Australian Book Review, August 2020, no. 423 by Australian Book Review

Victorian vicissitudes

Advances

The state of Victoria, as we all know, is currently doing it tough, with a marked increase in the number of active coronavirus cases. As we go to press, the outlook is gloomy. We all hope that daily counts will decline soon and that before too long all Australians will be able to enjoy the sort of freedom, movement, and confidence now enjoyed in other states. Meanwhile, the arts sector is grateful to the Victorian government for its sustained contribution to the creative industries, which have been devastated since March. Even at this disastrous time, when budgets everywhere are threatened, Creative Victoria continues to bolster artistic endeavour in myriad ways. Recently, Australian Book Review received $39,000 to help pay Victorian writers over the next twelve months. We couldn’t be more appreciative.

This year’s crop of stories were suitably diverse in both technique and content. The increasingly international profile of the prize meant that this diversity extended also to sense of place, narrative timbre, and even dialect. The dramatic year we are having as a species was also evident in stories that dealt with the pandemic scenario, but, as in any era, the very best of the crop transcended any single issue to dramatise the timeless heart of the human experience. Here are the judges’ comments on the three feature stories.

Skilfully composed and deeply felt, ‘Hieroglyph’ is a remarkable and entrancing feat of symmetry and style. It’s a rare thrill to encounter a story whose innovative form so seamlessly and sensitively reflects the emotional and elemental terrain of the lives held within. ‘Egg Timer’ is a refreshingly entertaining short story full of acerbic wit and linguistic nerve. Its highly contemporary vernacular prods at the seams of analogue and digital life while proCopyright and commentary viding a rendition of a community in the ‘new quotidian’ mode Over the past fifteen years, the Copyright Agency’s Cultural of the pandemic. The story Fund has been a consistent has many dazzling comic supporter of this magazine’s moments and a playful verve determination to broaden its for the creative potential of influence and to diversify its everyday speech. The story publishing. The Calibre Essay is also a timeless and rather Prize, ABR Arts, and States touching character study, a of Poetry would not have portrait of a child’s universe, been possible without seeding told by a narrator looking grants from the Cultural Fund. The 2020 Jolley Prize shortlist (L-R): C.J. Garrow (for ‘Egg Timer’), back on a Now equally As the pandemic worsens Mykaela Saunders (for ‘River Story’), and Simone Hollander (for ‘Hieroglyph’) divided by twentyand the world contends with first-century anxieties as by immense challenges – climate the old xenophobias hovering around the backyard fence. change, inequality, illiberalism and populism, and the enduring ‘River Story’ evokes Alexis Wright in its embodiment of the horrors of racism and slavery – commentary becomes more experimental and allegorical lyrical. The story illustrates the strong significant in ABR. To complement recent articles on Covid-19, matriarchal bonds between three generation of women and the the Palace Letters, and the climate crisis, ABR is commissiongrief, birth, and death that is shared between them. The river in ing a series of longer features on related topics, helped enorthe work’s title is viscerally described, and the story delicately mously by a grant of $20,000 from the Cultural Fund. unfolds at the collision of remembering and forgetting places. The August issue includes three articles in this new series.

Historian Georgina Arnott, in an essay that will surprise many readers, writes at length about the legacies of British slavery and the extravagant compensation of British slave-owners, some of which money made its way to the Australian colonies. James Ley, in a withering piece, laments the federal government’s vendetta against the arts, the ABC, and the humanities. Finally, Kieran Pender writes about law’s #MeToo moment in the wake of the Dyson Heydon revelations. ABR – and our essayists – are grateful to the Copyright Agency.

Jolley Prize

This year we celebrate the tenth ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. We received about 1,450 entries. The judges – past winners Gregory Day and Josephine Rowe, and Ellen van Neerven – have shortlisted three stories: ‘Egg Timer’ by C.J. Garrow (Victoria); ‘Hieroglyph’ by Simone Hollander (Colorado); and ‘River Story’ by Mykaela Saunders (NSW). The stories appear in this issue.

In the absence of public events, ABR will host an online ceremony on August 13 (6 pm). The shortlisted readers will introduce and then read from their stories, then we will announce the overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from total prize money of $12,500. This will be our first virtual ceremony via Zoom. To book, please email rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au. The judges have commended five other stories: ‘Wait for Me’ by Jasmin McCaughey; ‘I Believe’ by V.S. Kumar; ‘Two Africas’ by Jean McNeil; ‘Lucky Charms’ by Jennifer Down; and ‘Bedford Jeune’ by Lauren Sarazen. We congratulate the eight shortlisted and commended authors, and warmly acknowledge the generous support of Ian Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form.

Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020)

ABR was saddened to hear of the death of Elizabeth Harrower on July 7. Harrower was born in Sydney in 1928 and moved to London in 1951. Her first novel, Down in the City, was pubAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Australian Book Review August 2020, no. 423

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces managed studio, Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital Editor Jack Callil digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Monash University Interns Vivian Lai-Tran, Elizabeth Streeter Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully

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Cover Image The design features a reproduction of the 1807 Slave Trade 2007 £2 coin, designed by David Gentleman (above). The year’s zero contains the broken link in ‘the chains of oppression’. Around the perimeter of the coin are the words ‘An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ (photograph via the Chancery Collection). Cover design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Image credits and information Page 29: Arctic Tern in Hudson Bay Manitoba, Canada BI002183 (Bill Coster / Alamy Stock Photo)

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

ABR August 2020 LETTERS

Ian Campbell, Nicholas Jose, Ben Brooker, Alex Miller, Judith Masters, Roger Rees, Kim Harris, James Ley

COMMENTARY

8 22 50

Georgina Arnott James Ley Kieran Pender

Links in the chain: Legacies of British slavery in Australia Government contempt for the ABC, the arts, and the academy Law’s #MeToo moment

LITERARY STUDIES

Paul Giles

Two books on J.M. Coetzee

POEM

17 58

David Malouf Peter Boyle

‘A Grace Note’ ‘Crowded Out’

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

18 19 65 66

Paul McDermott James Walter Caitlin McGregor Sarah Walker

Warhol by Blake Gopnik The Insider by Christopher Pyne Inferno by Catherine Cho Sky Swimming by Sylvia Martin

INDIA

Chris Wallace

British India, White Australia by Kama Maclean

POLITICS

26 27

Jon Piccini The Fatal Lure of Politics by Terry Irving Benjamin Huf The Morals of the Market by Jessica Whyte

FICTION

30 31 32 33 34 35 35

J.R. Burgmann Jane Sullivan Don Anderson Fiona Wright Josephine Taylor Astrid Edwards Jessica Urwin

The Last Migration by Charlotte McConaghy Kokomo by Victoria Hannan Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford The Fogging by Luke Horton Murmurations by Carol Lefevre A Lonely Girl Is A Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu Benevolence by Julie Janson

JOLLEY PRIZE STORIES

36 41 45

C.J. Garrow Simone Hollander Mykaela Saunders

‘Egg Timer’ ‘Hieroglyph’ ‘River Story’

HISTORY

53 54

Danielle Clode Tali Lavi

The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver Genius and Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht

ECONOMICS

55 56

John Tang David Throsby

What’s Wrong with Economics? by Robert Skidelsky Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

POETRY

59 60 61

Michael Farrell Declan Fry James Jiang

Shorter Lives by John A. Scott Fire Front, edited by Alison Whittaker Three new poetry collections

MUSIC

62 63

Paul Kildea Andrew Ford

Summertime by Richard Crawford One Two Three Four by Craig Brown

CHINA

Will Higginbotham

City on Fire by Antony Dapiran

ORNITHOLOGY

Simon Caterson

The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman

JOURNALS

68 68

Rayne Allinson Elizabeth Bryer

Island 159, edited by Vern Field Meanjin Quarterly: Volume 79, Issue 2, edited by Jonathan Green

INTERVIEW

Patrick Allington

Open Page

TELEVISION

Jordan Prosser

Mystery Road

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Judith Wright

The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur, edited by Elizabeth Perkins

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

lished in 1957, followed by The Long Prospect a year later. In 1959 she returned to Sydney where she began working for the ABC and as a book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1960 she published The Catherine Wheel, her only novel not set in Sydney. The Watch Tower, acclaimed by many as her finest work, appeared in 1966. As Geordie Williamson noted in The Monthly in 2014, Harrower’s novels are ‘graceful, intellectually acute and possessed of the unrelenting quality of nightmare’. While Harrower continued to write, she would not publish again for nearly fifty years. When asked what impeded her writing in her 2015 Open Page interview, Harrower reflected: ‘At different times different forces, sometimes not even a world war.’ In Certain Circles, her final novel, was originally completed in 1971 before Harrower withdrew it from publication. As Bernadette Brennan noted in her review of the novel for ABR (May 2014), ‘Harrower withdrew the manuscript of In Certain Circles from publication because she felt “people would be disappointed. Patrick [White] would be disappointed.”’ The novel was finally released to critical acclaim by Text Publishing, which had included her earlier books in the Text Classics collection. A new short story collection, A Few Days in the Country, was released by Text in 2015. ABR was proud to have published the short story ‘It Is Margaret’ in the magazine.

National Library of Australia

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is now open, for the seventeenth time, with increased prize money of $10,000, of which the winner will receive $6,000. The judges are the 2020 Porter Prize winner, A. Frances Johnson, Lachlan Brown, John Kinsella, and John Hawke (ABR’s Poetry Editor). The closing date is 1 October. Full details appear on our website. We thank our supporting Patrons, Morag Fraser and Andrew Taylor.

Camaraderie and connection

Finally, a mid-year note of heartfelt thanks to our readers, contributors, subscribers, and supporters. Since mid-March, when everything seemed to change – our scope, our securities – it’s been a time of immense risk and uncertainty. None of us has gone through anything like this, and it’s not over yet. But it’s also been a season of great camaraderie and connection. This year, ABR subscriptions have risen by twenty per cent. To have increased our readership by a fifth at such a time is not a small thing – and we want to go further. Private donations – never inconsiderable at ABR – have risen by forty-six per cent, many of them, as donors have made clear, prompted by readers’ dismay at non-funding by the Australia Council. We’re so grateful for your support, your concern, your solidarity. It’s profoundly galvanising.

Letters

Dear Editor, The National Library Act 1960 empowers the Library on behalf of the Commonwealth to maintain and develop a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people. In tandem with its Australian collecting, the National Library of Australia has exercised remarkable foresight in building one of the world’s most extensive collections of South East and North East Asian materials. It has projected to the region a strength and openness in the pursuit of knowledge of the cultures and societies of the region. No state government library network has the remit or strategic location at the Commonwealth level to achieve this. Australian academic libraries have played an important role in supplementing the national role of the NLA, but they are now facing unprecedented funding challenges, post Covid-19. The National Library Council has, nonetheless, proposed a new Collection Development Policy and Collection Strategy which would effectively require severe curtailment or perhaps even cessation of collection from Japan and Korea and from most South-East Asian countries. According to one estimate, base funding for the NLA from government sources has fallen by at least fifteen per cent, accounting for inflation, between 2009–10 and 2017–18. Sixty years after the promulgation of the National Library Act and in an uncertain and challenging regional environment, the national interest still demands sustained, not reduced, NLA collection development and maintenance of focus on materials 4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Porter Prize

from North East and South East Asian countries, in addition to a continuance of comprehensive collection of library materials relating to Australia and the Australian people. The Commonwealth of Australia and its citizens deserve this. The NLA is a crucial international institution for Australia and its region. Ian Campbell, Beecroft, NSW and Nicholas Jose, Adjunct Professor, The University of Adelaide

Horrible men!

Dear Editor, It’s not easy to know what to do with the art of horrible men, although Peter Craven makes it seem so: deny the legitimacy of the case against them, and go on with business as usual (ABR, June–July 2020). Craven, who reviewed Woody Allen’s memoirs, Apropos of Nothing, may consider the allegations posed by Dylan Farrow – that Allen molested her when she was seven years old – to be ‘ancient and none-too-credible’, but many others do not (including Ronan Farrow, who accused Hachette, the book’s intended publisher, of ‘assist[ing] in efforts by abusive men to whitewash their crimes’). Craven seems to invite us to take Allen at his word, but why should we? Allen’s record of indifference and manipulation speaks for itself. The writer Emily Nussbaum – like me, a lifelong fan of Allen’s films – has called him ‘a malignant narcissist’. Craven mischaracterises the 1990s investigations into Dylan’s claims as exonerating Allen. In fact, Justice Wilk was damning, finding Dylan’s testimony ‘credible’, no evidence to back up the claim Dylan had been coached, criticising Allen’s ‘woman scorned’ defence, and concluding that ‘Mr.

Allen’s behaviour toward Dylan was grossly inappropriate and that measures must be taken to protect her’ (Allen’s bid for full custody and visitation rights were denied). As Nussbaum points out in her essay ‘Confessions of the Human Shield’, even if you put aside Dylan’s accusations, you are still left with the predatory origins of Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, his then-girlfriend’s daughter who was a college student at the time. In what sense is Allen’s career jeopardised, as Craven suggests? He continues to pump out films, with ever-diminishing returns, at a rate of close to one a year. Apropos of Nothing, despite being dropped by Hachette, has finally appeared. For every actor who won’t work for him, I dare say there are a hundred more who will. (Why is it that those most critical or dismissive of #MeToo are also those most likely to overstate its effects?) Allen was a significant part of my cultural education; conflicted as I feel about watching them these days, I still consider films like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters to be classics. But Allen’s character, and the allegations against him, demand appraisals – and reappraisals – that go beyond sycophancy and whitewashing. Surely, after #MeToo, this is the least we can do with the art of horrible men – and on behalf of their victims. Ben Brooker, Brompton, SA

Deirdre Bair in Adelaide

Dear Editor, Ronan McDonald’s review of Deirdre Bair’s Parisian Lives (ABR, June–July 2020) sent me back to her biography of Samuel Beckett, which I read more than twenty years ago, hugely impressed by it. As soon as I opened the book again, I remembered how engrossing it was. A day later I am still reading it and will continue reading until I finish it. I met Deirdre Bair in Adelaide some years ago, and we talked about Beckett. When she came out of the door of the hotel where we were staying and joined the group waiting for her – all women except for me – she apologised for keeping us waiting. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, managing to sound and to look very grand, indeed making an entrance rather than being late. I responded, ‘And then you overdressed.’ At this she took my arm and we went off talking at once about books. Alex Miller, Castlemaine, Vic.

When it was time

Dear Editor, I enjoyed reading Judith Brett’s review of Malcolm Turnbull’s book (ABR, June–July 2020). I agree that Turnbull turned out to be a disappointment as prime minister, his ability to institute a progressive agenda stymied by the far right of the Liberal/ National Coalition, in thrall to coal interests, and unable to imagine a different Australia. But as to Judith Brett’s assertion that the ‘booming Australia of the 1950s’ should rank as an ‘exciting time’ compared with the present day of Turnbull’s reference, I must disagree. The 1950s was a decade when women’s roles were severely curtailed by society and by law. Only misty-eyed white men want to revert to that time. I do however remember the excitement of Gough Whitlam’s election in

1972. Now that brought real, tangible change, for women in particular. And memorable, because I voted for the first time. For Whitlam, of course. Judith Masters (online comment)

Thinking differently

Dear Editor, Congratulations to Yves Rees on winning the Calibre Essay Prize. ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ is an engaging, passionate, intimate story told with humour, raw honesty, and some hurt laced with humour. Due to Rees’s courage, sense of history, and unique talent as an essayist, ‘Reading the Mess Mackwards’ provides a significant educational lesson for ABR readers and, it’s to be hoped, for the wider public. As Rees writes about their struggle for gender identity, I sense the way in which the future converges with the past. Both gather underground perhaps, but come together majestically in this brilliant essay. We will think differently and with much more understanding about issues of gender identity because of this essay. Well done Yves Rees and ABR! Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Smutting it up

Dear Editor, I can only confirm James Ley’s view of ‘us’ (Australians?) as a nation of prudes and wowsers as he describes us in his review of The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system (ABR, June–July 2020). Unlike his own response on reading Patrick Mullins’s book, I did not feel better after reading this review. Why did your reviewer have to use the word ‘fuck’ in this august journal? Perhaps he felt he had to ‘smut up’ his review to be in keeping with the novel. Kim Harris, Sandringham, Vic.

James Ley replies:

I apologise unreservedly for sullying the pages of this august journal and the minds of its innocent readers with my gratuitous profanity. It was an inexcusable lapse of judgement on my part. What I meant to say was f***.

Corrections

Sophie Cunningham’s review of Richard Cooke’s On Robyn Davidson in the June–July issue contained an inaccurate reference to one of Robyn Davidson’s books. In her review, Cunningham stated that ‘the difference between Davidson’s first book, Tracks, and her second, Nomads, was reviewed thus by Rosalind Sharpe’. Davidson has not in fact written a book called Nomads. The reference should have been to Tracks and Davidson’s fifth book, Desert Places. Geoff Page’s review of three new poetry collections in the same issue contained two inaccurate quotes from Ross Gillett’s The Mirror Hurlers. The quote ‘How will you get through the day // with this rearrangement of yourself.’ should have read, ‘How will you get through the day // with this rearranged version of yourself.’ The quote ‘Think of the weather wanting to get into the poem’ should have read ‘Think of the weather wanting to get to the poem’. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

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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 Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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Comment

Links in the chain

Legacies of British slavery in Australia

by Georgina Arnott

n 2007, Britain’s Royal Mint issued a £2 coin commemorating two hundred years since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the zero in ‘1807’ appearing as if a broken link in a chain. While interrupting the notorious transatlantic trade, the Act did not end slavery itself – that was achieved, at least in parts of the British world, with further legislation in 1833 that outlawed enslavement in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope. Emphasis on the dramatic, if illusionary, chain-breaking moment in some bicentenary celebrations extended a tradition of dwelling on Britain’s role in slave emancipation. The years 1807 and 1833 functioned partly within British society to obscure the fact that Britain had been a willing and central player in the cruel transatlantic business for almost four hundred years. What’s more, commemorations often overlooked unfree labour practices that continued to proliferate throughout the British world. Britain brought freedom, the coin seemed to say. In much the same way, the 250th anniversary this year of James Cook’s first voyage, and the defacing of his statues in Hyde Park, Randwick, North Fitzroy, and Cairns, have demonstrated the problematic nature of public commemorations. Few would disagree that Cook’s three South Pacific voyages were instrumental to the character of Australia. The difficulty is in coming to some sort of collective agreement about their precise significance and effectively conveying their complex consequences in a commemoration. Is it possible in commemorations to accommodate the moving parts? Are coins, plaques, statues, and re-enactments the most helpful ways for us to reflect on our pasts, or are there ways of publicly acknowledging the impact of the past on the language we use or on our psychological habits? Is this the only option when we uncover something about our past that has no clear-cut start or end date; that cannot be commemorated on a day or even quantified in numbers? We might be about to find out. Australia’s own entanglement in the transatlantic slave business is now emerging, albeit slowly and in ways complicated by its particular relations with nineteenth-century Britain. This is largely thanks to the production of a publicly available database of British slave-owners by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

(LBS), a University College London history project. The database shows that dozens of slave-owning men and women, and their children, travelled to the newly forming Australian colonies to take advantage of their opportunities. The movement of capital and ideas from Britain’s slave colonies to Australia, although far less quantifiable, appears to have been even more effecting, stimulating the growth of settlements, industries, and governance structures. How we tell these stories, and where we place emphasis – on the individual slave-owners, capital flows, policies, labour practices, psychological patterns – will shape how we think about their impact on the society we live in today.

he transatlantic slave business was, as historian Hugh Thomas once wrote, a vast scheme of things. From the early 1500s to the 1880s, twelve and a half million people were forcibly taken from Africa to the Caribbean, Brazil, Spanish Central America, North America, and Europe. After Portugal, Britain was the second-largest transporter of enslaved people during this period. British ships often moved along a triangular route, transporting goods from Britain to Africa, where they were sold and replaced with enslaved people before advancing to the slave colonies, where people were sold at a higher price and local goods (often slave produced) were purchased for sale back in Europe. Britain was substantially altered by its role in a global system of slavery, even if the enslaved people upon whom the system hinged rarely reached its shores. At the point of abolition, about ten per cent of Britain’s population (rising to fifteen per cent of its wealthy class) received significant material benefit from slavery business. ‘Slave-ownership permeated British commercial life’, writes LBS economic historian Nicholas Draper in Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). Profits from the business underwrote industries, technical innovations, trading systems, financial institutions, foreign settlements, transport projects, social and familial networks, private bequests – to universities, museums, schools, galleries, and more – maritime endeavours, and even global campaigns of discovery and conquest. Slavery informed Britain’s idea of itself in the world and gave shape and substance to

an ideology of white supremacy it harboured. Credible arguments continue to be made that Britain’s industrial revolution, empire, and dominance in world finance sprang from slavery. Conversely, the poverty, indebtedness, conflict, and corruption plaguing Africa and its diaspora can be traced to one of the largest social upheavals in human history, where generations of adults in the most productive period of their lives were forcibly removed and enslaved for life. Many in fact did not make it to the western side of the Atlantic; the average death rate across all transatlantic voyages was around fifteen per cent, and in some eras this was much higher.

Slavery informed Britain’s idea of itself in the world and gave shape and substance to an ideology of white supremacy that it harboured Thanks to the work of the LBS team, there is now greater awareness of an aspect of Britain’s slave past that had been almost entirely eclipsed: when the British parliament emancipated slaves in the 1830s, it compensated British slave-owners for the loss of their human property. The approximately 800,000 people ‘freed’ by the Act received nothing. Many were apprenticed under new laws designed to expropriate their labour as cheaply as possible. In subsequent years, the British Empire extended unfree labour practices into new parts of the world. Between 1838 and 1922, to take just one example, most of the more than 1.5 million people transported as indentured labourers from India went to British colonies, including Fiji and South Africa. British capital also continued to finance enslavement throughout the world, most especially in Brazil. For their losses, slave-owners in the British Empire received £20 million (around £300 billion in today’s money), representing about forty per cent of treasury’s income in 1834. As one might expect, the money consolidated existing wealth disparities in Britain. LBS Principal Investigator Catherine Hall notes that almost half of this amount went to just six per cent of the slave-owners: the ‘absentee’ ones.1 The £20 million was in fact loaned to the British parliament by Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, and only finally repaid in 2015. Here again, the legacies of British slavery have a salient monetary value and reach materially into the lives of many, often without their knowing it. Generations of taxpayers bankrolled Britain’s largest transfer of public wealth into private hands before the Global Financial Crisis bailouts. The 1834 compensation payments had a similarly stimulating effect, channelling finance into a broad range of capital projects via a burgeoning group of merchants, bankers, insurers, accountants, and solicitors concentrated in Britain’s port cities. London’s emergence as a global financial centre was confirmed. This compensation payout has received attention in recent years because of the LBS database, which lists around 47,000 individual claims for compensation. People had to apply for compensation and such claims were often contested by business partners or descendants of deceased slave-owners. There is little evidence of potential beneficiaries not claiming compensation,

except in instances where travelling to lodge a claim, or engage an agent, proved more costly than the likely award. Some entries in the database include the names, ages, and locations of the enslaved people, as well as compensation amounts and details of any contestation. Type nineteenth-century British surnames into the database and be pulled into the world of 1834 Britain, its clinical rendering of human value in moneys paid for men, women, and children depending on their gender, geographic location, and skill level. A particularly striking example is the entry for John Gladstone, father to British Prime Minister William Gladstone, and members of parliament Thomas and John Gladstone. John Gladstone was part of a compensation claim for eleven plantations, one of which saw him paid more than £20,000 for the loss of 415 enslaved people. The second phase of the database went further back in time and produced entries for British slave-owners between 1763 and 1833, the pre-compensation period. Overall, the project has made more graspable, as the LBS researchers write, ‘the ways in which empire enabled white Britons to enjoy their vaunted liberties and freedoms’. It has prompted new family histories, a renewed focus on legacy and intergenerational inheritance in historical scholarship, alterations to educational curriculums, and the 2015 two-part BBC program Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners (available on YouTube). It has reshaped the story Britain tells itself about itself. And yet, there are many more stories to be told. The LBS database shows that Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery reverberated around the globe, including in subtle, sometimes invisible, and often now forgotten ways, to wherever Britons ranged within their empire. That empire had a remarkable capacity to circulate people, capital, and ideas within far-flung ranges. High-level colonial administrators and military figures leapfrogged from the Caribbean to Newfoundland, to India and then on to the Australian colonies, and underneath this level of administration and military presence a whole British colonial society bent and swayed according to opportunity. For the first forty-five years of Britain’s permanent presence in what would become Australia, as it put in place a coercive human-transportation industry, commenced resource extraction, and navigated relationships with a new set of other people, Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery went on. During the 1780s alone, 35,000 enslaved people were transported every year in British ships. Why that involvement mattered to the new Australian colonies, and how, is a story we now need to figure out.

ne way in which it appears to have mattered seems counter-intuitive. As anti-slavery movements gained momentum throughout the late-eighteenth-century British world, a utopian framework for imagining new forms of imperial expansion developed alongside them. The first of many anti-slavery petitions to Westminster was circulated in 1783, just five years before the First Fleet arrived on Eora country, in a harbour that James Cook had named Port Jackson; British humanitarianism and the Australian colonies grew up together. In Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (2005), Deirdre Coleman provides a compelling account of New South Wales as a sanctuary for disaffected Europeans hoping to esAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

tablish an egalitarian society free from the inequalities that had led to transatlantic slavery and other repressive regimes. Some early firsthand accounts certainly suggest this. Lieutenant James Tuckey, transporter of convicts, spoke of a second Rome; George Wyndham, wealthy free settler and pastoralist, imagined a society built on principles of Athenian democracy. Romanticised visions of Athens and Rome rippled through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British bourgeois art and literature as symbols of democratic, rational civilisation. (They also represented an earlier instance of selective forgetting, given that Roman plantation agriculture was heavily dependent on slave labour.) The expression of this utopian desire reached its zenith in the poetry of Charles Harpur, son of transported convicts, who imagined the Australian colonies as ‘the cradle of liberty!’ The brutal realities of transportation, drought, starvation, isolation, conflict with Aboriginal people, and labour shortages, while hardening some, like Wyndham, inspired in the colonial centre and its metropolitan outposts a surge in activity – from protectionist movements to systematic colonisation schemes – which attempted to reform Britain’s colonial practice and protect the dream of a more humane civilisation. Even here, transatlantic slavery mattered. The language, networks, and strategies of abolitionism provided these reformist movements, so influential in the Australian colonies, with a model. The concept of freedom itself came to mean, oftentimes, not slavery throughout the British world. In the Australian colonies, discussion of transatlantic slavery reform enabled colonists to lay claim to a new kind of British imperialism promoting greater universal freedoms. During the 1820s some fifty newspaper articles reported on proposals and petitions to abolish slavery, most lending their support, and provided case studies of slavery and abolition in places as distant as Calcutta, New York, and Mauritius. An 1829 article in The Sydney Gazette deplored the ‘barbarous depredations’ of West Indian planters and slave dealers: to the ‘people of Great-Britain, these inhumane practices were perhaps more peculiarly obnoxious’. Referring to slavery in the Cape of Good Hope, the article reflected: ‘behold the strange anomaly of a system of slavery actually exercised in a British settlement!’ A letter to The Sydney Monitor in 1834 expressed outrage at the decision to award compensation to slave-owners, arguing that ‘a fearful accumulation of debt’ was actually due to centuries of enslaved people. Strength of feeling around slave emancipation in the Australian colonies was seized on to hasten the end of convict transportation and assignment. In 1838 an article entitled ‘White Slavery’ appeared in Sydney’s Colonist. It asked readers to consider what the British parliament would say when it learnt the ‘monstrous and undeniable fact’ that ‘British born white men … are now openly and notoriously sold in the public slave market of Sydney! ’ Advocates appealed to an ideology of white supremacy that had underpinned transatlantic slavery, arguing that slavery was a by-product of the transportation system. Transatlantic slavery mattered to the Australian colonies because it was a point of distinction. It came to represent old imperialism, which Britain had moved away from in favour of a self-consciously humanitarian approach, heavily influenced by Christian narratives and networks. In practice, more granular 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

distinctions existed between old and new imperialism, inhumane practice and humanitarianism: reality on the periphery, intention at the centre. Aboriginal Protectionism would again prove this. A broad set of practices aimed at bringing Indigenous people under British legal protection, it replaced slave emancipation as the guiding humanitarian ethos of Colonial Office policy from the mid-1830s, gaining instrumental force from the late-nineteenth century onwards in a number of Australian colonies and ultimately leading to humanitarian disasters such as the Stolen Generations.2

ransatlantic slavery mattered to the Australian colonies in another way, though this too is a story that is still taking shape. As the LBS database reveals, around 150 individuals who applied for slavery compensation migrated to, or invested in, the Australian colonies – or had descendants who did so. Since it appears that only around fifty direct beneficiaries of slavery compensation moved to the Australian colonies, it cannot be said that these colonies absorbed a significant portion of slave-owners fleeing plantation colonies in the post-abolition period. In the overwhelming majority of cases, beneficiaries in Australia did not attempt to replicate the labour systems that they had benefited from – at least directly. Instead, they filled the ranks of Australia’s professional class in the spheres of governance, law, religion, commerce, and trade. Stunning exceptions include two pioneers of the Queensland sugar industry: John Buhôt (1831–81), son of a Barbados sugar merchant and slave-owner; and Louis Hope (1817–94), son of the fourth earl of Hopetoun, whose family owned enslaved people in Jamaica. Buhôt, the first person to successfully grow cane sugar in Queensland, was commemorated in 1962 with a memorial in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. Hope, who is said to have coercively transported and enslaved Pacific Islanders to work his plantations, lived ‘as a landed aristocrat’, according to his 1972 Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) entry. Emma Christopher, a historian at the University of New South Wales, is currently interviewing descendants of these Pacific Islander labourers, for whom slavery in Australia is not news. It is worth dwelling for a moment on the overall picture of Australia, and its position in the British world, suggested by the LBS database. As Nicholas Draper from LBS has shown, around half of the total compensation money awarded in 1834, approximately £10 million, actually left the British Isles, a figure consistent with the fact that British international trade quintupled between 1840 and 1870.3 While it is unclear what portion of that £10 million landed in the Australian colonies, via the investments of slave-owning Britons, it was probably not a large one. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, prior to the gold rushes, Britain’s international merchant houses were pivoted mainly towards India, Latin America, South Africa, and Russia, not Australia.4 While New South Wales, Port Phillip, South Australia, and the Swan River settlement were by the late 1830s increasingly attractive investment propositions, they still carried significant risk. Australia, it seems, was spared the tainted capital through timing. And yet, it may be that the LBS database is giving us an impression that British slave-owners and their families were less

influential in the Australian colonies than they in fact were. The database includes those who held slaves, as the British parliament defined them, in 1833. It does not record, at least in its entirety, those who benefited from unfree labour up until 1833, or those who benefited from it after 1833 in the many forms that remained legal. Perhaps most crucially, full biographical details, including investment histories and descendants’ names, are not yet present for many entries in the LBS database. My sense is that much larger amounts of slave money, for want of a better term, helped establish the Australian colonies than we know, as wealth from slavery business rippled down the generations and across the empire. In the 1870s and 1880s, these colonies received more British capital than any other place in the world. Britons who invested in Caribbean slavery, without necessarily going there, may well have bequeathed wealth to children who invested in the Australian colonies, without necessarily going there. Transfers of capital may have taken the form of family loans or been directed by mutual funds investing in, or loaning money for, projects of exploration, resource development, assisted migration, or construction. The variables are dizzying. And while following the money is a tantalising possibility, the effort might simply prove something that we already know: empires sap the resources of local populations and thus fuel future resourcesapping empire-building endeavours. As you can see, the extent and strength of links between British slavery and Australia remain largely untested, and are certainly far from quantified. I am part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, just underway, that will extend the pioneering work of LBS and a handful of Australian historians by using Western Australia as a test case. The Swan River settlement, established in 1829, rode on a wave of British humanitarian movements, commencing as a society free from convict transportation – at least initially. And yet, as we learn more about the profiles of those who were compensated and migrated to Western Australia, we see the limits of this humanitarian influence, or perhaps simply the degree to which humanitarianism was produced by the same social networks, racial conceptions, imperialistic beliefs, and professions that sustained British slavery for so long.

