader senses, with gratitude perhaps, that the poet has not made a prison for himself but is free to move into, and out of, strict form as suits his needs. Transparencies is well up to the standard that Edgar has, in the past twenty years or so, increasingly set for himself. g
Geoff Page has published twenty-one collections of poetry.
Going under
Ceridwen Spark
ANAESTHESIA: THE GIFT OF OBLIVION AND THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
by Kate Cole-Adams
Text Publishing
$32.99 pb, 405 pp, 9781925498202
In 2009, pop star Michael Jackson, desperate to sleep, called his personal physician, Conrad Murray. To relieve the troubled star, Murray administered Propofol and anti-anxiety medications, then left. Jackson was found dead the next morning. Murray was later found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
Most people who have had a general anesthetic in the last twenty years have had Propofol. It is the drug that helps us ‘go under’ and stay there as necessary. But where is ‘there’. Where do we go under an anaesthetic? And who are ‘we’ when we enter this oblivion? These questions are at the heart of Kate Cole-Adams’s book Anaesthesia. Subtitled ‘the gift of oblivion, the mystery of consciousness’, the book, like Michael Jackson’s death, highlights the slippery boundaries between sleep, anaesthesia, and death. The subtitle is suggestive, conjuring the allure of a black and silent world. While it replicates entering an abyss, the experience of being anaesthetised can be strangely unremarkable. Most of us think of it as the path by which we can avoid the pain of a day procedure or the trauma of a major operation. Indeed, as the author notes, the respite from consciousness that anaesthesia offers can be a ‘gift’, a resting place, but one from which we are likely to return.
Happily, Cole-Adams avoids such reductionism. The long-time journalist, perhaps best known for her work at the Sydney Morning Herald, has spent twenty years researching and writing this impressive book. She brings deep intelligence to this effort to understand anaesthesia and the shadowy world that it represents. At times Anaesthesia is mesmerising. By her own admission, ColeAdams ‘writes very slowly’. The benefits of this are many and apparent. For one,
because it took so long to write, the book layers years of conversations, including ones between the author and those whose experiences of anaesthesia involve degrees of awareness, terror, and, in some instances, revelation.
The book has its beginnings, for instance, in Cole-Adams’s conversation with Rachel, a young woman who had endured the horrific experience of being aware, but unable to communicate, during a caesarean operation. Cole-Adams returns to this conversation with Rachel repeatedly, including in person towards the end of the book, when they sit on Rachel’s verandah. ‘No longer … interviewer and subject but women who might … be something closer to friends’, they discuss how Rachel thinks about the experience years later. ColeAdams learns that, while the experience was ‘absolutely horrendous’, Rachel sees herself as having had the opportunity to learn the gift of ‘deep surrender’. The poignancy of such moments is unlikely to have emerged in a more hurried text.
To write Anaesthesia, Cole-Adams read countless articles and spoke to a range of scientists, anaesthetists, hypnotists, and psychologists. Displaying the steady curiosity of an accomplished journalist, she attends conferences with impossible names, and drinks too much with her fellow attendees as, deep into the night, they plumb anaesthesia’s murky depths. We learn, unsettlingly, that there is much that anaesthetists don’t know about what happens during the ‘daily extinctions’ that they perform. Mixing their magic potions to send us temporarily to a world where our ‘self’ is suspended, if not momentarily obliterated, they know little more than we do about where we go under their spell.
In her quest for answers, ColeAdams pushes these normally authoritative figures to explore questions that most people have avoided, by virtue of their tendency to think within the limits of their disciplines. In the process, she humbly becomes, in her own right, a leading thinker on the subject of anaesthesia. It is unlikely her wide-ranging exploration will be matched any time soon.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, Cole-Adams brings two selves to the work:
What I was struggling with was not simply why I was writing … but who was doing the writing. There seemed to be two ‘me’s – each with their own agendas and itineraries and neither able or prepared to communicate with the other … One I will call the journalist – a pragmatic procedural self, this ‘me’ positioned … as the objective observer reporting on what I found in my travels. The other I will call the dreamer. Not in the romantic sense, but the dreamer as fool, blundering around, kicking up fragments of a different story.
These two figures – one pragmatic, one ‘blundering around’– are familiar to readers of Helen Garner, whose nonfiction triumphantly marries journalism and self-interrogation. Like most writers, Cole-Adams is less confident on this testing ground than Garner. Consequently, her melancholic and largely unresolved reflections on her own life can feel intrusive at times. But she courageously narrates an ultimately satisfying journey between these two selves. Indeed, we benefit from ColeAdams’s ability to traverse seemingly opposed strands of investigation. Steering between ‘hard science’ and an almost ethereal wandering into childhood memories and the world of dreams, she gives time and credence to diverse ways of knowing. Consequently, this rich and thorough study looks more deeply into questions about the nature of consciousness than many of us who undergo an anaesthetic are likely, or willing, to ponder. g
Ceridwen Spark is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.
ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE
Pheidippides
by Eliza Robertson
At the first interview, I sat in a plastic canteen chair while Berkeley lay under a towel and a woman with spiked hair dug into the cords of his thigh. He rested his chin on his forearms so he could talk, his eyes boring into my notebook, as if he could read the questions upside-down from the massage table. His blonde eyebrows faded into his skin and made his forehead look overdeveloped.
He’d just finished sixteenth in the men’s marathon with a time of 2:20:37, the only North American in the top twenty. I’d pitched a profile to the Globe on the premise that he was born in Nanaimo. We could sort of claim him. I asked the reader-pleaser questions – did he consider himself Canadian?
No.
Not a bit? I tried. What NHL team did he support?
I don’t watch hockey.
My son Dustin would be disappointed. He’d come up with that question. I told Berkeley so.
What’s Dustin’s team? he asked.
The Canucks.
Tell him I like the Flames.
He leaned his weight onto one elbow and twisted around to see the masseuse, who pushed her thumbs down his hamstring.
Can I have some Blistex please?
The woman rinsed her hands at the metal sink. She dried her palms on the seat of her sweatpants and rooted in the pocket of Berkeley’s track jacket, which he’d slung over the other plastic chair. When she brought him the chapstick, he kept his forearms folded below his chin and opened his mouth. Without blinking, she removed the lid and smeared the balm on his peeling lips. He rubbed them together.
What else you got?
I reviewed my notes. At this point I’d have to rely more on race stats and biographical details –I don’t know why I expected more.
How was the run for you today, Berkeley?
The question made him twitch, his face clenched by a spasm that faded just as quickly. The masseuse manoeuvred herself around the table and reached for his calf. She kneaded the flesh with the butt of her palm.
I can do better, he said.
You mean for the next World Championship? What’s your goal time?
I didn’t know yet he wouldn’t complete in the next one. He’d join the Air Force – it was August 2001 when we met.
2:10.
The event record. He was being ironic or my question was a stupid one.
Well good luck to you, Berkeley.
I closed my notebook and slotted it in my messenger bag, dug the press pass from my jacket.
Backatcha, partner.
He sank his face into the hole at the top of the table. From the door, it looked like he was floating mouth-down in a bathtub.
Kids died every year at the lake. We lived within earshot of the highway, and every summer fire engines wailed by at least once or twice while we were in the garden. At the lake, you often saw them wheel the red rescue boat onto the ramp. The men wore black jumpsuits with neon armbands. They’d climb into the vessel and rip across the water to the cliffs. We’d talked to Dustin about jumping – the lake was too shallow right there at the edge, you couldn’t see the rocks beneath the surface.
Teens gathered on the cliffs away from the main beach, where toddlers and dogs peed in the shallows. Maybe a girl he liked had come with her friends. I knew how it worked. I passed kids on runs with the dog. They didn’t have iPhones then, but they played music from someone’s stereo, and they sat without shirts on – our son reddening across the shoulders – that’s what Carrie noticed when we identified the body. His sunburn. ‘Didn’t anyone tell him? He had sunscreen. I put it in his backpack.’ As if that could have saved him. The girls would rub oil on their stomachs and lie back on the rocks, breasts concealed by a system of strings and triangles, sun glinting off the metal in their bellybuttons. No doubt the guys hid cans of beer in their backpacks, and the girls shared peach ciders or coolers or breezers, and someone lit a joint. And the sun would beat down, and Dustin would feel it sear his shoulder, and the
A BETTER NIGHT’S SLEEP IS NOW AT HAND.
music would be full and life-giving, and the girls would tiptoe to the edge and squeal as his friends leapt in, and soon they’d step off the rocks too, their strings and hair lifting off their shoulders for a beat before their legs sliced into water, and of course he wouldn’t linger back – of course he wouldn’t. That was my first regret. I shouldn’t have said, ‘If I catch you up there, you’re grounded.’ I should have taken him snorkelling along each cliff face so he saw, for himself, the splintered rocks, and where he should have jumped from.
No one tells you about the adrenaline. It kept me going the first day: a shaky coursing through my veins that made me circle the house changing light bulbs while Carrie called friends and family. By mid-morning on the second day, she had a shortlist of three funeral homes – homes, I scoffed, homes – and I had taken down the Christmas lights, sandpapered Dustin’s door so it didn’t stick in the frame, and driven a box of old batteries to the CRD recycling facility. Carrie had seen me from her office window as I hefted the box onto my shoulder and walked down the driveway. She leaned over her laptop to open the window, which she never opened, and dust from a mud wasp nest dislodged from the frame. For one wincing second I thought of my mother’s ashes, how they weren’t smooth like I expected, but lumped with fragments of tooth and bone. That’s what Dustin would become: the slender weight of him reduced to coarse sand, grains of mud chipped from a window.
Where are you going? she asked.
Recycling. Now?
And I told her household batteries were responsible for fifty to seventy per cent of all heavy metals found in the world’s landfills – a fact I’d learned moments earlier, when I searched for battery recycling facilities on the internet. Though modern batteries contain lower levels of toxic metals, they’re still dangerous to soils and groundwater, I said. Carrie levelled me with her stare and yanked the window shut with both hands. Another cloud of dust released into the air.
After that first week, the adrenaline drained and fear settled in. I woke one morning after Carrie had left for work. She’d been leaving early to go to the gym. I made coffee and sat at the table with my laptop, a leaden, groaning device, and I tried to start an article on the Pan American Games in Santo Domingo. I found myself pecking the keyboard with my index finger like I did before I learned to type. I wrote the following words, which I still remember:
Crazy Maisie went to town
Crazy Maisie bought a gown
She wore her gown and found the sea where her love had lain to sleep.
I didn’t mean to write a ghostly rhyme, yet felt pleased with it. That afternoon I drove west, past Sooke, with Sid our border collie, and took her for a three-hour hike. I stood on the beach for a long time, chucking rocks that Sid swam after, even though they sank to the bottom. I thought about throwing a stick for her, but a cruel splinter of myself wanted to watch her paddle into the bay, where a stone still rippled, and circle her own tail.
By the time I returned home, Carrie had reheated vegetarian lasagne for herself and was drawing a bath. I washed her dishes and smoked a cigarette outside, from the first pack I’d purchased in fifteen years. I didn’t have the urge, but it felt purposeful, a punctuation mark. When I came in from outside, Carrie had gone to bed. I lingered in the doorway and thought about climbing onto the mattress beside her, kissing her neck, running my hand over her hip. Instead, I closed the door and returned to my laptop, where the rhyme was still open. I took the laptop to the sofa and tried to watch a porn video about a dentist and her patient. I fell asleep.
Again, I woke after Carrie had left for work. The day continued in silence. It bothered me that we could go days without talking. Even with her, there was nothing necessary about speech.
I ate refried beans for lunch, though there was still lasagne in the fridge. In the first months I acted out my grief as though he were watching. For him, I would not return to the comfort of reheated lasagne. I would forget breakfast and eat beans from a can.
They flew in a pair of HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters, one designated as the trail aircraft, one as a lead. Both carried two pilots, two gunners, three PJs and two .50 caliber machine guns. Berkeley had landed for pick up. As he hauled a wounded soldier from the hot zone, insurgents attacked the lead chopper. A bullet struck the tail rotor cable, and the pilots lost control. While they struggled to land the aircraft, the insurgents launched a rocket grenade, which killed two PJs and riddled shrapnel into Berkeley’s inner thigh. The battle lasted four hours, by which time the airmen had devised a bandaid fix for the rear rotor, and the two helicopters lifted back into the air. By the time they reached the military hospital at Bagram Airfield, they’d lost a pilot and two gunners in addition to the first two PJs.
The shrapnel had hit Berkeley’s thigh at such high speed that it exited the body without damaging his nerves or blood vessels. But it shattered the bone into three pieces.The shrapnel to his chest had collapsed a lung; he lost five pints of blood. A tiny fragment the size of a mosquito wing had to be removed from his left eye. In the end, that’s what discharged him. He recovered. Fifteen months and three grafting operations later, he was running again. He ran
the goddamn Boston Marathon. He finished 282nd and raised $12,000 for the Wounded Warrior Project. The next year, before Kickstarter or GoFundMe even existed, he made a pledge on his website: I’m asking for donations to raise $100,000 in honour of my fallen comrades. If I meet my target, I promise to finish the Boston Marathon next year with a time that qualifies me for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
The qualifying standards for Athens in 2004 had been 2:15:00, five minutes faster than Berkeley’s race in Edmonton – before his femur was pinned back together, before the collapsed lung, which could recur under strain, before the blindness in one eye. It wasn’t possible.
I followed his LiveJournal, where he published his run times and photos at the gym – squatting with dumbbells, or tying a resistance band around his ankles to pry his legs apart. I wondered if he found it demeaning. He was used to running in the desert in full military gear, swimming in cold quarries. Now he stretched on a mat with a foam roller like a model in Men’s Health.
I printed the photos he posted and taped them to Dustin’s wall. I’d begun to work in his bedroom. It had been three years. We left the room intact, except I replaced his Kids 8–12 IKEA desk with a larger IKEA desk, and we changed his bedspread from the one with realistic elephants to a pale blue he might have liked, and which wouldn’t disturb houseguests when they stayed, which wasn’t often, or me when I slept in his room, which was more often. But we kept the taxidermied bobcat his uncle got him, and his shell collection, and the glow-in-the-dark planet stickers, and the fuck he’d printed in felt pen behind his computer. And we still called it Dustin’s room –‘I’ll be in Dustin’s room if you need me’; ‘I’m going to sleep in Dustin’s tonight’ – as if his presence were embedded in the wall plaster, and I’d meet him when I sat in my slightly larger desk and faced the same wall he had faced when he played Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.
