Mozart... Beethoven...
Beethoven... Mozart...
When you can’t decide, take yourself back to the lolly shop of your youth and buy one of each!
Beethoven 9: Ode to Joy
25–27 OCT
Don’t miss the greatest of symphonies. Conducted by Edo de Waart.
Beethoven 7
7–9 NOV
Rhythm & energy. The mesmerising seventh symphony is full of pulsing intensity and drama.
Lisa Batiashvili plays Prokofiev 2
28 FEB–2 MAR
Anne-Sophie Mutter plays Tchaikovsky
14–16 JUNE
Taikoz & the SSO
22–24 FEB
Powerful Taiko drums, pulsing with power and passion.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AzkabanTM
APRIL 2018 Harry soars across the big screen with the full score live.
Arabella Steinbacher plays Bruch 1
19–22 SEP
Renaud Capuçon plays Korngold 16–17 NOV
The Bernstein Songbook
10–12 MAY
From Candide to West Side Story led by John Wilson.
A Night at the Speakeasy
29 & 30 JUNE
Rhapsody in Blue with a side of 20s hits.
The mood outside the State Library of Victoria on 15 November 2017 was exultant – once the precarious line from Canberra had been restored and the ABS’s expatiatory chief statistician, David Kalisch, finally announced that 61.6 per cent of Australians had voted Yes in the postal survey. The feeling was one of relief and euphoria. It was over, at last, and the democratic rights of all Australians had been ratified by a substantial majority of Australians.
Elsewhere, there were recalcitrants. Later that morning I appeared on The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine and Karina Okotel, a prominent opponent of marriage equality. Ms Okotel lamented the likely challenges to archbishops and businesses and civil celebrants – totally ignoring the feelings of a class that has been persecuted for centuries. The right, as Dennis Altman wrote in The Guardian, are bad losers.
Congratulations to everyone who organised, lobbied, debated, written, and signed letters (includ-
ing our own). This is a famous result, and surely a turning point from the nation. There is an exquisite irony in all this: Tony Abbott and his ilk have succeeded in unifying liberal-minded Australians in a way we haven’t seen in two or three decades.
My fuller comment on the result itself appears on page 9. Ed.
liveable palaces
There are some outstanding art exhibitions on offer at present, especially the elegantly installed Mapplethorpe show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which Helen Ennis will review for ABR Arts (we will also run this in our January–February double issue).
The National Gallery of Victoria has several exhibitions at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. They are: The Highway is a Disco (Del Kathryn Barton); Our Knowing and Not Knowing (Helen Maudsley); Palace of the Republic (Louise Paramor); Ensemble (Mel O’Callaghan); and Transformer (Gareth Sansom). Sophie Knezic is
Collective coherence
Dear Editor,
It was disappointing to read Stephen Mills’s commentary on my recent Making Modern Australia: The Whitlam government’s 21st century agenda (ABR, 11/17). From a collection of eleven chapters Mills refers to just four and fails to mention the remaining seven. In doing so, he renounces any realistic attempt at a ‘review’ of the collection as a collection. There is no indication of the breadth of the book nor of the authors; the contributions of Stuart Macintyre, Murray Goot, Carol Johnson, James Walter, David Lee, and
Greg Melleuish are simply ignored. Since these remaining seven chapters cover topics immediately identifiable as having strong contemporary resonance, to ignore them in a review that claims the collection fails to evidence the Whitlam government’s twentyfirst century agenda is puzzling.
Mills has nothing but praise for each of the four chapters he mentions. How puzzling, if not absurd, that Mills can then ask, ‘what is the implication [of this] for modern Australia?’ Was the protection of universal health insurance and its counterpoint ‘mediscare’ not a key issue in the double
our reviewer.
The NGV exhibitions were launched on 16 November by the Victorian governor, Linda Dessau, who, in a cringe-making address, presented like a junior minister in the state government, extolling the ‘liveability’ of Melbourne and the ‘caring’ nature of all art (tell that to Francis Bacon). Her Excellency even tried to revive the old Sydney –Melbourne divide. It felt like marketing at its most banal. If we must have these expensive viceregents in their palaces, they should do better than that.
pRizes galoRe
Poets don’t have much time to enter the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now worth a total of $8,500. It closes on 3 December. Essayists have longer: the Calibre Essay Prize (now worth $7,500) doesn’t close until 15 January 2018.
Meanwhile, we look forward to announcing details of the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in the next issue.
dissolution election just last year? And was that election itself not a failed attempt by Prime Minister Turnbull to do as Whitlam had successfully done in 1974 and use the mechanism of s. 57 to pass stalled legislation through a Joint Sitting of both houses of parliament? Whitlam remains the only prime minister to have done so, yet Mills sees no implications in this for modern Australia.
Likewise, Michelle Arrow’s exploration of the Royal Commission into Human Relationships into every aspect of ‘sexual citizenship’ only leaves [Letters continue on page 5]
Peter Rose
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Benjamin Law: Moral Panic 101 Dan Dixon
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A win for Namatjira
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
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Mills pondering how this in any way demonstrates ‘the claimed Whitlam agenda for the twenty-first century’. Seriously? That this comment could be written in the midst of the same-sex marriage debate and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is remarkable.
Finally, I simply cannot reconcile Mills’s prime concern being not with the individual contributions but with the lack of a preface, without which, Mills suggests, ‘the book lacks coherence’. While it is gratifying to see individual contributions acknowledged, Mills fails to see the significance of their collectivity – as if their presentation in singular form has somehow diminished their intrinsic and acknowledged value. The contributors, and most importantly your readers, deserve better than this.
Jenny Hocking, Clayton, Vic.
Stephen Mills replies:
It must be a professional failing of the academy that its inhabitants too often assume the coherence and relevance of their output as self-evident. That at least seems to be the case here, where the purported editor did not see it as necessary in the book itself, or even in her letter here, to provide any rationale, theme, or context to pull this diverse collection together. Instead it is all supposed to be ‘immediately identifiable’. Readers may join the dots as they see fit; the ‘intrinsic and acknowledged value’ of the contributions, it seems, needs no further elaboration.
The fundamental point of my review was this book’s ‘agenda’ title raises valid questions – about causality, political reform, and the recurrence of public policy problems – that should have been addressed by an editor. My review did acknowledge the breadth
and credentials of the contributors, and argued that they have been let down. Lest readers be misled, Jennifer Hocking’s own chapter on s. 57 makes no reference to the Turnbull double dissolution or to ‘medi-scare’; likewise, Michelle Arrow’s chapter does not mention the same-sex marriage debate or the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. So context, it seems after all, is useful. But for that you’ll need to read the newspapers.
Dear Editor,
How much I enjoyed Elisabeth Holdsworth’s illuminating essay ‘If This Is a Jew’ (ABR, November 2017). In particular, I loved Elisabeth’s description of her ‘feast of audacious hospitality’. While I have allegiance to no particular faith, I take great pleasure in occasional visits to different places of worship – be it temple, synagogue, mosque, or church – for the sense of unity among the congregation, for the peace, calm, and hope that somehow thicken the very air, and for the uniqueness of the individual services. Overall, how similar are the messages. As Holdsworth points out ‘… as so often happens when Jews and Muslims get together, we ended up discussing what unites us rather than what divides us’. If I were allowed one wish, it would be that from the ignorance and upheaval of the current day, understanding and coherence not only eventuate, but triumph. It begins by educating ourselves and by abandoning our fears and prejudices – and it ends in a willingness to listen to others.
Tangea Tansley (online comment)
Thin walls
Dear Editor, I attended the first of Musica Viva’s
Melbourne performances of Rachel Podger and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (reviewed by Zoltán Szabó in ABR Arts). Here, too, Podger subtly interacted with the audience along the lines of what Szabó described. But I welcome such gestures. The economics of professional musicmaking in Mozart’s Europe were such that performers had to make sure that their audiences had a good time. Concert-goers routinely drank and ate during concerts, and no doubt talked as well. Any walls between the performers and audiences would have been very thin, and I think performers would have worked hard to engage their listeners, probably much more than Podger does.
It is time we moved away from music performance as purely cerebral, desiccated, and devoid of bodily communication between performers and audiences. It would make performances of classical music more engaging, accessible, and successful.
Brian Long (online comment)
Zoltán Szabó replies:
I discussed Rachel Podger’s ‘interaction’ with the audience because I did not find it subtle at all. It distracted from the enjoyment of the music. What may have been common practice centuries ago has changed. Thank goodness too! Otherwise our audiences would also eat, drink, and make bodily noises during performances. Nowadays we pay more attention and sit quietly as a sign of respect towards the artist’s hard work and the performance.
Like it or not, the fourth wall is there, in theatre, ballet, opera, concert halls. It fulfils a purpose – one with which I happen to agree – and in this concert the convention was ignored for no obvious or justifiable reason.
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by Peter Rose
As expected, the postal survey has produced a strong majority in favour of marriage equality. 61.6 per cent of respondents have voted Yes –the sort of majority that no recent Australian government has achieved at a federal election. A postal survey that few people wanted – a sop to bigots, reactionaries, and the prime minister’s enemies in his party – has endorsed the accuracy of numerous opinion polls. After a divisive and hugely expensive survey, the people have delivered an emphatic message. Like nearly all our key allies around the world, they have no problem with the notion that all adults should have the right to marry –not just some.
In the early days of the campaign, Australian Book Review was surprised by the despondency of many Australians, long inured to the illiberal and obfuscatory tactics of the far right and their friends in the media. With the first exit polls, the mood quickly changed to one of relief and resolve. People lobbied, debated, advertised, and – best of all – organised. Hundreds of organisations and companies (ABR among them) expressed unequivocal support for marriage equality. I spoke to a number of parents and grandparents who had exhorted their peripatetic children to make sure they voted. Alex Miller put it well when I invited him to endorse our Open Letter: ‘One very good, and unexpected, result of this public discussion is that those of us who knew ourselves to be one with the family of LGBTI now feel more openly a part of that union. Before this business, the togetherness was implicit, now, at least here in this community, it is a stated reality. And stronger, I think. People have stood up.’
Today there will be much euphoria in the LGBTI community – and beyond. Liberal-minded Australians will share our relief that a country almost pathologically averse to social change and reform for two decades has called time on intolerance, alarmism, and backwardness. As Peter van Onselen wrote in The Australian, ‘It took the public to do what politicians haven’t had the guts to do for years.’
That said, marriage equality will not be available until parliament legislates. It remains for our parliamen-
tarians to endorse this reform without further delay or qualification. Enough is enough. Australians will not tolerate more furphies or procrastination.
Unexpectedly, 2017 may turn out to be a signal year for progressivism in this country. Marriage equality (inconceivable two decades ago) is all but a fait accompli. The New South Wales and Victorian state parliaments are close to legalising euthanasia (a right supported by an even more overwhelming majority of Australians, as revealed in countless opinion polls). Recently, the disgraceful limitation of the Namatjira copyright, to the exclusion of his family, has been resolved fairly and honourably.
Much was written during this campaign – some of it bigoted rubbish, but mostly thoughtful arguments on both sides. None spoke better sense than Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute, who reminded us that: ‘It is a foundational principle of democracy that all citizens should be treated equally. To depart from this principle requires a compelling reason. In the case of marriage, there is only an appeal to tradition. The naysayers … stir up fear of change just as their counterparts did during the republic referendum campaign. Yet the sky did not fall in on America, Britain or France when they provided for marriage equality. Is Australia uniquely incapable of protecting marital freedom and religious freedom at the same time? How low an opinion of our country do the No campaigners have? To reject their tactics would also be to reject the negative politics that have held Australia back for a decade. If we can get this done, we may surprise ourselves with what else we can get done’ (AFR, 17 October 2017).
Now that Australia has rediscovered its reforming zest of the 1970s and 1980s, let us hope that the age of ‘negative politics’ is over and that we will see action on pressing issues such as climate change, Indigenous affairs, inequality, women’s rights, and the republic.
To paraphrase Diaghilev – and Michael Fullilove –let’s astonish ourselves! g
Peter Rose is Editor and CEO of Australian Book Review
December 2017, no. 397
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
PLEASE EXPLAIN:
THE RISE, FALL AND RISE AGAIN OF PAULINE HANSON
by Anna Broinowksi
Viking, $34.99 pb, 312 pp, 9780143784678
ROGUE NATION:
DISPATCHES FROM AUSTRALIA’S POPULIST UPRISINGS AND OUTSIDER POLITICS
by Royce Kurmelovs
Hachette, $32.99 pb, 272 pp, 9780733639241
More than any other political party in Australia, One Nation represents a puzzle for commentators. When trying to explain its support –which has hovered around ten per cent since its revival in 2016 – the temptation is to look for subtext, something deeper, beneath the surface. Could the party’s cultural pitch really be a code for economic concerns, with immigration a metaphor for the genuine fear of international competition? Perhaps we are witnessing a new political coalition of those ‘left behind’ by social change, bound together by a suspicion of everything cosmopolitan. Or is One Nation simply a vehicle for those pissed off at a stagnant political order, hoping to unseat and humiliate its representatives? What really motivates the mythical One Nation voter?
In the United States, this search has become an academic discipline in itself. Writers and journalists, often from big liberal cities, have set out to understand their fellow Trump-voting Americans. A kind of small-town anthropology, these works tie together various trends in modern life: the country’s ongoing heritage of racial tension; its amplification by demographic change and immigration; the slow erosion of industrial communities; and the radicalising force of partisan media. In most interpretations, these elements combined to produce the nuclear explosion that was Donald Trump’s election as president.
In the same spirit, a small but significant number of books have now been written in an attempt to understand One Nation’s resurgence in Australia. And while comparisons between Trump and Pauline Hanson should be cautious – one received sixty-three million votes and commands history’s greatest military force, the other elected four Senators – these works grapple with similar questions and a similar historical moment. As in the United States
and other democracies, why is the anti-immigrant right gaining ground, and why now?
In Please Explain: The rise, fall and rise again of Pauline Hanson (2017), documentary filmmaker Anna Broinowski trailed the party’s leader during her ‘Fed Up Tour’ of Australia, in the long run-up to the 2016 federal election. Propelled around the country in a two-seater airplane, Hanson granted Broinowski broad access to the campaign. The author attended political rallies, observed Hanson’s interaction with voters, drank with her, and even received a tour of her well-manicured country property.
While slightly less Gonzo in style – Broinowski is present in the narrative, but leaves Hanson firmly in the foreground – the book’s most obvious comparison is Off the Rails (1999), Margo Kingston’s madcap diary of One Nation’s 1998 election campaign. Like Kingston, Broinowski opposes Hanson’s politics but is curious about her life, searching for any complexity and nuance behind her story. Along the way, the book gives us a gradual but clear insight into Hanson’s motivations and world view.
Though the book is fascinated by the theatre of politics – Hanson is allegedly ‘magnetic’ in the flesh, with an artist’s feel for rural campaigning – it nonetheless reveals a deeply ideological woman. This can sometimes be obscured by Hanson’s fish-and-chip-shop aesthetic, but it’s central to her politics and appeal. The emotional basis of this philosophy is hinted at early on, when Hanson scolds a young journalist:
I’m a good way through my life. It’s you guys, you’re the younger generation and you need to start taking a real interest and listen to the older generations what this country was once like, because you don’t have the same opportunities
and freedoms we had. You may have the gadgets and knowledge, but you’ve lost so much, to what it used to be.
In The Shipwrecked Mind (2016), Mark Lilla describes the reactionary imagination as feeling ‘shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past, and with an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe’. Hanson feels all these things deeply, and the book does a good job of tracing the beliefs backwards – to her Brisbane childhood in the 1960s, a time when communities remained homogenous, doors stayed unlocked, and families sustained themselves without government help.
While this might look like empty nostalgia – a longing for a world that never was – it expresses itself as an opposition to material and social changes in the world. When One Nation supporters say they’re ‘fed up’ with politicians, they are not really talking about the stupidity of Question Time or the entitlement of staffers – they are referring to the genuine transformations politicians have overseen.
Hanson’s vision of post-1960s Australia is indeed apocalyptic. In her mind, it has been a time of fractured communities, with a lost unity around British culture; of disorienting changes to gender and sex, with fluidity and identity trumping biology; of an increasingly aggressive Islam eroding the unspoken bedrock of Christianity; of a retreating industrial sphere, with opaque services replacing material production; and of a failed multiculturalism, with ethnic groups challenging the established centre. It is a dizzy world in which chaos has replaced order, and One Nation voters don’t like it.
There is, of course, another side to this coin. While Broinowski is generous to One Nation supporters – they are ‘embattled’ and ‘underprivileged’, trodden on by neoliberalism, while their critics are ‘élite’, ‘urban’ and ‘educated’ – she is also fair. Interviewing many of the party’s targets, from Indigenous activists to Asian community leaders, we get a sense of how painful these debates are. For every moment of cultural loss felt by One Nation voters, there is a corresponding moment of exclusion and fear felt by non-white Australians – and one stings a lot more than the other.
As Broinowski acknowledges, the reasons behind this anger at modern Australia are simultaneously simple and complex. These are also explored in Royce Kurmelovs’s new book, Rogue Nation: Dispatches from Australia’s populist uprisings and outsider politics (2017). An independent journalist from Adelaide’s industrial north, Kurmelovs previously wrote about the area’s dying car industry, before becoming Nick Xenophon’s media adviser for six months. Rogue Nation straddles these two worlds, between the polished halls of parliament and a struggling economic periphery.
The author’s short time in Canberra produced a cynicism towards politics, at least in its formal guise, but also exposed him to a broad group of federal independents and minor party politicians. In twenty-three short chapters,
Rogue Nation interviews nearly all of them. It presents these figures – each squeezing their way through the widening cracks of Australia’s party system – as part of a single moment, ‘a snapshot of a time when the rules of the game seemed to be changing’.
Across the chapters, the book draws a line between political degradation, public disillusionment, and support for ‘populists’. Most of the politicians mention this feeling in their interviews, citing it as motivation for their candidacy. Kurmelovs is a crisp writer, and he links these trends to his experience in Parliament House well. In his telling, employment in federal politics is deadening and claustrophobic; a place where well-meaning people mingle with sociopaths, and where good intentions are slowly strangled.
This analysis is compelling, but there are limits to it. ‘Populism’ can be a baggy term, particularly when used to explain such diverse figures. It can also emphasise style over substance. While politicians like Jacqui Lambie, Nick Xenophon, and Ricky Muir might fit the bill – defining themselves in opposition to the composition, approach, and culture of major parties – One Nation’s critique is primarily about content. If her supporters claim that Hanson ‘tells it like it is’, it’s because they agree with what she is saying, not the way in which she is saying it.
Like Broinowski, Kurmelovs is eager to go beyond parliament, engaging with politics ‘out there’. In conversations from Tasmania to northern Queensland, the book talks to people flirting with One Nation votes. It is a grim picture, with declining industries, dwindling populations, and a deep sense of alienation. According to Kurmelovs, these people see One Nation as a ‘bull in a china shop’, there mainly to ‘make the bastards squirm’. Immigration, in this view, is a secondary concern.
Voting is complex, and social contexts shape ideas in many different ways, but this analysis can put too much faith in anecdote. As David Marr outlined in his Quarterly Essay The White Queen (2017), One Nation voters were united far more by policy preferences than wealth, according to Australian Electoral Study data. While they did tend to possess less formal education – itself a form of class – and while the party’s voters expressed anxiety about their economic futures, their defining trait was an opposition to immigration and discomfort with Islam, not any particular income level. Both books could have been more critical of this popular trope.
Regardless, Broinowski and Kurmelovs have both produced insightful, energetic books. Their desire to get their hands dirty – observing politics across a big, imperfect country – invigorates the material, and is a welcome development in Australian political writing. With One Nation’s polling holding its ground, and with the party’s drums beating loudly for the upcoming Queensland election, they should both remain relevant for a good time to come. g
Shaun Crowe completed his doctorate at the Australian National University, writing about political parties and Australian democracy.
THE DISMISSAL DOSSIER: EVERYTHING YOU WERE NEVER MEANT TO KNOW ABOUT NOVEMBER 1975
by Jenny Hocking
Melbourne University Press $19.99 pb, 301 pp, 9780522873009
Paul Keating claims that he wanted to arrest John Kerr. There were perhaps two points at which Kerr might justly have been taken into custody. There was the critical moment just after he handed Gough Whitlam the letter sacking him. Margaret Whitlam wondered why her husband had not simply slapped Kerr across the face ‘and told him to pull himself together’. But if you are one of the dwindling band that agrees with Garfield Barwick that ‘Sir John did his duty’, you presumably also support Kerr’s decision to refuse to see the Speaker of the House of Representatives when he arrived later bearing a no-confidence motion. A self-respecting constitutional democracy might well have secured Kerr’s arrest at this point. His determination to dissolve parliament, and to arrange an election with Malcolm Fraser as incumbent, made a mockery of parliamentary government, never mind democracy.
No event illustrates the intellectual vacuity of Australian conservatism more vividly. The right still regularly assails our senses with its bleating about our glorious British constitutional and parliamentary heritage. But at the very moment when that heritage was being debauched for partisan advantage, they looked on and cheered. Tribalism trumped principle.
Jenny Hocking, Whitlam’s biographer, has done us a dual service in these matters. She has updated, for the second time, her splendid and definitive account, first published in 2015. She has continued to track down primary material that enriches our understanding. But Hocking has also brought to the Federal Court a case to secure the release of ‘the Palace letters’ – the corre-
spondence that passed between Kerr, the queen, and her private secretary. These documents are in the National Archives of Australia, but have been deemed ‘personal’ and ‘private’, and therefore unavailable to researchers under the Archives Act. Unless the court rules otherwise, Buckingham Palace gets to decide in 2027 if we are entitled to see them.
Hocking has funded the case via crowdsourcing, also securing the pro bono services of Whitlam’s son, Anthony, a QC. We are still awaiting the judgment, but even on the incomplete evidence available any idea that the British government and the queen had nothing to do with the crisis has become unsustainable. Kerr received a hint from Prince Charles and later, firmer advice from the queen’s private secretary, that in the event of a rush to the Palace, Her Majesty would probably hold things up. Kerr would therefore get in first. This exposes the governor-general as either paranoid or a liar, since Kerr claimed to have feared that Whitlam would sack him before he could dismiss the prime minister.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was also apparently prepared to contemplate direct interference in Australian domestic affairs over Whitlam’s ill-fated proposal for a half-Senate election to resolve the deadlock. Some FCO officials managed to convince themselves that they were justified in acting to prevent the queen from being drawn into a colonial bunfight between Whitlam and conservative premiers threatening to stop a half-Senate election by refusing to issue writs.
The dismissal was a conspiracy, in the sense that it was the result of secret plotting between several actors – most importantly Kerr and Fraser – behind the prime minister’s back, with the aim of bringing down an elected government. In a less peaceful political culture than Australia’s, failure and exposure would have placed the liberty or lives of both Kerr and Fraser, as well as several others, in jeopardy. But Australia isn’t Turkey: everyone involved well understood that Whitlam would act with the restraint customary in the leader of a constitutional democracy, even if Kerr
couldn’t later forbear from lying that Whitlam had hinted that he would do otherwise.