plantation enterprise generated sufficient wealth to send Burt to London to be educated, after which he established a lucrative St Kitts legal practice, servicing fellow planters. Post abolition, Burt was awarded compensation for ten slaves, three of whom were domestic: Sarah, a washerwoman aged forty; John, a house servant aged twelve; and an unnamed child aged one. Like his father, Burt became Speaker of the House of Assembly in St Kitts but declined the judicial appointments that would have required him to relinquish his practice. When sugar prices and legal business plummeted in the 1850s, Burt became ‘anxious’, lamented his biographer John Bennett in 2002, to secure a judicial position within the British Empire. A well-placed friend lobbied on his behalf, finally procuring him the Swan River offer. Burt reluctantly accepted the distant outpost, a decision that was ‘forced upon him’, relates Bennett, by ‘the emancipation of the slaves just sixteen years earlier’. From Perth, Burt continued to own St Kitts sugar plantations, presumably worked on by formerly enslaved people under a modified labour model, and oversaw justice throughout Western Australia for sixteen years. Burt came to consider the Swan River a crude setting but found solace in his garden, which he planted around his home, Strawberry Hill, a small portion of which he reserved for sugar cane. Children of transatlantic slave-owners became leading figures in other realms of Australian life. Popular writers Adam Lindsay Gordon and Mary Broome (the wife of Western Australian governor Frederick Broome) came from families heavily invested in slavery. It seems clear now that we need to rethink their work from this vantage point. How did this slavery inheritance – intellectual, emotional, material – scaffold their work? What assumptions about race and labour did their writing promote throughout the colonies? While Jamaican-born Broome was the daughter of an Island Secretary, Gordon’s mother

he first Chief Justice of Western Australia, Archibald Burt, came to the Swan River settlement in 1860 from St Kitts, a Caribbean island where his family had owned enslaved Africans since the seventeenth century. This lineage might reasonably go unnoticed by readers of the ADB, whose 1969 entry describes Burt as the second son of a ‘planter’. In fact, the

Sugar cane in the garden of Strawberry Hill, residence of A.P. Burt, Adelaide Terrace, Perth (photograph by Alfred Hawes Stone, 1862, via the State Library of Western Australia/6923B182) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

was the daughter of the lieutenant governor of Berbice (which became part of British Guiana, or present-day Guyana) and the only living beneficiary in a claim for 285 enslaved people. She bequeathed £7,000 to Gordon, an amount that the 1972 ADB entry for Gordon states brought him ‘relative prosperity’, and represents over £900,000 in today’s money. Nothing about that entry indicates that this prosperity was generated through slavery. Gaps in the ADB both reflect and extend widespread ignorance of Australia’s links with a vast regime of racialised enslavement. Such gaps have been produced by conscious and unconscious acts of denial and compounded by time: this process is, of course, a characteristic of colonial societies. Today, the ADB is working alongside history projects, such as our own, to restore these pasts.5 There is much work to be done. Throughout the online database, the vast majority of entries written during the 1960s and 1970s are oblique or breathtakingly concise when dealing with slavery. The 1966 ADB entry on Reverend Robert Allwood emphasises his work ethic and humility as the minister at Sydney’s St James Anglican Church between 1840 and 1884 and vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney between 1869 and 1882. Born in Jamaica, where his father was a Supreme Court judge, Allwood was educated at Eton and priested by the bishop of Bristol, a city home to many slave-owning families, including that of Anna Bush, Robert’s wife. In 1834, six years before arriving in New South Wales, Reverend Allwood lodged a claim for 202 enslaved people. His father lodged five separate claims, one of which awarded him over £2,000, for 148 enslaved people. Anna Allwood’s family received compensation for 202 enslaved people; Allwood claimed a portion of this too. Then there is Sir Henry Barkly, governor of Victoria from 1856 to 1863, who was awarded almost £6,000 for 290 enslaved people in Grenada and Tobago in two bitterly fought compensation disputes. Henry’s father, London sugar merchant Aeneas Barkly, had been successful in twenty-six separate claims across the Caribbean, involving thousands of enslaved people. One claim awarded him £7,000 for 428 people in Jamaica. Despite the eye-watering scale of these compensation amounts, slavery itself produced far more wealth for the family and they believed themselves financially ‘ruined’ by slave emancipation. It may have prompted Henry’s colonial career, which began with his governorship of British Guiana, where a number of the family’s plantation estates had been situated, before postings in Jamaica, Victoria, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope. In Victoria, Sir Henry Barkly helped to establish the Royal Society, the National Gallery, and the National Observatory, and worked to suppress democratic reform. (He was honoured in the naming of several major roads and a smoky pub down the road from my primary school in Heidelberg.) The more you look, the more you see how Britain’s long history of enslavement travelled with settlers into the colonies, separating those who had capital and could pursue education, professional careers, and capital investment from those who could not. There is the Melbourne lord mayor, Godfrey Carter, born of a line of Jamaican slave-owners. Then there is George Fife Angas, celebrated founder of South Australia, who in his capacity as a financial agent signed compensation claims for more than 100 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

enslaved people. Successful Port Phillip western district pastoralists Andrew and Celia Scott appear in the database as part of a compensation claim for 107 enslaved people in Tobago. And so on. If there is one shared characteristic of those who came to the Australian colonies from slave-owning families, it is that they were not manual labourers.

Gaps in the ADB reflect and extend widespread ignorance of Australia’s links with a vast regime of racialised enslavement And that is what slavery does: it bestows freedom on some, unfreedom on others. This dynamic continues to operate, albeit via chains of supply and corporate structures that make the countervailing weights – the free, the unfree – appear so remote as to be impossibly related. As well as looking to the past, we need to ask: does selective remembering, forgetting, commemorating, and the stories we tell, perpetuate unfree labour practices today in much the same way as they did in post-abolition Britain?

here is much to learn about Australia, and maybe even our own unconscious assumptions or prejudices, from following the nation’s links to transatlantic slavery, even if quantifying its material impact proves elusive. By the time Adam Lindsay Gordon shot himself in 1870, at Brighton Beach in Victoria, he had developed a pronounced ‘melancholia’ and many unpayable debts, wrote Leonie Kramer in Gordon’s 1972 ADB entry. Gordon’s suicide came days after being told that he would not inherit his mother’s estate, Esslemont, in Scotland. As an Argus obituary related in extraordinary detail, Gordon did not sleep between reading the first (very positive) review of his newly published Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes and carefully folding his possessions into his hat on Brighton beach the following dawn. The volume would ignite an ‘Australia-wide craze’ and even earn him the title ‘father of the Australian ballad’.6 Both Kramer and the obituarist used the same word to describe Gordon’s life and death: strange. Literary historians have come to similar conclusions about his literary success, which endured into the mid-twentieth century. In 1934, a bust of Gordon was unveiled in Westminster Abbey; he is the only Australian writer to be so commemorated. Dingley Dell, Gordon’s former South Australian home, is today a museum, an honour not casually bestowed on Australian writers. Why did his work – no better in quality than many outback balladeers’ of the time – inspire pilgrimage sites in his memory? Here is my hunch. Gordon’s popularity appears strange when the story of slave-ownership is left out. Once its implications are considered, this element adds to our understanding of not only Gordon’s enduring appeal but also late-nineteenth-century responses to slave-ownership and its financial legacies. Australian literary critics have provided the groundwork for this theory. That the legend of Gordon’s life was central to the popularity of his writing suggested something disturbing about the ‘Australian psyche’, wrote Judith Wright in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry (1965), for that legend spoke powerfully of the brutality of European civilisation. His death, like his

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poetry, she said, was an expression of the ‘problems’ that he had In the post-Federation period, much of this meaning was lost brought with him from Britain. Wright, interestingly, did not on those who approached Gordon’s work. By then slavery mention Gordon’s links to slavery – perhaps she did not know, links were not common knowledge and they detracted from or overlooked, them. But the legend of Gordon always pivoted the story literary historians wanted to tell about the man as a around three points: his aristocratic origins pioneering Australian who forwent and ‘plantation wealth’, his exile to the upper-crust British society. Still, colonies, and his spectacular death. Might the emotional contours of earlier it be possible that the ‘problem’ of European responses to his work and legend civilisation that Gordon carried with him remained – most obviously in the was in part a history of enslavement and, euphemisms, reproduced in recent further, that this was at some level known years; the allowance extended to his by early devotees? misdemeanours, and the assumption Wright was on to something when that wealth and nobility were signs she wondered what Gordon, the legend, of virtue in the colonial period – not revealed about Australians. It seems that red flags. we have long acknowledged the presence of brutality in Gordon’s story without actually y recognising the role that saying it. Gordon’s expulsion to the colonies slavery wealth played in Aushas been described as the result of ‘some tralia’s past, it may be possible rather mysterious “disgrace” or “scandal”’; to learn something about the psycho‘a somewhat raffish adolescence’; ‘numerous logical habits that have brought us to youthful escapades’. His slavery inheritance where we are today. When we turn to is explained with comparable euphemistic the stories of slave-owners and their shading; after he arrived in South Australia children in the colonies, slavery is ache ‘came into a little money’, literary tually everywhere, obscured. Perhaps, historians have often said. (The obituarist then, our task in the first instance is saw no reason to underplay it: it was a to consider how earlier commemora‘fortune’.) In the frequency and flourish tions – plaques, ADB entries, musewith which such euphemisms have been ums, histories – have been complicit used, even in recent years, there lingers in the psychology of slave-ownership Memorial bust of Adam Lindsay Gordon something more than a gentlemanly and have used language to dishonour (photograph via Westminster Abbey Library permissiveness towards dirty money and the lives and legacies of those who © 2020 Dean and Chapter of Westminster) extramarital sex – it is a delight in moral were enslaved. abandon. In the nineteenth-century Australian-made Gordon There is, of course, a major precedent for this in Australian legend, there is the kernel of something ugly: the celebration of history. The ADB has already begun adding new entries in place of an unconstrained, ruthless masculine will to dominate. those written in the mid-twentieth century that eclipsed the lives Slavery was always present in the story of Gordon in a way of Indigenous people, or couched them within the same language that, somewhat perversely, cast the slave-owner as a victim of and narratives that justified dispossession and attempts at cultural European markets. (This is redolent of the numerous entries for and population decimation. Since it is becoming ever clearer that slave-owners in British and Australian dictionaries of biography commemorations of landings, departures, and acts of parliament that only refer to slavery in relation to the losses it was associated have done so much to cloak the experience of those millions with in the post-abolition period – as if it never also brought who have not benefited from them, maybe by the next major material gains.) The extraordinary wealth slavery generated for landing anniversary in Australia, in 2038, we will think less about Gordon, which proved in the end not fully graspable, was a the climactic moment and more about history’s long trails. g familiar boom-and-bust story for colonial Britons. Though slavery wealth and government compensation went disproportionately Georgina Arnott is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the to Britain’s wealthy, many in its middle classes moved into and out University of Melbourne and author of The Unknown Judith of this category through their investments in transatlantic slavery, Wright (2016). most notably via the South Sea Company. Late nineteenthcentury colonials, firsthand witnesses to the gold rushes, were Research for this article was supported by the Australian familiar with the tale; the desperation and occasional depravity Research Council. Georgina Arnott thanks Clare Corbould, Zoe that came with trying to propel oneself out of the manual classes Laidlaw, Jane Lydon, and Catherine Hall for their comments on through what were essentially get-rich-quick schemes: the this article. Any faults are her own. References appear online. recklessness of new money, the crash. In Gordon’s trajectory, in the poetic treatment of it, and in the solace he found in the company This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing culof a (supposedly) pre-modern, simple, rural, labouring society, tural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agenthere was a cathartic pleasure for colonials touched by it too. cy’s Cultural Fund.

14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

Literary Studies

Coetzee’s paradoxes A writer of the in-between state Paul Giles

J.M. Coetzee: Truth, meaning, fiction by Anthony Uhlmann Bloomsbury Academic $44.99 pb, 243 pp

A Book of Friends: In honour of J.M. Coetzee on his 80th birthday

edited by Dorothy Driver Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 238 pp

hough it is his second country of citizenship, Australia might be classified as J.M. Coetzee’s fourth country of residence. He was born in South Africa and served as an academic at the University of Cape Town from 1972 to 2000; he lived in England between 1962 and 1965, where he studied for an MA thesis on Ford Madox Ford and worked as a computer programmer; and he then spent seven years in the United States, taking his doctorate at the University of Texas and being subsequently appointed a professor at the State University of New York. Since his move from Cape Town to Adelaide in 2002, Coetzee’s global literary reputation has risen significantly, helped in large part by the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. In South Africa, Coetzee was a highly esteemed but controversial figure, with fellow South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer famously indicting him for deploying opaque styles of ‘transcendence’ and ‘allegory’ in his novels to avoid a clearer narrative depiction of the ‘daily, grubby, tragic consequences’ of apartheid. Coetzee himself has always preferred in his fiction to address political questions indirectly, so Gordimer’s critical appraisal was never quite fair, but his migration to the more tranquil pastures of South Australia did facilitate the framing of his creative work within a less overtly racialised milieu. This has led to the major late novels of his Australian period, from Slow Man in 2005 to the recent ‘Jesus’ trilogy, whose landscapes reflect a world both routine and strangely defamiliarised, reminiscent in their combination of banal modernity and luminous enigma of another one-time Adelaide artist, Jeffrey Smart. Anthony Uhlmann, a professor at Western Sydney University who has collaborated recently on research projects with Coetzee, seeks in his new book to shift the emphasis of Coetzee criticism from politics to philosophy, in line with this new direction in the author’s career. Covering the full range of Coetzee’s fiction, Uhlmann’s primary focus is on how it negotiates with philosophical questions, often of an abstract kind. There is an emphasis here on the development of intuition as a form of knowledge as developed by René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, together with a stress on ethical imperatives of a collective and collaborative nature. Coetzee’s 1994 novel The Master of Petersburg, insists Uhlmann, ‘allows us to glimpse the difference between passive desires that eat our soul and active desires that allow us to flourish’. There are several biographical sources directly relevant to this attempt to bring together philosophy and writing practice, and

Uhlmann’s work draws constructively on some of them. Coetzee’s own PhD involved the application of theories from linguistics to the prose style of Samuel Beckett, and he subsequently published several dense, scholarly articles on linguistics, while his notebooks and other archival material deposited in 2013 at the University of Texas also demonstrate the author’s close engagement with various poststructuralist critical theorists: Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and others. Uhlmann quotes plentifully from the notebooks, and this material usefully illuminates Coetzee’s fiction, testifying to critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s observation in 2014 that he might be considered ‘a creative writer of theory’.

Coetzee has always preferred in his fiction to address political questions indirectly What is not so compelling in this book is Uhlmann’s grander ambition to describe a more general theory about how ‘the idea of intuition is applicable to thinking in literature in general terms’. It is this aspiration that induces him to invoke philosophers such as Spinoza and Henri Bergson, with whom he admits that Coetzee himself had at most an oblique relation. Acknowledging that Coetzee does not address these philosophers ‘directly’, Uhlmann nevertheless suggests ‘there are some implications of Spinoza’s system that align with the formulations Coetzee develops in his PhD dissertation’. Or again: ‘While he is probably not thinking of Spinoza, or Bergson, the concept Coetzee develops through his own intuitions accords with Bergson’s concept of duration.’ Uhlmann suggests this contributes to his own critical claim that ‘there is truth in fiction’, but this seems at times something of a stretch. The meticulous scholarship in this book is valuable, particularly in such telling details as the references to Plato in Coetzee’s archives, which can be correlated precisely with a course on Plato’s Phaedrus that Coetzee co-taught with Jonathan Lear at the University of Chicago in 2003. But the critical analysis of Coetzee sometimes seems more cumbersome, as if intellectual agendas from a different kind of project were being interposed here in a counterproductive manner. Still, no book can do everything, and this work should be regarded as essential for Coetzee scholars and academic libraries, if only because of the information it brings to bear from the author’s archives. It also has one of the best covers I’ve ever seen, a ‘life portrait’ of Coetzee by Sharon Zwi, incorporating twenty-five photographs of the author from a baby through to the present day.

nother critical work on Coetzee of a similarly hybrid nature has been edited by Dorothy Driver, who describes herself in the book’s preface as ‘his life-companion over four decades’. A Book of Friends is ‘a gift of love’ that embraces ‘a few of those whose creative work and conversations John has admired and enjoyed in the regions where he has lived or worked’. Again, there is much here that is fascinating, including reproductions of two works of art made by Coetzee’s brother, David, shortly before his death. According to Uhlmann, David was the source of the main protagonist in the ‘Jesus’ trilogy. There are also excellent and informative contributions to Driver’s book from AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

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Jonathan Lear at Chicago, who writes astutely of how Coetzee is ‘impatient with living in clichés’, and from Rajend Mesthrie on Coetzee’s time as an academic teacher of linguistics in South Africa. But this collection is inevitably something of a mixed bag, and some of these contributions seem to be justified primarily by the individual writer’s friendship with Coetzee. Paul Auster, for example, published a fascinating book of correspondence with Coetzee some years ago that ranged widely across international politics and culture, but Auster’s ‘gift’ here, ‘Notes on Stephen Crane’, does not have any obvious relevance to Coetzee himself. It might be possible to infer parallels between Auster’s comments on the American author’s particular empathy for children and dogs and Coetzee’s representation of both his own childhood in Youth and the character of David in the ‘Jesus’ books, but such analogies remain implicit and merely suggestive. The thematically tangential nature of some of the ‘creative’ responses (from David Malouf, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, and others) also appears unusual in a tribute volume of this kind, though perhaps this testifies to the editor’s desire to accommodate a creative rather than critical community, in line with the priorities of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice to which he has lent his name at the University of Adelaide. Nevertheless, the artwork is always interesting – the book includes an excellent painting of Coetzee by Adam Chang – and, as with Uhlmann’s work, there are many bits and pieces that will also be invaluable for future scholarly inquiries. Oliver Mayo, for example, recounts a fascinating conversation with Coetzee about probability, testifying to the author’s expertise in mathematics. It is interesting as a thought experiment to consider how Coetzee might be read in fifty years’ time, when he is safely dead and has achieved the kind of historical perspective now granted to, say, W.H. Auden, who was transported to Mount Olympus in 1973. It is possible that Coetzee will come to be regarded as a great writer of the in-between state, travelling not only between different countries but also between different philosophical categories and social formations. Just as Coetzee’s fiction veers between mind and body, so it seems at its most compelling when achieving a state of estrangement from material conditions of society that nevertheless remain as intransigently present as the corporeal frame itself. Coetzee’s protagonists can no more transcend the limitations of the human body than they can escape from the political conditions of South African apartheid or from impersonal Australian civility, and it is the tension between these competing pressures that often elicits Coetzee’s most incisive black humour. His recent novels, for example, have sardonic fun with some of the blank words typical of Australian mandarins, such as ‘supervene’ and ‘appropriate’. Because of this inherently evasive quality, it seems difficult to fit Coetzee precisely into any philosophical template, just as he does not seem the ideal candidate to be happily encircled by a ‘book of friends’. Coetzee is a great Australian writer in part because of the strategic distance his work maintains from civic norms, just as the fiction he wrote in South Africa will surely come to be seen as more powerful because of its detached style, the way it approaches racial politics through the complex framework of power relations endemic to all human situations.

As Patrick White, Australia’s first literary Nobel laureate, was officially lauded for having ‘introduced a new continent into literature’ when his actual artistic achievement was darker and less patriotic, so too has Coetzee, Australia’s second literary Nobelist, epitomised not only ‘the surprising involvement of the outsider’, as the Swedish academy proclaimed, but also the outsider’s recalcitrant disengagement. Like Beckett, the subject of his doctoral thesis, to whom perhaps he still bears the closest intellectual relation, Coetzee operates in a paradoxical, doubled-up space, partly in the world but partly, as a matter of strict principle, set apart from it. g Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Backgazing: Reverse time in modernist culture (OUP, 2019).

A Grace Note

Four in the morning. Stumbling back to bed, the softness of my pillow in the spread of my fingers assumes again, after so long, the still longed for round of your head. How does it feel, out there in that undiscovered country from whose bourne et cetera, to be recalled, drawn back to your name on my lips again, the warmth of the flesh? I recall the promise we made and broke. Now, on a grace note of unbodied restoration in the dream-space timelessness of sleep, I keep it. A late gift.

David Malouf

David Malouf ’s most recent poetry collection is An Open Book (UQP, 2018). His poem ‘A Grace Note’ appears in A Book of Friends: In honour of J.M. Coetzee on his 80th birthday (Text Publishing, 2020). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Biography

The epitome of ennui The yawning voids of Andy Warhol Paul McDermott

Warhol: A life as art by Blake Gopnik

Allen Lane $69.99 hb, 972 pp

lake Gopnik’s Warhol is a monumental undertaking. At nearly a thousand pages, there is an intensity of labour here so dense that the tome feels light by comparison. The fifty chapters are arranged in chronological order after a prelude detailing Warhol’s first untimely death. This order, from birth to his second untimely death, charts a linear path through the chaotic, challenging, and extraordinary life of one of the art world’s most precocious and baffling personalities. A large part of the difficulty in dealing with Warhol’s life is Warhol himself. He proves a most unreliable source of information, one who consciously obscured his presence in the creation of his own work, claimed he wanted to be a machine, became the epitome of ennui, dismissed his own legacy, and, when asked what led to his ground-breaking ideas, would reply in a louche whisper, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Even now the monosyllabic respons-

Andy Warhol in 1968 (A.F. archive/Alamy) 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

es and the complete lack of interest in showing interest can be shocking. The yawning voids that Warhol left were invariably filled by other commentators. When Warhol arrived in New York in the late 1940s as a ‘shabby art student with mismatched socks’, his sexuality was apparent, not only from his ‘swish’ manner but also from the style of his drawings. Many who viewed his portfolio judged the whimsical images of butterflies and dainty curlicues as feminine. A rejection letter from the time is addressed to a ‘Miss Andie Warhol’. Warhol’s sexuality, implicit in so much of his work, deserves to be reassessed. Gopnik tells us that Warhol was an outsider as a young closeted man in his hometown of Pittsburgh, but that in New York he was welcomed into the burgeoning gay scene. He had constant companions, strikingly handsome boyfriends, and live-in lovers in the house he shared with his mother. He was an occasional, if not enthusiastic, participant in back-room orgies. His desire to merely observe got him kicked out of at least one. Queerness and queer culture inspired and propelled his explorations, and the works he created from them would still be an affront to conservative hetero-normative communities today. Warhol copied, borrowed, and stole directly from photographs. This process raised questions about appropriation and originality. In his early illustrations, the blotted line work is taken from the more expensive artist–illustrator Ben Shahn. The looping cursive, complete with misspellings, came from his mother, while Nathan Gluck, Warhol’s first assistant, replicated his commercial style, all the work still being attributed to Warhol. Just as his career as a commercial artist began to offer security and prosperity, Warhol pivoted into fine art, with forays into what would become Pop Art. He was not the first to investigate this new representationalism after the dominating influence of Abstract Expressionism, but he quickly became the focal point. In 1962, thirty-two Campbell’s Soup cans appeared, one for each flavour, confounding and angering the art community. Each was meticulously painted to give the impression of mass production. They are displayed together like everyday products in a grocery store. When asked about the inspiration for the work, Warhol claimed that he had drunk the soup for lunch every day for twenty years. He lied. Later that year, Warhol investigated photographic silkscreens, creating a new form of expression. He began a production line of myriad Marilyns, Elizabeth Taylors, Elvis Presleys, car crashes, electric chairs, wanted men, and flowers. They were reproduced, transformed, and multiplied in series after series of ‘paintings’ that simultaneously reflect

Politics and critique society. At the acme of Pop Art, Warhol abruptly declared painting dead, put away his ‘brushes’, and became a filmmaker. The following work was no less incendiary. Sleep (1963) is eight hours of his then boyfriend John Giorno asleep. Empire (1964), eight hours and five minutes long, is a single static shot of the Empire State Building. Warhol would go on to produce and/or direct around 150 films. The radicalness of these explorations cannot be overstated, though, if he ever received an unreservedly glowing review for these works, it’s not to be found in Warhol. In 1964 Warhol established the first of his Factories, with an open-door policy. The silver Factory attracted gangs of misfits, fuelled by amphetamines and egomania, who could be employed to sweep up, create art, or be elevated on a whim to stardom. In 1968 this free-spirited scene would culminate in Warhol’s first death at the hands of Valerie Solanas, author of the radical feminist S.C.U.M Manifesto. Gopnik’s retelling of this incident is as darkly comic as it is tragic. In Warhol, Andy is artistically confronting, sardonically clever, and very funny. As an artist he offered a wry, tongue-in-cheek commentary on society, commerce, value, consumerism, sexuality, and what constitutes art. It is a conversation that continues to this day. Each aspect of Warhol’s output is given equal attention in the book: Commercial Art, Pop Art, Photobooth Portraits, Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Brillo Boxes, Video Art, Film Work, Raid the Icebox, Time Capsules, Shadow Painting, Camouflage Paintings, Piss Paintings, Oxidations, Torsos and Sex Parts, and Business Art. No period or avenue is missed. Gopnik reveals a restless, inventive mind, a penny-pinching boss, a shopaholic, a rabid collector, and a techno-savvy innovator. He was both mean and generous, a provocateur, a starry-eyed fanboy, a caring son who didn’t attend his mother’s funeral. An avid consumer of books, media, and music who was well versed in the minutiae of his profession. A man who could be shy and inarticulate expressing the simplest ideas about his work but who could move, when he chose, with ease through all levels of society, from the high to the low. The book also reveals a ceaseless worker with a camera always ready, one who constantly sought new technology to advance his conceptual ideas. Warhol achieves, through intense scrutiny, a rounded, exacting, and human portrait of its purposefully enigmatic subject. There is an enormous life housed in these pages; Warhol remains fascinating throughout. Gopnik’s access to more than 100,000 documents, hundreds of interviews, boxes of ephemera, and the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh enables him to track the days and nights of the man. Gopnik pinpoints where Warhol was, whom he was with, and sometimes even what he ate. However, the spirit of this genius proves as elusive as ever. The closer you get to the screen the more difficult it is to see the image. All the disguises of this protean artist are exposed in Warhol, but they remain effective in concealing their creator. Andy Warhol is no less a mystery on the last page. g Paul McDermott is a writer, comedian and, occasionally, a painter. He has written and illustrated several books as well as writing, directing, and producing a number of short films. ❖

Look at me!

Bertie Wooster runs the House James Walter

The Insider: The scoops, the scandals and the serious business within the Canberra bubble by Christopher Pyne

Hachette $34.99 pb, 332 pp

n a long career talking to and about politicians, I have learned one thing. While many fantasise about being prime minister, the key driver is to get close to the centre. Christopher Pyne captures this immediately in The Insider, comparing the political world to the solar system in which the skill is to know one’s place relative to the sun (the prime minister), and the aim is to get as close to the sun as possible. To be an insider, to know how things work, with privileged information that few others share, is the allure. Pyne realised his vocation early. His initial claim, to having been drawn to the ‘mystery of the vaulting ambition of politicians’ is disingenuous. He has already given us the clue: as the youngest child of five, he needed ‘to garner maximum attention in all things’. Having first considered becoming a priest, but calculating that the papacy was closed to him, at the age of fifteen he concluded that the prime ministership of Australia was not: ‘It was to that destination I set my sail’. No vaulting here then. Unlike others of such high ambition, John Howard, say, or Paul Keating, who looked to past heroes as models (for each it was Churchill), Pyne found his inspiration in studying parliamentary procedures. Pyne says little about his private life, and nothing about his trajectory through party branches, university politics, the Young Liberals, work as a staffer (for Amanda Vanstone), and the first, unsuccessful tilt at election in 1989 that preceded his election to Parliament in 1993. He was twenty-six. This book concentrates on those years when he was, in mid-life, at last close to the action. So we see his frustration at not being quite in the front ranks in the late Howard years; the aggravating ‘winter’ of opposition, facing a ‘hopeless’ Kevin Rudd and a hapless Julia Gillard; and, finally, his triumphs as a senior member of the Coalition executive, and manager of parliamentary business, from 2013 to 2019. Pyne presents himself as one part Bertie Wooster, a jolly chap whose wit and good company won friends and disarmed others across the aisle and around the world; one part master tactician whose canny management of parliamentary business and sense of what the Liberal voter wanted reinforced the Coalition hold on power; and in large part a warrior who never shied from a fight and always returned as good as he got and ‘rather more’. He scrambled to be in the thick of it. As Vanstone observes, ‘he made sure his hands were on any levers he could grasp’. It is the warrior template that is the most disheartening aspect of Pyne’s world view. ‘War on all fronts at all times’ is how Pyne AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

characterises Tony Abbott’s success, yet it is the subtext in much of the rest of the book. It breeds partisan antagonism that is the obverse of what Bernard Crick, in his classic In Defence of Politics (1962), illuminated: politics as an activity that resolves differences through contestation, negotiation, conciliation, and compromise between different interests to reach a workable solution to the problem of common rule.