I watched Carrie observe the accumulation of printed photographs. Her eyes ran across the creased paper, the ink that ribboned Berkeley’s face with pixellated lines as he grinned over his dumbbell. Often her eyes landed on the red fuck I’d preserved. I never papered over it. Soon it was the only patch of bare wall that remained, and I looked to it for encouragement. To spur me on. A sort of mantra. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
At dinner, I asked Carrie about her legal cases, and she asked about Berkeley’s progress. I wasn’t working on anything else at the moment. Only once did she reach for me across the table and lay her cool palm on my wrist, lightly, without depositing any weight, and say, what are you trying to find?
He’d been running six-minute miles for weeks.
The marathon was 26.21 miles, so if he ran the distance in six minute miles, he’d finish in 2:37:19 – ten minutes faster than his last race, but twenty-two minutes too slow. I was engrossed in the tragedy of it – in what would happen if he didn’t make his time. But that week he ran a mile in 5:40. Then 5:36. Which, if he could sustain it, would bring his time to 2:26:50.
I don’t believe it, I said when I told her.
She studied my expression, as if to gauge whether I considered this a triumph.
That’s remarkable, she said, adjusting her tone as I winced. Good for him?
No, I said. I don’t believe it.
You think he’s lying?
A lie won’t qualify you for the Olympics. They don’t take your word for it, Carrie.
Her skin had warmed over mine, and the cool air surprised me when she lifted her palm.
I’d forgotten it was there.
The next weekend I took the Coho to Port Angeles and drove to Tacoma, where he lived. He received me in his home gym, a converted garage with walls of corrugated metal. He had no carpet or floorboards, but he’d laid a black mat over the concrete. The place had an underground industrial look. Bad ass, Dustin might have said. A shelf along the wall held dumbbells, and a long rope hung from the ceiling. He had a rowing machine, a treadmill and an adductor press. He’d grown since I’d seen him last. The noodlearmed teenager with curtained hair was broader across the chest and quadriceps. Still, he retained the physique of a long distance runner. He must have lost some military bulk in hospital. He sat at the adductor machine, and his trainer stood with him, a towel over his shoulder. The trainer introduced himself as Matthew. He wore a nylon tracksuit with a matching blue toque, which his eyes reflected. His expression was alert and eager in the way bornagain Christians appear alert and eager. I half-expected him to pass me a copy of Awake! His eyes tracked my movements around the gym as I took in the rope, the machines, the green exercise ball in the centre of the floor mat.
Nice place you’ve got here, I said.
Thanks, said Berkeley, following my gaze around the room, as if he were admiring the gym for the first time too.
He wasn’t sweating, I observed. No stains under his arms, his buzzcut dry. Had I come before the workout, or was this staged?
I can offer you water or Powerade, said Matthew.
He opened the door to a mini-fridge I hadn’t noticed until now and removed a bottle of water.
I’m okay thanks, I said. Do you mind if I record?
I rolled the fitness ball nearer to the adductor
machine and sat down, held the recorder in my hand because there was no obvious place to rest it. Berkeley looked at Matthew, who gestured for me to go ahead. I asked my first question.
The LA Times called you superhuman in a recent feature. They made an allusion to Ares, god of war. Berkeley nodded, his eyes focused on the floor. Does that embarrass you at all? You didn’t leave the military to be flattered by journalists.
Matthew lifted his hand. Honourably discharged, he corrected.
Apologies.
I did cringe when I saw the article, said Berkeley as Matthew’s hand settled back in his lap.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful. Donations to my blog doubled that day. But I don’t want people to get the wrong impression.
That this is a publicity stunt?
He nodded. It’s not.
We both waited for the other to continue. I found myself trying to guess which was his prosthetic eye. Each time I concluded it was one, the other appeared too clear, the iris too blue, man-made. In the silence, Matthew twisted the lid off the bottle of water in his hand. He passed it to Berkeley.
We’ve met before, I said. Do you remember? Why do you think I agreed to an interview?
I’m flattered.
Don’t be.
A chuckle rose in my throat like a hiccup. I coughed. The trainer gestured toward the mini-fridge where he was perched, his legs on either side of the door. This time I said yes. He tossed me a bottle of Powerade, though I’d wanted water. I broke the seal and drank from it, taking the time to swallow and wipe my mouth before I continued.
Your doctors must be impressed with your recovery. They are. But unsurprised.
Oh?
I’ve always been strong. Even in high school, I never cross-trained. I got up in the morning and ran to school. I ran at lunch time, then back home. It’s programmed into me.
The PJ training must add to that.
Oh yeah. Especially with the mental stuff.
Tell me more about that.
Some call it ‘grit’. What you’re capable of in an endurance environment is more determined by your mental strength than anything else.
I’ve heard ultra-marathon runners describe it as the ‘pain cave’.
That’s right. You have to get comfortable in the pain cave.
Some athletes use PEDs to get comfortable in the pain cave. How big of a problem is that among élite runners?
It’s a problem. But not one I’ve seen myself. No?
I’ve always tested clean.
Have you observed other athletes using them?
Sure. But I won’t go into details.
I read an interview with a former dealer. He’d created twenty different drugs in his lab, none detectable by today’s doping testers.
Exactly. So you can’t prove athletes are using.
Or not using.
Matthew arched his back to stretch. A joint popped in his sternum, and he lowered his chest back to neutral. He glanced distractedly at his watch in a way that implied the interview would end soon.
How’s Dustin? said Berkeley.
My son’s name in his voice jolted me. Later, when I played back the audio, I heard the tap of my shoe against the floor mat as my leg started to bounce. Without taking time to consider my answer, I said, he’s fine.
How old’s he now?
I hesitated, worried he knew more than he was letting on. I didn’t need to count the years in my head.
Sixteen.
What would Carrie say if she could see me? Or not say.
Is he too old for a signed shirt?
My tongue felt heavy in the base of my mouth. I shook my head.
Grab one of the Adidas shirts, he said to Matthew, who stood from the mini-fridge.
I promise it’s clean, said Berkeley with an upbeat laugh as Matthew hoisted up the roller shutter door.
Saliva leaked into my jaw from my cheek glands, like it does before you throw up. I washed it down with Powerade. After a few minutes, Matthew returned with a white mesh shirt and a Sharpie.
Berkeley scrawled his name in fat letters on the front. He asked for my digital camera, which hung over my shoulder, forgotten, and told Matthew to take a photo of us. He held up the T-shirt.
I finished the interview with a question about young athletes who wanted to join the military. Did he have any advice? I didn’t hear his answer as I folded the shirt into a tiny square and placed it at the bottom of my bag.
I stayed at a hotel in Seattle that night. A bland room that reminded me of Frasier because of the inoffensive carpet and unstained pine units. But when I tried to recall the Frasier apartment, I could only see my hotel room. Perhaps it was simply the city, the implied Space Needle, which I couldn’t see from my window, but which I knew was there, like you know the mountains are there, an imprint on the horizon.
I tried to call Carrie, but she didn’t pick up the landline, and her cellphone went straight to
voicemail. I indulged a worst-case scenario fantasy –that she’d been attacked while walking Sid at the lake; she always went off-trail, you never knew who was out there on a weeknight after the regulars went home.
Or another man was over. That fantasy was no less stabbing, but I indulged it for longer. There were plenty of candidates. The litigator at work who never met my eye at the Christmas party. Her yoga instructor, whom she disparaged because of his velvet voice and truisms – when we love ourselves on the mat, we love ourselves off the mat, as if loving ourselves were not a thing we did enough of right now, in society. I wouldn’t mind if it were him. He’d be meaningless. A pick-me-up. Carrie deserved a pick-me-up.
Who else. The man who delivered our veg box? He was attractive, I could see that. He had permanent stubble around his chin and the rough/gentle combo women go nuts for – the brawn to rip potatoes from the earth, yet the care to cradle one under a stream of water as he loosened ridges of dirt from the skin. Carrie always timed deliveries for when she was home. But then I never answered the door while I wrote.
Again she didn’t pick up, so I put on shoes and ordered Thai food from the takeout restaurant downstairs. They said it would be thirty minutes. The woman at the till looked at me with irritation when I said I’d wait for it, on the only chair, which had a plastic cover over the seat. A clock hung on the wall without a frame. It was an hour late, though the time changed four months ago. It occurred to me they might be waiting for the hour to change back. The woman at the till wore a slippery red shirt. She punched buttons on her phone – cellphones still had buttons then. Neither of us engaged the other in conversation, which we were both grateful for, I think. When I left, she gave me extra chocolate mints.
Carrie didn’t pick up when I got back to my room, so I left a message. I ate my green curry with beer from the mini-fridge. I imagined Matthew perched over this one too, passing me the Heineken. They both had such bible blue eyes. I should have asked about faith. That might have been a good angle.
I turned on my digital camera and checked the photo we took. Berkeley held the signed shirt to my chest. I visibly leaned back from it. The words, ROCK ON DUSTIN. LOVE BERKELEY, filled the fabric. The photo was completely unusable, and I wondered if he did that on purpose.
It had been windy on the island. I came home to find Carrie dragging a bough of cracked fir across the grass to a pile at the edge of the yard. I’d rarely seen her like this, when she didn’t know I was watching. I stayed in the car. She moved without caution, jigging the branch in the air to gain a better grip,
JOLLEY PRIZE
wrestling forward. She wasn’t wearing gloves. That’s when I noticed how vast the bough was. Longer than her. Flattening the grass under its weight. And she grappled with the spiked branches, heaving it across the lawn. After a few steps, she shifted the weight to one hand and shook the other in the air, kissing it to her mouth. She’d cut herself. I wanted to help, but she told me recently she found such offers patronising. She could open the jar herself, she said. Even if she had to smash it open. How do you think they figured out coconuts? I tried not to smile, but later I resented the comment. Couldn’t she let me have this? I didn’t rip potatoes from the earth. My car broke down once on the Malahat, and I had no clue how to fix it. I chopped wood clumsily, and only when she asked me to. Jars were all I had left. But it occurred to me, as I sat in the car, she might feel the same way. Maybe the jars, this tree, were all she had left. Maybe that was something we shared now. I tucked my hands in my coat pockets and imagined how cold and chapped hers must be. It wasn’t a warm day. She wore jean cut-offs, a yellow shirt tucked in, the mess of her hair tied in a scarf. I recognised the scarf. An old Forty Licks shirt, one of Dustin’s, torn in a wide strip. When she finally reached the end of the yard, she dropped the bough and stood over it with her hands on her hips like a hunter over a slain bear.
I opened the car door and slammed it to announce my presence. She glanced over her shoulder, then back at the bough. I opened the gate and walked partway to her down the path.
Windy night? I said.
She nodded, spearing her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. A curl had loosened from her scarf. She tossed her head back to knock it out of her eyes.
Did the power go out? I asked, hopeful, recalling my attempts to phone her.
No.
I could tell she was thinking about my calls too. The question hung between us.
You want stew? she asked. It’s leftover.
I followed her inside. The stew was in a Dutch oven on the stove. She lit the burner and turned, leaned against the counter.
So is he doping?
I let my bag slump off my shoulder to the floor, the camera clunking as it landed.
I think so.
Will you say that in your article?
If I do, you can expect a reaction. I get the sense war heroes are exempt from scepticism down there. Well, she said.
The stew started to slop and spurt in the pot. She rotated back to stir it. I noticed a printout of something on the counter. I recognised the shape of it – the text suspended in white space. Without
stepping nearer, I knew what she’d found.
Crazy Maisie went to town
Crazy Maisie bought a gown
She wore her gown and found the sea where her love had lain to sleep.
When Carrie glanced from the stove, she followed my gaze, then looked away. She wouldn’t have printed out the rhyme and left it there if she didn’t want me to explain. Rereading the poem from a distance, it looked like a sick suicide note. Is that what she thought? Or that she, in turn, was Crazy Maisie? I didn’t ask these questions out loud. To do so would admit how far we had fallen.
I had to use photoshop on your computer, she said. I saw the file name and clicked on it.
It was just a stupid rhyme I wrote. When I had writer’s block.
She nodded. I touched her hip and she tilted her weight, just slightly, into my hand. I kissed the tangles under her scarf. She didn’t step away. I opened the cupboard above her head, slid two bowls from the shelf and set the table.
A few days later, Berkeley mentioned me in a blog post. He said a journalist drove all the way down from Canada to interview him. That he’d met me before –at the IAAF in 2001. That we talked about his journey to this day, the challenges he’d overcome. How difficult it could be to keep going sometimes, with the guilt that his brothers on the field never made it. The motto for Pararescuemen is That Others May Live, he said. It killed him they didn’t. As I read the post, I understood he was writing my article. He was writing my article so I didn’t have to write the one I’d intended to. And the truth is – I was thankful. I wanted him to dope. If five men could die beside him. If his lung collapsed, and his femur broke into three pieces. If he lost five pints of blood and vision in one eye, and he could still qualify for the fucking Olympics, my sorrow was not good enough.
I printed his post and taped it to the wall with the others. Dustin’s red fuck beamed reassuringly from the patchwork. I began my article with the myth of Pheidippides, who ran to Athens to announce victory over the Persian army. As he reached the Athenian agora, he shouted nikomen, we won, and collapsed dead in the intense summer heat. g
Eliza Robertson studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she received the Man Booker Scholarship. In 2013, she won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her début story collection, Wallflowers, was shortlisted for the East Anglia Book Award. Her first novel, Demi-Gods, comes out with Penguin Canada and Bloomsbury in late 2017. ❖
Cold comfort
Iva Glisic
WHO LOST RUSSIA?: HOW THE WORLD ENTERED A NEW COLD WAR
by Peter Conradi
$38.99 hb, 384 pp, 9781786070418
Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency has redefined many features of US politics, not the least of which has been the nation’s relationship with its former Cold War nemesis. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ Trump asked while campaigning, ‘if we actually got along with Russia?’ This call for stronger Russian–American relations should have been unremarkable, particularly as it echoed a desire for closer cooperation with Moscow voiced by every newly minted US president since George H.W. Bush. Yet since his election Trump’s obsequious praise of Vladimir Putin, along with his brash disclosure of classified information to the Russian foreign minister – and ultimately the omnipresent sense that there is much more still to come on his dealings with the Kremlin – frame today’s rapprochement in very different terms. As the world seeks to make sense of this new political reality, it is hardly surprising that the study of post-Soviet Russia has become a topic of renewed popular interest.
