Australian Book Review - August 2022, issue no. 445 by Australian Book Review

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Anwen Crawford The speciousness of resilience Paul Strangio A tale of two Melbournes Catharine Lumby Frank Moorhouse Patrick Mullins All about Malcolm Mark Kenny Albanese in office

The Jolley Prize Read the three shortlisted stories

Entries are now open for the nineteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010). This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Des Cowley, and James Jiang. For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs First place $6,000 Four shortlisted poets $1,000 each Entries close 3 October 2022

The Jolley Prize

Advances

This year we received 1,338 stories for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. We thank all our entrants. The judges – ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu, author John Kinsella, and Monash University academic Melinda Harvey – have shortlisted three stories: ‘Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen (NSW), ‘Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis (NSW), and ‘Whale Fall’ by previous Jolley Prize-shortlisted author C.J. Garrow (Vic.). They appear in the fiction section of this issue. Entries this year came from thirty-six different countries, a testament to ongoing international interest in the Jolley Prize and the magazine. Writers explored themes and topics including the pandemic, climate change, grief, desire, parenthood, and community across a range of genres. Here are the judges’ comments on the three shortlisted stories (presented here, as in the issue, in alphabetical order): In the tense and atmospheric story ‘Dog Park’, Georgie takes her young son Max on a midday visit to the park where she watches from a shaded bench while he plays. Georgie’s protective love for her son infuses the story even as her desperate longing to shield him from potential pain or humiliation leads to growing tensions and an unsettling confrontation. ‘Dog Park’ is a tender examination of the evolving relationship between an anxious mother and her growing child that is filled with nuanced observations and telling details. The complex interactions between the characters in this story are particularly convincing. In ‘Natural Wonder’, the narrator watches over three boys – her son and his two cousins – as they spend the first days of a new year playing at a beach on Sydney harbour. This story of children swimming and fencing with toy lightsabers on the sand has a gently melancholic undertow: it emerges that the cousins have experienced the recent trauma of losing their mother. The narrator feels a strong urge to protect and comfort her nephews, but she is also drawn to ideas of escape and freedom. The story is remarkable for its quietness, acknowledgment of knotty feelings, and the room it makes for small miracles. The bullying of Bernard Tusk at a school for boys ‘of shallow prospects’ is conveyed in a wry, uncanny, and almost defamiliarising way in ‘Whale Fall’, which uses the beaching of a whale carcass as a metaphor for pointless death. As an implicated but also threatened observer, the narrator takes us through the destruction of Tusk who, like all the younger boys, vaguely seeks ‘cool’, but can’t attain it. The triggering complicity of the narrator is both strangely self-exonerating and self-accusatory as he tries

to figure out his role between collusion and empathy. The story skilfully examines a fraught complicity and guilt.

The overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500, will be announced later this month at an online ceremony (details anon). The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of fourteen stories, all of which are listed on our website. ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. We congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted authors.

Jennifer Down

Jennifer Down has won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her second novel, Bodies of Light. Susan Midalia, reviewing Down’s book for the October 2021 issue of ABR, placed it in the tradition of the ‘feminist Bildungsroman’ and praised the ‘psychological astuteness’ of its ‘pared-back language of abuse and repression’. Down is a past winner of the Jolley Prize. Her story ‘Aokigahara’, which won the 2014 prize, exemplifies her mastery of spare yet resonant prose.

Vale Frank Moorhouse

We tend not to panegyrise local writers and artists in this land, but the death of Frank Moorhouse on 26 June proved rather different, eliciting the sort of coverage normally reserved for sporting personalities and plutocrats. Moorhouse, who had not been well, died aged eightythree. Many of the valedictions concentrated on his Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, largely because of the controversial exclusion of the first volume, Grand Days, from the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a fate not visited on the second novel, Dark Palace, which won the 2001 Miles Franklin Award. (The third, Cold Light, was also shortlisted.) But connoisseurs of this inventive satirist looked back fifty years to discontinuous narratives such as Futility and Other Animals and The Americans, Baby – so influential at the time, brave too given the asinine censorship and homophobic policies of the time. Moorhouse’s dedication to the protection of copyright and his role – not single-handed, but significant – in the creation of public lending rights have also been cited. On 13 July, a large audience gathered in the Friends’ Room at the State Library of New South Wales for a ‘Farewell to Frank’. Ten speeches at a memorial service can seem de trop, [Advances continues on page seven]

Middlebrow Modernism Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction

MELINDA J. COOPER OCTOBER 2022 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Australian Book Review August 2022, no. 445

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 eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | Assistant Editor assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016)

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ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Interns Leonardo Balsamo, Eli McLean, Arwen Verdnik Volunteers Alan Haig, Troy Harwood, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Image credits and information Front cover: Flying Books, 2012. (Markus Spiering/Flickr) Page 23: Robert Drewe (photograph by Tracy Drewe/Penguin Random House) Page 61: Stardust particle, 2014, Olafur Eliasson, Presented by the artist in honour of Sir Nicholas Serota 2018. © Olafur Eliasson. Tate

ABR August 2022 LETTERS

Marc Mierowsky, Lisa Fletcher, David Mason, Tim Lenehan

COMMENTARY

8 16

Mark Kenny Paul Strangio

Anthony Albanese in office A tale of two Melbournes

POLITICS

11 13 55

Hugh White Patrick Mullins Kieran Pender

Australia’s China Odyssey by James Curran Ego by Aaron Patrick Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough

LANGUAGE

Anwen Crawford

The speciousness of resilience

LITERARY STUDIES

19 20 40

Julieanne Lamond Brigid Magner Gary Pearce

Inner and Outer Worlds by Anthony Uhlmann The Life of Such Is Life by Roger Osborne Consuming Joyce by John McCourt & One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses edited by Colm Tóibín

POEMS

14 58

Jennifer Harrison Vidyan Ravinthiran

Mandelbrot Set Pillaiyar

BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS

22 44 48

Danielle Clode Michael McGirr Ian Dickson

Rose by Suzanne Falkiner Apollo & Thelma by Jon Faine The Letters of Thom Gunn edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer

NATURAL HISTORY

Peter Menkhorst

Koala by Danielle Clode

FICTION

24 25 26 30

Jane Sullivan Michael Winkler Georgia White Jay Daniel Thompson

34 35 39

Morgan Nunan Nicole Abadee Penny Russell

Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston Nimblefoot by Robert Drewe Three new Australian novels on women’s suffering Marlo by Jay Carmichael & My Heart Is a Little Wild Thing by Nigel Featherstone Basin by Scott McCulloch Faithless by Alice Nelson The Coast by Eleanor Limprecht

JOLLEY PRIZE SHORTLIST

28 32 36

Nina Cullen Tracy Ellis C.J. Garrow

Dog Park Natural Wonder Whale Fall

CALIBRE ESSAY

Sarah Gory

Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere

TRIBUTE

Catharine Lumby

A tribute to Frank Moorhouse

POETRY

50 51

Anders Villani David Mason

Jennifer Harrison

Chris Arnold

Pyre by Maureen Alsop The Language in My Tongue edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington languish by Marion May Campbell & And to Ecstasy by Marjon Mossammaparast Where We Are by Alison Flett & ecliptical by Hazel Smith

INTERVIEW

Michael Winkler

Open Page

ARTS

62 63 64 65 66

Sophie Knezic Felicity Chaplin Tim Byrne Peter Rose Michael Shmith

Light: Works from Tate’s Collection Sundown The Comedy of Errors Il Trovatore A Winter’s Journey

Cathrine Harboe-Ree

Fellow Passengers: Collected stories by Elizabeth Jolley

FROM THE ARCHIVE 68

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

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

The ethics of memory Sarah Gory

India’s illiberal turn John Zubrzycki

Nuclear colonialism Elizabeth Tynan

Notes of a literary executor John Harwood

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Ben Saul

Abortion: the coalface of feminism Linda Atkins

Calibre Essay Prize Simon Tedeschi

From the archive

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Our partners Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. 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 Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, Australian Communities Foundation, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

but not on this occasion. First we heard from Frank’s elder brother, Arthur, who charmed everyone with his recollections of their childhood. Young Frank, growing up in Nowra and fantasising about Sydney, was always convinced that cars must drive right over the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – and was shocked when this proved not to be the case. Other speakers included Don Anderson and Nick Horne, who talked about Frank’s long friendship with his late father,

Donald. We heard from Frank’s long-time publishers Jane Palfreyman and Meredith Curnow, whose esteem for their lunch-loving, polymathic author was evident. Last came Tom Keneally, beaming, infectious, fraternal. Hilarious if unexpected was his account of the night he accompanied Moorhouse to a strip club. Keneally ended on such a rousing and celebratory note it felt like being at a gospel meeting. Then people repaired to the rooftop bar – for martinis of course. g

Glib wordplay

place. Tellingly, he takes pleasure in a scene from the novel in which contemporary characters, a scientist and an art historian, clash: ‘There is a formidable confrontation between them when she derides that great critic John Berger and her boyfriend wipes the floor with her.’ Craven does acknowledge Brooks’s achievements as a novelist, then remarks that ‘[g]reat novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, as have middlebrow ones’. In this context, shelving Brooks as middlebrow is an abjectly feminising move, gendering that is reinforced by the complete absence of any other women writers from his discussion. Craven surmises that no masterpiece ‘that simply soars alone like a steeple’ (a steeple, really?), citing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, ‘could possibly win’ the Pulitzer. Don’t be mistaken, Craven contends: Brooks’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize for March does not signify as much as her training as a ‘rookie journalist’ with a thing for the horses. Brooks deserved a more respectful and sophisticated review than this from ABR. Lisa Fletcher, Kingston Beach, Tas.

Letters

Dear Editor, I was dismayed by the quality and tenor of Don Anderson’s review of Howard Jacobson’s memoir, Mother’s Boy (ABR, July 2022). Jacobson offers a deeply personal exploration of how Jewish identity, as it is refracted through his relationship with his parents (and a series of wives), has shaped him as a novelist. All Anderson can muster in response is a bit of glib wordplay. Indeed, the reviewer seems more interested in displaying his reading than in reading the book at hand. To dedicate a paragraph to Joyce Cary, a writer Anderson concedes Jacobson ‘does not mention and would appear not to have known’, is bizarre, especially in a review that barely scratches the surface of Jacobson’s wonderful book. It can be hard to draw a line between literary enthusiasm and critical narcissism. I am sure I have been guilty of the latter myself. But it seems that there is something more troubling at play behind Anderson’s allusiveness. Even as he denies it, the review reads as a rearguard action fought on behalf of the ‘eclectic sceptics’ against arrivistes like Jacobson and Sam Goldberg, who attempted to introduce Leavisism to the University of Sydney’s English department. The kicker for me was the conclusion. For a piece that claims a synoptic purview on the teaching of English at university, surely Anderson knows that no such body as the HRC exists. Nor would he need to apply to the imaginary funder for a grant to write a paper on the ‘anti-Semitism of academic appointments’. One need look no further than the binary he imposes: between the genteel guardians of culture in all its variety and eclecticism and ambitious interlopers with names like Goldberg, Felperin, and Jacobson. Marc Mierowsky, Thornbury, Vic.

Flagrantly gendered

Dear Editor, The second paragraph of Peter Craven’s review of Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse (ABR, July 2022) begins, ‘And Brooks is as bright as a button.’ This infantilising praise sets the tone for this review, a flagrantly gendered piece of criticism that I wish ABR had never published. Craven hems Brooks in with a phalanx of literary men including Twain, Dickens, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Joyce. He characterises her as a ‘senior journalist’ using her facility with facts to spin charming tales, but failing to emulate great literary men. Most bios of Brooks will mention her former career as a reporter; Craven uses this fact to seek to put her in her

Western hypocrisy

Dear Editor, As an American living in Australia, I too have been painfully aware that the credibility of Western nations was compromised by the illegal invasion of Iraq. I am glad to see Ben Saul’s article ‘The Law of the Jungle: Western Hypocrisy over the Russian Invasion of Ukraine’ (ABR, July 2022). Some readers of ABR may also be interested in these reports from Ukrainian writers: https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/conversations-withukrainian-writers-at-war/ David Mason (online comment)

Throwing out baby

Dear Editor, Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s review of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality is a strange one (ABR, July 2022). She pays but scant attention to Piketty’s book. Rather, she uses it as a springboard to dive into a pool of her own concerns about colonialism, race, and gender. Little is mentioned of Piketty’s analysis beyond r>g. There is no serious discussion, let alone evaluation, of his suggestions as to how economic, fiscal, and social reforms might rein in inequality worldwide or, more ambitiously, reduce it. Piketty has blind spots, but he deserves a more substantive critique than this. To dismiss Piketty so superficially, with such palpable distaste, is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Tim Lenehan (online comment) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Commentary

The power of office

by Mark Kenny

efore the May 2022 federal election, Anthony Albanese, partly to silence critics of his ‘small target’ campaign and partly to manage wider expectations, proposed to lead a Labor government that under-promised and over-delivered. A deliberately thin ‘look-at-them’ election campaign was designed to keep the focus on a tired and compromised Coalition government, rather than following Labor’s usual approach of fighting for voters’ attention with big new ideas. For a social democratic party which exists for reform, it was an unorthodox strategy and one not without risks. The political capital from any ‘over-delivery’ might well accumulate for a ‘re-election’ bid in 2025, but the thinness of Labor’s 2022 enticements would be obvious. For progressives, the election presented slim pickings, even frustration. In the absence of the redistributive tax-reform measures (and accompanying class rhetoric) offered up by Bill Shorten in 2019 around negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions, and franking credits, some feared Labor was not giving its own supporters enough to rally around, and others enough reason to switch. Yet despite his own problems on the campaign trail, Albanese held his nerve, convinced that the election had to be about Scott Morrison’s failures rather than Labor’s plans. Accordingly, he would commit not only to match – and thus to validate – Morrison’s piecemeal and temporary cost-of-living ‘band-aids’ for households, but also to honour the Liberals’ Stage 3 income tax cuts for high-income earners from 2024, despite their colossal cost, vaulting unfairness, and implications for wider reform. And there was more. Foreign and strategic policy would also continue unchanged, with Labor stressing its undying fidelity to the primacy of the US alliance, to the newly struck AUKUS arrangement, replete with its pie-in the-sky nuclear-powered submarines, and to the continuation of Australia’s defiance of Beijing. Calls for a greater self-reliance in foreign and defence policy, from Labor heavyweights and respected academics, would go unheeded as Labor emphatically aligned itself with the Coalition. Rhetorically, Albanese’s ‘under-promise, over-deliver’ theme had other useful dimensions. First, by way of contradistinction, it proclaimed a clear alternative to Morrison’s unctuous habit of talking big and doing little. Albanese would flip that around. Second, it hinted to engaged and progressively minded voters – call it a positive dog-whistle – that although Labor’s presentation was cautious, that sparseness might itself offer hope. In other words, the election offering was not exhaustive – there would be scope for creative policy initiatives that had not been openly canvassed during the campaign. The unromantic calculus at the heart of all this was the product of Albanese’s long parliamentary career, during which he had witnessed Labor’s many disappointments. The party had held office federally for only twenty-six years since World War II and, of the past twenty-five, spent just six difficult years on the treasury benches. Albanese never doubted that he would face criticism for 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

his so-called ‘small target’ approach, but he believed the task of winning from opposition was best viewed as functionally discrete from the opportunities for governing once in office. His critique stood on two truths: first, that the voters he needed to attract had voted conservative in 2019, and had done so for a reason. Among this cohort were the usual undecided or ‘swing’ voters who had told pollsters they favoured Shorten’s Labor but had then equivocated in the polling booth. These voters were still there to be won, and by 2022 they had been joined a new subset: educated and affluent Liberal supporters unimpressed by Morrison’s cloying religiosity, his ‘not-my-job’ slipperiness through the bushfires and the pandemic, and his dishonesty. Among this group, there was also deep frustration over the Coalition’s climate denialism, and its penchant for divisive culture wars against universities, the arts, the ABC, and even women. Some of these voters were breaking free for the first time. What they needed in order to snap the habit of a lifetime was reassurance. For such voters, Labor’s message had to be one of safety, permission even, derived from a sense of major policy continuity under Labor, particularly vis-à-vis the economy. The successful community independent candidate in the safe Liberal seat of Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, harnessed this sentiment well with her campaign slogan, ‘Same isn’t safe’. Albanese’s recognition of the need to prise these Liberals away, informed the second part of his thinking, namely, his working assumption that any primary votes bled off on Labor’s left flank from courting disaffected Liberals would probably wind up back in Labor’s column anyway – through preference flows. Except in Queensland, where Greens candidates snagged three seats, this confidence was largely vindicated in the result. It explains how Labor could simultaneously slip backwards on first-preference votes – the lowest share of any incoming federal government – and yet go forwards on two-party-preferred, with a 52.1 per cent share to the Coalition’s 47.9 per cent which represents a swing to Labor of 3.66 per cent. Successive elections will reveal which was the more permanent shift in 2022 – the extraordinary emergence of the Teal independents in Liberal strongholds, or the long-foreshadowed (and finally realised) incursion of Greens into Labor’s lowerhouse territory. But it is the latter development that will have the most material effect on the new government’s capacity to deliver – not because of the Greens’ lower-house gains, but because of their enhanced leverage in the Senate. To pass any bills opposed by the Coalition, the new government needs thirty-nine votes in the Upper House: its own twenty-six plus the Greens Party’s twelve and one other. How tricky will that be? Before the forty-seventh Parliament even sat for the first time, both avenues had been narrowed if not closed entirely on one of the measures most central to the election result: emissions reduction. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton

declared that the Coalition will not support Labor’s forty-three per cent 2030 target, leaving Albanese with little choice but to secure support from the Greens Party or pursue it non-legislatively. Sparking memories of his party’s role in scuppering Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2009, Greens Party leader Adam Bandt flagged big problems with Labor’s 2030 target, while leaving open at least the possibility of compromise. The failure of Rudd’s signature reform touched off a series of political eruptions which were material in elevating Tony Abbott to the Liberal leadership (and ultimately the prime ministership in 2013), ending Kevin Rudd’s first-term premiership (2007–10), holing Julia Gillard’s leadership below the waterline, and stalling effective climate and energy policy for a dozen years. Few in Labor believe the Greens will ultimately find their way to a compromise. Yet for all these problems and despite the relative modesty of Labor’s formal campaign offering, morale in Canberra has risen markedly since the May poll. The immediate aftermath of the election revealed just how many ways there are for a new government to change conversations, expand possibilities, restore trust, and create hope. This is the power of office. It brings the ability to set a tone for good or ill, to prioritise expenditure, establish programs, send messages, and build a nation. One is reminded of Paul Keating’s 1996 observation: ‘When you change the government you change the country.’ Fifty years before Anthony Albanese, it was Gough Whitlam. Shortly before the 2022 election, I wrote in The Conversation that were Albanese to be elected he proposed to do less over a whole term than Whitlam fired off in his first furious month. At that time, the two leaders looked as different as chalk and cheese. Where the mellifluous and supremely confident Whitlam proposed a big reform agenda involving sweeping social and political modernisation of Australia, a defensive Albanese appeared to offer incrementalism. This contrast looked only more stark when considering Whitlam’s first month in office (December 1972), during which he established diplomatic relations with Peking (now Beijing), following his audacious trip to ‘Red China’ in 1971. Dramatic and decisive, it was part of an Australian reimagining which the late historian Stuart Macintyre had labelled ‘a nationalism attuned to internationalism’. Hurrying on, Whitlam ended military conscription and pulled Australia out of the Vietnam War; granted independence to Papua New Guinea; and ratified international conventions on labour conditions, racial non-discrimination, and nuclear weapons proliferation. Big changes. Multiple fronts. Yet if anything, Albanese’s first month was equally active and even more ‘international’, giving credence to his view that campaigning and governing, however sequential, were such distinct endeavours as to adduce two different Albaneses. In its first thirty days in office, the government made a minimum wage case submission in support of the lowest paid getting a wage rise of 5.1 per cent (i.e. matching inflation, for which Albanese was called a ‘loose economic unit’ by Morrison). The independent Fair Work Commission went even further. With just five ministers sworn in to hold all portfolios, the government swiftly returned the Murugappan family (also known as the Nadesalingam family) to Biloela, ending a sad and inhu10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

mane saga that had served nobody’s interests but the Coalition’s. The new government then formally notified the United Nations that Australia had adopted the forty-three per cent emissions cut for 2030. It also launched a new charm offensive in the region to assert Australian primacy as the economic and security lodestar of the south Pacific (aided substantially by the new climate stance). Between them, Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Defence Minister Richard Marles visited Fiji, Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, India, and more. On the domestic front, Albanese raised the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart in his victory speech on election night, ahead of any other policy. The atmospheric change from that commitment alone felt transformative. In another telling surprise just days later, the new prime minister appointed a Minister for the Republic (Matt Thistlethwaite), prompting monarchists to complain that he was the first minister of the Crown dedicated to the removal of the Crown. The government also removed the religious requirement from the Howard-era School Chaplaincy program to allow secular counsellors to be employed, and settled the financial costs to be paid to the French Naval Group for the cancelled submarines program. Across the Australian Public Service, Morrison appointees were replaced with fully credentialled top-level public servants. In one of his first acts after the 2019 election, Morrison had delivered a patronising lecture to public servants widely interpreted as telling them to stick to service delivery and leave the policy ideas to the government. Given such statements, the growing use of external consultants, and key political appointments, morale had tanked. Sources within the APS say there is now hope for a more vigorous, respected, and yet depoliticised public service. Yet problems are legion. Inflation has spiked, causing interest rates to rise sharply. The new Minister for Aged Care, Anika Wells, told Radio National in July that the federal budget was ‘not just a mess but was booby-trapped’, with a raft of measures funded only until December. One that ended on 30 June, the $750 pandemic leave for workers without sick leave, caught Labor immediately. With infections soaring from a third Omicron sub-variant wave for the year, Wells, one of Labor’s bright new talents, said the funding was not being cut but was instead expiring. It was the kind of sophistry of which the Morrison government was fond. The government was forced into its first big reversal. At fifty-nine, Albanese has seen all three of the new Labor governments since World War II. Each of them – for good or bad – has informed his thinking. From Whitlam has come the social reform zeal, an effervescent internationalism, and a certain joie de vivre; from Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, the insistence on thoroughly professional cabinet government, and the value of bringing interests together in pursuit of consensus; from Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, two more lessons: Rudd’s deft positioning to give voters the safe option of leaving Howard; and from Gillard, the harsh truths that conservatives play for keeps and that internal rivalries end up taking everyone down. g Mark Kenny is a professor at the Australian Studies Institute at ANU. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. ❖

Politics

‘The burden laid upon her’ Australia’s policy gyrations on China Hugh White

Australia’s China Odyssey: From euphoria to fear by James Curran

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 334 pp

n 17 November 2011, President Barack Obama quoted Banjo Paterson to an audience of Australian and American military personnel at RAAF Base Darwin. He recited a question that Paterson posed about Australia in a poem he wrote to celebrate Federation in 1901: ‘Hath she the strength for the burden laid upon her, hath she the power to protect and guard her own?’ The question haunts us still. Obama assured his listeners that the answer was ‘yes’, but everything about the circumstances of his speech suggested the opposite. Earlier that day, Obama had addressed a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament in Canberra to announce his administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia’. It was America’s first faltering attempt to resist China’s challenge to US strategic primacy in East Asia, and it was greeted with rapturous applause on all sides in Canberra. He and Julia Gillard, the previous day, had announced that in support of this policy US Marines would establish a permanent rotational presence in Darwin – the first permanent presence of US combat forces here since World War II. It could hardly have been clearer that in the face of China’s rise Australia did not believe it ‘had the power to protect and guard her own’. Instead, with the marines in Darwin we were clinging closer to the United States to protect us from China. Ten years later with AUKUS, we are clinging closer still. It is strange and suggestive that the White House speechwriters didn’t see how discomfortingly pertinent Banjo’s question remained, 110 years after he posed it. Or perhaps they did. There are many nuggets like this in historian James Curran’s rich and detailed account of the evolution of Australia’s relationship with China since the communists took power there in 1949. He is well fitted for this task, having written a number of fine books on Australia’s evolving place in the world and its relationships with Britain and America in the postwar era, as well as perceptive commentaries on contemporary affairs as a columnist for the Australian Financial Review. His work consistently demonstrates the value of well-wrought history to contemporary policy debates. The book’s epigraphs include a telling passage from the late Neville Meaney – one of Curran’s teachers, and perhaps the finest historian of Australian strategic policy – warning of the ‘uncritical mythology’ by which current events are misunderstood and policy choices distorted in the absence of a clear understanding of what has gone before. That is certainly true of Australia’s current problems with

China. Two intertwined oversimplifications – tales of Australian greed and naïveté on the one hand and Chinese duplicity on the other – distort debate about how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it. That distortion is even reflected in the subtitle of Curran’s new book (‘From euphoria to fear’), but the work itself is a powerful corrective. It gives a far more nuanced view of how generations of Australian leaders and their advisers have wrestled for decades to manage the challenges and opportunities posed by the world’s most populous country as it has undergone a series of profound transformations.