This is paltry stuff, where the fight is more important than the purpose When partisanship is amplified, all issues are seen through an ‘us-versus-them’ lens in which an opponent’s views are deemed unthinkable. There can be no bipartisan agreement on workable solutions. So Pyne delivers well-rehearsed, derisory accounts of Labor policy, familiar to anyone who reads the Murdoch press, castigates the Rudd government (especially its reckless spending during the GFC), and rejoices in reducing Gillard’s putative education revolution to rubble because she once slighted him in parliament. This is paltry stuff, where the fight is more important than the purpose, the goal is to destroy as much as possible of the Labor legacy, and an agenda of limited policy ambition – stopping the boats, the Heydon royal commission into trade unions, and austerity budgeting (defended as good policy but, sadly, bad politics) – comes a distant second. It is a far cry from the sort of memoir John Howard wrote, which covered the battles but always saw policy intentions as central. If it were not for the closing chapters of the book, where at last Pyne engages with policy detail – the National Innovation Agenda, and his self-defined transformational role in the Defence Industry portfolio – one would relegate this to the tiresome ‘whatever it takes’ genre pioneered by Graham Richardson. But then again, Malcolm Turnbull claims the Innovation Agenda as his own, not Pyne’s. And while Pyne’s arguments for ‘dirigiste’ intervention in the market to sustain Defence procurement and development in Australia – safeguarding industry R&D, promoting STEM teaching and research, fighting against the loss of local knowledge, skills, and jobs – are tenable, they are precisely the arguments that were made for retaining the car industry, which the Coalition gleefully sacrificed. Shallow and blinkered policy analysis may be irrelevant to readers who want the insider story of the internal battles in the Liberal Party, how it became ‘an election winning machine’ despite internecine warfare, and Pyne’s thoughts on the leaders with whom he has worked. So what does he deliver? Well, the warrior demeanour is well to the fore in Pyne’s accounts of partyroom confrontation between moderates and the right, but he continues to claim friendship with all players while regretting Tony Abbott’s eccentricity, the misjudgements of Peter Dutton and Mathias Cormann, and the need to sacrifice moderate star Julie Bishop once he had ‘called the card’ on the spill that brought Scott Morrison to power. Pyne continues to admire alpha-warrior Abbott excessively, asking if anyone can think of a more effective opposition leader. Well, I can: the great opposition leaders were those who unified 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

a divided party, clarified its philosophy, and devised an agenda for government – John Curtin, Robert Menzies, and Gough Whitlam. Abbott did none of this: amplifying division was all, and he brought nothing into government. Instead, the Coalition has been learning on the job, fighting over direction (with the ensuing dispatch of leaders) at a considerable cost to addressing serious issues such as energy policy and climate change. Pyne recognises Turnbull’s gifts, and the potential of his thwarted objectives. He gives a persuasive account of the partyroom battles (against ‘several’ malcontents) that led to the withdrawal of the National Energy Guarantee, the erosion of Turnbull’s authority, and Dutton’s challenge. When it comes to Turnbull’s downfall, however, there is little that is new for anyone who kept up with coverage at the time, save that Pyne argues forcefully – against journalists such as Pamela Williams, Peter Hartcher, Katherine Murphy and others – that Morrison was loyal to Turnbull, not plotting, or manoeuvring his supporters in successive votes to secure a run through the middle. His warrant for saying so is, ‘I was there.’ Yet another who was there, Turnbull himself, concluded that Morrison was ‘duplicitous’. Read each one and draw your own conclusions. As for the election-winning machine, that is an impressive feat given the turbulence and leadership rotation in Coalition administrations between 2013 and 2019. Pyne’s tactics as manager of parliamentary business evidently paid off. One can be less sure of his claim to understand just what works in winning over ‘Bob and Nancy Stringbag’ (and just think of that as a metaphor for the average Liberal supporter in our diverse, multicultural society). His elucidation of the concerns of ‘quiet Australians’ and his dismissal of the preoccupations of ‘the Canberra bubble’ (in which he spent his entire working life) do not coincide with the more rigorous analysis of voting behaviour presented by Shaun Ratcliff and others in Morrison’s Miracle (edited by Anika Gauga et al., 2020). Nor is he forthcoming about the sophistication of media and social media manipulation that now plays such a significant part in influencing voter perceptions: for that one must turn to Stephen Mills, again in Morrison’s Miracle. What Pyne gives us is the very model of the contemporary political professional, who has no life experience outside politics, is obsessed with process rather than purpose, and will leverage his insider networks to build a successful post-parliamentary career in lobbying and consultancy. Yet finally, Pyne’s continuing preoccupation with garnering ‘maximum attention in all things’ undercuts his attempt to secure his stature as a man of substance. Repetitious flourishing of lengthy endorsements of his achievement from friends, opponents, and world figures is purposely offset by self-deprecation. Here, the famous wit does not come off. What remains is the impression of a man strenuously trying to maintain unrealistic levels of self-regard by insisting ‘look at me’. Good luck with that outside the Canberra bubble. g James Walter is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University, and has published widely on leadership, biography, and political ideas. Volume Two of his history of the Australian prime ministership (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart),The Pivot of Power: The Australian prime ministership 1950–2016 (Miegunyah Press), was published in 2017.

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Fiction

An ocean devoid of sea life A novel that tinkers with genre J.R. Burgmann

The Last Migration

by Charlotte McConaghy

Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 272 pp

owards the end of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory (2018), Richard Powers attempts to articulate why literature, or more precisely the novel, has struggled to encompass climate change: ‘To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’ As with climate change, it is the human side of this equation, according to Powers, that is the true variable; literature, to quote Katy Waldman, ‘has always been a humanist endeavour … intrinsically and helplessly affirm[ing] the values of the species’. In other words, storytelling – like our carbon emissions – will shift only insofar as our species does. This is an apt framework through which to view Charlotte McConaghy’s literary début (she has written a number of Young Adult fantasy novels), a novel torn between the struggles of a few individuals and the larger, ineffable backdrop of climate change and disastrous species loss. The Last Migration takes place in what could be the near future, where ‘[t]here is hardly anything wild left’, ‘no bears in the once-frozen north, or reptiles in the too-hot south, and the last known wolf in the world died in captivity last winter’. The protagonist, Franny Stone, begins her journey in Greenland, where she plans to find a vessel that will sail south to track what will probably be the last migration of the Arctic tern to Antarctica, thus aiding her research into ‘what climate change has done to their flight habits’. Through a series of unlikely but highly entertaining interactions, Franny secures a berth aboard a fishing boat, the diverse crew of which is skippered by the enigmatic Ennis, a man with an Ahab complex, chasing the ‘Golden Catch’ in an ocean now devoid of sea life. Despite the inherent conflict between Franny’s conservationism and the crew’s labour, her contempt barely concealed, they set course, hanging on Franny’s word that the flight path of the terns will lead them to fisheries. This promise, along with the violent vagaries of the roaring Atlantic, make for tense sailing. As the Saghani ventures south, the stakes increasing with every nautical mile, Franny’s extravagant backstory is revealed through interspersed flashbacks that depict her upbringing in Australia and Ireland, her meandering relationship with her ornithologist husband, Niall, and the tragic circumstances that 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

led her to embark on this journey to the end of the world. As romance and drama, it is compelling and precisely paced to turn pages at a rate of knots; as environmental elegy, however, certain irreconcilable conflicts remain. Chief among these is the overwhelming sense that the world centres on Franny: that these sailors would risk their lives for this dangerously unskilled passenger, bending their will to wherever the plot takes her, and that the terns will be waiting just for her at the end of her journey. This effect is partly due to the novel’s form. Written in the first-person present tense, it betrays a claustrophobic quality that, while serving the human drama well (particularly Franny’s harrowing relationship with Niall), nonetheless does little to further the sense that larger planetary stakes are unfolding. For all the ways in which McConaghy excels at genre, there isn’t here any particularly strong impression of futurity, except through the persistent and well-articulated lens of biodiversity loss. The complex range of climate changes that would run parallel to – if not precede – such losses are consigned to the category of passing reference, as with there being ‘less snow than there once was. A warmer world.’ In an attempt at subtlety, some erasure of anthropogenic climate change occurs, and with it political urgency. This stands in contrast to, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), an exemplary climate-change novel that also focuses on migration and species loss and that interweaves the consequences of climate change with the quotidian circumstances of an unexceptional community, therein rendering the despoliation of the planet and the struggles of individuals not only equally compelling but also inextricably connected. Indeed, one’s capacity to become engrossed in The Last Migration might well depend on which side – need they be sides at all? – of these narrative scales the reader leans. This would be to overlook one of the novel’s most important qualities: that while The Last Migration is certainly an exhilarating read – part romance, drama, psychological and legal thriller – it is one of few Australian novels to tinker with genre in such a way that allows for climate change to feature as a contextualising given, rather than as a central narrative device. This is surprisingly rare, disconcertingly so. For while there has been a sharp increase in Australian ‘cli-fi’ in recent years – novels that take climate change as their chief subject matter (Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, or the recent novels of James Bradley and Alice Robinson) – there has been little by way of works that reflect our current climate reality, some kind of new realism. Amitav Ghosh, who has written both climate fiction and a monograph on art and climate change, put it well in a recent interview when he explained: ‘The reality is we are in a new world, in a new epoch … everything that we write about this world and of this epoch has to register this new reality.’ By this measure at least, McConaghy’s novel succeeds, even though it doesn’t manage to make ‘the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people’. g J.R. Burgmann, a writer and PhD student, is co-author of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A sociological approach (Liverpool University Press, 2020) and a researcher at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub.

Fiction

Cooee!

A wry romantic comedy Jane Sullivan

Kokomo

by Victoria Hannan

Hachette $29.99 pb, 299 pp

okomo has a startling beginning. ‘Mina knew in that moment what love is’, goes the first sentence. She is looking at Jack’s penis, which is compared to a soldier, a ballerina, a lighthouse, and a cooee. It is also the nicest penis she has ever seen. This is writing that trembles on the edge of silliness but is saved by irony. The astute reader knows pretty well straightaway that this is not love and that Jack is a bastard. It takes Mina many pages, however, to find this out. Meanwhile, she is saved by a bell, or rather, a vibrating phone. She is being summoned back across half the world to Melbourne because her mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in twelve years. Victoria Hannan’s début novel was the winner of the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Awards of this kind, or a place on their shortlists, are practically de rigueur these days for any hopeful newcomer, as publishing opportunities shrink and the industry becomes ever more conservative and cautious. The judges picked well: Kokomo is a fine début, a wry romantic comedy with both literary and popular appeal. The title comes from the Beach Boys serenade about a tropical island paradise. The singer invites his ‘pretty mama’ to get away from it all with him, so they can fall in love and perfect their chemistry. At one point, Mina’s ex sings the song at a karaoke bar and there are comments from various characters about how Kokomo isn’t a tropical island at all, it’s a city in Indiana, and certainly not a place you’d want to escape to. Kokomo stands for that elusive and illusionary thing called love, and as the novel unfolds the certainty of that first sentence is undermined at every turn. Hannan is writing about love in the context of female longing and yearning for a place that can’t be reached, a sense of something missing that can’t be found but that doesn’t stop you trying. It might be a sense of early creative ambitions unfulfilled or of someone else having a better life than you, but more often it’s a romantic need. Usually, but not always, that something missing is man-shaped. The two main characters experiencing this longing are Mina and her widowed mother, Elaine. For most of the story we are in Mina’s head, a messy place reminiscent of Bridget Jones’s Diary, with the comedy turned down a notch or two and the pathos turned up. At thirty-two, Mina is an up-and-coming hotshot in a London advertising agency, earning good money and ripe for

promotion (Hannan’s experience as a creative director has been useful here). But behind the successful façade chaos is brewing. When she puts her passion for workmate Jack on hold to return to her home town, Mina finds Elaine passive and uncommunicative, totally unable to explain why she has suddenly left the house after twelve years. It was Mina’s inability to deal with Elaine’s apparently all-consuming agoraphobia, rather than her own ambition, that finally sent her to London, and all her ghosts are waiting to greet her on her return. It’s not just romantic or parental love that eludes Mina: everything is always slightly, maddeningly out of reach. Over the road is the Cheng family, who have made a warm loving home while her own house stays chilly. Her best friend from school, Kira Cheng, is impossibly beautiful; her other friend, Shelly, is set up in a picture-perfect designer home with an adoring husband and adorable twin boys (Hannan has a sly and funny way of describing their adorable awfulness).

This is writing that trembles on the edge of silliness but is saved by irony It is not always possible to like needy Mina as she drifts around, frantically scrolling to find affirmation on her phone, envying her friends, getting wasted and getting high, and expressing all her petulant self-pity, but Hannan keep us onside with keen observation and sharp humour. At a bit past the halfway mark, we slip into Elaine’s point of view and discover the reason for her reticence. I don’t want to reveal too much; suffice to say she has been chasing that elusive thing in an entirely different way from her daughter. The vivid Elaine scenes have a tenderness, power, and urgency that made me sit up and take notice. One of Hannan’s strengths as a writer is the words she finds to describe this existential female longing in terms of the body and the domestic. Mina longs to be filled up. On Jack: ‘She’d let him open her up and put his whole body inside her body, to move around and live inside her if that’s what he wanted.’ On love: ‘She wanted to be taken apart and put back together, a kettle filled, boiled, emptied and refilled again.’ Hannan’s female characters are strongly drawn, including Kira’s mother, Valerie, a force of nature who gives Mina the intimacy she can’t get elsewhere. By comparison, Hannan’s male characters are not observed so closely, but that fits the point of view that regards men as love objects who may be infinitely desirable and infinitely disappointing. Sometimes novels of this kind take the easy way out with a feel-good ending. Kokomo isn’t tragic, but neither does it pander to the happily-ever-after brigade. Mina becomes less silly and more understanding, but the secrets revealed won’t solve anything and love is still a mystery that really doesn’t fill you up. You just take it on its own terms, and with luck you also learn to give. One of Mina’s early ambitions, never fulfilled, was to ditch the advertising agency and write a novel. In a sense, Victoria Hannan has done it for her. g Jane Sullivan’s latest book is a bibliomemoir, Storytime (2019). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Fiction

Feelings of impendment Richard Ford’s new short stories Don Anderson

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 255 pp

ichard Ford, born in 1944, is a North American novelist, short story writer, and anthologist of considerable distinction. His recurring character Frank Bascombe – The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank with You (2014) – is a commanding figure of American letters to rank with John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, each a protagonist used by his creator over several novels as a litmus test of his contemporaries and their not always united states. Frank Bascombe does not make an appearance in the nine stories that constitute Ford’s latest collection, Sorry for Your Trouble; nor do any of them bear the book’s title. So many focus on deaths that the book might have been titled ‘Sorry for Your Loss’. Since Ford has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the 2019 Library of Congress Award for American Fiction, among countless others, I guess he can call his book whatever he damned well pleases. Seven of the nine stories are short. The two longest, ‘The Run of Yourself ’ and ‘Second Language’, clock in at around fifty pages. They, in particular, reward not only reading but rereading. The opening sentence of the former is bald enough. ‘The second summer after Peter Boyce’s wife died, he decided he’d rent the little house near the end of Cod Cove Road.’ The latter, ‘Second Language’, takes four pages to get to the nitty gritty. Jonathan and Mary Linn Bell are youngish – he is forty-six – rich, and blissfully married Democrats. Jonathan has copious plans for them. All of which would very likely have taken place if one spring morning at breakfast, with impeccable mountain light streaming in over the meadow, and snow still on the peaks, Mary Linn hadn’t sat down with a cup of tea, looked across the table at Johnny, smiled curiously and remarked that she’d probably feel better if she would just lay her head on her folded hands for a moment, which she did. And died before Johnny could reach to touch her. She had cancer – the Idaho doctor said – something deep, deep within her limbic lobe. Dying was likely the only real symptom she’d experienced.

The reader, or this reader at least, is no less shocked than Jonathan. ‘Second Language’, like many of the stories in Sorry for Your Trouble, becomes a tale of a second marriage. The relative length of the story permits it to concentrate on divorce, old age, and death. I have been reading Richard Ford since the mid-1980s, and I have been reviewing him since 1990. He never ceases to delight. 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

I understand from a bespoke bookseller friend that my review of Wildlife (1990) in the National Times offended Ford, which was not my intention. I have since learned that Ford is quick to take offence at reviewers. Colson Whitehead, for one, records that Ford spat on him at a literary gathering, declaring: ‘You spat on my book in your review, so I spit on you.’ I still treasure the burning bear in Wildlife as I treasure Michael Fitzjames’s graphic, which illustrated my review. Richard Ford and I have grown old together, as have his characters. This would appear to be a serious consideration for at least one American reviewer of Ford, Zachary Hoole, who wrote: Even though I turn 45 years old this year, it felt as though these stories weren’t for me. Ford is in his mid-70s, and most of his characters in this collection are in their 50s and beyond. I felt as though I was still too young to fully grasp or understand [what] these vignettes of love and death were all about. The book was probably, in many ways, wasted on me.

Gobsmacked is how this leaves me. One can only wish this reviewer a long life so that he may derive pleasure if not instruction from Ford – Richard or Ford Madox, or any other writer of maturity. Texts test the critic, rather than the other way around. Ripeness is all. ‘Good choices don’t make very good stories,’ says Barbara early in the first story, ‘Nothing to Declare’, a declaration that states a dominant theme of the book. Her ex-boyfriend, Sandy McGuinness, disagrees. This apparently realist book (remember ‘Dirty Realism’?) is larded with literary echoes that take it out of the quotidian into the ethereal. Virginia Woolf, especially Mrs Dalloway, and Henry James, whose The Portrait of a Lady is quoted, play a role, and I would like to think I hear echoes of Philip Larkin whose ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ ends: … We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Here is the climactic moment of Ford’s story ‘Leaving for Kenosha’, in which the narrator drives his daughter to dinner after she has bid farewell to a school friend whose family is leaving for Kenosha because of the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans. And for that instant, Walter Hobbes experienced a sensation of something being about to happen. A feeling of impendment – not necessarily bad or good, just something in the offing. Though he knew that if he only paused in his thinking, as he’d recently learned to do, didn’t follow his thoughts all the way to where they led, or came from, then this sensation of impendment could subside.

The Larkin is more concentrated, but then it is poetry. But both the poetry and the prose are full of a sense of wonder. Both are instances of what James Joyce might have called ‘epiphany’, the essence of great writing. g Don Anderson first wrote for ABR in 1982.

Fiction

Panic attack

family works as a kind of counterpoint, a way of demonstrating everything that Tom is not and is unlikely to ever be. Almost everything else that accounts for plot occurs as A remarkably assured début memory, mostly where Tom reflects on the last holiday that he Fiona Wright and Clara took together. This was a decade ago, before his anxiety became disabling and both of their lives settled into their present groove, with regular (if dissatisfying) work, a home (albeit one that is rented and grotty), and a small circle of friends. That holiday had been a gap year of sorts, which the pair did ‘before they got serious about things’, and involved some of the usual stops – Thailand, Laos, Germany – as well as a month spent working on The Fogging farms in France. It is this month in particular that Tom thinks by Luke Horton about in Bali, in no small part because it precipitated a temporary Scribe breakup, the cause of which he has never quite understood but also $29.99 pb, 240 pp never discussed with Clara. This clever device offers hints about uke Horton’s novel The Fogging opens with a panic attack. exactly what is happening now, even as Tom remains oblivious Tom, the book’s protagonist, begins to tremble and sweat to the undercurrents of emotion that are eddying around him. when the flight he is on – from Melbourne to Denpasar – Tom’s failure, then, is largely one of empathy. He is so caught hits turbulence. Tom is travelling with his long-term girlfriend, up in his own feelings and reactions, his own interior life, that he Clara, on a holiday they have organised more out of duty than is unable to appreciate the interior life of his partner and the ways from any real desire for travel, having booked their flights to in which it might be different to his own. He is aware that he use up his mother’s Frequent Flyer points. The turbulence wakes and Clara don’t talk about their small conflicts or discuss their Tom’s ‘ringing nerves’ and anxiety starts ‘chewing his insides’, decisions, but genuinely believes that they don’t have to. He never making him ‘shimmer’ and ‘pulse’. He panreally sees Clara or appreciates her personics, or comes close to panicking, a number of hood and agency: in many ways, Tom offers times throughout the novel. Horton’s hana portrait of a kind of masculinity common dling of this – directly, sensorially, compasin young men, one which is well-meaning sionately – is remarkable. Tom’s panic attacks and non-violent, but devastatingly harmful are always vivid and bodily, and they always nonetheless. But Horton’s depiction is not feel true to life. It’s rare to see this achieved unkind, and Tom is never completely unlikeso well in fiction. able. We see his damage and his efforts to do Tom’s anxiety, his illness, is ever-present and be his best, and there’s a real skill in the in The Fogging, always sitting just below the way that Horton balances this character and surface of the text, or, to use the book’s own keeps the reader connected to him, despite his metaphor, always hovering in the air and bad behaviour and his flaws. clouding both Tom’s judgement and the perThe Fogging also does a beautiful job spective he offers the reader. Tom is rarely of capturing some of the complexities of Luke Horton (Scribe) comfortable and easily embarrassed, acutely place, and of tourists in Bali, especially aware of his own body and the impression as the event from which the book takes he is surely making on others, always alert for humiliation and its name – a thick, chemical spraying of pesticide all over shame. So much of what happens to him happens internally – the resort – causes its main crisis. The fogging is a practice the reader is privy to this in considerable detail – and this comes that is entirely for the benefit of tourists, and one that is arat the expense of any clear-eyed appraisal of what is going on tificial and poisonous; it is both demanded and despised by around him. the people whom it services. More importantly, it is obscurThis effect is heightened by the fact that not much happens in ing and insidious, like so much of what passes between the the novel. Tom and Clara’s holiday mostly involves sitting on the characters. beach or around a pool or eating in restaurants. This means that The Fogging, a remarkably assured début, is bold and striking the novel unfolds almost entirely inside Tom’s mind, which gives in its approach and voice. Horton has great control over his charthe narrative a sense of claustrophobia and a mounting intensity acters and their perspectives; he unfurls the narrative slowly and that grows increasingly disquieting. When it does open up, it is with considerable subtlety. Tom’s illness, in particular, is handled because of a young family that Tom and Clara meet beside the with generosity, directness, and an acute awareness of the effect resort pool, whose presence complicates the interactions and that it has, the constraints it places on him, and the people he loves. observations that Tom is relaying. The family – the charismatic The book is a portrait of indecision and inarticulateness, and the Madeline, her more taciturn partner, Jeremy, and their five-year- havoc they can wreak, however quietly and unintentionally, upon old son Ollie – have a simpler and more settled way of being than a life. g Tom is used to. Madeline is talkative and demonstrative, while so much that passes between Tom and Clara is left unsaid. The Fiona Wright is a writer, editor, and critic from Sydney.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Fiction

One true note A novella soars Josephine Taylor

Murmurations by Carol Lefevre

Spinifex Press $24.95 pb, 112 pp

arol Lefevre has shown herself adept at exploring connection and alienation in different genres. In The Happiness Glass (2018), the ambiguous zone between fiction and memoir forms a creative space within which Lefevre plumbs the intricacies of motherhood and loss; home and exile. Murmurations is imbued with similar tropes, the slight heft of the book belying its ethical density and the scope of its narrative ambition. The novella, which comprises eight discrete yet interlocking stories, focuses on the lives of six couples who socialised during the second wave of feminism. Opening years later with the funeral of Erris Cleary, one of the women in the group, Murmurations revolves around the mystery of her death – doubts initiated by the discovery of disturbing audio fragments in her husband’s recordings of medical letters. The past is seen through the eyes of four of the remaining women; the other stories are from the perspective of four different characters, three of whom may be crucial in bringing to light a monstrous wrong. The stories, set in varying times between the 1960s and the narrative present, move back and forth in time internally, dwelling on the implications of earlier decisions, with the absence of Erris an urgent presence throughout. While the first story offers mysteries, the second, ‘Little Buddhas Everywhere’, introduces primary characters and pivotal incidents from the past. In Claire Delaney’s memories, we find ‘progressive dinners, curry nights, fondues and fire pots’ shared by a social set of white heterosexual couples. The women in the group are affected differently by the feminist movement, with most rebelling against norms: Erris channels Jay Gatsby at a fancy dress party, dancing with ‘flame-haired’ Delia Harper; Annie Darkley makes a startling announcement at a dinner party before abandoning her family; Jeanie Tarrant neglects her duties as wife and mother in expeditions to Bailey’s Wood. Others carry out quiet struggles that end in capitulation, or cling to the gendered roles of a marriage even after it has ended. It is tempting to interpret feminism and misogyny as the principle concerns of Murmurations, but this assumption is undercut through, in one story, the wielding of abuse by a woman. Botched attempts at liberation can equally be interpreted as failure in the dreams characters have about their lives. Lefevre’s more pressing intention is signalled by the yoking together of strategies inspired by art and biology. In sustaining two disparate and competing orientations – one towards isolation or absence, the other towards empathy or presence – tension is generated, attention 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

compelled, and ethical complacency challenged. It is a brilliant manoeuvre. Lefevre writes in the acknowledgments that the novella is set in ‘the daunting urban landscapes’ of paintings by Edward Hopper, ‘pictures in which absence is as compelling and eloquent as presence’. The whole is ekphrastic, with each story a response to an individual work of art. In some, the painting remains as a trace; in others, the equivalence is striking. In ‘After the Island’, Emily visits a self-service café, the scene reproducing Hopper’s Automat (1927) with uncanny precision: a young woman in a green coat turns inward in contemplation, one ungloved hand lifting a ‘chunky’ china cup; the room and her plate are empty, the empty chair at her table foregrounded; the reflected lights in the window behind her stretch into a dark infinity. Faithful to this mood, Lefevre has created places that could be anywhere in the Western world. While the setting in each story is established through precise details in wildlife, vegetation and cultural habit, the author unsettles recognition by drawing these elements from different regions. Without place names and in shifting terrain, we are un-homed, exiled from the familiar. Alienation and absence are countered by an appeal to what connects us as humans: ‘The change in the behavioural state of one animal affects and is affected by that of all other animals in the group, no matter how large the group is’ (the epigraph). A murmuration is a large group of birds, typically starlings, that fly as one and change direction together. It is also the act of doing this – noun and verb. How might the simultaneous movements of a flock of birds translate into human behaviour? Lizbie Menick understands disaster as ‘dumb fate’, ‘the swerving patterns you can never see’; in reflecting on her life, Jeanie Tarrant believes ‘it only takes the slightest shift in purpose to spin a life off course’, then ‘countless lives soar and plunge amid trails of sparks and burning debris’. Moreover, memory is revealed as fallible, the ‘truth’ of past actions grounded in assumptions and personal prejudice, while malevolence is active in the fates of several of the characters. The narrative increasingly pivots on intertwining acts of kindness and courage. In the first story, Emily recalls learning to read from the Hippocratic Oath, and resolving to honour its motto: ‘First, do no harm’. Actual and metaphorical birds and cages are invoked with cumulative urgency, while seemingly peripheral characters are called to respond to the mystery of Erris Cleary. In the final story, it is a writer’s task to strike ‘one true note’ that might crack ‘the obliterating silence’ of failure and shame. In summoning what is best in a writer, Lefevre is modelling the impulse to imagine and empathise, and the capacity to maintain – even through discouragement – hope, humility, and resolve. In Murmurations, the strategies Carol Lefevre deploys are ethical as well as creative, and are informed by intelligent compassion. Even if we can never truly know one another, Lefevre suggests that the attempt to connect is imperative. We might know the states that unite us in flashes of grace; we might be moved when the flock turns as one. g Josephine Taylor’s début novel, Eye of a Rook, will be published by Fremantle Press in February 2021.

Fiction

The weight of giftedness

Muranging’s story

Astrid Edwards

Jessica Urwin

An explicit début

A thought-provoking historical novel

A Lonely Girl Is A Dangerous Thing

Benevolence

Allen & Unwin $29.95 pb, 290 pp

Magabala Books $19.99 pb, 338 pp

by Julie Janson

by Jessie Tu

hat a title, and what a début novel. Jessie Tu brings us Jena Lin, a twenty-two-year-old Asian Australian sex addict who was once a violin prodigy fêted around the world. She is a character to remember. The reader knows this from the beginning, and the compelling narrative tension is driven by the slow revelation of an event that occurred seven years before the novel begins. This is an exploration of sex, but from a perspective rarely – if ever – surveyed this way in literature. Here we explore sex and sex addiction from a woman’s perspective; we are spared no details, including masturbation and violent pornography. This work intends to make a statement, which is to be expected from a literary novel with ‘cunt’ on the first page. In A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing, Tu takes us through the shame and danger that can be part and parcel of extreme sex with strangers, but she also makes clear that there can be moments of tenderness and a path to empowerment. While sex is central to the story, Tu does not let it overwhelm the other themes she confronts head on. This is a work that explores the weight of giftedness. What is the life of a child prodigy? What choices do they have? And what can they become? A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing also provides a steady stream of observations and commentary about race, gender, sexual mores, female friendship, and the failures of family. Tu’s observations about race are particularly relevant given the questions reverberating around the world in 2020. The language is deft and the detail brilliant – the character of Jena Lin feels alive on the page. Jena’s choices, questions, and motivations are fascinating, and her constant practising of the violin only a moment away. With A Lonely Girl Is A Dangerous Thing, Tu has made a remarkable and strong entry into the national literary scene. Tu herself trained as a classical violinist, and, as with all first novels, one can’t help but wonder how much of her is in this work. That said, this is not Tu’s first work. In 2018 she published her first poetry collection, You Should Have Told Me We Have Nothing Left. g Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing. She teaches writing at RMIT University and serves on the Board of the Melbourne Writers Festival. She is also one of the founding members of the Book Industry Climate Action Group.

‘Y

ou not waibala, you not blackfella. You in between.’ So Granny Wiring tells Muranging, the protagonist in Julie Janson’s latest thought-provoking novel, Benevolence. While this is not Janson’s first foray into historical fiction – The Light Horse Ghost was published in 2018 – it is a tale close to her heart. While Benevolence is based on the oral histories of Darug elders and the archival snippets of her own great-great-grandmother, Janson’s characters evoke notions of belonging and benevolence in early settler Australia. Primarily set on Darug country between 1813 and 1842, Benevolence draws attention to the survival and adaptation of Aboriginal communities in the face of the destruction wrought by colonialism. In the opening pages, Muranging is abandoned by her father and handed over to The Native Institution; confused, she watches her father walk away. Located on the outskirts of Paramatta, this ‘benevolent’ institution seeks to deliver Aboriginal children from sin through Christian education and discipline. Here, Muranging experiences both love and loss, friendship and betrayal, but her overwhelming feeling is one of entrapment. Muranging is haunted by her existence midway between settler society and her Burreberongal roots. In this way, Muranging encapsulates the duality of Aboriginal contact with settlers in the early nineteenth century: settlers are – at times – vital for her survival, but contact is also very often overwhelmed by fear, longing, and a loss of identity. Janson’s experience as a playwright is evident in her telling of Muranging’s story: the prose is decidedly to the point; the novel’s twists and turns rush by at breakneck speed; days, weeks, months, and years pass in the space of a paragraph; and the nuances of Muranging’s situation are diluted by the sheer pace of the story. But the text’s undulation evokes the ever-changing interactions between settlers and Aboriginal populations following settlement, giving voice to an oft-overlooked Aboriginal perspective. In embracing this perspective, Benevolence evokes anxieties tied to the author’s own Aboriginality. Janson told Writing NSW that rage fuelled her writing of Benevolence: ‘I was tired of being told … that I wasn’t Aboriginal. The tiny drops of Darug blood that run in my veins are important.’ Throughout Benevolence, the reader is overwhelmed by the intensity of Muranging’s desire to reconnect with her land, culture, ancestry, and identity, vitally refracting Janson’s own desires. g Jessica Urwin is a PhD student in the School of History at ANU.❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Egg Timer by C.J. Garrow

t was important that no one took your photograph because you didn’t want to end up a rude picture for bad men to download. We were very sure of that, very certain in our certainty. ‘Noah Potnik has a program,’ Felix and Otis swore, ‘that strips the clothes from any photo to show what the person looks like underneath.’ Noah Potnik had nude pictures of Gal Gadot and Emma Watson and Gigi Hadid, and Felix and Otis told how he’d flashed these images to them with a horrible grin on the bus one afternoon, their eyes growing as big as paper plates because with this power a person could X-ray past the clothes of anyone they wanted, but that meant that even though for some reason Noah Potnik didn’t have any pictures of boys it must be possible that they, too – Felix and Otis – could end up flying around the internet where people would stare at them with their clothes off. We all nodded and pretended to know a lot about that, because at nine it was important to pretend to know a lot about the internet. We were suspicious of nice people photographing us too, actually, especially our parents, due to another thing we pretended to know about the internet. Indigo Munro’s brother had let her use his laptop to watch YouTube but left the kids’ lock off, so she decided to search Google to see if anyone else shared her name, and if so would they like to be her pen pal. What she found instead was herself. All over Instagram and on her mum’s Facebook she saw her own face gazing back, shiny and peach-coloured, smiling in every shot, at beachside kiosks or in front of waterfalls or waiting in line for under-age concerts she couldn’t even remember, and she said she felt this sickly hot bubble rising in her throat because she had finally gotten onto the internet only to find that she was already there. The photos weren’t really her, though, because Indi didn’t like big crowds whereas the girl in these photos beamed confidence and pride and was totally happy being on the internet where anyone could look at her. Even Noah Potnik, said Big Vivaan, with a concerned stare. Indigo scowled. She said it was like when something you thought you knew really well suddenly feels strange. Do you mean like when you drink orange juice after brushing your teeth? asked Luna, but that wasn’t what Indi meant. She said it was more like if you snuck into your parents’ room and found a 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

secret cupboard where they kept another version of you but it was a robot. Whenever they went to parties they would bring this life-sized doll version of you and show how it could do all of the Fortnite dances and it never got grumpy even when the parents teased it and they definitely never caught it eating dried flies off the windowsill. We all imagined our own parents with such replicas, this secret army closeted away in every home across the globe. It was a horrible thought, and we banished it by teasing Indi mercilessly until she cried, which only made things worse because it meant she really did think there was a robot Indigo Munro somewhere out there, because if she really didn’t think so then why did she get so upset? At the same time we all began to shy away from cameras. So many images from that era are of smeared cheeks caught midturn, eyes dipped or shoulder raised in defence, some instinct for self-preservation forcing us into retreat. Another one of the things we all pretended to know about was bloody bodies. We lived dangerous lives back then. The perils we faced daily were many. Peanuts, which could murder your friends. North Korea. The one per cent. Anti-vaccinations. Spiders were deadly but also needed saving (most really deadly animals needed saving). Bad men. Despite all of this we never saw properly bloody bodies. Minecraft and Star Wars didn’t have blood. We’d all had cuts and scabs and Luna had some story about her sister wearing a jumper around her waist, but the closest we had come to a real visible reminder of death was Jack Lumm because he smoked so many cigarettes that people called him Black Lung and everyone said he would die coughing up blood. If we’d been allowed to play football we might have had the chance to see some real bloody bodies. That was the best place to see someone really hit someone else and pretend it was an accident. It was hard to figure out why hitting was bad but smashing was good. Smashing avocados made them really expensive. Big Vivaan’s older brother was always trying to make him jealous with tales of all the things he smashed. He smashed burgers. He smashed boxes. He smashed pussies. But somehow even Big Vivaan’s big brother didn’t seem to get bloody.