In this context, Peter Conradi’s new book – Who Lost Russia? How the world entered a new Cold War – is timely. The current foreign editor of The Sunday Times in London, Conradi served as a Reuters correspondent to Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed. Returning to a ‘very different’ Moscow in 2016, he seeks to explain how, over the past quartercentury, the prospect of meaningful cooperation between Russia and the West has gradually been lost. Taking its title from a 1992 memo by Richard Nixon that forewarned of this very outcome, this is a ‘story of high hopes and goodwill but also of misunderstandings and missed opportunities’. Across a rapidfire series of chapters, Conradi recounts
all the key events: the dissolution of the Soviet Union; the presidency of Boris Yeltsin (1991–99); the economic chaos of the 1990s; the process of privatisation, and the associated rise of super-rich oligarchs on the one hand, and widespread poverty on the other; Putin’s emergence and ascendancy; the commodity-fuelled economic boom of the 2000s; and, of course, the wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Intersecting this chronology are descriptions of various discrete episodes that strained Russia’s relationship with the West, including the eastward enlargement of NATO, the UN-defying bombardment of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Iraq, and diplomatic clashes over colour revolutions in Russia’s neighbouring countries. The book also considers moments when the prospect of cooperation was raised, such as in the aftermath of 9/11.
Specialists might well ask for more robust analysis than Conradi’s approach permits. The book draws almost exclusively on English language sources and interviews with political élites; it does little to challenge the familiar narrative. The sequence of events is well-known, as is the overall reading of Russia–US relations since the dissolution of the Soviet Union: America’s triumphalism and its dismissive treatment of Russia as a vanquished foe engendered a sense of resentment that, as Moscow gained economic strength and political confidence, ultimately gave way to attempts at vengeance. Conradi’s play-by-play leaves little room for analysis, and his shotgun approach to storytelling flattens complex historical phenomena. Yeltsin, for example, comes off as a well-intentioned reformer, while debates over the resurgence of ultranationalist tendencies in Ukraine are presented as mere products of Russian propaganda. Elsewhere, the book reaches for the characterisation of armed conflicts in post-socialist states as outcomes of ancient hatred, a notion that historians have repeatedly exposed as a journalistic platitude that reduces complex political, social, economic, historical, and geopolitical factors to orientalist stereotypes. Ultimately, this lack of nuance makes for a frustrating reading experience.
For the most part, the book is
framed by a well-worn perception that twenty-first century relations between Russia and the West continue to be defined by conflicting interests and mutual suspicion. Yet Who Lost Russia? is at its most interesting when it complicates this story by observing how the West has bolstered the Russian regime by doing business with it. What should we make of the fact that former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder became chairman of a Gazprom-controlled gas pipeline company within weeks of leaving office in 2005, or that so many Western national banks have provided haven for the wealth siphoned from Russia by countless oligarchs? These episodes, though underexplored, provide a foundation for Conradi to consider what he refers to as ‘what aboutism’, by which Russian authorities deflect criticism by highlighting instances of Western hypocrisy. Yes, political prisoners have died in Russia, but what about Guantánamo Bay? If NATO can initiate humanitarian war, Russia can also use extraterritorial force to protect its citizens. If the West can so quickly recognise Kosovo’s proclamation of independence, surely it stands as a precedent for Crimea. With this strategy, truth becomes irrelevant, or, in the quoted words of Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev: ‘Putin doesn’t need to have a more convincing story, he just has to make it clear that everyone lies, undermine the moral superiority of his enemies and convince his people there is no alternative to him.’
Although it ultimately does more to catalogue than to unpack its subject matter, Who Lost Russia? concludes on an important note: ahead lies an era that will be shaped both by the Trump presidency and, almost certainly, also by a fourth presidential term for Vladimir Putin in 2018. In this new era, old questions of who lost Russia or whether there might be another Cold War are distracting. Instead, the challenge is to devise a political grammar by which contemporary reality can be properly articulated. g
Iva Glisic is a Research Associate at the University of Western Australia. Her forthcoming book explores the interplay between avant-garde art, politics, and ideology in late tsarist and early Soviet Russia ❖
Told you so
Alison Broinowski
THE VIOLENT AMERICAN CENTURY: WAR AND TERROR SINCE WORLD WAR II
by John W. Dower Haymarket Books
$24.99 pb, 167 pp, 9781608467235
Aweek after the Manchester Arena bombing, it emerged in the British media that MI5 had been warned about some of the terrorists but had apparently done nothing. M16, moreover, had reportedly encouraged British Libyans to join the 2011 civil war against Gaddafi. Their relatives, including the Manchester bomber, later went back and forth unimpeded between the United Kingdom and Libya. Yet this scandal attracted none of the political outrage directed at Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn for repeating that the United Kingdom, by invading Muslim countries, would invite ‘blowback’ terrorist attacks. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson declared it was ‘absolutely monstrous’ of Corbyn to ‘subtract [sic] from the fundamental responsibility’ of the terrorists. Johnson himself, however, when London trains and buses were attacked in July 2015, had cited the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessment that a war in Iraq would increase the terror threat to Britain, and had found it ‘difficult to deny that they have a point, the Told-You-So brigade’. His ineptitude, and that of the Tories, almost led to defeat at the 2017 general election.
Historian Chalmers Johnson, having worked for the CIA, remembered the agency coining the term ‘blowback’ for its overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran in 1953: the unintended adverse consequences of a policy or action. In Blowback (2000), Johnson (Chalmers, not Boris) anticipated the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. A few days after 9/11, he argued in The Nation that those who blamed hatred of American values or a clash of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ civilisations were wrong: the terrorists’ dreadful, indiscriminate assaults were a reaction to US ac-
tivities over many years. Between 1980 and 2001,US forces had invaded,occupied, or bombed twelve countries with Islamic populations – Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, and Yemen – inciting hostility towards the United States which blew back dramatically.
Another distinguished US historian, John W. Dower, describes anti-US blowback as the result of three-quarters of a century of interventionism. Americans, always in the name of peace, freedom, and democracy, have killed many more than the terrorists. The United States has engaged in widespread violence, some of it public and some secret through proxy wars, arms sales, inciting insurrection, or backing authoritarian regimes. US strategic bombing killed and terrified civilian populations in wars in Japan and Korea, and then in Southeast Asia, where American mines and chemical warfare left vast areas devastated. The nuclear ‘balance of terror’ intimidated an earlier generation, but America’s current ‘nuclear modernisation’ is equally terrifying. The United States is not alone, but as Dower shows in his latest book it has led the world in developing instruments of mass destruction, and has funnelled massive resources into a ‘gargantuan, intrusive, and ever-expanding national security state’. Many unpublicised facilities around the world are integrated with CIA ‘black operations’, which since 2002 include targeted assassinations by unmanned drones. For the United States, Dower concludes, fighting terror means creating terror.
War against terror does not deliver security. Instead, Dower detects a bipolar disorder in the United States: hubristic and overwhelmingly powerful, yet fearful and insecure. By fomenting anxiety about threats at home and abroad, and always finding new ones, US military planners have for decades ensured that politicians and the public keep footing the bills for the massive, public and private, military and security industry. It is now, says Dower, more ‘cumbersome, compartmentalized, factionridden, redundant, wasteful, corrupt and nontransparent’ than ever. Since 1996, the Pentagon’s mission has been ‘full-
spectrum dominance’ of land, sea, air, space, and information in every part of the world. In 2015 the US Department of Defense maintained 4,855 ‘sites’ of which 587 were in forty-two countries abroad. Special Operations forces were active in at least 150 countries. About 150,000 US troops in some eighty countries are located in 800 American garrisons, which include 181 bases in Germany, 122 in Japan, and eightythree in South Korea. Between World War II and 2002, the US engaged in 263 military operations, more than two-thirds of them after 1991. And yet since World War II the massively armed United States has won no wars (apart from Grenada, Panama, the brief 1991 Gulf War, and the Balkan conflict).
Although the United States changes its enemy nations often, and fights some former friends, its identification of individual ‘bad guys’ remains perennially consistent. Dower cites a training manual for covert operations in Latin America which targets ‘religious workers, labor organizers, student groups, and others in sympathy with the cause of the poor’. A revised manual whose preface states that torture is illegal and often counterproductive goes on to instruct trainees in torture techniques. Dower doesn’t discount other countries’ violence and oppression, but America’s record ‘helps place them in perspective’. US exceptionalism and ‘rule of law’ rhetoric are hubristic myths that provoke enmity.
Dower’s important book has two guiding themes. First, overt conflict between major states has since 1945 given way to relative peace, but in other countries civil wars have proliferated, often at US instigation. (Another new book, David Armitage’s Civil Wars, confirms that in parts of Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, internal conflict is now the most widespread and destructive form of organised human violence). Second, the ‘American Century’ that Henry Luce confidently proclaimed in 1946 has peaked, and the United States which Donald Trump promises to make great again is declining and may fall. g
Alison
Broinowski is researching the causes and effects of terrorism.
To Speak of Sorrow
by Darius Sepehri
‘I still have grief inside me, no matter how long my people’s been gone. I still have that grief, and tear, and rip in my heart like it happened yesterday … Even alherntere, nonIndigenous people can feel it.’
Margaret Kemarre Turner, Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means to Be an Aboriginal Person (2010)
Tehran, April 1987: Going Under
Descending in a stream of arpeggio broken chords: as we moved through night and the vernal air down into the green earth, my mother thought she heard a children’s song on the stairs as the bombs fell cascading. Like bells, bells of Hades sounding out inverted intervals, the bombs fell interminably. The sirens that were singing sang us downward to the damp islands of the underground shelter, a honeycomb under the Tehran metropolis, buzzing with heat-maddened, with death-maddened men and women. My mother was quick with child and as she ran barefoot down the spiralling stairs she was engulfed by the yawning mouth of the desecrated earth It was two months shy of my birth. All was opaque and suffocating. Concrete shards broke and fell from the ceiling, missiles rained down in deluge. As a whale yawning wide, trenches on the battle-front split and men were dragged into the void. Later, as I came up out of the waters, I knew this sorrow would abide. I tasted a fruit with an ashen core and I saw over all the earth ashes and soot spread abroad, veiling the stars, this shroud.
Vaslav Nijinsky, before going mad, wrote in his diaries that he felt the tremendous presence of god without fear: ‘I do not want to crack,’ he insisted, ‘but to say the truth.’ Decades later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, driven to express his moral vision of humanity charged with responsibilities of compassion, might have said the same. Undergoing extraordinary anguish, Solzhenitsyn
testified to our responses to life’s beauty and harshness. He sank into a hell but found there the possibility to realising a kind of heaven, fulfilling the desire expressed by Greek poet Odysseus Elytis: ‘I want to descend the steps, to fall into this verdant fire and then to ascend like an angel of the Lord …’
It is little wonder that I crave depths, catacombs, the belly of the whale; that I seek nourishment like the heart-roots of Tehran’s old sycamore trees. My life began with my mother’s descent into underground bomb shelters during the ‘War of the Cities’, late in the Iran–Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein, deploying Soviet missiles, rained death on Iranian cities. Thousands of civilians, like hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Iranian conscripts, were killed. The world watched, did nothing, and finally gave Saddam more weapons, including poison gas.
After surviving this plunge, there was a figurative one, a schooling, with millennia-old Persian poetry and music, in the inner dimension of depth, often expressing sorrow. The gift of such formative encounters arises from the reality that grief requires inwardness if it is to be more than a pathology. Inchoate in my mind – a product of this early experience of grief as soulful but transformative – was the sense that the aftermath of grief depended on the psychological, spiritual, and creative frameworks in which it takes place. Grief is best when it comes in alchemical modes. For metamorphosis to take place, we need a transformative, alchemical space presided by the psychopomp Hermes, who will lead us as he led Priam, almost destroyed by grief, to Achilles – both afterwards wholly changed.
Mythologically, the descent was always to an inner space. We are familiar with these mythological descents to the underworld, katabasis in Greek. Before Odysseus in Dante’s Inferno there was Gilgamesh, Osiris, Innana,
Hercules, and Orpheus; after him, Aeneas, Christ. And today? We enter the inferno with trials, losses, failures, wrongdoing in public and private, terror and trauma. Often the inferno is called depression, the black dog. Yet in Australia, what of the languages to express grief and mourning: are they accessible, appropriate? What is the function of these modes of expression in Australia? We know, despite our successes, there is enormous trauma in our history. We have made a kind of hell here, and abroad, and we cover them up. Coming from Iran, where grief is ubiquitous, it seems that only with the deaths of relatives and isolated shocking events is grief expressed in Australia. The grief with which I want to deal is not only bereavement, which some, narrowing the definition, take grief to be, though that grief gives us many opportunities for growth.
My family learned this when it lost a son and brother – my uncle – to senseless violence. He was thirty-two.
There is much to lament, including the massacres and dispossession of Aboriginal peoples, and subsequent policies of inhuman kinds, a background hum to our lives. Such brutalities are not only matters of political responsibility and reparation, they are psychic wounds that will not disappear until they are dealt with through appropriate modes of mourning. Wars followed in which men were butchered or, as with Vietnam, returned psychologically damaged. Today we note the confinement of people in offshore detention – in gulag-like conditions. The latter calls for Australians not only to engage in the clinical language of reportage, or angry expressions of opposition, but also protest voiced as lamentation, whether as essays, conversation, poetry, songs, art, letters to political representatives. Lament should not only be directed toward the far past. There is also the matter of ecological catastrophe, mass extinction of species, and the unravelling of ecosystems. Audra Mitchell calls this the ‘unmaking of being’; she argues that it needs to be experienced as more than statistics: ‘no matter how much data we collect on past and possible future extinctions, we can never have experienced extinction empirically.’