If proprieties had been observed, Kerr would have acted on the advice of his prime minister, and not shopped around to find backing for an act he was increasingly inclined to undertake. Kerr was determined to find authorities behind whose opinion he could hide, even attending regular seminars with senior legal academics arranged for his benefit at the Australian National University. The professor of law, Geoffrey Sawer, eventually called them off, rightly worried that the university might be embarrassed by its free tutoring of the former chief justice of New South Wales if matters became too hot.
Both Fraser and Kerr lied about it afterwards, but the evidence of prior contact and agreement between them is conclusive. Fraser, an unerring judge of Kerr’s weakness, persuaded the governor-general that unless he did his duty as Fraser saw it, he might find himself in legal trouble for his formal involvement in the government’s unorthodox efforts at raising overseas loans. Hocking slightly reduces Barwick’s significance, since he only came into the picture late, but another High Court judge, Anthony Mason, was advising Kerr much earlier and nearly to the end. It is impossible to imagine his appointment as chief justice by a later Labor government if Kerr and Barwick had not covered up his involvement in the dismissal. There lies an interesting counterfactual for judicial historians.
Could this happen again? I don’t doubt that within the conservative parties today there are plenty of parliamentarians who would block supply to a Labor government if they had the Senate numbers and thought they could get away with it. What is harder to imagine is a governor-general as cowardly, crooked, and contemptible as Kerr. It is fitting that the book ends with an account of his efforts to avoid paying tax on the windfall he expected from publishing his memoirs. His alias in this matter was ‘Mr King’. g
Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University.
‘The
Richard Walsh
WEDNESDAYS WITH BOB
by Bob Hawke and Derek Rielly Macmillan
$29.99 hb, 289 pp, 9781760554262
This is a book with a strange genesis. Its author, Derek Rielly, explains that he confessed to an agent one night that he’d always wanted to meet Bob Hawke. Her response was: ‘I know a publisher who loves Bob. Get me a proposal.’ In order to obtain Bob’s cooperation, Rielly had first to win over Blanche d’Alpuget and then the ‘greatest post-war prime minister’ himself. Given that Blanche herself has had two goes at nailing her husband’s colours to history’s mast, and that there is in fact a vast literature on The Hawke Ascendancy (as Paul Kelly, no less, tagged it), both of these ageing lovebirds are at first a little dubious about what more might be said. But the brash, youngish author (he tells us that Bob ‘filled my teenage season, culturally and politically’) informs the ex-PM he wants to interview him ‘about the joy of love. Desire. Finding true love through infidelity. Fatherhood. Success. Friendship. Religion in the modern world. Sport. The making of a man and what manhood is. Women. The lingering tang of any political bitterness. Enemies. The state of geopolitics. Death.’
David Rielly was born in 1967, in Perth; his father was a pro wrestler and his mother a diplomat (a mating almost as unusual as the spelling of their surname). He is best known as a surfing journalist. He seems to aspire to step into the formidable boots vacated by the late Bob Ellis; he writes vividly and is unafraid to put himself front and centre in his narrative.
Rielly would seem ideally placed to have a blokey chat with Hawkie, while ticking off his bucket list of hot topics. As if to confirm this, at one of their early interview sessions the exPM needs to have a leak but, instead of momentarily retiring, like any ordinary
mortal, he instead pees off his balcony while maintaining the momentum of his yarn-spinning and boasts to his interrogator that his sphincter suffers none of the failings often associated with eighty-six-year-olds.
If you admire a PM who feels compelled to piss in front of a journo, who is clearly a narcissist and is such an egotist that he seems to have no understanding of the collateral damage he inflicted on his first wife and the children she bore him, who chooses Richo and Singo as lifelong friends, this is the book for you. For the rest of us, this is a book that is only fitfully insightful. There are a number of meandering conversations with Bob, but only one of these could be described as spellbinding. To make up for this lack, Rielly goes hunting for other people to talk to, and here he hits pay dirt. His conversations with Kim Beazley and Gareth Evans are pure gold. Even his conversation with John Howard is more illuminating than his chats with Bob.
Kim Beazley has no doubt that Hawke was ‘our best peacetime prime minister’. British political theorist Walter Bagehot once wrote that a great statesman was ‘a man of commonplace opinions and uncommon administrative abilities’.
As Beazley observes, ‘That was Bob.’ He recalls admiringly the economic reforms of the Hawke–Keating governments and Bob’s grasp of the economic truth that the Australian market was too small to survive in an ultra-protected cocoon. This assessment was not publicly popular, but Bob ‘gets out there and he argues his convictions. He always did the Australian public the honour of assuming that they had intelligence. He was the quintessential democrat as a political figure.’
So does this mean that Hawke can take more credit for those important reforms than Keating? Here is Gareth Evans’s verdict: ‘Hawke is right that some of the early big reforms – the floating of the dollar and all that sort of stuff, which Keating has tended in retrospect to say me me me me me – they were probably more Hawke than Keating. Hawke was a good economist and had a good sense of what needed to be done.’
In summing up Hawke as a human
being, Evans says he was highly intelligent ‘but not an intellectual in any way, shape or form, and with no particular interest in the arts’. He reckons Bob read one book a year at most; but once, when he consumed a book on the eighteenth-century British statesman Robert Walpole, ‘we heard about bloody Robert Walpole about three times a week for the next two years’.
Rielly’s narrative is punctuated by compelling stories – like the time Hawkie and Singo won more than a million dollars when their horse, Belle du Jour, won the Golden Slipper in 2000; or, perhaps of more significance, Hawke fighting the good fight against apart-
If you admire a PM who feels compelled to piss in front of a journo, this is the book for you
heid and against mining in Antarctica. But the Silver Budgie’s response to contemporary political events is not particularly penetrating, although he has some interesting ideas, however impractical. He believes that ‘The Chinese are not a hegemonic power. They have not been historically and they’re not now. They don’t make any claims to the South China Sea.’ Everything could be amicably sorted out if the disputing countries could sit down together and develop ‘a regime for joint development’ (surely only a man who has spent much of the last few decades acting as a friend of China could be this naïve). He also believes that China has a role to play in guaranteeing peace between Israel and Palestine. He is a long-time advocate of burying uranium waste in remote parts of Australia and advances strong arguments in favour of this as a future national money-spinner.
David Rielly has served up a curate’s egg as some kind of dog’s breakfast. But, for Hawkophiles, it will be a must read. For others, there may well be enough gems sprinkled throughout to make the hagiography tolerable. g
Richard Walsh is Consultant Publisher at Allen & Unwin. His most recent book is Reboot (MUP).
by Bruno Latour,
translated by
Catherine Porter
Polity, $122.95 hb, 334 pp, 9780745684338
Have you heard of the Anthropocene, the so-called Age of Humans? Our geological epoch has been renamed because human influences on Earth are so profound that not only is our climate changing, but so are our soils, water, and social order. Bruno Latour, prolific French philosopher and historian of science, dedicates his book, Facing Gaia, to this ‘new climatic regime’, which leads to questions no smaller than how the Anthropocene changes our understanding of the planet, species, and politics. As the title indicates, the book is centred around the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, who became patron of the scientific Gaia theory developed by British chemist James Lovelock and American microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and 1970s. But why does a respectable science philosopher born of the French academies devote his book to the ‘monstrous, shameless, primitive’ Gaia when facing this new reality that will determine war and peace, food and water? Why do we need a silly goddess for serious times? The answer is intricately woven and presented in eight lectures, originally drafted for the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, and translated back and forth between English and French.
Throughout Facing Gaia, Latour traces the significance of Gaia theory for the Anthropocene. Gaia theory holds that the Earth’s biogeochemistry is an active and adaptive control system that self-regulates and therefore creates the perfect conditions for life to flourish. The hypothesis helped to expand evolutionary theory and explain questions such as how the oceans are kept in balance; or why our atmosphere contains high levels
of nitrogen and oxygen. Initially ignored and then ridiculed by scientists such as Richard Dawkins, the theory has recently experienced a resurgence as a model for the Anthropocene. Within the humanities, this resurgence has been helped by the science philosophers Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, and Latour, who continuously pollinate each other’s ideas.
The eight lectures are paired. The first two argue that separating the world into the nature/culture binary has been an unhelpful Western practice. The binary falsely attributes active- and passiveness among the world and has led to the deluded idea that humans are the masters of ‘nature’. If we avoid this binary world view, Latour suggests, we understand that our planet is full of ‘agents’, meaning constituents that have the power to act according to their own intention, will, force, desire, need, or function. Seeing the environment’s aliveness and interconnectedness is crucial for envisioning ways out of the exploitations that have led us into the Anthropocene. Interestingly, Latour claims that the role of scientists has always been to populate the world with agents and therefore add to the notion that our environments are everything but passive. Latour’s example is the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who discovered yeast as enabling the transformation of sugar into alcohol. Pasteur’s discovery of yeast as a ‘new’ actor was initially met with suspicion, as he was accused of bringing too much spiritualism to the process of fermentation. Pasteur, however, managed to strike a balance between reductionism (‘it’s just chemistry’) and vitalism (‘a ghost is at work’). Similarly, Latour argues that Gaia theory keeps this balance
between over- and de-animation.
The reasons for Gaia theory’s importance in our current time – the time in which the Anthropocene is being defined – are the subject of the third and fourth lectures. In these crucial chapters, the nucleus of the book, Latour argues that, with issues like climate change, our Earth can be said to have acquired a behaviour which is aptly captured by the metaphor of Gaia. Latour goes back to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod to understand Gaia’s role as ancestral force: Gaia (or ‘Ge’ from the ancient Greek root for ‘earth’) is hard to pin down. Her performances are ‘multiple, contradictory, hopelessly confused’. She is neither a figure of harmony, nor maternal; she animates her children to castrate their father, her husband Uranus. Importantly, she always makes others act. She is also the first prophetess and advises her family on what to do.
Similarly, Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ captures the way in which the biosphere gathers countless agents that function in their own way, with their own goals, but together create the ideal climate for life to flourish. Latour is convinced that with the Gaia metaphor Lovelock achieves the same balance between vitalism and reductionism as Pasteur: Gaia is not meant to represent a holistic or hierarchical super-organism, a God creator who makes her congregation act blindly through the laws of nature; rather, she assembles uncountable deities in the earthsystem. Latour’s strength lies in connecting multiple disciplines; he is practised at seeing the big picture, which generates insights such as this: science needs to communicate findings through language, and language is metaphysical. Metaphors are crucial for science; they are not just linguistic constructs, but properties of the world. Animating the world – or seeing spirit – is not just an act of whimsy, but scientifically valid, as it retains the agency that organisms already have.
The last four lectures consider how Gaia and her feedback loops can help us in these dark times: they contemplate the need to remake societies and politics. Especially astute in these chapters is Latour’s discernment of the supposed opposition of science and religion,
which he understands as two sides of the same coin. Latour describes Gaia as a terrestrial force, which designates the need for humble, situated solutions that break down the impossibly large dilemma of the Anthropocene. ‘Terrestrial’ also describes the imperative to become less anthropocentric, which could mean extending rights and representation to what he calls ‘earthbound’ entities –other species, rivers, oceans. Religion and science, as Latour holds, both need to come down to Earth.
While Latour’s tone can be anecdotal, playful, and personal, his writing remains highly academic and often out of reach. This is unfortunate: academics should aspire to readability, particularly on a topic of such gravity. I was also concerned by the book’s treatment of Gaia theory’s co-developer, Lynn Margulis, who is only mentioned a couple of times as Lovelock’s ‘side-kick’. While Latour traces the links to established philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk at great length, the reader is given little sense of the history of Gaia theory; consequently, Margulis’s importance remains obscure, an oversight suggesting that Latour pays insufficient notice to female thinkers.
The book is nonetheless valuable, if only for its contribution to the community of scholars who will doubtless make good use of the lectures to critically engage with these same issues. The intended audience is multidisciplinary, so that readers with backgrounds in law, theology, science, politics, linguistics, and more will find inspiration. The chapters are discrete: much can be gleaned from choosing just one lecture.
Facing Gaia stands as a toolbox for many disciplines. It harbours crucial insights: we are witnessing a catastrophe in which we are all implicated. It is as if Gaia has become, as Stengers called it, ‘touchy’, as if she reacts to us, calls us. Latour argues that it matters what each of us thinks and does. It will be written in clouds, spelt in stone, legible in water. g
Kathrin Bartha is a doctoral researcher at Monash and Goethe University Frankfurt. Her PhD project examines the Anthropocene as it affects the Australian ecology through fiction. ❖
by Ian Johnson
Allen Lane, $55 hb, 480 pp, 9780241305270
In 1989, as the Chinese Communist Party came to terms with the ongoing significance of religion in post-Mao China, they needed a new formula to explain its survival. Religion was, they said, a long-term phenomenon. It had a mass base; it had national dimensions, in that some of China’s nationalities identified strongly with particular religions; but it also had international dimensions – religious ties linked believers to communities outside China. Reaching the end of the list, the bureaucrats seem to have simply thrown up their hands: religion was, they said, complicated.
It is not entirely clear what the party had in mind by deeming religion to be ‘complicated’. Maybe they just needed a fifth defining feature to create a symmetry with China’s five official religions: Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Or did they have in mind China’s five sacred mountains? In any case, the old dictum that religion was the ‘opium of the masses’ clearly wouldn’t do; that might call to mind Marx’s corollary, that religion was also ‘the heart of a heartless world’ – and that would be tantamount to admitting that there was something heartless about reform-era China.
The complications of Chinese religion have puzzled outside observers, too. Before the Vatican ruled on the question, Christian missionaries famously couldn’t decide whether worshipping at the familial shrine was a religious rite or not. Indeed, the whole concept of ‘religion’ was a foreign import to China, and arguably our Western talk of religious ‘-isms’ has remained a poor fit for Chinese spirituality. To this day, only a minority of Chinese identifies
with a ‘religion’; far more would admit to engaging in (what we think of as) religious activities from time to time. Hence the view of some scholars that Chinese religion isn’t so much a question of what people believe, but of what they do. The CCP’s five official ‘religions’ by no means exhaust the rich pantheon of local deities or the smorgasbord of spiritual practices that persist in the People’s Republic of China. For the most part, the party can live with these ambiguities. Only when fringe-dwellers such as the Falun Gong begin to threaten stability do they risk being outed as religion’s nefarious twin: the evil cult.
Ian Johnson’s The Souls of China is an extended meditation on the complications of religion in China. The book is organised into a series of vignettes of various lengths, strung out according to the cycle of the lunar year – a nod to the agrarian roots of Chinese spirituality. In them, Johnson introduces the reader to religious practitioners of various stripes. We meet the Li family, heirs to a line of yinyang masters in rural Shanxi, whose ritual clanging now finds an audience in international music festivals as much as at local ceremonies; the Whole Heart Philanthropic Salvation Tea Association, active in a growing pilgrimage circuit around Beijing; the Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu; as well as networks of Qigong teachers, and charismatic exegetes of the Confucian classics.
Johnson is not much of a seeker himself. Gone are the days when Westerners might think of China as a place of spiritual salvation, or when Chinese might confidently tout their spirituality in reply to Western materialism. We get only a few glimpses of the author’s own
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participation in the rituals, and mostly his tone is detached.
For Johnson, the real miracle here is the survival of religion in the wake of Maoist repression. His story maps neatly onto a familiar account of postMao reform. Like the early adaptors and DIY entrepreneurs who profited from Deng Xiaoping’s economic pragmatism, a first generation of religious revivalists stepped heroically into the post-Mao void. The individuals we meet in his book mostly represent their disciples, who consolidated the breakthroughs and stabilised themselves in the 1990s, as a political crackdown reduced the space for forms of independent civil society.
A post-Tiananmen turn away from public engagement to spiritualism is most evident in the case of the Early Rain church. These Protestant evangelicals defy the authorities by maintaining links to dissident networks, and consciously propagating a counter-discourse to the party, in which they valorise the role of Christian missionaries in China’s modernisation.
Elsewhere, we see a cautious accommodation with the state. Believers have found ways to skirt the pitfalls of public religiosity and legitimise their practices in different terms, be it as martial arts, or within the catch-all category of ‘culture’. What were once terms of opprobrium in the party’s anti-religious discourse have been reclaimed. ‘People say I’m good at superstition,’ quips one female fortune-teller. Conversely, the atheistic state, while naturally hesitant to rule on questions of theology, has ended up heavily implicated in the daily religious life of its citizens. As one Chinese scholar puts it, ‘Everything is mixed up in China. You have a listed stock company running temples, and the government running temple fairs. That’s China; it’s chaotic.’
Now, in the age of Xi Jinping, Johnson’s interlocutors are cautiously optimistic. Xi himself has cultivated a certain reputation as a patron of religion since his early days in provincial postings. A similar aura surrounds his pop-star wife, said to be a devotee of a Tibetan Buddhist guru. Whether genuinely religious or not, as Johnson says, ‘people want to believe that their
leaders have faith’.
This is a book about the Chinese ‘heartland’, not the whole of the People’s Republic of China, and Johnson avoids discussion of Tibet and the Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Yet setting his account alongside these sensitive regions may yield a slightly different view of them. Particularly in Xinjiang, where renewed faith in Islam is invariably given a political colouring, and treated by the party as inherently subversive,
The atheistic state has ended up heavily implicated in the daily religious life of its citizens
Johnson’s description of the complexities of religious revival in China may give us reason to think differently.
Religion has returned to China, of that there is no doubt. But what is its future? Johnson offers few predictions but evinces a quiet confidence that religion will one day play some role in transforming China. Yet alongside scenes of remembering in the book, there are also scenes of forgetting. City-slicker youth lack the innate knowledge of ritual that rural society imparts. Wistful elders wonder if their children will pass on the ‘old’ traditions that they have so recently renewed. The idea that religion might be a force to remake China in the mould of a Western democracy carries with it the obvious irony, that in so doing religion may well be sowing the seeds of its own demise. g
David Brophy is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney and the author of Uyghur Nation (2016). ❖
by Kieran Pender
Politicians in ancient Greece were well acquainted with the alluring intersection between sport and politics. Alcibiades, an ambitious aristocrat, entered seven chariots in the 416 bce Olympics, aware of the potential political benefits. He came first, second, and fourth, later citing this ‘splendid performance’ to the Athenian assembly while lobbying for a senior military appointment in the Peloponnesian War.
Since then, sport and politics have become even more intertwined. Sports of all kinds serve as potent tools of nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm famously wrote that ‘the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’. The imagebuilding potential of sporting mega-events, meanwhile, has enchanted national leaders from Hitler to Ronald Reagan, Paul Keating to Vladimir Putin.
Despite the storied history, there remain prominent strands of denial. Seven countries refused to attend the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne in response to the Suez crisis, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, and the participation of Taiwan respectively. This angered thenInternational Olympic Committee (IOC) President Avery Brundage, who criticised the ignorance of those ‘unaware of one of our most important principles, namely that sport is completely free of politics’. Six decades later, Tony Abbott tweeted that ‘sport is sport’ in response to American rapper Macklemore’s intention to sing his pro-equality song at a rugby league game. ‘Footy fans shouldn’t be subjected to a politicised grand final,’ griped the former prime minister. Similar sentiments were expressed in certain circles when the AFL conspicuously endorsed the Yes vote during the marriage equality campaign.
If Abbott and his conservative colleagues were truly concerned about the politicisation of sport, they would have been better off looking to Turkmenistan rather than ANZ Stadium or AFL House. In mid-September, the isolated Central Asian state hosted the fifth Asian
Indoor and Martial Arts Games. Australia sent eighteen athletes to the event, returning with two bronze medals in taekwondo.
At first glance, Australia’s participation at the Games seems innocuous – athletes wearing the green and gold compete around the world on a regular basis. But Turkmenistan is no ordinary country. Run by the dictator Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the post-Soviet republic’s human rights record is atrocious. According to Freedom House, Turkmenistan is ‘a highly repressive authoritarian state where citizens’ political rights and civil liberties are almost completely denied’.
Notwithstanding Australia’s recent elevation to the United Nations Human Rights Council, our sporting administrators clearly felt no moral compunction about sending athletes to Turkmenistan. Human Rights Watch announced widespread destruction of houses during preparations for the Games (without adequate compensation for residents), and the host city – Ashgabat –was reportedly sealed off from the rest of the country during the ten-day spectacle. International best practice this was not.
When I put such matters to the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC), there was barely a squeak. I asked four questions of AOC President John Coates, with the phrase ‘human rights’ (and synonyms) used five times. His 140-word response did not include the phrase once. Instead, Coates offered platitudes like ‘Participating in these Games represents a wonderful opportunity for our young and developing Australian team to gain invaluable experience with some of the best athletes in the world in their sports.’ The political benefit of continued sporting engagement with Asia was evident in Australia’s participation, burying any concerns about the propriety of assisting a dictator to burnish his international legitimacy. Nor did the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade seem troubled, stating merely that ‘the AOC is a non-profit organisation independent of government.
Vivian Maier
A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
Pamela Bannos
CLOTH $35.00
Henry David Thoreau A Life
Laura Dassow Walls
The Red Atlas
How the Soviet Union Secretly Mapped the World
John Davies and Alexander J. Kent With a Foreword by James Risen
CLOTH $35.00
Planet of Microbes
The Perils and Potential of Earth’s Essential Life Forms
Ted Anton
CLOTH $25.00
A Village with My Name
A Family History of China’s Opening to the World
Scott Tong
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The Aeneid
Translated by David Ferry CLOTH $35.00
As such, we do not participate in its decision-making.’
If Australia sent athletes to a sporting event in North Korea, public condemnation would be immediate. But there was barely a murmur about the Asian Indoor Games. Not one Australian media outlet was accredited to cover the tournament, and the few stories to be published consisted of newspapers cheerleading for their local bronze medallists. Scrutiny of the AOC’s activities was conspicuously absent. Yet the comparison with North Korea is apt. Berdymukhamedov ‘won’ the 2017 election with ninety-seven per cent of the vote; dissenting voices are jailed or scared into exile. The leader’s predecessor erected a golden statue of himself that rotated to face the sun and named days of the week after family members. It was into this political environment that the AOC sent eighteen athletes.
I was commissioned to cover the Asian Indoor Games for The Guardian but had my media accreditation revoked eleven days before the tournament began. Several other prominent international media outlets, including Associated Press, were also denied entry to Turkmenistan. The AOC and IOC were both advised of this attempt to limit press freedom, an ideal to which both are committed via the IOC Charter. Neither offered any assistance, nor did they denounce the local organising committee’s actions.
the quandaries raised by China’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics. And with Donald Trump currently vandalising the White House, who knows what state the United States will be in come the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Fans and journalists are placed in an awkward position. Is it okay to attend a sporting event in Russia or Qatar, let alone enjoy it? By doing so, are we also contributing to the misuse of sport for murky political purposes? When the 2018 and 2022 World Cups begin, media organisations will inevitably overlook the underlying probity concerns and focus on the sporting action. Who can blame them? Supporters want to read about exciting on-field heroics, not corruption and political repression.
If Australia sent athletes to a sporting event in North Korea, public condemnation would be immediate
At the FIFA Confederations Cup in Russia in June, 2017, I sought the views of fans on these moral conundrums. ‘I do have difficulties with the way the bidding process was conducted, but I feel those issues are above the ordinary fan,’ said one Socceroos supporter. ‘Ultimately I just want to watch the football.’ But with FIFA, the IOC, and other such bodies abdicating any moral responsibility, is it not incumbent upon fans to take a stand?