I had one story about blood I told frequently, and it had even more currency because it involved Noah Potnik. We were all scared of Noah Potnik, not just because of the nude photos. We’d find his name all over our suburb, carved into benches, burnt into the backs of bus seats. He was everywhere and nowhere, which was doubly scary because he also lived next door to me. One evening I slid out the back door, careful not to let our new kitten Cirocco escape, and leapt up to dangle from the lemon tree in our backyard. I was hauling myself up onto the branch when the crash of a screen door flung shut yanked me from my reverie. From my elevated vantage I could see over the side fence to the Potnik yard. The place was waist-high with grey-yellow grass, interrupted by an occasional island of sun-faded lawn furniture or plastic toys from back when Noah was little. He was in his teens now, and I watched as he slunk across the yard in the growing purple gloom to the corrugated iron shed with the drooping roof. He stepped into its shadow and pressed a small black gadget to his pursed lips, and moments later his entire head disappeared into a roiling grey nimbus. I looked back at his house. It was a double-storey place like ours except their hospital-green weatherboards were coming away in places. Some of the windows were covered by yellowing newspaper, but through the nearest I could see into the Potnik’s kitchen. Mr Potnik was standing at the sink, grating cheese onto a plastic board, and when he was done he swiped the cheese onto a bowl of something steaming. He then lifted the board to his face and even at this distance I could make out his tiny pointed tongue stabbing at whatever cheese remnants clung to it. On his shoulders danced the blue light of a TV glow. A vase of dying flowers squatted on the kitchen table. There was always a vase of dead flowers at the Potniks’ house, which is why to this day dead flowers make me think of when I was a kid. I looked back to the garden to find Noah regarding me with a snarl. His face was tight. His nostrils flared like a camel’s. And almost as if he willed it, a single prick of red appeared from one of them and slowly began to descend towards his mouth. I released my grip on the branch and dropped to the decking. I tried to find wellness because wellness was important. A thing we universally did was pretend not to be upset. That’s how Indigo Munro made things worse for herself, by getting so visibly upset. Kyle McFerrell could walk into a room and immediately know if someone was the sort of person to get upset. We knew other kids who would corner you in the toilets or the bike lockup and give you paper cuts or threaten to shave your head, but these kids kept their torture practices to the shadows. Kyle was one of the few who openly paraded their villainy. He’d ask you if you were a virgin in front of all of your friends, and of course you didn’t know what to answer at nine. He waited until the hallway outside homeroom was crowded before tripping you up so that your books went flying, and then ask loudly why you were throwing your stuff at people. Sometimes Kyle’s punch-ups actually came with a schedule, and if you didn’t turn up at the designated time you’d face an even worse fate. No one was ever bullied, to be clear. To us, bullying existed exclusively in the world of children, the same world that claimed exclusive custodianship of Babybels and toy libraries and Ninjago. When an adult accused you of being bullied, they were reminding

you that you had so much growing up to do. There was also the fact that bullies didn’t think of themselves as bullies, or we would all have behaved pretty differently at one point or another. And then there was the sad truth that bullies could at least claim relevance. Everyone laughed at Kyle McFerrell’s jokes, because they didn’t want to be his next target. Kyle’s power was publicity, and some kids responded to that power by pretending Kyle was really tough and funny and original, when really he was probably just repeating lines he’d endured from older kids or siblings or possibly even his own parents. Mr Otomo was always trying to high-five kids. He would get snarly if you left him hanging. When he noticed that other kids treated Kyle McFerrell as if he was the coolest member of their year, he directed his high fives exclusively to him. Even when we were communicating via video link from his house stuffed with ferns, he would always pause after reading Kyle’s name in the roll call and raise his hand to the camera. When a teacher sides with a bully, you might as well give up. To this day, there’s little that inspires pity in me so much as a grown-up aching for a child’s approval. Anyway, when someone Zoombombed a grade nine class with a video of a penis, a rumour began circulating that the police had tracked the video to Kyle McFerrell. Nothing ever came of the rumour, but it was enough to completely vaporise his power. From then on when we logged on for homeroom Kyle’s bedroom was dimly lit, and his silhouette was so still that I would wonder if his feed had frozen until some tiny shiver would give away life. We all pretended to be relevant. I thought having a new kitten would make me relevant, but everyone was getting cats or dogs, and having Cirocco meant we had to keep all of the doors of the house closed so she wouldn’t escape and run under the wheels of a car. Over time we did begin to feel relevant, though. We were discussed. Our parents sometimes referred to us as a ‘wartime generation’. They said we were being forced to endure the kind of suffering and shortages faced by their great-grandparents, and while I’ll grant that there were echoes between our lives, you have to consider that the greatest generation didn’t have Animal Crossing. Of course, we attained even greater relevance later. Our emotional health has been monitored like radiation levels. We were worried over. It was worried that we would be an anxious generation, and we worried about our anxiety. It was very important not to be anxious, too, which only compounded the situation. Being on the internet, that was something we all pretended to do. We boasted about downloading and status updates and likes as if we knew what we were talking about. At the same time we worried that we were on the internet, zooming around as naked photos or robot versions of ourselves or just from all the surveillance, which we heard our parents talking about a lot. There were invisible cameras in the streets that could take your photo. When my mum said that, I said well Jack Lumm must be a celebrity because he lives on the street and there must be a billion photos of him. My mum looked like she’d been stung by an insect and said what a terrible thing to say, Jack Lumm was homeless and I shouldn’t make jokes. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

I couldn’t see how I was the bad person. Jack Lumm used to do jobs for people all around our neighbourhood, but now nobody wanted him in their house and he didn’t have his own house any more for some reason. Now that Jack Lumm was on the street all day he would drink alcohol and wet his pants and weep openly. I once asked my mum why he was crying and she said it was because he wasn’t believable. Believable? I asked. I said ‘grievable’, she replied. When he died no one would care. I thought about how my friends would care because of the coughing blood, but I held my tongue. She said it all in a very matter-of-fact way, like she was explaining how Tap Pay works, but beneath her words I sensed deep reservoirs of feeling I couldn’t name. I was very attentive to feelings I couldn’t name. Once I waited until the backyard was fully dark before climbing the lemon tree, hugging the branches tightly. I knew Noah Potnik regularly waded into the sea of dried grass to suck on his vape thingy and if it was dark enough I sometimes hid in the tree to watch him. As if I was a hidden camera too. That night Noah wasn’t vaping but was instead pulling faces. Thinking himself unobserved, he rearranged his features into a series of increasingly exaggerated scowls and grimaces. I couldn’t understand why he would be practising such different expressions, some of which bordered on the comical, but none of us even pretended to understand teenagers. We pretended to understand grown-ups. Until a certain age they’d represented a united front. Then we were told we were not to talk to Jack Lumm, even though he had been in most of our houses. It made us realise that maybe grown-ups aren’t all on the same team. Luna’s dad started up his own YouTube trying to pioneer double-style pasta, which is where you use two different kinds of pasta in the same dish, and I spied on my parents prancing around our kitchen copying him. ‘Forty-eight likes can’t be wrong,’ they chortled. And he was supposed to be their friend. I wondered if it was possible to fully understand anyone older than you. Then again, they didn’t seem to understand me at all, and so I wondered if it was possible to understand someone younger than you. Or to understand anyone, really. We pretended to understand a lot but didn’t realise how much the grown-ups were pretending to understand too. I didn’t much like the music my dad played, so I asked him if he had heard about Tupac and he said, ‘Here we go, what’s he done now?’ Which proved that he hadn’t heard about Tupac, because the one thing everyone knows about Tupac is that he got shot dead. Then there was the time Mr Otomo was acting really weird in a Zoom class and without warning started singing a funny song about being all by yourself and when we all laughed he got a bit teary and said, ‘Do you like it? Do you really think I’m a real cool teacher?’ When I told my mum she went quiet and chewed her lips and after a while said that Mr Otomo’s partner had decided to stay at someone else’s house when all of this started. Going to other people’s houses quickly took on mythical status. It might be why mail carriers were treated like angels, as if their ability to move from home to home, pausing on each threshold, was evidence of some higher level of being. It feels connected to the way we still revere delivery people and couriers, the bringers of stuff, the only people who could convey to us the 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

spoils of toy stores, game shops, all of the forbidden places. It could be why so many of us still harbour the desire, again well researched, to screw a postie. Cirocco was scratching at the back door, but I ignored her. I was busy seeing how high I could throw my Bumblebee without it breaking on the deck when I misjudged my footing and could only stare in horror as the Transformer arced up and over the fence into the Potniks’ domain. With a blazing fire in my cheeks I scrambled up the lemon tree and surveyed the yard. It was empty of life. The house was dark. I could have left Bumblebee to his fate, but I’d borrowed him from Otis back before all of this began and as soon as he was able I knew he’d be over to demand him back. I clambered up onto the barbecue in its grey plastic raincoat. From here I could hoist myself onto the fence. Eyeing the house for any motion, I dipped my runners into the grass. Ducking low I began to search among the tall blades, heart louder than the techno the Petronas boys blared when cruising the street. At times I reached clearings where some discarded toy had kept the grass from growing – a pink plastic shopping cart on its side, a T-Rex missing its forearms, a shredded paddling pool – but grew increasingly certain that Bumblebee would never be found. I almost headbutted the two skinny legs wrapped in black denim. ‘Well well well well well,’ said Noah Potnik. ‘Guess I picked the wrong day to quit murdering people.’ He took a long hit from his vaporiser as I backed away on all fours. ‘Are you going to take my photo?’ I whispered. He wrinkled his nose, baffled. ‘Why would I want your photo?’ ‘To take my clothes off with your computer,’ I murmured. His confusion only deepened and I worried it would give way to aggression. I hastily explained how Otis and Felix had seen his pictures of Gal Gadot and Emma Watson and his eyes widened in alarm as he asked if they’d been peeping over his shoulder and no no no, I said, he’d showed the pictures to them and then he was back in his bewildered state asking why the hell would he show sexy pictures to little kids, and anyway that app that can take people’s clothes off was just a myth, nobody had anything that could do that and I clocked that he was being very serious, very sincere, and I asked how could he be sure though? ‘I am extremely online,’ he said. Just then came a sound like a walrus giving birth and both of our eyebrows shot skyward. He turned to look back at his house and then flashed me a mischievous face. ‘Do you want to see something funny?’ I nodded in abject terror. Noah took my elbow and guided me towards the back of his house. ‘Have you noticed how everyone’s constipated?’ he asked. Constipation we were all interested in. ‘It’s because everyone’s at home,’ he went on. ‘Some people’s bodies just aren’t programmed to shit within earshot.’ A thrill rippled up my spine at his choice of words. He pointed to a window whose flyscreen flapped slightly. I lifted myself onto my toes and peered in, hands cupped around my eyes. In the dim light a figure bowed low, hands dangling by their ankles, and as another seismic groan erupted I recognised it was Mr Potnik on the toilet. Almost as if I’d said something out loud

he suddenly shot up and his jowly bulldog face was staring directly at my own. With a start he began blustering about and yelling worse words than Noah had said and I dropped back onto my heels and sprinted for my fence, thoughts of Noah and Bumblebee and Otis and Felix’s lie whisked away in the afternoon wind. When I pulled open the back door of our house I saw down the long corridor that our front door was open as well, my parents framing the rectangle in which Mr Potnik was waving wildly. What kind of peeping freak are you raising, he screamed, what the fuck is going on, distancing, educate your child for fuck’s sake, there’s a three-year-old on our other side who gets it. My dad sensed my presence and asked me to join them. I slunk the length of the hallway, staying just shy of the square of light that fell in from the porch. ‘Did you go next door?’ asked Mum. ‘But Mum,’ I pleaded. ‘Noah let me.’ All eyes turned to Noah. He shook his head, even though his eyes gave away the truth. I realised at that instant that ever since he’d confronted me I’d been able to read everything Noah was feeling, that I’d never seen a face that so blatantly gave up all that was going on behind it. And I knew that Noah had been on my side out there in the yard, but that Mr Potnik was the person he had to share a home with, and so I decided that his betrayal was at least understandable. ‘Jesus shit!’ my dad yelled as Cirocco cannonballed out the front door and into the night. The next morning I stepped out into the backyard to find Bumblebee sunbathing on the deck with a little bandanna parachute tied to his shoulders. I climbed the lemon tree. Noah was sitting on a plastic fold-out chair among the grass, earphones trailing down his shirtfront. He was staring towards the back lane, mouth occasionally twitching as half-formed words struggled to escape. ‘Have you seen our cat?’ I called. He reacted as if I’d fired a shotgun. Regaining his composure, he shook his head. ‘Not a fan of the whole animal community.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Just stuff and stuff.’ ‘What are you listening to?’ He shrugged. ‘Just sad Soundcloud rappers.’ I looked down at Bumblebee and then up at the Potnik residence. ‘Am I in trouble?’ I asked. ‘Everyone’s in trouble,’ said Noah. He was about to continue when a colossal crashing of glass somewhere nearby drowned his words. ‘There didn’t used to be so much recycling, have you noticed? But to go back to your question,’ he exhaled, ‘if you want to know if my dad’s forgotten your very existence, then it’s thumbsy uppies for you.’ Something beneath my ribs unwound itself. Noah exhaled a puff of gas and then sucked it up his nose. He smirked, satisfied. ‘That’s French,’ he said, and then puffed Frenchily again. I thought about things to talk about. The things I talked about with my friends didn’t seem relevant. I asked him if he had any models I could look at, like model airplanes or tanks or anything. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I do.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything else so I just stared around his yard. There was grass growing from the guttering of the house. After a while he removed his earbuds. ‘I’ve been told I’m hard to read,’ he said. ‘But I’ve always loved a closed book. So many possibilities.’ I felt awkward about the fact that Noah was the opposite of a closed book, and so I said, ‘Okay, well, bye,’ and slid down the branch. But the next day after class I leapt up onto the barbecue to see if Noah was there again. This time I found him sitting on a pile of bricks just below me, writing in a notebook. I caught a glimpse of the page, on which he’d written his full name dozens of times. I thought about how he’d done the same thing on buses and train platforms and park benches all over our neighbourhood, and for a second wondered why a person would want strangers to happen upon their name. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. He snapped the book shut and looked up, embarrassed. ‘Studying.’ ‘For what?’ ‘Exams.’ I remembered that Noah was in Year 12. My mum had said something about how hard it must be for kids his age, because the whole last year of school should be something special that bonds people together for life. Instead he would spend a vital rite of passage alone. ‘Do you miss your friends?’ I asked him. His face clouded, brows furrowing up. ‘Being my age isn’t really working out so well. I’m eager to move forward.’ I didn’t understand and I told him so. He looked as though he’d eaten something that didn’t taste the way he’d expected. ‘How can I put this? I just don’t know if I can trust you, kid.’ I was stunned. I racked my brain. All I could come up with were the times I had watched him without him realising. ‘Is it because of the hidden cameras?’ I asked. ‘Are you worried about facial recognition?’ He laughed, his mouth wide. ‘If you’re worried about facial recognition you should wear Juggalo makeup.’ ‘What’s a Juggalo?’ ‘Insane Clown Posse. Their fans wear crazy makeup that can defeat facial recognition.’ That’s how we began wearing elaborate and slightly scary clown makeup whenever we met. ‘Losing my entire mind,’ Noah laughed the first time he saw me with the face. ‘I am extremely here for this.’ Over the weeks I learned that Noah’s dad had lost his job and was home all the time now, and that it made life hard for them both. They didn’t have much of an internet connection – ‘we don’t even have a YouTube in our house,’ he’d joked – and Noah had to use his dad’s old work computer in the living room to study. If Noah complained or asked for help, he always faced the same response: ‘Not my circus, not my monkey.’ When he said that, I spent a long time reading Noah’s face. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

It was the hardest I’d ever had to try, but then again there was a lot to take in. I felt that he wasn’t angry at his dad, or blaming him for anything, that he knew his father was doing his best. But I also felt that some part inside of him couldn’t understand why his dad didn’t notice that his son never looked really happy. That there was some broken little kid in there who couldn’t make sense of the fact that his dad didn’t notice his sadness, or worse, that he noticed and didn’t care, or wrote it off as a character flaw for which he held no responsibility. Noah saw me looking and turned away. I tried to change the topic. ‘Did you hear about Mr Otomo?’ His eyes creased at the edges. ‘Did he really reinvent himself as a rapping grandpa?’ ‘Yes!’ I shrieked. ‘His channel is so good!’ ‘Who would have thought that business model would take off?’ ‘Well, that generation are heavy users of the internet these days.’ Thinking about my old teacher reminded me of something. ‘Can I ask why you don’t like school?’ I said. He sighed. ‘It’s not that I don’t like school ... I don’t think school likes us.’ I didn’t know what he meant by ‘us’. ‘We’re always told that it’s okay to be vulnerable, like we shouldn’t be afraid to admit weakness. But I don’t think that’s the problem. I think that people are more afraid that if they try to be strong they’ll get be laughed at. So nobody tries to do anything hard.’ But now we all had to do hard things, I shot back. We have to stay at home and not go to our friends’ houses, and we can’t borrow things from each other or spend our money at the shops, and my mum was saying it’s even harder for teenagers because that’s when people want to go on dates and fall in love.

I cut myself off with the sudden thought that Noah might not find any of this hard at all. Maybe the end of the world was just business as usual for him. Around that time someone spread a rumour that birthdays didn’t count that year because we couldn’t celebrate them together, and everyone I knew died inside thinking that we would have to be nine for two years. But as it turned out most of us got to have people at our birthday parties. The minute the floodgates were opened we raced to one another’s homes, we couldn’t get there fast enough, and somehow my catch-ups with Noah became something that happened before, frozen in time, just like a photograph. Except for this one afternoon when Otis was over and we were firing our Avengers from slingshots we’d made from rubber bands and coathangers and Otis accidentally sent Iron Man hurtling over the fence. We looked at each other in horror and he mouthed Noah Potnik’s name. I looked back to the fence just as Iron Man made the leap back over to the safety of our side. We stood in hunched silence, frozen. I heard a faint mechanical hiss and saw a pale plume rise up past the afternoon sun. ‘Thanks,’ I said in a small voice. There was no answer. We left the action figures where they lay and raced back inside. A startled Cirocco leapt onto the kitchen table, almost knocking over the oversized vase stuffed with gladioli, geysers of scarlet and purple and orange just stinking of life. g C.J. Garrow is a Melbourne writer whose fiction has been shortlisted for international prizes including the Fish Prize (Ireland) and the George Garrett Fiction Prize (USA). ‘Egg Timer’ is his first published work of fiction. ❖

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40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

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ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Hieroglyph by Simone Hollander

.G. and Tebita sat down by the river. Several minutes of confused communication had concluded, once again, in a revelation of O.G.’s obtuseness. O.G. had asked the name of the river, as it wasn’t yet the Nile. But Tebita kept saying iteru, which O.G. knew meant river. So O.G. pointed again to the water and said ‘But how is this river called? What is the name on it? Which river is this?’ And, despite the frustration, was impressed she could even ask the question three different ways after – was it five? – weeks in Abydos. Time, her friend, her enemy, had become difficult to reckon. But Tebita said again and A fear of wild animals, again iteru, iteru, ee-tare-you, despite or maybe because of until it looked like she might her old and future job at the cry but instead opened her zoo, had led Diana to research satchel to lay out their lunch. crocodiles, hippos, cobras, and The girl had gone from being scorpions: the ancient Egypa finicky mostly-bread-eater to tian fauna she most feared. in the last few weeks showing O.G. how to make delicious dried fruit bars, sweet breads, and fish stews. Though this morning, instead of gobbling up the bread and lentils as she had done on previous outings, Tebita ran her fingers across the newborn heads of bright green shoots beginning to rise from the riverfreshened soil. O.G. tried another approach. ‘How many rivers for –’ and not having a word, if there even was one, for Egypt or this country, O.G. swept her arms as wide as she could, tried to include the lands all around them, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘One,’ Tebita had said, and offered O.G. a round of bread without raising her head. ‘There isn’t only one river!’ O.G. said in English. Then, in a pattern she sometimes told herself was just the rest of her brain returning from the future, O.G. became aware Tebita was right. There was only one river. Here, the Nile was called River, because that’s what it was, the one, the only, river. O.G.’s life was now dependent upon this wild, mysterious, unpredictable water. It had flooded just before O.G.’s arrival; a good flood, everyone had said, and the relief on their faces and in their voices – even the children – had planted a seed of terror in O.G.’s heart.

A bad year, the inevitable bad year: what would that look like? In what tremendous and terrible manner would this river now shape her life? ‘Iteru,’ O.G. mumbled into her lap. Tebita nodded as if she’d never been questioned at all, an auburn curl loosed from her plait by the movement. Feeling almost all stupid most of the time was beginning to wear on O.G. She longed to be expert at something. Could someone just once not correct her on some basic element of life? No one had asked for a geography lesson in weeks – her most, her only, useful knowledge. She’d racked her brain these past weeks to discover a contribution to this community, a way to be of value and so to be valued. No one needed databases programmed nor spreadsheets reformatted nor accounts balanced. No one needed anything O.G. knew how to do, and she had never much liked what she used to do anyway. None of her clerical work at the zoo had made any difference in her old world of school shootings, pandemics, or the climate crisis. To concentrate on a more It had seemed obvious concrete task and slide into crocodiles were the big monthe comforts of a good worry, sters on the river scene, but O.G. scanned the water for Diana knew how dangerous crocodiles and tried to enjoy and territorial hippos were. If her meal, which she’d made they were at the water’s edge, herself, and which tasted not if they went in the water, it was half bad (it was in fact half still a risk, even at common bad, containing as it did a soft swimming holes. flask of the beverage O.G. had In this matter Diana was come to call Golden Beer Water). surprised to find she and Azim Eating by the water was had traded roles. He was at made more difficult by tiny flies ease with the wild waters. eager to explore every orifice. There were also some of a larger variety that looked distinctly bitey. O.G. at last sent broody Tebita into tiny hysterics with her impression of a biting fly, taking great airy chomps out of the teen’s arms and legs, Tebita’s laughter a remarkable fissure of immature giddiness and delight. Tebita had stopped taking secret naps in O.G.’s cottage and O.G. hoped it wasn’t due to a return to professionalism or a loss of camaraderie. Though their AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

interactions were still superficial in language, they were fuller in emotion, in the way words were said and definitions asked, in the tones O.G. used, her manner with Tebita, Tebita’s availability, all these extra-linguistic elements completed the meanings around their words, the way the River, the one river, in its many states of being, shaped and fed the valley where she now lived. O.G. pressed on for more ‘Providence already sent me vocabulary. A group of three five thousand years back in boys fished from a hand net, time,’ Azim said, ‘do you think their upper bodies where they I’m statistically also eligible stood waist deep in the water for a crocodile attack?’ He reflected back, doubled each shrugged and waded into the boy into two torsos, two heads. river beside a playful group Another passel of younger of young boys, their bodies boys – for a world with one splitting apart the sun-danced thousandth of the population water. O.G. had left behind there sure Diana rested her back were a lot of boys at the water against a date palm – first this afternoon – bounced in checking for creepy-crawlies, and out of the river, laughed, plus a monkey-scan for the paddled round, and gave tree’s upper reaches. Their little O.G. tiny heart attacks each friend Merit corded bright time they disappeared under shoots of sprouted reed grass, the water. Tebita said, ‘What three strands held together an ancient grandmother,’ and with her teeth, her small finindicated a figure a ways off, gers plaiting the line. its back to a palm tree. O.G. looked and didn’t see anyone, thought she must be looking in the wrong direction. Sun shimmered off the water, the air around the river foliage almost dyed green by the intense vitality of the newly watered plants. O.G. looked at Tebita, who had a confused expression on her face as well, then looked back to where Tebita pointed and sure enough, there appeared the same elderly woman O.G. had spotted from afar the evening of her arrival in Abydos, the bright riverside greens smudged in grey streaks of her hair, light brown swashes of her linen kaftan, darker brown swashes of her skin. The old lady’s shape parted and joined that of the palm tree against which she rested. The melding and unmelding of person to environment wasn’t unfamiliar to O.G., who felt at unpredictable and erratic intervals incorporated, then impossible. O.G. didn’t think of herself as being from the future, couldn’t say such ridiculous words aloud to herself. The tram, the time-travel tourism that coasted from Seattle back to one place for a few moments in Egypt’s past, was a lark, a joke, a diversion for the other passengers. They’d complained it was too short, too restricted, only ninety seconds in this one spot outside of Abydos, just this one view of this one small caravan, and you could hardly see the natives. No one even noticed the crying girl. They paid attention only to the young men in an argument; they scoffed at the lack of clarity out the windows, the miracle of all the trams ever to tour the scene occupying the same place at the same moment, layers of tissue-paper-people, for those transcendent ninety seconds. A ninety seconds created by nature, even, the result of climate change. Nature crying out and still it was just an impediment to what should be better, more. O.G. shook her head free of such time-tangled memories, they made her too angry. All she’d done was taken action against a resilient past, jumped free to make a 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

difference and help Tebita, the crying girl. Not unlike this blurry old woman, who looked after a little girl braiding grass. When O.G.’s gaze settled on the little girl the sun shimmer cleared, the day at once more solid, and O.G. could now discern the little girl looked often to With her eyes closed the the water where a man bathed. light and shadows played He stayed in the shallows near across Diana’s lids, she let the little swimming boys, his the river’s lap-patter feed a body in a crouch, his hands fantasy of porpoising through sloshed water onto the back the cool, swift water, immune of his neck, until he pressed from predators and parasites, them to his forehead. His hair- immune from fear, immune cut was almost modern, wavy from the future. and dark, almost one of those She would love a swim, general all-purpose dad styles. ached for one, in fact, but could Shielding the sun from her not bring herself to yet enter eyes, O.G. searched out the lit- the water. Her role still nascent tle boys splashing in and out of in the community, she worked the river while the man bathed hard to maintain an authority quietly and, it seemed to O.G., and decorum that precluded with a sorrow that came to the functional and perhaps her in shimmers, as if she also emotional transparency remembered a dream which of splashing about in the Nile. was at once sad, then not, then Wet linen would reveal her, sad again. and though the locals wouldn’t O.G. composed a sentence care, she and Azim weren’t on in her head to ask Tebita what such terms. she thought of the sad man, but Tebita stared hard at the little trio, her green eyes sharp shimmers of Nile water. What about the group upset her? O.G. bumbled out her sentence anyway. It would take her several more minutes to compose a new one and her original enquiry plus tone of voice might bring them around to the topic of Tebita’s interest in the group. Tebita shook her head, said More – a word O.G. knew well – she used it every morning in reference to food, with an added hand gesture of frustration, a swirl of the finger tips with which O.G. was also familiar. ‘Yes,’ O.G. said. There was a noun tucked in there that Tebita had said in her own language, not the local dialect. A habit O.G. suspected and hoped Tebita employed from boredom more than spite. O.G. parroted the sound of the word, but not solid on its meaning, offered ‘Is that like, lots of picnickers? Or triads?’ in retaliatory English, and looked round to see if there were any more groups in kind. There weren’t. Not even in the fields around their swimming hole, where a few farmers worked at sowing the river-rejuvenated soil despite the state holiday. Tebita stood and brushed off her embroidered dress, which was a shade of dusty red particular to her. The girl wasn’t from the Nile valley, but had lived near what O.G. assumed was an oasis in the Western desert. The Nile was perhaps the only river she’d ever seen. O.G. scolded herself for not being more culturally astute when Tebita rose and delivered a rapid, unpunctuated speech. O.G. said the word that meant either slow or walking. Tebita was probably just testing her, or wanted them to leave right away for some reason, and O.G. looked around for scorpions. Tebita ignored O.G., calling out to the three fishing boys and pointing back at O.G. as she strode away. Responding to whatever it was Tebita had said to them,

the fishing boys parked their net and trotted over to O.G. They chattered along, close enough to prevent O.G. from getting up and following Tebita, who headed north along the river instead of back to town. A panic surfaced, but if these boys didn’t know O.G. they at least knew Tebita. O.G. wasn’t a stranger, she had some protections. Or she used to. ‘Tebita! Tebita!’ O.G. called out. There were just three boys, all shorter than O.G., lean limbs muscled, teeth not yet ground away, eyes keen and secure. The promise of their future authority as males budded out their limbs like a tree in new growth. They sang a song, humming first, then with lyrics O.G. couldn’t understand, and undulated their arms around O.G.’s face. O.G. sat there, looked up into a constellation of bright boy eyes and snakelike arms, the new grass steamed around her, misted over the atmosphere. she could almost smell the oxygen. Though she only suspected the month, the season at least was still fall, but not her fall. Nothing here was hers. Fall in Egypt was the flood, outrageous insect blooms, catfish spawning in shallow pools, and small, many-coloured, song-filled birds. The very opposite of Seattle’s orange and red season of decreasing sun and rising knits, apples, a fresh, chill wind. That same passel of younger boys who had been swimming appeared now too, water droplets from their bodies flew at O.G.’s face in intervals, applied river tears which mixed with her own. ‘Tebita!’ and this time the name flew from O.G. in a gasping cry. O.G.’d thought she could learn this language, join this culture, make a life here, but without Tebita, to whom she couldn’t even speak properly, O.G. was Diana gazed down the alone. She thought to look for bank in reaction to a shouted the other picnickers, maybe the name, then started with ingrey old woman could help, but voluntary violence at the unO.G.’s eyes flooded, the harder mistakable blur. She shut her she squinted the less she could eyes tight and pressed her back make out the group, who were into the ledges of the palm. there and not there, the old She refused to fall through the lady against the palm; the earth, sink beneath the river, be palm unobstructed; the little swallowed by a timeless liquid girl braiding the grass, looking earth just because she’d seen to the palm, looking to the herself. Just because they river. were both here, so close, one The boys stopped swirling hundred yards away. Well, and chanting long enough a hundred yards and fifty-two to at last look down at her, years, but those years, all those the crying foreigner in the years of waiting to return, they grass. felt like a wink now, a butterfly’s skip down a stretch of Nile. Diana could get up and walk over. They could shake hands. She could stand over herself, smile benevolently, beatifically upon the great and famous O.G., the young woman who jumped the tram, her miraculous survival incised by her own hands into limestone cliffs for all the future world to see. Which was fine until the future had decided to rescue O.G. mid-jump from her tram and had stranded Diana, her famous nickname, Our Girl, now long abandoned, for fifty-two years in a present from which she wanted nothing. It was almost a song, the old lady who swallowed the spider who swallowed the fly. But where they were now, here, in Abydos, at the Nile, this was before all that, before the petroglyphs, before the rescue: this was