It could hardly have been clearer that in the face of China’s rise Australia did not believe it ‘had the power to protect and guard her own’ Curran starts by outlining the complex and often sophisticated debates that lay behind Menzies’ crude invocation of communist Chinese threats in the 1950s and early 1960s. He describes discussions about whether to follow the United States in denying recognition to the communist regime and how far to go in threatening Beijing militarily – especially with nuclear weapons – about which they were notably cautious. Curran then describes Gough Whitlam’s audacious overture to China in 1971, and the commendable mix of optimism and sober realism that framed the opening of diplomatic relations in the years that followed. And he unpacks Malcolm Fraser’s efforts to harness China to his surprisingly audacious efforts to build an anti-Soviet coalition in the late 1970s. China, in those days, remained mired in Mao’s rule and its chaotic aftermath, but the potential for China to profoundly transform Australia’s strategic environment and challenge our view of our place in the world was already clear to perceptive observers. As early as 1976, our first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, wrote of the need to develop relations with China so that ‘we may the more easily accommodate to a situation in which Chinese influence is paramount in our part of the world’ – a prospect which then seemed very distant indeed. Things are very different in the 1980s, when Deng’s economic reforms and opening to the West gave a glimpse of China’s potential, and began to offer Australia the opportunities that would for so long transform our economic fortunes. Curran’s account of Bob Hawke’s and Paul Keating’s remarkable efforts to realise these opportunities by engaging Chinese leaders is one of the highlights of the book. He recounts how Hawke’s rapport with key figures in Beijing in these critical years was closer than that of any other Western leader’s. But Curran’s story really hits its stride when he moves on to the Howard era. Coming to power in 1996 as China’s rise was really beginning to tell, John Howard was the first prime minister to confront its complex implications head-on. On the one hand, China’s growth of ten per cent per annum year after year offered Australia quite extraordinary economic prospects. On the other, that growing wealth gave China the power – if it chose to use it – to challenge the US leadership in Asia on which Australia’s security depended. From his first weeks in office, which coincided with the last major US–China AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

military confrontation over Taiwan, Howard sought ways to harness China’s rise to drive our economy while preserving the US alliance and upholding American regional primacy. Ever since – for more than twenty-five years – that has remained the primary challenge to Australian foreign policy. The story of how that challenge has been conceived and addressed by successive governments forms the heart of Curran’s book. He gives a fascinating and detailed account that shows the sheer inaccuracy of the image of Australia as simply greedy, complacent, and naïve before suddenly waking up to Chinese perfidy in 2017.

too easily assumed that America would remain unchallengeable economically, technologically, diplomatically, and militarily, and that it would remain committed to doing whatever it takes to preserve its leading position in Asia and globally. These failures of assessment have together led us to assume that America would solve our China problem for us, by ensuring that we never had to, in Fitzgerald’s words from 1976, ‘accommodate to a situation in which Chinese influence is paramount in our part of the world’ – whereas that seems to be precisely what we now have to do. The third constant is that since 1996 we have too easily taken for granted that accommodating to Chinese hegemony in our Howard sought ways to harness part of the world is something we simply cannot do. This is part China’s rise to drive our economy while of Howard’s legacy. He often said that Australia would never preserving the US alliance and upholding have to choose between its history and its geography. That was his way of expressing his faith that our historical friends – our American regional primacy Anglo-Saxon friends – would always and must always shield us Curran recounts Howard’s artful positioning, neatly symbol- from our geographical neighbours. It is a faith that took deep ised when on two consecutive days in October 2003 he hosted root and has been maintained by his successors on both sides of politics ever since. both the US and Chinese presiThat faith overturned an idea dents – George W. Bush and Hu that had been slowly gaining Jintao – to address our parliament. ground among Australians for He describes how Kevin Rudd’s fifty years before 1996: the idea fluency in Mandarin became a that eventually we would and liability rather than an asset in could and should find our way dealing with both Beijing and in an Asia that was no longer Washington. He explains Julia dominated and made safe for Gillard’s successes in rebuilding us by Anglo-Saxon powers, but both relationships, and describes was instead dominated by Asian Tony Abbott hailing Xi Jinping powers. Almost sixty years ago, as a champion of democracy, Donald Horne explored this idea just a few days after telling Anin The Lucky Country. Hawke and gela Merkel that our relationship Keating expressed it when they with China was built on ‘fear and said that Australia must in future greed’. look for its security in Asia, not Curran’s blow-by-blow acfrom Asia. count of all this is comprehensive, But Howard killed it, and it engaging, and very valuable. It has never been revived, so that does, however, have the weaktoday some of our political leaders nesses of its strengths, because all argue that we should go to war the fascinating detail can tend to with the United States against occlude the bigger questions that China – a war that we cannot win our policymakers really need to – rather than face the challenges address. These concern the three of making our own way in the assumptions that have underAsia of the twenty-first century pinned all the political and policy without America’s support. To gyrations since 1996 that Curran them, and I fear to many others, so fluently describes. the answer to Banjo Paterson’s First, we have consistently James Curran (University of Sydney/NewSouth) question – ‘Hath she the strength underestimated China’s power for the burden laid upon her, hath and resolve. In the face of abundant evidence, we have too easily assumed that China’s economic she the power to protect and guard her own?’ – is still ‘no’. We rise would wane, that its political system would falter, that its need to prove them wrong. g technology would lag, that its military power would remain uncompetitive, and that it had no real interest in challenging US Hugh White is emeritus professor of strategic studies at ANU power. Second, we have consistently overestimated US power and the author, most recently, of Quarterly Essay 86: Sleepwalk and resolve. In the face of equally abundant evidence, we have to war: Australia’s unthinking alliance with America. 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

Politics

All about Malcolm

Liberal loathing of one of their own Patrick Mullins

Ego: Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party’s civil war by Aaron Patrick

HarperCollins $34.99 pb, 336 pp

hen out of government, the Coalition parties resemble nothing so much as an ill-disciplined horde, by turns bombastic and bilious, riven with discord, forever tearing down putative leaders and searching for scapegoats to explain their losses and lot. The blame almost always falls on the departed. In the 1980s, it was Malcolm Fraser’s unwillingness to undertake proper economic reform that they most decried; after 2007, it was John Howard’s refusal to relinquish the leadership to Peter Costello. In Aaron Patrick’s new book, Ego, the blame is laid not at the feet of Scott Morrison, as might have been expected, but at those of Malcolm Turnbull. A writer for the Australian Financial Review, Patrick has authored book-length accounts of the rot at the heart of the last Labor government (2007–13), of the dysfunction of the prime minister’s office under Tony Abbott (2013–15), and of the shock delivered by the 2019 re-election of the Morrison government. He is an experienced observer of the federal political landscape, if also one who, in recent years, has become better known for his contrarian views, some of which find voice in this expansive and tendentious volume. According to Patrick, Turnbull, after losing the prime ministership in August 2018, engaged in a sustained campaign to undermine his successor: ‘He plotted and schemed, applying his enormous energy to the destruction of the Morrison government.’ This energy was most palpable during controversies around the treatment of women and issues of sexual harassment, during the government’s self-torturing attempts to simultaneously do something and nothing about climate change, and over Australia’s ill-fated submarines deal with France. In Patrick’s view, Turnbull evinced a naked hostility towards his party and former colleagues that is without parallel in Australian political history. There can no doubt that Turnbull was a notable critic. His command of public attention and his willingness to speak bluntly about the government’s failings, especially to left-wing audiences, helped him to recover some of the stature he had lost in office. And whether it was on the allegations against Christian Porter or the government’s candour with the French, Turnbull offered commentary that was articulate, scathing, and entertaining to boot. Having dismissed Kevin Rudd and Abbott as ‘miserable ghosts’ for their ongoing engagement with political debate in post-prime ministerial life, Turnbull’s own engagement represented a notable about-face, of which some have been rightly critical. And, to be fair, Turnbull’s commentary was not always

judicious. Turnbull’s speculation about the circumstances of the suicide of Porter’s accuser was ill judged, and his calls for an integrity commission rarely acknowledged that he had resisted similar calls while in office. In some instances, too, Turnbull’s pressure was efficacious. Porter’s decision on 3 March 2021 to out himself as the minister accused of historical rape offences came only a few days after Turnbull gave great publicity to the allegations by speaking about them at a writers’ festival and on ABC radio. And Turnbull’s attacks on Morrison’s character – ‘He’s lied to me on many occasions,’ he told journalists – certainly contributed to the growing distrust of Morrison’s authenticity and honesty. But apportioning responsibility for the Morrison government’s woes is hardly as simple as this book suggests, and despite Patrick’s best efforts Turnbull appears more as an agitator, not an instigator, during the cavalcade of scandals and controversies that erupted between 2018 and 2022. It was Morrison’s constant resort to the tone-deaf platitude that saw issues around sexual harassment and the treatment of women become so potent. It was the government’s unwillingness to establish an inquiry to delve into the Porter allegations that allowed them to become so heated. It was the government’s diplomatic ineptitude that provoked France’s hostility when the AUKUS arrangements were announced. It was the government’s internal disunity that crippled any meaningful action on climate change. And it was the government’s failure to attract talented women into its ranks and deal successfully with the issues near and dear to inner city electorates that saw a swath of Liberal heartland seats fall, in May 2022, to the Teal independents. At the heart of this book is a question about loyalty: to the public, to the country, to party, to institutions, to movements. Should Turnbull, for partisan interests, have muzzled his views on issues in which he had a longstanding involvement? Should he have curbed his desire for revenge on former colleagues? Patrick suggests the answer is yes, if only for the Liberal Party, which gave Turnbull a seat in parliament and then the prime ministership. ‘It had given him the prize he had always sought. It expected, and later hoped, forlornly, for loyalty in return.’ And yet, as Turnbull, sharply, replies: ‘The Right believes in loyalty until it doesn’t suit them, and then they blow the place up.’ For all the heat and light directed at Turnbull, what Ego most sharply illuminates – perhaps unwittingly – are the fevered prejudices, petty vanities, and self-interested paranoias shared by members of the former government. Josh Frydenberg can ‘command access to millions of television cameras, almost at will’, Patrick writes, yet he is upset when junior colleagues fail to retweet his ghost-written banalities. The current deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Sussan Ley, blames Turnbull for her 2017 resignation as health minister: it was not her blatant misuse of travel entitlements but his desire for clear air that was pivotal. Former Defence Minister Linda Reynolds called someone a lying cow but thinks the insult is mitigated by context and regards herself as a victim. The Liberal Party’s right wing thinks Porter a ‘martyr to the cause of conservatism’, no matter that he decided of his own volition to retire from politics. Perhaps most notably, the sustained barrage of controversies led members of the government to perceive a ‘conspiracy’ at work AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

to destroy the Coalition’s hold on power, with Turnbull a central figure. Patrick appears to have gulped the Kool-Aid. References to the possibility of informal alliances, too striking coincidences, and unrevealed connections abound. The publisher of Turnbull’s score-settling autobiography is also the publisher of a polemic on the Morrison government’s ‘lies and falsehoods’. Turnbull, prompted the opening of Guardian Australia, an outlet frequently critical of the Coalition. It was also the home of Katharine Murphy, one of a handful of female journalists regarded by the Coalition as enemies because of their coverage of the government’s issues with women and sexual harassment. Patrick does not repeat his much-criticised 2021 claim that these journalists produced ‘angry coverage that strayed into unapologetic activism’, but his account of their work is sceptical. We can harbour reservations about efforts to apportion all

the blame for the May 2022 election defeat to Turnbull. Despite Patrick’s claims that ‘it was all about Malcolm’, that he was ‘the shadow figure’ in all its misery, that he was ‘at or near the heart of the conspiracy’ to cast the Coalition from office, the truth is simpler. A government long in the tooth, bearing the scars of bitter leadership battles, prolonged instability, and division, staring at the world with a jaundiced eye, detecting enemies wherever it looked, led by a man distrusted by the broader public and denigrated by his own followers, was ultimately driven by its own demons to stampede like the Gadarene swine to the precipice of electoral oblivion – and then to plunge in. g Patrick Mullins is the author of three books, the most recent being, Who needs the ABC? Why taking it for granted is no longer an option (2022), with Matthew Ricketson.

Mandelbrot Set

a fractal mathematical world discovered in 1980 by Benoit Mandelbrot, as reported in Cosmos 17, 2008

i ~ dots of colour points on a complex number plane where the x horizontal axis represents the ‘real’ part number and the vertical y gives us unseen space the imaginary i x=iy and i2 =-1 which is the infinite horizon’s periphery of scolia stellate forms narrow sky water earth data an exiguous eternity ... a free fractal generator ChaosPro (www.chaospro.de) takes our most malleable maps and gives back to us neon lichen estuaries snowflakes black beetles astral trees tributaries fjords coastlines budding spores and flowers all the river mysteries Zeus might have seen from heaven or the shallop we imagined belonged to the gods infinitely divine and wise ... kaleidoscopic world beautiful blaze enlarged by looking it took a man his entire life to decipher this hidden world while Zeus had only immortality to juggle in the mountain’s clouds and olive trees the blue ocean a scimitar leaning back on land’s edge to gnaw the fronds of fate liturgies leave it up to our kind our eyes to keep the smaller picture in mind ~

ii ~ a new set of chess pieces unrecognised moves and checkmates no single gene or game clock to regulate strategy and the vertical y gives us unseen space the imaginary i x=iy an elastic blueprint each trait defined by what we cannot see or hear or know an infant reaching for a mobile phone listening for the sound of words phrases sentences imprisoned by lost languages ... ChaosPro (www.chaospro.de) ... Alan Turing imagined a machine that could decipher the arithmetical world without consciousness calculation hurled at the mind’s handedness cryptography (Daniel C. Dennett called Turing one of the twigs on the ‘Tree of Life’ in the 2020 New York Review of Books) his analytic machines scything through intercepted Nazi codes with Darwinian practicality ... enlarged by looking it took a man his entire life to decipher this hidden world of spider webs wasp nests beaver dams ... we have not met our lockdown grandchild a face already loved beyond imagining heart-gesture inherited transcending space and time to un-net the spider un-melt the ice un-dam the beaver welcome to paradise ~

Jennifer Harrison Jennifer Harrison’s latest poetry collection is Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). ‘Mandelbrot Set’ was longlisted for the 2022 Porter Prize. 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

Category

F I C T I O N A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022 23

Fiction

Brooms and cupboards

A familial portrait of the Melbourne art world Jane Sullivan

Bad Art Mother by Edwina Preston

Wakefield $32.95 pb, 324 pp

n 1961, Gwen Harwood submitted a sonnet to the Bulletin under the name of Walter Lehmann. Her poem, ‘Abelard to Eloisa’, held a shocking acrostic secret that many people considered very bad art. Nobody discovered the secret until after it was published. But despite her transgression, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘she found much greater acceptance’ – to the point that she is today considered one of Australia’s greatest poets. No such luck for Edwina Preston’s fictional poet, Veda Gray. On the first page of this ferociously funny novel, Preston borrows Harwood’s secret and ascribes it to Veda at the launch of her first book of poetry. When the secret is disclosed, it kills the book – and ultimately, we suspect, it kills Veda. ‘It was 1970,’ says her son Owen, the narrator. ‘Germaine Greer was yet to publish The Female Eunuch. Mother wasn’t a respectable woman.’ Veda confronts the same question that faced Harwood – how to be a poet, a wife, and a mother – but with a different result. Everything works against her ambition. Her husband, Jo, is perennially absent, running a restaurant and feeding the poor. The cultural gatekeepers, all men, see no value in her work and its small, domestic subjects – as Veda describes them, ‘too many brooms and cupboards and pieces from jewellery boxes’. At last, one gatekeeper agrees to publish a book of her poems, but it is constantly delayed and censored by its editors. She fights hard to give herself space and time to create, but unfortunately she’s an expert at self-sabotage, internalising criticism that undermines her confidence. She comes to believe that she has no natural affinity for anything and might have been better off living in a time when women did not learn to read. Any creative person, particularly any creative woman, will recognise these battles between the outer and inner world. The complacent chauvinism of the postwar era has shaped our culture, and it’s far from dead. Inevitably, volatile Veda spirals out of control, taking refuge in alcohol and cigarettes and a brittle insouciance that sometimes explodes in bouts of self-destructive fury. In this sense she’s a Bad Mother. Not that she would dream of hurting Owen, though he is often neglected. He is, however, blessed with two substitute mothers who fill the gaps that Veda leaves wide open. Mrs Parish, a wealthy, childless woman with her own longings, takes the boy under her wing and becomes an adult friend; while his ‘almost-aunt’ Ornella, a grumpy, unmagical Mary Poppins without a creative bone in 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

her body, puts in all the practical care a growing boy needs. It’s no coincidence that Owen is telling his story to Ornella. Just as there are three mothers to Owen in this story, there are also three women pursuing their own dreams of creativity. Apart from Veda, there is Rosa, a migrant worker in Jo’s restaurant who paints her beloved Dolomites on the walls. Meanwhile, Mrs Parish is quietly snipping away at her ikebana flower arrangements. All are in the shadow of Mr Parish, a celebrated and influential poet who can make or break an artistic career. He is so deeply mired in misogynistic views of women and art that he can’t even recognise his own prejudices. As the author of a biography of Howard Arkley, Preston already knows a thing or two about art and artists. Here she proves adept at weaving together the tales of her characters against a backdrop of Melbourne in the 1960s, a time when old money and old certainties were challenged by an influx of European migrants and a subversive spirit of entrepreneurial and arty bohemianism. This was typified by the real-life Mora family, with their winning combination of restaurant, art gallery, and outrageous artist in the person of Mirka Mora. The Moras don’t make it into the novel, but Preston observes this backdrop with a wide-ranging and accurate eye, and a bit of assiduous name-dropping: ‘Max bloody Harris’s bookshop’ or Mrs Parish’s ‘Hal Ludlow’ dress (I’m assuming that ‘Hal’ instead of ‘Hall’ is a typo). But Preston never romanticises the era: Mr Parish and men like him have their deadening hands on artistic hopes. We feel most sympathy for Veda through Preston’s device of including letters to her sister Tilde, where she can be honest about her feelings – sometimes wistful, sometimes desperate. The dreams of girls are enormous air balloons, she writes – ripe for the pricking. But the triumph of this engaging novel is the voice of Owen, the boy narrator. He is irresistibly appealing in his earnest bafflement, trying to understand these strange grown-ups, willing to believe the best of everyone, becoming a vegetarian so he can direct his anger and sense of injustice towards the people who kill animals. Veda is the biggest puzzle because of her moods: ignoring him, shooing him away, then gathering him up and kissing him (‘“poor darling O-yo, Mummy’s such a bad old Mummy” … How could I know what to be, with a mother like that?’). His innocent observation makes for an original, poignant, and often hilarious take on the dilemmas of creative women and the roles that the patriarchy expects them to perform. He is a generous narrator. Even horrid Mr Parish is converted through Owen’s eyes into a figure of pathos. And he’s spot-on in his conclusions about what art does to these people. Art made Mrs Parish ‘calm and strong … Art made Mother sad, Mr Parish silly, and Rosa overexcited.’ We also meet Owen as an adult, keeper of the flame of his mother’s work: after her death, she is finally venerated as a pioneering feminist poet. His partner is the publisher of Veda’s collected works, not a poet but more than a little like Veda herself. I found myself fervently hoping for their happiness. g Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne author and literary journalist. Her latest book is Storytime (Ventura Press, 2019).

Fiction

Reckless as a rule

fourteen, he piloted bay gelding Nimblefoot to victory in the Melbourne Cup – then faded from the historical record, freeing Drewe to pursue his fictional fancies. Robert Drewe’s ambivalence towards history In Nimblefoot, Day is whisked away to a brothel after winning Michael Winkler the Cup by a group that includes Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred and Captain Frederick Standish, Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police. After Alfred rapes and injures a young girl, Standish murders her and an African American servant. The teenage jockey, witness to these atrocities, escapes before he can be killed, scarpering to the familiar Drewe territory of Western Australia. Here he falls in and out of employment, luck and love, Nimblefoot encountering numerous colourful acquaintances, the kind that by Robert Drewe Henry Lawson called ‘common brother-sinners’. Hamish Hamilton Reading a new Drewe novel feels like opening another chapter $32.99 pb, 305 pp of a narrative that has unfurled over almost five decades, intensified he National Portrait Gallery owns a minuscule sepia by the reappearance of familiar tropes. Like Molloy in Grace (2005), studio photograph titled ‘Master Johnny Day, Austra- Day can’t swim and is anxious around water: ‘he wasn’t sure about lian Champion Pedestrian’. From this curious gumnut, an element that required not only mastery but surrender’. A minor character collects the skulls of small native animals; skulls and bones Robert Drewe has created a sprawling multi-limbed eucalypt. In a few months, Drewe will turn eighty. He is part of an recur in Drewe’s fiction. The outrages perpetrated by Standish and extraordinary cohort of Australian novelists born in 1941–43, Alfred exemplify the defects Drewe habitually locates in the empire including Helen Garner, Roger McDonald, Peter Carey, Murray or its representatives. The malign hitman who stalks Day reminds Bail, and Janette Turner Hospital. We now have an opportunity us of Eric Cooke in The Shark Net (2000). The narrative skips from first to third person, occasionally to discover what late style means for these heavyweights. For Drewe, on the evidence of Nimblefoot, it means intensity within the same chapter. Drewe sporadically interleaves fragrather than looseness. Nimblefoot contains more stuff than Colonel ments from newspaper stories, advertising copy, a promotionPewter’s holdall, including Rechtub Klat, Noongar techniques for al poster. Famous figures abound, slightly off-centre – as in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books or Don DeLillo’s catching marron, the incineration of a Underworld (1997). (But then, in scale model of the royal vessel Galatea in Fortune [1986] Drewe warned us that Bendigo, the ‘Lunatic’s Douche’, manin a country with a small population, agement of bubonic plague in Western ‘everyone over thirty knows everyone Australia, and Dante Rossetti keeping else.’) Here is Adam Lindsay Gordon, pet wombats in his London garden. depicted as he might have described The book opens with a strong, himself, ‘Hard livers for the most part, strange animal interaction – out of somewhat reckless as a rule.’ There is register, toppling expectations. The first Lola Montez, performing the notorious sentence reads: ‘The Moscow Maestro Spider Dance. A set piece concludes is wearing a nanny goat around his neck with a hungover Anthony Trollope like a scarf.’ It is a gambit that Drewe visiting an abattoir and vomiting on his has used previously. Think of the lion boots. And as the character Day says to barking at the start of Our Sunshine Trollope: ‘Wait, there’s more.’ (1991). Wasn’t that supposed to be This is a book of abundance. a Ned Kelly book? A true picaresque – episodic, rambling, Immediately we recognise that with the central character acted upon Drewe’s powers of imagination are rather than agentic, buffeted by fate. undimmed. The bravura manoeuvre of Every detail is detailed, every particular placing a circus at Glenrowan in Our particularised; this might be delightful Sunshine and reframing a well-worn tale or tiring, depending on your preference. is echoed as once again he mixes ideas Michael Ackland wrote in Westerly of and smiths images to revivify history. Drewe’s ‘abiding ambivalence towards The kernel is the little-known story history’, that ‘his novels are concerned of Day, a race-walking prodigy. By the with defamiliarizing the established age of ten Day had won 101 races at record, with highlighting lacunae a time when punt-struck Australians and neglected episodes or aspects’. I were betting large sums on pedestrianMaster Johnny Day, Australian Champion Pedestrian thought of eutrophy, the state of bodies ism. As the sport’s prominence ebbed, c.1866 by an unknown artist or water that have too many nutrients (National Portrait Gallery of Australia) he turned to horseracing. In 1870, aged

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

and not enough oxygen. This quest to conjure depth and vibrancy is freighted with a lot of information that might be shaded as extraneous, and it can be difficult to discern the telling detail from the decoration. For all that, what a joy to spend time with a writer who does not give us a dog but ‘a loony border collie with one blue eye, the other brown’. After Day’s mother miscarries there is, ‘Dry lightning menacing our house and a carpet of blood from front door to back’. A stock character is brought to life: ‘the rare glimpses of him in shirtsleeves revealing dark armpit stains, stained orange from a strong anti-perspirant ordered from the London perfumer Eugene Rimmel’. Drewe searches always for the startling image, such as horses still in harness that have plummeted from a pier, ‘in petrified mad gallop on the seabed two fathoms down … blowfish and small octopuses politely reduced the horses from the lips and nostrils backwards’. Wilson Buntine, purportedly the first-ever Black student of Hale School, is one of many carefully crafted characters that appear, seem likely to have narrative significance, then wander off-stage – which is the way things work in life, certainly, but not always in compelling fiction. We are told that Buntine is named

after two houses at the school. Hale old boy Drewe would know they are names of twentieth-century headmasters, whereas we meet the student in the 1870s. Perhaps this dip into asynchronism flags that the novel’s relationship with time unravels in the last portion. My assumption based on the flow of action was that the period of Day’s pursuit in Western Australia lasted a year or less. However, there are references to Ned Kelly’s beard, the Catalpa rescue, and Monet’s move into Impressionism, which suggest that the action sprawls over most of a decade. Then when Standish dies, the wrong date is given and probably the wrong year. Why break some rules of historical veracity and not others? What are these choices telling us? Twenty years ago, Drewe postulated that there are two Australian myths always fighting for precedence in our literature – the Myth of Landscape and the Myth of Character. Both are on bright display in this late novel. Many readers will be glad they can still accompany him as he referees the wrestle. g Michael Winkler is the author of Grimmish, shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award, and a past winner of the Calibre Essay Prize.