Australia’s recent morally questionable sporting engagement in Central Asia is not an isolated incident. The Socceroos will participate at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia and, most likely, the next contest in Qatar four years later. Both raise a panoply of ethical issues. The Russian organising committee reportedly used North Korean forced labour to build stadiums, and hundreds of migrant construction workers have died in the Qatari heat. Russia is edging ever closer to authoritarian rule under President Putin, while the emir of Qatar holds absolute executive and legislative authority. Both nations are rated as ‘not free’ in Freedom House’s latest report.
The methods by which Russia and Qatar secured hosting rights are also questionable, with allegations of corruption surrounding both winning bids. Sacked FIFA General Secretary Jérôme Valcke claimed in a leaked email that the Qataris ‘bought’ the World Cup, while Russia’s bid team had conveniently wiped their computers before an international audit could commence investigations. Of the twenty-two-member executive committee that awarded the two events in 2010, seven have since been accused of criminal conduct by US authorities and another five sanctioned by FIFA’s internal ethics body.
In such circumstances, should Australia be participating in these World Cups? Beyond football, the 2022 Winter Olympics will be held in Beijing, repeating
Sport has previously been a force for political good. Sporting boycotts of South Africa contributed to the fall of apartheid, with a number of international sports federations restricting or suspending South African participation. Even there, Australia’s own involvement was far from unimpeachable. Supporting South African rugby and cricketing tours to Australia in 1971, Prime Minister William McMahon expressed views that would not have been out of place in the current debate. ‘I don’t like people to prostitute their political position by saying there’s some moral issue involved,’ said the Liberal Party leader. ‘I think sport ought to be divorced from politics and I believe that’s the view of the Australian people, too.’ McMahon would end up on the wrong side of history, as would Abbott, who has been criticised for participating in a rugby tour of South Africa during the apartheid era.
Forget Macklemore (although I applaud his gesture). There is a more important conversation that Australia needs to be having. Sport has always been political. Australians and our elected officials should appreciate that and hold our sporting organisations to account for their inherently political decisions. When Australians athletes compete in authoritarian Turkmenistan, giving a veneer of credibility to one of the most repressive regimes in the world, we are all complicit. g
Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and researcher, and a regular contributor to The Guardian ❖
by A.N. Wilson
John Murray, $48.99 hb, 438 pp, 9781444794885
Millions of words have been printed by and about Charles Darwin. There are hundreds of biographies, the dozens of books he wrote (including his own autobiography), as well as various pamphlets, essays, correspondence, diaries, manuscript notes, and other ephemera. Fascinating though the man and his work is, it must be hard to come up with anything new to say about him.
Perhaps this is why A.N. Wilson opens his new biography, Charles Darwin: Victorian mythmaker , with the bald statement that ‘Darwin was wrong’. It is a perplexing start. Darwin was ‘wrong’ about a great many things – the mechanism of inheritance, for instance. Scientific theories evolve, adapt, diversify, and separate over time. We don’t expect any of them, not even Charles Lyell’s, to remain set in stone. Wilson’s lack of familiarity with science is apparent from the opening pages through to his references (mostly books, rarely scientific articles). The early pages are filled with imprecise definitions, inapt vocabulary (like ‘fact’ and ‘truth’), culminating in this dramatic question on page five: ‘What exactly, did Darwin discover? Or is his theory just that – simply a theory?’ My forehead hits the table, under the impetus of gravity, which is also ‘simply a theory’, but leaves a bruise nonetheless.
Wilson exhibits many common misconceptions about science and evolution. He thinks that disagreements signify that the science is flawed, rather than in robust good health. He seems to be unclear about (or deliberately fudges) the difference between evolution and natural selection. He lurches through mangled discussions of punctuated equilibrium (the notion that evolution proceeds in sudden jumps rather than gradually),
as if they disprove evolution by natural selection, rather than simply refining the details. He misjudges the depth of time and the rarity of fossil-isation, believing that a lack of ‘missing links’ in the fossil record proves that gradual evolutionary change has not occurred.
Fortunately Wilson is on firmer ground when he sticks to biographical and historical detail. He is quite good on Victorian upper-class society, parochial though it is to classify the international development of evolutionary thought in the context of an English queen’s reign. When Wilson is not offering his own opinions on science and evolution, the book is engaging, nicely written, and feels authoritative and accurate, covering much the same ground as a great many other Darwin biographies. As a result, the book is strangely patchy, predominantly as competent and authoritative as we might expect from a biographer as experienced as Wilson, but punctuated by random twists of contorted logic and unsubstantiated conjecture.
Perhaps rather than trying to unpick the multitude of problematic conclusions that build from Wilson’s flawed assumptions (which many other reviewers have done in detail), it is more interesting to ask why Wilson chose to take this approach to his subject. Wilson’s problem with Darwin’s fallibility is puzzling. He doesn’t focus on the commonly accepted errors in Darwin’s work, but rather contends that a) evolution does not proceed as gradually as Darwin believed, and b) that evolutionary theory lead to a range of undesirable consequences such as Nazism. The notion that scientists should be held accountable for the gross misuse and distortion of their ideas by others is problematic, and certainly ahistorical. As to the issue of evo-
lutionary gradualism, this is indeed one of the great unsolved debates in evolutionary theory, but just because Darwin didn’t solve everything doesn’t mean he was wrong or unimportant.
One of the reasons that punctuated equilibrium is contested is the lack of a convincing mechanism by which it might occur. It is one thing to have an idea about what is happening, another to explain how it might happen – which is, of course, precisely what Darwin provided for evolutionary theory. He hardly claimed to be the first to propose evolution – what he provided (alongside and
Wilson’s lack of familiarity with science is apparent from the opening pages
inspired by many others) was a mechanism, natural selection, along with a vast amount of convincing evidence for it.
Why would Wilson expect Darwin to be saintly, perfect, or infallible? If we are going to engage in the kind of amateur psychoanalysis Wilson favours, perhaps it is because Wilson perceives Darwin as being such an important architect of ‘God’s funeral’ that he demands a more worthy replacement? Wilson’s track record certainly suggests a penchant for royalty and religion. The language of faith, rather than reason, is evident throughout this book. In an article in the Evening Standard, Wilson declared that ‘the ardent Darwinians … would like us to believe that if you do not worship Darwin, you are some kind of nutter’. I think I know why the evolutionary biologists (only historians call them Darwinians) Wilson met might think he is eccentric, but I don’t think it has anything to do with Darwinworship.
Perhaps it is just that Darwin is too popular for Wilson’s liking – a sacred cow ripe for journalistic slaughter. Wilson is not above accepting the conventional idolatry of great scientific figures: Linneaus, Owen, Lyell, and Cuvier are all presented uncritically in clichéd finery. Darwin’s actions, however, come in for detailed investigative scrutiny. Wilson returns repeatedly to the early death of Darwin’s mother as a cause of
major psychological damage: eczema, social withdrawal, moodiness, intense competitiveness, egotism, and gastric illness. Darwin’s claim not to have any clear memory of her is not, according to Wilson, because he was only eight when she died, but because she taught her children botany and Darwin wished to depict himself as ‘self-taught’. Darwin’s self-confessed propensity to tell tall tales as a child is similarly taken as evidence of pathological lying rather than evidence of a curious and imaginative mind. Wilson is no more convincing as a psychologist than he is as a biologist.
Poor Darwin, it seems, is damned no matter what he does. Wilson complains that Darwin’s ‘diary gives no clue, and one gets no sense, when he visited Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, or Lima, that he pursued women. The lack of evidence suggests either very great discretion or very great restraint; if the latter, it was perhaps more easily achieved in one with very low libido.’ I am not entirely sure what Darwin’s libido has to do with the quality of his ideas, but it illustrates the kind of evidence Wilson provides to discredit Darwin’s work and character.
Geniuses are not always nice people, but everything I have read about Darwin (including in Wilson’s book) seems to suggest that he was a fairly nice bloke, if suffering from some health and anxiety issues. I can see nothing in this book that would make me think that Darwin was any more egomaniacal, dishonest, or sexually abnormal than, say, Linneaus. In neither case does this have much bearing on the quality and value of their work.
It is almost as if Wilson struggled to put an original spin on a fairly conventional and uncontroversial story. Perhaps, in the end, Wilson’s approach to Darwin was simply about getting attention and selling books. In which he has succeeded. What is new in this book is not convincing, and what is convincing is not new. There are many better biographies of Darwin to read. Save yourself from having to navigate the unnecessary spin in this one. g
Danielle Clode is writing a biography of nature writer Edith Coleman.
THE FIRST CASUALTY by Peter Greste Viking, $35 pb, 348 pp, 9780670079261
It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.
In the last three decades, the massive power that journalism wielded, and the influence this afforded a coterie of editors and foreign correspondents, has waned. We live among the ruins of a once great industry. Mastheads have fallen or migrated online; the staff that served them have been reduced to a skeleton crew of overworked generalists locked in the hamster-wheel of the 24/7 news cycle, frantically updating stories filed earlier in the day. Refugees from the defence round and the foreign desk, grammar-Nazis, and commissars of style who upheld enviable standards of public literacy have been scattered to a thousand boltholes in PR, corporate communications, and the academy. Its influence increasingly undercut by social media platforms, its fourth estate role challenged by consumer demand for the melding of fact and opinion – or the failure to recognise that there might be any difference between the two – journalism has slipped from the critical list into
palliative care.
With their power and privilege evaporating, outlets and reporters unaccustomed to self-justification have increasingly fallen back on arguments about principle to assert their relevance or to justify their paywalls. Whether they are defending the public interest, safeguarding inalienable rights, pursuing truth, or holding the powerful to account, journalism has suddenly become a theme park for principled endeavour. The spectacle of national broadcasters, newspapers of record, and press barons across the globe defending their right to serve as arbiters, mediators, gatekeepers, and interpreters of the news calls to mind Camus’s assertion that ‘to abandon oneself to principles is really to die’.
A prominent advocate of the media’s burden of principle has been Australian reporter Peter Greste. Arrested in December 2013 while covering the downfall of Egypt’s Morsi government, Greste and his co-accused, fellow Al Jazeera reporters Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed, were the victims of a farcical show trial in which the prosecution advanced no evidence and the defence offered no rebuttal. Convicted of ‘damaging national security’ and conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood and other ‘terrorist’ groups ‘to depict the country in a state of rift and infighting’, Greste and Fahmy were given seven years each, while Mohamed got ten. Greste still seems shocked that the case against him and his co-accused was not laughed out of court. His refusal to accept that justice was a key weapon in the establishment backlash against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and not an impartial principle checking its excesses, suggests a worrying disengagement from the realpolitik he was supposed to be re-
porting on for his employers.
In one sense, The First Casualty is an orthodox prison memoir recounting Greste’s experiences of arrest, imprisonment, and trial, his life behind bars in an exotic location, and the subculture of the penitentiary. Yet the book’s structure implies that he is aiming at something grander than dispatches from the belly of the beast. Chapters on life in the Egyptian penal system alternate with those recounting the global news events that marked the progress of his career and registered the fundamental changes in the news media’s practices, role, and status over this time. As digital connectivity democratised the production and distribution of news, so information was transformed from the stable currency of international knowledge exchange into a weapon of influence and authority. Over two decades, information rapidly moved from being a means of publicising force capability to an integral feature of it, and then the battlefield in itself. Here in the information environment, as Islamic State have demonstrated, insurgents could match, and often master, the firepower of their better-armed adversaries. However, where information is a weapon, its channels and those who staff them, are perceived to be its warriors. In a world where every government department, every political party, every company large or small musters information to serve its ends, all forms of media are regarded as committed to one cause or another and assertions of ‘truth’ or ‘objectivity’ are accepted as indispensable elements of an information strategy. A ‘Press’-emblazoned flak jacket is no guarantor of principled reporting. Journalists have become both deliberate targets, and the collateral casualties, of our own and our adversaries’ intolerance of heterodoxy.
An insistence on transcendent truth, and the principles of moral purity this enables, might appear indulgent in such a polarised landscape, yet these are the arguments that Greste advances. Extrapolating from his experiences, he parallels his ordeal with, and takes up the burden of, others struggling in defence of truth, justice, and freedom of expression. From the fortified compounds of Mogadishu to the offices of Charlie
Hebdo, from the psychotic vaudeville of the White House briefing room to the bloodied deserts of Western Iraq, there isn’t a martyred media worker or a retrograde statute that isn’t mined for a principle that Greste can defend. His Cairo jail becomes a Robben Island of the mind, where, in small acts of defiance – hiding a diary, baking bread, planting vegetables – he strikes a blow for all those suffering under oppression or fighting for their rights.
Absorbed by his own struggles, Greste overlooks the exemplars of principle all around him, the once-andpresent enemies of the Egyptian state, former cabinet ministers, ministry officials, students, and unfortunate bystanders, with whom he shares a cell-block. ‘Extremists’ in the eyes of some, these men have sustained a lifetime of strug-
gle against repression. Growing old behind bars, separated from their families for years at a time, they are a stark reminder that true principles, unlike empty posturing, come at a high price.
Like many others, as Greste’s ordeal dragged on I warmed to his parents. Plunged into a nightmare of alien laws and unwonted celebrity, though visibly battered by their experiences, they retained their sense of humour and sustained a jaunty rapport with the global media. Their focus was not on any larger cause that might reside in their ordeal, but on freeing the son they loved and bringing him home. Humility: now there’s a much undervalued principle. g
Kevin Foster teaches in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
You’ll be lost in the headlong city, turning your oar, older Her house needs to stay open for another October
Oblivious as ever I’ll be wandering across the glassy weir Unmediated the zebra finches scatter, wheel and veer
Now you can wear your new transitions Imagine you’ve co-evolved with the country’s margins
It’s expanding away from us, the infobahn of lights An accelerating mentalese of mythical nights
There’s no telling where the willow-fringed portal is The signs have all been shot away with Remington pellets
The night train is like a highway squall heading our way
A Zanzibar light hangs in the corner apartment of Marina del Rey
Planes rip through the sky. Crumpled up at home, I’m a Midori bottle I am You’re always setting out, a neon arm around memory, like Skyline Sam.
Philip Mead’s new poetry collection, Zanzibar Light, will appear in early 2018.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR OUR CULTURE, LIVELIHOOD AND RESILIENCE?
Monash Arts making a difference through research
Dr Xin Gu of our School of Media, Film & Journalism, is leading an ARC Discovery international research project: Urban Cultural Policy and the Changing Dynamics of Cultural Production. The research explores the dynamics of the “cultural economy” and how changing industry relationships, urban development and policy dynamics affect cultural production. The research is focused on uncovering these dynamics across the inner Northern suburbs in Melbourne and Marrickville, Sydney, with international case studies in Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Shenzhen. It aims to discover new insights into crucial urban manufacturing relationships to inform policy and innovation potential in Australia.
What creative industry strategies does Australia have to consider for its resilience? How does urban cultural policy play into this? What industry links need to be fostered? In seeking answers to these questions, the research is already revealing much potential for Australia towards the development of knowledge, skills and
Have you considered research? For
Research areas
» Film, Media and Communications
» Historical Studies
» Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
» Literary and Cultural Studies
» Philosophy
» Social and Political Science
» Theatre, Performance and Music
practices to create new products, processes and work opportunities. And, through the international case studies, it shares lessons on what policies other countries are developing and how they are responding to the changing dynamics in the creative industries.
We spoke with Dr Gu on specific issues to each city and some of the ideas already arising to solve these spanning policy protection, industry code re-categorisation, “maker/manufacturer” branding, the role of university innovation labs, investment in local manufacturers and potential for global trade. And, as Dr Gu highlights, “as a country, it’s very dangerous if you only have the cultural consumption end of things because of the reliance of global networks and other countries; resilience requires us to be less reliant on other suppliers and this is where the creative industries can excel”.
Access our full interview at arts.monash.edu/xin-gu-urbanculturalpolicy
Practice-based research degrees
» Creative writing
» Journalism
» Music composition
» Music performance
» Theatre performance
» Translation studies
Beejay Silcox
BORDER DISTRICTS
by Gerald Murnane Giramondo
$24.95 pb, 160 pp, 9781925336542
‘I always dreamed that I would read a book that would be absolutely everything that I’ve wanted, and because I didn’t find that book, I wrote it myself. I don’t mean one particular book. I mean my collected works.’
Gerald Murnane (2015 interview)
There is a whiff of mythology about Gerald Murnane. He is quietly infamous for who he isn’t: for the things he’s never done (travel by aeroplane); the things he’ll never do (live outside of Victoria, wear sunglasses); the things he’ll never do again (watch movies or a Shakespeare play); the books he won’t read (contemporary fiction); the books he won’t write (interrogations of national identity); and the literary prizes he hasn’t won (almost all of them – much to critical incredulity). Australians often struggle with strangeness: we do not easily surrender to the unconventional, the wilfully eccentric, or the unapologetically clever. It’s hard to know what to do with a writer who is all three.
As its blurb explains, Border Districts has been ‘conceived as Gerald Murnane’s last work of fiction’. Conceived is a slippery word: it seems to offer the weakly flickering hope that more fiction might follow, despite the author’s initial resolve, but – more likely – it reflects the defining quality of Murnane’s fiction: intention. Murnane has a deliberate mind. If Border Districts has been conceived as his last fiction, it will have a
particular role to play – a culmination, a closing.
An unnamed man is writing a report ‘for his files’. Like his author, the man is writing in the blurred, liminal space between fiction and non-fiction: ‘I am not writing a work of fiction, but a report of seemingly fictional matters.’ Like his author, the man has moved from the city to a remote border town, the last place he intends to live (Murnane is now based in Goroke, on the edge of Victoria’s Wimmera plains). As the man explains with measured directness: ‘I moved to this district near the border so that I could spend most of my time alone and so that I could live according to several rules that I had for long wanted to live by.’ It is a premise with echoes of Thoreau’s ascetic isolation (‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately’), but without his marrow-sucking outwardness.
Murnane has spent more than forty years interrogating and re-interrogating a recurring set of potent images that unite, unlock, and anchor his memories: a dark-haired woman, the swirled centres of childhood marbles, morning light through coloured window panes, the vividness of jockeys’ silks, a spectral pattern of ‘stems and leaves and petals’. In Border Districts, he returns to this kaleidoscopic inspiration, but with a sense of calm finality. ‘Here, near the border,’ he explains, ‘I am even more inclined than of old to complete a pattern in my mind and then go on writing until I learn the meaning for me of such an image.’ There’s a deceptive simplicity about this endeavour; it is simultaneously concrete and ethereal, haphazard and cyclical.
When J.M. Coetzee insightfully profiled Murnane for The New York Review of Books in 2012, he observed: ‘Whether the connections between images lie implicit in the images themselves or are created by an active, shaping intelligence ... [and] whether that energy is always to be trusted – these are questions that do not interest him.’ In this last book, Murnane again deflects these questions, and their implications. Murnane has never been a theorist or a theologian; he is a cartographer of the inner ‘homeland-of-the-mind’.
Murnane divides readers. He can
seem bloodless and cerebral, overly complex and obscure. Such criticisms are valid, but inevitable to Murnane’s enterprise. Like Woolf, Proust, and – more recently – Karl Ove Knausgaard, Murnane’s fiction maps the terrain of a particular mind. Murnane’s fictional minds are like the old-fashioned marbles his child-self favours, they do ‘not readily give their contents away’. If this neural landscape feels too alien, so too will its narrative and allegorical logic. His project is not wilfully exclusionary, but neither is it actively inclusionary.
Devotees are drawn in by Murnane’s dispassionate contemplation, and his willingness to inhabit the borderlands between conjecture and reality, memory and imagination, writer and written, life and death, love-letter and elegy: ‘Even in my youth,’ he writes, ‘I seem to have been seeking evidence that the mind is a place best viewed from the borderlands.’
In Australian literature, Murnane is sui generis: Border Districts is – quite simply – a book for those who love Murnane. Border Districts is a quieter, gentler book than its forebears, weighted, but not haunted, by Murnane’s Catholic upbringing and its echoes. It’s also a synesthetic book, heady with colour: ‘I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine ... I was too clumsy a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being.’ There is nothing clumsy about Border Districts. In its final pages, the narrator’s calm contemplation is jolted by a radio interview with woman on the other side of the border, a writer, a fellow seeker of answers. He imagines sharing his report with her, crossing the border and placing the pages in her hands. It is sublime writing – a plea for connection; an aching, transcendent coda.
The seventy-eight-year-old Nobel Prize contender writes like a clockmaker: every sentence is a finely tooled cog, every book an exquisite machine. With Border Districts, his fictional clockwork is complete; if you put your ear to the pages you can almost hear them ticking. g
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and literary critic.
DEMI-GODS
by Eliza Robertson Bloomsbury
$24.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781408895597
In the preface to Demi-Gods, a boy burns moths with a magnifying glass. A girl – the novel’s narrator, Willa – watches ‘khaki wings’ that seem to be ‘folded from rice paper’. She imagines ‘ten moths circling a candle to form a lantern’, cries later, but does not stop Patrick. The wings ignite ‘like dogeared pages in a book’.
Like dog-eared pages, Willa’s memories are folded for revisiting. Memory, she thinks, returning to a handful of charged encounters with Patrick over many years, is a dwelling place both in the sense of a residence and ‘a lingering’. Lingering disrupts time. It holds and expands some moments, eclipsing others. In narrative terms, the novel’s vivid pieces enact the push-pull of magnification and erasure, set against the backdrop of a child’s developing awareness amidst neglectful and self-absorbed adults.
The protagonist of John Banville’s The Sea (2005) thinks of the past beating ‘inside me like a second heart’. The rhythms of Willa’s memories are similarly syncopated. In prefaces to the novel’s different sections, she reflects in lyrical detail. By now a classics scholar, she brings to her analysis awareness of the shapes of mythological stories. In her later years, she translates Ovid’s Fasti, renowned both for its witnessing of Roman culture and for its erratic accuracy. Eliza Robertson holds these analogues lightly, as provisional lenses.
Brought together by the relationship between Willa’s mother and Patrick’s father, Eugene, in a forced and jerrybuilt pseudo-familial space dominated by adults’ insults and drinking, the children, nine and eleven when they meet, seek escape. While Willa’s sister Joan becomes romantically involved with Patrick’s brother Kenneth, the younger siblings tread more ambivalent terrain.
The first time Willa follows Patrick, he takes an egg from a nest, sucking it and squeezing it in his fist. Willa, like the egg – its shell ‘clay green, murmured with black splashes’ – is Patrick’s fascination and toy. His question: ‘What will you do for me?’ precedes their setting sail in a sinking boat. Both question and precarious voyage set the tone for their relationship.
A jellyfish slips into the boat. Its bell sprawls ‘like an open wound, the net of stingers grazing my thigh’, until its tentacles entangle Willa’s arm. They both know that urine will deactivate the stings. Willa refuses Patrick’s offer to ‘pee on it if you want’. ‘Oh scram’, she says, not sounding like a nine-year-old, and suggesting the remembering self’s shaping of the narrative: ‘I’ve had enough of your ideas.’ But she thrills to the possibility of passing this test in her own way.