O.G.’s first turn, the first thread, pure and gold in the tangled pile that had become Diana’s time-addled life. ‘A bug bite,’ Diana said when she reopened her eyes. She knew Merit would be watching her, would have stopped braiding her grass. O.G., her slouchy modern posture the worst in the entire town, radiated self-pity. Diana snorted and turned away in frustration. Anyone who experienced time as a linear forward-moving force in their lives could indulge in the illusion of having killed their younger selves. The old me. An illusion stripped from Diana, who now had the practical chance. The still-thick and still-black hair falling over O.G.’s face, pliant brown skin, lithe senses coordinated by a pink and resilient brain; O.G. had everything she needed, not even recognising the good young boys who reached out to help, just because they did so in their usual chaotic and unfocused manner. Diana had been led to believe, had led herself to believe, O.G. had flourished in Abydos, a hero, a master survivalist, the queen temporal émigrée of all time. Azim had fallen through the port like a slice of carrot dropped behind the stove; it was impossible for him to be rescued. But O.G. had jumped on purpose, they had both jumped on purpose. One of the boys – Diana was pretty sure she knew him but his name escaped her – crouched down and stuck his face right up to O.G.’s, who was startled and swatted at the space between them. Diana had no memory of her life at this moment, but she had spent the last fifty-two years – aided by sound archaeological evidence – fantasising its content. It was memory, true or false, and emotion, current or remembered, that let time sweep through her life in spirals, not the fact she’d jumped back five thousand years, twice, not even that she’d been forced to wait half a century before they had let her ride the trams again; all that was just logistics, was just branches on a tree. Diana could hear O.G. call out again to Tebita. Even Azim heard from the water, stood up from his crouch and shielded his hand over his eyes to better see. Merit glanced up once but then made herself intent on fashioning a clasp for her corded grass. Diana had to grip her own hands together and press them into her lap. She unwrapped the remainder of the flatbread that was their small picnic to divert her shaking hands and pinched chest. The boys began to split apart like a flock of birds. Diana, though the image blurred in and out of focus, could see O.G. was shaken, and when one of the boys at last made eye contact with Diana, the old woman gestured for them to scoot after O.G. and help her get back to town. It was a small gesture on Diana’s part, her great age in ancient Egypt almost as powerful a tool as her fore-knowledge, yet she might have just saved O.G.’s life. It must be so terrible, Diana said to herself, flush with power. It must have been so terrible, she added, the branches of her multi-foliate life fanned out around her. One of the boys patted the top of O.G.’s head the way future Seattleites might indulge a neurotic dog. ‘Come,’ he said after trying first a longer sentence to which O.G. made no AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

response. He took O.G.’s hand and pulled her up and she followed him quiet and subtle, like a snake in the grass. She saw the thin shoots along the bank thicken and become clumps of watered papyrus and grasses, heard rustling and buzzing everywhere they moved through space, the dirt of the desire path that led through the foliage and along between fields still spongy till she knew it would harden at the outer reaches of the river’s inundation. O.G. tasted sand in her mouth. She crunched it often in her food and wondered for how long she would notice all this ambient sand, everywhere, all the time. The green along the sides of the trail thinned a little, as did the shade, though it still dappled the ground. O.G. watched the pink cracked heels of the boys who led her, watched them grow thin as they lifted from the soles of their reed sandals, then slumped back round and steady when they put their feet back down again. The shade thinned, made a variegated light, ran across the path this way and that. The past wasn’t another time, it was just another country, one without chocolate ice cream, several-ingredient cocktails of unnecessary length and complication, music on demand, tasks she knew how to complete, even mundane ones, like renewing her driver’s licence. Fifteen pairs of pants, she’d owned! People with whom she could converse at speed-of-thought in her own language had been everywhere, all the time; she’d had food to order and eat, easy, her hands Diana watched Azim to wash, easy, soapy, hot water, squeeze water from the cuffs towels everywhere, her kitchen of his khakis; he had opted to with cold, pre-packed groceries, wear his pants – which he now kale rinsed in fresh running saved for the rarest occasions water, as much potable water in order to preserve them – to at whichever temperature swim. It comforted her unshe desired gushed from her expectedly, this sign he still kitchen tap, under her own related to his former life, that control, like a god. ‘I want to she and he were still united go back,’ she said, into the in some unbreakable cultural ground. and temporal commonalities. ‘Yes,’ responded the boy in The decision to swim had been front of her, ‘we’re going.’ last minute, a treat for her and Azim under living conditions that had begun, Diana feared, to strain her advantage. Azim was ignorant ancient Egyptian beginner, Diana was studied expert. He provided the livelihood, she offered her cultural expertise. But Azim became more independent every day, and Diana worried about her value to him. She was, after all, indelibly paired to a future to which Azim could never return. This brothers-in-arms displacement could be a comfort or, Diana knew too well, a torture, a constant reminder.

Despite Diana’s desire to see herself, she’d instead spent her time in Abydos building her rapport with Azim. But here she was regardless,together,her two selves at the river.Was the past so strong it could pull you into its current, like an undertow, like a riptide? The sun fired through thick clumps of papyrus, made their hollow stalks glow green with life. Now the boys had dispersed, various birds took up their absences along the waterline. An egret resumed its frog hunt. Other waterfowl peeked from the marshy grasses as if on cue, as if it had to be one or the other: birds, or boys. Merit took her cord and fastened it around Diana’s wrist. A small, but Diana knew profound, gesture of trust on the little girl’s part. As the grass was still fresh and supple it stained Diana’s delicate skin. Eighty-two years old and from the future, her body, her age spots, freckles, wrinkles, all the stains of time upon her, returned to this moment by the stone breath she would soon lob, as O.G., five thousand years into the future. Diana put her arm around Merit’s bony little shoulder and gave it a warm squeeze. ‘What was all that about?’ Azim walked back from the river, shook water from his dark hair. Diana barely noticed Merit scoot out from under her too tight grasp. If O.G. had seen Azim’s pants – pockets, belt loops, cuffs – she would have known he was modern. It was a close call. Fate had almost exposed her. ‘I have no idea,’ Diana said, an automatic lie to shield her flittering pulse. ‘Some domestic squabble between those two women, with I believe Katsenut’s twins and several others who might be from her brother’s farm aiding the melee. Those little boys are such gossips, aren’t they, Merit?’ The last bit Diana spoke in their local dialect, though without knowing a word for gossip, called them instead very-talkers. Merit looked up and smiled at Diana, but didn’t say anything. Azim shrugged his shoulders and sat down cross-legged in the grass. ‘Coming here was a good suggestion,’ he said, picking up a round of flatbread, their daily bread, staple of their lives. He said this in English, to which he and Diana reverted when they were tired, or lazy, or didn’t want Merit to understand. At the silence that met his comment, Merit’s from incomprehension, Diana’s from the concentration it took to crystalise the present and lash it to her soul, Azim offered his open hand to a small green lizard ascending the palm just above Diana’s head. ‘Friend,’ he said to Merit in her language, ‘what do I call this?’ g Simone Hollander is a writer from Monterey Bay, California. Her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington was completed on independent study from Dublin, Ireland. She has won prizes for her short fiction and creative non-fiction and is writing a novel. ❖

Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics TANYA DALZIELL An essential companion to one of Australia’s most interesting contemporary writers 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

River Story by Mykaela Saunders

crow-shaped shadow flies across the river. Juna knows that her daughter is coming, so the right thing to do is make her favourite feed. Juna casts a fishing net over the river with her mind. The net drifts onto the surface, slips under the skin, and is swallowed by the water. The net descends through the deep water slowly, resting on the bed. River grass unflattens and pokes up between the spaces. Juna sings a song to attract fish to the area. The bulging tide turns the river over like a slow screw, and the net follows, one corner lifting and twisting over and over itself like a tight cigarette. Pulling the corners of the net together, Juna tugs it back into her mind. It is heavy with water and fish. Inside her skull, she unrolls the net and five dirty silver bream, one deep charcoal catfish, and a dove-grey nurse shark begin to flop and bounce. The shark bares its teeth, its black eyes not giving anything away. She inhales the shark and the catfish and the smaller bream into her throat, then breathes them out with a force so sharp they fly through the walls of her skull, through the window, and splash back into the river. While they are all busy reorienting themselves, the shark eats the catfish and swims away from the haunted place. The three remaining bream flop heavier and less frequently, embodying all the drama of dying. The exertion of gasping weighs on their bodies, the way Juna feels when she breathes in her body. They stop jumping, shuddering to a shivering then a stillness. She imagines this is the way her lungs will stop working inside her comatose form. Gracey enters her mother’s room. In her huge soft bed beside the window, Juna is cradled in sunlight. Gracey prowls over to the bed. ‘Hey Mum,’ Gracey’s voice catches. ‘Long time no see.’ Gracey inhales; the room is musty. She treads over to the window and opens it up to clear out her Mum’s sick breath

circulating through the room. The river shimmers. It is very low, but at least there is some water – last time she was here it was bone dry. The skin of the water buzzes and cracks, licking the air, tasting the storm which is to come. She sits on the bed beside her mother. Juna looks like she’s asleep, sipping air and panting it out. Clear plastic tubes catch the light, drip fluid into her wrist from the machine next to the bed. She looks soft, fragile, too different. From her eyes, Gracey projects her sorrow onto her mother. Unspoken words of regret and sorry business dance in the space between their faces. The heart monitor beeps steady. Juna’s white hair has grown out in thin, soft wisps, barely hiding the skin of her scalp. Baby hairs are stuck down on her damp face, forming spit curls that frame her creased brown face in translucent waves. Her dearth of hair accentuates her fragile neck and round skull. ‘Same haircut as me, aye, Mum? Gracey’s fingers brush through Juna’s hair, mussing up the smooth nap and combing out moisture from the soft cotton wool. Detritus falls from her scalp like dust from an old book. Juna’s hair frizzes and floats. Juna’s synapses are firing, old circuits lighting up like a refired grid. Neurons spark and spread like wildfire. Her daughter is here, in a way, but she’s still feeling too sorry for herself to be present. Always so serious, that girl. In her mind, Juna takes each fish and lays them on the hardwood bench she’s set up over her left temple. She separates their bodies from their heads with her machete, fins and tails them, and shaves them down with her scaling knife. Opalescent confetti dances over the ground, sequins sticking to her arms. Her meaty hands became slick in the handling. She slits a fish from arsehole to throat, and opens it up like AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

a thick pink purse. The flesh is cold and sticky. She locates the dimensions of its spine and removes the entire skeleton in one go. Without its internal framework, the body is malleable in her hands. She prepares the rest of the fish, carves each body into thick fillets, forearm muscles tightening and softening with each slice. She tosses the fillets into a bowl so the meat can relax while her daughter does her thing. Juna builds a campfire behind her eyes and sits beside it. As she waits for her daughter, she throws the fish heads into the river for Old Man Pelican. Old Man Pelican rises over the river, lifting himself on powerful white wings, showing red and purple sinew underwing. Up he flies with an eye on the electric water and folds his wings before descent; streamlined and graceful despite his bulk, using gravity’s pull on his weight to slice through the air, he bombs down into the water. He widens his jowly jaw and closes it again over his catch, excess water streams down the sides of his beak. He chomps and swallows, skinny throat expanding and contracting to pull his feed down into his body. He soars back up again then down for another feed, stockpiling before he will have to take refuge behind the hill, the visibility too poor for fishing. The campfire crackles. Gracey takes her Mum’s skinny hand; her skin is damp and hot. Using the sheet, she pulls Juna’s body away from the encroaching sunlight, and arranges her arms and legs in a foetal position facing the window. She picks up the framed photo on the bedside table: Juna is holding Little Grace in her lap. She’s about ten years old – many years before she grew up to hate this place and leave. They were in the backyard here, fishing. Juna took this selfie, squinting and smiling into the camera. The river was fuller then, but still not as full as it should have been. Mum and daughter’s long black curls are whipping out to the side, entwined in the wind. Once upon a time, they were close. ‘In the future,’ says Grace. ‘In the future – you used to say – we will catch fat fish, we will not have to worry about money or work or anything, and we will live a real life, just like our Old People did. We will be happy.’ She looks up at Juna and smiles. But her Mum’s not there. The vessel is empty, as it has been all along. Her Mum has never been there. She’s always been somewhere else, somewhere away from Gracey. She pulls off her big black boots and sits on the end of the bed. Nothing has changed really, but Gracey feels lonely now she’s admitted that her Mum isn’t here. She’s alone with the idea of her, alone with nothing but an empty-fleshed reality for company. ‘Please come home, Mum, from wherever you are.’ She holds Juna’s feet through the sheets. ‘I miss you.’ Juna sprinkles a handful of spinifex seed into her grinding bowl, a hefty stone worn smooth with aeons of use, and reduces the seed to flour. She shakes it out and it drifts down lightly on the hardwood. The shiny surface turns matte with powder. She slaps the fish onto the flour and flips them to coat them, and her tough hands become powdery and silky as she handles the fillets. Her forearms turn white. Puffs of flour float up and settle on the fine black hairs. She stands and wipes her arm across her forehead to divert 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

the beads of sweat about to run into her eyes. The flour bonds to the sweat, becomes a paste smeared across the deep lines across her forehead. An ochre smear, for ceremony. She splashes oil into a frypan, holds it over the fire, and drops the fish in the hot oil, cooking quickly. She hands a plate to Gracey and slides half of the fish onto it. ‘Remember, my girl,’ says Juna. ‘Even when the wind howls through your branches at night, and it blows right through your bones, and you’ve never felt so alone in your life, I want you to remember that you are my dream come true.’ Clouds converge. The glass rattles, and Gracey gets up to close the window. The wind pulls strips of water across the small surface of the river, in long thin striations, and across the wet skin the sinew warps and twists. Gracey sits back on the bed and watches her mother for a long time. Tears drip and then rain hard. She holds Juna’s feet and keens, tears swimming down her face – grieving the absence of her Mum now, grieving the heartache between them in the past, grieving a never-to-exist future where they might make new memories, a future where hurt and heartache are old storm water under a bridge, the bridge between them well used and sturdy. Sun on glass catches Gracey’s eye. She picks up the old photo. On the day it was taken, her Mum had caught a fish. After unhooking it, she made its mouth move to pretend it was talking. In an old man’s voice, the fish told Gracey to always be careful with her fishing lines and to put any broken line in the bin so the birds won’t become entangled. Little Grace, not a baby anymore, rolled her eyes and shook her head. Mum put the fish down. Then the fish jumped and rolled back into the water, scaring the shit out of them both, and they fell into each other wheezing and clutching their sides. Gracey’s racked with laughter, coughing and spluttering, shaking the bed. Outside, the setting sun dips under storm clouds. The skin of the muddy river gives off pale amber light. Sunlight penetrates a few inches before it’s blocked by particles of mud, and the light reflects back and gets trapped in the epidermis, making it glow like honey.

∞

Gracey is sweating, cooling off by the river behind the house, the river she was born in almost thirty-five years ago. Just like when she was born, the air over the bright brown water is dense with white smoke. Trees curve over the soak, and the thick air combs itself through the branches. Now, as when she was born, they’re burning off the sugar cane. This means that the fish will be running up the coast; it is also almost the rainy season. All of these things are connected, then and now. Unlike when Gracey was born, the water in the river is low. The sun is high overhead. Sunlight streams through the pale smoke and turns the opaque air golden. The smoke – sweet and ceremonial – soothes her lungs. Being here, so close to death, she remembers being born. At least, she remembers the story – her mothers’ collective memory of it – which is just as good as remembering it herself. She watches the scene of her birth unfold in the shallows of

the river: her mothers and aunties are squatting in the water. The youngest woman, Juna, looks like she’s swallowed the full moon. Black ash from the burning dances over the river. Juna’s mum, Jenny, and Jenny’s sister Liana are assisted by Juna’s sister Tracey. In the trees, crows jump and sing. They are midwives too. They hop from one branch to the next creaky caws cheer Juna on as she pants and growls, rocking onto her haunches. The other women holding her djerrbilila, singing in comforting murmurs. In between contractions, the women stand Juna up to prevent her skin getting waterlogged, and massage her vulva and perineum so her skin will stretch instead of tear. Juna wades over to the deeper water, howls, waddles back again. Assisted by strong arms, she squats in the cool water and steels herself. Soon her body contracts again. She breathes into it. Roars. Her lower body is a white-hot portal of pain. She feels like she’s sitting on the sun. She crouches deeper into her squat, hunkers down into the chair made by her sisters’ arms for the push. The crows jump around, offer throaty screeches of encouragement. Mum Jenny reaches down to feel Juna’s opening. Everything’s swollen like bloated fruit and stretched tight like a drum. Baby Grace’s head stretches Juna open, wearing her vagina like a crown. Jenny feels her daughter’s wiry hair encircling her grandbaby’s soft hair. Juna screams into the sky. Her toes clutch mangrove roots beneath the silt, slimy and wiry and strong. Baby Grace’s head pops out, and the water beneath them reddens, then diffuses around them. The women hold Baby Grace’s head and gently guide her shoulders out. Juna lays back on Liana, as the others pull Gracey out. With another breath cycle and push from Juna, Baby Grace slides into the world and into the water, and is caught by her other mothers’ hands. When the women hold her up to examine her perfection, she yowls, strong lungs expand her tiny chest. Juna takes Baby Grace, holds her to her chest and whispers to her, crying and dazed. ‘You did well, big girl,’ the women congratulate her, their eyes shining through tears. They all hold on to her. The water is opaque with blood and tiny guppies flit around and nibble at bits of Juna’s insides. Juna’s body shudders again. Sister Tracey reaches down and grabs the thick slimy cord that still connects Baby Grace to Juna. She tugs gently, and the placenta moves to plug her opening. Juna breathes in. When she exhales and relaxes, her sister pulls the placenta out. It pulsates and floats around in the water beside them. Juna bites into the umbilical cord, rips the tough sinew with her teeth, and gnaws until it separates from her daughter. She lobs the placenta at the fig, and it thuds inside their varicose buttress roots. The crows jump down lightly, walk around and examine it like real sticky beaks, necks tilting this way and that. They peck at the meat, pausing to chew. More crows appear out of thin air, summoned by their own fear of missing a feed. They are noisy and chatty, flapping around and feasting on the confluence of Juna and Baby Grace. Juna tells the crows: ‘That’s us you’re eating there. That’s our body. You mob are responsible for her now.’ When the crows finish eating they squawk and fly off, leaving black feathers behind. Her mothers bathe Baby Grace in the muddy river and clean her caul off, and they walk up the riverbank and gather around

the campfire in the backyard. They oil Baby Grace’s thick black curls. Her mothers’ hands comb it this way and that, smoothing and mussing up the soft mossy nap. The warmth of the fire sinks into her skin and relaxes her. As her mothers paint her skin, they tell her ancient stories of resistance and triumph, and sing her myriad connections to an intricate community rooted deeply in this country in all-times. She is passed around like the gift she is. Capable hands hold her and tickle her velvet skin, and the two younger women feed her their milk. She can taste the love flowing out from their hearts, through their nipples and into her mouth, down her throat and settling warmly in her belly. When they admire her fat legs, which is often, their cheekbones ripen into fat golden pears with rust-coloured blush; she reaches and tries to pluck them. Joy shines so clearly out of their eyes that it dazzles her. As the sun sets, Baby Grace sinks into the peaceful sleep of babies who are loved. As she grows up, Baby Grace’s memories of this are slowly replaced by the stories of it. But now that Gracey can see it, the intimacy of her genesis re-emerges. It floats up from the depths of the shallow river. She skims her hands over the surface of the water, remembering.

∞

Nan Jenny, Aunty Trace, and Old Aunt Liana are out on the verandah, sitting around the table and drinking tea. ‘Gracey Galgalaw, my darling granddaughter! Come and sit down with us for five minutes, will ya? Haven’t had a proper yarn since you got here,’ says Nan Jenny. ‘Of course, my love,’ says Gracey as she hugs her Nan. ‘Haven’t seen you for such a long time!’ Nan Jenny puts her arms around her youngest grandchild. ‘We missed you, bub,’ says Aunty Trace, hugging Gracey. ‘Missed you too,’ says Gracey. She means it. ‘Well, why you been staying away from us for so long then?’ Old Aunt Liana says. ‘It’s been years since you’ve shown your face.’ ‘There’s no work around here,’ Gracey says, but everyone knows there’s more to it than that. She squats down behind Liana, kisses her warm cheek and hugs her. ‘Oh, there’s work to do all right, just not work that’ll earn you a fancy salary. Your mum’s been having a go of it, been fighting for our water rights for a while now.’ ‘True?’ ‘True god,’ says Aunty Trace. ‘A few years after you left, she started cleaning her act up and taking her cultural responsibilities more seriously.’ ‘And how was that working out for everyone?’ asks Gracey. ‘She was doing all right, truth be told! The water’s coming back,’ says Nan Jenny. ‘But between the stress of all the legal stuff and her drinking, well.’ ‘You said she’d stopped drinking,’ says Grace. ‘She had. But I don’t think her liver ever really recovered, and she never stopped smoking. You know she started doing all that a long time ago.’ ‘Yep, I remember. When the river started drying up and she couldn’t fish anymore.’ Grace had taken off soon after. ‘How come AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

she isn’t in hospital?’ ‘Everyone’s been chipping in to keep her here. You know she hated hospitals.’ ‘Yep, she always said they were for sick people.’ Everyone is silent. ‘She come good in the end, Gracey girl,’ says Nan Jenny. ‘You would’ve been proud.’

∞

Days pass, then weeks. Gracey sits with Juna every day, talking to her and remembering. Nan Jenny, Aunty Trace, and Old Aunt Liana stay at the house too, fielding phone calls and visits, playing euchre and gossiping on the verandah. Every morning, the nurse comes in to check on Juna, and someone or other from the community is always popping in. Gracey has lots to catch up on. Always, Juna is present, part of their connection. Gracey prefers to be alone with her mum. When the visitors have left she selects a photo album from the heaving bookshelf and sits in the big comfy chair beside Juna’s bed, curled up with a cuppa. Gracey flicks through the photos of them when they were both younger, and narrates the story of the pictures. Sometimes Gracey puts on the community radio station and sings along to country songs, or blues and jazz. Every new song is an old gem: these are the songs they used to sing together, and she hears her mum’s voice in her own. Sometimes she leaves the stereo off and sings by herself. After a while, some of the songs her mum used to sing to her in language come rolling off her tongue. Pouring out of her throat. Visit by visit, story by story, and song by song, Gracey’s grief transforms into gratitude.

∞

Every afternoon, Gracey fills two bowls with water from the river. She carries the river into her mum’s room and sets it down on the bedside table. She has to move all the photos and flowers and cards to make room. She wets a soft cloth in the cool water, wrings it, then wipes her mum’s face and neck and chest with the damp wash cloth, then dips it again and wipes down her arms and hands. The water becomes cloudy quickly. She rinses the cloth in the other bowl, then wipes her mum down again, wetting and wringing and wiping and rinsing with cool water. When she is finished, she empties the water back where it belongs, thankful for another day.

Gracey sings, murmurs, hums to her mother. Juna takes her last breath in her daughter’s hands. Gracey lays down and spoons Juna’s curled-up vessel, holds her in her arms the way she was held inside her belly once. She cries long and hard into her mother’s empty body. Juna is leaving. She doesn’t mind. In fact, she barely understands what’s happening until it’s happened, because she’s too busy fishing and enjoying the presence of her daughter – especially her daughter’s voice, telling their stories and singing their songs. One moment Juna is there, the next she doesn’t belong to her body anymore. A high-pitched buzz surges through her and vibrates exponentially, tone and sound sharpen and accelerate second by second until they peak in intensity, and when it all becomes too much she’s ejaculated from her body – a whole-being orgasm that ruptures her in spirit-shattering force. Skin emptied of herself, escapes through her skull, campfire and fishing gear abandoned. An immense clarity peels away at her, and strips away every single hurt and horror, leaving only the joys she’d grown and carried in her heart. She splices and separates into unfathomable directions, following the threads of everything and everyone and everywhere that had ever touched her, and so she is divided infinitely, because all that had ever touched her had also been touched by other hearts and minds and places, and so all around her country, and other creatures, and then the cosmos, she splits and peels and zooms, fracturing off in new directions with every feeling ever felt, shooting back and forth through time because all the love she ever had has manifold origins and futures. Soon the entire known world is inadequate to hold her at the velocity she is flying, hurtling through inner and outer space faster than the speed of thought. She pings through stars and molecules and black holes and atoms and bypasses nothing, shooting at phenomenal warp-speed toward the apex of the universe – the point of ultimate singularity where divisions between past, present, and future collapse into one preternatural state of fluid existence, and despite fractioning and fracturing infinitesimally, nothing of her is diluted but is restored to a wholeness of spirit by returning home to the repository of collective matter and memory – everything that ever was, is, and will be. A new star is born in the sky, and ancestors around their campfires welcome their radiant daughter home. Rainclouds gather in sympathy with Gracey’s loss.

∞

Part of Juna swims into the clouds: part of her hitches a ride back to the river in a raindrop, and part of her splashes into the room through the window and onto her daughter’s face, who is still curled around her old body, and the rain mixes with Gracey’s tears and sinks into her skin, trickles into capillaries, into her blood, and swims around waiting to be reborn.

Day by day, Juna’s breath thins out. Gracey barely leaves her side. One night, Gracey knows her mum is leaving. She sits on Juna’s bed and cradles her tiny head in her left hand, and holds her skinny hands in the other. Juna’s breathing is slower and shallower.

The rains have cleared, after a downpour that lasted a week, and the river is waist-deep with water. The ceremony is in the backyard, and the place is packed.

Every afternoon, Juna swims in the river with her daughter.

48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

∞

Everyone paints up in sacred ochre gathered from the marbled seams at the foot of the mountain. In a semicircle facing the water, most people sit on woven mats. Older people sit in chairs at the back. At the front of the formation, the young ones set up speakers and a microphone. In language Nan Jenny welcomes everybody and gives thanks to country, community, and culture. A handful of the older people take their turns saying goodbye. Gracey wants to say something but she doesn’t know what to say. Aunty Trace leads the community singing her sister into the river. Gracey opens the jar and shakes the ashes in, wrist circling, her mother’s remains sprinkling in a spiral. The ashes trail and melt into the muddy water, and everyone floats her away with flowers and dirt, then waters her with tears. When it is done, they stop speaking her name so that the living will no longer haunt the dead. Everybody gets into formation to dance their farewell song. Gracey hasn’t danced this dance in years. At first she is rusty, disembodied, but her muscle memory soon pulls her into the patterns of the dance. Underneath the barriers that time has created she’s still a cultural girl. With her community she dances this new iteration of a ceremony that has been passed down unbroken for millennia, dancing the way her ancestors did, on the very same ground – ground that has changed so much in a short time but still retains its memory. This deep and ancient energy connects her with all the moving bodies around her, grounding them all in their home.

Afterwards, the sky bruises into purple at the horizon. In a choreographed dance of rise and fall the sun drops behind the hills as a full moon pops up across the way. Crows sing out from the trees and a pelican glides around down river. Some of the younger people strip off and play in the river. So much of the water isn’t there, but its history and its promises swirl together in the empty space. Gracey watches at first, then joins in swimming. She can feel the old river still moving around her: a deliberate, weighted, immense body, thick and muddy, a huge snake carving out its path in the land, inscribing their songline through dusty banks. The ghost river is rebirthing, growing into its potential and ancient form from an ancestral template. Laughing young people splash around in the long-lost water. Tiny bubbles of air and light reach Gracey’s skin, and her mother’s legacy attaches itself to her like a blanket and like armour. g Mykaela Saunders is a Koori writer, teacher, and community researcher. Of Dharug and Lebanese ancestry, she’s working-class and queer, and belongs to the Tweed Aboriginal community. Mykaela has worked in Aboriginal education since 2003, and her research explores trans-generational trauma and healing in her community. Mykaela began writing fiction and poetry in 2017, as part of her Doctor of Arts degree at the University of Sydney. Her work has since been published across forms and disciplines, placed in writing prizes, and attracted funding and fellowships. ❖

Spend winter reading

What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in colonial Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? What would it reveal about her marriage? About being a woman? Kate Grenville returns to the territory of The Secret River with an unforgettable story about courage, truth and the mystery of human desire.

Spellbinding and utterly magnificent, The Rain Heron is an epic tale set in the wilds of a country devastated by coup. Hunted down in her mountain hideaway, Ren is drawn into the destructive mission of Zoe, a ruthless young soldier, in search of the mythical rain heron. ‘Exquisite.’ Jane Rawson

NEW BOOKS FROM TEXT— INDEPENDENT SINCE 1994

Summer 1966. A pet-killer and a late-night phone stalker. Constable Mick Goodengouh is the new cop in town. Can he unpick the dark web of smalltown secrets before it’s too late? The Night Whistler is top-shelf Australian rural crime from a brilliant new voice. ‘Haunting, tense and unforgettable.’ Christian White

In a state of grief after her son is sent to prison, Erica Marsden flees to the south-east coast. There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean— but she cannot do it alone. A disquietingly hypnotic story of guilt and denial, family bonds, and the power of art. ‘Beautiful.’ Rebecca Starford textpublishing.com.au

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Comment

Law’s #MeToo moment Effecting change in the legal profession

by Kieran Pender

There is a senior partner at my firm who famously harasses young women particularly when he has been drinking at social events. I was groped on two separate occasions. Nothing was done about it the first time I reported it. I did not report it the second time. A barrister attempted to rape me after a conference. I successfully fought him off – dress torn, bruised. I did not report it. My career would have been ended had I made a formal complaint against a very senior and very highly respected counsel. I worked for this judge as an associate … The behaviour was physical and highly intrusive and probably a criminal offence … I know of at least five women associates who have been the subject of a similar incident. There must be more.

riting in 1957, American judge Felix Frankfurter mused about the qualities demanded of those in society who serve ‘in defence of right and to ward off wrong’. Of our lawyers, he observed, we expect certain attributes ‘that have, throughout centuries, been compendiously described as “moral character”’. Frankfurter’s historical analysis took him back to the reign of Edward I in the thirteenth century. Had he delved even deeper into the archives, he might have settled upon the words of Aristotle. Discussing humankind’s first lawyers, the orators of Athens, Aristotle insisted upon the occupational requirement of ‘good moral character’. When allegations regarding Dyson Heydon’s past conduct were published by the Sydney Morning Herald on a wintry day in June 2020, I was not surprised. We have known for decades that harassment is widespread within law firms, courthouses, and barristers’ chambers. Since the 1990s, dozens of empirical studies in Australia and around the world have reached such 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

conclusions. Law is a profession based on evidence; the evidence here is incontrovertible. In 2018, a survey I led for the International Bar Association (IBA), the profession’s global peak body, found that one in three female lawyers and one in fourteen male lawyers had been sexually harassed at work or in work-related settings. This data was drawn from a sample of almost 7,000 respondents from 135 countries – the largest survey of its kind. In Australia the figures were even higher: forty-seven per cent of women and thirteen per cent of men said they had been harassed. Our legal profession has approximate gender parity in numerical terms, although the ratio of men increases considerably with seniority. If almost half of the women – a full quarter of the profession – have been sexually harassed, it follows that there must be harassers in abundance. That is the unavoidable conclusion from three decades of research: there cannot be thousands of targets experiencing this abhorrent misconduct, and few perpetrators. This makes the widespread shock at the Heydon news perplexing. We should not be surprised that a member of Australia’s High Court has been found, by an independent inquiry, to have sexually harassed at least six of his junior associates. We should not be surprised that eminent barristers, judges, and law firm partners have similar skeletons in their closets. Given the statistics, it would be surprising if there were not any sexual harassers within our judiciary. Indeed, perhaps the most surprising aspect of this whole affair is that Heydon’s conduct did not come to light sooner. That fact reflects poorly on many – including his colleagues at the bar, where it had reportedly been an ‘open secret’, and his peers on the bench, at least two of whom, the SMH alleges, were aware of incidents when they occurred. While several other highprofile Australians were identified as sexual harassers in the early

days of #MeToo, it took almost three years for this reporting to see the light; reflecting, no doubt, the conservative nature of law and the plaintiff-friendly nature of Australia’s defamation regime. But now we know, and we can hardly feign ignorance of the reams of research. In a profession that prides itself on the highest ethical standards, the evidence suggests there is a deficit of good moral character. Aristotle’s commandment is today reflected in the professional conduct regulations that govern the legal profession. The uniform conduct rules, for example, which have been adopted in a majority of states and territories, provide that ‘a solicitor must not in the course of practice, engage in conduct which constitutes discrimination, sexual harassment or workplace bullying’. Yet the harassment continues.

here is a paradox in the way we talk about workplace sexual harassment. We gravitate to stories, to individuals, to outrage. The Heydon story was on our front pages for a week. But he is a symptom, not the cause. Heydon is just another wrongdoer in a profession with plentiful harassers and in a society where harassment is rife. The ex-judge’s status makes the purported conduct all the more reprehensible, but his harassing is otherwise depressingly orthodox.