Katabasis as transformation was at the heart of Solzhenitsyn’s work. In The Gulag Archipelago (1973), he argues that grief brings moral development:
In prison, both in solitary confinement and outside solitary too, a human being confronts his grief face to face. This grief is a mountain, but he has to find space inside himself for it, to familiarize himself with it, to digest it, and it him. This is the highest form of moral effort, which has always ennobled every human being. A duel with years and with walls constitutes moral work and a path upward (if you can climb it).
Critic Dan Jacobson said: ‘Solzhenitsyn takes for granted an absolutely direct and open connection between
literature and morality, art and life.’ Solzhenitsyn himself made the relationship between art and morality explicit in his Nobel lecture, when he insisted that the road to glory runs through a frank acknowledgment of despair, cruelty, and failure. The artist must inform society of ‘all that is unhealthy and cause for anxiety’.
Solzhenitsyn, in the Ekibastuz gulag, had a kindred spirit, the poet Anatoly Silin. A latter-day Myshkin, Silin declares that the human soul must suffer before it can taste the ‘perfect bliss of paradise’, and that ‘by grief alone is love perfected’. Silin had memorised twenty thousand lines of poetry. Solzhenitsyn, using a rosary, memorised twelve thousand lines of his own work. This was a theology of suffering practised by weaving together hardship with the creation of imaginative works.
What we learn from the story of Jonah, with his repeated denial of God’s instructions, is that katabasis can be avoided but keeps calling. As Joseph Campbell taught us, one may refuse the heroic journey to the transformative space and stay in town. In our successcrazed society, it is necessary to remember Icarus. Katabasis: sinking down, bottom pulled out from under us in the blink of an eye, a swift fall; leaving the world of glittering things as ashes and cinders; loss of normality, prestige, success, and order; embrace of doubt, mourning, danger, isolation.
I have always been distrustful of society’s disavowal of grief. Growing up Iranian, I absorbed music, poetry, art, turns of phrase and habits of mind, all of which, as the inverse of an extraordinary emphasis on beauty, stress sorrow. The grief in Persian culture comes partly from Iran’s tragic history, beginning with defeat by Muslim Arabs of Zoroastrian Persia under the Sassanian dynasty, having been weakened by long conflict with the Byzantines. After that year zero, Iran has not, apart from the odd brief exception, been ruled by Iranians. In successive waves, the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols battered the Iranian people and subjugated them, before becoming themselves Persianised.
Genghis Khan, after crossing the Syr Darya river in 1219, directed the unfathomably brutal campaigns in Transoxiana and Khorasan; between 1220 and 1221 he destroyed the grand cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, Herat,Tus, and Nishapur. According to Rashīd al-Dīn, a historian who served under Ilkhanate rule in Iran, the Mongols murdered more than 700,000 people in Merv and over a million in Nishapur. No wonder that Iranians are obsessed with their ancient past: pride in the achievements of the Achaemenids makes it a bitter cup to swallow the losses that followed. I have heard similar laments from Aboriginal people in Australia.
These calamities happened long ago, but the suffering has never gone away. Trauma, an essential signifier of our times, relates ‘present suffering to past violence’, according to Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman in The Empire of Trauma (2009), and is the ‘collective imprint on a group of a historical experience that may have occurred decades, generations or even centuries ago’. The
book is a study of the condition, wholly contemporary they argue, of victimhood and its historical construction and political use. It is true that grief, trauma, and victimhood are connected in ways that are important to acknowledge. We are often told, especially on Anzac or Australia Day, that any kind of public grief over historical traumas not prescribed within established national narratives is the product of a mentality of victimhood that serves unwelcome ends. It falls to those who are fighting on the side of memory against oblivion, acknowledgment rather than denial, to insist that simply because victimhood is problematic does not nullify the reality that trauma persists vividly and tenaciously.
In his recent Monthly essay ‘Rom Watangu’, Aboriginal elder Galarrwuy Yunupingu tells how memories of European massacres in East Arnhem Land ‘are burned into our minds. They are never forgotten. Such things are remembered. Like the scar that marked the exit of the bullet from my father’s body.’ A few hundred years, even a thousand, may not allow suffering to fully dissipate. Trauma, as Yunupingu attests with his metaphor, is passed down first through the body, beginning, I have always believed, with the women who pass the effect of stress (physically, as cortisol), screams, and terror to the next generation through the closeness of the womb.
Christmas 1993, Sydney
When I was six my uncle was murdered. Masoud was his name. He was thirty-two. Beloved on the earth.
My grandmother wanted to tear the earth with her teeth, unwind the white bandage. Her son, made in ecstasy. Agony that lurched drunken and raving through the streets, rabid dogs and dust under frantic hooves.
There was something about the father of the Flanagans who lived four doors down from our Brisbane home that reminded me of my mother. Like Iranians, the Irish have a tragic conception of history, which they sing, dance, chant, and keen. After centuries of subjugation and occupation, it is inevitable that the Irish – Australian historian Patrick O’Farrell has called them the ‘archaic, melancholy, humorous, religious, contradictory and occasionally indomitable Irishry’ – know how to mourn. In the now extinct practice of ‘keening’, keeners (bean chaointe) howled stock poetic elements in lamenting melodies over the dead body, both during the funeral and at the place of interment. Today, similar rites still occur at Iranian funerals, where hired singers, skilled at manipulating emotions, weave the names of the deceased into stock poems and sing them with great intensity. Heated singing and crying for deceased relations has been carried out by Aboriginal women on this continent for generations.
In the Iranian and Irish context, lamentations at the deaths of Indigenous heroes and Abrahamic saints and martyrs, ritualised Catholic and Shia mourning events, are extreme and sentimental, as well as regenerative;
they can bring the energy of cataclysm and breakdown required for true homeostasis. Lamentation for the Shia Imams, especially martyred Hossein, known as rowze khani, are Dionysian and Saturnine. Decorum and restraint ensure things run well, but they can lead to stagnancy. Popular expressions of sorrow ensure that a language of mourning is available to people; one can slip into grief quickly if need be. My Iranian ancestors have sung grief, and so can I. Hafez, the greatest of Persian poets, is the poet of ecstasy and sorrow, in equal measure.
The exploration of grief uncovers persistent distrust of its open expression. Soon after Australian settlement, the British regarded their pragmatism as being tied up with habit and perseverance, while the Irish were seen as wallowers or even savages. The grief they brought with them from the Old Country would go on to affect Australian society and writing, as exemplified by the sorrow of oral ballads. In David Malouf’s The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996), we find this description of Ireland: ‘Salt and sorrow over the fields, a sad country; mournful, made human by the long sorrows it had endured, the sorrows yet to come.’ The phrase itself reads as lament and locates grief in the landscape itself as produced by human activity that ‘saddens’ and shapes that landscape. Malouf’s lyrical sentence implies that grief can help to make us more at home in the world.
Deborah Bird Rose reminds us that country to Aboriginal people is spoken of as people are: ‘People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice.’ And what to do when country has been hurt? How do we sing that sadness along with Aboriginal people? If we have no ‘knowledge of grief’, as Rilke calls it, what will we say, how will we cry out?
In the stories of recent arrivals in Australia, we often find that grief comes as a double exclusion from the old country and the new. ‘I cannot claim to belong here fully,’ writes Andrew Riemer writes in his memoir Inside Outside (1992); he arrived in Australia as an eleven-year-old in 1947 from a devastated Hungary. ‘No matter how thoroughly you have been absorbed by your adopted society … your otherness cannot be expunged.’
The dolour of Kenneth McKenzie’s The Young Desire It (1937) reads as the ‘perilous tension’ between his loss of an idyllic childhood and his alienation at the boys’ school where he is tormented. This liminality is the true meaning of Gethsemane, where Christ found everything he had depended on slipping from beneath him, his mission shattered, his dozing disciples – how awful the sound of their untroubled sleep – unable to comprehend his feelings. Why then, do Christ’s brokenness and vulnerability at Gethsemane often seem so distant from Christian spirituality?
Something similarly telling has occurred with the Persian Sufi poet Rumi, whose popularity has reached extraordinary heights in the West, especially the United
DISCOVER SOMETHING NEW UNIQUE STORIES AWAIT
BRIDGING THE GAP
Priya Raja
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This book is about filling the gaps in the education system to create a more meaningful experience for students and society as a whole. Shanmuga Priya speaks for holistic education system and for it to adopt a more humane way of functioning. To invent new curricula that encompasses spirituality as a practical practice. It is a book that gives a voice and hope for a better education system.
SELF-PRESERVATION
Don Collins
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In a desperate bid of Self-Preservation —prevent his going bankrupt while maintaining his luxury lifestyle—young property developer David Hudson willingly accepts the help of Geoff Simons, a brilliant but shady accountant, to resort to lies and fraudulent practices.
MY FRIEND JACK
A Story of Adventurous Characters Drawn Together in a Later Half of the Last Century
John Cooper
www.xlibris.com.au
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Three disparate young men from different countries and backgrounds are fated to meet far from their homes in Australia and Korea. Their paths mingle in an adventurous story that spans half the world in the latter half of the last century.
SHIRTSLEEVES TO SHIRTSLEEVES IN TWO GENERATIONS
First Generation
Gerard Leahy
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Because he was so shy of publicity, little is known about J. J. Leahy. He was called by some as the back-country baron, one of Australia’s most important early pastoralists. With a limited education and no money, he went on to build up a large pastoral empire. His story and that of his descendants are all documented in this memoir that chronicles Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Two Generations: First Generation.
IS GOAT BEEF?
Tales from the Front Served with Dishes from the Rear
Jeffery M. Camp
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Is Goat Beef? Shows the humorous side of the military and how service members relax during times of conflict. This book combines the author’s love of humor, food, and his military service.
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUB AND TUB
Gillian Wells
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The Amazing Adventures of Bub and Tub follows the story of two friends, a small black-and-white dog called Tub and a small grey pony called Bub, both of whom are always getting into mischief and having adventures.
States. In much of the English-speaking world, largely due to the work of Coleman Barks, Rumi is prized for his joyfulness and ecstatic utterance, not for his lamentations, as in the famous opening to his epic Masnavi: ‘Now listen to this reed-flute’s deep lament / About the heartache being apart has meant.’ As Rumi scholar Franklin Lewis has pointed out, Rumi, like Hafez, is a poet ‘of overpowering longing, trying to grope through his shattering sense of loss – loss of Shams and alienation in the material world from the spiritual source’. The grief in Persian poetry and music, so familiar from my childhood, is not only a memory of harsh experiences but is in fact archetypal, having to do with metaphysical separation from ultimate reality, and the tragedy of everything not fulfilled, with our incompleteness and propensity to fall short of what we might be, our brokenness and un-wholeness. ‘Life is, in itself, forever a shipwreck,’ said José Ortega y Gasset, as he packed his bags to flee a broken Civil War Spain.
My uncle went to the morgue to identify his brother’s body. The police pulled back the cloth only partly, for Masoud’s face was disfigured. They took my uncle outside and asked him to sign for his brother’s death. He refused to acknowledge that his brother was dead. They took him back into the room, showed him the body. Outside, they asked him to sign. Still he wouldn’t agree. The police looked at each other and at their feet.
Last night my uncle made Masoud dinner.
Deborah Bird Rose, professor in environmental humanities, has introduced the idea of ‘double-death’, in which too many losses in an ecosystem also destroy the process of resilience and thus unravel the relationship between life and death. Rose believes this is an ‘open secret, and an open wound’ we are struggling to witness. ‘Perhaps,’ she reflects, ‘we lack awareness of the beauty of death, and therefore fail to perceive that it is being violated.’
One kind of double death that Rose defines is the ‘unmaking of country, unravelling the work of generation upon generation of living beings’. Mourning the violence inflicted on the land is hard, serious work. Death belongs to the whole community, and dying is not only for the dead but for those who remain to mourn and remember and to sing the dead to their proper place. When mass killings and atrocities occur, according to James Hatley, they are acts of aenocide: ‘a murdering of generations’. What is killed is thus not only living beings but knowledge itself. It was perhaps against such violence that Oodgeroo wrote: ‘Let no one say the past is dead. / The past is all about us and within. / Haunted by tribal memories, I know.’ Here, the poet’s ‘I know’ itself grieves, and is a work in grief of the highest nobility.
Anthropologists Luke Godwin and James Weiner write that ‘places where Aboriginal ancestors were killed as a result of frontier violence constitute one of the most important and impassioned categories of contemporary
“sacred” places for all Indigenous communities in Australia’. In contrast to this is what is called ‘dark tourism’, travel to sites connected to death or disaster or atrocity or just general strangeness. There is no mandatory attempt to mourn the suffering visited on the site. On www.dark-tourism.com, under the Australia section, one reads that Uluru could be a site for dark tourism because it ‘generates a somewhat spooky aura’ and because of the death of Azaria Chamberlain. If this is not enough for them, ‘dark tourists’ have the choice of grave tourism, genocide tourism, prison/persecution site tourism, or Cold War tourism.
Gulag tourism: if you visit Ekibastuz in the Pavlodar oblast, do you hear the bawling and yowls of mortification, forlorn curses of wrecked men, prayers of reborn men, the sound of the Redeemer creating upon pummelled flesh and mutilated skin a wealth of love?
Solzhenitsyn accepted the descent, did not crack, and spoke the truth.
I believe this dark tourism, griefless, is often a kind of torture fetishism. As you step into this room you’ll see where they pulled fingernails out … It is of a piece with recent genres of entertainment like ‘disaster porn’ and ‘torture porn’, which depict trauma but find no meaning in it, a traumatising process.
In major cycles of Irish mythological tradition, grief and suffering unmourned bind our spirits to the earth and curb its progress. Perhaps that’s why I went to Weereewa, or Lake George, as it was named by Lachlan Macquarie in 1820. The lake, twenty minutes from Canberra, was two-fifths full and rapidly evaporating. This wasn’t dark tourism, though with the many drownings and the Aboriginal story that the water drains into the other world, the designation might be appropriate. Rather, I went there to grieve my uncle, who used to throw me high into the air and buy me iceblocks. No one has ever truly recovered from his killing, and no one will. The sky is huge here, a view to infinity. I wanted my uncle’s death to fill the sky from horizon to horizon like the angel Gabriel visiting Muhammad.