Fiction

Getting sad or getting mad Three new novels exploring women’s suffering Georgia White

n a famous letter to her friend and fellow writer Lorna Sage, Angela Carter declared that no daughter of hers should ever pen a title like Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945): ‘BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.’ The choice between getting sad or getting mad, the dilemma of how to represent the reality of female anguish without romanticising or pathologising it, is a recurring theme in twenty-first-century women’s writing: it forms the main subject of Leslie Jamison’s essay ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ (2014); it is the premise behind the post-feminist revenge films Jennifer’s Body (2009) and Promising Young Woman (2020). Three new Australian novels offer different approaches to the spectacle of women’s suffering. Following on from her début, See What I Have Done (2017), a reimagining of the 1892 murders in the Borden household, Sarah Schmidt’s Blue Hour (Hachette, $32.99 pb, 320 pp) is an elegiac tale about mothers, daughters, 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

and the traumas they endure. Set in twentieth-century Australia, the narrative jumps back and forth between the perspective of Kitty, a woman whose unplanned pregnancy in 1941 forces her into a marriage she regrets, and her daughter Eleanor, who is grappling with sorrows of her own while on a road trip thirty years later with her baby girl, Amy. Schmidt has a distinctively prose-poetic writing style, sifting through images for meaning and turning them over and around as if she is panning for gold: ‘In the dark of their bed George crushed his hands together as if he were building fires, tinder sticks alighting. All the heat of him spread to Kitty in her dreams. The way it woke her, as if she were fleeing burning buildings.’ But while this approach can lend a welcome richness and grace to a gruesome, unsolvable crime (‘Lizzie Borden with an axe / Gave her father forty whacks’), Blue Hour falters somewhat when it comes to its own story. Schmidt seems to have an almost elemental understanding of womanhood as a cocktail of angst, fury, guilt, and penance – a formulation that, again, makes sense in the world of an accused Victorian murderess but that turns the lives of more ordinary women into the stuff of melodrama. The characters of Blue Hour and the events that befall them are already skirting the line of cliché (the 1940s virgin wanting to be rebellious; the wartime nurse tending to the wrecks of returning soldiers; the daughter alienated by her mother and then increasingly by motherhood itself ). For all its elaborate metaphors, the novel lacks emotional or character nuance. Eleanor’s husband seems like a monster, but it’s hard to be shocked by his actions when he has never behaved otherwise. Kitty’s resentment of her husband and her grief at a loss that took place shortly before Eleanor’s birth manifests as pure, primal, unbridled rage and remains so ever after, never wavering or calcifying into something harder. The overall effect is that of a gilded soap opera, or a variation

on Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘Woman hands on misery to woman, ascending like a placental shelf. Get out as quickly as you can, and let your husband kill himself.’

t the centre of Sally Piper’s Bone Memories (UQP, $32.99 pb, 268 pp) is another mother–daughter dynamic, but it is augmented by other, equally intricate relationships: grandmother–grandson, widower–wife, matriarch–usurper. The novel is set in and around the home of Billie, a garden centre employee in her sixties; Angus, her former son-in-law; Daniel, Angus’s son and Billie’s grandson; Carla, Angus’s second wife and Daniel’s stepmother; and Scout, Angus and Carla’s young daughter. The missing piece that lends context to this unusual ménage is Billie’s daughter, Jess, who was brutally murdered by an unidentified man sixteen years prior, leaving the infant Daniel as the only witness. While the rest of the household is ready or at least willing to try to move on, Billie is unable to contemplate abandoning the house that she, Jess, and Angus shared together. Stylistically, Piper’s writing isn’t particularly elegant: her sentences abound with incomplete clauses and awkward pivots in mood, theme, or scope (it’s not unusual for a discussion about the family property to be interspersed with Daniel’s musings on the atomic bomb, or for Billie to be sitting under the bright lights of Indooroopilly Shopping Centre and suddenly wonder ‘how a tree hold[s] itself tall for so long?’). Perhaps this is a character quirk, or the product of long-term trauma, but it makes for arrhythmic reading. Nevertheless, the novel’s personalities are expertly crafted, as is the escalating tension between them: Billie, the ageing greenie whose loss has radicalised her already atypical set of ethics and stubborn disposition; Daniel, the teenager with the survivor’s burden, unable to contemplate risk or instigate change; Angus, the husband and domestic peacekeeper, passive and enigmatic as men in his position often are; and Carla, caught between her guilt in longing for a household of her own and her anger at not already having it. The novel’s various thematic threads (the natural world and our place in it; the notion of the ‘ideal victim’) align nicely with and enrich the story’s conflicts, though at times they intrude upon the pace.

inally, Isobel Beech’s Sunbathing (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 295 pp) is perhaps the most emotionally sophisticated of these novels (impressively so, as a début). Slow, subdued and contemplative, its narrator is a young woman travelling to the south of Italy in the wake of her father’s suicide. Her friends Giulia and Fab put her up in the ‘Birthing Room’ of their house – so called because ‘Women from my family had their children in this room,’ Fab tells her – while the three of them prepare for the couple’s wedding in a month’s time. In this rustic, ageless place, the narrator experiences peace and disquiet as she follows Giulia’s domestic routine: making bread, picking fruit, tending the garden. Her deceptively calm narratorial tone belies the fact that, as is so often the case with grief, there is a raging incongruity between the gentle sensations in the world around her (the summer’s heat; the joyful colours of Giulia’s sheets; the benign insects crawling around the house) and her abject state of mind (‘It was as if I were naked and alone in some wet and unforgiving place’). Her idle hours are lost to

reverie and social media scrolling as she searches for something, anything, that might give context to her loss: a tense conversation with her father over Christmas; an argument, from years before, between friends at a party; people’s online eulogies for other suicidal men.

The dilemma of how to represent the reality of female anguish is a recurring theme in twenty-first-century women’s writing Not a great deal else happens. The days come and go; the wedding approaches; the celebrations conclude, and the narrator prepares to return to Melbourne and resume the life she had there. The novel seems light on plot, but it asks some ambitious questions. How can suicide exist in a world with so much life (a pregnant cat, a lizard gleaming in the sun) in it? Can a love like Giulia and Fab’s really originate from the same fleshy atoms that regularly kill themselves, and each other, on a global scale? If the novel (and its narrator) struggles with the insolvability of these questions, the lack of easy resolution on offer is perhaps an apt allegory for what it is to experience suffering in real time – a dull, meaningless, privately felt ache, melting away as imperceptibly as a sculpture of ice rather than expelling itself in a dramatic gesture by Grand Central Station. g Georgia White is a writer and PhD student at Monash University.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Dog Park

by Nina Cullen

eorgie heads towards a bench in the shade. No prams or bags or snack boxes on it. No other parents looking for playground chitchat. Max scuffs along a few metres behind her. He’s waving a stick like a metal detector and mumbles to himself. Georgie sits down and waves for him to hurry up. She should’ve shelved it by now. You can’t hurry Max. He’s always walked to the beat of his own drum. At his own pace. He stops for a moment to look at the sky and holds two hands up around his eyes like binoculars. He’s looking, maybe at something, maybe at nothing. Georgie whistles. He takes his hands down and comes over to her, sitting on the bench and pulling off his sandals. ‘Not so fast, mister!’ She grabs an arm before he slips away. ‘Sun cream.’ ‘Okay.’ He holds his hands out for a squirt and gets to work on arms and legs while she deals with his neck and face. He’s still going when she is done, rubbing in any leftover cream. More thorough than she is, these days. ‘Now can I go?’ ‘Yes!’ Georgie leans her cheek out for a kiss and grabs him into a cuddle at the same time. He’s soft and if she catches the right place on his head, she swears it still smells like a baby. They both have pale skin and freckles and no business being in the midday sun, so their park visits are usually in the early morning or late afternoon. Fine by Georgie. It’s just babies and toddlers at that time and tired parents who need to get out of the house. The kids toddle around Max but don’t demand anything of him. They take a bucket or spade occasionally. The parents bend down and ask if it’s okay and he nods. He’s always been a generous kid. Sharing has never been the issue. Max crouches over the sand with his legs spread wide. Georgie stands up, ready to take him to the toilet block. He’s never done a wee in the sandpit before. But he bends down lower and sand is suddenly flying out from between his legs. ‘Are you digging up a bone, Maxie?’ Georgie sits back down. ‘Arf. Arf.’ He keeps digging. ‘Found anything yet?’ ‘Roooow.’ He walks over to her on all fours with a sad dog face. Georgie leans in and gives him a scratch behind the ears. One of the mums looks over at them from the swings. 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

‘Probably no bones here, Maxxie. How about we build tunnels and castles instead?’ ‘Woof.’ He shakes his bum in lieu of having a tail to wag. They play this doggy game at home. Sometimes, she even gets down with him and they roll around on the floor with tickles and Max’s gulped giggles. It started as a distraction from his screaming. When he didn’t get something, he would scream and hit. She spoke to him about using his words, but that didn’t resonate. One day, he screamed in her face and she barked at him. He stopped and laughed and started barking too. Then when he got angry, instead of yelling he would bark. She would try not to smile when he stood there with his arms crossed and brows ridged, barking like a dog. It got it out of his system. He’d turn from an angry pup back into her little boy, and she’d go from growly top dog back to his loving Mamma. He’d come for a cuddle and they’d snuggle on the couch. She’d pet him. A little scratch behind the ear. A pat along the back. And he’d fetch something, a book to read or toy. ‘Okay. Enough of the playful puppy game. That’s one for at home.’ Georgie leans down to Max and brushes some hair out of his eyes. There are a few more families in the playground now. Some of them with older children. Max leans back on his haunches ready to howl. ‘How about a cheese stick.’ Georgie quickly finds one in the snack bag and holds it out like a treat for a good boy. She pats the seat next to her and he sits down and grabs the snack. ‘Yummmm.’ Georgie scruffles his hair. ‘I think you’re really a mouse. All the cheese you eat.’ ‘Squeak,’ Max answers. He swings his legs and takes a sip from his drink bottle. Her beautiful boy. Sometimes, Georgie looks at him and thinks that her heart is going to burst. At pick up time, everyone stands around, waiting like a crowd at the airport. She’s not good at school gate small talk, so she is always a little off to the side. They’re all there, parents, dogs, younger siblings, grandparents, and nannies, stretching a neck to see if their child is coming. She can’t see him. And then he’s there and her heart bursts. He’s carried by the crowd and jostled towards her by the bodies on either side of him. He’s made smaller by a big bag and long shorts, but he’s there.

Max holds his hand out for more cheese. ‘No, mister. Have a bit of a play. We can have more later.’ His hand is still out. She tickles it and nods to the sandpit. Max gets down in the sandpit. Georgie packs his drink bottle back in her bag and fishes around for her phone. Max is at her feet on all fours again. ‘Woooof. Woof. Woof.’ He has his angry face on. Georgie giggles and looks back at her phone. He barks again. She looks around the playground. A few of the kids are watching. ‘Come on Maxxie. Let’s leave it for now.’ He sits on his haunches and holds his hands out. ‘Roooow. Rooow.’ His pleading puppy is perfect. His eyes are big, head cocked to the side, whine drawn out long and loud. Two kids walk over. They’re bigger than Max. Older. Probably brother and sister. They have the same thick dark hair and long faces. ‘Okay. Maybe some crackers.’ Georgie gets the snack box out of her bag but is too late. ‘Here, boy.’ The girl smiles at her brother who whistles and holds his hand out. Max turns around and pants with a tongue hanging out. He’s smiling and goes towards them. There’s usually a rush of relief when Max finds other kids to play with. He’s not generally part of the pack. Georgie sometimes worries that this precious child of hers isn’t a great fit with the modern world. He has a big heart and a wild imagination. He’s sensitive and dreamy and a total original. Kids sniff that and try to snuff it out. He’s told her that he sometimes spends lunch in the library. She hopes it’s because of his love of books rather than any lack of friends. Georgie doesn’t like the girl’s tone. She sits forward. Alert. Ready. She can’t control what happens in the school playground or the classroom. But every other moment, outside those gates, she can be his mother. Max follows the kids out of the sandpit on all fours. ‘What’s your name?’ The girl squats down next to him and strokes his head. ‘Max.’ ‘He’s even got a dog’s name,’ the boy says. The two kids giggle and Max joins them. Georgie is ready to pounce. ‘Want to play with us?’ ‘Yeah!’ Max jumps up and follows them as they run off towards the slide. They climb up the side, then take the stairs, then swing themselves up along railings before sliding down every time. They chase round and round and after each other in circles. The sister throws herself down the slide, head-first on her tummy, then head-first on her back. Max hovers at the top of the slide. He lies down head-first and then gets back into a normal position and pushes himself down. His shorts slow him to a stop and the other two pile up behind him. The brother pushes Max’s back with his feet. They all get moving again and end up in a tangled heap at the bottom of the slide. Georgie stands up to see. There aren’t any tears, just Max is rolling around and laughing. She sits back down again but still leans forward to see them past the bushes. They come back to the sandpit but settle in at the far end from Georgie. ‘I’m just getting my things.’ Max is breathless. ‘You’ve made some new friends?’ Georgie puts his hat on and offers him a sip of water. He takes a quick gulp and nods. Then he runs back to them with his sand toys. The sister takes the bucket.

The brother gets the spade and Max is left digging with a plastic crab. They build castles and knock them down, then run around the playground marking their territory. Max will sleep well tonight. On the weekends, Georgie has to plot in enough activities to tire Max out. It’s different with an only child. They won’t just run around a garden on their own. Or the park. Well, Max won’t. So, she makes sure they go to the pool or get on their bikes or scooter up to the shops to drop off their library books. She thought clock-watching was something only mothers with babies did but here she is having a quick look at the time and hoping this might last for another forty minutes. Mornings are what Georgie likes best. Max crawls into her bed with three soft toys. He lifts her arm to position himself just right. They often fall back to sleep, tucked tightly into each other. She gives him warmth and comfort and security and surely that goes some way to balance what she can’t give him. On bad days, when other people make themselves feel worse by thinking about what they haven’t done with their life or how ugly and unlovable they are, Georgie thinks about Max growing up. She thinks about lengthening limbs and a deepening voice. Her beautiful boy is replaced by an unrecognisable man, one who leans away from her hugs and kisses and doesn’t need a soft pat to fall asleep. She has nightmares about this stranger in her house, this man-son. And when she wakes from them, she feels dirty and distressed. Every few minutes, Georgie looks up. The kids never settle for long and there are five of them now. Two preschool girls have joined them. They run a few metres behind but catch up eventually and no one seems to care too much. They’re back at the slide where a few toddlers climb the steps carefully and hold up the line. The oldest girl pushes forward. Somebody falls over and one of the toddlers starts to cry. By the time the parent arrives, the big kids are long gone. It’s getting hotter now and the bench is losing its shade, so Georgie moves along. She scans the playground perimeter but can’t see Max. She stands up. Dread spreads through her. She’s suddenly cold. Max gone. On her watch. All her vigilance. All these years. All the precautions she’s taken, the way she’s lived with her body as a shield for him, all the decisions she’s taken on his behalf in the name of protection, all of that and he disappears while playing in a park. She grabs her bag. Panic and tears combine as she calls his name. ‘Max!’ She scans and stops. He’s crouched low behind a bush. He has a finger up to his lips and Georgie sees the oldest boy leaning into a tree and counting with his eyes closed. It’s gone. In the same instant that her life could have been taken, it is restored. She feels silly and looks down. She doesn’t want to know if other parents are looking. Someone else has taken her seat in the shade, so she ends up on one of the rocks. It’s not as comfortable but has a better view of the whole playground ‘Woof ! Woof !’ Max is on all fours again. He has a big puppy-dog smile and rubs against the knee of the older girl. One of the preschoolers hands over a stick. She throws and points to it. ‘Fetch. Go on. Fetch.’ ‘Fetch!’ the boy says. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

‘Fetch it. Fetch it.’ The girl starts a chorus and the preschoolers join in. Max happily crawls after it and comes back with the stick in his hand. He drops it at the feet of the older girl. ‘Good dog,’ she says. The older boy comes back with a packet of crackers. He holds it out to her sister. She takes one and pushes it in the direction of the preschoolers. They take one each. Max stands up too. ‘You have to beg for it,’ the girl says. Max gets back down and kneels with his hands held out in front of him. ‘No, like a dog. Paws.’ She holds her hands up curled like two paws. Max copies and tilts his head to the side. ‘Roooow,’ he says. ‘Good doggie.’ The girl gets down and scratches around his ears then holds the packet out to him. Georgie is gripping the edge of the rock. She’s about to go over but the kids are all standing again and Max is laughing and eating snacks with them, so she stays where she is. The girl disappears and comes back with a sarong. Georgie can’t hear them but Max is back on the ground. The preschoolers laugh while the older girl tucks the sarong into Max’s T-shirt. It’s rolled like a leash and she gives him a bit of a push to get him moving. ‘Enough!’ Georgie shouts it over the playground. She marches over to them. ‘We’re going. Max.’ Max stays where he is. Georgie pulls the sarong out from his T-shirt. ‘It’s time to go.’

‘We were just playing.’ The girl’s shifted stance is concave and full of attitude. Georgie throws the sarong at her and holds a hand out. ‘Now. Max, come now. We’re going.’ ‘I want to stay.’ Georgie bends down to pull him up. She can’t. He’s made himself heavy like a toddler. She used to grab for him, to pick him up mid-tantrum. But she couldn’t. He’d be loose-limbed and impossible to lift. ‘I’m playing with my friends.’ Georgie crouches down and takes a deep breath. She and Max are eye-to-eye. ‘Come on. Time to go.’ He doesn’t move. The other kids stand above her in a line. The oldest girl is right by Max. Her brother is next to her. The little ones fall in on the left. Georgie is in their shadow. She looks at her little boy. ‘Come on.’ ‘Stay Max,’ the girl says. She rests her hand on his head and he leans in to her leg. ‘Let’s go. Now.’ Georgie holds a hand out. Max springs forward and snarls at her. His canines look more like fangs and Georgie falls back in the sand. The kids laugh and she hears Max’s gulped giggle, louder than all of them. g Nina Cullen is a Newcastle-based writer. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in various Australian and international publications. She has just finished a collection of linked short stories and is working on a novel. ❖

Fiction

Nowhere places

Welcome contributions to queer fiction Jay Daniel Thompson

Marlo

by Jay Carmichael Scribe $24.99 pb, 150 pp

My Heart Is a Little Wild Thing by Nigel Featherstone

Ultimo Press $32.99 pb, 282 pp

t first glance, neither Marlo nor My Heart Is a Little Wild Thing seemed particularly appealing. Both focus on queer men pining for love in a homophobic world. Both appeared to recycle what Jay Carmichael (Marlo’s author) calls ‘the tradition of tragedy in queer literature’. Digging deeper, we find that the novels offer nuanced and even uplifting perspectives on gay male experience over the decades. There are moments of adversity, but it’s the resilience and emotional strength of the protagonists – their ability to find pleasure in even dire situations – that make both books so compelling. ‘Marlo’ is the name of the rural hamlet that young Christopher has just departed. He arrives in Melbourne during the 1950s, 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

having escaped the homophobia and gender stereotyping of his bucolic upbringing, only to confront prejudice everywhere in his new surrounds. By day, Christopher toils in a blokey mechanic’s garage. By night he seeks relief from a world ‘not intended for me’ by cruising the Botanic Gardens. This nocturnal wonderland offers a sexual and emotional release, even if that release is tinged with the constant threat of violence. One evening, Christopher meets Morgan, a charming Indigenous man. The pair fall in love and embark on a relationship that unfolds outside – but also in front of – the gaze of a society in which heterosexuality and whiteness are everywhere valorised. Marlo is bookended with snapshots of archival research. The novel opens with an excerpt from the Crimes Act 1949, which cautioned that any male found to commit an ‘act of gross indecency with another male person shall be guilty of a misdemeanour’ punishable by incarceration. The text concludes with a summary of the societal and legal sanctions that gay men faced during the twentieth century. These snapshots are useful inasmuch as they contextualise the events described throughout. Carmichael brings to life 1950s Australia with unnerving clarity. The language (including ‘bird’, a crude colloquialism for women) is straight out of the postwar era. The dizzy, drunken excitement of the ‘six o’clock swill’ and the starchy formality of social gatherings are palpable. Most impressively, Carmichael suggests the inability or reluctance of individuals to see stigmatised ways of being, even as these

play out in public spaces. Heterosexual couples stroll obliviously past cafés where gender- and sexually diverse patrons mingle. Male couples share bedrooms and lives, while their straight brethren do not (or will not) ask questions. As Christopher’s sister remarks: ‘Most people trust what they see is true. They don’t stop long enough to see what lies beneath.’ Of course, they choose not to see what is in front of them. Christopher and Morgan’s relationship is sketched with a touching tenderness, playing out as it does in shadows and sunshine, on trains, and in suburban homes. This is a relationship marked as taboo on two counts (interracial and homosexual); it’s also one that both men mostly refuse to be ashamed of. The reader is mercifully spared the ceaseless despair that is stock in trade for the ‘tragic gay’ genre (see Brokeback Mountain, to which Marlo is likened on the back cover).

mentions that his mother ‘did things to me’ as a young child, but this is not used to ‘explain’ the protagonist’s queerness or to demonise Meredith. That old, misogynist ‘blame the mother’ trope is refreshingly absent. The book’s strongest moments depict Patrick’s frequent visits to a nudist beach. This is a space where he can momentarily escape from pressing commitments and engage in sexual encounters with other men. These moments hum with tender eroticism. Featherstone mostly writes with clarity, though some passages are mired in cliché and earnestness. Patrick embarks on his ‘secret path of desire’ and discovers that ‘[t]here is no greater

y Heart Is a Little Wild Thing unfolds in New South Wales just prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. The book opens in dramatic fashion, with Patrick, the protagonist, declaring: ‘The day after I tried to kill my mother, I tossed some clothes … into my backpack, and left at dawn.’ The reader follows Patrick as he ventures to a childhood holiday home in the country, a ‘nowhere place’ where a simple and carefree existence seems achievable. While there, he falls in love with handsome and enigmatic musician Lewis and gradually embraces the homosexual desire long resisted. Patrick confesses with disarming frankness: ‘I’ve never really come out.’ In what follows, Patrick balances his desire for love and sexual pleasure with his caring responsibilities. His mother, Meredith, has emerged unscathed from the opening attack, though her health rapidly deteriorates through Alzheimer’s disease. Patrick’s love for Meredith is laced with anger and also an uncertainty about who she really is. Strolling around her house, he wonders: ‘What did I really know about the woman who lived here?’ My Heart Is a Little Wild Thing is a coming-out novel, albeit one with a significant difference. Most coming-out narratives focus on youthful protagonists, whereas Patrick is in his early fifties. His queerness is not so much a sudden revelation as a force that has bubbled silently in the background, occasionally acknowledged but seldom acted on. Further, Patrick’s loved ones are aware of his sexuality long before he discloses this to them. The opacity of the line between the seen and unseen is one characteristic that Nigel Featherstone’s novel shares with Marlo. Patrick’s description of homosexuality as a secret society might seem more suitable to 1950s Melbourne than contemporary Sydney, a gay mecca for decades. Yet this comparison, while melodramatic, is understandable given his long sexual silence. Patrick’s voyage of sexual discovery is nicely paralleled with his quest to learn more about his increasingly frail mother. Neither mission is straightforward; Featherstone avoids easy answers and simplistic psychologising. Patrick encounters anti-gay sentiments, including from Meredith, but these in themselves do not explain his long-standing unwillingness or inability to ‘come out’. He

Jay Carmichael (Scribe)

Nigel Featherstone (Ultimo Press)

power than love’. ‘What a dreadful state of affairs is love,’ we are told. Sex scenes are punctuated by dialogue that includes ‘I want you’ and ‘you’re divine’. Such passages are unintentionally amusing; others are cringeworthy. They detract from the novel’s sophistication and freshness. Marlo and My Heart Is a Little Wild Thing are welcome contributions to the field of Australian queer fiction. Both could so easily have devolved into maudlin misery-fests, but their authors’ eye for the complexities of sexuality and everyday life ensures that neither text meets this fate. g Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer and Program Manager in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