In a profession that prides itself on the highest ethical standards, the evidence suggests there is a deficit of good moral character I began this article with some stories: three responses to the IBA’s survey, each from a member of the legal profession in Australia. They are shocking. But again, sadly, they are not unusual. In our subsequent report, Us Too? Bullying and Sexual Harassment in the Legal Profession, we shared as many as we had space to include, alongside tables and graphs displaying the grim data. Within a password-protected spreadsheet on my laptop are thousands more of these personal stories. After we published Us Too? in May 2019, I set out on a global campaign to talk to the legal profession about harassment. I personally visited twenty-five cities across five continents; colleagues saw to another five cities and the sixth continent. In each location, we would host public and private events and meet with stakeholders – law firms, judges, barristers, representative associations, law schools, young lawyer groups, women lawyer groups, regulators, and many others. Between May 2019 and March 2020, when Covid-19 precluded our thirty-first and final trip, we presented our data hundreds of times to thousands of people. It was always the stories that elicited audible gasps. Inevitably, when I clicked to a slide containing one of the survey responses, the audience would be stunned into silence. I suppose that is the nature of explicating in such direct language things that are usually taboo, shrouded in silence. From Sydney to São Paulo to Singapore, whether presenting to law students or senior partners, the personal stories hit home. Yet as the journey wore on, I began to reflect on the efficacy of stories in driving positive change. It is human nature to be drawn to these anecdotes: even though the raw data should be more shocking by virtue of the pervasiveness it reveals, we feel

a strong emotional response to these deeply personal stories. Behind the numbers are real people and real suffering. But we have been hearing these stories for decades now (and in many cases experiencing them firsthand). As a profession, and as a society, we have only acted haltingly, through ad hoc initiatives and individual disputation, the latter often shrouded in secrecy by non-disclosure agreements. How do we harness the power of these stories – the outrage at Heydon being the most recent example in a long list – to drive systemic, enduring change? A week after the news broke, I met with a target of Heydon’s conduct for coffee. She put into words what I had been thinking: ‘We have to move the conversation along. By focusing on Heydon, we miss the bigger picture.’ None of that diminishes the importance of targets and bystanders speaking up. Individuals reporting incidents remain the primary way that harassment is addressed, and workplaces should endeavour to provide flexible reporting channels to encourage targets to raise their voices. Speaking up can also be a moment of empowerment; hundreds of respondents to our survey said that it was the first time they had told anyone about their experience. We should applaud these individuals for courageously sharing their stories. We should provide them with whatever support and assistance they require. But we must move away from an individual-centric approach and focus on a structural response. Perhaps, then, these personal stories might move us beyond shame and outrage, and provoke wider change.

hat does that mean? What does change actually look like? The risk inherent in our focus on high-profile individual cases is that most harassment is not Heydon-esque. Our emphasis on Heydon and whoever next incurs our righteous public wrath (have no doubt – someone will follow) obscures that significant fact. Our survey found that two-thirds of respondents who had been sexually harassed experienced sexist, sexual, or sexually suggestive comments; half had been looked at in an inappropriate manner, while nearly half had experienced ‘inappropriate physical contact, for example patting, pinching, brushing up against the body’. In contrast, one in five had experienced ‘seriously inappropriate physical contact, for example, kissing, fondling or groping’, and three per cent had been raped. Our research also indicated that non-sexual harassment – bullying – is endemic: globally, one in two female lawyers and one in three male lawyers have experienced it. Once again, the numbers were significantly higher in Australia: seventy-three per cent of female lawyers and fifty per cent of male lawyers said they had been bullied at work. In other words, the vast majority of harassment in legal workplaces is latent and non-physical. That makes it no less insidious, no less corrosive, and often no less impactful on the targets of the behaviour. More ‘serious’ incidents may of course have an aggravated impact. Law’s harassment problem looks like Heydon’s purported wrongdoing; it also more commonly looks like the ‘everyday’ inappropriate conduct that remains widespread in Australian workplaces. My fear is that by focusing on Heydon et al it is too easy for members of the profession to say ‘I am not Dyson Heydon’ or, echoing #MeToo, ‘I am not Harvey Weinstein’, as if their responAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

sibility ends there. Every member of the law needs to reflect on a daily basis about how we treat one another. We must act with respect and civility, we must call out inappropriate behaviour when we see it, and we must support those who endure harassment. Every single member of the law – from junior lawyers to senior judges – must say: ‘This is my problem, too.’

‘We have to move the conversation along. By focusing on Heydon, we miss the bigger picture’ Acknowledging this reality helps inform the development of wider structural initiatives. This is not a case of a few bad apples – this is a rotting barrel. To achieve change, we must better understand the reasons for that decay: a male-dominated senior leadership, extremely long work hours, chronic stress and anxiety, mental health challenges, pervasive alcohol consumption and so on. These are not excuses, but they do help explain and, it is to be hoped, will in turn aid positive change. Ultimately, that change comes through a long process of shifting the profession’s culture. Improving the anti-harassment ‘infrastructure’ – policies, procedures, training – is a vital condition for change. But it is not a sufficient condition. We must change attitudes, opinions, and mindsets – no paperwork ever achieved that.

his is a story about one particular sector, a small subset of our community. Yet it has pressing relevance for our entire society. The challenges currently facing the legal profession are not atypical. The law may be undergoing its own, distinct #MeToo moment, and the profession may be unusual in the millennia-old obligations of good moral character (now with modern regulatory underpinnings). But the law is not alone in being a repository of sexual harassment and other workplace wrongdoing. In March 2020, the Australian Human Rights Commission published its landmark Respect@Work report on the national inquiry into workplace sexual harassment in Australia. It found that the phenomenon is ‘prevalent and pervasive: it occurs in every industry, in every location and at every level, in Australian workplaces’. The Commission’s cross-sectoral data broadly mirrors the statistics from law: it found that thirty-nine per cent of women and twenty-six per cent of men had been sexually harassed at work within the past five years. Australia was once at the forefront of efforts to eradicate sexual harassment, from our workplaces and society at large. State anti-discrimination laws indirectly prohibited sexual harassment

in the 1970s; in 1984 the federal Sex Discrimination Act explicitly made sexual harassment unlawful, and established a Sex Discrimination Commissioner to oversee this change (the current Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, led the recent national inquiry). But change has not fully materialised. The Heydon reportage throws into stark relief what academic and industry research has been telling us for decades: sexual harassment remains widespread, in the law and elsewhere. It is usually not reported, and it exacts a significant toll on targets and those around them – an impact on human rights, human dignity, and human productivity. Our formal initiatives to address harassment are not working; Commissioner Jenkins wrote in the foreword to her report, ‘the current legal and regulatory system is simply no longer fit for purpose’. During the Us Too? campaign, wherever I was in the world I would conclude my presentations with one final story. In 1983, a major American law firm held a ‘swim-suit competition’ for its summer interns. The firm had wanted to hold a wet T-shirt competition, but colleagues suggested that was ill-advised. The firm persisted with the competition and the ‘winner’, a Harvard law student, was given a graduate role with the firm. A partner told the Wall Street Journal: ‘She has the body we’d like to see more of.’ My slide that accompanied this story contained two words, in large bold font: ‘Maintaining Momentum’. When the Journal story was published, it provoked considerable outrage across the profession. A few years later, a survey of female American lawyers found that sixty per cent had been sexually harassed. The American Bar Association subsequently recognised sexual harassment as a ‘serious problem’ in a formally ratified resolution. In other words, none of this is new. We have known since the 1980s that sexual harassment is rife in law. Swimsuit competitions, #MeToo, and now Dyson Heydon have given sporadic impetus to efforts to provide safe and supportive work environments. But ultimately, as a profession and as a society, we did not meet these aspirations. We have, variously, felt surprise, outrage, collective shame. Now we have to maintain the momentum and achieve real change. Anything less will be to betray those who have summoned the courage to tell their stories. Anything less would amount to complicity. There is no good moral character in that. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer. He is a senior legal adviser with the IBA’s Legal Policy & Research Unit in London. These views are his own. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

NO.1 IN SA IN CREATIVE ARTS FOR FULL-TIME EMPLOYMENT *

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FLINDERS.EDU.AU/CREATIVE-ARTS 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

History

‘Some first-rate sport’ A metaphorical colonial conquest Danielle Clode

The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver

Miegunyah Press $34.99 pb, 338 pp

s generations of Australian tourists have found, the kangaroo is a far more recognisable symbol of nationality than our generic colonial flag. Both emblematic and problematic, this group of animals has long occupied a significant and ambiguous space in the Australian psyche. Small wonder, then, that Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver have found such rich material through which to explore our colonial history in The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt. Despite earlier descriptions of smaller pademelons, quokkas, tammars and hare wallabies, it was the descriptions by James Cook and Joseph Banks of large hopping deer- or dog-like animals, known to Guugu Yimithirr people as a ‘kanguru’, which brought these animals to European attention. As with many first-contact encounters, a brief moment of wonder swiftly ended in bloodshed, and it is this aspect – the hunt – that Gelder and Weaver focus on. Notwithstanding the long history of Indigenous hunting, they argue that the first shooting of a kangaroo can be seen as a foundational moment in Australian colonial history, foreshadowing cultural and environmental destruction and appropriation. This initial interaction with the forerunners of British colonisation contains many of the elements that the authors draw out in subsequent chapters, including Indigenous conflict, sustenance, sport, science, and aspirations to colonial aristocracy. In the early years of colonisation, there was a huge enthusiasm for kangaroos in Europe, which even found their way to the Empress Josephine’s famed garden at Malmaison. And yet, in the colony itself, the focus on kangaroos was more as a source of meat. Matthew Flinders did not name Kangaroo Island for the beauty of its wildlife but rather ‘in gratitude for so seasonable a supply’ of fresh meat. There is nothing romantic about his pragmatic, although not unsympathetic, account of the slaughter. Kangaroo remained an important source of meat for sustaining the early colonies, leading to fatal conflict with, and displacement of, Indigenous communities. In early descriptions of kangaroo hunting, it is often portrayed as a battle with formidable male kangaroos, as if, Gelder and Weaver contend, the kangaroo hunt was a metaphorical conquest of the country. Kangaroo hunts, often with Indigenous assistance, have been celebrated in poetry, prose, and paint, as beautifully illustrated by this Miegunyah Press title. Given that both the authors are literary scholars, it is not surprising that their primary focus is on the kangaroo hunt in literature – and an apt focus too, providing

a rich and illuminating vein of research, and revealing much about the subtle shifts in the stories we have told about ourselves in the short time since European colonisation of Australia. As invasion progressed into settlement, symbolic conquest soon transformed into a performative sport. Like fox- and deer-hunting, kangaroo-hunting with dogs and horses enabled wealthier colonists to express their aristocratic aspirations. Visitors like Hyacinthe de Bougainville, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Darwin joined in, not always successfully. With hard soils and dense vegetation, the rough Australian terrain was not always as kind to ‘grand battue’ pursuits as the soft churned fields of Europe. When Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred visited in 1867, he enjoyed ‘some first-rate sport’ on Yorke Peninsula with the hunting party shooting twenty-seven kangaroos.The rival colony of Victoria claimed to have more kangaroos on one run than all of South Australia, but the two Victorian hunts proved dismally unsuccessful. A small mob of roos was penned into a cattle yard where the regal visitor might take potshots at close range. What started as an attempt to ‘replicate familiar English landmarks, enthusiasms and hunting traditions’ and to import ‘an authentically aristocratic way of being’ rapidly degenerated into brutal slaughter. The authors trace the ambivalent and shifting role of the kangaroo hunt through different literary traditions. Epic poems, similar to European odes to deer-hunting, glorified the ‘gallant’ hunt where the formidable male quarry of earlier accounts was more likely to be, disturbingly, a docile, often weeping, female. Such Green Romanticism, however, is undercut by the work of Steele Rudd, whose biting parody ‘A Kangaroo Hunt from a Shingle Hut’ from On Our Selection (1899) satirises any attempts to ape the well-practised performance of English entitlement. A similar contrast is apparent in the depiction of Australian Kangaroo dogs which transition from idealised noble companions of ‘incomparable swiftness’ to Rudd’s half-starved ‘motley swarm’ with a keener taste for mutton than for wild meat, or Joseph Furphy’s notoriously disreputable ‘Pup’ in Such is Life. The analysis of novels and children’s books reveals even more complexity around the nature and role of kangaroo hunting in Australian colonial society. Many of these works were by women, some of whom had never been to Australia but who had a strong connection with science and natural history. The ambivalent morality of the kangaroo hunt in these books is used as a test of character – through a coming of age, the raising or saving of children, or personal transformations. Perhaps even more importantly, these novels explore regret and remorse, not just over the treatment of native animals but more particularly about the European relationship with Indigenous people. It would do this book a grave injustice to describe it as a historical account of kangaroo hunting. The moral trajectory of the kangaroo hunt is the story of colonial settlement and Indigenous dispossession itself. Like the literature it discusses, The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt provides a surreal and disconcerting, yet convincing, evocation of our colonial history. By focusing on our relationship with such singular animals, the authors cast into sharp relief our own ambitions and ambiguities, our cruelty and our empathies. g Danielle Clode’s latest book is In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World (October 2020). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

History

The sense of otherness A current of existential angst Tali Lavi

Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the world, 1847–1947 by Norman Lebrecht Oneworld

$39.99 hb, 448 pp

y first encounter with Daniel Deronda (1876) was during a university undergraduate course in Victorian literature. The novel was almost shocking for its romanticised Jewish eponymous hero and its deep evocation of Judaism and modern Zionism’s stirrings. This was a singular experience when it came to reading Jewish characters by writers who were not themselves Jewish. Fictional Jews of this period were more likely to be permutations of vile stereotypes, Shylock or Fagin-like. They induced a feeling of shame, even when arguments could be made for the work’s nuance and literary brilliance. In Genius and Anxiety: How Jews changed the world, 1847–1947, we meet Daniel Deronda’s unlikely muse along with a profusion of other personalities, some famous, others whose legacies have been unnoticed or suppressed. Prussian-born Emanuel Deutsch – Talmudist, polyglot, and genius – was George Eliot’s Hebrew teacher and friend. His death at the age of forty-three galvanised her to create the novel that may not be her finest but is nevertheless glorious. ‘Promise Lost’ might be an alternative title for Norman Lebrecht’s book. Loss through premature death, as in Deutsch’s case, or through the prevalence of suicide attests to the often intolerable political and social landscape, steeped as it is in virulent anti-Semitism. Lebrecht is a music historian and award-winning novelist, whose non-fiction works include The Maestro Myth: Great conductors in pursuit of power (1997) and The Life and Death of Classical Music (2007). Predictably, he shows a close interest in composers and writers. Early on, he raises the question of his own authority. His answer is telling, claiming that he has a connection to the material, some of it being of ‘first-hand origin’. This inclusion of self is a frequent note, mostly enjoyable but one that some may find laboured. Lebrecht explores the impact upon the world of Jews like Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, and numerous others, alongside the Jewish nature of their thinking. He traces it to a Talmudic mode of analysis that is forever evaluating oppositional responses. Furthermore, he addresses ‘a current of existential angst’ experienced by Jews at this time, heightened after the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the twentieth century, which ‘reawakens a primal fear ... of their marginality’. This anxiety stimulates their ingenuity; for Jews, aware of their difference, radical thinking or creating becomes less risky. As a collective group, they have no elevated position from which they may fall. 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

Lebrecht has evidently been deliberating over these ideas for some years, as demonstrated in interviews. Like Sander L. Gilman in Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the hidden language of the Jews (1986), Lebrecht interrogates a recurring anti-Semitic slur: namely, that Jews are outsiders to the prevailing culture or Kultur. Jews, with their own language, are perceived as being incapable of speaking the nation’s mother tongue, whether it be German or French. Lebrecht argues that instead of being merely proficient in these cultural languages, many of these personalities revolutionised them in their words and music: Proust, Heinrich Heine, Felix Mendelssohn, Sarah Bernhardt, Arnold Schoenberg. These notes of triumphalism erupt among tragic refrains. Arthur Koestler’s pessimistic judgement of 1946 – ‘Self-hatred is the Jew’s patriotism’ – haunts the book as a spectre. Unlike for Bernhardt and later Leonard Bernstein, two extravagantly proud Jews, the inner conflict plays out agonisingly for many of the subjects as an endless wrestling between self-repulsion and self-actualisation. Lebrecht’s classical music blog, Slipped Disc, is widely read and highly contentious. The writer has professed that gossip is ‘the human comedy’, and its spirit animates Genius and Anxiety. Georges Bizet’s Carmen is likely to have been inspired by his Jewish wife, Geneviève Halévy, who, on remarrying after his death, reinvented herself into a literary salon host and counted Proust among her friends. Eliza Davis is a revelation. An English Jewish woman driven by pursuit of justice peppered with a healthy dose of chutzpah, she managed to precipitate a change of heart in Charles Dickens regarding the representation of Jews in his novels. Anecdotes are central to this book’s pleasure; one stores them away like bonbons. Lebrecht’s partiality to certain figures like Gustav Mahler – about whom he has written two books and admits to being obsessed by – are countered by his antipathy to others such as Freud, and one suspects Hannah Arendt, who is reduced to her phrase ‘the banality of evil’. This can be tiresome. For the most part, those depicted are complex creatures with varied moral codes, eliciting empathy and disdain and many shades in between. There is a staggering amount of material here, with an accompanying extensive bibliography. Characters jostle for space and demand more attention. At times, the subjects feel ill at ease with their fellow chapter companions. Formidably, though, Lebrecht has undertaken a century-long study of European Jewish civilisation, religious and secular, and the revolutions taking place within these communities amid broader historical events. Genius and Anxiety teases the reader, inducing a desire to know more about Fanny Mendelssohn, Else Lasker-Schüler, and many others. If there was an accompanying musical score, it would not be played in the register of Schoenberg’s atonality but rather a mixture of Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘joyful vivacity’ and Bernstein’s openly Jewish scores, ‘straddling highbrow and low’. Genius and Anxiety is a love letter to Lebrecht’s heritage and to a world mostly lost and radically reconstituted. The fractured glass that appears as a motif can be witnessed in the contemporary rise of anti-Semitism. Lebrecht’s lament, ‘The sense of otherness is back’, makes sense when noting that he is English. For Jews of different origins, this positioning as Other has never really gone away. g Tali Lavi is a Melbourne-based writer and reviewer.

Economics

Pride comes before a fall The supposed iniquities of economics John Tang

What’s Wrong with Economics? A primer for the perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

Yale University Press (Footprint) $47.99 hb, 248 pp

t is a truth universally acknowledged that pride comes before a fall, and ‘Anyone with a historical sense would have realised that the hubristic attempt to make the world into a frontierand culture-free single market would end in tears.’ This opening salvo in Professor Robert Skidelsky’s new book is part of his answer to what is wrong with economics. Besides arrogance, this includes amorality, ahistoricism, sociopathy, over-formalisation, and unscientific dogmatism. Skidelsky’s unsparing indictment, laid out in fourteen highly readable chapters, shows how economics transformed from a moral philosophy to the current mathematics-heavy social science favoured by governments. Included here are insights from major schools of economic thought, quotes from well-known practitioners, and descriptions of its troubled relationships with other disciplines. Skidelsky claims that over the past century economics has lost its ethical foundation and multiplicity of perspectives, replaced with models that are divorced from reality and useless in predicting crises. By the book’s end, Skidelsky recommends a wholesale reformation of the discipline’s motivation and practice: reinserting ethics and institutions and highlighting the role of uncertainty in decision-making. Without such changes, he claims, ‘it does not seem that today’s pretentious economics will be of much help’ against the modern challenges of inequality, political disillusionment, and economic crises. A reasonable question to ask is whether Skidelsky is right. Unlike most critics of economics, Skidelsky has insight from being an emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick. His three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes (1983–2000) adds authority to his attacks by drawing on that scholar’s work and dissatisfaction with the field. To non-economists, these strengths, coupled with the author’s command of history and his liberal use of choice quotes, seem to justify many of his criticisms. To students of economics, however, the identified failings veer toward caricature and target anachronistic and ideological straw men. Take, for example, Skidelsky’s charge of amorality. He describes early economists like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx as being concerned with self-interest and justice, albeit in different ways and degrees. For them, there existed the concept of a ‘just’ price that predated competitive markets and represented customary value for the labour used in production, later expanded to include labour embodied in capital. This framework

allowed for discussion of fair allocation between production cost and rent. In contrast, modern economics, particularly among its neoclassical adherents in the Chicago School, admit that prices only reflect willingness to pay, with individuals paying more or less depending on their subjective utility preferences. The market price is an equilibrium that is reached when individuals maximise their utilities across different goods subject to their availability. Skidelsky argues that this reformulation, supported with technical analysis, replaced the moral sense of value (what is fair) with a numerical one (what is efficient). In the process, modern economics removed the social dimension from economic decision-making and legitimised the evils of labour exploitation, price gouging, inequality, and unemployment at the hands of profit-maximising firms and complicit governments. Humans were little more than selfish calculating machines, each seeking utility maximisation, and were encouraged to act that way for the sake of efficiency regardless of social consequences.

Modern economics removed the social dimension from economic decisionmaking and legitimised the evils of labour exploitation, price gouging, inequality, and unemployment One problem with this description is that few modern economists abdicate their moral responsibility in their research or actually believe humans are wholly self-interested robots behaving in a rational vacuum. Separating equity from efficiency and society from markets may displease humanists, but there is a difference between a reluctance to pick sides and an endorsement of predatory behaviour. Focusing on what can be allocated (i.e. positive economics) instead of why (i.e. normative economics) does not make economists unethical, and it also avoids a culturally specific definition of good or fair. Even then, many economists, including the Nobel Prize winners George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, and Amartya Sen cited by Skidelsky, use their findings to challenge the discipline’s orthodoxy and to advocate for social change. Using the same tools and framework as neoclassicists, equally influential (but uncited) economists like David Card, Angus Deaton, and Esther Duflo have shown how minimum wages can be non-distortionary, unemployment harmful to health, and open markets beneficial to the poor. While the title of the book clearly shows Skidelsky’s scepticism toward the field, a more nuanced presentation of how economics is generally practised today would mitigate concerns about ideological bias. Skidelsky makes more solid arguments about the discipline’s methodological rigidity and fixation with mathematical formalisation. Modern economics is distinguished from other social sciences or humanities in having common assumptions and analytical tools used in its research questions. The reliance on logic and quantification may give the discipline an undeserved gloss of rigour while also limiting access for those unfamiliar with its tools or who disagree with its first principles. That said, even with a shared paradigm there exist great diversity and debates among economists AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

that have allowed the discipline to change. Behavioural economics, far from being a marginal subfield preoccupied with quirks deviating from mainstream benchmarks, has reinvigorated the field by adding greater realism. This has led to effective policies that increase personal saving and improve public health. New economic history, instead of being corrupted by ahistorical models and inappropriate tests, has gained tools to revisit conventional wisdom based on anecdote or limited contexts. While cultures and social institutions differ across time and space, they also share commonalities that can be identified with such tools. That fields like literature, linguistics, political science, and sociology have all adopted similar statistical methods indicates their versatility, complementarity, and accessibility. If economics is to be singled out for its failings, it seems fair to ask whether other fields are subject to the same criteria. Should medicine have as its only defensible purpose the eradication of disease? Should physics be discarded for attempting to find a unified theory or having limitations to testing its predictions? Should philoso-

phers be less smug? If economics is to be judged by its outcomes, should the failures of shock therapy or Washington Consensus reforms outweigh the gains from microlending, cheaper traded goods, and global poverty reduction? It would be useful to understand which achievements made by modern economics are still possible without its allegedly malignant changes over the same period. This Skidelsky does not do. All the same, Skidelsky has written a provocative and timely book that challenges economics and its practitioners to shift its paradigm and to reclaim a moral foundation before it is too late. Had economics retained its 1970s and 1980s orientation, his censures might have found a more deserving target, but the discipline has since moved on. Economics will continue to evolve, with or without Skidelsky’s admonitions, much like its irrational, all-too-human subjects. g John Tang is Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Melbourne. ❖

Economics

Human consequences

Examining the use and misuse of economics David Throsby

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better answers to our biggest problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Allen Lane $45 hb, 412 pp

survey conducted in the UK in 2017 asked people whether they trusted the opinions of a variety of experts, such as doctors, scientists, and nutritionists. Economists came second last in a big field, beaten to the bottom only by politicians. How can it be that practitioners of an academic discipline that traces its intellectual history back at least 250 years have sunk so low in popular esteem? It seems that the blame rests not with economists themselves, most of whom are honest and well-intentioned individuals whose main handicap, at least among the males of the species, is their legendary boringness and appalling taste in ties. Rather, the problem lies in the discipline. The dominant school of economics that conventional economists practise is founded on the neoclassical principles of free markets, economic efficiency, consumer sovereignty, reduced taxation, and a diminished role for government in managing the economy. As professional practitioners in business, finance, and the public sector, economists steeped in these principles have considerable influence on economic policy, an influence that the public appears to regard with a great deal of disdain. 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

As policymakers, economists came of age in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States – a period dubbed ‘The Economists’ Hour’ by economic journalist and author Binyamin Appelbaum – when they were able to persuade successive US governments to adopt a range of libertarian policies including privatisation of public assets, deregulation, reduced government spending, tax breaks for the rich in pursuit of the now discredited trickle-down effect, and more. It was the stuff of Reaganomics, and it was enthusiastically embraced by Margaret Thatcher on the other side of the Atlantic. While these ideas are appealing to champions of individual libertarianism, and have provided the ideological playbook for right-wing think tanks in many countries, including here in Australia, they have also underpinned some of the worst failings in economic policy in recent times. The global economic crisis of 2008, for example, was a direct result of deregulated financial markets and a misplaced belief that the market would behave according to the idealised models of neoclassical theory.

How can it be that practitioners of an academic discipline that traces its intellectual history back at least 250 years have sunk so low in popular esteem? In their book Good Economics for Hard Times: Better answers to our biggest problems, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo offer not so much an apologia for their profession as a suggestion that the concepts, analytical methods, and tools are there, if only economists knew how to use them sensibly and with regard for the human consequences of their recommendations. The authors, a husband-and-wife team who were joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, are well placed to make such a judgement. They were awarded the discipline’s top accolade for their work on poverty alleviation and economic development. Their research in the developing world has brought them into direct

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contact with the inequities that continue to exist in the distribution of income and wealth both within and between countries. As a result, references to inequality and economic injustice run like leitmotifs through the book, providing a stern critique of the way in which mainstream economists, most of whom tend to accept uncritically the neoclassical tradition in which they have been trained, privilege efficiency over equity, private over public interest, markets over intelligent interventionism, and ideology over objective analysis of evidence. The book devotes each of its nine chapters to a different area of economic and social concern where ‘good economics’ can be applied to yield ‘better answers’, beginning with migration, a topic described as the single most influential issue in the world’s richest countries. It is an issue that populist demagogues exploit to create fear and distrust of immigrants and refugees among their constituents. In a lengthy chapter that contains the volume’s only diagrams – two graphs showing why more migrants do not always lead to lower wages – the authors work through a range of illustrations, many drawn from their extensive experiences in India, to show that economic incentives cannot on their own explain population movements, nor can simplistic economic models necessarily predict the impact of immigrants on local economies. Subsequent chapters consider international trade, the future of economic growth, the causes of inequality, the impact of technology, and a surprisingly brief chapter on the role of government and civil society organisations in implementing socially progressive policies. There is a thoughtful analysis of racism, placed in the context of a discussion of the ways in which preferences, beliefs, and values inform economic behaviour. The book pays particular attention to climate change, a field where the contrast between good and bad economics could not be more stark. For example, there are many studies that use spurious economic methods to show that reducing greenhouse gas emissions places excessive costs on the national economy. Despite the fact that such studies are inevitably only partial and ignore a range of associated benefits and costs, they are seized upon by politicians in defence of short-sighted and self-interested policy prescriptions. Other studies apply economics more judiciously, for example utilising a prediction of simple economic theory on which economists of all shades of opinion are likely to agree – namely that prices influence behaviour. If a policy strategy is aimed at changing consumption habits in order to reduce emissions, it is doomed to be ineffective if it fails to place a price on carbon, for example via a carbon tax or a tradable permits system. This chapter on environmental issues says little that is new, but it does provide a forceful reminder that it is our obsession with economic growth that underlies these problems, blunting the will of rich countries to take action, and exacerbating the global inequality that imposes increasingly disproportionate costs on the poor of the world. This immensely readable book is well documented, authoritative, and extensively illustrated with the authors’ own experiences. It provides a scathing critique of the ways in which economics has been used and misused to entrench prejudice and to underwrite all sorts of political chicanery. There is a shelfful of recent books making much the same criticisms, but the difference here is that Banerjee and Duflo offer us some hope that economics 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

can be redeemed. They provide a practical account of how a more enlightened and less ideologically driven economics could lead us towards a better, saner, more humane world. ‘Economics,’ they conclude, ‘is too important to be left to economists.’ g David Throsby is Professor of Economics at Macquarie University. His most recent book is The Economics of Cultural Policy (CUP, 2010).

Crowded Out

The world presses in, a towering river of debris glittering with specks of one ongoing explosion. All of us are morphing, our faces layered with many faces, two eyes gazing upward from the ending of time. Our skin is travelling from country to country even as we sit still and the second hand stays frozen on the wall clock. From somewhere far inside us a young woman of a millennium ago rises to the surface, comes close and we shiver with all her tenderness. At the place where our breath is suddenly held back a child is there, watching the trees above him spin in fast motion. In the vast empty bar room of the mind a skeleton holding a wineglass gives us a familiar nod. Birds fly in and out of the multiple cages that are our ribcage. A single cry from any one of their throats is enough to thread white light across the darkness. So large, so impossible – our hands shake as we carry the world.