The vast expanse seemed like the plains or Russian steppes. Shiraz, where my people come from, is on the Iranian plateau and offers vast panoramas. In preEuropean times, Weereewa, which means ‘bad waters’ due to the water’s fast arrival and disappearance, was a meeting place. According to Canberra historian Ann Jackson-Nakano, ‘different parts of the lake marked the furthermost frontier for a number of hunter-gatherer groups whose main territories stretched much further afield’. According to the Ngunawal people, Budjabulya is a creator spirit that lives in the lake, which they also call Lake Ngungara. The lake can become completely dry and then refill, they say, because of Budjabulya, who gives when he is respected and takes away the food supply and the water when he is angry.
I take this story seriously, though I am far from it and have probably mistold it. I am familiar from Persian cul-
ture with the notion of the place of human beings as the bridge, or pontifex, between heaven and earth. Living in such a ‘pontifical’ way, we stay connected to our origins, and we have a centre. We live on the outside of a circle in the world, but so long as we remain a bridge we can dive inward, downward, to the core, the heart of things. Today, by contrast, we live as Promethean creatures, having tried to misappropriate the powers of the ancestors and of the divine realm. Knowing that Aborigines saw the role of humans as intermediaries, custodians, makes me feel closer to worlds that otherwise feel so inexplicable. There is a couplet of Hafez that I love to recite in Persian:
Like a compass, I was circling with ease on the circumference of things.
Like a point I was pulled into the centre by the cycle of time.
Near the Quaker retreat centre at the lake, called Silver Wattle, a stone labyrinth has been erected. As I walked through it, spiralling in and out, I was drawn inwards, as are all those who walk labyrinths for healing and meditation. Labyrinths are for many a space in which to reflect on the joys and challenges of life, and on mortality itself; walking inwards, one may take sorrow into the centre, where one can stop and breathe, before returning to what awaits in life. The grandeur of the lake, which has the aspect of limitlessness that I love, also opens one to mortality. I thought of the Celtic triskelion symbol, which is of three interlocking spirals, each with its own centre. Let this be a model, I said to myself as I walked the labyrinth. Let me know the beauty of Persian, Western, Aboriginal traditions, and learn from them all.
Writers, who spiral in and out and who are our bridges between worlds, have often found beauty and truth after diving downwards. There is James Agee, for instance, who underwent a katabasis to write Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the Fortune report that featured Walker Evans’s legendary photographs of Alabaman cotton farmers. Both men left New York, where they were known and celebrated, and lived with impoverished sharecroppers. Agee plunged into the farmers’ world; living with them in houses that slept three, four, or five to a room. Agee’s own suffering connected him to that of others. Famous Men is full of Agee’s extravagant excesses, his volcanicity and verbosity. After a preface that seems Melvillean in its windings, self-referentiality, and facetiousness, Agee takes three pages to describe a sharecropper family falling into a deep sleep. The language of exaltation is reminiscent of the King James Bible and Elizabethan theatre. The first sentence is pure gravity: ‘The house and all that was in it had now descended deep beneath the gradual spiral it had sunk through; it lay formal under the order of entire silence.’ This incantatory style lasts until the last sentence of the section: ‘There was now no further extreme, and they were sunken not sin-
gularly but companionate among the whole enchanted swarm of the living, into a region prior to the youngest quaverings of creation.’
Those who want to write about grief and trauma can learn much from Agee, not by copying his style but by noting how he makes use of the characters. Using prose at such a high level, imparting such grandeur and majesty while depicting poor hapless workers and animals going to sleep, creates an ambience that is at once stately and vigorous. If the vigour mirrors the farmers and their workhorse stamina, the grandeur of voice brings what straight reportage could not: a sense of dignity. The gravitas of Agee’s writing, sombreness strengthened by sadness, gives characters full-bloodedness and puts them our level: we can experience grief without condescension or facile pity. Agee’s autobiography, A Death in the Family (1957), which traces the effect of his father’s death in an automobile accident, is one of the most visceral depictions of grief in writing: ‘Mary meanwhile rocked quietly backward and forward, and from side to side, groaning, quietly, from the depths of her body, not like a human creature but a fatally hurt animal.’
In Brisbane, when our house was heavy with silence, my mother would play traditional Persian music. In the afternoon, when the subtropical air was tiresome, the dirge-like voices got under my skin. The plaintive singers –revered names like Shajarian, Banān, Eftekhari, Shahram Nazeri, Marzieh – expressed a kind of ache from the deepest parts of the soul. The grief in traditional Persian music is not mere psycho-emotional affect. It is contemplative; one enters a meditative state. Shajarian, greatest singer of Persian traditional music, has said that the power of vocal singing such as his – avaaz in Persian – lies in its ability to make the listener go inward. The sadness is about tamarkoz, concentration, and motamarkez shodan, becoming centred in oneself. Much of Persian traditional music, and nearly all of avaaz, is interior. Its close links to Sufism and musicians either initiated into Sufi orders, or at least cognisant of the main principles of Sufism, have allowed Persian music to maintain an equilibrium between ecstasy and grief. I understood early, with such a schooling in grief and depth, that at the far edges of experience you have to grieve before you can praise and enjoy. As Hafez says:
May the world never be devoid of the lovers’ lamentation For it has a joyful sound and a cheerful melody.
The language of sorrow and grief is the language of absence, distance, separation, calamity, and affliction, but also of upheaval or reversal of the order of things. So the song ‘Morgh-e Sahar (Bird of Dawn)’ that is Shajarian’s signature piece, performed for years without exception at the end of all his concerts, is a cry for justice that calls for increasing lamentation and the smarting pain of the wound.
Morning bird, mourn, further renew my pain. With a sigh that rains fire, break this cage and overturn it.
Grief and bidad, the cry for justice, go together. For millions of Iranians within and without Iran this is a natural language, the language that unites sorrow and lament with a narrative of redressing wrongs. None of which is found in the books of Daniel Ladinsky, a non-speaker of Persian who claims to translate Hafez but who reinvents every poem in his own words, removing Hafez’s poetry from its historical, cultural, and spiritual roots. Unfortunately, this work of charlatanry has sold millions of copies. A similar hoax was carried out in 1994 in Marlo Morgan’s Mutant Message Down Under, a best-seller in which the American author claimed to have met a non-existent group of Aborigines who charged her with communicating their message –since they were, they told her, choosing voluntary death as a tribe. Both of these acts of cultural vandalism were successful on a popular level because of the widespread general ignorance of spiritual traditions of Aboriginal Australians and the Persian mystical tradition, which is rooted both in Islam and pre-Islamic Iranian esoterism. Anyone who wants to translate Hafez should recall Yeats’s pungent line about creativity brewing up alchemically out of ‘old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can’. Needless to say, the pain of the Aboriginal people is utterly extirpated in Morgan’s book.
But there have been cultural exchanges between Australia and Iran that have been based in nobler principles. A shining but little-known example is Judith Wright’s reading of Persian poetry and of Hafez. This engagement lasted for decades and influenced Wright’s work. She wrote a dozen of her last poems in the form of the ghazal, common to Persian, Arabic, and Urdu literature. Like a bookend, ‘The Shadow of Fire: Ghazals’ sits at the end of her last collection, Phantom Dwelling, published in 1985. Wright’s transposition of the ghazal into Australian writing is dynamic. In the ghazal ‘Pressures’, she reconciles grief and ecstasy like Hafez, but rather than using stock images, as Hafez does, Wright makes the ghazal operate in a modern poetic practice by using concrete ones. One couplet has a beautiful metamorphosis: ‘Brown butterflies strike my window-pane. / When I get up to look they have always become dead leaves.’ Other couplets describe the accumulating weight of age, necessitating a slowing down under ‘Gravity’s drag, time’s wear’. The ghazal ends: ‘Blood slows, thickens, silts – yet when I saw you / once again, what a joy set this pulse jumping.’ As in Hafez, we have many couplets expressing sorrow, followed by a last couplet with another voice intruding Wright’s joy that sets the thickened, silted blood jumping echoes the importance in Hafez of seizing the moment, even in grief, embracing reunion with the beloved (either earthly or divine). Hafez dwells repeatedly on the broken nature of life and the inevitability of pain and sorrow, but resists total pessi-
mism. Odysseus Elytis said a similar thing of the poetry of his compatriot and contemporary, Giorgos Seferis: ‘Yes, he is somber, but he never vilifies life. He has that respect toward life which has existed in Greece ever since antiquity.’ Albert Camus, in his anguished essay ‘Helen’s Exile’ (1948), also contrasted Greek knowledge of despair (which came though beauty, he believed) with the modern age, which, in contrast, ‘has fed its despair on ugliness and convulsions’.
Mainstream news and media feed us despair and make grief impossible. News cycles encourage hatred, outrage, paranoia, titillation, and blame. Mainstream entertainment can be even worse. Hollywood, according to the documentary Reel Bad Arabs (2006), has depicted Arabs and Middle Easterners as malicious ever since its creation. With the exception of Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog (2003), I have never seen a Hollywood film that showed Iranians as real people who hurt.
‘Film is an empathy machine,’ Roger Ebert was fond of saying. Not necessarily. Films can make us worse. Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) presents a narrative that purports to be an examination of slavery and black suffering, but instead has so much to do with an unbridled revenge fetish, a recurring theme in the director’s work.
Sometimes, we find black poets who can conjure up that suffering without explicitly mentioning instances of historical cruelty. Consider, for example, the serene utterance of Langston Hughes in his well-known poem ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’: ‘I’ve known rivers / Ancient, dusky rivers. / My soul has grown deep like the rivers.’ After naming four rivers connected to black and human history, the poet’s refrain, his ‘I’ve known’ – calm and robust like Oodgeroo’s ‘I know’ – is once again a force of witness against forgetting, and the merging of landscape, memory, and implicit grief, as in Malouf’s ‘mournful country’, shows us that writing has the power to locate grief in the world as well as within the poet’s self.
That is the power of writing, but meditative cinema has related powers. The best two films I have seen that mourn trauma are Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015) Both films use the beauty of the cosmos – stars, water, ocean – to enfold grief in something that can bring healing when touched through narrative. Since they deal with the extermination of indigenous Americans and Chile’s troubled history, they are relevant to Australia. The success of both countries is built on blood and bone beneath our houses and cities.
Federico García Lorca, visiting New York in 1929, was shocked by its ‘extra human architecture, its furious rhythm, its geometry and anguish’. In Poet in New York (1940), alongside poems raging against the economic injustice he saw there (particularly the marginalisation of black communities), we find biblical lamentations like the electrifying, baroque defiance against
animal slaughter in ‘New York: Office and Attack’, which begins unforgettably:
Under the multiplications, a drop of duck’s blood; under the divisions, a drop of a sailor’s blood; under the additions, a river of tender blood.
Lorca’s personal katabasis, his anguished experience of the city, was directed to an examination of the blood lying beneath the city’s image of itself as a symbol of achievement. The lines are high-voltage, but this is grief work. It passionately mourns forgotten and ignored suffering, and pays respect back to the disrespected. At the end of the poem, like Christ in Gethsemane, Lorca offers himself ‘as food for the cows milked empty’. Little wonder that his lament for bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías makes Auden’s elegy for Yeats seem tepid. Consider this passage from therapist Francis Weller on the wildness associated with deep grief: ‘Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture.’
Many Spanish-language poets from the early twentieth century understood the ‘feral’ nature of grief. Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Miguel Hernández: their voices have bite, a ferocious energy that is sorrowful and defiant. In Germany, Georg Trakl wrote from a similar anguish, using startling images instead of a confessional voice. We are nourished by the grief in Hart Crane, George Herbert, Kathleen Raine, Judith Wright, Francis Webb. We need elegists and lamenters and keeners, we need earth-grief, and we need to weep as a family.
Psychic wounds, as Edmund Wilson noted in his study of the Philoctetes myth in The Wound and the Bow (1941), bestow on artists immense creative prowess. Philoctetes is both banished to the edge and sought after by his fellow Greeks. The symbolic meaning of the Sophocles story is that Philoctetes is needed precisely because he knows suffering and anguish. One who is thus enclosed in the solitude of heavy grief but connected to the community, if he were alive today, would dance the Zeimbekiko, a Greek folk dance performed solo, improvised to a slow time signature. The dancer is surrounded by friends. Arms are held out wide, like Christ, like an eagle slowly circling, like Agee’s regal prose giving voice to tribulations. The modern Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos, in a poetic monologue consisting purely of Neoptolemus persuading Philoctetes to return with him to Troy, has Neoptolemus speaking of a full moon seen from a ship that makes all the fighters onboard stare motionless and ‘bewitched, as if already dead and immortal’. Then they begin to yell and make
vulgar gestures ‘perhaps to forget that moment, that understanding, that absence’. As Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it, we have a ‘fear of going down’. Yet turning away from the reality of our fragility and mortality, and leaving sorrow unexpressed, weakens our power to praise. MartÍn Prechtel, a First Nations Canadian man trained in the Tzutujil Maya shamanic tradition, has written exquisitely on grief. He insists that grief is also praise, ‘because it is the natural way love honors what it misses’.
I think of Persian words when I read Margaret Kemarre Turner talking about the word Alwharpe, which means a sadness intertwined with separation from the Land: ‘If you’re sad or something, the Land just urges you, and brings you back and encourages you to go back. Because it’s got a sort of touching.’ In Persian, grief has similar visceral verbal force, with the nouns for sorrow gham or ghosseh needing to take the verb khordan, to eat, in order to form the verbs. So grief is eaten in the Persian context. Reading Turner and others, I think Aboriginal people know that sorrow and suffering sit in the body, in the chest, under the rib cage, in the liver and guts and the quivering torso. Healing comes first from the body, dancing Zeimbekiko: each of us taking the hero’s journey alone, with the communal encouragement. Hence the power of recited poetry, using breath, body, and rhythm to dance with language the grief trapped inside in the cells.
December 1999
After moving from Brisbane to Sydney, I had a dream. Faint, fatigued, dead on my feet, weak as sand and bathed in sweat, I walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and at the other shore I am in Shiraz, under the northern stars in the dry night air. I am atop the flat roof, where mattresses are laid out to sleep. My family are there, under countless numbers of stars studded in the clear white sheet of the sky. Masoud my beloved uncle is there, no shroud or cloth on him. The celestial vault turns around the earth, the air is sweet, and I am light and clean and newborn. g
Darius Sepehri’s essay was placed second in the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize. Darius was born in Iran and moved to Australia at the age of five. He has an abiding passion for Persian culture and poetry. He is a researcher and writer at the University of Sydney in the Department of International and Comparative Literary Studies, where he is completing a doctoral thesis. He has published translations of Hafez and a long essay on the influence of Persian poetry on Judith Wright in Southerly.