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ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Natural Wonder by Tracy Ellis

n the stillness, after the fireworks, I stood for a while at the window. The bay below was crammed with the pretty lights of marine craft and it looked as though you could step from one boat to another, all the way across the harbour. ‘Why don’t I do that?’ I thought, and stayed there for some time, plotting my passage across the decks and bows. The next day was New Year’s Day and I waited until quite late before taking the three kids down to a sheltered harbour beach. There was my son – Cosmo, aged eleven – and his cousins Ed, ten, and Elmo, nine. I watched as they swam, clambered over the rocks at one end and then the other, and marked out an imaginary ball game in the sand, miming moves and even arguing over the pretend rules and the pretend score. I had a headache and sat in the shade behind sunglasses watching a large white boat, just offshore, caught by a stubborn anchor. It throttled back and forth, motoring in circles. When the skipper left the cabin to peer over the side, the boat drifted towards the beach. He hurried back and the engine gurgled to life, but the boat floundered in circles again. A man towelling himself off after his swim tried to strike up a conversation with me. Perhaps he thought I was alone. He reminded me that the beach is called Shark Beach – a name no one likes to use. A net strung from wooden pylons encloses the swimming area. The kids don’t see their luck yet, spending summers like this. They don’t see privilege or ponder reasons. Maybe Ed, the older cousin does. I overheard him asking his father to explain the share market, and last night, with some solemnity, he asked me why time slows down when you travel into space and whether, if you went far enough and fast enough, it would be possible to go back in time. I’ve been pondering this myself ever since. I was thinking about it again while watching their imaginary ball game and missed the moment when the snagged boat cut loose its anchor. I looked up as it motored off, a clump of seaweed swinging from the chain on the bow. It pulsed over the wake of another boat and evaporated in the setting sun. I’m hoping the cousins will come to stay for a few days like this every school holidays, if I can work it out with their father and grandmother. I send a text a few weeks before the end of each school term: ‘Are the kids coming up?’ I know it’s not my problem and I shouldn’t take it on like a cause, but when they were smaller and I watched my son wrestle with them like cubs, I imagined all three were mine and felt a

32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

primal urge to protect them, even before anything happened. Elmo bumped his head yesterday. Crumpling in tears, he ran to be comforted. I was just out of the shower and he pressed his face into the towel around me and I held him, standing awkwardly in the hall. I was about to say, ‘There, there, you’ll be okay,’ and pull away, but thought I’d just hold him until he let go by himself. But he didn’t let go. ‘Have a lie down on my bed,’ I said, so I could at least get dressed. Then I stroked his hair and patted his back until his tears dried and he got up and went to play with his brother and cousin again. The older brother, Ed, lost a wiggly tooth on his first night here. He’s probably too old to believe in the tooth fairy, given he can grasp the theory of relativity, but I washed it and put it in a dish beside the bed and swapped it for a coin as he slept. I can never quite bring myself to throw away baby teeth so I put it in a little zip-lock bag – the tiny ones that drug dealers use. Not that I know any drug dealers. They say cocaine flows in the sewers around here. It makes a good story, but it’s not the only story. Some of us just don’t like to be too far from the sea. I forgot about the tooth in the zip-lock bag and opened my desk drawer in front of Ed the next day and he saw it. He said nothing. There was no accusation, no ‘you told me the tooth fairy took it’. At what age do children start protecting adults? Even lying for them? The boys don’t mention their mother. No one does, and it would be selfish of me to remind them just so I could comfort them. ‘Why don’t I do that?’ That’s what I thought when I heard. Not the first thought. First there was No. Followed by How – not how did she do it, but how could she. Now there is just Why. A question I don’t like to get too close to for fear of finding the answer. I first met her when she was pregnant with Ed. She was very beautiful, prettily tattooed, enigmatic. She still looked like a child herself. I was a new mother and out of my depth, clutching my baby, frozen with anxiety. She spoke very little, so I asked all the questions in an incessant, insecure prattle. When she moved back to the country, taking the kids with her, I didn’t ask or get involved. I tried not to speculate or gossip about the break up. Even her own mother refused to take sides: ‘There’s his story, her story and the truth,’ she said, with that country pragmatism. It can be refreshing when no one else is

talking and questions hang in the air like a fog. I called whenever we were passing through so that Cosmo could see his cousins. I have a photo of the last time. We met in the Memorial Gardens on a winter’s day. She was dressed in a long tweed coat with a black scarf, jeans and Converse sneakers, a vintage hand-tooled leather bag over her shoulder. There was no clue. The boys stayed for three days and on the last night it was stiflingly hot, so after dinner we went down to the harbour again to sit by the water. It was getting dark already, but they waded in the shallows and fenced on the sand with their toy lightsabers. They wanted to swim out to the pontoon but I said no. Cosmo says I take the fun out of everything, but I know they can’t resist a challenge and would dare each other to swim under it or dive down until they touched the slimy mud on the harbour floor – the same things I did at their age. I let them walk around the boardwalk instead. The tide was low, leaving a long drop to the harbour. Christmas king tides. There’s a railing on the harbour side, but not the pool side and I worried about Elmo – still not convinced he can swim properly. When I’d mentioned this to his father he looked bewildered. ‘Right,’ he said, considering the implications, like it was all a bit overwhelming for him, which it probably was. Cosmo’s lightsaber flashed on and off as he swung it around. When I couldn’t see them on the far side of the boardwalk, I could still track the red light flashing occasionally. Their three black shadows disappeared, then reappeared as a Manly ferry, that hardy maritime vessel, passed in the distance behind them, framing their silhouettes in the blocks of gold light from its warm interior. They slowly made their way the length of the horseshoe boardwalk. When they got to the ramp on the sand at the other end, Elmo ran, shouting, ‘I dropped my lightsaber!’ Elmo’s lightsaber was blue and didn’t light up like Cosmo’s. Its telescopic plastic tubes collapsed into a hollow handle and I imagined it had sunk straight to the bottom. ‘Did you drop it in the pool, or outside, in the harbour?’ I asked. ‘Outside!’ he said, his voice a husky baby-animal growl. ‘Mum gave it to him,’ said Ed. We walked across the beach back to the boardwalk. The sand was soft and starting to cool, the boards on the deck felt dry under foot and worn smooth. ‘There it is,’ said Cosmo, racing ahead. The four of us leant over the railing to see the toy, a plastic crucifix floating majestically, shimmying and swaying on the rippled mirror, halfway between us and a clinking moored yacht. I considered swimming out to get it, but the spectre of the man with the towel whispered ‘Shark Beach, Shark Beach’. I looked for an oar or for some movement, someone out there on the water to help. Up on the sand, under the Moreton Bay figs, there were a dozen dinghies and kayaks, all padlocked to the fence or to each other. Useless. We watched the toy drift further away and I told Elmo we’d come back and look for it in the morning. I explained there was a chance it would wash up on shore, if the tide came in and the southerly held off. It sounded like a hollow promise and I don’t think he believed me. But he accepted it like he was used to

hollow promises, to being kept in the dark. By dawn the next day, there’d been no change in the weather, not even a breeze, so I was hopeful. It was worth looking, at least. But first I had to pick up the boys’ grandmother from the station. I left them sleeping, flung across the sheets. She’d spent all night on the train to come and take them home. I lifted her small suitcase into the boot and we drove back through the still, almost deserted streets. It would have been a good time to ask her how she was, but I made small talk instead. I’d written to her when it happened but she’d never mentioned my letter. Only immediate family were allowed at the funeral. Her daughter’s friends had to pay their respects in a separate gathering in the park. If she’d died any other way it would have been a public tragedy, not a private one. The boys greeted their grandmother with hugs. I turned the portable fan up high, plumped the pillows on the couch and made her a cup of tea, then said to Elmo, ‘Shall we go see if we can find your lightsaber?’ The sun was high now. It was searingly hot and the beach was crowded. We walked the length of the boardwalk and scoured the water’s edge back on shore. Elmo’s small feet stamped perfect footprints into the sand ahead. When he stopped to look back and make sure I was still there, I glimpsed his mother’s face under the peak of his cap, with its splash of freckles and thick black eyelashes. We walked all the way to where the sand ended in oystercovered rocks at the foot of the sea wall, and searched the crevices and shallows until the beating sun wore us down and it was hard to find an excuse to continue. I’d kept my promise to him, and I could see he’d accepted his loss, so we made our way back. As soon as we stopped looking it appeared. We were climbing the concrete stairs to the carpark. I glanced to the right and there it was, lying on the grass, found and then discarded by another child. ‘Elmo,’ I said, ‘Is that it?’ His eyes widened. I hardly believed it myself. Only the tide can bring things back. It was clogged with sand and grit but once we were back home I flushed it under the tap in the bath, as if it were Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake had risen in a halo of phosphorescence from the dark harbour to return it. When the moving parts worked again, I collapsed it down and packed it into his suitcase. In the lounge room, I heard Ed asking his grandmother the same question he’d asked me about space travel and whether you could go back in time. ‘Well it’s natural to wonder about these things,’ she said, ‘But even if you could go back, I don’t know if you could change anything.’ It was just Cosmo and I again that evening and it was quiet. When he’d gone to sleep I turned off the lights in the lounge room and stood at the window. The boats had all gone from the bay. There was no twinkling raft left to cross. g Tracy Ellis lives in Sydney and works as an editor in digital and print media. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from UTS and was previously longlisted for ABR’s Calibre Essay Prize. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Fiction

The face of the deep

A pilgrimage to the border of oblivion Morgan Nunan

Basin: A novel

by Scott McCulloch

Black Inc. $24.99 pb, 186 pp

n the surface, Scott McCulloch’s début novel, Basin, takes place in a brutal and degenerated landscape; the edge of a former empire in a state of violent flux. Rebels, separatists, terrorists, paramilitary groups, and the remnants of imperial forces clash over borders and interzones in the wake of the ‘Collapse’, an undefined geopolitical and ecological disaster. Print and broadcast media warn of inter-ethnic conflict and Rebel advances. Bazaars, brothels, and a chain of Poseidon Hotels all operate amid industrial waste and military checkpoints, servicing the region’s fishermen, soldiers, smugglers, and drifters. There is a multiplicity of language and religion (Abrahamic denominations mingle with archaic, pagan beliefs). Alcohol consumption and illicit drug use are rife. The climate is oppressively humid. Enter Figure, McCulloch’s mysterious anti-hero and narrator (named only in the blurb and in the title of the first act), a perpetual exile and nomad; a drug-fuelled ‘tramp’ and public masturbator. For Figure, the war remains ‘illusory’. He is indifferent and dissociated; uncertain of even basic details of the sociocultural context. Early on, he can’t identify a military flag ubiquitous enough to be printed on stickers and towels. Later, he is unsure if the war extends to the Other Isle (he learns fairly quickly that it does). Even after the conflict erupts and surges, forcing him to flee and ramble through a ‘criss-cross’ of seas and rivers, cedar forests and wild steppes (‘[as] a ghost who’s wandered into the odyssey of a lunatic’), Figure maintains a stubborn estrangement. Part of this is due to his ongoing recovery from a suicide attempt (at the beginning of the book, poisoned and almost drowned, Figure is pulled from the water by a ‘wayward seer’: the deranged paramilitary soldier Aslan). His chronic substance abuse also renders him an inherently unreliable and hallucinatory narrator. There are traces, too, of the sentiment in Theo Angelopoulos’s film Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) (a similarly elliptical road narrative through the war-torn Balkans), when a journalist paradoxically exclaims: ‘What are you looking for? Signs of war? You won’t find any. The war’s so close that it might as well be far away.’ As Basin progresses, a deep, primal ‘amnesia’ shrouds the purgatorial landscape. McCulloch employs a three-act structure for his protagonist’s wandering journey. Figure drinks with fishermen and shepherds, partakes in fleeting sexual liaisons, witnesses violence and displacement, and benefits from a surprising amount of hospitality. As he covers three broadly distinct regions (by foot, boat, truck, 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

car, and tractor), he oscillates between existential confusion and a yearning for a vague catharsis, with tantalising yet elusive hints at his forgotten past. The topography of the novel is loosely based on the northeast coastline of the Black Sea and its immediate interior, the southern edge of the Pontic–Caspian steppe (McCulloch has been based between Ukraine and the Caucasus since 2014). While some readers might be tempted to search for references to the region’s recent (and continuing) tumult (the Sukhumi massacre is one likely influence for the major event in the first act), McCulloch undermines parallels to the modern world with the use of fictional or alternative place names and other geographical and historical abstractions (there are eucalypts and cities from antiquity; surrealistic flights). It is a text irreducible to political or historical allegory. Like Xenophon’s march between the poles of the Aegean and Black Seas, each of the novel’s acts establishes a pattern of anabasis and katabasis; a movement away, then an inevitable return to water. This use of water as the guiding motif is important in the context of a largely plotless narrative, where encounters with minor characters can have shades of the scripted sequences of adventure video games; where the war and its reverberations often act as a McGuffin designed only to propel Figure’s passage from one village to the next. McCulloch’s bold faith in imagery as the connective tissue of the narrative proves to be a great strength. In obsessively paratactic and incantatory prose, Basin inundates the reader with potent, mesmeric imagery. Echoes of history, mythology, theology, and avant-garde literature and cinema combine in a dogged portrayal of the abject, grotesque, and taboo; collapsing boundaries between past and present, external and internal realities; between bodily and earthly, human and animal. The corporeal writing of Pierre Guyotat and the post-apocalyptic pilgrimage in Konstantin Lopushansky’s film, A Visitor to a Museum (1989), are important precursors that haunt these images. From the outset (the book begins at chapter ‘0’), McCulloch initiates a dialogue with the primordial abyss, the ‘nudity of Creation’. The swirling mosaic of mythemes on fertility, origins, pilgrimage, flood, and the underworld continues the book’s emphasis on the fluidity of space. The region’s borders and power dynamics arbitrarily shift (fishermen and smugglers haul stock ‘for when the Guard changes again, for when they once again wake up in another new country’). Figure’s Dionysian-like rebirth sees his bodily excretions (his sweat, blood, bile, sperm, and shedding, psoriatic skin) merge and ‘blend’ with the landscape. The first-person, present-tense narration incorporates a ghostly ventriloquism, a disembodied voice which asks early in the book: ‘How many people are we at once?’ The result is a compelling exploration of the nature of creation: the formation of geographical and geopolitical borders; the birth (or rebirth) of the self and its psychological sites; the composition of a work of art. Basin is a searching, cerebral journey that foregrounds the corporeal in a polyphonic, multilayered text. With a compulsive regard for myth and metaphysics, the novel successfully emerges from the primeval waters of oblivion. g Morgan Nunan is a writer based in Adelaide.

Fiction

Raising the hat Alice Nelson’s third novel Nicole Abadee

Faithless

by Alice Nelson

Vintage $32.99 pb, 312 pp

aithless is the third novel by West Australian writer Alice Nelson. Her first, The Lost Sky (2008), saw her named Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and her second, The Children’s House (2018), attracted widespread critical acclaim. All three explore themes of trauma, displacement, memory, and love. Nelson, many of whose family migrated here from Europe, once pondered in a 2019 interview with Brenda Walker at the Centre for Stories whether writers write to ‘heal some kind of loss’ and whether for her ‘it began with that sense of loss of homeland, loss of culture and country that ran through my family’. At the heart of Faithless, set in England, India, and France, is the passionate affair between Cressida, a writer and translator, and her married lover, Max, a renowned German-born writer. The novel is written in the first person and addressed to Max. When it opens, Cressida has just learnt of Max’s recent death and has fled to his hometown of Dunwich in Suffolk with sevenyear-old Flora, whose relationship to her is unclear. Max and Cressida had met almost twenty years before, when Max was a guest at her mother’s hotel in Rajakkad, India. Familiar with Max’s writing, she was twenty and studying Classics at Cambridge; Max was thirty-six and at ‘the beginning of his literary fame’. Their connection was instantaneous and highly cerebral – they discussed poetry, translation, and her desire to be a writer. Before long they commence an all-consuming relationship that will last until his death. Nelson’s portrayal of their relationship, founded on fierce mutual desire and intellectual attraction, is as compelling as it is convincing. Obsessed with each other, they frequently communicate via poetry and literary allusions, which form a ‘secret language’ between them. To Cressida it feels ‘As if our being together were not choice at all, but fate.’ Yet despite the joy it brings her, their relationship is, from her perspective (we do not see Max’s), also ‘a welter of pain and pathos and jealousy and yearning’ as she is forced, albeit willingly, into the role of mistress, or ‘shadow bride’. As his literary star rises he does not want them to be seen together publicly, he won’t endorse her writing (despite his high opinion of it) or acknowledge her in his own, despite the significant role she plays as his first reader. Cressida, achingly conscious that he does not belong to her, tortures herself by imagining his life of ‘domestic harmony’ with his wife. She clearly pays the higher price for their clandestine love affair, but

her obsession with him is such that she accepts this. Max is a fascinating, complex character through whom Nelson develops the themes of intergenerational trauma and exile. Born in 1944, he grows up in an unhappy home. No one, in his family or the outside world, speaks about what happened during the war. Deeply ashamed of this ‘willed amnesia’, he flees to England where he builds a career writing about Germany’s traumatic past, how ‘we never escape the injuries done to us by history’ and ‘inherited guilt’. Cressida reasons at one point that ‘marrying Clara [who has her own traumatic war history] was your form of reparation, of atonement, for all that shame you carried on behalf of your countrymen’.

At the heart of Faithless is the passionate affair between Cressida and Max Many of the characters in Faithless, including Max, are in self-imposed exile. His rootlessness is something else he has in common with Cressida, who feels at home neither in England where she was born, nor in India where she grew up. He quotes Goethe to her, saying he is ‘everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home’. Cressida’s mother, the beautiful Amandine, is in double exile – she left France to be with her married lover in London, then, at his behest, swapped London for India. One other theme that Nelson returns to is that of taking responsibility for another person’s child, a central concern of The Children’s House. Max is clearly attached to Clara, but even more to her daughter Ellen, whom he has co-parented from a young age. His desire to protect them at all costs is one factor that prevents him from leaving the marriage. Cressida, too, becomes the carer for Flora, a child who is not her own, but whom she loves fiercely: ‘Flora is not my blood, not my responsibility. And yet there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Faithless is a superb literary achievement that firmly places Nelson among Australia’s leading contemporary writers. The beauty of her language, the sophistication of her ideas, and her skilful interweaving of plot, character, and meaning set this book apart, and it deserves critical acclaim and to reach a wide audience. I have one fairly minor quibble. In her acknowledgments, Nelson refers to German writer W.G. Sebald, who once wrote that he tried in his own work to ‘raise his hat’ to his literary heroes. Nelson writes that, ‘in the same spirit, some of the lines spoken by Max in the novel are taken from Sebald’s own work … Faithless, however, is a work of invention; though one in which I have raised my own hat to Sebald.’ In fact, there are striking biographical similarities between Max and W.G. Sebald (although the affair between Max and Cressida is not one of them) and between Max’s work and his. (Sebald, of course, also went by the name Max.) Perhaps a more fulsome acknowledgment of the degree to which Nelson is paying homage to Sebald’s life and work might have been appropriate for the benefit of those unfamiliar with them. g Nicole Abadee writes about books and other things for Good Weekend. She appears regularly at writers’ festivals as a facilitator, and has a books podcast, Books, Books, Books. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Whale Fall by C.J. Garrow

video in the museum foyer chronicles the dismantling of a rotting whale that had beached itself on a nearby coast. The machinery hauling away its distended remains and the workers standing knee-deep in the guts of the creature arrest my attention; for the longest time I thought the death of a whale one of the saddest things imaginable. My teacher, Mr Maurice, schooled me otherwise. What’s worse than death is death without purpose. Most whales don’t die on sand but in open water. As the carcass descends, sharks savage its soft hide and spill a fecund chaos that will nourish sea creatures for a century. This harassment was Mr Maurice’s lesson. For months the mobile scavengers gorge themselves on this flesh with the relish of a child who has happened upon a forbidden idea, thinking themselves the first in history to have encountered such an abundant resource, even countenancing the possibility that this might see them right for life (the shark) or make the older boys laugh (me), neither of us realising that as we tear chunks from the descending whale we send tiny, scuffed, and unhonoured remnants travelling ever upward, nourishing strata we will never meet – plankton and other forms of ocean lint – while the slurry of nutrients cascading towards the ocean floor equally invites creatures to burrow into whale marrow and flesh, and, we’re not done yet, grinned Mr Maurice, at the same time bacteria feast on the viscera and in turn vomit up hundreds of years of dinner for clams and snails, the meals kept refrigerated by the plummeting temperatures – like the Titanic, those that fall into deep waters are doomed to preservation, he said – and so as generations of land-dwellers rise and crumble, this single whale slowly passes through the ocean’s twilit realms towards the midnight zones, where frankly obscene bottom-feeders who have never seen light will still suck sustenance from the sinking hulk; it justifies a death. Mine was a small school for boys of shallow prospects. The buildings were in a state of protracted collapse, rendered invisible to the outside world by the many evergreens in whose shadows they cowered. The branches hiding the sagging tiles kept the grounds in a perpetual dusk so that, even at the height of summer, the earth remained damp underfoot and the air was bereft of the sunny screams of cicadas looking to mate. Whether due to their own diminished fortunes or a more pragmatic impulse not to foster disappointment, the teachers of the school had developed subtle, ongoing methods by which to 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

discourage their students from gazing too long at the horizon. A particular set of the mouth or slow slump were enough to rein in our enthusiasms, bridle our glee. The nasal whistle of a sigh could cut across a classroom as sharply as whipped leather. Mr Maurice was the exception. He strode the yard with the swagger of a seagull on a concourse, his grey eyes forever ensnared by some distant phantom invisible to the rest of us. This seeming state of distraction was misleading. He remained attuned to his environment, as though his true apprehension of the world was through sound, or even scent. He commanded a general schoolyard respect that caused other teachers to bristle, their envy further compounded by the self-disgust familiar to any adult who seeks validation from children. But Mr Maurice was liked by all of us, even the older boys. We knew what the older boys wanted because knowing that is everyone’s full-time job. You had to stay alert to their intentions or you might find yourself press-ganged into some horror show, often involving the various humiliations of Bernard Tusk – his toilet-dunking, de-underwearing, eyebrow-shaving – on account of how Bernard Tusk’s pale and soft features and general BO collaborated against him. Tristan was the first to tell the older boys about Bernard’s stink; we watched them descend like raptors. What came next was normal. To be expected, you could say, though nobody ever said so out loud. Not in my experience, which is limited or was limited when into my view first lurched the chalky frame of Bernard Tusk, who wore his quivering smile like a warding spell, so that it was immediately obvious that he had been routinely belittled. His arrival was accompanied by all kinds of rumours – his account of both the country and the condition in which he was raised varied according to which kid you asked, which cemented an attitude of mistrust among the older boys, who were forever seeking wall cracks and chinked armour. We laughed when they made jokes, not because we got the joke – and if you did it was rarely funny-funny – but because we had learned to recognise the shape of the jokes they told, in which everyone played their role, so that even the least among us had some importance. They – the older boys – would get pretend-angry if we didn’t laugh. Not that they were upset. It was just another aspect of the ritual. We never understood why someone would want to pretend to be angry, but the older boys were big into that. They’d flex abruptly, about to smash you, but you knew it was merely performance or lesson. We didn’t blame

them for their brutality. They were siege engines, for sure, but propelled by someone else’s grievances. On YouTube we once saw a group of older boys smashing chairs on each other’s backs? We had teachers who lectured us about ocean breathing and we liked Cosmic Kids Yoga, but our thoughts always returned to the boys bashing and breaking those beige plastic seats across their friends’ spines. To some of us, the video felt like porn – the boys were shirtless and there was swearing – but they were doughy and pale, like Bernard, whereas both the fighters and porn stars we were used to ingesting were tanned and brawny. Mostly it felt like a coded message from the future. I am a boy, it must also be said, and older now, which is important. I know that a person can be permanently extinguished. I should have paid better attention to Bernard Tusk and the circumstances of his extinction. No clothing suited him. His bones were coathangers at best. His lanky gait, all shoulders and elbows, I knew would attract attention. Got dressed in the dark? An older boy would gesture at the too-large shorts held like bunched curtains by a strip of vinyl, or the shirt whose not-quite-right hue gave away its thrift shop provenance. The boy would poke Bernard’s ribs, hard, after a colleague had dropped to all fours behind the poor victim’s knees. Both would end up caked with the rich humus that carpeted the yard, but the humiliation only stuck to Tusk. I should note that we weren’t exactly afraid of the older boys or afraid that we might suffer Tusk’s fate; fear implies a knowledge we simply didn’t possess. I’d never felt real fear, or couldn’t remember having done so. This I can say, then: I’d never felt the kind of fear you can’t forget. I’d been scared a few times, but that amounted to loose change, nothing that would buy you couch time as an adult. While it stood to reason that I might die, on a conceptual level, it seemed at the same level of probability as time travel, which was also worth pondering. We just weren’t afraid of anything as trivial as death, I suppose. I’d seen two goldfish ascend and I’d scratched my itchy grey-suited bum while Grandpa Jay’s coffin trundled down the conveyor belt. But nobody important vanished from our lives for good. Real people went missing all the time, like how Lincoln from Prep B moved to Toowoomba for a bit or how my best friend Jenna from kinder moved to New Zealand because her dad was rich from technology and New Zealand was the safest place to build a hole in the ground, like in the Hobbit movies, except this was in case of the end of the world. We did a Facetime where she was in a kayak. Nobody really went away forever is what I’m saying. There is a form of psychic annihilation, though, that feeds those around it. One carcass can provide sustenance for all kinds of beings. Like most of us, Bernard Tusk sought the secret signs and gestures that would render him cool; none of us were burdened by the horrible understanding that coolness shared similarities to equally nebulous concepts such as honour or grace, in that other people decide whether or not you have it. Bernard’s efforts to affect a casual nonchalance had been doomed from the moment the older boys had marked him out as deeply uncool – contagiously uncool – a verdict that brought with it that other quality decided not by an individual but a community, which is shame.