Canadian-born Robertson has won a swag of prizes for her short fiction, including the 2013 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for ‘We Walked on Water’ and the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Prize for ‘Pheidippides’. Her collection of short stories, Wallflowers (2014), was published to international acclaim.
Demi-Gods is her first novel. Like her stories, its strengths lie in exquisite and vivid evocation. Each encounter between Patrick and Willa is saturated in sensual detail, prickling and shimmering in the dwelling place of Willa’s recollection. The most striking of Robertson’s descriptions are at once sonically and sensually rich and acutely perceptive.
The sisters grow up like trees crushed close: ‘shovelled into the same soil, competing for sun, limbs warped with forking, needles interlocked’. When he arrives at Willa’s family home, Patrick wrecks, splinters, and buries a doll’s house Willa’s father made for her mother when he designed their beach house. Willa finds her mother standing in a kimono, massaging Patrick’s back with her feet. She imagines Patrick lifted ‘in her talons like a limp trout’. Her mother applies lipstick: a ‘hook of pink the colour of her Campari’. This poetic style stands out at a moment where pared, even austere, prose is prevalent. The bravado and abundance in that risk
is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s style. If, occasionally, a description feels overwrought, or a metaphor mixed (a sky ‘enfolding everything in sonorous blue’), it feels worth it for the daring that is more often rewarded.
On the other hand, Robertson’s eye on the emotional and erotic currents between her characters is unerringly steady. Reading Patrick and Willa’s relationship by means of contemporary pop psychology is a trap Robertson aims to avoid. While Patrick is strange and sometimes sadistic, Willa responds with a rush and charge, and with the emergence of her own ferocity and tenderness. The dynamic, or, as Willa reflects later, the imprint, is something unique they generate, and it brings Willa her most exalted moments, as well as danger and pain.
As they grow older and the sexual tension increases, it is in moments of concentrated exchange that Willa discovers her own power. As adults, she notes that he watches her ‘with a fullness I hadn’t encountered from other boys – as if he hoped to memorise the bone of my collar, the shape of my ears, the gap of fabric under my armpits. I felt important.’ Ultimately, in the power games between them, Willa conducts the charge towards an almost-catastrophic conclusion. This takes place on a boat, with Joan, Kenneth, and the sting and sag of their foundering marriage. Its recapitulation of their first boat trip provides a more thrilling and desperate stage for Willa’s power. This heady section is the centre of this acute, edgy, and captivating novel, its murky, complicated dynamics lingering like Willa’s insoluble memories. g
ATLANTIC BLACK
by A.S. Patrić
Transit Lounge
$29.99 pb, 280 pp, 9780995409828
Writing this review in the first week in November, I look at the calendar and note that we are a few days away from the seventy-ninth anniversary of Kristallnacht, when, over the two days of 9–10 November 1938, at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels, there was a nationwide pogrom against German Jews that saw synagogues, business premises, and private homes ransacked. At least ninety people were killed, perhaps many more. It was a sign of things to come.
A.S. Patrić’s new novel, Atlantic Black, is set – although this isn’t mentioned in the book – about seven weeks after these events, on an ocean liner in the mid-Atlantic on New Year’s Eve of 1938, by which time many people could already see the blackness that 1939 would bring to the world. ‘Anytime I hear that date,’Patrić said in a recent interview, ‘for me it’s a shorthand for catastrophe, for cataclysm.’ The symbolic structure of this book is simple and strong: characters of mixed nationalities are all at sea, crossing a world on the eve of destruction.
Patrić’s name was not entirely unfamiliar in Australian literary circles, but it suddenly became much better known when he won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2016 for his first fulllength novel, Black Rock White City (2015). Much was made by commentators of this being a ‘début novel’, but he had published three earlier forays into fiction, the short-story collections The Rattler and Other Stories (2011) and Las Vegas for Vegans (2012), and the novella Bruno Kramzer (2013). Each of these shows the technical sophistication and intellectual heft that characterised Black Rock White City, and those things are apparent again in Atlantic Black
Katrina Klova is seventeen, the
daughter of the English Anne and the Russian diplomat Audrius. Katerina and her mother are travelling from their most recent home, in Mexico, to France, where they will meet up with him and with Katerina’s brother Kornél. She has memories of living in other cities: Leningrad, Lisbon, Warsaw. They are travelling in direct defiance of Audrius’s wishes, and there’s a strong hint that he knows – as a diplomat would – what is about to be loosed upon the world: ‘In the handbag are the keys to the house in Mexico that they might never see again. Audrius had been clear in a telegraph: Do not sell. Do not leave. He’d been away for two years. The next telegraph that came through was even clearer: STAY.’
Small but ominous things happen to Katerina in a steady stream from the beginning of the book. She slips on the deck and falls over. She sees a man at the ship’s rail who seems to be contemplating suicide. She is bitten by one of her father’s borzois, travelling in cages in the bowels of the ship. She sees a Great War veteran who has lost a leg; then she sees a dead body. And all of this happens before we find out, still quite early in the novel, that her mother, her travelling companion, has had some sort of psychotic break, leaving Katerina –a seventeen-year-old girl on a ship full of strangers on New Year’s Eve – entirely to her own devices. ‘With her mother in the infirmary time has opened up, become strange and uncharted.’
The disintegration continues, exacerbated by the strangeness of New Year’s Eve. Patrić has mentioned the influence of Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game (1941) on his own novel, but what it kept reminding me of was Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story (1948), with its stylised and near-hysterical narrative fragmentation mirroring the disintegration of Europe in wartime. Bad things continue to happen to Katerina, and the downward spiral is formally marked as she reads some letters that her mother has been keeping from her.
With its costumes and its traditional loosening of conventions, this shipboard New Year’s Eve has about it a kind of dark carnivalesque feel, a sense of licensed disorder. Katerina, for reasons that remain murky, has decided to
put on her brother’s dress uniform, and roams the ship in this outfit. Katerina is in drag, her mother is in a straitjacket, her brother is in trouble, and she hasn’t seen her father for two years: this family is splintering. As with Patrić’s earlier prose fictions, there’s something dreamlike and heightened about the world created in this book, with an edge of nightmare. It is too stylised and strange to be thought of as any sort of standard realist fiction; the dialogue alone is formal, sophisticated, and hectic well beyond any real conversation. The whole novel is like an Expressionist painting, with impending disaster just beyond the horizon.
Whether you regard this novel as ‘historical fiction’ depends entirely on what you think that is. Some people think of bodice-rippers; others think of historical fiction as something whose main concern is the public events being lived through during the period in which the novel is set. My definition of historical fiction is any fiction set more than a generation earlier than the period in which it is being written, and good historical fiction always shines a light on the world we live in now, and the way we live in it. Certainly we have never, in my lifetime, had more reason to fear an impending and engulfing international disaster than we do at the moment, and it’s very clear that Patrić’s real subject in this book is the current state of the world. g
Michelle de Kretser
Sybille Smith’s Mothertongue (Vagabond) is a thoughtful, brief memoir-in-essays, chiefly concerned with growing up between two places, Vienna and Sydney, and two languages, German and English. It speaks of loss and carves out recoveries (partial, provisional) in moving, lucid prose; a small gem.
In a big year for Australian novels, here’s a shout out for two collections of stories. Jennifer Down’s Pulse Points (Text Publishing, reviewed in ABR 9/17) consolidates her reputation as a remarkable young writer. Her stories are effortlessly global yet strongly anchored in place. They testify to Down’s remarkable powers of observation and her ability to create bleak but engaging worlds – the longer tales are especially potent. Tony Birch’s Common People (UQP, 9/17) also traffics in characters in difficult circumstances, but Birch is tender as well as unsentimental. This sturdily crafted collection, Birch’s best yet, offers illuminating, sometimes harrowing narratives that sing of solidarity and humour in hardscrabble lives.
Geordie Williamson
In a world where nations are more likely to militarise than to engage in dialogue, to build walls rather than open borders, Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons (Text Publishing, 8/17) is a formally elegant and intellectually rigorous argument for peace. Not a pacifist manifesto so much as a collage built from paradox and juxtaposition –from encounters with images of terror, war, and torture –whose total implication is clear. We in the affluent West cannot remain unsullied by refusing to look at evidence of the multiplying human disasters around us. Sentilles’ book inspires us to be more than we are, to live beyond our historical moment. Not a call to arms so much as a call to the writers’ pen.
In too many biographies of political leaders the private self is lost, or not even sought. Like John Murphy’s subtle portrait of Herbert Evatt (NewSouth, 11/16), which revealed a complex human being, Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (Text Publishing, 9/17) explores our second prime minister’s career with full attention to his intense inner life and family relationships. Her title points to the puzzles, but Brett doesn’t simplify; she ponders, suggests, dramatises. Closely observed and psychologically persuasive, this is more than a life-and-times; it is a life. Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (Viking) looks like an elegy for small-town America, but the degree of loneliness Strout exposes puts paid to any easy notion of community. Strout’s interconnected short stories reveal the isolation of people who have known one another since childhood. As well as lies and secrets, gossip and harsh judgement, there are astonishing moments of compassion. A brilliant, disturbing work.
Tom Griffiths
Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A new agriculture – a new earth (UQP, 10/17) is a revolutionary and lyrical story of a farmer’s journey towards ecological literacy. It is learned, wise, practical, and full of hope. Another impressive big book is Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (UWA Publishing, 6/17). It is a brilliant work of scholarship that effectively establishes a new genre; I hope it inspires more regional literary ecologies. Don’t miss Kieran Finnane’s honest, powerful, and sensitive report from the streets and camps of Alice Springs, Trouble: On trial in Central Australia (UQP). This is journalism of the highest calibre. And I love Alex Miller’s new
novel, The Passage of Love (Allen & Unwin, 11/17), which delivers an enthralling fusion of fiction and memoir.
James McNamara
I should nominate Twitter, because I spent much of the year in America reading and shouting at it. Offline, I hugely admired Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury, 10/17), a magnificent reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone that traces the impact of a brother’s radicalisation on his British-Pakistani family. Mohsin Hamid’s beautiful, magical realist Exit West (Hamish Hamilton) deftly humanises the refugees that Western governments are deftly trying to ignore. Robert Webb’s memoir, How Not To Be A Boy (Canongate, 12/17), is both hilarious and lip-wobblingly poignant. And, without meaning to sound too much of a (tweedy, threadbare) jetsetter, I missed the 2010 Australian release of Ashley Hay’s The Body In The Clouds (Washington Square) while I was living in London, but I delighted in its publication here in the States this year. So I’m going to count it for 2017 and direct some positive shouting towards Hay’s brilliant, multilayered work: ‘huzzah!’
Sheila Fitzpatrick
In China Miéville’s October: The story of the Russian Revolution (Verso, 10/17) – the liveliest of the centenary publications – the dramatic events of 1917 in Petrograd are related with some wistful regret that things didn’t turn out better. Sarah Dowse’s As The Lonely Fly (For Pity’s Sake, 6/17) is a twentieth-century Jewish family saga encompassing Russia, America, and Palestine – a moving story that makes you think. Chris Hilliard’s The Littlehampton Libels. A miscarriage of justice and a mystery about words in 1920s England (OUP) is a real-crime scholarly history, but Agatha Christie fans should love it. It’s Christie’s world, and those dogged and courteous police officers turn out to be real.
Paul Giles
Dennis C. Rasmussen’s The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the friendship that shaped modern thought (Princeton) is a lively and readable account of how two Scottish philosophers conspired to subvert many nostrums of Western culture during the late Enlightenment era. Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (Hamish Hamilton, 11/17) is an important novel that treats relations between white Australian and Indigenous cultures through a framework of dark postmodernist humour. Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (Allen & Unwin, 10/17) sensually incarnates her themes of travel and displacement in a work of fiction that brilliantly evokes the climate, smells, and cuisine of Sydney. And Tracey Moffatt: My horizon, edited by Natalie King (Thames & Hudson) brings together Moffatt’s provocative visual exhibition for the 2017 Venice Biennale with a collection of essays from Alexis Wright and others that testifies to the enduring importance of Moffatt’s oeuvre.
Fay Zwicky’s death was keenly felt among poets and readers of poetry earlier this year, so it is a bittersweet joy to see all of her terse, tough, magnificently spiky poems gathered in one volume. The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky (UWAP) reveals a poet whose oeuvre was the product of what she calls ‘the dissenting imagination’; her poems concern themselves deeply with the ethical realm, but also grapple profoundly with agnosticism and doubt. This meticulously edited collection offers all seven of Zwicky’s books, along with a substantial selection of new and uncollected poems at the end; it is a pleasure to be able to read her life’s work in order and trace how her relentlessly contemporary late style developed. ‘Let us talk of now,’ she said in her masterwork ‘Kaddish’, and her poems follow suit. This indelible collection will be treasured everywhere by those who love poetry.
As one of the Miles Franklin Award judges, I spend the first part of the year reading Australian novels published in the previous year, after which I set out to catch up on other contemporary fiction. Kamila Shamsie’s latest novel, Home Fire, bowled me over: it is a brilliant rewriting of the story of Antigone, set mainly in London, about two families destroyed by jihad and anti-Muslim politics. Apart from fiction, two new titles from university presses – Georgina Arnott’s The Unknown Judith Wright (UWA Publishing, 11/16) and Thea Astley: Selected poems, edited by Cheryl Taylor (UQP, 11/17) – provide fascinating insights into the earliest work of these two giants of twentieth-century Australian literature.
Two books exploring father–son relationships in the context of changing masculinities and gay life stand out. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair (Picador) is as profound as you would expect from this Man Booker winner. Beginning in Oxford in 1940 and stretching over seventy years, Hollinghurst lovingly evokes period detail without allowing it to overwhelm the absorbing drama of lived intimacies. Jim Davidson’s memoir, A Führer for a Father: The domestic face of colonialism (NewSouth, 9/17), by one of Australia’s leading cultural historians and biographers, explores with enviable subtlety the connections between British imperial rule and the patriarchy of a man inside a family. Judith Brett’s excellent The Enigmatic Mr Deakin introduces this Federation-era giant to a modern audience: a timely reminder of the achievements and failings of a century ago, and perfect summer reading for any Australian politician whose aspirations rise above seat-warming.
I am currently judging an Australian literary award, so will refrain from nominating some of this year’s brilliant Australian fiction. Melanie Joosten’s A Long Time Com-
ing: Essays on old age (Scribe) is an important, moving collection of essays on ageing, mortality, and the ethics of writing. Arundhati Roy’s huge – in every sense of the word – The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton, 6/17) and George Saunders’s lyrical Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury, 3/17) extend the novel’s form superbly. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire takes us deep inside the psychology of a disaffected Muslim youth, and draws us into a complex world of loss, pain, filial piety, and (largely destructive) duty. My favourite book of the year is Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible. What a thrill to be returned to the richly extended world of Lucy Barton and her narrative people.
‘I found myself immeasurably and inexplicably moved’, to use the words of one of its ghostly narrators, by George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo. While it is a novel that is bold in its formal innovations, these never overpower the simple, heartrending premise of a father’s raw grief for the death of his eleven-year-old son. Closer to home, I had my unfairly high expectations met by Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (Picador, 8/17), in which the problems of reconciliation between settler and indigene in Australia were slowly and slyly circled, then seized with breathtaking precision. Both novels rose to a similar challenge, the challenge of all serious literature, which is to narrate the unnarratable.
My list begins with the latest dazzling novel by Ali Smith. Winter (Hamish Hamilton) is the second in a proposed series of four seasonal novels and follows the crisp and crackling Autumn (Hamish Hamilton, 1/17). Set between life and death, closeness and solitude, the mythological and the contemporary, it shimmers with snow crystals, etymology, and thaw. Smith’s winter is ‘an exercise in how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again’. I found Arundhati Roy’s sprawling, magnificent The Ministry of Utmost Happiness a demanding and compelling assemblage of ‘a shattered story’. I have begun Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come and am thrilled by the shape of her every sentence and her acute wit and insight. And Reinhard Kleist’s Nick Cave: Mercy on me (SelfMadeHero) is a rollicking confabulation exploring the Nick Cave universe, all myth, slash, and swagger.
Shannon Burns
I particularly enjoyed three works of Australian fiction: Kim Scott’s Taboo combines aesthetic and moral seriousness with unusual success, and is a worthy follow-up to his two Miles Franklin-winning novels. His is a truly generative and urgent brand of fiction. Tony Birch’s Common People is a collection of stylistically unadorned yet artfully wrought stories. Birch hones in on protagonists and communities rarely glimpsed in contemporary Australian literature. Ali Alizadeh’s The Last Days of
Jeanne d’Arc (Giramondo, 10/17) is lightly experimental and emotionally rich – the kind of novel that invites and rewards close attention without forcing the matter.
On the non-fiction front, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-year untold history of class in America (Allen & Unwin) – which documents the social history of the ‘waste’ people transported from Britain to the United States – was particularly eye-opening.
George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, a cascade of voices observing, mourning, and denying death, is a literary high wire act. The peril of an adventurous literary conceit teetering so close to extremes as to threaten collapse kept me reading: the most arresting novel of the year. Judith Brett achieves something rare in political biography: a synthesis of the public life with the beliefs, doubts, private struggles, and spiritual inquiry that made The Enigmatic Mr Deakin our most intriguing prime minister. She rescues Alfred Deakin from recent ahistorical readings of his ‘Australian settlement’. Not only politically minded but also general readers perplexed by the collapse of confidence in public institutions should read Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, and Gwylim Croucher’s No End of a Lesson: Australia’s unified system of higher education (Melbourne University Press) A compelling narrative history of John Dawkins’s revolution in higher education, it is a revelatory instantiation of the intentions, achievements, and unforeseen consequences of recent policy reform.
Tara Bergin’s The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (Carcanet), a wonderfully angry, self-deprecatingly funny yet tragic collection of poems, reflects on women’s lives in fiction and in history. Bergin gives voice to famous people, fairytales, and folklore in her rhythmic, beautifully disturbing collection.
Vahni Capildeo’s chapbook Seas and Trees (Recent Work Press) is crammed with vivid images, and language that shimmers and sings. It presents a landscape of possible universes where ‘trees had evolved to eat other trees’, where the familiar sea becomes strange and unknowable. Supple, subtle, marvellous.
Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers (Black Inc., 8/16) is probably the funniest literary novel since Tristram Shandy. This unmerciful lampooning of ‘extraordinary Australian writers’ – barely disguised, bizarrely intertwined – doubles as a parodic, playful workshop in OzLit, and a portrait of the literary community and its politics.
Andrew Ford’s memoir of his extraordinary life in music, The Memory of Music (Black Inc.), seems somehow effortless, but it’s also profound, deeply moving, and often very funny. The ‘composer’s memoir’ might be a niche
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category, but Ford’s is a classic of the genre.
In Australian poetry, The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky shows what an uncompromising and playful poet Zwicky was. Meanwhile, I loved Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments (Graywolf). Only ninety pages long, Manguso’s book brilliantly extends the literary possibilities of the ancient form of the aphorism. And talking of brevity and renewal, Fleur Jaeggy’s wafer-thin These Possible Lives (New Directions) reinvents the biographical essay. In Jaeggy’s hands, the lives of John Keats, Thomas de Quincey, and Marcel Schwob become nightmarish and uncanny prose poems. Happily, the year also saw the appearance of a new collection of Jaeggy’s stories, I Am the Brother of XX (New Directions).
One of my favourite books this year felt like a call to arms: Briohny Doyle’s Adult Fantasy (Scribe). Doyle’s book is about how difficult it is for our generation to come to terms with our own adulthood, because so many of the markers of that stage – a house, a stable career, a marriage –are so often unavailable to us; the book seemed to articulate something (some things) that I’d been feeling, vaguely, for years. It’s smart and funny and fierce, but never angry or divisive – it isn’t interested in the intergenerational slanging wars that so often categorise this kind of discussion in the media (there’s nary an avocado toast in sight), rather, in a much more personal muddling through that’s somehow still hopeful and affirming and bold.
This year I particularly enjoyed reading Laurent Binet’s witty and irreverent novel The 7th Function of Language (Vintage), a parodic thriller that pokes fun at the influential cohort of French philosophers and literary critics (Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, et al.) whose work colonised the humanities in the latter decades of the last century. In a rather more serious vein, I also enjoyed thinking about the arguments proposed in Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger: A history of the present (Penguin), which seeks to understand the political volatility of our own time by tracing its origins all the way back to the eighteenth century. It is an impassioned and rather narrowly focused book that draws some long bows, but one that nevertheless contains important insights. My final hat-tip is to Wayne Macauley’s Some Tests (Text Publishing), a subtle and quietly moving novel about illness and death. Macauley’s stylised and artfully paced narrative, which gradually takes on a dreamlike quality, is a fine example of his ability to evoke the inchoate sense of dissatisfaction and existential disquiet that lurks beneath the surface of contemporary life.
I loved the mix of vaunting ambition, vendetta, and sheer madness in Their Brilliant Careers, Ryan O’Neill’s wicked re-imagining of Australian literary history. A weird mob,
these great writers. O’Neill acknowledges Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas as essential background, and Vivian Darkbloom walks on wonderfully from Nabokov. Satire is its own reward. Julie Koh’s Portable Curiosities (UQP, 8/16) is darkly comedic, too, combining formal inventiveness with a poker face in a particularly sharp collection of short stories. ‘The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man’ is surely a classic. Then there is Sam Carmody’s The Windy Season (Allen & Unwin, 11/16), an emotionally charged novel that kept me awake at night, raw and selfscrutinising in its exploration of the ‘toxic masculinity’ in a West Australian fishing town, scarier than any shark.
Many terrific Australian poetry books have been released this year – how to choose? I was impressed by volumes from many small, indeed, micro publishers, such as Sydney’s Subbed In. But Alison Croggon’s New and Selected Poems 1991–2017 (Newport Street Books) is a long overdue highlight, a deliberate reconfiguration of her poetry, thus, a ‘new’ work. Croggon, again, shows us how to do things with lyric in ways I can only envy. Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives reads like meticulous yet dreamlike collage. The essay on John Keats is worth the price of admission alone. Equipment for Living: On poetry and pop music (Simon & Schuster) by Michael Robbins is an intense, if at times overheated, exploration of the consolations of poetry and music. He’ll never get me to love metal, but his Basho-to-Rhianna ‘playlist’ is a smart coda.
Evgeny Finkel’s eloquent Ordinary Jews: Choice and survival during the Holocaust (Princeton) shows how serious historical research can benefit from the perspective of a political scientist. Claire L. Shaw’s Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, community, and Soviet identity, 1917–1991 (Cornell) is a landmark in the history of disability and the Soviet welfare state. A stunning first book, it covers the entire Soviet experience from a thought-provoking perspective. Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin, 11/17) was published in Russian in 1985 and in a hard-to-get English translation in 1988. This stunning oral history remains unsurpassed. Finally, it is back in print. Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex (Icon Books), finally, makes short work of scientific sexism. Male evolutionary biologists sometimes claim that men evolved to be promiscuous because they can, allegedly, make 100 babies a year with 100 different women. The schedule involved would be punishing, as Fine points out.