The Calibre Essay Prize, created in 2007, is Australia’s premier essay prize. Calibre is funded by Australian Book Review. Here we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of ABR Chair, Mr Colin Golvan QC, and our many ABR Patrons.
Art |
ABR Arts
Michael Halliwell on Brett Dean’s Hamlet
Theatre
Bronwyn Lea
Noises Off (QT and MTC)
Music Morag Fraser
Das Lied von der Erde (MSO)
Art Patrick McCaughey
Giacometti (Tate Modern)
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
Brett Dean (photograph by Richard Hubert Smith)
Das Lied von der Erde
by Morag Fraser
Schubert’s most famous ‘unfinished’ work, the Eighth Symphony, is unconventional in a number of ways, its B minor key and the opening movement’s 3/4 pulse not least of them. Mahler’s grand Lied is a match in strangeness –setting, as it does, a miscellany of ancient, wry Chinese poetry to music that is supremely European, for all its oriental reference, and absolutely of its time – its tonal shifts signalling ‘Twentieth Century’ in music’s equivalent of neon.
So it was an inspired piece of MSO programming to pair the Symphony and the great Lied. In the MSO’s splendid rendering, the Unfinished was an achieved whole, its melodies seamless and sublime, its great chordal progressions disturbing and challenging – as Schubert always is. In its characteristic alternations of profound and playful, sonorous and lyrical, it prepared the audience for the work to come. But it also lingered, like an indelible context.
I am sure most of the audience came to hear the Mahler. But the Schubert, particularly in this performance, with an orchestra in full voice and its strings under exquisite control – their extraordinary, recurring legato skeins of melody a revelation – was superb, and entirely satisfying. Unfinished? Who would ask for more than this integration of the celestial and terrestrial, transcendence and the percussive blood pulse of doom?
Mahler’s title, Das Lied von der Erde, intimates a lyric pastoral, a song cycle in a grand tradition of evoking the natural world, full of longing and lyric pathos. But nothing about this monumental work is predictable, least of all its libretto. There is no herdsman wending his way into a benign landscape to ease you into the music. Instead, a brass fanfare and a tenor at full, strident stretch and wine beckoning in a golden goblet, (Schon winkt der Wein im gold’nen Pokale), but first he will sing you a song! The song of sorrow that shall resound laughingly in your soul. In the German, consonants predominate: Das Lied von Kummer / soll auflachend in die Seele euch klingen.
Stuart Skelton is a fine tenor, equal to the steep ascent of pitch and volume that the song (and insistent orchestration) demands. He is also able to switch gears after the rapid acceleration of the opening bars, and expand into the broad sonority of the song’s refrain: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod (Dark is life, dark is death). The refrain is almost a
relief, despite its sombre assertion. The orchestra pulls back a little from its frantic pace and the clash of sound subsides.
For this first song, Mahler uses the poetry of the eighthcentury Chinese poet Li Tai-Po. Who can understand the subtleties and mood of the poetic original of this and the succeeding five songs (by different poets), given that they are strained through French and then German translations, and Mahler’s own interpolations? What matters is the way in which Mahler has used his selection of these seven very different poems from Hans Bethge’s (1876–1946) collection, Die Chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute). Mahler was too good an artist to be influenced simply by the prevailing fashion for Chinoiserie. The poems must have appealed to his sense of the extreme fluctuations of life and nature; their sentiments become springboards into a model of symphonic invention and vocal virtuosity.
The balance between orchestra and voice seemed sometimes awry. Skelton is a strong and dramatic interpreter, but not even his vocal presence could always prevail. In his two later songs, the interplay between voice and orchestra was more sympathetic, and in his vigorous, embodied reading of the lyrics and music, Skelton did suggest an irony in the original poetry that one hopes is there – if only to temper the emotional anarchy of the songs.
Mahler’s own circumstances at the time – the death of his young daughter, his professional travails in a time of increasing anti-Semitism, and his heart condition – would be quite sufficient to explain an immersion in the darkness, edging towards nihilism, of much of the lyrics and music. But the strangeness, the ambivalence, the momentary visions of beauty in the Chinese lyrics, and Mahler’s embrace of them, come together with darkness to compose a depth and complexity in the work that transcends despair. But conveying that richness, and seaming together the emotional extremes that the songs comprehend, is no easy task, and this performance did not seem to me to always achieve the work’s elusive unity.
Where Skelton’s performance was electric, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, with her beautiful pre-Raphaelite eyes fixed on eternity, was a study in stillness and decorum. Her performance had dignity, grace, and faultless articulation, crucial in these songs, which move so swiftly from one emotional register to another. Her voice is lovely, if not plangent, and grew more penetrating as the work progressed, culminating in a final, profound rendering of the Der Abschied (The Farewell). I think the whole audience sank with her in relief as she sat down for the orchestral interlude between the song’s two parts, before rising again for the exactitudes of the final section and its lingering, heartbreaking ewig (for ever).
Mahler never heard Das Lied von der Erde performed. He died in May 1911, six months before his great friend, Bruno Walter, was able to conduct singers and orchestra for a performance in the Munich Tonhalle, on 20 November 1911. It is difficult to credit that a work of such range and complexity (‘excessively modern’ according to Henry Wood, who nonetheless conducted it in London in 1913) should have been heard only piecemeal by its composer. But
then Beethoven never ‘heard’ his Missa Solemnis. So we are privileged that the MSO’s performance is there to remind us of Mahler’s dramatic finesse and orchestral mastery, his knack for highlighting particular instrumental tonalities even in the great sweep of his orchestral structures. What a conductor he must have been himself!
And a man of what are still our times – fraught, alive to beauty, and too conscious of all that the world brings. Listening to Mahler, I was reminded of the related and resonant artistry of the London-born poet Isaac Rosenberg, who died on the Western Front on April 1918. This is the opening of his great poem, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’:
The darkness crumbles away It is the same old druid Time as ever,
THamlet
by Michael Halliwell
hree ‘new’ operatic versions of Hamlet in two years: the time is certainly not ‘out of joint’ for Shakespeare. Italian composer and conductor Franco Faccio’s Amleto was successfully premièred in Genoa in 1865, but then had a disastrous performance at La Scala in 1871. The opera then completely disappeared for well over a hundred years, until American scholar and conductor Anthony Barrese discovered the crumbling manuscript score in Milan. He created a performing edition, which was premièred in Albuquerque by Opera Southwest in 2014. The opera triumphantly resurfaced in its European homeland in Bregenz, Austria, in 2016.
Verdi famously stated that when adapting Shakespeare, ‘one must take the bull by the horns’. Arrigo Boito’s observed drily that it was like ‘squeezing the juice out of a fruit’. Shakespeare continues to fascinate composers; another Hamlet appeared during the Shakespeare anniversary year of 2016, in Vienna. Young German composer Anno Schreier, with Austrian playwright Thomas Jonigk, premièred their version at the Theater an der Wien. It is an intense and taut contemporary family drama. English-language Shakespeare adaptions have always proven problematic, and there are few in the repertory. Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1958) is frequently performed and highly regarded, while Thomas Adés’s The Tempest (2004) has enjoyed several productions. Now a new English-language Shakespeare opera seems set to take its place in the operatic repertoire. Brett Dean is recognised as one of the foremost contemporary classical composers. His first opera, Bliss (2010), based on Peter Carey’s novel, enjoyed a level of success unprecedented for contemporary Australian opera, with performances in
Only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer sardonic rat, As I pull the parapet’s poppy To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
There is an ideal world in which Gustav Mahler will set the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg, and Franz Schubert will smile. g
Das Lied von der Erde and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony (Melbourne Symphony Orchesra) was performed on 29 and 30 June and 1 July, 2017. Performance attended: 29 June. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.
Morag Fraser is a former chair of Australian Book Review.
Sydney, Melbourne, and Edinburgh, and a second production in Hamburg, conducted by Simone Young.
Commissioned by Glyndebourne Opera, Dean was hesitant about tackling such a monumental work – there are over forty operatic versions, few surviving – but soon decided, much in the way that Verdi and Boito approached Shakespeare, that one must be uninhibited and even ruthless in the use of the original material. Dean and Canadian librettist Matthew Jocelyn examined the three versions of the play that form the basis of the text – any performance of the play is necessarily an adaptation, as there is no one canonical version – and used some of the First, or ‘bad’ Quarto, thought to be the imperfect recollections of an actor who played Marcellus in Shakespeare’s time; a version which provides a quirky yet poetic variation on the standard Second Quarto and First Folio versions. An early decision was to use only Shakespeare’s text, apart from a few small additions for the chorus. This is in stark contrast to Adés’s strategy in The Tempest, where the original text is filtered and refracted through a contemporary demotic. Jocelyn, however, frequently reassigns text from one character to another, or to different places in the unfolding events.
Dean has made innovative use of the particular theatre spaces at Glyndebourne, including having part of the chorus sing from the orchestra pit and the auditorium, while the orchestral forces are divided into different sections, with two groups playing in spaces under the theatre ceiling. The orchestral writing uses a range of different tunings for the instruments as well as calling for unusual playing techniques. There is also the incorporation of an accordionist, the virtuoso Scottish musician James Crabb, who is part of the group of players in the play-within-the-play. Dean again employs electronic elements. From the rumbling and indeterminate brass opening of the opera to the plangent solo cello at the end – ‘Good-night sweet prince’ – Dean’s orchestral sound world is dazzling: his music is often darkly intense and beautiful. It would be hard to name a contemporary opera composer his equal.
Shakespearean scholar Gary Schmidgall notes that ‘no
sensible producer decides to cook up a Hamlet without first catching his prince’. As is the case with most operatic versions, the title role is taken by a tenor, in this case the versatile and expressive British singer Allan Clayton, who has established a strong reputation as one of the best young singers of his generation. The role is immense: he is on stage virtually the whole opera, and his is an impressively sustained physical as well as vocal performance. A bear-like, dishevelled, and shambling figure, he is lithe and athletic at the same time; a persona in stark contrast to the pale and gaunt Hamlet figures of popular imagination, but it works superbly. He is a disturbing presence from the start, while his mercurial changes of mood and emotion are captured in spiky, febrile music, which often dissolves into snatches of lyricism. His voice has beauty when necessary, but power and projection throughout, including a considerable amount of Sprechgesang
Opposite him is Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, one of the most versatile and highly regarded singers in contemporary opera, also with a burgeoning conducting career. The role of Ophelia, in the various versions of the play, has little more than 150 lines; Hamlet has more than ten times this amount. However, all the operatic versions understandably expand this role to provide a strong vocal and dramatic foil to the prince. Hannigan has an almost balletic physical presence, and Dean demands equivalent vocal acrobatics from her, although not to the same extreme voice-breaking extent as Adés’s Ariel. Most operatic versions have Ophelia’s madness as a musical high point, and Dean does not disappoint. Drawing on operatic tradition which demands coloratura pyrotechnics, Hannigan triumphantly negotiates these challenges while performing extreme physical manoeuvres. She fully matches Clayton dramatically and musically.
Gertrude and Claudius are the renowned singers Sarah Connolly and Rod Gilfry; they provide powerful physical and vocal presences throughout the drama. Connolly’s despairing shuffle off the stage at the end of Act One is heartbreaking, while her soliloquy, on the death of Ophelia, in duet with Ophelia’s distant voice, is poignant and beautifully sung. The great British bass John Tomlinson
intones suitable sepulchral tones as the Ghost, and contributes wonderfully comic turns as the first player and gravedigger. Kim Begley is an effectively pedantic yet moving Polonius.
As is the case with all Glyndebourne operas, the smaller roles are uniformly strongly cast, with a broad cross-section of rising and already established young talent. Laertes (David Butt Philip) and Horatio (Jacques Imbrailo) are both outstanding dramatically and vocally. Accordionist James Crabb might have an operatic career ahead of him. Dean’s decision to use this non-operatic instrument in the play-within-the-play scene is a masterstroke. It is such an unexpected sonority, and Crabb’s virtuosic playing underpins the broad comedy as each player quotes their own favourite line from the play, culminating in Tomlinson’s cavernous ‘To be, or not to be …’, which then results in a dispute about the correct wording – a little Shakespearean in-joke regarding the First Quarto, followed by a snatch of Latin plainchant. It all brought the house down.
Vladimir Jurowski, chief conductor of the London Philharmonic, returns to the pit after having relinquished his post as Glyndebourne music director in 2013. He directs the wide array of musical forces with a firm yet supple hand and expertly creates Dean’s kaleidoscopic sound world with memorable playing of this complex and challenging score from the London Philharmonic. The layout and virtuosity of the orchestral forces adds sometimes eerie and estranging effects, seemingly without an identifiable source. The chorus is outstanding, providing a vocal soundtrack that weaves virtually throughout the opera and a spine-chilling wall of sound when necessary, as well as being a commanding and vivid physical presence.
There is an all-Australian team overseeing the production. Neil Armfield directs – as he did with Bliss – while the set is by Ralph Myers, costumes by Alice Babidge, and lighting by Jon Clark. Armfield’s production is fluid and physical; the final extended duel scene is visceral and confronting, but the character direction is nuanced and subtle and the relationships clear and effective. Myers’s settings exploit the stage fully and provide flexibility in playing spaces, supplemented by Clark’s subtle lighting. Babidge’s costumes range from ‘period’ to contemporary, strongly adding to the visual characterisation of the production.
As with all new operas, it is almost impossible to say at this stage whether Brett Dean’s Hamlet will have ‘legs’. The rapturous reception from an informed audience at the première suggests that it might. Let’s hope that before too long that will be an Australian reaction as well. Hamlet is an important and significant addition to contemporary opera. g
Hamlet will continue its tour across England until 1 December 2017. Performance attended: 11 June 2017. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.