He should have seen where things were headed, with his thin shoulders and all that leaky kindness. Once the demonisation of Bernard Tusk had spread beyond isolated instances of name-calling and private torture – once species other than the dreaded older boys had begun darting in to tear off shreds of their own – a near-permanent transformation could be observed in his body. He would walk the halls pre-flushed, red-faced before anyone had yet had a chance to remind him of the slow social dismemberment he was experiencing. Bernard’s crimson tint galvanised us as a community. Petty differences persisted, but the perpetual sundown that blushed his cheeks gave us all something to pity and revile. I remember clambering up into the peppercorn tree one musty afternoon and spotting the tiny, comma-like figure crossing the parched soccer oval, trailing what seemed like the entire student body, like dust rising behind a far-off desert vehicle. We should categorically rule out any personal failing on Bernard’s part when it came to his distinctive odour. During his mother’s childhood the punishment of choice had involved shoving the fully clothed offender under a cold shower, instilling a lifelong aversion to bathrooms; his father, meanwhile, felt the smell of human sweat was evidence of a day fully lived. Bernard had no idea that he was a type, a dirty kid, until a well-meaning teacher directed him home before classes even began with a letter to his parents instructing them to bathe him before his return. Though Tristan was the direct instigator, how the older boys caught wind of this deviation from the day’s routine was beside the point. The predation would have occurred regardless; only its object was determined in this moment. Older boys were merely the most visible flesh-eaters in a complex ecology of interdependence and symbiosis whose digestive processes could take years, even decades to fully play out. It might seem as though all of this is injustice of the highest order, because you have been blessed with the moral sense to recognise such inhumanity. But perhaps you are no more responsible for your ethical uprightness than is a shark for its endlessly regrowing teeth. It is terribly well suited to its environment, this eating machine, but I don’t assume it had much choice in the matter. You may not be the architect of your own finely tuned sense of right and wrong, either, in which case your moral luck, as it were, is equalled by the moral luck of the older boys, who were simply born into different circumstances. We can only hope this is not the case. I don’t blame the older boys for the blow that ultimately penetrated Tusk’s heart, any more than I blame myself. In a gloomy, locker-lined corridor the older boys had formed a tight ring with Tusk and myself thrust into its centre. With shoves and kicks they howled at us to fight one another, warning of what would come if we failed to comply. I had never thrown a punch in my life – had no desire to – but it was plain to see that Bernard Tusk was even more harrowed by the prospect. He was emitting a noise, no words, his voice a fierce alarm growing higher and higher, like a melody that could ascend forever. It strikes me now that being the object of assault was something he could weather, but being forced to inflict suffering on another was a kind of moral injury; a bruising of the soul itself. Instead of raining fists on each other, I called Tusk an idiot. He replied that I was the idiot, and AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

I reached for the nearest retort, hardly thinking. Some words lodge themselves in your brain like parasites. Even the most popular of us had been called something. We’d been gross, fat, stupid, weird. Those leeches will still be feeding years on, though it’s possible to tear the bloodsuckers out with enough effort. You try to think of another way of thinking, and sometimes discover there’s a modicum of pride available in slurs. Some people are disgusting on purpose. Thicc and chonky got hot. Acting stupid can be a career move and weird people are only weird because they love something a lot, which they know is better than the alternative. As I threw my insult at Tusk, his eyebrows twisted not in horror but in comprehension, lightning striking the ocean. Oh!, those eyebrows announced. I am ugly! Say it out loud: even the word feels ugly in your mouth. Of course, nobody could ever seriously accuse Bernard Tusk of being ugly. The creaturely innocence of his blinking gaze and the thinness of his hide lent him a natural prettiness. But Tusk now understood his place in a system, and the reason for his torment. He was wrong about his ugliness, but it afforded him a lever with which to pry open the entire complex machine of which he was merely one component. It was the day of the sports carnival. Parents were screaming. Hats and sunscreen and even umbrellas were stuffed into backpacks, teachers interrogated about waterbottle refill zones and we gathered it was going to be a scorcher. Many of us heard the word heatstroke for the first time. It was noted. With his long lashes and his kindness, we figured Bernard Tusk was not prepared for sports day. We had all been hardened by the quiet fears engendered by older boys, the way soft ferns left in corners accrue a stiff dust. That day, however, we were all rattled by the sight of Bernard Tusk as he took off running. No events had begun, no starter gun fired, yet he was sprinting as those chased by demons. He raced around the track past children barely out of nappies and older boys who could break him over their knee. His gait was as awkward and ungainly as ever, but for the first time it persisted. Teachers tutted and eventually yelled. Lit further aflame by his exertions, he evaded their grasp, panting in his protests. From the bleachers this pantomime left the entire school in hysterics. Mrs De Souza’s sandals threw up tiny mushroom clouds as she stormed across the long jump sand and tried to catch hold of Bernard’s passing elbow. He wove away at the last minute and the waiting athletes hooted. He just kept running, was the thing. Past triple jump and relay. Hatless and bare-limbed, his sad shape clowned out for what seemed like hours. Teachers swore in our vicinity. Nobody could withstand the day’s rays for so long. The comedy grew stale. His skin took on the sheen of grilled meat. Still he fled, cavorting for the stand’s approval. I ran to Mr Maurice. As sports teacher, he felt the most responsible here. What’s doing, jabroni? he asked. I was too winded to speak at first but pointed at the pink demon reeling across the landscape. The grey eyes took in the faraway scene. He inhaled. Bernard Tusk isn’t doing himself any favours, he said. His 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

fingers plucked scroggin from his bum bag. But you’re not doing yourselves any favours either. I licked salt from my lips. Some of you older boys want to be getting in there, teach him what’s what. Doesn’t look good for any of us, this kind of thing. Teachers at other schools will be roasting me for years to come. When the day ended Tusk had been so burned by the sun, so deliberately scorched, that we marvelled as he pulled strips of skin from his arms and neck and dangled them in our faces. He was so violently red we felt sick from it, enriched by it. I want to note that I ran into Bernard Tusk a few years ago. The zebra crossing was slick with rain and as my feet skidded I looked up from my phone, panicked, only to find strong hands catching me from behind and preventing my fall. Before I could apologise the grown Bernard Tusk, now bear-like in aspect, simply lumbered off into the downpour. Or I could report the time we met eyes along a bar, two clapped-out souls waiting for someone’s attention, both aware we were too old and looked too poorly to command it. We exchanged an understanding. Those days were behind us. If we run into each other now, we just ... pretend? one of us signalled. That none of it happened? I’d respect that, the other would nod. Or I could tell you of the news report about Bernard Tusk the international peacekeeper, airlifting aid to beleaguered lands; or Bernard Tusk the biologist, whose sacrifices saved untold lives; or even Bernard Tusk the lottery winner, fortune finally throwing him a bone. I want to say any of this happened, but the brutal demands of daily life prevent that kind of lie, and I am afraid of becoming an older boy. The only reason I’ve thought of him in the last however many years is that I noticed on social media that his funeral was being livestreamed. He’d died in a foreign war. I was tempted to log in but don’t need to know more about what remains, or who would turn up to the event, or what last nourishment was left for them. For all I know Bernard Tusk remains skinless, pecked at. I slide that day back into its drawer. I did run into Mr Maurice, however. Arriving at the museum I hurried past the video of the whale only to collide with my former teacher. Though his face had been ravaged by the years, I instantly recognised the grey eyes I had torn from the screen. Over the succeeding awkward minutes we ricocheted across various moments, none shared. My mind went to Bernard Tusk, whose recent death had hit me like a rail spike. Mr Maurice confessed that the name didn’t ring a bell. The sports carnival? I said. He blinked patiently and listened to my description of that day with a faint smile. No recollection, he said. We had a boy like that in my year, though. In my experience every school has one. What a clown act. Good for a laugh, those sorts. Bernard got all blown up, I stammered. He shook his head. I’ll bet you this Trusk character landed on his feet, he said. Survive school and you can survive anything. His eyes were distant but his teeth were bare. g C.J. Garrow is a Melbourne writer whose fiction has been shortlisted for various international prizes and his story ‘Egg Timer’ was shortlisted in the 2020 Jolley Prize.

Fiction

Loneliness in the lazaret Fiction that is a shade too careful Penny Russell

The Coast

by Eleanor Limprecht

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 334 pp

child of nine is taken to Sydney for the first time to visit her mother, a patient at the Coast Hospital lazaret. Upon arrival, she learns that she, like her mother, has leprosy. Her fate is fixed from that day; she will live the remainder of her life in the lazaret. She takes the new name of ‘Alice’ to hide her former self, and the world closes in upon her. There will be no more school, no playing with her younger brothers and sisters, no friends of her own age, no prospect of romance, no hope of freedom. Only the sea, the protected bay, and the wild, beautiful coast let her know she is alive. Bathing in stinging salt water, picnicking on the sandy shore, or taking a boat out in quest of fish or adventure might almost feel like freedom, were it not for the confinement and repetitive monotony, the bodily decay of leprosy, and the lurking presence of death. Alice’s mother finds refuge from loneliness in sensual pleasure – the company of men, the consolations of grog. Mother and daughter confront the emotional complexities of their relationship under the benevolent gaze of the doctor, Will Stenger, who fights for his patients while battling his own demons of isolation and loss. The arrival at the hospital of Jack, a Yuwaalaraay man known in the lazaret as Guy, briefly transforms Alice’s world. With its plot weaving across several decades, from the 1890s to the 1920s, The Coast is a meticulously researched historical novel. Eleanor Limprecht sketches striking images of crowded Sydney streets, the exigencies of rural poverty, the discomforts and indignities of transport, the menacing presence of prejudice and fear. She is informative on medical and surgical treatments of leprosy, conditions in the Coast Hospital, the arrangement of the lazarets, the entertainments and living conditions of the lifelong inmates. Through Jack’s storyline, she brings in contrasting conditions in other leprosaria, such as Queensland’s Peel Island, describing in shocking detail the racially discriminatory treatment of Aboriginal patients. It is impossible not to sympathise with the dreams, fears, and frustrations of the four main characters, caught as they are in strangling webs of indifferent bureaucracy. At the same time, I remained oddly detached from their suffering. Perhaps the very plethora of historical detail forestalls an emotional response. It is just a shade too careful, making us aware of an observing authorial presence that hovers above the action and outside the minds of the characters, noticing and duly reporting on the material and

social peculiarities of the world they inhabit. Those characters themselves are curiously ineffectual, often appearing more as victims than products, let alone agents, of their historical world. The drama of the plot is not generated by tension between individuals but rather unfolds inexorably from the miserable conditions of the past in which they find themselves, with all its prejudices, hypocrisies, and fears. It is a past in which they do not quite seem to belong. Against her beautifully crafted historical background, Limprecht sets four main characters whose embodied experience is credibly of their time, but whose views and values are sometimes jarringly anachronistic. It is hard, for example, to think where and how a doctor trained around 1900 could have acquired the attitudes to race, gender, class, or sexuality that Will Stenger holds. His views on leprosy, contagion, and the policy of isolation have certainly been borrowed from a real doctor from the period, E.H. Molesworth. But when Molesworth waxed eloquent on the cruelty of isolating leprosy patients from the world, his sympathies were strictly qualified. Isolation was unnecessary for those of European race, he insisted, for they had greater resistance to the disease than ‘native’ and ‘coloured’ races. To be confined for life in the company of those more susceptible races was, in his view, a particularly cruel punishment for white Australians. Limprecht selectively borrows Molesworth’s words, massaging them to fit a character who will not offend her readers: Stenger unites his progressive medical opinions with enlightened and respectful views on race. I wished that Limprecht had peopled her historical world with characters whose sensibility was more recognisably a product of it, who shared its moral values and failings, but who nevertheless engaged our interest, even our reluctant sympathies. Instead, she invites our sympathy for characters who, though born in the twenty-first century, seem to have been tossed by bitter circumstance and a malicious author onto the stormy waves of a world that is not their own. As the narrative shifts from one point of view to another, and back and forth through time, sympathy is demanded for each of the major characters in turn. We do not linger long with Alice’s horror at being thrust without warning into lifelong confinement, but move swiftly on to her mother’s own story of betrayal and disappointment. By the time we return to Alice, some chapters later, she is already partly resigned to her lot. There is tragedy and real feeling in the account of Jack’s removal from his family at the age of five; but some of his later experiences seem compressed, hurried, and thus muted in impact. Time sweeps over the characters while our emotions are demanded elsewhere. The multiple perspectives allow Limprecht to present a broad tapestry of historical experience, and a rich portrait of lives caught and held in fleeting, fragile connection. Greater complexity comes, however, at the cost of diffusing emotional intensity. The trade-off may indeed be intentional. If we stayed always in Alice’s head, locked in her diminishing world of doomed hopes and only gradually, with her, coming to understand the separate burdens carried by the other main characters, this would be a story of almost unbearable poignancy. I wondered at times whether Limprecht was shielding herself as much as her readers from an excess of pain. Together we dip a toe into a sea of anguish, and hastily retreat. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Literary Studies

The Ulysses century

Reflecting on James Joyce’s work a hundred years on Gary Pearce

Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland

by John McCourt Bloomsbury Academic $130 hb, 304 pp

One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses

edited by Colm Tóibín Pennsylvania State University Press, US$45 hb, 184 pp

ames Joyce’s Ulysses was published 100 years ago by American Sylvia Beach, who ran a Parisian bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. The early history of the work was marked by controversy and censorship. The centenary is being marked by numerous publications in celebration of the work by writers, academic Joyceans, and even the odd Irish ambassador. John McCourt’s Consuming Joyce: 100 years of Ulysses in Ireland traces the reception of Ulysses in Ireland. As much a book about Ireland as it is about Ulysses, it follows the critical, institutional, and popular reception/consumption of the work through the different phases of Irish history. The centenary also sees the publication of One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, edited by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. This work is lavishly illustrated and coincides with an exhibition by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. It focuses on the circumstances of the book’s writing, the different forms of its publication, the censorship trials, and the manuscript legacy in various library collections. When Joyce moved from Ireland into European exile in 1904, he burnt his bridges by employing an ‘unsparing realism’ in his early writing targeted at Ireland’s paralysis and isolation. Ezra Pound’s depiction of Joyce as shedding his Irish background to become an international writer would shape many subsequent interpretations. More recently, there has been recognition of the determining influence that Ireland had on Joyce’s work. McCourt examines the background to this shift by delving into the Irish archive and tracing a line of response to Ulysses that emphasised the Irish Joyce. He recognises that this was a minority response to a work that, more typically, was regarded with hostility or indifference. Ulysses was written during a period of national and political ferment and was published in 1922, the same year as the founding of the Irish Free State. Those turbulent times meant there was little mood for indulging critical voices. The hostile response was focused on the book’s treatment of a Catholic Church that was aligning itself with the new Irish state. Critics such as Mary and Padraic Colum, however, understood the importance of Irishness and Catholicism to Joyce’s own world view. McCourt situates him among an emergent generation of Catholics destined to take leadership positions in the new Irish nation. McCourt’s prodigious research ranges across reviews and other published responses; government attitudes; book consumption; tourism activity; and the response of writers, academics, and 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

intellectuals. The emphasis on cultural and economic self-sufficiency under Éamon de Valera’s government in the 1930s allowed little place for exiles like Joyce. McCourt is particularly interesting when he documents the response to Ulysses by dissident nationalists who saw in Joyce an alternative vision beyond the conformity and parochialism of the new state. This was a period of growing censorship. While Ulysses wasn’t banned in Ireland, it was regarded as contraband. Meanwhile, Joyce’s growing international reputation placed him on the cover of Time magazine. Writers’ responses tended to be more complicated; early admirers such as Seán Ó Faoláin and Frank O’Connor became alienated when the excerpts of Finnegans Wake were published in different literary periodicals. Nevertheless, young Joyceans like Brian Coffey and Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien) were inclined to question censorship and the nationalist status quo. The other important strain that McCourt examines is the tension between the Irish response to Ulysses and the emerging US academic scholarship in the 1950s. The first Bloomsday (16 June) in 1954, celebrating the setting of Ulysses, was led by a distinguished gathering of writers that included Brian O’Nolan, Patrick Kavanagh, and others. McCourt notes that this event was largely ignored. The first collection of Irish writing on Joyce in the periodical Envoy adopted a grudging tone and was critical of American academic attention to Joyce. The American literary critic Richard Ellmann also arrived in 1954 and let it be known that he was writing a biography of Joyce (it would be published five years later). McCourt notes a hostility to American Joyceans at this time. New Criticism held sway in the United States, treating works as self-contained and universal rather than being explicable by external circumstances of authorship and historical context. The problem was that the Irish academic response to Joyce was underdeveloped and dominated by memoir and reminiscence. McCourt notes how Joyce came to symbolise a more liberal Ireland from the 1960s onwards. A key moment in the wider acceptance of Joyce was the formation of the Joyce Tower Society in the 1960s to support the museum at the Martello Tower in Sandycove that forms the backdrop to the opening scenes in Ulysses. This was followed by early documentaries, a film, and international symposia. These developments would sometimes attract disapproval and controversy. The mainstreaming of Joyce and Ulysses through commercialisation and tourism would continue to draw criticism. However, by the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982, Ireland had made its peace with him. After some initial foot dragging, the Dublin City Council swung its support behind the celebration. By the time of the Celtic Tiger economy in the 1990s, Ireland was post-nationalist, pro-European, pro-capital, and Joyce was ‘official culture’. After decades of government resistance to concerning itself with the material culture commemorating Joyce, an astonishing €16 million was spent on Joyce manuscripts and material for different national collections. McCourt also records a contrary movement on the part of postcolonial critics who placed Ireland within a Third World history and Ulysses within a canon of resistance literature. This seems a key moment in questioning the idea of a high modernist Joyce divorced from local concerns. McCourt is resistant to this ‘greening of Joyce’, pointing to his own ‘attempt to give voice to a more nuanced and rooted European or Triestine Joyce’.

McCourt’s agreement with criticism that the overly political approach of those like Seamus Deane defeats literary appreciation in advance leaves its own assumptions unexamined, as does the attempt to reconcile these positions through ‘semi-colonial’ approaches. Nevertheless, his last chapter documents new voices and approaches that signal the arrival of Irish scholarship within international Joyce studies.

that transformed the application of censorship to works of art. The complications of Joyce’s writing process are illustrated by another essay on the so-called Rosenbach manuscript, the surviving complete manuscript of Ulysses named after Philadelphia dealer A.S.W. Rosenbach. Close examination of this manuscript reveals it to be simultaneously an advanced draft, a collateral text, fair copy, and final manuscript. The last essays are on one of the main US Joyce collections at the University of Buffalo, along with the Sean and Mary Kelly Collection that forms the core of the Joyce collection at the Morgan. Inevitably, there is an element of celebration and even public relations in a book like One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But it confirms McCourt’s observation in Consuming Joyce that

ne Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses focuses its attention more explicitly on the material heritage of Ulysses. It is generously illustrated by manuscripts, portraits, and photographs from different US collections. Tóibín’s introduction situates the whole within the historical and social background to Ulysses. He discusses the role of song as a kind of yearning and aspiration, the transformations in Ulysses’s setting of Dublin, and suggests that the book acted as a blueprint for a society in the making. The collection opens with a group of essays by distinguished Irish academics, including McCourt, that focus on the circumstances within which the writing took place, that is, in the cities with which Joyce is most closely associated: Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. There follow essays that focus further on Joyce’s rewriting and revisioning of Ulysses, its manuscripts, the library collections that house them, its publication, and censorship. In one of the more interesting essays, Anne Fogarty argues that Ulysses is not just about Dublin but is a ‘staging and embodying’ of its chaotic materiality that manages to change what is possible for the novel form. McCourt’s essay argues that Joyce’s move to Trieste, with its European and modernist affiliations, allowed Sylvia Beach and James Joyce in Paris (Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy) him to progress from the depiction of paralysis contained in his early work to a more expansive and composite perspective in Ulysses. Both Ronan Irish academics have found their place within international Joyce Crowley’s essay on Zurich and Catherine Flynn’s on Paris trace studies. The discussion of the cities and geographies associated the further widening of interpersonal and intertextual reference with the writing of Ulysses, along with the fascinating and imin these cities, vital to the writing of Ulysses. Flynn points out pressively illustrated history of the book itself, make it a useful that some of Joyce’s most stylistically innovative chapters were and absorbing document to mark this moment. In some ways, the written in Paris, where he drew on writers like Édouard Dujardin, narrative outlined in McCourt’s new work is also a celebratory one, a story of increasing openness and sophistication in the Irish Gustave Flaubert, and Alfred Jarry. These essays are followed by Maria DiBattista’s discussion context. There may have been a lost opportunity to engage more of how Ulysses evolved across its different published versions as extensively with how the politics of modernist cultures might Joyce continued to edit the text obsessively, even as he received disturb this narrative. Nevertheless, as studies of the history of proofs from the printers. She characterises this obsessiveness as the production and consumption of Ulysses, both works prove the ‘art of surfeit’: naturalistic detail was piled on, with a new indispensable for gaining perspective on the centenary. g novel form emerging from a combination of fact-checking and mythography. An essay by trial lawyer Joseph M. Hassett follows Gary Pearce holds a PhD in comparative literature and cultural the court case brought by the New York Society for the Suppres- studies from Monash University. He is manager of Library Resion of Vice that led to the effective banning of Ulysses in 1921. search Services at RMIT University Library. His other writing He also outlines the overturning of the ban in a 1934 court case has appeared in Jacobin, Overland, and Eureka Street. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Tribute

A tribute to Frank Moorhouse by Catharine Lumby

rank Moorhouse, one of Australia’s most prolific and told me that characters in his fiction were parts of a ‘discarded loved authors, essayists, and public intellectuals, died self ’. The same characters recur in his early work: Milton and aged eighty-three on 26 June. Moorhouse left a legacy of Anderson being two key examples. Both are semi-fictionalised, eighteen fiction and non-fiction books, a series of screenplays, or refracted, references to his friends of the time: Milton to the and countless essays. He was also a tireless activist on a range of scholar and writer Michael Wilding; Anderson to his long-time fronts, including opposing censorship and promoting copyright friend, the scholar and literary critic Don Anderson. Moorhouse is known for his use of what he dubbed the law reform. Moorhouse was born in Nowra in 1938 to a middle-class ‘discontinuous narrative’, a narrative style that stitches together family. He was the youngest of three brothers spaced five years his short stories into a larger narrative relying on the device apart. Moorhouse’s parents were a strong influence on their son of recurring characters and themes – threads that Moorhouse pulls together to weave a more complex and and prominent in community organisations, novel-like story. including the Country Women’s Association In his first book Futility and Other Aniand Rotary. mals, published in 1969, Moorhouse set about Moorhouse left Nowra at the age of renovating the short story and bringing it into seventeen to become a cadet on the Daily the present day. His style is already apparent: Telegraph. He had a complicated relationship knowing self-deprecation, irony, an uneasy yet to his origins. He wrote often about the complicit relationship with the intellectual South Coast and loosely based a character life, and a searching approach to received on his father in his third book, The Electrical ideas about gender, sexuality, and human Experience (1974), who also appears in his relationships. League of Nations novels, Grand Days (1993) What is remarkable in hindsight is the and Dark Palace (2000). When I asked him characteristic frankness with which Moorin an interview about how much growing up house narrates and names the uncertainty in Nowra influenced him, he said, somewhat and the dissonances that attended the social tongue in cheek: ‘I’m always writing about change affecting sexual identities and gender Nowra. You could say everything I’ve ever roles at the time of writing. The Americans, written is about Nowra.’ Baby was published in 1972, at a time when In 1959, Moorhouse married his childhomosexual acts between men were still crimhood sweetheart Wendy Halloway (now WenFrank Moorhouse (Kylie Melinda Smith/ inalised in all Australian states and when the dy James), who was also an aspiring writer. Penguin Random House) gay liberation movement was in its infancy. The marriage did not last long, but James and Moorhouse remained in touch intermittently until his death. Moorhouse has never been pegged as a ‘gay’ writer, but he was When Moorhouse published his semi-fictional memoir Martini one of our earliest fiction writers to openly tackle the subject in 2005, James took exception to the way she was portrayed in a and to do so through characters who were sometimes bisexual. To understand the way the women’s liberation and the gay thinly veiled character based on letters she wrote to Moorhouse as a teenager, and wrote a lengthy piece in The Australian in 2007. liberation movements unfolded in Sydney in the 1970s, and the Moorhouse left journalism at the age of thirty to become issues that Moorhouse was implicitly grappling with in his early a full-time writer, an audacious career move at the time. From work, it is critical to see the fingerprints that the Libertarian his earliest days as a writer, Moorhouse infused his work with movement, known as the Sydney Push, left on Sydney intellecaccounts of political and social issues that defined the milieu tual and political life. Moorhouse often described himself to me and broader society he narrates. His writing is also frequently in interviews as a left-wing anarchist, by which he meant that and transparently entangled with his life. Not that he directly he was suspicious of hard-line ideology on either the left or the translates people and events – no writer does. Moorhouse once right and rejected a polemical or doctrinaire approach to debate. 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