Peter Boyle

Peter Boyle’s most recent collection is Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness (Vagabond, 2019).

Poetry

Names, names, names! Experimental mini-biographies Michael Farrell

Shorter Lives by John A. Scott

Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 134 pp

ohn A. Scott’s Shorter Lives is written at an intersection between experimental fiction, biography, and poetry. It inherits aspects of earlier works, such as preoccupations with sex and France. As the title indicates, it narrates mini-biographies of famous writers – Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Stephen (Woolf ), André Breton, and Mina Loy – and one painter – Pablo Picasso – with interludes devoted to the lesser-known poet Charles Cros and the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. The narratives are largely distilled from more conventional prose sources. Scott gives himself poetic licence to fictionalise, and anachronise: Paul Cézanne’s collection of twentieth-century American paintings, for example. The most purely fictional life here is that of Breton: a record of his time spent in Melbourne. The year is 1942, and, after just two-thirds of a page of free verse, a decorative font resembling a circus announcement announces that he has ‘LEFT AMERICA’. From ‘LEFT AMERICA’ on, and, aside from this flourish – and an insertion of Leon Trotsky’s signature, made, mediumistically, in the night, by Breton – this section is in conventionally set prose and reads like a short (nineteen-page) novel. Why leave ‘odious’ America for Melbourne in the middle of World War II? To announce the coming of Ern Malley? (Not exactly.) Breton has been invited by art critic Gino Nibbi. He joins in with the scene at Nibbi’s art shop, the ‘Leonardo’, a scene that includes Sidney Nolan. Also present are (painter David?) ‘Strachan’ and the plausible-sounding ‘Harry Hocking’, a poet who also appears in Scott’s 2014 novel N. Nolan shows Breton photos of ‘revolutionary’ Ned Kelly’s ‘surreal’ armour, which brings Breton to ‘near ecstasy’. What follows is also surreal and involves a conversation in English between Breton and Mr Chang, a Chinese laundry proprietor, regarding the handwritten texts of famous writers who have visited Australia, some fictionally (i.e. Rimbaud) – and others, like Mallarmé, who have not. Chang expatiates on the ‘linen halls’ of laundries, which turn out to be shadow archives, preserving world literature (Ancient Greek and Syrian plays are mentioned): safer than libraries, Chang avers. The figure of Chang, and his discourse, is a brilliant contribution to Australian letters: a figure for Peter Carey to envy (this moment, between Kelly and Malley, feels like Carey territory). Breton, as a poet who represents the manifesto, is the perfect pin to fix this wartime, surreal, and Surrealist-inflected moment. The experience, naturally, raises Australia in Breton’s estimation.

Rimbaud is himself a form by now, even within the context of Australian poetry, but in Scott’s life there is an emphasis on Rimbaud’s body: and also that of Paul Verlaine. The police doctors’ examination of Verlaine’s genitals recalls Michael Jackson’s video statement of his own examination, as legal experiments to see whether their bodies would somehow profess guilt – or humiliation produce confession. Two other aspects are intriguing. The first is the portrayal of Rimbaud’s sister, Isabelle, who sees her brother’s ficto-biographical potential: emerging as a kind of Ethel Malley figure, of whom more could be made. Then there is the posthumous section, which ironises Scott’s title concept, in extending Rimbaud’s shorter life. Contemporary publishing technology allows for a range of effects, including pages of varied type, which, at one point in Shorter Lives, evokes the archaic, crowded look of nineteenth-century newspapers. Like any retro effect, it is neater than its original. It suggests ‘archive fever’, especially in the researched context of the Stephen family history of madness and abuse. The use of grayscale, used for quotes, but also for the name of Virginia’s sister, Laura, whose clamour/trauma can’t be borne, adds pathos. It is not a quietening device in the same way as the text’s use of smaller type: while clearly legible, it evokes the defocusing effects of contemporary cinema. Despite typographical variation and side notes, this life consists almost entirely of a cycle of sonnets beginning and ending on an indented shorter line, like beads on a necklace. Forms are envelopes and sonnets are no exception. The Stephen sonnets expel, or sideline, their paratextual notes and quotes, but those of the Loy sequence manage to contain many of theirs – be they paler, of smaller point, of superscript, or of typewriter font. (These sonnets are, in a sense, mongrel texts: mongrel being a key term for Loy, and used throughout this section.) It is the most substantial life: at forty-two pages roughly double that of Rimbaud, Woolf, or Picasso. She is worth the attention, in terms of both work and life. It commences with her relationship with Swiss Surrealist poet Arthur Cravan, the six-foot-seven boxer, a nephew of Oscar Wilde, who famously disappeared, in Mexico, presumably drowned. Given the treatments of Rimbaud and Breton, I wondered if Scott would afford him a new fictional existence? (Not in this book.) Loy goes to a New York party: all the present and referred to are famous, many of whom have Parisian/Surrealist connections; the accumulated network suggests, in Ab Fab terms, ‘Names, names, names!’ It’s almost too readable – if you know the territory. In Scott’s hands, the sonnet (elsewhere mostly a lyric form) seems eminently suited to narrative, although the retelling of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, by Loy to the artist Joseph Cornell, one afternoon in her New York apartment, is rendered in prose; but the lyrical, almost-implied discourse of Loy, in sonnet form (in ‘Three Collages’), along with similar moments in the Rimbaud, are for me high points of the book. The concluding life, of Picasso, is typographically straight. An obvious way to Australianise this narrative would have been to give Picasso an Australian lover – but his sexual relations, as brutally summarised by Scott, we could not wish on anyone. g Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His collections include I Love Poetry (Giramondo, 2017). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Poetry

‘Loss of breath is the legacy’ Not so much an anthology as a reckoning Declan Fry

Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today edited by Alison Whittaker

‘T

University of Queensland Press $24.99 pb, 178 pp

he constant loss of breath is the legacy.’ So wrote poet Ali Cobby Eckermann in 2015 for the anthology The Intervention. The eponymous Intervention of 2007 in the Northern Territory was, in the long history of this continent, the first time that the federal government had deployed the army against its own citizenry. As I write this review, in the United States police are using tear gas, traditionally reserved for warfare, against those protesting the worth of black life, while the president flirts with the idea of calling in the military. Some of us gasp in shock. Some, in suffocation. But the loss of breath is not only that of George Floyd, or Eric Garner. It is the loss of breath which belonged to Cherbourg dancer Daniel Yock in 1993 – to David Dungay Jr in 2015. Dungay’s death in Long Bay jail followed an altercation with prison guards over a packet of biscuits. Footage played during the coronial inquest showed him saying twelve times: ‘I can’t breathe.’ What inheritance, what obligations, does this create for First Nations poetry? How do we catch – if not recapture – our breath? Fire Front tackles the issue laterally. Avoiding temporal and genre constraints – the anthology as canonical fiat – it offers an opportunity for publishers and readers to consider what it means to place times, communities, and concerns in mutual dialogue. From the oral poetics of Declan Furber Gillick and the dropbear poetics of Evelyn Araluen to the fiery bars of Provocalz and Ancestress, the carceral yearning of Dylan Voller to the grim passions of Lionel Fogarty, Fire Front celebrates both the established and emerging, the new and familiar. Each contribution is notable for its vivid, breathing compulsion. Together, they speak with – and toward – a living history. Some, like Joel Davison’s poem ‘Ngayrayagal Didjurigur (Soon Enough)’, achieve this on two levels: explicitly, by placing Gadigal language between lines of English; and internally, by having the abstractions of the poem’s opening, a weary dialogue of generalised deficiency (‘Wiribay dagura / Worn out and cold [...] Ngarrawan biyal / Distant and no where’) spoken back to by the staunch invocation near its end: ‘Nabami ngyini / You will see yourself again / Ngyinila / You must.’ Reflecting on Yvette Holt’s ‘Custodial Seeds’, Steven Oliver’s contribution reveals how, between and among First Nations, respect for difference, combined with a desire to understand teachings that are ‘not my knowledge to know’, can prove gen60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

erative, reconciling one’s knowledge of self and community. They embody an act of creation: of ‘identity, sovereignty, resistance, pride, affirmation and honouring’. Equally poignant is Chelsea Bond’s piece on what it means to suddenly find oneself an Elder, welcoming someone whom you have only just noticed knocking at the door – a conundrum made all the more strange upon realising that, the whole time, the person knocking was you. Mojo Ruiz de Luzuriaga’s ‘Native Tongue’ considers questions of identity and inheritance, the geographical palimpsests irreversibly traced by the history of this continent. Singing of her Wiradjuri great-grandfather and Filipino father, of being born here yet feeling ‘so ill at ease’, Luzuriaga’s refrain – ‘I don’t know where I belong’ – does not render her homeless so much as provide refuge in the act of singing place: ‘So if you want to call me something / Call it to my face / But I will not apologise / For taking up this space.’ Following Rio Tinto’s destruction of 46,000 years of cultural history in the Juukan Gorge, Samuel Wagan Watson’s ‘The Grounding Sentence’ is (again) assuming new resonance, speaking back to an ‘eternity of dispersal’.With Fortescue Metals and BHP vying to outdo their competitor in potentially obliterating even older sacred sites, the multiple readings yielded by Watson’s sentence (Verbal? Judicial? Destined?) begin to look, not sardonic, so much as inescapably pained. How do we write our way out of a destruction that, with breathless velocity, seems unstoppable? Is the constant loss of breath to be the only legacy of this continent? At present, a petition is circulating to have the New South Wales Attorney General refer David Dungay Jr’s death to prosecutors. Dungay Jr was, among many things, a poet. A stanza of his work closes the petition: ‘They don’t care, well that’s how it seems / And they take away our hopes and dreams / And until the day we’re out and free / This is how our life’s to be.’ Fire Front offers another possibility. A vision of First Nations poetry as ongoing work – work begun long before we come to it. It is a lesson in how to listen; in how to recognise songs that cannot be heard until we are ready to hear – and to honour – what they are trying to say. In this, Fire Front stands as not so much an anthology as a reckoning. It grapples with our various inheritances and with what can no longer be inherited. Not because it is ‘lost’ (nothing ever is – there is always an imprint left behind by absence, a peculiar bas-relief ); rather, because it was never ours to inherit. It was only a guide. A fire to sit with. Until the flames, having subsided, signal that the time has come to move on again. Epitomising the optimistic vein of Bruce Pascoe, who gestures here toward the pleasures of generosity and patience, the poets of Fire Front sing joy as much as anything else. That spirit which ensured the Ancestors would ‘keep wording, even to the deaf ’. For those who aren’t being heard, our responsibility is to keep listening, learning to amplify their song. Even if we fail, these poems – their indelible grace and compass – will not be lost. They will go on. They always have. They always will. g Declan Fry is an essayist and critic, born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie. He lives on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land.

Poetry

Omnivorous and fractal Three new poetry collections James Jiang

ount Parnassus remains a proscribed destination for the moment, but Aidan Coleman’s Mount Sumptuous (Wakefield Press, $22.95 pb, 56 pp) provides an attractive local alternative. Following on from the poems of love and recovery in Asymmetry (2012), this collection marks the poet’s reawakened appetite for the sublimities and subterfuges of suburban Australia, from cricket pitches ‘lit like billiard tables’ and Blue Light Discos to the flammable wares of Best & Less and the implacable red brick of ‘all-meat / towns’. As these poems and their pseudo-pedagogical endnotes show, Coleman is a keen philologist of the language of commerce. The title’s ‘sumptuous’ (from the Latin sumptus for ‘expense’) keys us in to the vital ambivalence of a poetry, which on the one hand honours the rituals of everyday consumption (‘lounging / book in hand, Tim Tams / … tea a given’), and on the other speaks to the exploitative logic of consumer capitalism (‘Take the juiceless fruits / of day labour and a white / goods salesman’s leaden chicanery’). This won’t be the first review (or the last) to compare the poetry of Coleman to that of John Forbes, whose biography he is currently writing. Forbes’s influence can be felt in Coleman’s fascination with not only Pop Art’s cartoon aesthetic (‘Cartoon Snow’) but also with electronic gadgetry. When, in the second of Coleman’s ‘Secondary’ poems (each one an improvisation on a secondary colour: green, purple, orange), we come across ‘A tang / of primitive electronics: the circuit board’s / braille labyrinth, the slab type / of Amstrad’ (a brand of personal computer), we see the complexity of Coleman’s negotiation of Forbes’s legacy. The evocation of an almost instinctively sensual recognition – ‘a tang’ – makes all the difference. In Forbes, everything is artificial and contrived (mechanically or ideologically); his density of allusion and detached hedonism squeeze all the phenomenal pungency out of experience. Yet this element remains undiluted in Coleman’s work, even when something like the incursions on the human sensorium by commodity culture is being implied (‘lungs scoured / by Brillo air’). Coleman has recently reflected on his desire to compose what he calls an ‘omnivorous lyric’, and throughout this collection one detects the ongoing experiment of marrying a looser associative method to the poet’s natural feel for taut, concise lyric forms (still evident in the short parenthood poems ‘Unready’, ‘Regent & Seal’, and ‘But Soft’). The latter is where Coleman seems most at home, and home, as he writes in ‘Quest’, ‘is the

place to exercise / your subtlety’. As his poems range ever more freely and adventurously across the zodiac of his own wit, they continue to register the centripetal pull of intimate enclosures, whether poetic or domestic.

here Coleman’s volume traverses ‘the vast, blue continent of theory’, Jennifer Mackenzie’s work roams through the jungles and grasslands of Southeast Asia. Navigable Ink (Transit Lounge, $24 pb, 80 pp) emerges from Mackenzie’s decades-long engagement with Indonesia and its writers, especially the novelist and essayist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose manuscript for the historical epic Arus Balik (a ‘reversal’ or ‘turning of the tide’) found its way into Mackenzie’s hands in 1993. Almost all the poems in this collection are inspired by or allude to Arus Balik (one poem, ‘Malacca’, is a direct translation), making Navigable Ink something of a prolegomenon to Pramoedya’s monumental work.

This won’t be the first review (or the last) to compare the poetry of Coleman to that of John Forbes Yet this is a book of formidable learning – historical, cultural, philological – in its own right. You will want to read it with a dictionary and encyclopedia or search engine at hand; you will probably want to go back to it after watching Jalan Raya Pos (‘The Great Post Road’), Bernie IJdis’s 1996 documentary about the road that slinks across the top of Java, a project commissioned by the Dutch and completed using forced labour that killed thousands. While there is clearly an activist dimension to Mackenzie’s work, it consists less, I think, in the stridency of the poems’ stances against censorship and environmental devastation, and more in the cross-cultural networks of artists and scholars these poems call into being through their acts of dedication and citation. Navigable Ink presents some of Mackenzie’s most vivid historical reconstructions. But unlike Borobudur (2009), a collection that follows the wayfaring Gunavarman, the priestly architect of the sacred Buddhist site, this latest collection presents the reader with no clear protagonists to follow, no central narrative braid to clutch. Instead, the fractal eloquence of Mackenzie’s poems and images branches out from an oeuvre obscured by years of censorship under the old colonial regime and Suharto’s New Order. In the sequence of poems that reflect on Pramoedya’s life in letters, Mackenzie’s clipped and almost telegraphic idiom suggests the precariousness of a vocation facing multitudinous forms of world-historical blockage (‘1965: / I. Library Ransacked / II. hysteria of flags / III. discourse a burning tyre / IV. imprisonment to the East’). Yet it is a vocation which persists, even at the extremity of deprivation, as a wager on eternity (‘typing onto the blank pages of the future, the text / wrapped in the / bottle / & out to sea / to history / to ETERNITY’).

ust as Mackenzie’s recreations of sixteenth-century Indonesia allow for time travelling, the poems in Stephen K. Kelen’s A Happening in Hades (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 96 pp) address a future populated by drones, high-definition screens, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

and ‘a vast coelenterate’ (i.e. jellyfish) – ‘a giant wobbling freak god, translucent and full of movement and light’ filling up the empty seabeds. Of the three poets, Kelen has arguably the greatest range: his poems plough a number of disparate furrows, from Australiana (‘The Great Australian Noun’) to Byromania (‘Don Juan Enters the Underworld’), canine capers (‘Dog Day’) to confessional disclosures (‘Packing Up the House’), the koanic (‘Cold winds blow from angry hearts’) to the corybantic (‘Anaheim’s street dogs barked rock / and roll all night’). This, then, is ‘omnivorous’ verse of another stripe, more commonly known under the sign of ‘mock’. Despite its origin in patrician literary practices, mock has a levelling effect, allowing the high to get a sniff of the low in all matters political and poetical. The residues of mock are everywhere to be seen in Kelen’s book, from a title that conflates the contemporary with the Classical in its evocation of Hades (a tactic deployed by T.S. Eliot, Shelley, and Pope, among others) to the casual raillery of literati and poetasters in poems such as ‘Empire of the Scene’, ‘Floating World’, and ‘Bush Town’ (‘Verse once so strictly equestrian had become bovine’). It’s even there in some of the gentler moments of domestic felicity that lionise the mundane: ‘Empty the mind – / exalt the profound kitchen, / wash the dishes transcendence’. But the mock strain becomes most explicit in the three Don Juan poems that conclude the book. The libertine protagonist of

Byron’s mock-epic is reimagined as ‘a happy mongrel / (Family background tick multicultural)’ prone to the seductions not of women so much as of consumerism. Indeed, shopping malls serve as Kelen’s analogues for the slave markets in Byron’s original. The disavowal of comic rhymes is disappointing in this context (what’s the fun of imitating Byron if you won’t pair ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’?), but the doggerel is convincing, especially in the first ‘draft’ poem. While it is the only one of the three not arranged in stanzas, it romps along more merrily than its strophic counterparts, marred only occasionally by a note of sententiousness (‘Not everywhere’s a mall, outside there’s a world / Incredibly sad … / Where children search for shrapnel to sell for scrap’). There are rival mock lineages in Australian poetry: on the one hand, the stately neo-Classical satires of A.D. Hope and Peter Porter; on the other, a more larrikin Augustan tradition that extends from a colonial poet such as John Dunmore Lang to a contemporary such as Justin Clemens. Kelen belongs firmly in the latter camp; he keeps its rambunctious spirit of wit alive even as he despairs of poetry’s ability to compete with television, video games, or the pub for time and attention. But declaring ‘GAME OVER’ is a timeworn move in mock’s repertoire. As every gamer knows, that screen only appears when the story isn’t quite done. g James Jiang is a writer and academic based in Melbourne.

Music

‘Work for yourself !’ Gershwin as musical disrupter Paul Kildea

Summertime: George Gershwin’s life in music by Richard Crawford

W.W. Norton & Company $34.95 pb, 612 pp

rnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were two of the greatest architects of twentieth-century art music, each of them simultaneously an agent of continuity and disruption. The disruption is easy enough to chart: Schoenberg’s complete rewiring of tonality’s motherboard; Gershwin’s successful integration of jazz and symphonic music (more successful than the integration into American society of the greatest exponents of this same music). Although the continuity in each instance is slightly more nebulous, it is equally as compelling. Schoenberg’s early works snuggle up comfortably with Brahms’s late ones: it’s hardly a coincidence that the younger composer undertook an orchestral arrangement of the elder’s piano quartet. Even those works of Schoenberg’s from the beginning 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

of the twentieth century – when the fruit really was starting to rot on the vine – are not coy about their debt to Brahms. And Gershwin – born Jacob Bruskin Gershowitz in New York City in 1898, his parents and their families having escaped the pogroms and anti-Semitism of St Petersburg in the 1890s – followed the path of so many émigrés in these decades, all of them holding on to the borscht and the Brahms they had left behind while simultaneously reshaping the culture of their adopted country. In American music, this reshaping took different forms and used different agencies, though with one key element in common: the gramophone in the 1920s would be unimaginable without Jewish émigrés, likewise cinema in the 1930s and Broadway and the symphony orchestra a decade later. Gershwin was both beneficiary and engineer in this regard, though in the early years he was not yet the disrupter he would become. He was the kid who studied classical piano, subsequently pimping instruments and plugging songs for one of the many American firms that in these years discovered gold in them thar hills. He did the vaudeville supper slot in the Fox City Theatre for $3.13 a night and soaked up the popular music that kept Tin Pan Alley so neatly paved. He wrote songs for musical reviews – tentatively embarking on the partnership with his brother Ira that would soon prove so fruitful – before going on to write complete shows, a number of runaway successes among them. Unusually for a composer, Gershwin was an extrovert. Ira (bookish, introvert) remembered him as a boy who lived mostly outside, his eyes blackened from fights – Italians against the Irish and both against the Jews, a rehearsal of the racial/geographic tensions in New York City in these decades that would later inspire Gershwin’s

Music partial heir, Leonard Bernstein, when he set about updating the story of Romeo and Juliet in the 1950s. A different personality would somehow have missed these opportunities; next to Gershwin, Cole Porter couldn’t seem more white. Gershwin’s composition teacher Edward Kilenyi identified in his gifted pupil ‘an extraordinary faculty for absorbing everything he observed and applying it to his own music in his own individual ways’. And then some! Reminiscing about his years as a song plugger, Gershwin fondly remembered the ‘coloured people [who] used to come in and get me to play “God Send You Back to Me” in seven keys’. It was an unbelievably fertile apprenticeship, but so too was Gershwin uniquely built to serve it: unending curiosity, great facility, and an absence of bigotry collided with spectacular effect. Richard Crawford has added to the long line of biographies of this most intriguing subject, leaning heavily on his years of research into that most wondrous cauldron of American culture: the emergence of a vibrant art-music industry at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. And he does it beautifully. The pace is fast, the nuggets carefully mined, the prose unflashy but good. And he writes as a real musician, able to turn sound into words. The cast of characters is long yet perfectly disciplined. The eleven-year-old Oscar Levant pops up to describe hearing Gershwin play piano in his show Ladies First, Levant ignoring the stage to focus on the pianist who had caught his ear (‘I have never heard such fresh, brisk, unstudied, completely free and inventive playing’) – much as Anita LaskerWallfisch, in the horror of the recently liberated Auschwitz, found herself blocking out Yehudi Menuhin’s playing so that she could concentrate on Benjamin Britten’s accompaniment. Fellow Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin turns down Gershwin as his musical amanuensis (‘What the hell do you want to work for anybody else for? Work for yourself !’), while the pianist Lester Donahue recalls that the conversation among party guests following the Carnegie Hall première of Gershwin’s Concerto in F – with the composer as soloist – was a spirited debate about whether Gershwin should abandon Broadway immediately to concentrate on orchestral music and opera. ‘I wrote this concerto in that form,’ Gershwin told a reporter during rehearsals for the première, ‘because Mr. Damrosch was interested in my Rhapsody and wanted me to write in a form that could be used by his orchestra … I got out my books and studied up on the “concerto” style and then wrote.’ This single anecdote sums up Gershwin’s genius and lack of pretension. Embarrassingly for me, the concerto is a work that somehow has never been on my radar. Last year, following a blistering performance of it by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson, I found myself apologising to the soloist, Kirill Gerstein, for this lacuna. He was gracious in his deflection, yet this astonishing virtuoso – who grew up playing jazz and was recently the dedicatee of a fiendishly difficult new concerto by Thomas Adès – is Gershwin’s most perfect advocate, one foot planted firmly in each world. Gershwin now has another, for Richard Crawford has written an elegant and quietly passionate book. g Paul Kildea is the author most recently of Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (Allen Lane, 2018).

The Beatles in context A hybrid biography of the band Andrew Ford

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in time by Craig Brown

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 642 pp

hapter 148 of Craig Brown’s engrossing book is speculative fiction. Gerry and the Pacemakers are ‘the most successful pop group of the twentieth century’, their 1963 recording of ‘How Do You Do It?’, which the Beatles turned down, having launched their career. ‘To this day,’ Brown writes, ‘they remain the only artists to have achieved the number one slot with each of their first three singles.’ The last bit is almost true: they held that record for two decades. Brown’s fantasy, in which John, Paul, George, and Ringo become Gerry, Fred, Les, and Arthur, makes us wonder how much luck was involved in the Beatles’ achievement. Undoubtedly there was some, but it was the quality and variety of the Beatles’ original music that lay behind their still unparalleled fame. When Gerry and the Pacemakers began to record their own songs, they ceased having those number ones. It is only because of the music that Brown’s book exists, but there is curiously little about it in One Two Three Four, and when musical matters are touched on, one senses authorial fudging. There is also the odd howler. David Mason played a brightly piercing piccolo trumpet on ‘Penny Lane’, not, as Brown insists, the flugelhorn that he’d played in the première of Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony some eight years before. Still, mention of Mason’s classical credentials provides some context, and that, above all, is what this book offers: hundreds of bits of context. Much of it comes from the sifting and synthesis of existing sources. Besides the official books, including The Beatles Anthology (approved by the Beatles themselves), Mark Lewisohn’s several histories, and classics such as Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ records and the sixties (1994), there are myriad volumes by people in the Beatles’ lives. These include two memoirs of John by his first wife, Cynthia, another by his sister Julia, and a fourth by his father’s second wife, Pauline. There’s the original drummer Pete Best’s autobiography, and a biography of Jimmie Nicol, who deputised for Ringo when he had his tonsils out; there’s John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me by the Beatles’ press officer Tony Barrow, and The Cutting Edge by their hairdresser Leslie Cavendish. Brown admits that ‘virtually everyone who ever worked in any capacity for the Beatles seems to have put pen to paper’. If half this book’s words are direct or indirect quotations, it is their ordering and juxtaposition that bring insights. Conflicting views are presented and weighed, often silently. Opinions emerge AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

China without seeming to have been stated by the author. Brown evidently has no time for Yoko Ono and little for Lennon, post-Yoko. She is talentless; together they’re spoilt children. Alexis Mardas – ‘Magic Alex’ – is ‘perhaps the most fraudulent of all the Beatles’ hangers-on’. Having threatened to sue the New York Times for calling him a charlatan, Mardas settles, on the condition the paper make it clear that ‘charlatan’ doesn’t imply ‘conman’. In fact he was both, and he cost the Beatles around $8 million in today’s money, though they were too stoned to notice. It was Alex who poisoned the group’s relationship with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, portrayed here as bewildered and hurt by the Beatles’ sudden desertion. Sometimes Brown even contextualises the context for clarity. When Judy Garland shows up unexpectedly at one of Brian Epstein’s dinner parties, the Beatles manager having forgotten he’d invited her, the chapter ends: ‘At this moment, Judy Garland has a little under five years left to live and Brian Epstein exactly three years, two weeks.’ In addition to reading books Brown has also been on Beatles tours in Liverpool, standing in suburban kitchens and bedrooms, being reprimanded by the guides (characters from Little Britain) for taking notes or recording their ‘private’ commentaries. He soon tires of this: ‘“John, Paul and George all had their hair cut here,” says Stevie T proudly. I think of asking him why Ringo never did, but the question evaporates in my mouth.’ The book’s 150 chapters include dozens of incidental characters, most touchingly Eric Clague, the off-duty policeman who ran over Lennon’s mother, Julia. When the Beatles became famous, he read in a newspaper that John’s mum had been killed by a car in Menlove Avenue and realised he’d been its driver. By then, he was a postman whose rounds included Paul’s home. Every day, he delivered sacks of Beatles fan mail to the address. ‘The Beatles shone so brightly,’ Brown comments, ‘that anyone caught in their beam, no matter how briefly, became part of their myth.’ The remark is made in relation to the video of ‘Hey Jude’, in which the group were joined by a crowd of fans. We meet the young man who ends up playing Ringo’s tambourine and the young woman in the yellow dress (whose boss thought she was home sick that day). But who is the ‘old geezer’ with the carnations behind his ears? No one knows. He’s ‘the British equivalent of the umbrella man in Dealey Plaza,’ Brown suggests. It was eleven weeks after President Kennedy’s assassination that the Beatles made their conquest of the United States, watched on The Ed Sullivan Show by a fourteen-year-old Billy Joel, thirteen-year-old Tom Petty, twelve-year-old Chrissie Hynde, and seventy-three million others. The viewing figures (second only to the aftermath of the assassination) are an indication of the scale of the Beatles’ fame. Another is that, six months later, before their second US tour, they were invited by Lyndon Johnson to be photographed laying a wreath on Kennedy’s grave. They politely declined. When it ended, the Beatles were still in their twenties. Brown’s final chapter is a fast rewind from Brian Epstein’s autopsy to where the book began, Epstein walking down the Cavern steps and into history. g Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and ABC broadcaster. His most recent book is The Song Remains the Same (2019). 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

One summer in Hong Kong Resisting Chinese authoritarianism Will Higginbotham

City on Fire: The fight for Hong Kong by Antony Dapiran

Scribe $35 pb, 336 pp

t began with a request to overturn a controversial bill that would have allowed people to be extradited to mainland China. According to the bill’s many detractors, this was but the latest example of the erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms. By June 2019, millions of Hong Kong’s residents had taken to the streets. August saw sit-ins at Hong Kong’s International Airport, and by October clashes between police and protestors were characterised by violence and chaos – tear gas, rubber bullets, arrests, and prosecutions, the norm.This was summer in Hong Kong, a city dominated by increasingly violent upheaval with the world watching on. By October, the protests had stopped being about just defeating a bill and had morphed into a movement decrying China’s rising authoritarianism. It became ‘a battle for Hong Kong’s very soul’, writes Australian author and lawyer Antony Dapiran in his book City on Fire. Dapiran goes right to the frontline to capture the unrest that plagued Hong Kong in 2019. He writes with journalistic prowess of what he witnessed among protestors and police, the tension mounting in each chapter. One finishes the book with an appreciation of the magnitude of what was achieved by the protestors. This leaderless group of mostly students and millennials succeeded in having the extradition bill overturned. It also symbolically took on a global superpower, with actions that reverberated around the globe. Indeed, pro-Hong Kong rallies happened in Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. City on Fire also contextualises the movement in the city’s long history of dissent. Dapiran takes the reader through the city’s history of protest. Who would have thought that a large portion of Hong Kong’s citizen, after years of prosperity and relative freedom, would be so willing to fight for democratic rights? As Dapiran writes, ‘It’s as if, twenty-two years after the handover, people woke up and realised that the China they found themselves living in was not the one they expected it to be.’ Yet Dapiran excels at contemplating both the small and big events that have contributed to such a tipping point in Hong Kong society. The book invites the question, what will happen next? Covid-19 may just be providing a brief respite from the political tension between China and Hong Kong, but Dapiran argues that the events of 2019 will fuel whatever Hong Kong protest comes next. Dapiran promises one thing: there will be another. g Will Higginbotham, currently based in Melbourne, is a writer and journalist. ❖

Memoir

Reconstruction A new kind of ‘momoir’ Caitlin McGregor

Inferno: A memoir by Catherine Cho

Bloomsbury $23.99 pb, 272 pp

atherine Cho’s Inferno is the first ‘motherhood memoir’ I have read since reading Maria Tumarkin’s essay ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ in Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018). The topic of motherhood has been ‘overly melded’ to memoiristic writing, Tumarkin argues; it feels ‘too much like a foregone conclusion’. This tendency to squeeze stories about motherhood into a pre-existing narrative form is driven partly by marketplace – by assumptions about what kind of books people want to read about and by mothers – and both derives from and perpetuates deeply held ideas about what mothers have to say, and what kinds of stories and ideas we want to hear from them. Enter Inferno. With the subtitle A memoir of motherhood and madness, Cho’s first book occupies an interesting space in the landscape of ‘momoirs’. Tumarkin identifies some of the genre’s recognisable features as ‘the vomit-on-the-blouse candour, the smell-of-my-baby’s-foot lyricism, reflections on the author’s self transformed by a new life’s momentous arrival, obligatory self-deprecation’. These tropes are recognisable in Cho’s memoir, but they appear as much darker versions of their usual selves. Inferno is certainly full of candour – unsettlingly so, at times – but its focus is not the bodily excretions of her newborn. Rather, from a psychiatric unit, Cho writes, ‘I know I should miss Cato [her baby], but my mind is still blank when I think of him.’ Inferno is also full of lyricism, but not of the baby’s foot kind. Cho has a poet’s eye for detail and imagery; her prose renders her account of postpartum psychosis crystalline, horrifying, and sometimes grimly beautiful. As for ‘the author’s self transformed by a new life’s momentous arrival’: Inferno is the story of a new mother’s self near-obliterated. When the onset of Cho’s psychotic breakdown lands her in hospital two months after the birth of her son, she is admitted to a psychiatric unit as an involuntary patient. She is told by one of the workers that ‘you need to have a written autobiography to go from involuntary to voluntary’, the implication being that in order to be considered sane and safe – in order to have, or to be, a ‘self ’ – you have to know and understand your own story. ‘I feel like I am reconstructing myself from my memories,’ Cho writes. ‘I am following a thread from the past to the present,and then I will know, I think. I will know how I got here. I will know who I am. And then, maybe I will be able to find a way to leave.’