Michael Halliwell has sung over fifty major operatic roles and teaches at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
The cast of Hamlet (photograph by Richard Hubert Smith)
Publisher of the Month with Louise Adler
What was your pathway to publishing?
As an English and Comparative Literature graduate whose childhood had been circumscribed by chronic asthma and excessive reading of Enid Blyton stories of naughty school girls, I was ill equipped for any other form of employment. Lucky breaks, for which I will be forever grateful, were provided by Mark Rubbo, who appointed me editor of this fine magazine, and a year later Sandy Grant believed I might make a good publisher for Reed Books.
What was the first book you published?
It was exciting to publish Brian Toohey’s Oyster (1989), Sanctuary (1989) by Mark Aarons, and Stephen Thomas Knight’s The Selling of the Australian Mind (1990).
Do you edit the books you commission?
I’m usually involved in the early stages – agreeing the structure and voice and determining the audience. The fine surgical work with a scalpel is done by far better editors.
How many titles do you publish each year?
Forty-five to sixty new titles.
What qualities do you look for in an author?
My spirits are lifted by the discovery of a writer who has courage, who is passionate about an idea that adds to public debate rather than rehearses well-worn themes, who is willing to think hard about audience, and who is able to promote their book.
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
It is always a thrill to match a writer and an idea. It might sound simple, but my greatest pleasure is discovering that a writer you hoped would deliver actually does. We recently published Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell. I had watched the investigative reporting by Louise Milligan for ABC’s 7.30 and was impressed by her meticulous work regarding a deeply disturbing issue. To see that integrity brought to the book project was inspiring. Challenges? Managing authors’ expectations about the market is never easy: most non-book business people are flabbergasted by the facts and figures. Equally challenging is managing the author’s disappointment (and our own) when a book we fervently believed in doesn’t find the readers we believed it deserved.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
Writing the occasional review is a personal indulgence. I like the reading, the immersion in a text and shaping a response. Perhaps it is a throwback to my student days in a variety of English and Comparative Literature departments.
Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?
I am a big fan of Sarah Beshtel, a quintessential New York editor who publishes my kind of books. I do have particular respect for those disrupters and outsiders who work without the safety net provided by being part of an international publishing business. However there are terrific publishers in all Australian publishing companies, particularly those who are members of the Australian Publishing Association, so I won’t single out any one Australian publisher.
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
I am not sure that is correct. We have seen that individuality often prevails to rise above the dross and the rip-offs. The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) should serve as a morality tale for all of us: authored by a British ceramicist, concerning Japanese netsuke and a Jewish family caught in the crosscurrents of twentieth century history. No one in publishing today predicted that book would become a bestseller.
On publication, which is more gratifying –a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?
All of the above. We have had brilliant launches. We will never forget the bravura and riveting fifty-eight minute performance by Paul Keating to launch Gareth Evans’s Cabinet diaries. Good reviews vindicate our judgement, although these days they have little impact on book sales. Rapid book sales are terrific, but extended book sales are even better.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?
Sadly, I don’t think it is possible to say that good books inevitably find their readers. More and more work, particularly by the author, is required to make a book a success. Cautious optimism is probably necessary in thinking about the future. Fortunately for the literary culture and the community of readers, writers continue to feel compelled to write and their publishers continue to be a weird species of inveterate enthusiasts.
Louise Adler is the Chief Executive of Melbourne University Publishing and the President of the Australian Publishing Association.
Giacometti
by Patrick McCaughey
Tate Modern has excelled itself with its Giacometti retrospective. It is not easy to take a familiar modern master and return a new and compelling view of his work. Many years ago, MoMA in New York failed the challenge abysmally. They had nothing new to say about the artist and went through the motions of a retrospective. Worst of all: you came away thinking that Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) was tired and obvious. How wrong could you be?
Tate Modern worked closely with the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti with its cradle-to-grave collection of the master’s work, plus the rich archive of documents. During his lifetime, Giacometti formed a strong personal bond with the Tate. In 1965, after an earlier retrospective, he wrote to Norman Reid, the director: ‘May I tell you how much I enjoyed my visits to London and how touched I was by your kind welcome … also how touched and grateful I am that you have chosen so many works for the Tate Gallery.’ Fiftyone years after Giacometti’s death, the bond between museum and artist still holds. Tate Modern’s account is intimate and revealing, where MoMA’s was starchily institutional.
The early work, less familiar, less canonical, forms a long entrance passage. You are from the start aware of Giacometti’s hand kneading and incising his materiel. He roams freely through a variety of styles, from Bourdelle’s classicising realism to a lively encounter with Cubism to the first Surrealist plasters and bronzes. Giacometti was quick to grasp Miró’s importance and was the first to translate his graphic style into sculpture. The Couple (1927) astonishes still with its deft combination of primitive markings and modern form. By the early 1930s, Giacometti was established as the leading sculptor of Surrealism, with such resonant pieces as the open form but claustrophobic Cage (1931), which influenced so many artists from Noguchi to Francis Bacon. Giacometti embraced André Breton’s dictum that ‘beauty should be convulsive’. Violence and sexuality charge Giacometti’s Surrealist objects from the bronze Woman with her Throat Cut to the nasty and menacing Disagreeable Objects, giant dildos with studs at their tips. Breton excommunicated Giacometti from the Surrealist group when he returned to using models. The artists ignored their pompous pope and Giacometti exhibited regularly with his fellow Surrealists. The big rupture came with the German invasion of Paris in 1940. A Swiss national, Giacometti retreated to Geneva and into himself, making small, even tiny figures and heads, sensitively installed at Tate Modern.
Giacometti returned to Paris in 1945. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir befriended him. The former wrote an influential essay on the artist, The Search for the Absolute, in which he made the penetrating observation that Giacometti’s elongated figures are conceived and created as though seen from a distance. The sculptures retain that distance from each other and the viewer, a condition of perpetual estrangement. That quality in the postwar years led to the characterisation of Giacometti’s work as ‘existentialist’. Now Giacometti’s postwar sculpture and painting remind us more of Samuel Beckett and the bleak landscape his figures inhabit. Beckett and Giacometti became close friends before the war. Their one attempted collaboration – Giacometti’s design for the tree at which Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot – was a disaster. They pulled it apart together in Giacometti’s studio.
The coup de théâtre of the exhibition was the reclamation of the important group sculpture Femmes de Venise. The six figures in plaster were the principal exhibition in the French Pavilion in the 1956 Venice Biennale. Later figures were added to the group; some were cast in bronze and are now widely dispersed. But the original plasters have not been shown in fifty years. Tate Modern found them, conserved and restored them. Naked rather than nude, stripped down to bone and breast, heads and legs, they were both the centre and the climax of the retrospective. Jean Genet summed them up:
… all of them are different, so that my hand travels through a highly varied, living landscape … Seen in profile, the oscillation from woman and goddess is perhaps the most disturbing thing about them. Sometimes the emotion is unbearable … I cannot stop myself coming back to these gilded – and sometimes painted – sentinels who, upright, immobile, are keeping watch.
A day or so before I saw the Giacometti exhibition, I had been in Tate Britain. The tomb-like rooms given to those huge dumps and clunks of bronze bearing Henry Moore’s signature looked grandiose and oppressive in comparison with Giacometti’s spare, puzzling Pointing Man or Walking Man. Those sculptures still ask the viewer the existential question: who am I? what am I?
A pleasantly dotty catalogue accompanies the show. In an age which believes in the multi-authored catalogue, Giacometti outdoes everybody with forty-one contributors. They compile an almanac, an A–Z of topics and persons with a bearing on Giacometti’s career. There are some oddities and omissions. Sartre and Beauvoir get an entry, but Beckett does not. Cézanne gets a common and garden entry, but not Miró. Nonetheless, it makes for easier and livelier reading than the majority of contemporary catalogues straining for originality and effect. g
Giacometti continues at Tate Modern, London until 10 September. The exhibition catalogue Giacometti is edited by Lena Fritsch and Frances Morris (Tate Publishing, £19.99, 304 pp, 9781849764605).
Patrick McCaughey is a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut, and the Yale Center for British Art.
A Quiet Passion
by Anwen Crawford
An account of the life of Emily Dickinson (1830–86) can, like that of a saint, be reduced to its elements of spiritual and physical suffering. She was acutely sensitive, frequently ill, and when she died she left behind thousands of unpublished poems. It would be easy to portray her as a heavenly creature, temporarily descended upon nineteenth-century Amherst, Massachusetts from an empyreal realm. Immortality, after all, was one of her major poetic themes. A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies’ new film about Dickinson’s life, doesn’t stint on her struggles, but it does give us a woman who was also clever, passionate, and stubborn.
The film’s short prelude sketches the Dickinson siblings in their adolescence. Emily, her sister, Lavinia, and her brother, Austin, are educated, exuberant, and ready to match wits with their elders. In one scene they banter over tea with a disapproving aunt; for a moment it seems that the film will be, of all things, a comedy of manners. But while the siblings’ verbal sparring carries on into adulthood, their high spirits do not. In another, nighttime parlour room scene, the camera revolves slowly around the room to reveal, at the end, the young Emily in tears. It is as if the walls are closing in upon her.
In her performance as the adult Emily, Cynthia Nixon is vivid; she shows us how a young woman’s joys have dwindled, over time, to a brittle and even embittered sense of self. Her life’s possibilities, both material and emotional, are constricted, even more so because she refuses to countenance marriage. She has little choice but to remain with her parents, helping to keep house. Dickinson’s father, Edward (Keith Carradine), a respected lawyer, is stern, though he does allow his daughter the crucial liberty of rising before dawn to write. Her mother, also Emily (Joanna Bacon), is kind-hearted but feeble. ‘My life has passed as if in a dream, as if I had never been part of it,’ she tells her daughter. One has the sense that the younger Emily is determined, at least on the page, to make her presence more felt.
A Quiet Passion, like most films about writers, sticks to the life that can be dramatised, rather than the writing process, which can’t. Nixon does read several of Dickin-
son’s poems in voiceover, and she interprets them well –her readings, like her onscreen performance, capture the blend of slyness and seriousness that went into Dickinson’s poetic voice. But the pairing of words and images is, at times, too literal, and has the effect of making Dickinson’s writing seem like a commentary upon her life, which both is and isn’t true. There is something genuinely weird in Dickinson’s poetry, a riddling mystic spirit that eludes explanation. The profusion of her imagination, when set against her reclusive habits, is one reason why she continues to fascinate.
As a director, Davies is familiar with both the wounds and enchantments of family life. His earliest films, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), drew upon his childhood memories of Liverpool, England. With those films he established a cinematic style that was based upon the visual elegance of the fixed frame, juxtaposed with drifting, dreamy sound collages of spoken dialogue, inner monologue, and song. A Quiet Passion is a more conventionally made film, which is disappointing in so far as I might have expected Davies, of all contemporary filmmakers, to show a more intuitive, expansive feel for the cinematic possibilities of Dickinson’s poetry.
The script, also written by Davies, is strongest when it focuses upon Dickinson and her relationship with Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle). Though also unmarried, Lavinia was nevertheless the more socially capable of the sisters, and as we watch Emily gradually withdraw from society, we also see how Lavinia, in Ehle’s intelligent characterisation, handles her with a mixture of patience and frank concern. Lavinia sees how Emily’s self-restraint is also a kind of self-indulgence, a refusal to assume the common burden of joining in with the world.
Nevertheless, without that refusal it is doubtful that we would have Dickinson’s poetry; her vocation was solitude as well as literature. In real life, Lavinia provided Emily, especially after the latter’s death, with a crucial conduit to the public, because she strove to have her sister’s poems posthumously published. During her lifetime Dickinson had also had other readers and champions of her work, including her brother’s wife, Susan Gilbert, and his mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd. This complicated and intimate tangle is rather simplified in the film: Susan is reduced to a bit part, while there is no indication that Mabel and Emily were correspondents. But still, this is Davies’ interpretation of Dickinson’s life, and within the parameters that he has set, the conflict works. Emily, in her anger at her brother’s infidelity, draws attention to the double standards that applied to men and women of her time. The quiet passion of the film’s title is, in part, her refusal to submit to such hypocrisies. Within the confines of her bedroom she found a liberty of soul that could not have existed outside of it. g
A Quiet Passion (Palace Films), 125 minutes, is written and directed by Terence Davies.
Anwen Crawford is the music critic for The Monthly.
Cloud Nine
by Ian Dickson
Clive, a splendid chappie, has taken up the white man’s burden in darkest Africa and is attempting to bring some British order to the lesser breeds without the law, even though the ungrateful blighters are getting a bit restless. He’s accompanied by that jolly good stick of a wife of his, Betty; their little nippers, Edward and Victoria; his mother-in-law, Maud, a bit of a dragon, if you ask me, but a good person to have in a tight corner; and the children’s governess, a tasty bit of crumpet called Ellen. But hold on a minute, folks. On closer inspection there appears to be something decidedly rum about the whole affair. If Betty is a good stick, she seems to be a very long one with rather large hands and feet, while their servant, Joshua, is decidedly pale for a native and carries on like a sinister Jeeves, and one might call Edward a bit of a nancy boy except for the fact that he is actually a she. Yes, Caryl Churchill’s fantasia on gender, race, sexuality, and power, Cloud Nine, has returned to the Australian stage.
Written in collaboration with the Joint Stock Company and first performed in 1979, Churchill’s play explores, in her words, ‘the parallel between colonial and sexual oppression’.
So the first act is set in a British colony in Africa in the nineteenth century where a colonial administrator, his family, and a couple of blow-ins celebrate, in a manner of speaking, Christmas and a rather sudden wedding. In the second act, Churchill moves the play forward to present-day London and presents us with several of the characters from the first act who have ignored the ravages of time and aged only twentyfive years. In this way, she is able to explore not merely how attitudes to sexuality and the patriarchal structure have changed over the years, but also how much of the old ways of thinking remain, how difficult it is to break free from them and, once one has, what does one put in their place.
Forty years on, one would think that the play might have lost its relevance, and indeed there is now a much greater understanding of the amorphous nature of sexuality which, in the first act, breaks through Victorian repression to hilarious effect and which the characters are beginning openly to explore in the second. But the optimism of the late 1970s
withered under the ravages of AIDS and the resurgence of conservative values in the 1980s. In a recent interview in the The New York Times, Noam Chomsky, discussing the American election, talks about ‘the factors of white supremacy – deeply rooted in the United States – racism and sexism’, attitudes that are by no means unique to that country.