On the issue of free speech, about which he and journalist and academic Wendy Bacon led anti-censorship battles in the 1970s, he was fascinated by how many rules we need to live civilised lives. His instinct was to question why laws or rules were put in place and whom they protected. His major work, the League of Nations trilogy, was prompted by his fascination with the grand scheme the League embodied: to design rules for civilised living for the global community. He spent years in the archives funded by the newly established Australia Council Creative Fellowship, also known as the Keating Fellowship. In the first book of the trilogy, Grand Days, Edith Campbell Berry arrives in Geneva to work at the newly created League of Nations amid an atmosphere of heady idealism. Dark Palace, for which he won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award, chronicles the fall of the League as Hitler comes to power. The third, Cold Light (2011), is set in Canberra, where Edith returns after World War II, and focuses on the building of the capital and the anxiety at the heart of Australian national identity. Moorhouse, at times, found himself the subject of unwelcome controversy in the literary world. Grand Days was bizarrely dismissed from contention by the Miles Franklin judges on the grounds that it was ‘insufficiently Australian’, despite being a book that interrogates the meaning of borders and features a young woman from the south coast of New South Wales. As Moorhouse noted in a speech to a literary lunch at the time, the book examines: ‘the crossing of borders and the meaning of borders, national and other, and identity.’ Moorhouse also wrote a number of screenplays, including for the movie The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), directed by Dušan Makavejev and produced by David Roe. Moorhouse’s oeuvre is remarkable not only for his productivity but equally for his ability to write in the voice of female characters. Writer and commentator Annabel Crabb, who launched Cold Light, founded the unofficial Edith Campbell Berry fan club. She says of Edith: ‘There’s a joy in finding a [female] character who is complicated, who’s appealing, is clever, but fallible … She feels like a gift to me.’ Moorhouse worked closely with publisher Jane Palfreyman and later with Meredith Curnow at Random House. Palfreyman says that working with him on Grand Days, Dark Palace, and Martini: A memoir were life and career highlights for her and that Moorhouse was an ‘astonishing talent, a true original and one of our finest writers’. Moorhouse had many intense and loving relationships throughout his life and a wide circle of friends, too numerous to name here. He loved the rituals of eating out, drinking, and engaging in excellent conversation. He was a bon vivant and a very witty raconteur. He is survived by his brothers Owen and Arthur. His memorial was held at the State Library of NSW on 13 July. Among the speakers were literary critic and scholar Don Anderson and the author Tom Kenneally, both friends and admirers of his work. g Catharine Lumby is a Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney and the author of a biography of Frank Moorhouse, which will be published soon by Allen and Unwin.

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Biography

Justice and identity

Jon Faine’s compassionate approach to biography Michael McGirr

Apollo and Thelma: A true tall tale by Jon Faine

Hardie Grant $45 hb, 373 pp

lesser writer than Jon Faine would have found many more cheap laughs in this extraordinary story. One of the two central characters, Paul Alexander McPherson Anderson, was better known as The Mighty Apollo. In what feels like a bygone age, he was the proprietor of The Mighty Apollo Martial Arts centre in West Melbourne. He lived there in spartan quarters, above a panel beater. His modest circumstances did not imply much modesty of spirit. Paul, ‘Australia’s indestructible man of steel’, was a tireless self-promoter. He performed endless improbable feats such as being stood on by an elephant, being run over by vehicles while lying on a bed of nails, and pulling trams and buses with a bit between his teeth. This last achievement beggars the imagination, especially since, on at least one occasion, he had to repeat the effort for the sake of the newsreel cameras. In between times, Apollo was an oracle with much to say about God and everything else. Yet his communication with his three sons was not so sure. The beauty of this book is that Jon Faine doesn’t believe in freak shows. He wants to find the bedrock of humanity on which this extraordinary personality was built. Many Victorians would be familiar with Faine’s daily presence for many years on ABC morning radio. He was a kind of cultural anchor point, joking with Red Symons or pushing the full range of politicians on matters they may well have preferred to avoid. He had a mind for issues of justice, whether they came in the aftermath of bushfires in Australia or natural disasters in Pakistan; he also kept listeners up to date on the progress of his veterans’ hockey team which sometimes sounded more interesting than the AFL. I was once invited to co-host the conversation hour with him, a part of the program that ran between eleven and noon and in which the focus became more informal and guests were allowed to share their stories. Faine’s preparation was impeccable. His interest in my interests was genuine. He told me that the most impressive person he’d ever interviewed was John Howard, shaking the idea he had a leftist bias. It didn’t seem to matter that Faine and I saw the world through different eyes. Faine was a young lawyer when he first met the Mighty Apollo. Paul’s sister had been found dead and now there were issues regarding her legacy. For many years, Old Ma (Thelma) Hawks had been the proprietor and lawmaker of a pub with the unlikely name of Wanda Inn. Her police force was comprised of fierce dogs. It was not an easy place to wander into, located some 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

800 kilometres from Darwin, possibly the most remote watering hole in the country. In terms of country, it was not far from Wave Hill, the Vestey cattle station which was the site of the Gurindji walk off and which became a central place in the emergence of the Indigenous land rights movement. Wanda Inn was more than just a pub: it was a frontier. Thelma never allowed Indigenous people to set foot inside her premises but she was happy to charge them exorbitant prices for grog. The conduct of the place was shameful. In 1981, Thelma died and her estate was left to three young men – Paul, Mark, and Bruce – the sons of her brother, Apollo. The boys’ mother, Rondahe, had abandoned them.

Thelma never allowed Indigenous people to set foot inside her premises but she was happy to charge them exorbitant prices for grog As the tale gathers momentum, it effortlessly embraces a wide range of issues of justice and identity that still smoulder at the heart of contemporary Australia. Faine’s treatment of this cavalcade of characters is superb. Nobody is trivialised, nobody is idolised. The book has compassion for the weakness of characters who present to the world as towers of strength. Faine is not an easy man to bluff. Faine weaves the story of Apollo and Thelma in and around his own coming of age and improbable emergence as a broadcaster. He met the Anderson family as a tie-wearing trainee lawyer; working in a city office came as a kind of culture shock. Faine describes how he discovered the real possibilities of the profession when he also began working in legal aid in Fitzroy. Here he learned to see law from the perspective of those on society’s lower rungs. Fitzroy and the city were almost as foreign to each other as Wanda Inn and the sophistication of the Gurindji who saw thousands of years of subtlety thrown over by beef and beer. Faine’s sympathies were deepened by being the stepfather of an Indigenous son, Nigel. There is one particularly vivid recollection in this book. Faine was the MC at Frank Hardy’s memorial service, which was held in a packed Collingwood Town Hall in 1994. Hardy, the author of Power without Glory, had communist leanings and was a prominent advocate for the Gurindji at Wave Hill. His book, The Unlucky Australians, is impassioned. As a young priest, I was taken along because a mutual friend had told Hardy’s partner, Jenny Barrington, that she would manage to get a Catholic priest to the service, whether by hook or by crook. I was a bit nervous, but at the wake I had great conversations and many laughs with notables of the communist world, people I was brought up to believe were the devil incarnate. They were no such thing. They were just great characters trying to make sense of life without resorting to clichés. As was I. As is this book. That is what makes it irresistible. It delicately shows all the colours of the human catastrophe. g Michael McGirr is the author of Ideas to Save Your Life (Text Publishing, 2022).

Calibre Essay Prize

Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere by Sarah Gory

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)

1. The library is comprised of every book that does and could exist. Every possible combination of characters has been written and bound and placed in the library, which is also the universe. ‘The certitude that everything has been written [even] the minutely detailed history of the future […] turns us into phantoms.’1 Somewhere in the library is a description of the sound my grandfather made when he fell face first onto the carpet, dying instantly. When my Buba came in to investigate the noise her first thought was, Shit – I just got the carpet cleaned. At least, that’s how she tells it later. 2. It’s the morning after the funeral and as we’re walking to school my child turns to me and says, If the Nazis come and kill you and S. while we’re at school, me and W. will stay together holding hands and I can look after her. An echo across time to thirty-something years earlier when my younger brother, barely four years old at the time, asks our grandfather, Will I go to the camps too when I grow up? I think about what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘postmemory’, the idea that traumas can be transmitted through generations so deeply that they form, for those of us who come after, memories in their own right, ‘mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment’. 2 I don’t know how to answer my six-year-old, whose imaginative investment has brought together threads of death and Nazism and parents murdered and his sister too, because he knows that I am named after my grandfather’s red-haired sister who didn’t survive. I don’t know how to answer him and besides, he didn’t really ask me a question. When we arrive at school, I want to kneel down and hug him forever, but he’s already shrugging off his backpack, waving goodbye as he runs to play tag with his friends. 3. During the funeral, the sound of Buba sobbing echoes across the room, our stoic British grandmother who was never prone to bouts of affection. Later by the graveside, to the sound of earth hitting wood in a thud thud thud, she tells me that every sin-

gle morning Mark, our grandfather, made her breakfast. Freshly squeezed orange juice and tea brewed just the way she likes it. I made my own breakfast this morning, she tells me, her hand silksoft in mine, for the first time in fifty years. She cries that he was a better husband to her than she was a wife to him and that they fought over everything, even a bag of oranges. But we all know that Mark adored our Buba. I suddenly remember their fiftieth wedding anniversary: the end of the meal, table scattered with dishes and empty wine bottles. Somehow the discussion turned to porn and Mark says to us all, straight-faced, Oh, we can’t watch porn, Buba gets too excited. Of course, we all laughed, thinking it was a joke. 4. My aunt lives overseas and cannot fly over for the funeral because of quarantine restrictions. Jews bury their dead immediately and it’s Passover in a few days and Shabbat before that, so we cannot wait for her. She says she wishes she could be there with Buba as the daughter that she, our Buba, deserves. In the meantime, Buba is surrounded by six of her ten grandchildren, the descendants of survivors of genocide. At the funeral, the Rabbi, talking about my dad and his brother, says in Yiddish, The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Dad always says that too, although he says it in English and I always reply, facetiously, that my apple rolled down a hill. I think about the cultural imperative of keeping tradition alive, and it was only when we arrived at the cemetery for the funeral that I realised I never thought to bring a kippah, a skullcap, for S. to wear. Even if I had, we didn’t have any at our house. 5. About five years ago, one of my cousins invited us all to her daughter’s birthday, or it could have been her son’s. It was at her mum’s house, the same house that we went to almost weekly as kids, where we’d cut our Barbies’ hair and have Passover dinners at the long table and sleepovers and birthday cakes in the back garden. I hadn’t been back for over a decade, and it seemed like nothing had changed. Even the cat was still there, a little thinner than I recalled but just as skittish. It felt like time was folding back on itself, that in this corner of this suburb in this city no time had passed at all. There are lollies and games set up for the kids, so I sit with my grandparents at the outdoor table, the backs of my legs slick against the plastic chairs. Mark, watching his great-grandchildren underfoot, turns to Buba and says, Hitler didn’t win. He says it in Yiddish, which in itself is a kind of proof that Hitler AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

didn’t win, although I don’t understand what he says, so perhaps Hitler didn’t win, but he didn’t quite lose either. Later, when Mum translates what Mark said for me and I look at my baby, I think of motherhood as an act of resistance. Not just mine but all of ours. 6. A few days after the funeral, my cousin Sam comes over and he reminds me that Zayda, my mother’s father, also used to say that – Hitler didn’t win. As he explains it, of course Hitler didn’t quite lose either. Look at the material legacy of the Third Reich, he says, starting way back when the Nuremberg Trials were undermined by Operation Paperclip. So many of those Nazi scientists and engineers went on to have celebrated careers across the world, using research developed with stolen money, the same research that justified the slaughter of millions, of Jews and gypsies and disabled people and queer folks. Then there were the extensive ties between the escaped Nazis living in Chile and the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship, not to mention their links with Operation Condor, torturing and ‘disappearing’ tens of thousands of people all across the Americas. And then there is the current rise of hate and the far right in Europe. There’s that, too. Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva once said that there was the Holocaust and Hiroshima and nothing else of consequence in the twentieth century. I’m not sure that’s true, but I do know that the soil is still soaked in blood and chemicals. That the spectre of what happened continues to shape the future we are moving towards.

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7. W.G. Sebald was born at the tail end of World War II in Bavaria to German parents. His father had been in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis and was a prisoner of war at the time of Sebald’s birth. That the Holocaust and its legacy were spectres that haunted Sebald’s life is clear from the four books that he published. Sebald was interested in the way memory functions not as a mere recall of things past, but rather as ‘a gradual approach to a kind of historical metaphysics, bringing remembered events back to life’.3 Sebald died young, not quite sixty years old, and so his legacy is also one of never-was. We are haunted by the books that he didn’t write, as though the spectre of them does exist, ‘as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last’.4 As though we are waiting, still. ‘He wrote,’ Geoff Dyer notes, ‘like a ghost.’ 8. When my older brother and I were in primary school, we shared a room for about a year. We invented a game. Late at night, silver moonlight through curtains, we would hide under the blankets and intone in a ghostly voice: Gorzychanski, Gorzychanski, Gorzychanski. I recall my brother’s stuffed snake, long and patched, in shades of crimson in the bed. Now, in my remembering of it, the whole scene is overlaid with a line from Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ (1948), a poem I could not have known then: ‘he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland’. Gorzychanski was the surname my grandfather was given at birth, the name we would have inherited. When Marek Gorzychanski fled Europe and its ghosts in the wake of the Holocaust and arrived on Australian shores, they whitewashed his name – that foreign, hard-to-pronounce name – and so he was reborn Mark Gory. That is the surname I inherited and that I have given to my children. 9. During school holidays when we were kids, we would sometimes visit Mark at Scheherazade, a Yiddish restaurant on St Kilda’s Acland Street, pre-gentrification, that served chicken soup with kreplach and golden schnitzel with coleslaw. Every Wednesday morning, Mark and his friends would spill over the tables, drinking black coffee and talking loudly and all at once in Yiddish. A thousand and one stories. Sheina maidala, they’d say to me, beautiful girl, pinching my cheeks between copper yellow fingers, smelling of tobacco and mothballs. 10. Mum is always telling stories that she considers to be amazing turns of fate, or serendipity – when a person she meets at a café knows someone from her youth back in Perth, or how the jazz singer she happens upon at a bar is the daughter of a man Dad studied architecture with three decades ago. She has begun studying Yiddish during lockdown, learning anew the language of her dead father. 11. One of my nieces is learning Yiddish at the school she attends

46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

around the corner from the house Mum lives in, up the road from the Jewish youth movement my brothers and I attended when we were about her age. Hearing the tongue of our dead ancestors emerging from a child’s mouth feels uncanny – it reminds me that this would have been, should have been, our inheritance. Instead, we speak the language of the settler-colonialists, here where we live on unceded land. 12. A community in a small Austrian town is working with families of Holocaust survivors to build a memorial to the 22,000 Jews who were taken there on a death march in the final days of the war. Among those who survived that march was my grandfather. I understand the desire for a memorial, I do. Remembering to stem the tide of the future, an insistence on ‘never again’. But I am also unnerved by this insistence, this idea of memory as some kind of salve. ‘Never again’ is a fallacy and the idea of another memorial – from the Latin memorialis, ‘belonging to memory’ – seems to me not a way of remembering but a form of forgetting. Relegating to the past what is ongoing. Because we know that the past haunts us, that what happened is still happening, as legacy, as ghost, as spectre. ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again,’ writes Primo Levi, who lived through Auschwitz, impossibly. ‘It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.’ We say ‘never again’ like a mantra to drown out the sound of it happening all around us. 13. As the Nazi party rose to power in Germany, sympathisers across the ocean in the literary circles of Buenos Aires accused Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges of ‘maliciously hiding’ his Jewish heritage. He replied: ‘Who has not, at one time or another, played with thoughts of his ancestry, with the prehistory of his flesh and blood? I have done so many times, and many times it has not displeased me to think of myself as Jewish.’5 Borges was, it turns out, fascinated by both Jews and ghosts. His fictions are populated by ghost towns and later, when his country became a refuge for Nazis fleeing justice, he wrote cautionary allegories about the legacy of fascism, about the ways the past asserts its presence. Borges described the word remember as a ‘ghostly verb’. From the Latin rememorari – re- ‘again’ + memorari ‘be mindful of ’. To be mindful of, again. To exist in the past and then to exist now, again. 14. If remembering is about locating the past in the present, then forgetting is the process of discernment, of deciding what is relevant and what is not. In Borges’s ‘Funes the Memorious’ (1942), the titular character has a memory so absolute that everything is recalled – he can recite a book verbatim, learn a language in a day. But memory is not the same as knowledge: ‘To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teeming world of Funes, there were only details.’

Which is to say: memory demands a kind of ethics. We imbue it with purpose, or we don’t. We allow it to stake a claim for presence, or we pretend that the past can be confined to history. If memory is historical metaphysics, then ghosts are not only in our imaginations. 15. What, then, are the ethics of the individual in the face of collective memory, or memorialising? What are my ethical obligations to the memory of my grandfathers, to my ancestors? What are my ethical obligations to the future memories of my children? Or, put another way, I am haunted already by what is now being done in my name, in all of our names. 16. I watch the movie Call Me by Your Name (2017) late one night. The image that stays with me is Elio fingering the small golden Star of David that Oliver wears around his neck, just like the kind that we were all given for our bat mitzvahs. ‘My mother

The author’s grandfather, Mark Gory (right), with his parents, both of whom were killed during World War II

says we are Jews of discretion,’ Elio tells him. This makes sense – for a Jew in Europe in the early 1980s it seems reasonable to see discretion as the better part of valour. My friend’s younger brother, circa 2019 in Melbourne, likes to wear his Star of David like ironic bling, big and shiny. I imagine him, in contrast, as a Jew of defiance. Sometimes, when asked, I will answer, My family is Jewish, rather than, I am a Jew. If you asked me why, I wouldn’t be able to answer, but I know that this is not mere semantics, that my choice of words matters. Unmoored, language becomes sleight of hand. Language becomes a weapon: colonisation, apartheid, Nazi state, genocide, fascism. These are words that haunt, that cannot be unsaid, that cast shadows so large we get lost in the gloom. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Letters 17. If to remember what was done to my ancestors is an ethical imperative, then to confront, to know, what is being done in their name and so in my own – whether that be halfway around the world in the open air prison that is Gaza or here, on Kulin Nation Country – is, also, an ethical imperative. Today’s (mis)deeds are tomorrow’s spectres.

The New Jerusalem

Filtering experience through the grid of the finite Ian Dickson

18. There is a small, faded black-and-white photo of our Zayda from the day he was liberated in 1945. He looks like a ghost. 19. Family legend has it that Mark read every history book on the shelves of his local library, and the neighbouring ones too. Haunted by the past, chasing spectres through the stories: ‘for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherencies’.6 Borges tells us that ‘to speak is to fall into tautology’. Perhaps what he means is that living itself is tautological. When we were kids we called it déjà vu, but now I just see ghosts, ghosts everywhere. 20. In the years before he died, when we’d go to their house for a visit, Buba would have chocolates for the kids and stories to tell but Mark would sit quietly. Sheina maidala, he’d whisper, looking at my daughter. I realise with a start that my daughter’s eyes are the very same shade of sky blue as her great-grandfather’s. g Sarah Gory is a writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her creative non-fiction and art criticism have appeared in various Australian journals and magazines and in 2021 she co-edited the AMBLE issue of Cordite Poetry Review with Elena Gomez. Sarah is the co-publisher of imprint Common Room, with Paul Mylecharane, and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’ was runner-up in the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize. Endnotes 1. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel’, in Labyrinths: Selected stories & other writings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New Directions Books, 1964), 54. 2. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 3. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated Anthea Bell (The Modern Library, 2001), 19. 4. Ibid., 264. 5. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘I, a Jew’ [1934] in Efraín Kristal, ‘Jorge Luis Borges’s Literary Response to Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 104, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 355. 6. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Library of Babel,’ 53. A reference list appears in the online version of this essay. 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

The Letters of Thom Gunn

edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer

Faber $79.99 hb, 734 pp

f the major Anglo-American poets of the previous century, none was more transformed, at least on the surface, by the journey across the Atlantic than Thom Gunn (1929–2004). Travelling in the opposite direction, T.S. Eliot found echoes of his mid-Western emotional repression and discreet anti-Semitism in the England of his era, while W.H. Auden, who carried his world with him, was only mildly affected by his time in America. When Gunn left England in 1954, he was a closeted academic who had just published his first collection of poetry, a cautious, emotionally reticent selection called Fighting Terms. By the time of his death from ‘acute polysubstance abuse’ in 2004, he was a gay spokesman openly celebrating the druggy, leather scenes of San Francisco and New York and mourning the friends and lovers who had died in the 1980s and 1990s. His English critics threw up their hands in maidenly horror as his subject matter became more overt and his poetic style relaxed into syllabics and, finally, free verse. But Gunn never entirely abandoned rhyme and metre. Commenting on the fact that many of his drug-related poems are metrical, he claims he was ‘filtering the experiences of the infinite through the grid of the finite’. In Eavan Boland’s words: ‘Few poets in our time have been so deeply nourished by tradition and as lovingly open to change.’ In a late poem, ‘Saturday Night’, Gunn leads us on an evocative tour of a torrid night in a 1970s bathhouse in Dantesque terza rima. Virgil outfitted by Tom of Finland. Gunn always claimed his childhood – spent first in Kent, then in Hampstead – was a happy one, though his father, a successful journalist and editor, and his mother divorced when he was ten. This idyll came to an abrupt end five years later when Thom and his brother, Ander, pushed open a barricaded door to find their mother’s dead body. Gunn adored her. In an unpublished poem he wrote: ‘Yet / of course, we were lovers. / Who could equal you, dazzling / contradictory woman? If it is true / to say that you made me queer, it is equally true / to say you made me a poet.’ But it was only in his final collection that he was able to write openly about her suicide. He abhorred confessional poetry. In an early letter he states: ‘I don’t want to write of my emotions according to their intensity, but to the competence with which I can treat them.’ He makes his great poem about his mother’s death, ‘The Gas Poker’, work by ‘withdraw[ing] the first person and writ[ing] about it in the third person’.