Australians should long remember Mark Colvin – for his authoritative ABC voice (its British modulations raised Bob Hawke’s hackles) and his exemplary integrity as both radio presenter and foreign correspondent. So the publication of Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a spy’s son (Melbourne University Press, 3/17), a few months
before Colvin’s untimely death, was an unexpected bonus – revealing the extraordinary life behind that Radio National sangfroid. Colvin, committed journalist and seeker after truth, was the loving – and loved – son of a Cold War MI6 spy. I found his story psychologically complex and professionally inspiring.
Alex Miller’s new novel The Passage of Love is capacious, wise, and startlingly honest about human frailty and the permutations of love over time. Frankly autobiographical, it is also a work of fully achieved fiction, ripe with experience, double-voiced, peopled with unpredictable men and women, and set in Miller landscapes that characteristically throb with life.
Glyn Davis
For sympathy and insight, Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin is a welcome contribution to analysis of Australian politics. A difficult subject, often deliberately elusive, is captured with skill. Through close and compelling reading of Deakin’s private writing, Brett brings to life his political thinking and spiritual wrestling. An important book.
For sheer reading pleasure, Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: a father, a son, and an epic (Knopf) is compelling. This classical scholar leads us through a semester teaching The Odyssey with his father in the classroom, reflecting on parallels between Odyssey and Telemachus while he displays the hidden weaving in Homer’s text.
Alice Oswald is a precise and powerful poet. Her latest collection, Falling Awake (W.W. Norton), is about change in the natural world, with reflections that speak to motion among people. The opening poem about rain, ‘A Short History of Falling’, approaches perfection.
Anna MacDonald
A number of books have remained with me this year. Teju Cole’s captivating collection, Blind Spot (Faber & Faber, 11/17) rewards slow reading. Cole’s photographs are presented in abstract relation to short texts that read as part prose poem, part metaphysical investigation, and part memory fragment. The whole is often heart-stopping. Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is challenging in the most necessary sense. A polyphonic epic, this novel incorporates stories of hijra, Kashmiri rebels, Guajarati Muslims, and is clearly a counterpoint to Roy’s political activism. Beverley Farmer’s This Water: Five tales (Giramondo, 6/17) is a lyrical and resonantly interwoven rewriting of myth, fairytale, and folklore. Farmer’s last work, This Water affirms her place among Australian literature’s pre-eminent stylists. And Eley Williams’s collection, Attrib. and other stories (Influx Press), playful and genuinely original, is a joy to read.
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been misread by some critics as being untidy and too polemical. But well-kept gloom or neat literary dystopias
won’t satisfy this reading heart. Roy has said that her return to fiction was prompted by a frustration at ‘winning the argument but losing the battle’. Well, her return has produced the most virtuosic and emotionally affecting response to our era’s profit-driven barbarities that I know of. In many ways it makes real some of the ideas prescribed by ground-breaking Californian academic Donna Haraway in her Staying With The Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Duke) Like Roy, Haraway is responding directly to our age with what could be described as a permacultural approach to organising human society. Staying With The Trouble sits alongside Charles Massy’s wonderful The Call of The Reed Warbler as the most regenerative non-fiction stimulants I digested this year.
Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons, a word collage, is a complex and original reaction to violence, warfare, and conscientious objection: I’m still thinking about it, still dipping back into it. Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin is a reminder that meticulous scholarship can also be elegantly written. Kim McGrath’s Crossing the Line: Australia’s secret history in the Timor Sea (Redback) chronicles decades of Australian misbehaviour, notwithstanding developments since the book was published in August 2017. The quarterly Mekong Review continues to impress with its mix of Southeast Asian-related criticism, analysis, reportage, fiction, poetry, and more.
We’ve had a feast of Helen Garner with her reissued Stories and True Stories (Text Publishing) for her seventy-fifth birthday, and Bernadette Brennan’s ingenious A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (Text Publishing, 5/17), which gets around the subject’s resistance to biography by viewing her life through her writing, as Garner herself does. Michelle de Kretser warns that The Life to Come may be her last novel. If so, I will miss her mastery of metaphor, her laser insight into the yearnings and pretensions of characters – writers, shopkeepers, travellers; friends, lovers, neighbours – and her scrutiny at once of the domestic minutiae and the global context of their lives.
Living with a bird-watcher, I welcomed The Australian Bird Guide by Peter Menkhorst et al. (CSIRO Publishing, 10/17) as a gorgeous lure to spend more time in nature.
I am enthusiastic about the two new Fleur Jaeggy translations published by New Directions this year – a collection of essays called These Possible Lives and a collection of stories called I Am the Brother of XX. Everyone seems to be talking about this enigmatic Swiss writer, now in her late seventies, and with good reason. Two Australian novels stand out. The first, Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden (Text, 6/17), is a cut black gem of a book: beautiful, compact, and sinister. The other, Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, overflows with intelligent,
incisive observations about identity, imagination, and privilege. I am currently working my way through The Tracker (Giramondo) by Alexis Wright, and it’s proving something of a revelation. It’s both an exhaustive account of the life and work of activist Tracker Tilmouth and, crucially, an experimental form of ‘collective’ memoir.
My literary heart belongs to the rule breakers – to the form smashers and narrative knotters. George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won me over early and easily this year with his fragmented tale of Abraham Lincoln’s transcendent grief for his lost son. A novel haunted by its spectral cast, but also by the ghost of an American future yet to come. Sarah Sentilles’ tender collage essay Draw Your Weapons was an unexpected marvel: equal parts treatise, history, meditation, and prayer. Her premise – that art can vitiate violence – is unapologetically idealistic and deeply necessary. Closer to home, Odette Kelada’s début novel, Drawing Sybylla (UWA Publishing, 12/17), was a mercurial wonder, illuminating the inner lives of Australia’s women writers. And finally, The Sarah Book (Tyrant Books) – an almighty wallop of a book. I wouldn’t have encountered its author, West Virginian Scott McClanahan, had I not lived just across the state line – I’m deeply glad I did.
Robert Hass’s handsome Little Book on Form: An exploration into the formal imagination of poetry (Ecco) begins: ‘A single line is a naked thing. It is both light and heavy. It is, obviously, the basic unit of all lyric forms.’ I could read his prose all night long. One of the contemporary masters of the line is Alice Oswald, whose Falling Awake is ever awake to the repetitions of the natural world. In a hat-tip to Wallace Stevens, ‘Slowed-Down Blackbird’ ends with her blackbird on the edge ‘trying over and over its broken line’. Also in pride of place on my bookshelf are The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky and Lionel Fogarty: Selected poems 1980–2017 (re.press). ‘Do yourself a favour’, Fogarty says borrowing from a Stevie Wonder song – ‘educate your mind’.
The most imaginative Australian history at present comes from young women, who locate our past in a wider world. Sophie Loy-Wilson’s Australians in Shanghai: Race, rights and nation in Treaty Port China (Routledge), an evocative account of the transnational lives and chaotic mobility that challenged the White Australia Policy, prompts us to rethink national history. Katherine Ellinghaus’s fine study, Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and assimilation policy (Nebraska) digs deep into American archival sources to show how
ideas about ‘mixed-blood’ facilitated the white takeover of Indian land. In locating her subject in a broader consideration of settler colonialism, Ellinghaus helps us to understand the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Australia. Further afield, I recommend Harvard historian David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A history in ideas (Yale). It reminds us that civil wars are now the most common kind of warfare and refugees – including the almost five million from Syria – their most vulnerable victims.
Michel Leiris’s Fibrils (Yale) is the third and latest volume in Lydia Davis’s translations of Rules of the Game, his ground-breaking experiment in ‘creative non-fiction’. A meditation on the relationship between literature and politics, set against the 1950s background of a visit to Mao’s China, Leiris’s selfexcoriating writing includes a description of his own suicide attempt. This year saw the first visit to Australia by legendary US anthologist, Jerome Rothenberg: a new and expanded fiftieth-anniversary edition of Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred (California), described by Nick Cave as ‘the greatest anthology of poetry ever created’, has just appeared. Among local poetry, Lionel Fogarty’s Selected Poems gathers the best work of this important Indigenous poet in a single volume. Also recommended are three volumes by younger authors, Matthew Hall’s First Fruits (Cordite), Bella Li’s Argosy (Vagabond), and Oscar Schwartz’s The Honeymoon Stage (Giramondo), each of which indicates intriguing new directions for our literature.
Catherine Noske
I was fascinated this year by Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love (Allen & Unwin), and thought it a deserving winner of the Stella Prize. More recently, I’ve been enthralled by Alexis Wright’s ‘collective memoir’ The Tracker, which is creative and important, challenging expectations of the biographical form. Weaving several voices together in a unique cultural history focused on the life of Tracker Tilmouth, Wright’s work is testament to the power of Indigenous modes of storytelling. Finally, this year’s poetry titles from UWA Publishing have been exciting; of the eight offerings from their series, Nathanael O’Reilly’s Preparations for Departure stood out for me. Separately from UWA Publishing came The Collected Poems of Fay Zwicky, poignantly released only days before Fay passed away. Edited with love and subtlety by Lucy Dougan and Tim Dolin, it is a rich body of work from an important poet.
Suzy Freeman-Greene
In Being Here: The life of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Text Publishing), French author Marie Darrieussecq
animates the short life of a passionate German artist with vivid, spare prose. The first woman to paint herself naked and pregnant, Modersohn-Becker died in 1907, at the age of thirty-one, soon after giving birth. This taut biography, written in the present tense, has the urgency and poignancy of the best novels.
In Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles reflects on war, art, the ethics of looking, and how we should respond to the violence governments enact in our name. Sentilles mounts her argument with an accumulation of detail, employing metaphor rather than polemic. Her examination of drone warfare is especially powerful.
Alice Pung’s On John Marsden (Black Inc.) is ostensibly a tribute to an author of Young Adult novels. But this wise, political, heartfelt essay is about so much more.
Mohsin Hamid’s Booker-shortlisted Exit West uses an unexpected fantasy device to disrupt a mode of realism so precise and sharply focused that it would feel like reportage if not for some truly breathtaking writing. His style builds ideas into its very grammar, and gives its account of a world in conflict an extra dimension of meaning and reflection — and sometimes a horrible beauty as well. Closer to home, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner: One woman’s extraordinary life in death, decay and disaster (Text Publishing) is a superbly written book about the redoubtable Sandra Pankhurst and her work as a trauma cleaner: someone who cleans up after hoarders, murders, meth labs, and suicides. This is the startling life story of Pankhurst, a trans woman with a heart the size of Uluru, written in Krasnostein’s irresistibly warm, frank, intelligent voice as she describes sites of sadness and horror that take the reader straight to the dark heart of the human condition.
To narrow the excellent new Australian poetry collections I’ve read so far this year down to four is an almost arbitrary exercise. Among them, however, would have to be Clive James’s unerringly formal and poignant Injury Time (Picador). A comparable technical achievement is Stephen Edgar’s Transparencies (Black Pepper, 8/17). Edgar’s cleverly rhymed poems often end in a single powerful image, leaving us with an awareness of the poem as a resonant whole. A third highly formal book is Euclid’s Dog by Jordie Albiston (GloriaSMH). It’s a pleasure to be carried along by her unfailing metres – and to be surprised by the unpredictable internal rhymes which have so long been a part of her armoury. Melinda Smith has an innate feeling for irony and humour but can also produce poems of extreme tenderness and emotional depth. Her new collection, Goodbye, Cruel (Pitt Street Poetry), displays all of these and more.
Sometimes a year produces a novel that is head and shoulders above everything else, and for me that was George Saunders’s wonderfully weird Lincoln in the Bardo. It reads like a play of fragments performed by ghosts; it weaves historical accounts, fiction and mythology into an inextricable tangle; it is outrageously grotesque, satirical, comical, scary, and poignant. How daring a writer he is: and how well he shows our lack of daring, our skill at deluding ourselves, even beyond death.
Plenty of bold new Australian writing, but perhaps the standout was a first novel that dared to tackle a rich but hugely challenging subject. Pip Smith’s Half Wild (Allen & Unwin, 12/17) transforms the true story of a transgender man accused of murdering his wife into something far beyond the sensational: it is a sensitive examination of a secret life that for all its subtlety also conjures a sense of rollicking adventure. g
‘The best modern successor to Hancock.’ John Hirst (‘First XI: The best Australian history books’)
‘A perceptive, balanced, wide-ranging interpretation of the evolution of modern Australia which is both erudite and well-written.’ Duncan Bythell
‘...an extremely well-written book that seeks to make contemporary Australian society comprehensible to outsiders. In this it certainly succeeds, with its many pertinent illustrations complementing the judicious insights that dot the elegant text.’
The Times Higher Education Supplement
‘I have always judged John Rickard’s Australia: A Cultural History (1988 and revised 1996) the best of the single authored general histories.’ Max Quanchi
Susan Wyndham
CAN YOU HEAR THE SEA?
MY GRANDMOTHER’S STORY
by Brenda Niall
Text Publishing
$29.99 hb, 276 pp, 9781925498790
Brenda Niall has touched on aspects of her own life in many of her admired biographies of writers and artists, such as the Boyd family and the Durack sisters, and Melbourne’s Irish Catholic Father Hackett and Archbishop Mannix. Time – and perhaps the deaths of central people – has pulled her focus in close to tell the story of her maternal grandmother, Agnes Gorman, and through her the extended family, in Can You Hear the Sea?
This portrait of an impressive ordinary woman reminded me of Kate Grenville’s biography of her mother, One Life (2015). Like Grenville, Niall had the gift of her mother’s unpublished memoirs, which she explains were both the main source and the impetus for her book. How fortunate, in both cases, that they were passed on to responsible, professional writers. Niall also applies all her skills as a biographer, drawing on other family records and interviews with surviving relatives, as well as public archives and published histories. She is clear about her process, asking questions, noting gaps, offering her own memories with an easy blend of intimacy and distance, in an authoritative yet conversational voice.
Agnes Maguire, as she was named in 1869, or Aggie, as she was always known, was one of eleven children born
to Jane and John Maguire, owner of a Liverpool match factory in Britain’s north. A brief history of match-making (in the old sense of tinder rather than Tinder) seems at first a detour but becomes fascinating and central to the fortunes of the family, as John and his sons campaign to replace deadly white phosphorus with the red phosphorus familiar in safety matches. The men of the family would become rich, influential, and honoured for their work.
Young Aggie received a solid education for her time while also teaching. Yet at the age of nineteen she seized the chance for greater freedom by taking a ship to Australia with her artistic sister Minnie and brother Joe, for the sake of his delicate health. After Joe died on the voyage, the two women made the bold decision to stay in Melbourne and start their own school.
Aggie’s life was reshaped by her marriage to Richard Gorman. He rode into a northern Victorian town where she was teaching and took her home to his Riverina property, Galtee Park, and his domineering family of graziers descended from an Irish-born settler. Although Aggie was a practising Catholic, the Gormans referred to her as ‘the English bride’, marking her as an outsider and setting up a lifelong tension that is valuable to Niall as a storyteller.
Independence is Aggie’s strongest quality, but she missed her distant Maguire relatives and became a resourceful, caring wife and mother of seven children, including Niall’s mother, Connie, born in 1902. She disciplined her children lightly by sending them outside to resolve their fights, and insisting they did not scribble on her books. Literature runs through the biography as a theme. Aggie read every afternoon and passed her love of books on to her ‘seven little Australians’ and twenty-five grandchildren. Niall sees as significant that she gave the grandchildren Wuthering Heights but not the more sedate Pride and Prejudice. Connie’s identification with the heroine of Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series must surely have planted a seed in Niall, whose first book was on the work of the children’s authors Bruce and Ethel Turner. Aggie’s strong marriage ended with Richard’s death from a degen-
erative disease, leaving her a widow at thirty-nine to raise her family and deal with a complicated inheritance. Her practical and quietly rebellious nature is illustrated by the light floral dresses she wore while mourning. She accepted help from her brothers and brothers-inlaw, but resisted efforts to take one son to England for a privileged upbringing. Her politics were always expressed indirectly but clearly, for example by naming one of her children Joubert, after a Boer general and in defiance of the British.
Niall neatly brings to life the next generation as individuals, with Aggie’s sons going onto the land, into medicine, and to war. Miraculously, she didn’t lose any of them. The Depression hit the family hard, especially the graziers, and Aggie calmly shifted her comfortable life again into a more modest style. Her small Melbourne flat, shared with her daughter Nesta, overflowed with grandchildren until the end of her life in 1953.
In an interview after Mannix won the National Biography Prize in 2016, Niall told me that as a child she often saw the archbishop walking to St Patrick’s Cathedral and wondered where he bought his buckled shoes. She was pleased to find the answer during her research. A lovely touch in this book is that Aggie’s only personal extravagance in her later years was taking a taxi to Lygon Street, Carlton, to order handmade boots ‘from the maker of Archbishop Mannix’s famous silver-buckled shoes’.
Two other possessions are central to Niall’s relationship with her grandmother. When Niall was ten, Aggie gave her a cedar box that her brother Joe had made during the fatal ship voyage from Liverpool. She seemed to know Niall would be a writer. A conch shell, which Aggie had found on a French beach and held to the children’s ears, provides the book’s title and cover. ‘We knew that Grandmother had crossed oceans; somehow she’d brought home the sea,’ Niall writes with respect for a woman who built a dynasty across centuries, was adventurous and stable, traditional and ahead of her time, English and embodied the best of Australia. g
Susan Wyndham is a journalist and writer. ❖
by Noëlle Janaczewska
UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 303 pp, 9781742588049
Every Saturday around Australia, the suburbs hum with the sound of lawnmowers. While cutting grass, the mowers simultaneously decapitate the milk thistles (also known as sow thistles) that sprout in most gardens around the country. But this rude beheading is little more than an inconvenience from which these hardy plants soon recover. Perhaps this is why, despite their benign name, milk thistles rate a mention on the webpage of a company that is synonymous with weedkillers. The Roundup page describes milk thistles as ‘a common weed’ that ‘can reach over two meters if not controlled’. Given the apparent threat, the solution to managing these seemingly triffid-like proportions appears obvious and unavoidable. Homeowners must take part in the ‘war on weeds’.
But what if we consider these apparently weedy outliers from a different angle? Does our view change when we discover that milk thistle sustained Maori and Australian Indigenous peoples for millennia, or when we learn that, during the war, English mothers picked them to supplement the diets of hungry children when other foods were rationed? What if we were to conceive of thistles as ‘stellar performers in the struggle for existence’ rather than as an aesthetic and ecological blight?
Noëlle Janaczewska considers such questions in her aptly titled The Book of Thistles. Like the thistles that constitute her subject matter, she enters marginal territory to do so. Hers is a risky venture, not least because it is likely few people share her passion for this prickly subject. Further, as the author points out, thistles have tended to be discussed in impenetrable language such as that employed by government botanist Ferdinand von Mueller in his ‘practical guide’, Illustrated Description of Thistles, Etc. (1893).
Fortunately, Janaczewska is no botanist, but rather an award-winning playwright, poet, and essayist. While the book’s front cover mentions her having won the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize (a lucrative award in the United States), she has also won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, various playwriting and radio awards, and been a finalist for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Deeply curious about history’s ‘gaps and silences’, Janaczewska’s work explores subjects that have been overlooked or marginalised. In The Book of Thistles, she couples her idiosyncratic fascination for this sub-species with a willingness to transgress the boundaries of literary genres, to explore big themes and questions. Thus, while we learn much about thistles themselves, they are also a vehicle for exploring questions of belonging, value, and marginality. Often witty, sometimes political and occasionally profound, this latest offering from Janaczewska provides much on which to ruminate.
The book is divided into headings, including ‘Names’, ‘War’, and ‘Food’. This structure is a useful device not least because it helps to contain the author’s predilection for tangents, only some of which she signals explicitly. It also enables Janaczewska to move between genres without the chaos this might otherwise represent to readers. She does so adeptly and with humour. Poetry, miniature plays, and minor essays are all contained within The Book of Thistles Her five-page play about the peace a couple achieve when they finally purchase weedkiller – and thus neighbourhood belonging – is a notable example of her obvious skills in this genre. Some of her poetry is a joy. Take, for example, the following extract from one about England, her native country:
Yes, to rushy streams, overarching trees, The midnight snowfall that winter brings No, to a longish list of other things
The research that underpins The Book of Thistles is also commendable. If the book takes us into unexpected places as a result of its overall poetry, it also retains our interest because we learn surprising
things. There were, for instance, large numbers of Afghan shopkeepers in Western Australia in the nineteenth century; Joseph Conrad’s wife, Jessie, was a good cook, including of salsify, a root vegetable belonging to the dandelion family; and bimbimpap means ‘mixed-up rice’. Behind all these intriguing facts is an author who has not only spent much time in libraries but who also draws creatively on a wealth of cross-cultural experience including in Australia, France, and Korea.
Despite the book’s many achievements, minor things grate. Although Janaczewska’s willingness to play with conventions is effective, the incomplete sentences scattered throughout the book are annoying. Suggesting a laziness otherwise absent from this otherwise delicately crafted book, these were unfortunate, not only because they are avoidable, but because they distract from the otherwise accomplished writing for which the writer has been deservedly recognised. At times the book is less engaging than at others. While this may reflect personal taste – the section on food, for example, fascinated me, less so the section on law – it could also be due to a slight unevenness in the writing. Despite these minor shortcomings, The Book of Thistles is a surprising pleasure. Perhaps its greatest achievement is that the humble thistle becomes an unlikely hero of the downtrodden, devalued, and deviant. Although she never comes out and says it directly, Janaczewska appears to identify with the thistle. Like Emily Dickinson, who was herself the daisy she described in her poems, this immigrant from England conveys a certain thorniness and non-belonging that mirrors that of her chosen subject. g
Ceridwen Spark is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.
by Pip Smith Allen & Unwin
$29.99 pb, 390 pp, 97812760294649
In this inventive début novel, Pip Smith recounts the multiple lives of Eugenia Falleni, the ‘man-woman’ who in 1920, as Harry Crawford, was convicted of murdering his first wife, Annie Birkett. Smith employs various types of text–sketches, newspaper articles, witness statements – alongside third-person accounts – to embroider an archive rich in narrative possibilities. The story moves from Wellington, New Zealand, in 1885 to Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century. Each of Falleni’s multiple selves (Nina, Tally Ho, Harry Crawford, Jack, Gene, and Jean Ford) tells his or her own first-person story. In this way, the structure of the novel conveys Falleni’s perpetually shifting identity.
Gender and other forms of performativity are at the heart of this story. Growing up, Nina refuses to be domesticated. She sews the head of a lizard onto a cicada’s body – ‘mainly so the lizard could see what it would be like to fly’ – and recalls stories of men who would wear the skin of a cheetah in order to cannibalise each other. In a first rehearsal of masculinity, Nina cuts her hair, changes her skirts for trousers, adopts a new name, and labours at a brickworks, although for ‘only a ha’penny a day, or the real boys will get jealous’. In Sydney, Harry Crawford is surprisingly strong, walking with exaggerated steps ‘like a man twice [his] size’. His performance recalls that of Lady Reay, a fellow Long Bay prisoner, who ‘couldn’t tell the difference … between acting and its opposite’. Perhaps because there was none.