Following on from his excellent production of Love and Information (2015), it is clear that Kip Williams has an affinity for Caryl Churchill’s work. On a stage empty except for a glass box into which the women are occasionally confined, he conjures up a hilarious first act. The performance style is as farcically broad as it is possible to be, but Williams and his magnificent cast still manage to put across moments of genuine anguish as they struggle to repress their natural, or what then would have been called unnatural, urges and conform to the dictates of Victorian morality. The two actors who have the most opportunity to perform this double act are the two who are cross gender cast. Harry Greenwood, all flailing arms and flouncing skirts, comes over as a combination of a pantomime dame and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter mode. He makes Betty’s attempts to be the perfect wifely little woman while struggling with her desire for the explorer Harry hilarious but also strangely touching. Heather Mitchell’s Edward, bewildered by emotions and sexual urges that don’t conform to the masculine ideal, also finds poignancy amidst the humour. But all the others have their moments, especially Josh McConville, whose Clive, the one character who perfectly fits into the society in which he finds himself, is baffled by the chaos which surrounds him. Interestingly, Williams makes a slight but important change to the ending of the first act.
It must be admitted that the second act is less successful than the first and in many ways more difficult to bring off. After the manic energy and anarchic humour of the first act, the second can seem a bit mundane, and the myriad plays of the last decades that have covered the efforts of Western urbanites to make meaningful lives for themselves have lessened its effectiveness. But Williams and his cast still manage to keep our interest. Here, Anita Hegh as an adult Victoria, Kate Box as her lover Lin, and Matthew Backer as Edward’s lover Gerry come into their own. Fine though McConville is as Cathy, to this reviewer Churchill’s decision to cast a man as a little girl is a miscalculation which undercuts rather than accentuates the points she is trying to make. But it is Heather Mitchell’s elderly Betty, finally taking charge of her life and discovering fulfilment of sorts, whose journey is most exhilarating and William’s staging of the play’s final moments bring Cloud Nine to an affecting and effective conclusion. Now please, can we have Caryl Churchill’s massive and magnificent Light Shining in Buckinghamshire? g
Cloud Nine (Sydney Theatre Company), written by Caryl Churchill and directed by Kip Williams, continues at Wharf Theatre 1 until 12 August 2017. Performance attended: 6 July.
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
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His own Bible, written to purge K.C. Smith’s mind, Sacred Kingdom acts as a release and burden of knowledge, where a silver lining is unveiled. Sacred thoughts flowed onto the paper; therapy to rid his mind of the past. This book compiles recollections of his passage through hell where he faced a challenge advancing with a major mental disease. Publicly crucified, the scene everyday life led him through this marathon; so readers join his journey into the unknown by a sixth sense; instinct and culminating in life after death. This is his own path to the Holy Grail.
Noises Off
by Bronwyn Lea
If you’ve done your homework and think the answer to the ‘ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything’ is 42, you’d be wrong. You’ve read the wrong book The actual meaning of life is not to be found in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but in Michael Frayn’s farcical masterpiece, Noises Off Sardines. The answer is always sardines.
Or so thinks Lloyd Dallas (Simon Burke), the Cambridge-educated director, reduced to intellectual rubble and close to a coronary thanks to his efforts to coax a middle-aged, scatterbrained actress – named Dotty no less – to remember her props and exits. ‘Doors and sardines,’ Lloyd explains, airing his exasperation. ‘Getting on – getting off. Getting the sardines on – getting sardines off. That’s farce. That’s theatre. That’s life.’
An award-winning novelist and playwright, Michael Frayn’s credits include Copenhagen (1998) and Democracy (2003), as well as several screenplays (notably Clockwise [1986], starring John Cleese). He has been rewriting Noises Off ever since it premièred at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1982, tirelessly honing the meta-farce into the work of structural perfection that opened to an almost full house at QPAC’s Playhouse. Noises Off, a play within a play, follows Dallas and the second-tier cast of Nothing On across three devolving performances. In the first act, the actors flounder through a late-night dress rehearsal of a British sex farce housed in a country manor. In the second, one month later, the set spins to expose the backstage antics of the actors, who, when not sharing a bed, are at one another’s throats. In Act Three, toward the end of the company’s tour, the set returns to front stage and we watch the now barely decipherable play as if we were the audience at the Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees.
Designer Richard Roberts’s set evokes the 1970s, with the manor’s fifty shades of drab décor, and the rotary telephone in the living room, whose line and coiled cord affords the actors shameless opportunities
for entanglement gags. Crucially, he has placed all the doors in the right places, as necessitated by the play’s fiendishly precise choreography of door slamming.
If the technology is now obsolete, so too are the play’s gender politics, though perhaps not quite as much as we might hope. The obligatory ‘bombshell’, Brooke Ashton – we can hardly blame farce when it meets its brief and trades in stock characters – is played superbly by Libby Munro, who could easily be a body double for the new Wonder Woman’s Gal Gadot. Treading the boards in little more than a white bra and suspender belt, she proves that, while the play’s representation of women might be several decades in arrears, the idealised female figure has firmed up considerably since the 1970s.
In the spirit of gender equality, there are multiple trouser falls – what would a bedroom farce be without at least one? – from Hugh Parker, who earns the bulk of the laughs as Freddie Fellowes. But it is Louise Siversen – one of the few actors who manages to keep her gear on throughout all three acts – who steals the show as Dotty Otley playing Mrs Clackett, with her hilarious shape-shifting and splendid comic timing.
Director Sam Strong sees Noises Off as the ‘funny cousin’ to Lord of the Flies (1954). William Golding’s masterpiece, he says, reveals how the wrong environment can draw humanity’s dark side to the surface. Instead of an island, Frayn offers the theatre as a petri dish in which to examine human behaviour: illicit affairs and petty jealousies emerge, followed by gross acts of sabotage and magnificent emotional meltdowns.
The actor in this view is a metaphor for the human desire to present an acceptable face to the world. We construct our lives as if on a theatre set, curating our speech and behaviours front-stage for our audience, while corralling all our excesses, inconsistencies, and defects backstage. When reality intrudes on the pretence, pandemonium – and sometimes hilarity – ensues.
Given a purist reading, Noises Off is an elaborate set of physical jokes strung together for our communal entertainment. ‘In the theatre the audience is released by the laughter of the people around them,’ Frayn says, to contrast the experience of live theatre with the solitary act of reading. With a novel there is no corporate reaction, no contagion. Slapstick theatre makes for belly laughs, yet it can be difficult to discern the performative laugh from the genuine.
At intermission, I watched one audience member thumb through realestate.com on his phone, while another trawled David Jones’s midseason sale. Perhaps the answer to the ultimate question of life is not sardines after all. g
Noises Off (Queensland Theatre and Melbourne Theatre Company), written by Michael Frayn and directed by Sam Strong, continues at the Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse until 12 August 2017. Performance attended: 8 June.
Bronwyn Lea is a Brisbane-based poet and writer.
The Sound of Falling Stars
by Ben Brooker
It has been almost forty years since Robyn Archer created A Star is Torn, her one-woman cabaret honouring the too-short lives of female singers from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin. Now she has written and directed The Sound of Falling Stars, a sort of male companion piece starring fellow Adelaidean Cameron Goodall, who was born the same year A Star is Torn premièred at the Universal Theatre in Fitzroy.
Backed by George Butrumlis on accordion and Enio Pozzebon on keyboard, Goodall – who also accompanies himself on various acoustic and electric guitars – embodies thirty-one singers in the course of the show’s seventy minutes. It is a much more generous selection of subjects than Archer’s – about three times as many. But then, four decades have passed since, the death toll has risen, and men are supposedly bigger risk takers than women. In any case, the emphasis is the same: those who died young, and mostly troubled souls who exemplify that signature paradigm of rock and roll, here making its way into the mouth of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain by way of his 1994 suicide note: ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away.’
The presentation of stars is more or less chronological, though the show opens, and occasionally returns to, the figure of Sid Vicious, here a sort of nihilistic chorus. The Sex Pistols bass player and vocalist died of an overdose at the age of twenty-one in 1979 after having stabbed Nancy Spungen to death the previous year. ‘Love is for people preparing to die,’ Goodall sneers in his best cockney. Later, he will peel open his crisp white shirt and scrawl the circle-A anarchist symbol on his singlet with a marker pen.
Vicious’s mother, we are told, gave Sid the drugs that killed him, one of the show’s many indications that Archer is fascinated by the relationship these musicians had with their parents. Jim Morrison, The Doors frontman, dead at twenty-seven, had a military man for a father. Jeff Buckley ‘hardly knew his dad at all’. Marvin Gaye’s murdered him. When we get to John Lennon, it’s not ‘Imagine’ we hear but ‘Mother’ – ‘Mama don’t go, daddy come home’. Not that it’s all bad. Elsewhere, we learn that Nick Drake’s mother, a poet, sang to him at night. It is not hard to hear her lyrical sensibility in Drake’s songwriting or delicate, plaintive
timbre. The vexed correlation between mental anguish and creativity forms another thread through many of these stories. Depression and anomie abound. ‘I’d like to be without the pain,’ says Cobain, ‘but maybe without it I wouldn’t be able to write my songs.’
Cobain’s close-mouthed Seattle drawl, as well as Drake’s ‘creamy English charm’ (to borrow Evelyn Waugh’s phrase), are superbly rendered by Goodall. His range and versatility, spoken and sung, often astonishes. (Only Sam Cooke is really beyond him, but Cooke defeats everyone.) It is, after all, a long line between Elvis and Cobain, between the tragic accidents that claimed the lives of so many of the early rock and rollers – Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper in the one plane crash – and the tortured interiority of Ian Curtis and Elliott Smith, all of whom are touched on here.
Impressive too is Goodall’s economy of expression. Both Morrison and INXS frontman Michael Hutchence are conjured with little more than a flick of hair and a casually dialledup sensuality. Goodall has insisted in interviews that these are not impersonations; more accurately, they are sketches, hung on recognisable characteristics – Holly’s hiccupping vocal style, Lennon’s sneer – that, while sometimes hewing close to stereotype, are persuasive and often affecting.
Goodall is well served by the songs’ canny arrangements, each realised with skill and fitly rock-and-roll gusto by Butrumlis and Pozzebon. Geoff Cobham’s lighting is evocative, although Tony Harding’s set is not altogether pleasing. The worn armchair and stage door, flanked respectively by bottles of whisky and vodka, are fair enough. but the rationale for a backdrop of construction site-style fencing is hard to guess at.
Archer’s astute script and direction, shot through with a very Australian humour that often undercuts rather than endorses the mythology of the romantically doomed musician, encourages us to see the connections between these falling stars. Cobain and wife Courtney Love, we are told, used to check into hotels under the names Sid and Nancy. Jeff Buckley – who drowned in an accident in 1997 with no drugs or alcohol in his system, and whose musician father died from an overdose at the age of twenty-eight – wonders at the seeming fatalism of it all.
The final word is Cobain’s. ‘Entertain us,’ Goodall sings over and over again, the familiar, anguished refrain from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (1991), as the names and dates of the show’s stars are projected onto the back of the stage. It strikes an intriguing final note – neither celebratory nor elegiac in the vein of the rest of the show, but simply exhausted. There is a sense in which the audience is made to feel complicit in these tragic stories through its insatiable desire to be entertained at any cost.
The Sound of Falling Stars is a worthy successor to A Star is Torn. It deserves as long and illustrious a life. g
The Sound of Falling Stars, written and directed by Robyn Archer, was performed at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival from 21 to 22 June 2017. Performance attended: 21 June. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.
Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, and playwright.
Why do you write?
Open Page with Gregory Day OPEN PAGE
Because I get enjoyment out of it, and so do other people.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Could be. I’m still waiting for the dancing brolgas in my novel The Grand Hotel (2010) to materialise on the riverflat near my house.
Where are you happiest?
There’s an unmarked bush track near home that we privately call ‘The Poulenc’, after the composer of Trois Mouvements Perpétuels. I can be as pretentious as I like out there.
What is your favourite film?
I gave up films years ago.
And your favourite book? Are you kidding?
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
I’d like to sup on abalone, glasswort, and boobialla currants with some Wadawurrung locals sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century. They could tell me a few things I desperately want to know.
Which word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see back in public usage. Just one disliked word? Let’s start with ‘cheers’, ‘weird’, ‘like’, and ‘stuff’. And if I hear someone say ‘extraordinary’ again I think I may never come back from ‘The Poulenc’. Otherwise I’d recommend reanimating your local landscape by getting to know your local Aboriginal language. The kids at our local primary school are doing it, and it sure beats Harry Potter.
Who is your favourite author?
An amalgam of Herman Melville and Joseph Furphy would be something. Speaking of which, my dream social occasion involves an interlineal reading of Moby-Dick and Such Is Life. The Bullock/Whale Reading Group. Any takers?
And your favourite literary hero and heroine? Bartlebooth from Georges Perec’s Life: A user’s manual (1978) is a tragic yet meticulous wonder. The thought of him and his manservant wandering around Geelong in
the early 1950s is positively iridescent. Also, Theodora Goodman from Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story (1948) remains one of fiction’s deepest companions.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Eutrepelia. The golden mean between boorishness and frivolity.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
The French Algerian Albert Camus was my first literary idol as a teenager. That’s apt in a brutal yet beautiful colony such as ours, and he only seems more important with each passing year.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Looking at the bestseller lists it seems Australia’s reading tastes – barefoot investors who wear shoes – might be a problem.
How do you regard publishers?
I think the best publishers are often writers themselves. Italo Calvino and Roberto Calasso come to mind. And in Australia, Hilary McPhee, Michael Heyward, and my current editor at large, Geordie Williamson.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
I love long-form, heuristic, creative criticism. Susan Howe is a must.
And writers’ festivals?
Outdoors is best. Mind you, finding yourself on a minibus full of other writers is always an infantilising experience.
Are artists valued in our society?
It sure seems like it. Probably too much. Enough habitual whingeing.
What are you working on now?
A sand archive.
Gregory Day is a winner of the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. His forthcoming novel A Sand Archive will be published by Picador in 2018. He lives in south-west Victoria.