After a boring period in National Service and a few revelatory years at Cambridge, he followed his then lover and subsequent life partner, Mike Kitay, to the United States, eventually settling in the Haight in San Francisco, where he lived until his death. Surprisingly, there is yet to be a comprehensive biography of Gunn. But this collection of his letters, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer, with a perceptive introduction by Nott and a comprehensive chronology which acts as the shilling life, is a fascinating and revealing complement to his poetry. Because in his work he refused to wallow in his emotions, Gunn has been inaccurately named a ‘cold’ poet. But there is nothing cold about the man who wrote these letters. The editors seem to have winnowed the recipients down to a fairly limited number, but the tone and the topics vary widely. There are the letters to the family: dutiful ones to the father to whom Gunn was never close; carefully bowdlerised ones to his aunts; and warm ones to Ander. As he is creating, Gunn reaches out to trusted friends for critical feedback. He makes enlightening comments about what he is trying to achieve in specific poems and proffers drafts which are intriguingly different from finished works. In a letter to his friend Tony Tanner, he subjects the poem ‘Innocence’ to a lineby-line dissection asking for ‘your further advice, because there are real problems with it I can’t work out by myself ’. There is also plenty of literary discussion and gossip. Writing to Christopher Isherwood, he tells him: ‘I would like to write poetry with the same sort of power as your prose.’ At a first meeting, Auden, whose early work he admires, is a disappointment. ‘I could hardly believe this was the Wild One of the thirties … a flabby dilettante, gracious living, complacent and trite.’ Allen Ginsberg, on the other hand, whose work he at first finds uncongenial, is a pleasant surprise. ‘I met Ginsberg for the first time and was hugely impressed: I’d always thought he might be a bit hysterical, like some of his poetry, but he is sensible and kind and takes charge and looks after people in a way I admire.’ He describes Elizabeth Bishop as ‘a person of a certain superficial formality – in a very nice way – beneath which is really a great openness to experience’. In a letter to Ander, he reacts to the dismissive reviews with which the British critics greeted his collection The Passages of Joy (1982). ‘You may have noticed that my latest books have ruffled the calm of the London literary establishment, who range from snide (Observer) to really vicious (our old friend Ian Hamilton, of course, who seems bent on extending a career founded almost entirely on malice!, in the Times Lit. Sup) … if I am being punished by them for not sharing in their preconceptions about poetry and sexuality, then so much the better – I’m in less danger than being contaminated by their praise.’ For gay men in the Western world who made it to the big-city ghettos, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of ebullient improvisation and experiment. As Gunn remarks: ‘We were making things up as we went along.’ Gunn threw himself into the scene, but this caused tensions with Kitay, who was by nature more monogamous. For a while they split, and the letters Gunn writes as they try to discover a modus vivendi that would work for them are the emotional heart of the book. Responding to Kitay’s accusation

of coldness, Gunn makes a personal declaration that could be as relevant to his work as to his personality. ‘You always credit me with lack of feeling because I often don’t show feeling … but I admire the understatement of feeling more than anything … Like in Handel … and Racine … the feelings in them are contained within a clean and strong framework.’

Because in his work he refused to wallow in his emotions, Gunn has been inaccurately named a ‘cold’ poet. But there is nothing cold about the man who wrote these letters Gunn’s appetite for drugs was as rampant as his appetite for sex. In a long letter to Tanner, he attempts to describe a particularly powerful trip. While admitting that ‘People who go on about their trips are very boring’, he suggests that, ‘One thing it does … is to present as possible still the choices one had thought were settled long ago.’ A more successful attempt to describe the experience is his poem ‘A Fair in the Woods’, one of the poems that most riled the British critics. It is an almost too apt poem in which this devotee of Edmund Spenser and pharmaceuticals attends a costumed pageant, Renaissance Fair, in the San Raphael Woods while tripping on LSD. As the AIDS epidemic takes hold of his community, the tone of the letters changes. In the poem ‘Elegy’, he writes: ‘They keep leaving me / and they don’t / tell me they don’t / warn me that this is / the last time I’ll be seeing them.’ As he aged, Gunn became more of an elder statesman for both the gay and the literary communities. His letter to the academic and poet Gregory Woods commenting on Woods’s reading of his work is an exemplar of tactful criticism (‘I find you innocently misleading – you are never malicious, just over-ingenious’). Elder statesman he may have become, but his Rabelaisian side never disappeared. Recalling the 1970s, when it seemed as though the gay community was inventing what he called a New Jerusalem, he writes: ‘There are many varieties of New Jerusalem, / Political, pharmaceutical – I’ve visited most of them. / But of all the embodiments ever built, I’d only return to one, / For the sexual New Jerusalem was by far the greatest fun.’ g Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales, and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee.

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Poetry

A continuous elegy Maureen Alsop’s syntax of loss Anders Villani

Pyre

by Maureen Alsop

‘E

What Books Press $36.99 pb, 94 pp

very sacred language,’ writes Octavio Paz, ‘is secret. And conversely: every secret language … borders on the sacred.’ In the liminal Pyre, poet Maureen Alsop traverses – and erodes – this secret/sacred border, which is also the border of life and death, ‘the valley between our language’ (‘North Channel’). Each of the book’s section titles is a variation on ‘Selenomancy’, defined on the contents page as ‘a divination by the observation of the phases and appearances of the moon’. That Alsop titles multiple poems ‘Sky An Oar’, moreover, betrays the purpose of these divinations: to reach the other side, the ‘village across the waters’ that ‘burned all night’ (‘Witness’). The collection’s challenge, which it mostly meets successfully, is to remain on the compelling side of hermeticism. Pyre can be read as a continuous elegy to multiple others, including the speaker. ‘Dear Hillary’ addresses Hillary Gravendyk, one of the two people to whose memory Alsop dedicates the book. Throughout the poem, the desire for communication with the deceased burns: ‘They spoke for guidance to each ship that paused’; ‘a scar smudged every quill’; ‘We speak once again in open arrival’. After this ‘open arrival’, however, the poem’s language grows opaque: ‘And lumens titrate a prairie’s unmet constellation, beyond which stagnant / boots cloud the gnats, motes infiltrate the nightcurtain.’ If this is the syntax of loss, it is sealed in idiosyncratic particulars. Later, in ‘Selenomancy’, the speaker apostrophises her father – ‘Father, I apologize’ – and describes ‘his burial’s many places’. Alsop’s best sentences allow such places to enter the quotidian: ‘linden shadows expand the room’ (‘Later Star, Later Blackness’). What is more, the poet expands death to encompass the living – ‘I died in a burning sweat’ (‘Sacrestia’) – and experience that can be shared: ‘I remembered our death’ (‘Chalmette’ 72). Borders do not disappear, but exist as features of a single, mutable plane. Arcane natural, especially botanical, imagery dominates Alsop’s poems, lending them ‘a strange witchery’ (‘Selenomancy’). Material phenomena become conduits for accessing the other side, whether this divide concerns life and death or the subject’s inner and outer experience. Consider, in ‘Sky An Oar’, how nature, the body, and language fuse: ‘you held her alone hand, a faded / lupine, your pearlweed lips grazed bloodwood fingertips, her torso spelled / a new boundary’. Elsewhere, the addressee ‘read[s] the weed’s summation’ (‘Sacrament of Venus’); ‘incantations 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

recur through blackthorn’ (‘Sepiolite’). When, at the speaker’s father’s burial, mourners ‘mulch gray pachysandra & peony’, the atmosphere is ‘atremble of sticks, / stasis, sandalwood cinder’ (‘Selenomancy’). Notice how the word ‘stasis’ leaves a trace of human behaviour, as if things and emotions held the same status, burned on the same pyre. Alsop’s phrasing is often luminous: ‘In the year of ghost-holly-noon in winter and chestnut sky at night – / the dead’s voices carry dowry-bells and silver spools / along the river’s collarbone’ (‘Selenomancy’). At times, however, the craft feels too lapidary, as when Alsop uses multiple possessive nouns in quick succession. In the first stanza of one poem, we find ‘snow’s miscarriage’, ‘love’s copyright’, and ‘the landscape’s grammar’. Inverted syntax, likewise, can shimmer – ‘[i]nto the tell of it I asked’ (‘Crimes Tonight’) – or feel overworked: ‘beautiful it is when you say I am’ (‘Gabion’). But such overworking may be necessary in a poetics this private, as readers of Paul Celan or Emily Dickinson will know. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of Pyre’s chief subjects is language itself. The book abounds in instances where words cannot accomplish their task: ‘the day’s failed confession / a black stone on the tongue’ (‘Ballast’); ‘our syntax / was damaged. A pierced liquid’ (‘Parenthesis Skyline’); ‘O sublingual address, please speak’ (‘Equuleus’); ‘what words came, / came in pieces.’ (‘Selenomancy’). Most climactically, in ‘North Channel’, ‘sumac claims the throat’. But is this claiming a gag, or a new speech – that of things, of nature? If one has the power to ‘edit … the sea’ (‘Selenomancy’), then can sumac speak the unspeakable, culture and nature – and life and death – being one? Alsop hints at as much: ‘your afterlife’s translation was my language’s / reversal’ (‘Oculus’). Wanting to interpret death, to speak across it, the poet reverts to the phenomenal, the figurative, the ritualistic, and the ambiguous. She becomes ‘paragraph’s flax’ (‘Chalmette’). For Paz, ‘the ultimate meaning of all poetizing’ is to recognise that life is death, and vice versa: ‘poetry … re-creates man and makes him assume his true condition, which is not the dilemma: life or death, but a totality: life and death in a single instant of incandescence’. Through elegy, the poetic form that makes its relation to death plain, we straddle more clearly what Alsop calls ‘our / invisible boundary mapped by water-edge & light’ (‘Gabion’). We add depth to the feeling that ‘when the one you love goes, a part of you follows’ (‘Sky An Oar’). That the poems in Pyre inhabit so secretive a space, and that Alsop avoids sounding overt notes of autobiography or personal emotion, ensures that this book, preoccupied with death, cannot be read as tragic. Neither, it must be said, does it console in the conventional sense. It is, for all its difficulties, a wondrous display of poetry’s capacity to touch what is most evanescent, ‘something to secure a wisp of blue smoke’ (‘Why Loss Burns Back the Only Accompaniment Our Name Hardly Saves’), and to grasp, with this touch, an intimacy that was always there. g Anders Villani holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he received the Delbanco Prize for poetry. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press; his second, Totality, has just been published by Recent Work Press. A PhD candidate at Monash University, he is an ABR Rising Star.

Poetry

‘Might be long long time’ A mixed anthology of trans-Tasman poetry David Mason

The Language in My Tongue: An anthology of Australian and New Zealand poetry

edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

FarFlung Editions US$21.95 pb, 215 pp

here’s an old Irish saying: ‘If you want praise, die. If you want blame, marry.’ I could add from personal experience, ‘If you really want blame, edit a poetry anthology.’ While poetry is relatively popular, it often seems that more people write it than read it. As a result, poets can be desperate for affirmation and recognition, managing their careers more jealously than investment bankers. What too often gets lost in all the log-rolling and back-scratching is the poetry. We turn to anthologies for help, hoping to find in small, palatable doses good poets we can choose to read in depth. We find anthologies representing nations or geographical regions, literary periods, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, forms, categories like postmodernism, post-colonialism, eco-poetry, and themes like love or madness. The Language in My Tongue, edited by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington, is hard to pin down. You could call it a regional anthology, its thirty-five poets coming from Australia and New Zealand. It is relatively brief, which can be welcoming, but I am not always convinced it contains the best work these poets have to offer. The editors strive to make a case for poetry as resistance – what Wallace Stevens elegantly called ‘the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality’. Much of their rationale is salutary, but when their introduction descends to academic clichés I instinctively revolt: ‘many of the poems in this volume are haunted by the liminal spaces of demotic intimacy and alienation. They explore a relationship with the quotidian which engages with concepts of transgressive intensity and self-reflexive technique.’ Yuck. What about making poems we can dwell in as well as dwell upon?

When the poems in this volume fall flat, as several do, they seem afraid of eloquence. I feel a bit unfair picking on Adam Aitken, whose poems open the book by virtue of alphabetical order, but his lines too often forgo the poet’s brief in favour of triviality: ‘Reaching forty now I ask: Why did Mum / never sew the hems of my jeans, even if Death on the TV / reminded her of her children?’ When Aitken casts lines aside and gives us a prose poem, calling it ‘Lines from The Lover’, the most beautiful bit is a quotation from Marguerite Duras. Prose poems require a rare talent for poetic experience minus poetry’s most distinctive element, the line. Those on offer by Luke Beesley, for example, are clever but cold. If I compare Beesley’s ‘Bees Nudge the Mouth of a Feathered Rose’ to the psychological nuance of ‘A Story About the Body’, by Robert Hass, I find the latter, which far more stingingly involves bees, a poem I can’t forget, Beesley’s a poem I can’t remember. I am more intrigued by the outright experiments of the late Jordie Albiston, who combined the conceptual audacity of the avant-garde with a beautiful way of phrasing emotional states: … to enter the error is recklessness to feel it deeply austere absolute it is sent to murder us in our sleep it is a bitmap of all that I am what can be learned from the rickety mind what can be learned from a glittering shape – children & gods beseech our instruction

Albiston at her best offered such beauty that her untimely death earlier this year seems a loss, among all the other losses, to modern poetry. Editors of anthologies make a perilous choice when they include examples of their own work. I was entertained by the playful free associations in the first two prose poems by Cassandra Atherton, but more powerfully impressed by her ‘Relics of Hiroshima’: Time is like a keloid that keeps returning. Black rain stripes white walls in inky watercolour. We see twisted metal and debris, a stack of fused teacups – fragments of lives that persevere. The hibakusha sobs as he holds up his sister’s school shirt. It trembles like a flag.

By contrast, Paul Hetherington’s prose here – admittedly an excerpt from a longer work – feels at times like an essay in art

NEW POETRY NEKHAU RICO CRAIG TOTALITY ANDERS VILLANI

OUT NOW RECENT WORK PRESS recentworkpress.com AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Poetry criticism. His verse in ‘September’ moves me more. So what is one to think of any poet’s work known only by such selections? We can understand why some poems, and not always good ones, become anthology pieces, perennial favourites, but The Language in My Tongue is not that kind of anthology, not a book of touchstones or chestnuts. Readers will identify their own preferences and I can only be honest about mine. I find some of this writing enervated, anxious, and dull.

Heels on the throat of song Exploring the limits of poetry’s expressivity Jennifer Harrison

languish

by Marion May Campbell Upswell Publishing $24 pb, 103 pp

Editors of anthologies make a perilous choice when they include examples of their own work I admired the post-colonial clarity of Merlinda Bobis’s ‘The String of Beads’, the graceful ekphrastic of Peter Boyle’s ‘A Painting in the Prado’, and the way Kevin Brophy’s poems express moral urgency without sanctimony. His ‘Dog on the Road’ joins my small anthology of compelling prose poems: ‘Inside you is a world where lives come and go like days, like wrappers, like novels, like meals, like buses, like birds, like seasons, like you. What is love without indifference, you say to yourself.’ The ambiguity of that final sentence stays with me, a signal intelligence. Several poets here prove adept at rhyme, like Luke Davies – better known, perhaps, as a screenwriter. I want to read more of him, and I want to read more of Ali Cobby Eckermann, who produces lovely dialect writing: When you feel the story You know it true Tell every little story When the people was alive Tell every little story more Might be one week now Might be long long time

The anthology’s title comes from a prophetic poem by Susan Hawthorne: ‘The language in my body and in my tongue / is the language they spoke in Delphi.’ In contrast, John Tranter’s musings about Australian identity, wishing he were a part of some other culture, seem old hat. They meet a tenable riposte in New Zealander Chris Tse, who writes of ‘Wellington, where the storm can’t take my tongue’. The poets I like most in this book are unafraid of beauty and eloquence. In addition to some already mentioned I would include Sarah Holland-Batt, Felicity Plunkett, essa may ranapiri, Peter Rose, and Gregory O’Brien, who writes in an elegy for a musician, ‘It was air that gave the grand thing / life. Like a sailboat // or newborn, it was sprung / to song …’ Notice that first line break isolating the word ‘life’. Then you read the second line as ‘life like a sailboat’, followed by a newborn, followed by song. The poem builds with deliberate skill and grace, and I am glad this uneven anthology offered it to us. g David Mason is an American writer and permanent resident living in Tasmania. His most recent books are The Sound: New and selected poems and Voices, Places: Essays. 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

And to Ecstasy

by Marjon Mossammaparast Upswell Publishing $24.99 pb, 88 pp

he title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement. Several reviewers have commented on the work’s intertextuality (Campbell often employs compositional strategies such as parody, allusion, calque). Always the audience or reader is integral to shaping the text. For Campbell, importantly, the unsaid or unquestioned are as important as collaged lyric or contemporary language trace, as seen in these lines from the first poem in the collection, ‘speechless’: the big print men shimmer in as the luxury of our exquisite unsaid develops over centuries from the filigree we grope in the anticipatory susurration fricatives sizzle somewhere for us plosives plonk & roll like whiskered seals amused in reef pools & listen as the nasals find their flutes we trust in our long withheld power verbs that’ll paint us in

From the same poem, later lines suggest the poet’s task is: ‘to break / this isolation of wounded consciousness / whose claim to suffer cannot reach / the billion lives that we detain / in the tropic margins of our precious / speechlessness’. In political terms, this poem appears to challenge language’s failures. The enjambments are untraditional, almost careless, yet urgent. All this in the first poem of a section titled ‘our heels on the throat of their song’, a phrase which references Vladimir Mayakovsky’s futurism, his challenge to conservatism and interest in cultural renewal. This initial poem is also described as a response to Nathalie Sarraute’s 1939 experimental novel Tropisms (to quote Campbell’s notes: the novel is about ‘the interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions’). In psychology, the term references the way individuals acquire new functions through experience, and underpins stimulus-response theory like that outlined in The Psychology of B. F. Skinner. The questions posed by such a charting of language dynamics are those of interiority, subjectivity, but also the microscopic psychological ramifications

of cause and effect. In Campbell’s crisp, excoriating, often witty poems, the antidote to languishing is exactly the Mayakovskian of forging modern subjectivity in art: a cultural renewal that doesn’t flinch from sharp self-critique in the context of what has been inherited in terms of utterance. The prose poems are extraordinary creatures (or, as the poet Philip Salom calls them, ‘lyrically trippy and beguiling’). Whether exploring language as aquifer soaking up meaning (‘Eurydice & the frogs’) or the ‘tick-tick-tick’ of impending mortality (‘breakdown’), they dazzle with manoeuvres, wit, textures. In the ‘settle of brittle’ of a poem like ‘still life’, the ravaged earth is sardonically idyllically female, yet physically mined: ‘my bifurcated self cracked up in mourning for this gone / gone land, where littered bones of sonnets, bones of lyrics lie where / the epic petered out, staggered into the blaze, went mad.’ The poem ends, ‘Where there is still life, there still is life. They’ll see. Or not. It is / precisely, finally, equivalent.’ My margin note calls this poem brilliant. Its rage against ‘the edicts’, its rave against silence and personal inaction, its embrace of human frailty is full of savagery. A prose poem later in the collection, ‘stabat mater’ (a term which references the suffering of the Virgin Mary on her son’s crucifixion) imagines how we might begin again to fashion a new Venus of Willendorf, a new vessel of language that is free from bias and insinuation: ‘from the dream yeast she rises’. The final section of the book, ‘in the margins of desire’, explores the intimacy of relationships. The personal is not for languishing within sentimentally. Pronouns are vivisected until they dissolve, ‘It’s like a pronoun for the self-diminished, a marker for all the proper names retreated. The greedy amnestic dark’ (‘pronouns in the darker mirror’). The poems seethe with sensuality, oscillating between unreality where loss of love is like ‘sailing a dream, a ship without mast or compass’ and shocked pragmatism, ‘a Bunnings drill without a cord ... cordlessly I am charged / by that drill / to return to primal words’ (‘cleaving, or, rereading difference & other distractions during this time of plague’). The final, rather beautiful prose poem in the collection, ‘in the next paragraph’, invokes ‘the declivity between dunes where ‘we dreamed riparian, and flowed back in.’ Dream imagery might impress as the easiest trope of this magical collection and yet the dream of wetlands, the laws of living by water, suffuse any dream’s idyll with the reality of water – like language, it flows on if let be.

arjon Mossammaparast’s earlier book, That Sight, won the 2018 Mary Gilmore award and was commended in several other awards. I was impressed by the way these new poems reach into spiritual traditions, such as that of the Bahá’í faith, yet also explore identity. This anchoring within worldly place (many poems footnote a particular place of action at the end of the poem) allows the poems their own meditative inspiration that sites experience at the centre of the poem, or at least signs off with ‘place’ as the poem’s postscript. Actuality of place seems to be almost an afterthought, a punctuation of memory. Mossammaparast’s elegant poems create a whole from fragments of text and glimpses of meaning, reminding me of Anne Carson’s explorations of archaic fragments. Antiquity is a presence here but in no way overpowers the sense of a contemporary

observant intelligence. Cultural record is presented with grace. One might choose any poem to quote, but here is ‘Interlude 3’ from the section ‘(Here)’ in entirety: This afternoon moorhens, scratching in the leaves pelican and ibis, the tune of honeysuckle electricity towers’ unbroken Morse the limbic pose of a submerged log and Time, at the bottom of the lake, to date later

colossal humus underfoot percolating to testify

Jells Park

Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement Not exactly puzzle boxes, yet always mysteriously eloquent, the poems circle around certainty, creating eddies of meaning, a different kind of dream from Campbell’s: a metaphysical dreamfield in which the reader contemplates their own surroundings, questioning the way meaning is made, the scale of signification. The poetry seems minimalistic (the contents page lists only the three sections of the collection – ‘(There)’, ‘(Here)’ and ‘Field’) – but Mossammaparast’s simplicity is deceptively complex. The poems are layered with space, pause, and non-sequiturs that move in surprising ways, ‘light / The long pause, fretful and laden. / We are prone.’ (‘Interlude 2’). References range from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Farsi script, the poem ‘Seeing Things’ by Seamus Heaney, and Cai Guo-Chiang’s Terracotta Warriors. Punctuation is both formal and informal, and the poems embrace expansive imagery without compromising tautness. The impression is one of careful thought and text ‘placement’ as though every nuance matters. In the collection’s final section, Mossammaparast fashions a unique spiritual field from lines that travel between cosmos and grass, ‘in a field neither here nor there / where created things are / and absolutes concealed / planes, rolled up in plains / hiding the stem of the leaf / we climb and climb (‘Cosmos’). The oscillation between small and large, grass and cosmos, space and particularity affords this poetry a perspective that is both beautiful and challenging. From poems that reference Sufi cosmology to a poem fashioned from the Islamic 99 Names of God in Arabic, this work impresses as a poetry of integration as well as scale. In their awareness and acknowledgment of past writers and thinkers, Marion May Campbell and Marjon Mossammaparast appear to have similar preoccupations. Perhaps it is this depth of interrogation, as well as the finesse of the poetry, that Upswell finds deeply important. This is poetry of belonging, dislocation, and location. These two books are voiced so differently, yet both exude assurance, uncertainty, a belief in poetry’s centrality to cultural thought and definition. Where poetry directs language, we look and listen: ‘they warp and weft just to say I am’ (‘winds’). g Jennifer Harrison’s ninth poetry collection, Sideshow History, is forthcoming from Black Pepper in 2022. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Poetry

Itchy feet

New poetry from Alison Flett and Hazel Smith Chris Arnold

Where We Are by Alison Flett Cordite Books $20 pb, 73 pp

ecliptical

by Hazel Smith

Spineless Wonders $24.95 pb, 137 pp

azel Smith’s ecliptical features an image of a Sieglinde Karl-Spence work of art,‘Becoming’,a pair of ‘winged feet woven with allocasuarina needles’. It is a striking image, evocative of Mercury, with one foot resting on the other, as if the right foot’s instep is itchy. The idea of ‘itchy feet’ is something that ties ecliptical to Alison Flett’s Where We Are. Flett and Smith are both migrants to Australia; their poetry is sensitive to its site of writing, and to international and interpersonal connections. Hazel Smith is relentlessly experimental: no two poems seem alike in form. Her poetic range is impressive, too; she works along a spectrum from expansive, prose-poetic writing to highly compressed and disjunctive poems. This means that ecliptical, in spite of its experimentation, is not always difficult to read. ‘The Lips are Different’ writes of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian woman denied re-entry to her home on the grounds that she didn’t match her passport photograph – according to officials, ‘the lips are different’. This poem eschews complex image-making in favour of plain speaking and exposing privilege: for white travellers, ‘they are happy to believe that you are / who you say you are’. Just as the poem moves from lips to voice, noting that Mohamud’s voice wasn’t heard, Smith pauses: ‘let me be clear / it’s unwanted ventriloquism / for me to speak for her’. As activist writing, Smith’s political poems are carefully considered. Then there are the poems that ask more of the reader. ‘RankA-Poem’ is a remarkably well-executed survey-as-poem. The brutally short sentences in ‘Firebrand’ evoke bushfire: ‘Bodies cruciform on beaches. Day posing as night. The po-faced fire app. Warming the backs of his legs.’ ecliptical also works with the ‘posthuman’, through several machine-assisted poems. Machine assistance is provided courtesy of Roger Dean, Smith’s partner and collaborator in AustraLYSIS, an electro-acoustic music collective headed by Smith and Dean. Dean has a background in cognitive science, and ecliptical shows evidence of a deep awareness of how memory works. Common experience has memory functioning like a bank of videos we ‘play back’, but neuroscience shows that memories are rebuilt from fragments rather than remembered as units. Memory is unreliable, mutable stuff. Smith gives this thinking as the basis for ecliptical’s title: memory is circuitous and easily overshadowed. There is a hint of Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic. Smith claims that Malley had no influence on the collection or its title, so it seems that Ern’s ghost works in mysterious ways: ecliptical probes deeply into 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

questions of authenticity and identity. Perhaps that’s inevitable in poetry that questions memory, whether it’s the textual memory of Ern Malley’s collage poems, or physical memory. Questions of authenticity and identity are obvious in ‘The Lips are Different’. They’re less explicit elsewhere, but always present. ecliptical ’s opening poem, ‘The Collection’, takes this questioning to its logical conclusion: an overarching theme with moat-like fencing was fashionable but she wanted to spit out the volume in little bits

Read as a manifesto for the collection, this poem denies the book any fixed message or style. ecliptical works more like memory; its identity builds from ‘little bits’.

ound is crucial to ecliptical’s strength, and to Alison Flett’s Where We Are. Flett’s Scottish background is prominent in poems such as ‘No Matter What’: ‘today ahm alive, taes / pointin taewards / ooter space’. Poems such as this are occasional reminders that the reader is in a different sonic space. My internal Scottish accent is dreadful, but reading with a different cadence in mind reveals poetry with a finely tuned rhythm. At times Where We Are overdoes the self-reflexive poem. A clutch of these near the middle of the book have the poet writing herself writing the poem. ‘No Alarms and No Surprises’, for example, seems to betray hesitancy, as if the poet has nothing much to say, though the poem contradicts this, abruptly moving from ‘I wrote this poem / someone used the atm’, to a thought that slides everything to a different scale: all-the-time underground of chemolithitrophs eating only stone

trillions are thriving without light

The poem pulls up short just as it gets going: what’s that got nothing skrauching across

to do with anything? just me the abyss

Perhaps this hesitation reflects the insecurity that goes with meeting new people, with trying to find a place and a community. Whatever the case, Where We Are rewards persistence. ‘No Alarms and No Surprises’ marks something of a turning point. From there, the poetry’s like the fox on the cover: sure-footed and purposeful. This is particularly evident in the longer poems. A sixpart sequence, ‘Semiosphere’, is a formally variable meditation on the fox as a symbol for the wild’s coexistence with the domestic. Part three, ‘Liminoid’, is a short prose story of finding the sublime in an urban encounter with a fox – ‘a pencil line o silens runnin atween me an the fox’. Part five, ‘Parousia-apousia’, combines familiar phrasing with scientific language – ‘you solve me fox, you straighten my gaze / push your bright dark neb through my

CNS’. Other long poems, ‘Seen Through’ and ‘Vessel’, are no less effective. ‘Cemetery Songs’ is an understated concrete poem; a monumental garden of pathways, stairways, and slabs of text. The tension between wildness and domesticity is a theme that Flett signals in her preface, writing of a ‘bone-dry and primal’ longing for her home and people. It’s a motif she taps for ecological thinking, from the empathetic pain of ‘Connections’ to the antipodal shock of the upside-down seasons. ‘Wrong Season Christmas’ is particularly affecting, beginning with ‘Almost a fortnight over 40’ and the lit Christmas tree overshadowed by lit trees in the bush. the smell of burning gum glistering embers of gold the giant fires that birl inside. All that wrapped stuff in the corner turns quietly invisible.