Ultimately, Smith’s half-wild history unmasks the objective of narrative biography: the need to name, to identify, to domesticate by making singular its subject. Everything in this imaginative novel – its collage of archival and imagined material, its conflicting points of view, its collusion in the performance of identity – celebrates the multiplicity of its transgressive subject.
Anna MacDonald
‘Man up’
HOW NOT TO BE
by Robert Webb
Canongate, $29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781786890092
IS
by Adam Kay
Picador, $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781509858651
The literary world too often disdains comedy writing as unserious. It rarely features in our grander prizes, and is usually relegated to literature’s cheap seats. This is, of course, silly. Great comedy can make as many grave points about humanity as realist fiction. You just get to laugh along the way.
Two crackling literary memoirs by comedians show this seriousness of purpose. Robert Webb is best known for costarring in the Mitchell and Webb sketch shows and the sitcom Peep Show. Given that pedigree, he could have written a memoir about professional glory and pissed banter with David Mitchell. But How Not To Be a Boy is more courageous, offering a Bildungsroman that examines the effect of his mother’s death on his early life, and the culture of toxic masculinity that muffled his grief and stifled his emotional growth (basically, everything you’d get in po-faced literary fiction –plus jokes).
Webb, raised in a working-class, Northern English household, was exposed to corrosive masculinity from childhood; his father’s rages terrorised the family. Webb recalls being hauled from his chair and thrashed with his own shorts without explanation.
As he grew up, Webb didn’t fit in. He was bad at everything expected of a ‘normal boy’ – science, maths, sport: ‘I welcome the sight of the ball arching towards me in the same way that a quadriplegic nudist covered in jam welcomes the sight of a hornet.’ Delighting in reading and comedy, he preferred ‘pretending’ in his room, but was conditioned to feel guilty about it: ‘Pretending
is not Normal. Normal boys have real fights, not pretend fights.’ Similarly, his ambition to be a ‘funny actor’ was kept secret. In his macho, ‘twat-packed’ village, the comedians he admired – ‘formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies’ – were a foreign species. Webb’s plan to join them – by getting into Cambridge and joining Footlights – seemed outlandish.
In part, that unlikely ambition was rooted in fame: ‘Dads don’t hit famous children, right? ... Imagine doing something so wildly beyond the reach of the other boys. What would I care for their … football and swimming and maths and fighting?’ But this dream was shaken by his mother’s death just before his exams. Webb returned to school the day of her funeral and, unable to talk about his grief, became insistent on memorialising her through success. When he didn’t get the marks for Cambridge, he moved back in with his feared father to re-sit his exams, ‘royally bollocksed’ those, then returned to school for another year, a ‘nineteen-year-old man in a school blazer’. While ‘hell-bent on Cambridge’, he was unable to work. Ironically, his father diagnosed the problem: ‘Y’mum just died, mate … bless your old heart.’ When Webb gloomily replied that his headmaster says it’s now ‘curtains for Cambridge’, his dad ‘looks up. “Cunt! What does he know?”’
Not much, it transpires – Webb got in the next year.
As he matured, Webb found empathy for his father. He develops the character in his memoir from a childhood ogre to a man reduced to a ‘walk-
ing powder keg of repressed grief’ by the death of Webb’s brother, aged six, and conditioned to express those feelings toxically: ‘Be a man. Man up. Act like a man. Get a grip … BE A MAN. MAN UP.’ Then alcohol. Then anger.
At Cambridge, Webb unwittingly emulated this response to grief. His unsparing discussion of his appalling undergraduate behaviour is acidly funny as he sweeps through Footlights in a long coat, screaming ‘It’s not ENOUGH’ at the applause. This ‘minty’ behaviour gets worse when he becomes a husband and father. Webb smokes and drinks outside, separated from his family by a windowpane and his own mismanaged grief. Ultimately, he realises that he has been not the sensitive hero but the unwitting villain of his own story.
Webb’s memoir is redemptive: beneath the swaggering, boozy actor is the boy terrified of a thrashing, the teen coping as best he can after his mum dies. His willingness to investigate and reveal unflattering truths as a sustained critique of toxic masculinity is impressive. Rather unsportingly, considering he’s famous for everything else, Webb proves himself a top-notch literary writer.
Similarly accomplished is Adam Kay’s This Is Going To Hurt, the darkly hilarious diaries of his years as a junior doctor. As a newly qualified medic, Kay had no preparation for the chaos. Night shifts ‘made Dante look like Disney … you’re up on the wards, sailing the ship alone. A ship that’s enormous, and on fire, and that no one has really taught you how to sail.’ His hours were harrowing and his patients often showered him in gore, something he describes with doctorly relish. His first experience of death was horrifying: a patient ‘hosing enormous quantities of blood out of his mouth’ that ‘jetted everywhere: on me … on the walls, curtains, ceiling’. After reading his gory description of a de-gloved penis, I needed a lie-down. Medicine contains rich potential for gallows humour, and Kay deploys it masterfully. While delivering a baby, the ‘midwife tells mum to stop pushing and start panting, so she can guide baby’s head out slowly and hopefully avoid too much of a tear. As the head advances,
dad screams, “Oh my God – where’s it’s face?!” Mum understandably also screams, her baby’s head shoots out uncontrolled and her perineum explodes. I explain that babies are generally born facing downwards.’ In another preoperative consultation, ‘I finish consenting a couple for caesarean section. “Any questions at all?” I ask the room. “Yes,” chips in their six-year-old. “Do you think Jesus was black?”’
Kay’s comedy is brilliant and hardfired, made more savage by the terrifying stakes behind it. There is a sense that hysterical laughter is the only thing between him and screaming darkness. Woven through the jokes are the punishing consequences of his work: constant exhaustion, HIV needle-sticks, no home or social life, which ultimately costs him his boyfriend and his best friend. Kay watches other doctors crack: when a colleague attempts suicide, the hospital shrugs – the ‘only surprise is it doesn’t happen more often’. Kay breaks when a baby dies and he nearly loses the mother during an emergency operation: ‘I came back to work the next day … a different doctor … I went six months without laughing.’ He needed counselling, but ‘there’s a mutual code of silence that keeps help from those who need it most’. He quit medicine soon after.
Like Webb with masculinity, Kay uses his experience of burn-out to reveal how a generation of intensely devoted doctors are being ruined by appalling work conditions, their passion ‘bullied out of them by politicians’. His memoir is both a love letter to the NHS and a cri de coeur that seeks to show regulators and patients that ‘Your time in hospital may well hurt [your doctor] a lot more than it hurts you.’
Comedians’ memoirs can be patchy; some owe more to mumbled dictation under the horsewhip of an agent than to literary skill. Others – Stephen Fry’s Moab is My Washpot (1997), Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs (1980), Tina Fey’s Bossypants (2011) – are shining works of lasting value. Webb’s and Kay’s stand amongst them. g
James McNamara is a television writer. He was recently selected for BAFTA’s main talent development program in Hollywood.
THE PACIFIC ROOM by Michael Fitzgerald Transit Lounge
$29.95 pb, 240 pp, 9780995359550
Simile haunts The Pacific Room
So many sentences begin ‘It’s as if …’ that the phrase seems like an incantation.
Michael Fitzgerald writes that he agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson that ‘every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning.’ For the reviewer coming from outside the circle, this book does not so much erect screens as exist within a lush, enticing forest of signs which seems indifferent to one’s presence. As Teuila, the Samoan fa‘afafine, confidently climbs to the summit of Mount Vaea in the dark, we are told, ‘For an outsider there is no hint of what lies ahead, so inscrutable is the dense foliage.’ One is aware that given time and multiple readings, the forest might become as familiar as it is to Teuila. On a first reading, the best option is to let the strangeness of the book seep into one’s consciousness and resist the temptation to seek clarification at every twist in the path.
I did search for one image online. The book circles around the portrait of Stevenson – Tusitala –painted in Samoa in 1892 by Girolamo Nerli, and seeing the painting illuminates much. The painter, the writer, his family, and his Samoan friends populate the novel’s first layer of time. In the second layer, the fragile, haunted scholar Lewis Wakefield comes to Samoa from Sydney to research the painting, ‘to collect an island of voices, to hear notes of dissonance and disquiet’. Other characters pass through the novel, tantalising the reader in short, enigmatic chapters, moving about in this forest of signs like figures in a dream. Simile again: this ambiguous, elusive novel excites the likening impulse more than the urge to interpret. Like a forest; like a maze; like a dream.
Gillian Dooley
Gemma Betros
FLAUBERT IN THE RUINS OF PARIS: THE STORY OF A FRIENDSHIP, A NOVEL, AND A TERRIBLE YEAR
by Peter Brooks Basic Books
$45 hb, 264 pp, 9780465096022
As we approach the end of what might be considered another pretty terrible year, it’s worth being reminded that every age has its tribulations. In Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Peter Brooks – Ivy League professor in comparative literature, and author of Henry James Goes to Paris (2007) –takes on a year in the history of France known as l’année terrible, a year whose physical and psychological violence would, once again, reopen the scars left by France’s revolution of 1789.
The year in question began in July 1870 with France’s misguided declaration of war on Prussia, and ended with the brutal destruction of the Paris Commune in May 1871. In between came the fall of Napoleon III (nephew of Napoleon I), the declaration of the Third Republic, and the siege of Paris by the Prussian Army. Although a newly elected conservative government negotiated peace with Prussia, its terms – demanding reparations from France and the ceding of territory in Alsace and Lorraine – created such a sense of betrayal among Parisians and the National Guard that they hounded the government from the capital, replacing it with the radical Paris Commune. The government regained control only when the French Army invaded Paris in a blood-filled week that saw the city in flames and some 20,000 Communards executed.
For Gustave Flaubert, author of the bestselling Madame Bovary (1856–57), this was a year of horror, a sentiment he shared with writer George Sand. The two corresponded regularly, their letters marked by honesty, support, and often tenderness. Their politics were as different as their novels – Sand was a socialist, Flaubert an élitist – but their views became more aligned as Sand con-
demned the Commune for opposing the legitimate republican government and as Flaubert began to see a republic as the only means by which France might achieve stability.
Flaubert’s horror stemmed not so much from the ravages of war as from the irrationality of his compatriots as they turned first on the Prussians, and then, one another. ‘The odour of the corpses disgusts me less than the swamps of egotism exhaling from all mouths,’ he reported to Sand. Like many, Flaubert travelled to Paris after the Commune’s fall to witness the city’s devastation, lamenting to a friend that if only more people had read his novel Sentimental Education, ‘none of this would have happened’.
Published in late 1869, Sentimental Education was conceived as the story of Flaubert’s own generation, one that had come of age in the momentous year of 1848 when revolution had swept through Europe and installed in France a second republic. The novel follows Frédéric Moreau from lovestruck student to middle-aged failure. Perpetually distracted by his love life, Frédéric misses his role in history, remaining a passive observer at the edge of the events transforming his world.
Why did Flaubert think that his novel about one insurrection could have prevented another? Reviewers disliked the indolent Frédéric, unable to recognise in his ineptitude the author’s own exasperation with the political developments of his age. ‘The current folly is the result of too much stupidity,’ he wrote to Sand, ‘and this stupidity came from an excess of jokery. From too much lying we became idiots.’ The universal suffrage of 1848 had ushered in not a better society but Napoleon III, a rotten leader who had set France, yet again, on a path to devastation and created a regime in which, Flaubert declared, ‘everything was fake’. He predicted that a similar antiliberal reaction would follow this new upheaval, and again bring in ‘a conservative regime of a reinforced stupidity’.
Brooks perhaps takes Flaubert’s claim about his novel too seriously, but it is an effective starting point for exploring what he terms ‘the novelization of history’. Although a historical novel, Sentimental Education represented a de-
parture from the genre by dealing with recent history as experienced by those who lived through it: to ensure accuracy Flaubert spent much time gathering eyewitness accounts. Importantly, he endowed the young Frédéric with the ambition to ‘one day be the Walter Scott of France’ (a line Brooks does not discuss), an ambition that quickly recedes. Flaubert’s interest lay not in romanticism but in realism, and in showing, suggests Brooks, ‘what is at stake for the individual amid the forces of history.’
Flaubert’s horror stemmed from the irrationality of his compatriots
Brooks offers a masterful introduction to nineteenth-century France, stretching from its literary and political worlds, to its photography, to the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, built in a confused attempt to expiate the past. In his account of the Commune, we smell the fires smouldering throughout Paris, hear executions taking place, see blood on the streets, and wonder about the taste of salami de rat, part of the diet of so many besieged Parisians. He also shows how Flaubert’s changing political views played out in the author’s subsequent writings, tracing here the crucial influence of Sand, a writer whose personal life too often still distracts from her work.
The French Revolution had set a blueprint for how the unhappy might try to achieve change: Brooks’s own experiences of the 1968 student revolution in Paris, recounted in the epilogue, remind us just how long it has endured. A novel was never going to prevent the events of 1870–71, but in crafting from an individual life history a cautionary national one, Flaubert sought to excavate the truth behind the dream. While the French Revolution had given birth to new ideologies, it had also fractured them in a way that meant political stability in nineteenth-century France would remain an illusion. g
Gemma Betros is Lecturer in European History at the Australian National University ❖
‘My
Amanda Nettelbeck
THE GOOD COUNTRY: THE DJADJA WURRUNG, THE SETTLERS AND THE PROTECTORS by Bain Attwood Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 239 pp, 9781925523065
The Good Country begins in February 1840 with a crosscultural encounter in Djadja Wurrung country, now central Victoria. Two Protectors of Aborigines, recently appointed to the burgeoning pastoral district around Port Phillip, met with an Aboriginal group camped near Mount Mitchell. At this time, the Aboriginal protectorate had been operating for little more than a year as an experiment in ‘humane’ governance. Designed less as a foil to colonisation than as a means of mitigating its impacts, the protectorate had various parallels around the British Empire in offices of protection for slaves, indentured labourers, and others perceived in need of imperial concern. As part conciliator, part magistrate, and part missionary, the Protectors’ role was to uphold Aboriginal people’s rights of redress against injury or exploitation by settlers, and convert them into Christian farmers and labourers. Present at this day’s encounter were George Augustus Robinson, Van Diemen’s Land’s famed ‘conciliator’ and now Chief Protector for the Port Phillip District, and Edward Stone Parker, come amongst the Djadja Wurrung as their advocate. The head of the Aboriginal group was Nandelowwindic. He recognised the colonial officials and invited them to sit. Identifying features of the landscape for their benefit, Nandelowwindic told them that this was ‘my country, merrygic barbarie, good country’.
Within a decade of this encounter, the Port Phillip protectorate had closed, undermined by other government priorities and declining administrative faith in Aboriginal people’s transition to colonial subjecthood. Dispossession and introduced diseases wrought havoc on
the Djadja Wurrung, and by the 1860s they and other Kulin peoples were being gathered onto mission stations under the oversight of a Central Board. After this time across Australia’s colonies, programs of protection were redefined around legislative measures that abandoned an earlier rhetoric of Aboriginal people’s legal rights and made them wards of the state. It would be well into the next century before the civil rights era signalled a shift in Aboriginal people’s perceived place in the nation, although they had continuously sought rights and recognition. When Nandelowwindic described his country to the Protectors in February 1840, this long cycle of alienation from land and the imposition of state control over Aboriginal lives had not yet worked its devastating impacts in Djadja Wurrung country, although it had begun.
From this distant encounter, Bain Attwood asks his readers to consider the colonial experience from the position of the Djadja Wurrung, whose secure place in their own land was subjected to radical upheaval. Readers of Attwood’s extensive scholarship on Aboriginal Australia might recognise the provenance of this book in a smaller, earlier work published as My Country: A history of the Djadja Wurrung (1999), the result of research undertaken for the Dja Dja Wurrung Aboriginal Corporation. But The Good Country is much more than an expanded version of that earlier work. The larger history it tells is of a complex, multi-layered relationship between different groups whose interests were primarily competing but sometimes came into alignment: the Djadja Wurrung whose country was overtaken by pastoralism, the settlers who laid claim to it, and the colonial officials who were
by Paul Collis
University of Queensland Press $29.95 pb, 206 pp, 9780702259753
Dancing Home opens in forthright fashion. The author, Paul Collis, urges readers to ‘[t]ake sides. Be involved in the ideas I’ve written into this book.’ The novel offers an uncompromising examination of some of the injustices faced by Indigenous Australians.
The plot focuses on three men –Blackie, Rips, and Carlos – who have embarked on a road trip to Wiradjuri country. Blackie and Rips have recently been released from prison, where they met. Blackie is intent on enacting revenge against Hunter McWilliams, the white police officer who was responsible for his incarceration. Blackie whiled away his prison sentence ‘imagining how he would hurt the cop with every punch he threw’.
Dancing Home has been promoted as ‘Koori-noir’, and it certainly has a noirish feel. The novel traverses some emotionally and aesthetically bleak territory. Even the book’s lighter moments are underscored by the threat of violence. Collis demonstrates fine skills in character development. For example, Blackie might be tough and streetwise in the manner of the classic noir protagonist, but he is also vulnerable and human. His plans for revenge are secondary to the main challenge he faces, staying alive in a world of state-sanctioned racism. The relationship between the three central characters is well developed and believable.
Dancing Home’s historical setting is opaque. For example, the novel opens with a reference to the Antz Pantz commercials of the early 1990s. There is a sense that the ad campaign is contemporaneous with the rest of the narrative. Later, however, one character refers to Bill Clinton (US president from 1993–2001) as though he hailed from the distant past. This issue aside, Dancing Home is commendable. The novel won the 2016 David Unaipon Award for a previously unpublished Indigenous Australian writer. This reviewer hopes to read more of Collis’s prose.
Jay Daniel Thompson
by Benjamin Law Black Inc.
$22.99 pb, 144 pp, 9781863959513
It is rare, in 2017, to return to a long news story’s beginning, to untangle its threads and find how it came to occupy its looming position in the cultural imagination, to learn how the dog-whistle words gathered their energy. Impressively, Benjamin Law’s Quarterly Essay achieves this feat. It is a meticulously researched piece of writing, clear-eyed and forceful. Law makes the unambiguous case that conservative media figures and politicians lied about the Safe Schools program and ruthlessly exploited the queer community as a battleground in the culture war. He traces Safe Schools’ transformation from a policy launched by the Abbott government and happily supported (or at least tolerated) by both sides of politics, into a political football about which The Australian wrote thirty-one stories in 2015 alone.
Law’s sharp, unembellished delivery ensures that the often horrifying realities hit hard: the history of violence against queer Australians, the anguish many queer children must face every day, the pitiless rhetoric of those who dismiss them. Built on in-depth interviews with proponents of both sides of the argument, Moral Panic 101 is often positioned as a conversation between Law, his sources, and the reader. To read the essay is to sit alongside its author, discovering how the particular and particularly cruel alienation of queer youth is ignored for the sake of political capital. Ultimately, the essay is about belief and how easily it is given. It shows how we come to trust in wild, baseless stories, and how radically those stories can change when we look past the news cycle and pay attention to the details. Law begins the piece with the assumption that ‘everyone invested in the discussion wants the same thing: to keep kids safe’. The discussion fails when unsafe children cannot be heard above it.
Dan Dixon
❖
appointed as mediators. Significantly affecting this three-way relationship were the movements of neighbouring Aboriginal clans, with whom the Djadja Wurrung shared ancient trade networks, communication lines and rivalries. This pre-existing world of Aboriginal politics was unsettled by colonisation and, in turn, triggered shifts in the fragile balance of colonial relationships.
Some of the competing expectations and difficult proximities that underpinned this culture of the pastoral frontier were visible in events that occurred on Henry Munro’s Mount Alexander station a month before Robinson and Parker’s encounter with Nandelowwindic’s group. In January 1840, several groups coalesced on or around Munro’s station. The Djadja Wurrung, facing increasing hunger as pastoralism took over their country, expected a display of reciprocity from the settlers in their midst. Their rival neighbours, the Daung Wurrung, were camped nearby, their unfamiliar presence adding a new element of tension. Munro and his men were nervous, their limited capacity for conciliation ready to give way to violence. The Protectors Robinson and Parker were on hand, but they carried little authority with the pastoralists. The Border Police arrived, escalating rather than diminishing the potential for resort to force. A circumstance that might have resolved peacefully erupted into open conflict, and at least one Aboriginal man was killed.
Despite a series of such clashes, Attwood illustrates that conflict in Djadja Wurrung country was more contained than in some other districts, its counterpart being relatively harmonious relations. In explaining this, he stresses the importance of local conditions. Most clashes in the district occurred on a limited number of stations, often involved the same protagonists, and arose from specific environmental factors and pastoralist attitudes. Beyond these conditions, the spread of pastoralism unfolded at a slower pace than in many parts of the colony, creating some scope for Djadja Wurrung and pastoralists to explore terms of cooperation. This, then, is a deep local history that pays attention to the forces of time and place to explore
how colonial relations evolved as they did in this region, and how Aboriginal people responded to the successive colonial processes of dispossession, institutionalisation, and assimilation. Ultimately, the Djadja Wurrung survived those processes, notwithstanding profound changes to their world. While it is deeply regional, many aspects of this history are mirrored elsewhere in the wider story of colonisation across the continent, and in the everyday relationships behind it.
In The Good Country, detailed archival research is coupled with incisive reflection on the contemporary problem of how we understand and ‘own’ the past. This combination of strengths is familiar to readers of Bain Attwood, who has contributed more to tracing the histories of Australia’s colonial experience and Aboriginal rights than perhaps any other historian of his generation. Having opened with an early colonial encounter, The Good Country closes with a set of questions about colonisation’s continuing afterlives and their meaning for Dja Dja Wurrung people today. Here, Attwood suggests that the early aim of reconciliation programs to articulate a ‘shared’ or unified history might usefully be turned to an aim of ‘sharing histories’, allowing for the contingencies of who speaks, different kinds of historical knowledge, and an absence of neat resolutions. The Good Country furthers this aim by grappling at close range with the complexities of colonial relations and their contested legacies. At a time when how we remember and memorialise the past remains at issue in the public domain, this task is more relevant than ever. g
Amanda Nettelbeck is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide. ❖
June 2-15, 2018
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• ABR literary event and reception at the Australian Embassy in Berlin
• Janácek’s From the House of the Dead in Munich, Verdi’s Rigoletto in Dresden, Offenbach’s Bluebeard and Puccini’s Tosca in Berlin
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Explore some of the great German cities with like-minded ABR readers and supporters, enjoying outstanding performances of opera and orchestral music, visiting a selection of superb art galleries and exploring Germany’s literary heritage from Goethe to Nietzsche and beyond. The tour – led by ABR’s Editor Peter Rose and seasoned tour leader Christopher Menz – builds on ABR’s successful tours to the USA and the UK in 2016 and 2017.
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Michael Winkler
AUSTRALIAN GYPSIES: THEIR SECRET HISTORY
by Mandy Sayer NewSouth
$34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781742234670
In the Australia of my childhood, the Gypsy skirt was fashionable, ABC Radio played Django Reinhardt, ‘The Gypsy Rover’ was in school songbooks, peripatetic players were called ‘Gypsy footballers’, the Gypsy Jokers were a feared bikie gang, and nefarious Gypsies were stock villains in children’s books. Gypsies – or Roma – occupied cultural terrain, but the people themselves had a low profile. Mandy Sayer attempts to redress this. She reveals that Roma have been in Australia since the First Fleet, and estimates the current local population at 100,000. While Roma have faced discrimination in this country, it pales against their persecution in other nations across history.