Inferno is the record of this attempt: Cho’s efforts to reconstruct herself from the memories that slowly begin to return as she recovers. The result is the intricate story of her life up to the point when she was admitted to hospital, cleverly woven through key details and remembered moments, interspersed with accounts of Cho’s time in the psych ward. By the time these two threads meet in narrative time, the reader is in a position to comprehend nuanced connections between moments of Cho’s life – sometimes minute ones, such as the look in her mother-in-law’s eye in a particular memory – that collide in her mind and come to alarming fruition while she is in the thrall of her psychosis.

Cho’s first book occupies an interesting space in the landscape of ‘momoirs’ Cho has written a book with the topic of motherhood inarguably at its core. Her illness is postpartum psychosis – triggered by the birth of her son and the two months of early parenthood that follow – and it is her motherhood that she ultimately returns to at the book’s close. In narrative terms, motherhood occupies only Inferno’s periphery. As Cho pieces her memories and her mind back together, we are told of her childhood, growing up with her brother Teddy; she remembers and reconstructs her complicated relationships with her parents, and with the Korean traditions – ‘or superstitions, as I thought of them’ – that she has inherited. Cho remembers, ‘I was twenty-two when I fell in love with the wrong man.’ She describes a prolonged relationship with a violent and abusive partner. Then she meets James, who will become her husband, central to her recovery: ‘My psychosis,’ she writes, ‘for all its destruction and wrath, was a love story. It was a story of sacrifice; an obsessive search for my husband. I thought I was Beatrice, the one who was assigned to lead my husband through Hell, and that my life was a sacrifice for his.’ The birth of a baby and the transition to motherhood can be events that fuse a person’s past, present, and future in previously unforeseen ways – this much has been written about before. But Inferno presents us with a mother as we rarely get to see them: Cho sees demons in her baby’s eyes, forgets who she is, tears her clothes off in the hospital waiting room and screams. She sees her baby and doesn’t recognise him: ‘He looked like a stranger. I searched myself for some emotion, but I couldn’t find any.’ As Cho delves into her past to make sense of her present, and to thereby regain access to her future, Inferno serves as a testament to the ways in which a person’s self is built through their relationships to and with other people. It is by examining and honouring her relationships with others – with her husband, her parents, her parents-in-law, her brother, and even the other patients she meets on the ward – that Cho is able to come back to her senses, herself, and her family. In the process, she demonstrates that memoir can still ‘blast open’ (Anne Carson, via Tumarkin) the topic of motherhood, and have us considering it anew. g Caitlin McGregor is an essayist, critic and editor based in regional Victoria. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Memoir

Geography of desire Not quite a memoir Sarah Walker

Sky Swimming: Reflection on auto/biography, people and place by Sylvia Martin

UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 205 pp

ueer memoir is particularly given to formal play, to unpacking and upsetting the conventions of genre in order to question women’s roles as both narrator and subject. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) mixes scholarship and bodily transformation. Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House (2019) unpacks the nature of narrative itself to reflect on an abusive relationship. Into this field comes Sky Swimming, Sylvia Martin’s ‘memoir that is not quite a memoir, more a series of reflections in which I act as a biographer of my own life’. For Martin, the critical distance of the biographer enables her to consider the resonances that exist between her own experiences. Martin specialises in biography that casts her as a queer detective, uncovering the lives of women whose artistic and erotic lives have been lost to Australian literary and cultural history. She mines locations, documents, and works of art for the threads of suppressed stories, the subtexts and absences that expose the private lives of her subjects – writer Mary Eliza Fullerton, librarian Ida Leeson, and poet Aileen Palmer. Her process is consciously rooted in feminist modes of storytelling that give primacy and agency to the teller. In Sky Swimming, Martin turns these processes back onto herself in a collection of fifteen reflective essays, where her biographer’s interest in the landscapes and communities that surrounded her subjects extends to her own life. The essays in the first half of the book focus on objects. For Martin, these are totemic presences holding the past and bearing it into the now. To frame discussions of her youth, she considers pottery, music, photographs, quilts, fragments of amber. There is a museological quality to these reflections, as of a guide breathing life into trinkets laid out in velvet-lined display cases. As the collection progresses, this format gives way to a more wide-ranging discussion of the nature of biography and the urge to write. Sky Swimming holds at its core the notion that no story stands alone. Each memory unfolds into countless others, brushing up against each other, making contact. If a memoir is a form of authorship that prioritises a single perspective, perhaps biography is the form that best recognises the village it takes to raise a child and the multitudes it takes to tell a story. Martin’s biography is heavy with accumulated individuals. The Boyd family, composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, and a cohort of family, lovers, and friends accompany her into the past. She worries about the holes in their narratives as doggedly as about those of her subjects. Martin concentrates on the women, 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

the gaps in their timelines, the things unknown. ‘I come from a matriarchal line, aware from childhood of the sparking static of strong women rubbing up against each other.’ The text bristles with women – as subjects, as artists, as writers. As was ‘Lorelei’, the house she built with her partner Lizzie in rural New South Wales, Martin’s text is ‘a women’s space’. Several essays preoccupy themselves with Aileen Palmer, the subject of Martin’s book Ink in Her Veins (2016), and clearly still a subject for her of intoxicating fascination. While a painting of Palmer is the focus of one essay, it is evident that Palmer, for the author, continues to acquire meaning and resonances. In Sky Swimming, this culminates in a piece titled ‘Love in the Blitz’, a dreamy piece of short romantic fiction imagining Palmer’s relationship with a woman known to history only as ‘B’. Along with Lizzie, Palmer is evidently one of the central women in Martin’s life – frustrating, elusive, and ever-desired.

Martin specialises in biography that casts her as a queer detective ‘As a biographer,’ Martin writes, ‘I try to interpret aspects of a person’s life from clues gathered from archives, from material that is full of gaps and silences.’ The ‘sleuthing’ work of the biographer, however, creates a curious distance when the writer is also the subject. The more we examine Martin’s email correspondences, the descriptions gleaned from friends about her home and her writing, the objects she encounters and carries with her, the less we know of her. She describes how reading interviews with the Boyds and their contemporaries helped to ‘frame and understand my memories of my own childhood’. For the reader, however, these secondary sources often exclude us from Martin’s internal world. Her rigorous personal research, the letters, the history, and the objects laden with traces, conceal more than they reveal. Martin notably eschews the pull towards first-person narration. Some of the book’s most elegant, impactful writing – about the death of Martin’s mother, the destruction of ‘Lorelei’, and an early crush on a drama teacher that ‘nudged the edge of my consciousness and lay there teasing’ – is also its shortest, condensed in favour of practicalities and proofs, letters, and transcriptions. Martin’s interest in postmodern and feminist writing, her fascination with a type of critical autoethnography, sit uneasily on the page with her embodied experience. She takes shelter in the biographer’s modus operandi. ‘The writing that does take notice of the body and its reactions to the environment sparkles, breaking free of the structured rigour of the surrounding text. In ‘Talking Place’, Martin describes ‘the movement across spaces as constitutive of my subjectivity – my geography of desire’. Martin searches for a ‘women’s space’ not only in the physical world but also in the literary canon – a place where ‘lesbian desire’ has authority and agency. Sky Swimming tracks the movement through memory, history, fascination, and obsession. Though enigmatic, it comes together as a collection centred on the primacy of women’s stories: of visibility, belonging, and acceptance. g Sarah Walker is a Melbourne-based writer, photographer, and fine artist, and is the current ABR Rising Star (Victoria).

Ornithology

Messing with people’s minds The most spectacular form of wildlife Simon Caterson

The Bird Way: A new look at how birds talk, work, play, parent, and think by Jennifer Ackerman

Scribe $35 pb, 355 pp

ne of the most bizarre as well as unfortunate deaths in literary history occurred when the playwright Aeschylus was struck by a tortoise dropped on him by a bird. Bizarre, that is, if we don’t consider what the bird involved was doing, which was clever as well as practical. From the bird’s perspective, the tortoise was being dropped on a convenient stone rather than the bald head of a Greek tragedian who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jennifer Ackerman, a leading science writer, is the author of several previous books on birds. Not least among the virtues of The Bird Way is the wealth of Australian material, confirming that this country is an ornithological superpower. Birds are everywhere: we see and hear them even in the most densely populated cities. Notwithstanding human encroachment, birds remain the most spectacular form of wildlife in our daily lives. As The Bird Way illustrates in wonderful detail, what happened to Aeschylus nearly 2,500 years ago is but a tiny example of a world of intelligent bird behaviour, the scope and complexity of which humans are still trying to comprehend. When all the myriad species of birds are taken together, we see that they can do everything that humans can do, in addition to their ability not only to fly but to do so in complete darkness and silence. Humans did eventually work out how to fly through the air, but so far only in a mechanical way. In recalling the demise of Aeschylus, Ackerman explains that birds, like humans and other primates, understand how to find food using gravity and other, more advanced techniques. Some birds have learned to catch fish using bait, while others have transported firesticks to ignite areas of grassland in order to flush out prey. In Australia, there are eyewitness accounts from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources of native raptors starting spot fires by picking up and dropping smouldering sticks with remarkable precision. Experiments have shown that birds can learn how to spread fire in order to hunt for food by first observing how others in the community do it. Moreover, some birds – the azure kingfisher of Australia and New Guinea is an example – watch how other animals forage for food and follow in their wake to snap up prey disturbed by non-avian counterparts. Birds can be ruthless and at times shockingly cruel – aspects of their nature also found in us. Birds aren’t just highly observant creatures often possessing eyesight much keener than human vision; their cries and calls

form a system of language as intricate as any human equivalent. Some birds, such as the lyrebird, have an astonishing capacity for mimicry of other birds’ sounds as well as the full range of noises that humans make. ‘A few birds,’ writes Ackerman, ‘even make their own tools, about as rare a behaviour as any in the animal world.’ One of the most advanced tool-making birds is the New Caledonian crow, which is ‘the only species other than humans to make and use hooked tools, little sticks with a hook on the end, which the bird uses to extract grubs and other invertebrates from tree holes and the nooks and crannies of plants’. These birds even store their tools after use. Birds don’t always need to be taught how to solve problems – they may be able to work it out for themselves. In one well-known recent experiment, eight wild New Caledonian crows were presented with a puzzle box containing food that could only be reached if the crows worked out how to put together a compound tool by fitting together pieces of different shapes and sizes. ‘With no training or guidance’, the birds completed the task of assembling the tool within five minutes. ‘Children can’t make these sorts of multipart tools,’ notes Ackerman, ‘until at least age five.’ In addition to their impressive capacity to solve practical problems such as getting enough to eat, birds also play. Among the most playful birds are ravens and Australian magpies. The New Zealand kea has been known to disrupt human activities such as roadworks by moving traffic cones. Apparently, they enjoy messing with people’s minds and are notorious vandals. That innate mischievousness can easily lead to trouble, just as it does for humans. The kea can sometimes be too clever for its own good, and indiscriminate slaughter by people lacking the same sense of fun has led to the species being given protected status. Birds form relationships within and beyond their species that at the very least match what we think of as distinctly human behaviour. Sex, for example, is not simply about the biomechanics of reproduction. The rituals of certain species of birds are known to be sophisticated and elaborate. ‘The roses-and-chocolate gestures of humans can hardly hold a candle to the wild, lavish, and exuberant courtship displays of birds,’ according to Ackerman. Some birds are functional when mating – there are examples of parents having nothing more to do with each other once fertilisation of the female has occurred. Other species of birds, meanwhile, form extraordinarily close lifelong partnerships and may even devote themselves to raising young that are not their issue. In some cases, it has been observed that gender has nothing to do with long-term same-sex relationships that arise among certain species of birds. ‘They love who they love,’ as Ackerman puts it. Just like humans. g Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer whose first contribution to ABR appeared in 2001.

Want all the latest news from ABR? Sign up for our free newsletters www.australianbookreview.com.au AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Journals

Island redivivus

Disparities and delights

Rayne Allinson

Elizabeth Bryer

An invigorating collision of perspectives

Meanjin’s winter issue

Island 159

Meanjin Quarterly: Volume 79, Issue 2

Island Magazine $16.50 pb, 96 pp

Melbourne University Press $24.99 pb, 220 pp

edited by Vern Field

irst published as The Tasmanian Review in 1979 (soon after the Franklin River Dam project was announced) and renamed Island Magazine in 1981 (the year of the Tasmanian Power Referendum), Island emerged as one of Australia’s leading literary magazines, yet always grounded in a fragile environment. True to its ecological roots, this fortieth anniversary edition, put together by the new editorial team of Anna SpargoRyan (non-fiction), Ben Walter (fiction), Lisa Gorton (poetry), and Judith Abell (art features), maintains a distinctly local focus while exploring new creative directions. Over the past forty years, Island has published some of Australia’s most celebrated figures, yet its standing as a relatively small not-for-profit and print-only publication has made it an ideal nursery for emerging and marginal voices. Island’s precarious financial position was severely tested in 2019 when, like other highly respected publications, it was denied a renewal of multi-year state government funding, making the appearance of Issue 159 (made possible by a once-only government grant matched by an anonymous private donor) seem as miraculous as sighting a Swift Parrot among the blue gums on a winter morning. Unsurprisingly, the contents of this issue cohere around a common theme: that when productivity becomes our only framework for assessing value and usefulness, our ecological and cultural survival are similarly endangered. Sam George-Allen’s essay on the simple, life-affirming joys of starting a garden from scratch (‘Principles of Permaculture’) is contrasted with a bitter triptych of the mechanised capitalist psyche in Andrew Roff ’s story ‘The Lever, the Pulley, and the Screw’. The profound grief evoked by Julie Gough’s installations on Aboriginal dispossession and genocide (Mary Knights) is mirrored in the repressed, wordless rage of a young man in Christine Kearney’s story ‘Stingrays’. Jonno Revanche’s essay on Kylie Minogue and Pip Smith’s story of an elderly baker explore the angelic and demonic aspects of embattled femininity, while poets such as Jake Goetz (‘Ash in Sydney’) and Toby Fitch (‘Pink Sun’) remind us how quickly last summer’s devastating bushfires slipped from the headlines. Such an eclectic, invigorating collision of perspectives leaves one hopeful that, just as public outcry against the Franklin Dam led to the creation of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (and Island magazine), audiences will unite to support the arts and the real people making them happen. g Rayne Allinson is a writer based in southern Tasmania. 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

edited by Jonathan Green

n the winter issue of Meanjin, some of Australia’s best writers, including Sophie Cunningham, Lucy Treloar, and Jennifer Mills, grapple with the climate emergency and our relationship to place in these days of coronavirus and the summer that was. One of the delights of a literary journal is the way that bringing pieces together can seem to prompt a conversation. Sometimes, however, this highlights a disparity. This issue’s cover essay, Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s ‘Depreciated: The Price of Love’, recounts, in the wake of a breakup, how the author subsumed her sense of self to the relationship in a way her partner did not. The gendered nature of this dynamic is ostensibly the essay’s focus, but I was left feeling impatient with the wan observations. Later in the issue, Elizabeth Flux’s ‘Call Him Al’ reads as a riposte: Flux has her protagonist undergo the transformation that Osborne-Crowley means to examine. The short story’s uncanny allegorical twist expresses much more that is vital, and it is aided by far greater technical assurance, imagination, and pathos. Meanwhile, high points of Peter Lewis’s analysis of how the web might evolve in Australia – including how Uber’s frankness about its non-compliance with the law has, thanks to a quirk of Australian common law, meant that a class action can be brought against them – are unfortunately overshadowed by the perplexing editorial decision to let stand a series of outrageous analogies to Indigenous dispossession in which tech titans are cast as colonisers and Indigenous Australia has ‘problems’. And the standouts? Alexis Wright continues her remarkable exploration of sovereignty in literature, bringing to bear a cosmopolitan Indigenous worldview. Fatima Measham’s exquisitely written and researched ‘Time in the Antipodes’ is a meditation on time that blends the personal with the political, historical, and geological; it synthesises vastly different chronologies to contemplate the current moment, including time as hindered or facilitated by the state, time under capitalism and according to Australian employment laws, and time for the ecosystems that went under the flame this summer. Emerging writer Muhannad Al-wehwah’s memoir ‘Mixtape–Side A’ is a beautifully balanced piece that juxtaposes a history of cassette-tape manufacturing with their role in his childhood and the connection they provided to family in Australia, Palestine, and Lebanon. g Elizabeth Bryer is a writer and translator. Her first novel, From Here On, Monsters, is out now with Picador. ❖

Interview

Open Page with Patrick Allington

Patrick Allington is a writer, critic, editor, and academic. His most recent work is Rise & Shine (Scribe, 2020), and his first novel, Figurehead, was longlisted for the 2010 Miles Franklin award. He has also had short fiction published in Meanjin, Griffith Review, The Big Issue, and elsewhere. Allington has taught politics, communications, and creative writing, most recently at Flinders University.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? Antarctica: in case it’s not there later.

What’s your idea of hell?

There is no hell. But if there is, it has rats.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Any virtue can be too much, sometimes. Is ‘prolixity’ a virtue?

What’s your favourite film?

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

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

I read George Orwell in my final year of school and was very taken with Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), which is an okay novel. I wrote about 1984 in my exam without having read it.

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

Brazil (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam.

I have mixed feelings about Enid Blyton – and about Gore Vidal.

And your favourite book?

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

One? I refuse to answer. For many years I would have said Peter Carey’s Illywhacker, and I still love it, but many more years have elapsed.

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

Angela Merkel, artist Hilma af Klint (her art is on the cover of Rise & Shine), and musician Roky Erickson.

Life. Work.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? I appreciate critics who enter into a conversation with a book and who draw upon curiosity, wonder, and deep thinking to judge. Maria Tumarkin writes magnificently about writers and books.

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

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I’d be happy never to hear the phrase ‘of course’ again. On the other hand, I don’t hear ‘kerfuffle’ nearly often enough.

I like bookchat, in moderation. Writers’ festivals benefit writers and readers, but I’m not sure they need to get ‘bigger and better’ year after year after year.

Who is your favourite author?

Do you read reviews of your own books?

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Are artists valued in our society?

Do you have a favourite podcast, apart from ABR’s one of course?

What are you working on now?

It changes by the day. I’m currently in awe of the brilliance and boldness of Alexis Wright. The Saucepan Man from Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree series.

I love Backlisted. It shakes the dust off old books with serious irreverence.

Yes, though it’s no fun. I’m a lapsed critic, so I have a professional interest. Yes. But no.

A novel about self-imposed exile. Some essays about strange books. And I’m thinking about what happens next in the world of Rise & Shine. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Television

The adventures of Jay Swan A new series of Mystery Road Jordan Prosser

Aaron Pedersen as Jay Swan in Mystery Road (photograph by David Dare Parker/ABC TV)

s a genre, the western springs from colonial tension: tension between the old ways and the new; between the native people and an invading population; between humans and the land itself; between lore and the law. There are no westerns set in Britain. And while the gun-slinging adventures of cowboy frontiersmen have receded into the background of American culture, the genre remains ripe with critical and narrative potential for more freshly colonised countries like Australia. While it’s never entered the mainstream the way it did in American film and television, the western has had a foothold in Australian culture since moving pictures began. The world’s first feature film was The Story of the Kelly Gang, shot in and around Melbourne in 1906. Australian filmmakers have been returning to that creative wellspring ever since, with films such as Robbery Under Arms (1957), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), and The Proposition (2005). The year 2017 saw one of our greatest westerns in Sweet Country, directed by Warwick Thornton (Samson & Delilah [2009]), one of two pre-eminent Aboriginal filmmakers at the helm of ABC’s second series of Mystery Road. He shares directing duties with Wayne Blair (The Sapphires [2012], Top End Wedding [2019]). Mystery Road, which premièred in 2018, is a serialised continuation of the adventures of Aaron Pedersen’s cowboy hat-toting Indigenous detective Jay Swan, from the franchise-starter Mystery Road (2013) and its sequel, Goldstone (2016). Those feature films from writer–director Ivan Sen were a high watermark for Australian cinema, and the series has proven equally successful, winning the Logie for Most Popular Drama Program (no mean feat for a gritty, Indigenous crime series set in remote Western Australia that casts Ernie Dingo as a paedophile councilman). The distinctive interplay of story and setting makes Mystery Road immediately comparable to other countries’ international crime-drama exports, like the ever-popular slew of ‘Nordic noir’. Mystery Road has proved to be a massive hit in France. In this second series, Jay Swan arrives in the far-flung coastal 70 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

town of Gideon, summoned by the discovery of a headless corpse in the mangroves. He believes the body is connected to a statewide methamphetamine operation he’s been tracking for years – his own great white whale. Soon he finds himself partnered with constable Fran Davis ( Jada Alberts) – a young Indigenous policewoman haunted by the disappearance of her cousin ten years earlier – and butting heads with the incompetent (and perhaps corrupt) Senior Sergeant Owen Cross (Mark Mitchinson). Gideon is a place ‘at the edge of the earth,’ where ‘no one cares who deals drugs or dies’. There are dodgy pearl fishers, secretive small-town priests, drug pushers, junkies, flunkies, tattooed bikers, and troubled teens aplenty. There’s also an archaeological dig led by Professor Sandra Elmquist (Sofia Helin, on loan from the aforementioned The Bridge), that’s stretching those colonial tensions to breaking point. Elmquist has been granted permission by traditional land owner Amos (Rob Collins) to excavate a sacred site, hoping to find physical evidence of civilisation that will reaffirm Australia’s First Peoples as the oldest living culture on earth. Her scientific saviour complex isn’t making her any friends in the local Aboriginal community, especially when she uncovers a bag of bones on the dig site that might belong to Fran’s missing cousin. While Mystery Road takes its thematic cues from the western, its storytelling structure and visual language are pure hard-boiled detective thriller. This second season especially embodies the moniker of ‘outback noir’; floodlights from four-wheel drives reflect on coastal mudflats like rain-slicked city streets. A woman’s high heels traipse through red dirt. The rhythmic hissing of a sprinkler system underpins a high-stakes shootout at a roadside motel. As in the best detective stories, all our hero has to do is pull one loose thread to unravel a rotten hotbed of corruption and iniquity. This is where the detective genre has always excelled: as social dissertation in pop-culture packaging, where one simple crime gives rise to a detailed analysis of broken systems, societal, judicial, governmental, or otherwise. That makes it another story mode uniquely qualified to pick apart modern-day Australia, where the buck never stops quite where it should. These stories suggest that there is always someone higher up the food chain, profiting from other people’s suffering, and it is characters like Jay Swan, in the tradition of so many no-nonsense lawmen before him, that have the nose to detect them and the will to unmask them. The hard-boiled detective feels especially useful in the twentyfirst century, for it is one of the few archetypal characters that encourages a male lead to inhabit multiple modes of masculinity. While a true western trades in cardboard-cutout male heroes, the detective is both a celebration of maleness and a lament for its limitations. Philip Marlow, Sherlock Holmes, Bruce Wayne, Jay Swan – they are all talented, intelligent, and damn good at their jobs, but they are also addicts, liars, bad fathers, worse husbands, and terrible communicators. The first series of Mystery Road drove this point home too strongly at times, bogging Jay’s storyline down with family drama that felt ancillary to the plot, and forcing him to run gauntlets of backstory, where usually a detective (or cowboy for that matter) would be understood purely through action and decision-making. The second series wisely reins this in while finding a role for Jay’s long-suffering ex-wife

Directors Wayne Blair and Warwick Thornton (photograph by David Dare Parker)

Mary (Tasma Walton) that is not only compelling in its own right but essential to the story. Everything about the new series is more streamlined, while still building on what came before. The violence is tenfold what it was in the previous season, the body count nearly countless, the blood thicker, the sun harsher, the gunshots louder, the bikies meaner. And yet it never suffers from the dreaded bloat of so many sequels. Even with its twisty plot and lavish visuals, every aspect of the production feels keenly focused. Aaron Pedersen is terrific as Jay Swan, effortlessly exuding world-weariness and brusque charm. He is one of Australia’s best leading men, playing what is becoming one of our most iconic characters. The cast around him is another roll-call of familiar faces and first-rate performers, all apparently having the time of their life with the material they have been given. Gary Sweet gleefully chews the scenery in a Hawaiian shirt and Panama hat, while Callan Mulvey pulls off a delicate balancing act as the shady retired cop wooing Jay’s ex-wife. While nearly every character undergoes a fully satisfying transformation, the emotional weight of the season falls squarely on Jada Albert’s shoulders as Fran, who becomes the lynchpin of the archaeological dig storyline. Instead of dovetailing with the main drug-bust plot, this vignette becomes its own parallel series. If Jay’s crusade is to fix things in the here and now, then Fran’s is to right the wrongs of the past. The bag of bones discovered at the dig site leads her down a rabbit hole of local secrets while offering an extended, poignant meditation on custodianship, and the prickly question of who ‘owns’ the past. Where the previous season partnered Jay with Judy Davis’s Senior Constable Emma James, mining the relationship and its inherent power dynamics to great effect, this season’s choice of a buddy cop for Jay is even more interesting. Fran became a policewoman to protect her community, but Jay is a living testament to where those good intentions get you; he’s loathed by

blacks and whites alike, considered a traitor to his culture. Jay is a lone cowboy, an obstinate gumshoe, set in his ways. And if genre history tells us anything, it’s that men like that change rarely, if ever. Jay may be fated to repeat the same mistakes, sequel after sequel, series after series, but there’s hope for Fran and others like her as she navigates that tension between the old ways and the new. This unique perspective is what makes Mystery Road so much more than just Logie-worthy Aussie TV; it is vital and evocative Australian storytelling. g Mystery Road is produced by Bunya Productions and is currently on ABC and streaming on ABC iView. (Longer version online) Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2020

Poetry

From the Archive

Judith Wright (1915–2000) first wrote for ABR in May 1962: a book review and ‘Metamorphosis’, the first poem to be published in ABR, along with one by Randolph Stow. Here is an extract from her review of The Poetical Works of Charles Harpur, published in the July 1984 issue. This is one of thousands of reviews in our digital archive, all accessible by ABR subscribers – a unique critical resource.

t is 116 years since Charles Harpur, Australia’s first poet of real eminence, died with his own collection of his works unpublished. Except for a couple of small selections – the most recent of which, made by Adrian Mitchell in 1973 and containing only about 120 pages of the poetry, was the most comprehensive – and the infamously corrupt 1883 ‘collection’, it has remained so. This has been a blot on the reputation of Australian critical and academic workers and a loss not only to Australian literature but to Australian history. Now Elizabeth Perkins has handsomely remedied a long injustice. The task was a difficult and long one. Though Perkins lays little emphasis on the difficulties of collating, editing, and preparing from the Mitchell Library manuscript collection the 977 pages of verse the book contains, a task from which Mitchell recoiled as enormously demanding, the book stands as a critical and scholarly achievement for which we ought to be properly grateful. The basis that Perkins adopted for the choice of versions was Harpur’s own ‘final transcription’ for a collection intended for publication in England, but which never reached that country – and would probably have been rejected as a colonial piece of presumption if it had. Other poems and variants not included in these ‘Major Manuscripts’ and therefore left ungrouped by Harpur himself are arranged by editorial decision, and the editor emphasises both the problem of dating many of them or their variants, and the nature of this collection as a first and non-definitive presentation of Harpur’s work. Harpur was long dismissed from critical consideration on the basis not only of the 1883 volume but of his lifetime reputation as an emancipist reformist. In days when Tennyson and Swinburne were the critical touchstone in Australia, Harpur’s obstinate Miltonism and neo-classicism seemed to outdate him in favour of the younger and more lyrical Kendall. His late twentieth-century rediscovery has suffered from the lack of any reliable large collection by which he could be judged. Yet it can be seen from this book that he was not only, as his editor says, ‘an original but curiously representative colonial poet’, but, as a member of what Parkes described as ‘the first popular movement in Australia’, a significant historical figure. Formal almost always, didactic in tone too often, Harpur was nevertheless a principled, consistent, and pointed commentator; Perkins describes him justly as ‘inexhaustibly interesting’ both in his political-satiric aspect and as a more ambitious poet. Emancipist descent, poverty, and the factionalism of such literary circles as Sydney possessed at the time hampered Harpur from the beginning, and he died bitterly disappointed by his lack of 72 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2020

recognition and publication. His lifetime saw much change in the colony – between his eighteenth year and his death the European population of Australia rose from a mere 70,000 to more than a million and a half, and the old reformist aims in land reform, independence, and self-government were overwhelmed by history. Between Harpur and the writers of the 1890s, no Australian-born poet except Kendall emerged – an indication of the way things were going. Harpur based his hopes for future recognition mainly on his longer poems, but few of these have been available for critical inspection until now. We now have a number of them, including the important early ‘Genius Lost’, ‘The World and the Soul’, the early long narrative poem ‘The Kangaroo Hunt,’ with its immensely interesting notes, and the extraordinary ‘The Witch of Hebron’, Harpur’s last poem. The latter is so sustainedly unexpected and original, with its psychological and philosophical insights and implications, that its appearance alone would justify the book. The question of how ‘good’ a poet Harpur is, in his amazingly various roles from satirist to critical parodist, to topical commentator, to somewhat heavy-handed lyricist and sonneteer to playwright to philosopher to metaphysical speculator to forerunner bush balladist, will probably be argued for years by protagonists of one or another critical school. What can certainly be said is that in all or most of these he was a first-footer in Australia and not a negligible one in any. For me, in the longer poems on which he based his hopes for future recognition, the quality which most stands out is his quite remarkable quality of three-dimensional architectonic vision – the juxtaposition and deployment of contrast – light and shade, height and depth, mass and space, and in the moral sphere, good and evil. The modern habit of close textual analysis may very well miss these qualities and contrasts altogether – after all, modern critical equipment lacks instruments and exemplars to deal with them. The second problem for modern criticism is the fact that of all our poets, Harpur most demands to be treated in a social and historical context, and this too is an area which the new criticism deals with with reserve and disclaimer, if at all. Perhaps a new school of literary historians may rescue him from its limitations. Meanwhile, we have the book, at last. Its typeface is excellent, its layout pleasant, its binding and paper of good quality – it should last out the critics. It would have been useful to have had a checklist of manuscript numbers for reference and comparison with other variants – but in a book of more than one thousand pages, one can’t ask for too much. And we, and the long-unsatisfied shade of Charles Harpur, now have the book he has too long deserved. g