Whether it’s bushfire, a daughter hanging out the washing, or a kitchen door – ‘rain has pixelated the flyscreen’ – Flett’s observations of nature against human life are incisive. At a recent publisher’s event, the question of Hazel Smith’s place in Australian poetry was raised. I imagine it’s a question that vexes any migrant writer, and it’s encouraging that Smith and Flett each find different ways of speaking to and of Australia and its literature. Both are confident in the value of diasporic voices; their different points of view and their different sound. Two references encapsulate the musicality of these collections: Flett’s John Coltrane/Neil Armstrong mash-up from ‘Ars Poetica in the Outback’ – ‘The moon’s theme tune / plays but there are no giant steps.’ – and Hazel Smith’s ‘Listening’ – ‘There was […] no law about how to open your ears.’ g Chris Arnold is completing a PhD at The University of Western Australia. He was shortlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Politics

Fiscal fellow travellers Abetting Putin and his cronies Kieran Pender

Butler to the World: How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals by Oliver Bullough

Profile Books $39.99 hb, 273 pp

he ongoing war in Ukraine is not mentioned in Oliver Bullough’s new book, Butler to the World. That is not unexpected: it went to press before Russia invaded Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin’s illegal and reprehensible invasion looms large over this excellent new book about Britain’s role in enabling financial crime. The invasion is an acute example of the real-world consequences of this industry. Thus, on 9 April 2022, Bullough wrote in a column for the Guardian: ‘the Kremlin is solely to blame for the horror it is inflicting on the Ukrainians, but its ability to wage war derives from the wealth it has accumulated. And that is something we share responsibility for, and something we should address as urgently as we are providing Kyiv with missiles to destroy Russian armoured vehicles.’ As the author sets out in forensic detail in Butler to the World, bankers, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals in London and Britain’s offshore territories have made it their business to help wealthy individuals manage money and avoid scrutiny – with a blatant disregard for the consequences. They have been active accomplices as Kremlin-loyalist oligarchs accumulated wealth and

influence in recent decades, and must now share the culpability. At last, following the war in Ukraine and associated sanctions on oligarchs, a reckoning for these ‘butlers’ has begun. Will it last? Butler to the World begins, somewhat surprisingly, in Egypt in the 1950s. As the sun set on the British empire – underscored by the fiasco that was the Suez crisis of 1956 – Britain searched for a new role in the world. ‘Britain wasn’t the biggest bully in class any more, but it still knew an awful lot about the bullying business, and that knowledge turned out to be very valuable indeed,’ Bullough writes. That role was helping the wealthy, regardless of the provenance of the wealth. Bullough frequently returns to the most famous caricature of a butler – Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse’s stories – as an effective shorthand for the role British bankers, lawyers, and accountants play today.

‘Britain wasn’t the biggest bully in class any more, but it still knew an awful lot about the bullying business, and that knowledge turned out to be very valuable indeed’ From the Suez, Bullough travels (metaphorically, for much of the book was written during lockdown) to London as the City’s financial sector invented the ‘eurodollar’ (US dollars held offshore to avoid regulation), and on to Tanzania, the British Virgin Islands (BVI), Moldova, Scotland, Kazakhstan, and beyond. He relates how legal quirks have been exploited to enable money laundering and to hide dubious wealth, and how British professionals have been all too happy to assist, with regulators largely turning a blind eye. Bullough tells the story of the BVI’s emergence as an accidental tax haven and shell company paradise, after an American lawyer came calling in the 1970s. He goes on the trail of a billion dollars that went missing from Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, thanks to an opaque legal form, a Scottish Limited Partnership. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

One of the strengths of Butler to the World is that Bullough never loses sight of the human cost of this industry. One particularly illuminating chapter describes how Gibraltar, the British territory on the edge of Spain, was instrumental in the proliferation of the gambling industry by undercutting other jurisdictions on taxes and regulation. Britain’s betting problem

One of the strengths of Butler to the World is that Bullough never loses sight of the human cost of this industry – currently estimated at more than $200 billion annually, and leading to about 650 addiction-related suicides each year – began in Gibraltar. ‘Just as the BVI feels divorced from the reality of how its shell companies allow kleptocrats to hide their crimes and wealth companies to reduce their taxes to nothing, Gibraltar is a world away from the reality of young people spending money they don’t have on online games rigged to ensure they can’t win,’ he writes. A world away in the minds of the butlers, perhaps, but having devastating real-world consequences nonetheless. Bullough began his career as a foreign correspondent in Russia, reporting on the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, including the war in Chechnya. His first two books covered this ground: Let Our Fame Be Great (2010), about culture and conflict in the Caucasus, and The Last Man in Russia (2013), on the decline of Russian society. Bullough has since become an expert on financial crime – Butler to the World follows his book Moneyland (which I reviewed in the May 2019 issue of ABR). But the writer’s knowledge of the post-Soviet world, and his journalistic eye for a narrative, help ensure that his work is eminently readable, despite the complexity of the subject matter. If there is a flaw in this otherwise excellent book, it is that Bullough fails to fully interrogate the role of lawyers and the British legal system in assisting foreigners to protect their wealth and reputation. One of the final chapters does explore the rise of private prosecutions, a peculiarity of the British justice system. But Bullough neglects to canvass in any depth how libel proceedings have become a favoured tool deployed by oligarchs to keep investigative journalists at bay. It is a perplexing omission, given that Bullough himself is currently faced with a costly defamation claim brought by the vice-president of Angola over his last book (albeit in Portugal, rather than the English courts). Fortunately, the war in Ukraine has focused Britain’s attention

on the misuse of libel law to silence journalism, a ploy that has been labelled ‘strategic litigation against public participation’ (SLAPP) cases. When distinguished journalist Catherine Belton published a book on Putin and his allies, Putin’s People (2020), her publisher was promptly sued by four oligarchs and a major Russian oil company. Since the invasion, three of the four oligarchs have been sanctioned by the United Kingdom for their ties to Putin. The House of Commons is belatedly investigating such ‘lawfare’. While Butler to the World is largely focused on Britain’s woes, it offers salutary lessons for other jurisdictions, Australia included. We should not be so naïve as to presume that none of the factors that have allowed the ‘tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals’ of Bullough’s subtitle to subvert the British system is present here, even if the problem might not be so acute – yet. Australia’s domestic and offshore anti-bribery and corruption laws have been criticised for their shortcomings. In 2015, the Financial Action Task Force, an international body, called out Australia for failing to apply anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financial laws to professional services, including lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, and trust and company service providers. Seven years later, there has been no action. Australia now joins Haiti and Madagascar as the only three nations yet to even begin the process. In June 2022, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article headlined ‘From Casinos to Houses: Why Australia Remains a Money Laundering Haven’. The reputation management offered by British lawyers is also increasingly influencing the Australian approach to defamation; Roman Abramovich, a now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, sued Belton’s British publisher in Australia’s Federal Court in 2021, in parallel with the London proceedings (both cases were ultimately settled). If Australia does not presently serve as the butler depicted by Bullough, this is largely by accident rather than design. Butler to the World is a timely and penetrating work of investigative journalism. Bullough diagnoses the ills that have allowed Britain to become the go-to destination when ‘dictators want somewhere to hide their money’ or ‘oligarchs want someone to launder their reputation’. In effect, Bullough is holding up a mirror to Britain’s professional services class. The trade may be lucrative, but is the human cost worth it, he asks. Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine – well past the 100day mark, with no end in sight – is a tragic reminder of the high cost of aiding and abetting corruption. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer.

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Language

A rubber cudgel of a word The speciousnesss of resilience

by Anwen Crawford

n his concession speech on election night, after a perfunctory Acknowledgment of Country and a fulsome acknowledgment of Australia’s defence personnel, past and present; after hymning our ‘functioning’ democracy with reference to Ukraine, and intimating that without him we imperil ourselves; after mentioning the ‘great upheaval’ of recent years but failing to use the words pandemic, floods, lockdown, bushfire, or climate change; and after reassuring us that he still believes in miracles, outgoing Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that ‘the one thing’ he had ‘always counted on’ was ‘the strength and resilience and character of the Australian people’. Hansard records 115 occasions on which Morrison has used the word ‘resilience’ in the House of Representatives, beginning in June 2011, when, as the member for Cook, he thanked constituents for the resilience they had shown in turning out during ‘inclement weather’ for a Cancer Council fundraising event. In 2014, during his stint as Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, he praised ‘our social resilience and our cohesion as a country’, and in 2016, as Treasurer, ‘our economic resilience’. Resilience is the liquid sealant of contemporary corporate thinking; the word is as plastic in its applications as it is fluid in the mouth. The first time ‘resilience’ enters Hansard is in March 1908, when Senator John Henry Keating of Tasmania discussed tariff protections for ‘Tool Handles, unattached’ that had been manufactured in the Commonwealth. ‘Notwithstanding the contention that many imported woods are exceptionally suitable,’ Keating observed, ‘we have native timbers possessing the peculiar resilience necessary.’ The connection between resources and economics – the transformation of a thing like a tree into a commodity like an axe handle – continues to be present in more recent uses of ‘resilience’. In April 2022, Senator Rex Patrick asked Senator Anne Ruston, in a Senate Estimates hearing on the Murray–Darling Basin Plan, about the likelihood of government intervention when water for growing food crops proves unobtainable during drought, because the water allocation has been bought by profit-making, cotton-growing agribusiness: ‘What’s the government’s view? Is it just simply to let the market do what it needs to do versus national interest, which a farmer can’t determine, by making sure we have the right mix of crop and the right resilience across the basin in respect of food production?’ Resilience across the basin. One of the characteristics of ‘resilience’ now is the scale of thing it describes: a millionsquare-kilometre river system, or the whole population of Australia. I am coerced into resilience by being one of millions to whom the word ‘resilience’ is applied without distinction, which is why it repels me; we have become as abstract as money. ‘I would contend that in the majority of the cases, the market operates best,’ Senator Ruston said, in reply to Senator Patrick’s question about how farmers might get fodder to their drought-starved animals. Ruston conceded that governments can take action ‘under ex-

ceptional circumstances’, but her now former government was not ‘in the business of intervening and telling people how they should be using their productive assets’. The ‘productive asset, obviously’, Ruston elaborated, ‘is the water and the land’. Resilience and resile both descend from the Latin intransitive verb resilire: to leap or to spring back, to recoil, to rebound. Resile entered English first, in the early sixteenth century, and, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, is also related to the obsolete French word resiler, ‘withdraw from an agreement’. The verb retains that meaning today, in the sense that to resile is to change one’s mind, though instinctively, I want to use resile like I use the word repel: I am resiled by – I recoil from – resilience. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, that epoch of cast iron and concrete, steam trains and safety elevators, ‘resilience’ had a specific application in mechanics as the measure of stress that a substance could withstand. ‘The Resilience of a body is the amount of work required to produce the proof strain,’ wrote Thomas Alexander in Elementary Applied Mechanics, which was published in 1880. Alexander was a Glaswegian civil engineer employed at the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo during the 1870s, when Japan was rapidly modernising, and his book was written for engineering students. ‘If a solid be strained beyond a certain degree, called the proof strain,’ Alexander wrote, ‘it does not regain its original length when released from the strain.’ The solid is still trapped inside ‘resilience’ like a ghost inside a wall; we feel the ghost of the wall. We are the wall, we are a load-bearing column each time we are thanked by employers or by governments for demonstrating our resilience, each time we are asked to be resilient – though the asking is more like telling – through another round of funding cuts, wage freezes, and ‘efficiency dividends’. ‘Resilience’ was uncommon in English until about 1980, the dawn of the neoliberal era, when its usage began to chart a steep, then ever-steeper, upwards trajectory. We are flexible. We can adapt. We will adjust. Weary bodies and broken hearts show through this Latinate flattery, and in this, Morrison’s concession speech was typical – nay, exemplary – of what such language reveals about what its users are trying to disguise. How fortunate that the now former prime minister should find himself alive at a time when, should his house burn down in a bushfire, he can turn to the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, a federal government body established in May 2021 with a view to ‘coordinating … Australia’s national capability to build resilience’, or perhaps to the volunteers of the Australian Resilience Corps: ‘our aim is to create a culture focused on building resilience’. All that is solid melts into air and et cetera; the material with which to build resilience turns out to be resilience itself, if only we can adjust our attitude, prove our aptitude for it. The Australian Resilience Corps is a partnership between NRMA Insurance and the Minderoo Foundation, the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

latter of which is chaired by billionaire mining magnate Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest. How nice to feel the lubricant of immense wealth as one shifts into resilience-building gear. Early in 2020, as Covid-19 first began to circulate in Wuhan, an abandoned accommodation village in Howard Springs, close to Darwin, was repurposed by the federal government as a quarantine camp. The village had been built in 2012 for fly-in, fly-out workers at a gas plant owned by the Japanese energy com-

pany Inpex. It was renamed the Centre for National Resilience, ‘resilience’ in this context barely plugging the fractures of history: fossil fuel extraction, native trees cut down for axe handles, frontier violence, border politics, the whole bloodied lot. Resilience, in its current application, is a rubber cudgel of a word: it might not leave bruises, but the injuries are lasting all the same. g Anwen Crawford’s most recent book is No Document (2021).

Pillaiyar

– that’s Ganesh to you – is pictured with a broken tusk: why? The tale was added late on to the Mahabharata. Vyasa, author requiring a scribe asked that noble child with an elephant’s head. Only, replied the god, if once begun we do not cease ... my pen mustn’t rise from the page. So the poem became difficult: Vyasa improvised knotty passages Pillaiyar had to pause and parse – while he, Vyasa, also took a breath. When the pen broke Vyasa, as promised, kept unrolling that wonderfully embroidered carpet of verse ... The elephant-god had no choice. He snapped off his tusk, dipped the end in ink and wrote with that. Since then, all writing, everywhere, has this character. It can’t decide whether to speed up or slow down. It wants you to understand. Then it plays hide and seek. There are two people here, even before you arrive – playing tug-of-war. Impulse and form. Breath and language. And since the pen is a torn-out tooth red between the lines you’ll taste blood

Vidyan Ravinthiran ❖ Vidyan Ravinthiran’s most recent collection is The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe, 2019). 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

Natural History

The fluffy ambassador A wide-ranging look at the koala Peter Menkhorst

Koala: A life in trees by Danielle Clode Black Inc.

$34.99 pb, 323 pp

his is the third book dedicated to the koala that I have reviewed in ABR in the past fourteen years. That level of attention says much about the place we hold in our hearts for this endearing marsupial. It also relates to the fascinating natural and social history of the koala, along with the wildlife management conundrums it throws up. The koala is probably the most widely recognised of Australia’s animal species. It is also probably the most studied of our roughly 380 mammalian species, so there is a strong knowledge foundation around which to build a good story. The first two books I reviewed – by Stephen Jackson (2007) and Ann Moyal (2008) (ABR, November 2008) – are fine works that thoroughly cover the natural and social history of the koala as it was then understood. However, they are rather academic in their approach and thus narrow in their appeal. By contrast, Danielle Clode takes a more relaxed and engaging approach, deftly maintaining scientific accuracy and credibility as she brings us up to date with the rapidly expanding scientific literature. She ranges widely across koala ecology, evolution, anatomy, physiology, reproduction, diseases, and conservation. Further, she doesn’t hesitate to take the reader on side excursions into related topics such as the fossil history of marsupials, Holocene environmental fluctuations, the evolution of eucalypts, and Aboriginal prehistory. Do not be put off if this subject matter sounds technical – Clode is a master at popularising science and making the complex understandable. I have been actively involved in koala management and conservation for some thirty years. Here, I found almost nothing to object to or even quibble over, testament to Clode’s familiarity with koala behaviour (she lives among a dense population near Adelaide), combined with her biology background. Her understanding of the differences between the threats faced by koalas in the northern and southern parts of its broad distribution through eastern Australia has produced clear and reasoned statements on the differing conservation status and management needs in each area. Indeed, Clode’s portrayal of the conservation status of koalas in southern Australia is pragmatic and refreshing compared to the gloomy predictions and misrepresentations frequently emanating from Queensland and northern New South Wales. There, two debilitating diseases – Chlamydiosis and koala retrovirus (sometimes called koala AIDS) – add to the ever-present pressures resulting from loss and fragmentation of habitat due to the expanding human footprint. In southern populations, these

two diseases, though present, are less pathogenic and consequently have a lower impact on population processes. Southern populations have a unique history: steep declines caused by clearing, hunting, and bushfires around the turn of the twentieth century, fortunate preservation in island havens, followed by a sustained (ninety-nine-year!) translocation program that has seen the koala reintroduced to almost all remaining habitat in Victoria and South Australia. The only downside of this extensive translocation program is that genetic diversity has been lost as a result of the small numbers of founding individuals inevitably providing only a fraction of the genetic material present in the wider population. Happily, there is little evidence that southern populations are being constrained by this genetic shortcoming. Although difficult to predict, future negative impacts are more likely due to the rapid environmental changes being driven by climate change. The book is divided into six parts, each with several subsections. The parts are introduced by a short fictional account describing elements of a koala’s life in its forest environment from the koala’s viewpoint. This device is presumably aimed at scene-setting and personalising the detailed material that follows. Overall, this insertion of a slice of fiction into a work of non-fiction succeeds, providing segues between the parts and enlivening the reader’s experience by adding a koala’s perspective to the narrative, highlighting the daily pressures faced by individual koalas. It takes a sound ecological understanding to pull this off without falling into the traps of anthropomorphism or cloying sentimentalism. The last chapter continues this theme. It begins with a description of a koala’s perfect world, again demonstrating Clode’s nuanced understanding of koala ecology and the natural forces that affect koala populations, for better and worse. She clearly articulates that, even in a perfect world, not all individuals can lead perfect lives. Some individuals are forced into sub-optimal habitat and may not successfully breed or even survive; others succumb to natural diseases. What matters is whether enough new individuals are recruited into the population and manage to breed successfully, thus counteracting the death rate. Too many people in our modern world do not seem to comprehend that individual mortality and population persistence are two very different things. This focus on the individual is amplified for ‘cute’ animals such as the koala, but it is true for all life forms. The worldwide popularity of the koala owes much to its appearance: with its round, forward-facing eyes, lack of a snout, and large fluffy ears, it resembles a combination of teddy bear and human infant. But that is not a rational reason for giving it top conservation priority. As Clode points out, there are many species of Australian flora and fauna more immediately threatened than the koala. Despite this, in the aftermath of the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires, people from around the world donated millions of dollars to Australian conservation organisations. They were frequently motivated by a heartfelt need to ‘save the koalas’. Perhaps then, the most important role for the koala is as an ambassador for the rest of Australia’s embattled nature. To this end, Danielle Clode has written an important book that focuses on the koala but is really an impassioned and informed plea for the conservation of Australia’s flora, fauna, and wild places. This is natural history and science writing at its best. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2022

Open Page with Michael Winkler

Michael Winkler lives in Melbourne. His most recent book is Grimmish (Puncher & Wattmann), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He was the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize. His essay, ‘The Great Red Whale’, is available on the ABR website.

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

My sister died seventeen years ago and there aren’t many days I don’t miss her. I’d like us to be walking together beside the Murray River near our place in Merbein, hearing her laugh, and being renewed by the sunshine through the river red gums.

What’s your idea of hell?

Being trapped. Physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, morally.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Temperance.

What’s your favourite film?

A tie. Sunset Boulevard (1950): glorious. Man of Flowers (1983): flawed but mesmerising.

And your favourite book?

Moby-Dick (1851) contains multitudes.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Anne Bonny, Judas Iscariot, Paul Robeson. Some good stories there.

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

Dislike: Woke (pejorative). Bring back: fair dinkum. Its prominence has been washed away by waves of cultural cringe, but in a time when spin doctors, spivs, and speculators are in the ascendant, I’m cheering for its return.

Who is your favourite author?

As a long-time fan of this column, my nomination is the one most regularly cited: prolific and prodigious Toomany Toname. Beyond that, how fortunate to be a reader in this country when Alexis Wright, Helen Garner, Michelle de Kretser, Evelyn Araluen, and Maria Tumarkin are at their zenith.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Thomas McNulty and John Cole and their fierce simple love in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (2016). I always envied the brio of Huckleberry Finn. And, apologies to Lucy-lovers, but I’m most fond of Olive.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

The combination of hard work, talent, and a great ear producing prose that makes you gasp with surprise and pleasure. Not just sentence-level brilliance, but stunning paragraphs and extraordinary pages. Plot, character, and theme are subordinate, for me, to strings of sentences that make my heart race. Luminescent pearls rolling one after another. 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2022

(photograph by Joe Winkler)

Interview

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

My early reading was heavily dependent on what I could find in small-town libraries. Mainly Australian authors: Ruth Park, May Gibbs, Ivan Southall, Colin Thiele as a kid; Arthur Upfield and Xavier Herbert in mid-teens. I read what was around. When I was about fifteen, a woodwork teacher lent me Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970), and a window opened.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. My teenage passion for Jack Kerouac was slavish and predictable. I’m glad to have moved on.

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

Beyond the Zero. The host, Ben, interviews contemporary authors and fosters discursiveness and excellent reading suggestions.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Fear and laziness.

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

Ones who have no fear and no laziness. I like some evaluation, not just explication. I enjoy the way occasional wild reviews shake things up – Joshua Cohen on Gordon Lish, Kevin Power on Megan Nolan, Andrea Long Chu on anyone at all. I admire the grace and depth of music critic Ian Penman. The first time I read Beejay Silcox in ABR I became a fan. She is formidable and fabulous.

How do you find working with editors?

I’m guessing this question was written by an editor, and is thus a trap.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given, and occasionally euphoric after a successful session. My admiration for skilful panel hosts is unbounded. However, I’m cautious about the idea of writer as performer. I care about the writing, not about whether the author is a raconteur who can tongue-and-groove road-tested anecdotes into glib opinions without a stumble.

Are artists valued in our society?

Serious artists, in Australia? No. Is that a problem? I’m not sure. There is some value in being undervalued; it can be liberating, and might lead to better art – but it doesn’t pay the rent.

What are you working on now?

I have dreamed up a strange little story, and I’m trying to devise a novel structure to best suit its telling. It should be complete in less than twenty years’ time. g