It is obvious that Sayer is passionate about her topic. She has travelled and read widely, interviewed many Roma and immersed herself in their culture. It is unfortunate that the resulting book has so many shortcomings. Even in this age of ‘truthiness’, where feelings supplant facts, the contract between non-fiction author and reader is founded on a promise of accuracy. Sayer’s book is littered with errors. She dates the end of convict transportation as 1852 – it was 1868. She has gold deposits being found in Victoria and then later in New South Wales, rather than the other way around. She gives an incorrect figure for Australia’s population in 1851. She claims that in the 1850s, ‘virtually every new immigrant who arrived in Melbourne needed to buy a good horse to transport
them to the diggings’. Many goldseekers travelled to the diggings by commercial coach, dray, or ox-cart, and many more walked. She describes Elvis Presley as a country and western artist and states that during World War II Australians had to obtain written permission to cross state borders. None of these mistakes is unforgivable, but the cumulative effect is damaging. If easily verifiable facts are skew-whiff, it diminishes faith in the veracity of her original research.
Sayer details important parallels between Roma and Indigenous Australians: ‘being driven away from their traditional lands; forced removal of their children; loss of language and identity; and policies drafted to discriminate against them specifically.’ This seems a fertile area for exploration, but frustration ensues. According to Sayer, ‘indigenous Australians originated in southern India’, a highly contestable statement that presumably stems from misreading (or overstating) research by German anthropologist Irina Pugach. The assertion that ‘There is some evidence that these early travellers, like the Gypsies, had been banished from their homeland [India] either through warfare or as a form of punishment’ is presented without the purported evidence and should have been challenged by an editor, along with the suggestion that all Aboriginal peoples were nomadic.
Sayer portrays freed convict Henry Lovell’s fathering a child with an Aboriginal woman as ‘extending the already-close ties between the Roma and Aboriginal people’, a yawning overstatement. When Lovell takes the woman and child to England, Sayer muses that, ‘The fact that Lovell’s partner agreed to leave her clan, her language and her land forever might seem surprising’, completely ignoring the power imbalance, with the unnamed individual – Sayer calls her, unhappily, an ‘illiterate black woman’ – probably having no say in the matter.
The book is full of airy pronouncements that invite challenge. Henry Lawson ‘began practising the oral storytelling traditions of his Gypsy ancestors … and unwittingly forged Australia’s first literary form: the bush yarn, or tall tale’. Unwittingly? And was this our first
literary form? What of colonial journals published locally and in Britain, let alone millennia of Aboriginal song?
She claims that when police in the late 1800s ordered Roma to move on ‘they always did, without complaint’. Olga Sterio’s accusation in 1926 that Rose Flores flirted with her brother-in-law was ‘an allegation that was no doubt false’. How can Sayer know these things with the remotest certainty? She posits that, ‘Even in the 21st century, the Roma remain as the ultimate “other” in Western society.’ This assertion of supreme alterity may surprise members of other othered ethnic and religious groups.
There are non sequiturs, repetitions, loose language, and infelicitous word choices. Straightforward historical chapters are interleaved with third-person accounts of Sayer meeting local Roma. The men are almost invariably ‘handsome’, and she is at pains to emphasise their generosity. This over-eagerness to redress discrimination against Gypsies leads to Sayer’s praising them for stealing less money than they might have done; suggesting that non-Roma would not provide extended-family care for children of a dead mother; and arguing that excluding Roma adults from enrolling in a primary school was due to their ethnicity, not their age.
A stricter editor may have argued that including a bizarre story about the author defecating in the yard of a Roma woman, wiping herself with a sheet of A4 paper and getting a paper-cut ‘on my sphincter’, is a tonal shocker. Ditto the story about appearing bottomless before a Roma man, which concludes with Sayer being informed she has a ‘great arse’.
Sayer has demonstrated before her adeptness at using close-to-the-knuckle anecdotes to advantage. Consider the indelible recollection in Dreamtime Alice (1998) of being nine years old and touching herself as she lies in bed listening to her parents have sex. This is a different book, however, and these moments are in the wrong register. Australian Roma could not have a stouter defender, but this effort serves their interests more than those of the reader. g
Michael Winkler won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize.
EASTERNIZATION: ASIA’S RISE AND AMERICA’S DECLINE: FROM OBAMA TO TRUMP AND BEYOND by Gideon Rachman
Other Press, $US25.95 hb, 310 pp, 9781590518519
Competing with Middle Eastern wars, terrorist attacks, and presidential tweets, Asia still tends to receive less attention than it merits. Furthermore, while geopolitical tectonic-shifts are occurring in the Indo-Pacific, it can be difficult to step back from daily headlines to assess the current transformation in its entirety.
In Easternization, Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times journalist, argues that an epochal shift in power is occurring from West to East, especially in China. Some significant problems with his execution should not obscure the vital importance of his thesis.
The ‘root cause’ of Asia’s transformation, Rachman tells us, has been its ‘extraordinary economic development’. It began with Japan and the Asian ‘Tigers’ from the 1950s. China and India followed after undertaking economic reforms from, respectively, 1978 and 1991. Economic growth matters because economic power leads to political power: Asian states’ high GDP growth is allowing them to erode the West’s military, diplomatic, and technological dominance. ‘The consequences’, Rachman argues, are now ‘defining global politics’.
Much of Easternization focuses on increasing tension between the United States and China. Rachman attempts to examine the underlying reasons for a more confrontational Beijing. Noting that Xi Jinping’s ascent to the leadership in 2012 corresponded with a tougher Chinese line, he argues that deeper factors are also at work. An ‘aggrieved nationalism’ is not only cynically propagated by the regime: the Chinese people believe much of the narrative themselves. Beijing’s confidence in its new-found economic and international strength,
combined with anxiety at its perceived domestic political vulnerability, is driving its assertiveness. Spectacular growth figures have buoyed the Chinese leadership, as has the performance of Chinese companies like Alibaba and Beijing’s increasingly successful wielding of influence. Their successful bullying of David Cameron, the British prime minister, after his meeting with the Dalai Lama, for example, was something they very much noticed, Rachman tells us. Simultaneously, fear of a ‘colour revolution’ – which Hong Kong’s mass demonstrations in 2014 appeared to validate – haunts them. Discussing America’s parallel shift toward confrontation, Rachman shows notions of interdependence and ‘win-win’ outcomes dominant during the Bush Sr and Clinton presidencies giving way to Barack Obama’s militarised Asian ‘pivot’. Rachman says that Obama’s first summit in China was ‘disillusioning’ to the US administration, revealing Chinese intransigence, quickly reinforced at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. The United States, he says, has essentially been ‘reacting’ to a Chinese challenge. Rachman’s teleology feels overly neat – what about the climate deal of 2014? – and his analysis of precisely what is propelling US anxieties about China is less than satisfactory. In his discussion of US China policy, Rachman includes some sensational, and instructive, quotes from US officials. Kurt Campbell, Obama’s undersecretary for East Asia, says ‘the US will not go quietly into the night’ and that America ‘has grown accustomed, psychologically and politically’, to global leadership. Another official calls the US Navy ‘addicted to pre-eminence’. Such anecdotes suggest that, in attempting to explain
US–China tension, more might usefully be said about the core ideology and worldview of American élites.
The sole chapter on Southeast Asia is perplexing. Though Rachman mentions the ASEAN area’s rapid economic development in the 1970s and 1980s, when he surveys the contemporary region he doesn’t seriously examine any of the ASEAN states as economically rising and politically influential actors in their own right. Instead, he examines Southeast Asia simply as a zone of Chinese power projection. Given its economies and demographics – Vietnam’s growth is more than six per cent, Indonesia has 260 million people – and its consequent relevance to Rachman’s thesis, this is odd. Even if we were to accept such a US–China ‘Great Game’ focus for the chapter, Rachman has apparently carried out firsthand research on Southeast Asia only in Singapore and Australia (his account relies heavily on these two countries’ perceptions). A rationale for this approach, beyond less muddy boots, is difficult to see.
Indeed, Rachman cannot quite decide how much ‘Easternization’ means the rise of several Asian nations and how much it effectively means the rise of China. This is a big topic to deal with ambiguously: whether we are more likely to end up with a genuinely multipolar world or a ‘Pax Sinica’ is, needless to say, a profoundly important question. This book’s blurb specifies that ‘Easternization’ refers to multiple Asian powers. But 150 pages in – after the book’s section on Asia itself – Rachman admits he has been writing specifically about ‘the Chinese challenge’. His chapter on
India is entitled ‘Asia’s Second Superpower’, but within it he qualifies bullish projections for India’s economy, then writes about Chinese influence in South Asia. The chapter on Japan describes Japanese economic malaise: because Japan is part of a Western-led set of alliances, the country’s decline is apparently evidence for, rather than against, ‘Easternization’.
Rachman then describes what he calls ‘Easternization beyond Asia’. A weakened United States is ‘unable’ to ‘restore order’ in the Middle East. Western military budgets have been decreasing. Chinese trade and investment is increasing in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, while politicians in those areas are defying Washington. These points, while broadly valid, require qualification. Countries thumbing their nose at the United States was common, even at the height of America’s Cold War power. Whether economic links will give Beijing greater clout than the United States in these regions is still unknown, though extensive Chinese trade relationships with Vietnam, Japan, and India certainly have not won those countries’ compliance. Meanwhile, Rachman says that both Russia and Turkey are ‘Easternizing’ – thus making it impossible to avoid questioning what, precisely, his idea of the ‘East’ constitutes.
‘[S]ome may find this book,’ Rachman admits, ‘excessively concerned with the machinations of the global governing elite.’ Indeed, there is a jarring number of references to the World Economic Forum at Davos: Rachman ‘bumped into’ one contact there, arranged meetings, or listened to presentations by others. ‘Viewed from the offices of the powerful’, he writes, ‘the world can at times resemble a giant chessboard’ –essentially the view Easternization provides. Yet, when considered from
elsewhere, the rise of Asia is also about young Chinese women moving to Shenzhen for better-paying work, young Indonesian men signing up to be drivers for Go-Jek (like Uber, but for motorbike taxis) in Jakarta. Surely some attention to the net effects of these ‘Easternizing’ forces on human lives other than academics and government officials – people from Mumbai to Hanoi with a dramatically expanded sense of possibility – is necessary for a complete, and properly contextualised,
window onto Asian events?
Easternization remains a comprehensive, lucidly written overview of how the West’s ‘centuries long domination of world affairs is coming to a close’, and how a more Asian-influenced globe beckons. g
David Fettling’s work focuses on Australian relations with Asia, historical and contemporary. His first book is Encounters with Asian Decolonisation (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017). He lives in Yogyakarta. ❖
I see you then: long and veined with red like the closed pod of an asphodel bud: if you opened now it would be with the strangeness of a lily its scent edging between sweat, and the musk that marks a territory: I have not forgotten you: in the bed my other children are sleeping: they climb under the covers: a fluffed head on my shoulder: five tiny toes cold against my leg: in the morning light the children will shake themselves to feathers and float away: I will find them pale and half-transformed: one arm becomes a great white wing: at the end of the leg a black, webbed swan-foot: nothing could be happier than finding them whole: tides drag to the land and back again: cool night: the children wake to the red of closed eyelids: strings are trilling or snapping loose from their pegs: the wet stamen of lilies offer themselves up to the bees: spinning fear: if I knitted a nightshirt of nettle leaves, you would not be a swan flying away.
Marguerite Johnson
Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm and still …
Far from being a flimsy, frilly story for women full of antique charm and middle-class manners, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel of sharp social observations and nuanced critique; subtle and sometimes latent sensuality; and layered, intricate allegory. The ‘shimmering summer morning warm and still’ brings the opposite to what it promises. Life is more complex and unstable in Lindsay’s world. Whoever would have thought that a picnic on Valentine’s Day 1900 would go so horribly wrong for the students and teachers of Appleyard College, or that the picnickers would return to the school with three senior girls and one teacher missing at Hanging Rock?
Of course, the events are not true. The story of Picnic at Hanging Rock is fictional, no matter how many readers believe it to be otherwise. Admittedly, my first reading of the novel as an adolescent left me convinced the events described were true. Lost among Lindsay’s police statements, letters, and newspaper extracts, in an era before the internet, I had limited access to information that could qualify her story. Like so many readers, I was left with the ambiguity posed at the beginning of the novel: ‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.’ As an older reader, I know the story is fictional. I am surprised at the grown-ups who resist the fiction and cling to the romance of a factual basis. I am equally delighted at younger readers whose initial response is belief.
Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock turns fifty this year, a mere drop in the ocean in a country that has been settled for over 40,000 years. Yet its place in Australian literature, itself a sapling in an old growth forest, is remarkable, powerfully influential, and without generic peer. Amid a tradition of male voices, bush ballads, wilderness idylls, and the hardships of conquering nature, the novel is both traditional and innovative. Picnic at Hanging Rock is ground-breaking in its exposé of an introduced species’ tenuous occupation of an environment. Likewise, the novel’s focus on the repercussions of losing the girls is a break with familiar tropes. Picnic marks the changes in the country that spawned it between the years of its setting and publication. Laid out for measurement under Lindsay’s literary magnifying glass are themes of gender and sexuality, chronicled as innate, constructed, fluid, and contested.
Lindsay’s protagonist is Hanging Rock, the European name for a cluster of gigantean boulders that forms part of Mount Diogenes in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges. Hanging Rock essentially ‘hangs’ between its companions, hence its name and, by extension, that of the supporting boulders. Suspended unexpectedly and low, it forms a natural gateway, a mesmeric liminal point. In the language of the Wurundjeri people, this 6.25 million-year-old volcanic formation may have been called Geboor, Tarehewait, or Anneyelong. Through its gateway was a place of initiation for Aboriginal men. Sadly, by 1900, the year in which Lindsay’s novel is set, the widespread death and dispossession of the traditional owners of the region, the Dja Dja Wurrung, Taungurung, and Wurundjeri, meant that the initiations had long since ceased. The last recorded ceremony took place in 1851.
Records from the mid-1800s include geographical and geological surveys, accounts of picnics, and reports of disappearances. When German zoologist and engineer William von Blandowski explored the Macedon Ranges in the 1850s, he documented the Rock’s geological features with the occasional romantic flourish. Images based on his sketches, admittedly with the engravers’ artistic licence, show a dramatic, alien and threatening monument.
In 1864, the first communal picnic was recorded, and in 1867 the disappearance of a three-year-old boy was reported. Mount Diogenes and its Hanging Rock had begun to garner a reputation as a site not only of joyous days but of devastating mishaps, becoming the backdrop to stories of trauma, disappearance, and homicide, real and imagined. In 1891, the first instalment of Ivan Dexter’s serialised novel The Mount Macedon Mystery appeared in a New South Wales newspaper While Dexter’s tale is one of mundane murder, not metaphysical mayhem, he shares with Lindsay a need to associate the area with a chaos inextricably linked to colonial anxiety concerning the Australian bush.
The story of Picnic at Hanging Rock is fictional, no matter how many readers believe otherwise
Lindsay (1896–1984) was fascinated by Hanging Rock. Her own childhood days included holidays in its vicinity, and she had powerful memories of an early Christmas holiday in the Macedon Ranges with the pungent smell of pansies, over which she claims to have uttered her first word – ‘beautiful’. Lindsay was four years old, and as Christmas rolled into New Year’s Day 1900 she was taken on the annual picnic at Hanging Rock. While she never elaborated further on this visit to the Rock, she did explain that it was a dream about the site that was the primary inspiration for the novel. As she continued to dream of the Rock, the girls’ story came to her in instalments.
Another source of inspiration was her connection to Clyde Girls’ Grammar School, which she attended when it was in East St Kilda. The contrasts that exist between Clyde Grammar and Appleyard College may initially suggest that Lindsay’s school was not an influence on the dreaded institution in the novel. Yet there are traces of Clyde in Lindsay’s use of the surname of one of the teachers, ‘McCraw’, borrowed from Miss Helen McCraw who was a general secondary teacher at Clyde during and after Lindsay’s time there. While far from a mathematical genius and a strange, masculine woman like her fictional namesake, Helen McCraw was involved in leading excursions to Hanging Rock after the school was relocated to Woodend in 1919. The first venture to the Rock in 1919 took place at dusk, with the dishevelled and overexcited group not returning until midnight. We do not know whether something strange occurred that evening, although it did enter Clyde legend. The school
then held an annual picnic at the Rock for the next forty years, with each return trip accompanied by ghost stories. Lindsay was also intrigued by William Ford’s painting At the Hanging Rock (1875), purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria on the recommendation of her husband, Daryl Lindsay, during his time there as director. This oil depicts a decidedly colonial interpretation of the Australian landscape, including signs that the London-born Ford struggled to bond with the bush, which he rendered in varying shades of khaki. The attempt to understand, indeed to tame, the landscape is evident in Ford’s decision to populate it with ‘civilised’ picnickers. Of course, this fails; the mostly female cast appears out of place in their frocks and hats. There is, however, one noticeable picnicker, a young woman who brings the only splash of colour to the dreary scene; she stands left of centre with her back towards the viewer, adorned in a blue coat and matching blue hair ribbon, taller than her conversational partner and with long red curls down her back. She is a likely prototype of Miranda, who alludes to the painting as she traverses the path to the Rock: ‘I remember my father showing me a picture of people in old-fashioned dresses having a picnic at the Rock. I wish I knew where it was painted.’
Lindsay repeatedly returns to Hanging Rock in her novel, describing and redescribing it, searching for a definitive meaning. Is Hanging Rock nothing more than a mysterious volcanic mass? Is it threatening and destructive? Does it possess a strange sentience that portends malevolence or transcendence, or both? Lindsay certainly evokes a sinister aura around the Rock, evident in the description of its first sighting by the schoolgirls. It appears suddenly and startlingly; a massive ‘fortress’, ‘walls gashed with indigo shade’, ‘immense and formidable’, ‘jagged’. It is frightening and unknowable, ‘appearing and disappearing with every turn of the road’.
Hanging Rock and its surrounds are consistently contrasted with the genteel, ‘civilised’ worlds of contained gardens and manicured lawns. This is part of an overarching theme of the novel; namely the uneasy and contested displacement of one environment by another. Of course, such displacement is a lost cause. No matter how many rose gardens and picnic spots are created on cleared bush and native habitats, the Australian landscape fights back. Sometimes it wins in the most ruthless of ways. Like the bushfires that devastate homes and their occupants, and the storms that destroy ships and their human cargo, Hanging Rock takes people and vanishes them. Lindsay does a post-colonial turn before the term was invented, by continuously referencing the imperial lack-of-fit with the bush. This disjuncture, as Lindsay implies, borders on hubris. As the sensible mathematics mistress comments: ‘“And this we do for pleasure,”
Greta McCraw muttered from the shadows, “so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants … how foolish can human creatures be!”’
Despite Miss McCraw’s disdain for the bush, the schoolgirls are excited about a day out. This is hardly surprising, as Appleyard College, an imposing Victorian mansion, is a site of suffocation. Furnished with marble mantelpieces imported from Italy, heavy Axminster carpet, and hemmed in with sculptured flowerbeds and manicured lawns, it radiates resistance to youthful exuberance and passion. Lindsay describes the school as ‘an architectural anachronism in the Australian bush – a hopeless misfit in time and place … like exotic fungi following the finding of gold’.
Miranda is the most enthusiastic of the escapees on Valentine’s Day. Her otherness, her other-worldliness, are symbolised by her affinity with nature. Unlike the very English and very European characters in the novel, whose collective motivation is to re-establish the environments and cultures of the old worlds in the new one, Miranda is free of tradition. The child of a Northern Queensland grazier and ‘well used to the Bush’, she took as much pleasure in ‘a bunch of wildflowers’ pinned to her coat, ‘as a breathtaking diamond brooch’. As such, she is ripe for the taking by a brooding, mysterious geological formation. It is through Miranda that the enigmatic power of the Rock is principally evoked. Even before the day begins, Miranda confides to her roommate Sara Waybourne that she won’t be here much longer, as if she knows she won’t return.
uncanny and unfamiliar.
Arguably, Lindsay herself did not understand what it was she was writing – or trying to communicate – in the long scenes culminating in the disappearance of the girls. For pages, she grapples with the innate mystery of the Rock and its unexplained role in the event. Her befuddlement at her own mystery is represented in the novel by Michael Fitzhubert’s obsession with the girls’ disappearance. Fresh from England, and a witness to the girls making their way through the bush, he is subsequently haunted by strange dreams, apparitions, and a jumble of overwhelming emotions he cannot comprehend or articulate.
On the day of the picnic, Hanging Rock ‘had been creeping down towards the Picnic Grounds’, as if to call Miranda and her companions to its secrets. The studious and mathematically gifted Marion Quade requests a closer look ‘to make a few measurements’, and Miranda and the beautiful heiress Irma Leopold ask to join her. They are given approval by their guardians for the day, Miss McCraw and the French mistress, Mademoiselle de Poitiers. The three senior girls allow Edith Horton, a younger boarder and ‘the college dunce’, to tag along. While Marion initiated the exploration, Miranda leads it. More than once she is described as being ahead of her three companions, as if the Rock relies on her to deliver the girls to it. Indeed, it is Miranda who opens the gate into the picnic area at the beginning of the day, heralding the entry into the
Perhaps in a declaration of defeat in her quest to communicate the incommunicable, Lindsay focuses on the responses of the girls as they edge closer to vanishing –describing, not interpreting. They are silent, unconscious to anything around them as they continue their ascent. There are moments of epiphany; Irma dances – no, she floats – shedding her stockings and shoes, and Marion discards her pencil and notebook, symbols of her intellect and logic. Lindsay refers to their enchantment, increasing lassitude, and longing to sleep, which culminates in their strange collapse. Miranda wakes in a transcendental state of heightened awareness and insight: ‘Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete.’ Edith is the only one who fights against the force of the Rock. Resisting at every turn, whining and proclaiming illness, she is the hysterical witness to the disappearance of the senior girls ‘behind the monolith’. It is this terror-induced resistance to the expedition she so desperately pleaded to join, and her abhorrence at the increasing power of the Rock, that ultimately result in Edith’s return to the group of picnickers. Is the ‘the college dunce’ found an unsuitable offering to the undeclared needs of Hanging Rock?
Lindsay plays with ideas of European vulnerability in the Australian bush. This underlying tension is achieved with ease in the novel because of our familiarity with the motif of the lost white woman or child. This is a colonial response to the bush, haunting the literature and art of the nineteenth century, and not without reason. Men also got lost, but their stories seemed to lack the pathos to be immortalised by artists such as Frederick McCubbin (Lindsay’s teacher at the National Gallery of Victoria
School), whose Lost (1886) shows a bereft girl standing in the bush. McCubbin returned to the theme again in 1907 in another Lost, in which a boy is depicted crying amid a lonely landscape later identified by his daughter as the bush near Hanging Rock.
But the differences between McCubbin’s paintings and Lindsay’s novel are as powerful as the similarities. His figures wait for rescue, her girls are driven onward. For all their sentimentality and artistry, the paintings lack the mysticism and otherworldliness of the novel. No sentient rocks or natural forces pull the artist’s lost children into the unknown. Unlike Miranda and Marion, the two girls who never return from Hanging Rock, the audience can at least see McCubbin’s figures – they are tangible, almost touchable, thus rescuable – whereas Lindsay’s have vanished, never to be seen again. This is emphasised by the absence of tracks on the Rock; as if something or someone obliterated the girls’ footprints, or as if there were none left in the first place. Perhaps, as in Irma’s epiphany, they all floated, which is implied in Edith’s observation that the three girls were ‘hardly walking – sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet’. Interestingly, when Irma is found alive eight days later, her bare feet are impeccably clean, without any injuries, despite cuts and bruising to her face and hands.
Land not only the young and beautiful were kept busy opening their cards this morning. Miranda as usual had a drawer of her wardrobe filled with lace-trimmed pledges of affection …’
Is Hanging Rock nothing more than a mysterious volcanic mass?
ike the gothic grandeur of Appleyard College squatting awkwardly in cleared bushland, Lindsay’s deference to the pastoral genre is more at home in the literature of Europe and Britain. And, like the college landscape in which the girls and their teachers are cloistered, the inclusion of the pastoral is a device to explore gender and sexuality.
In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the pastoral manifests in all its Classical glory, reminiscent of the Greek Golden Age, complete with virgins in the wilderness, mythical allusions, a pervading sense of the mystical, and a displacement of time and space. Even the ‘misty summit of Mount Macedon rising up’ renders it an Australian Mount Olympus. And as Greece’s highest mountain was once home to ancient gods, Hanging Rock, towering at its peak at 718 meters above sea level, houses supernatural forces hidden from the uninitiated.
Per the literary rules of pastoral, women are young, beautiful, and on the brink of sexual awakening. Lindsay establishes the sensuality of the nascent sexuality of her girls through Miranda, whose desirability and inherent charm are symbolised by the meaning of her name; from the Latin, ‘she who must be marvelled at’. Her pre-eminence as the embodiment of Venus is introduced early in the novel with the reference to Valentine’s Day and its eponymous patron: ‘Saint Valentine is impartial in his favours,
The languid, fluid sensuality of the schoolgirls echoes the theme of innocent sexual awakenings characteristic of the pastoral genre. The orphan girl, Sara, loves and is in love with Miranda, her passion being the subject of the students’ casual gossip. Such romantic, perhaps erotic expressions underlie the world of the school, extending to subtle moments of intense reciprocal admiration of female beauty, and tenderness between women. Indeed, Lindsay’s exploration of the sexuality of turnof-the-century women is masterful. Applegate College is a sequestered feminine enclave where the girls’ inner lives are comparable to the dreamy, romanticised world of the Greek poet Sappho’s imaginary school for girls, once believed to be nestled away on the island of Lesbos. Lindsay, much like Sappho, may be somewhat coy on details, but ultimately that is the point of such romantic friendships; they embody sensuality, mild eroticism, burgeoning sexual awareness, but usually not sex. This is not about lesbianism in the modern sense, nor was the original Sappho for that matter, but rather an intense female awareness and love of feminine beauty, which Lindsay herself understood and experienced. In this way, she deftly avoids anachronistic renditions of samesex desires in the late Victorian age, which is quite an achievement for a novel published in 1967.
The allusions to Sappho are not far-fetched in view of Lindsay’s intertextual reference to the English poet Mrs Felicia Hemans. Author of ‘Casabianca’, better known as ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’, Hemans was also known for her poems on female death, particularly suicide, cast in a Classical tenor. ‘The Last Song of Sappho’ is typical of such works, and chronicles the overdone, apocryphal story of the broken-hearted poet’s suicidal leap off the Leucadian Cliff. Lindsay mentions Hemans in a strange scene of incorrect referencing, suggestive of unhinged behaviour, when the headmistress, Mrs Appleyard, and Sara lock horns. Sara is prevented from attending the picnic due to her failure to recite Longfellow’s ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ the day before. Her punishment entails sitting in the schoolroom on Valentine’s Day ‘committing the hated masterpiece to memory’. While Sara is aware of the task at hand, Mrs Appleyard is clearly confused: ‘You little ignoramus! Evidently you don’t know that Mrs Felicia Hemans is considered one of the finest of our English poets!’ Mrs Appleyard’s conflation of Longfellow’s ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ with Hemans’s ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ is a complex intertextual game on Lindsay’s part. The headmistress’s error may denote nothing more than a tenuous grasp on literature, which ironically
renders her the ‘ignoramus’. But it may also hint at her increasingly strained state of mind; the sight of Sara, the object of Mrs Appleyard’s hatred, provoking fantasies of a deliciously imagined end for the obstinate girl.
As it transpires, the poetry of Felicia Hemans hits more than a poetic nerve with Mrs Appleyard. Inspiring more than morbid fantasies of heroines like Hemans’s Sappho throwing themselves off cliffs, the poetry materialises later in the novel when Mrs Appleyard pushes Sara to her death ‘from the wall directly below the tower’, and not long afterwards hurls herself from the Rock.
It is not only Sara’s love for Miranda that plays with Sapphic idealism. Irma also engenders sensual female admiration, overtly in Mademoiselle de Poitiers. It is Mademoiselle who explains to Irma that Valentine is the Patron Saint of Lovers, and in Lindsay’s introduction to the young teacher she implies her comfort with same-sex desire with a deftness of sly syntax: ‘Thus Saint Valentine reminded the inmates of Appleyard College of the colour and variety of love. Mademoiselle de Poitiers, who taught dancing and French conversation and attended to the boarders’ wardrobes, was bustling about in a fever of delighted anticipation.’
This literary style of expressing the sensuality of the feminine gaze is again employed in a scene of reverie, as Lindsay evokes Mademoiselle’s favouritism of Irma:
‘Depêchez-vous, mes enfants, depêchez-vous. Tais-toi, Irma,’ chirped the light canary voice of Mademoiselle, for whom la petite Irma could do no wrong.The girl’s voluptuous little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes in the dingy schoolroom the Frenchwoman, brought up amongst the great European galleries, would look up from her desk and see her against a background of cherries and pineapples, cherubs and golden flagons, surrounded by elegant young men in velvets and satins …
As a European who knows her art, Mademoiselle pictures Irma as a model for Baroque artists, situating her amid erotic pastorals of cherubs, possibly Bacchus with his ‘golden flagons’, ever the subject of the erotic gaze. It is also Mademoiselle’s keen eye for artistic comparisons that casts Miranda as ‘a Botticelli angel from the Uffizi’, one of the novel’s most famous similes. Of course, this comparison is off-kilter. Tired, dozing, perhaps overwhelmed by the girl or simply forgetful of her cultural touchstones, Mademoiselle conflates the surfeit of European angels with Botticelli’s Venus. Much later in the novel, Lindsay clarifies Mademoiselle’s error in the form of Michael’s vision of ‘a girl in a white dress … standing beside a giant clamshell that served as a birdbath’. As he moves towards the apparition, he sees a white swan, drinking from the basin, then flying away. The vision casts Miranda as Botticelli’s Venus, who is depicted emerging from a clamshell. The swan, Venus’s sacred bird, further
connects the girl to the goddess. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film, the scene shows Mademoiselle resting a book on her lap, open at a page showing The Birth of Venus, simultaneously illustrating and correcting the schoolmistress’s slip.
Valentine’s Day, cherubs, angels, and Venus combine to imbue Mademoiselle with a dreamy sensuality of Classical freedom and ambiguities. As she is drawn to the voluptuousness of Irma and the erotic appeal of Miranda in all her purity, she is also aroused by thoughts of her beau, Monsieur Louis Montpelier, whom she later marries. Indeed, daydreams of her watchmaker fiancé from Bendigo, turning the key of a Sèvres clock with experienced hands, have her close to fainting.
Even the landscape around Hanging Rock is endowed with a sexual energy. Lindsay points out the ‘romantic summer villas’ that ‘hinted at far off adult delights’ as the carriage takes its passengers through the village to the picnic site. This reference to ‘adult delights’ suggests freedom, and also a less romantic, less idealised sensuality; alluding to expressions of illicit desire afforded by remote settings. The observation, brief and casual, adds a knowing, unsettling element to the narrative; a presage of the prurient theories surrounding the disappearances.
The pastoral setting is traditionally one of both beauty and potential danger. Accordingly, part of the fear and mystery generated by Picnic at Hanging Rock originates from suggestions of the girls’ abduction, rape,
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and murder. Gossip travels quickly, indifferent to the rigid class-based categories that maintain a stuffy social order in the region. When Irma is found alive, Lindsay chronicles the inherent anxieties of Australian readers anticipating revelations of rape. There are whispers of Irma’s missing corset, politely kept from the police, but ‘the body’ of the living girl is confirmed to be ‘unblemished and virginal’. However, this does not stop speculation about the fate of Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw. When Edith finally confesses to seeing the mathematics mistress on the Rock, she reluctantly confides that Greta McCraw was without her skirt, wearing only pantaloons. The loss of clothing, symbolic of a suspicious sexual encounter – criminal or otherwise – characterises accounts, interpretations, and theories. Mrs Appleyard, usually cold and aloof in the face of scrutiny, momentarily loses her composure when a detective from Melbourne concludes that the girls were most likely ‘abducted, lured away, robbed – or worse’. It transpires that ‘worse’ entails working at a Sydney brothel, being ‘raped by a drunken seaman’. The claim, which he quickly dismisses, comes from a misogyny, articulated silently in idle musings as he speaks with the headmistress: ‘These perfect ladies were the Devil. Dirty minded as they come, he wouldn’t mind betting.’ Even Greta McCraw becomes a suspect in her own disappearance when Constable Bumphers puts it to Mrs Appleyard that she may have planned ‘some private arrangements of her own’.
In keeping with the complexities of late-Victorian sensibilities and morals, Lindsay treats sexual expression and gender binaries in muffled and indirect ways. By adopting the mannered obliqueness of the age, Lindsay is free to explore a range of relationships, including those between men. The most fascinating male relationship is between Michael and Albert. In terms of the era, the friendship they develop is particularly unusual because of the class disparity; Michael is the Honourable Michael Fitzhubert, nephew of Colonel and Mrs Fitzhubert, and Albert Crundall is their coachman. Their friendship is cemented on the day the girls go missing, a catastrophic event that locks them in a bond both fated and unbreakable.
Observing the four girls crossing the creek at the base of Hanging Rock, Michael and Albert become unfortunate participants in the mystery. Albert whistles at the girls, Michael reprimands him, and their lives are changed forever. On seeing Miranda, nameless and unknown to him, Michael immediately knows he will live out the rest of his life in Australia. What he does not know at the time, however, is the reason; ‘the tall pale girl with straight yellow hair, who had gone skimming over the water like one of the white swans on his uncle’s lake’. Michael’s overwhelming feelings for Miranda are inexplicable and irrational in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Greek belief in the force of Eros, the god of passion and desire. While later subsumed by the charming figure of Cupid, Saint Valentine’s less threatening companion, Eros was the embodiment of the overwhelming
power of unquenchable love; as one of Sappho’s fragments attests: ‘Eros the loosener of limbs once again shakes me, / that bittersweet, utterly irresistible little beast.’
As the mystery that engulfs Michael and Albert deepens, their friendship grows and they become ‘at one’. Despite their closeness in age, the young coachman cares for his master’s nephew as if he were an adopted charge. Albert’s intense feelings for Michael extend beyond his assigned role in the Fitzhubert’s household and are matched by the powerful emotions of his friend. There are elements of mateship in the bond between them, but there is also something else. Lindsay sees Michael through Albert’s gaze, describing his ‘slim boyish figure gracefully clearing the creek and striding off’. Like the representation of the sexuality of her female characters, which is complex, rich, and varied, Lindsay’s evocation of the bond between the two men is one of subtle homoeroticism, which also has a place in the pastoral tradition. The socially awkward nature of the friendship means that much of their contact takes place in private, away from the disapproval of Colonel and Mrs Fitzhubert, which augments its latent eroticism.
It is the heroic Albert who saves Michael from the Rock when he loses his way in a vainglorious attempt to find Miranda (and the others). When Albert sees Michael, unconscious and beaten by his experience on the Rock, and remembers the little white flags he had left in a hopeless attempt to mark his trail, his overwhelming emotions ‘made him go over to the bed and gently stroke the limp blue-veined hand on the coverlet’. And when Michael awakes from his ordeal, Albert is the only person he wishes to see.
Picnic at Hanging Rock opens with the girls of Appleyard College ‘fluttering about in their holiday muslins like a flock of excited butterflies’. The simile references the beauty of feminine adolescence but also its brevity, and the brevity of life itself. The image further implies that the girls are fragile and in need of protection. Throughout the course of the novel, Lindsay conversely reinforces and destabilises this stereotype of femininity.
For the most part, Lindsay’s women function independently of men, who tend to occupy utilitarian roles to facilitate the smooth running of the school. Mrs Appleyard, though missing her long-dead husband and sexually frustrated, can maintain an unyielding order at the school as long as she has Greta McCraw by her side. Indeed, the headmistress’s descent into alcohol-fuelled madness is more a case of a flawed character than any notion of feminine weakness, and is accelerated by Miss McCraw’s disappearance: ‘It was inconceivable that this woman of masculine intellect on whom she had come to rely in the last years should have allowed herself to be spirited away, lost, raped, murdered in cold blood like an innocent schoolgirl, on the Hanging Rock.’
The mathematics mistress’s intellectual acumen,
which challenges traditional claims that such qualities belong to men alone, liberates her from the social constraints of gender. Her eccentric appearance and indifference to style – ‘coarse greying hair perched like an untidy bird’s nest on top of her head’ and an ‘outlandish wardrobe’ – may suggest she is a bluestocking. She is shown directing, contradicting, and dismissing the local coachman, Mr Hussey as she assumes the dominant role during the picnic. An erstwhile figure of both awe and quiet mockery among her students, Miss McCraw, who listened to ‘the Music of the Spheres in her own head’, was a ‘brilliant mathematician – far too brilliant for her poorly paid job at the College’. Here, Lindsay shows the complexities of gender in 1900; Greta McCraw has a degree of agency because of her intellect and education, but her full potential is unrealised. This is not just about the limitations of class – all is ‘an accident of birth’ – juxtaposed with the optimism inherent in female access to education, but also the social restraints faced by Australian women in 1900. And while Lindsay realises that education can be a means of escape from marriage and motherhood, the reality is that the pupils of Appleyard College are being prepared, ultimately, to assume their allotted role in life.
Lindsay plays with ideas of European vulnerability in the Australian bush
the élitism of utopian visions of female illumination and emancipation. If the reading were adopted, then the novel explicitly and significantly depicts the selection of those defined as ‘special’: Miranda is miraculous, and both Marion and Miss McCraw possess extraordinary intellects. It would follow that there is no place for the likes of Edith or Minnie, one of the school’s domestic staff, or even the beautiful and wealthy Irma, who is ultimately rejected by whatever mysterious force it is that takes (and keeps) the other three. If the strange events on Valentine’s Day 1900 mark a new beginning for Australian women in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the world presaged is not for the ordinary. As Irma becomes increasingly irritated by Edith, she muses: ‘why was it … that God made some people so plain and disagreeable and others beautiful and kind like Miranda’.
But this reality is not something Lindsay blithely accepts; her protestations can be detected in the symbolic use of clothing (and its shedding) in the novel. Lindsay protests the restrictive attire of her characters, describing the girls as ‘[i]nsulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots’. Likewise, Irma complains: ‘Whoever invented female fashions for nineteen hundred should be made to walk through bracken fern in three layers of petticoats.’ Appropriately, when Irma experiences the uncanny power of the Rock, which is liberating as well as frightening, she does so without gloves, shoes, stockings, and corset.
It may be argued that Lindsay’s fascination with mysticism, which she explicitly aligns with the feminine, contributes to the muting of feminism in the novel. Mysticism is partly expressed through the theme of liminality. The event occurs on Valentine’s Day, a time when, according to Lindsay’s friend, Phillip Adams, she believed ‘the commonplace [is] ... overwhelmed by the extraordinary’. It is also a millennial year, a time characterised by the uncanny and the foreboding as well as the anticipated and optimistic. And while this focus on a world betwixt and between may suggest that 1900 symbolically marks a new epoch for Australian women, with Miranda, Marion, and Miss McCraw ultimately entering an enlightened space, such a reading is problematic. This is not only because it may be over-interpretation, or that female agency via mysticism is more disempowering than liberating, but because it also implies
Lindsay’s muslin-clad schoolgirls are in stark contrast to the lives of women in 1967 Australia, a time of radical change and reform that arguably laid the foundations of the Whitlam government five years later. A major referendum resulted in the recognition of Australia’s First Nation Peoples as citizens, although it took several more years before any significant changes began to take effect. The year also heralded the federal government’s announcement that it would not ban the contraceptive pill. Women actively protested the Vietnam War; lobbied governments for equal rights in marriage, the workplace, education, politics, sport, and the arts.
Although Lindsay wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock at a time when many victories had been won for women, and in a decade of advances in liberation, she appears to have missed most of the action. It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that Lindsay was indifferent to women’s rights, not out of any antagonism for the movement but because she did not perceive herself as needing feminism. She was the child of a privileged Melbourne family. Her mother, Anne Sophie Hamilton, a gifted pianist, grew up in Dublin Castle where her father, Sir Robert Hamilton served as under-secretary for Ireland, and later became governor of Tasmania. Lindsay’s father, Theyre à Beckett Weigall, Australian-born, was a King’s Counsel. Lindsay was cherished, well-educated, encouraged to pursue her artistic talents, and to travel overseas.
Yet, as with many aspects of her life, Lindsay’s feminism – or lack thereof – may not be quite so clear-cut. The major clue to this mystery, like so much else, lies in the novel. Throughout Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lindsay is damning of the academic deficits of Appleyard College and the lack of compassion of its headmistress. Despite Mrs Appleyard’s commercially driven promotion of the scholastic merits of her College for Young Ladies, she is indifferent to the reforms of the female curriculum of the Victorian era. She barely provides anything resembling instruction in the more traditional skills of feminine
accomplishment. Indeed, besides the brilliant Marion Quade it would be highly unlikely that any graduate of the school would have met the matriculation requirements to enter the University of Melbourne when its Council agreed to permit women to sit the examination in 1871. In contrast to Lindsay’s more rigorous education at Clyde, Appleyard College is a sham. This contrast, and the intense anxiety that Lindsay evokes in her descriptions of the fictional school, may be the unexpected feminist twist in the novel. The stifling, unimaginative, unacademic, rigid, and sometimes cruel school environment, with its obsession with marriage – for the girls, for Mademoiselle de Poitiers – symbolises a powerful lack of freedom that the self-identified libertine would have found an anathema. From a free, somewhat bohemian family, and well-educated, her depiction of the school may be a powerful reminder in 1967 of those unacceptable institutions for women in the not-so-distant past. Perhaps, by making Miranda vanish, Lindsay has ensured her escape from a future life of marriage and
them focusing on creativity, entertaining and being at the heart of Melbourne’s cultural élite. Far from disappointing her eminent, well-heeled parents, Lindsay is indulged as much as an adult as she was as a child. Her life, as outlined in Time Without Clocks, is full of art, music, literature, family, friends, and her husband. It seems to be a blessed existence. However, as with much of Lindsay’s public persona, this is a stringently edited version of a life constructed for public reading. This approach ensures that any unpleasantness or sadness she may have experienced during those early years at Mulberry Hill, her home for most of her married life, is never mentioned. She is more forthcoming in Facts Soft and Hard (1964), which tells of the time she and Daryl spent in the United States – ‘I had only the vaguest idea of what it means to be a museum wife’ – but not much.
Likewise, Lindsay’s interest in the metaphysical, one not shared with, or appreciated by Daryl, is a subject never breached. Thus, for those of us interested in her providing insights into her views on the mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the novel and a few fleeting interviews – during which she regularly and tantalisingly would state that ‘something did happen’ – are essentially all we have.
children as the wife of a Queensland grazier or, worse still, as a beautiful bird in a cage in a Melbourne mansion. Clyde was not exactly traditional in some respects, and Lindsay was at times critical of it. Nevertheless, in her autobiography, Time Without Clocks (1962), she indirectly reflects on the benefits afforded a woman of solid education and liberal upbringing, albeit ones predicated on class. Her marriage to Daryl Lindsay in London on Saint Valentine’s Day, 1922, which opens the book, denotes Lindsay and her new husband as modern people; they marry in a registry office, without family. In the early part of the autobiography, Lindsay blithely depicts herself as unfit for the traditional role of wife; she cannot cook and has no interest in housekeeping. Instead, she works at her art and writing with Daryl, the two of
It is happening now. As it has been happening ever since Edith Horton ran stumbling and screaming towards the plain. As it will go on happening until the end of time. The scene is never varied by so much as the falling of a leaf or the flight of a bird. To the four people on the Rock it is always acted out in the tepid twilight of a present without a past. Their joys and agonies are forever new.
We have one additional insight into the mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the much discussed and sometimes rejected final chapter.
The Secret of Hanging Rock, chapter eighteen of the original novel, was published posthumously in 1987 by Lindsay’s literary agent, John Taylor, to whom she had assigned the rights. As Lindsay was originally persuaded by her publishers to remove chapter eighteen, parts of it were put into chapter three (the main narrative concerning the girls’ experience on the Rock). Thus, parts of chapter three read complicatedly and chapter eighteen repeats passages from it.
The Secret of Hanging Rock opens as above, with time happening now, then, later and forever. It is presented, for the most part, from the point of view of the beautiful but ultimately unextraordinary Irma. She cannot understand or participate in the complete experience of that Valentine’s Day, and is finally left behind. As recounted in the strange images and metaphors of chapter three, chapter eighteen confirms that the Rock pulls Miranda and Marion into it, pulling them ‘like a tide’,
pulling them ‘inside out’. The mystery of Miss McCraw is also solved in the most fantastical of ways with her manifesting as ‘a clown-like figure dressed in a torn calico camisole and long calico drawers’. Manic and distressed, the creature who was once the unflappable mathematics mistress, eventually lays down with the semi-catatonic girls and sleeps. And like Miranda and Marion, she awakes with heightened perceptions: ‘Anything is possible, unless it is proved impossible. And sometimes even then.’ She also has extrasensory perception, being able to see Marion’s brilliant mind and Miranda’s pure heart. And with that, the three chosen ones step through into ‘a hole in space’, leaving Irma, waiting – rightly so –on the earthly plane. Like McCubbin’s figures, Irma is (merely) lost, waiting for rescue.
The mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock is no mystery at all. It never was. Even without chapter eighteen, with its additional details, the novel stands alone – explicable, complete, and containing most of what a reader needed to know in the first place. The only real mystery lies in Lindsay’s belief that her fiction was fact: ‘I can only say that for me fact and fiction are so closely aligned that some of it really happened and some of it didn’t. And to me it all happened. It was all terribly true to me.’ Lindsay’s words, from a 1974 interview for the (then) Arts Australia Council record, was a consistent response to her own creation: ‘it all happened’.
Making my way through the tourists at Hanging Rock one brisk winter’s morning, I witness parents pointing out the site of the alleged vanishing to their children. I watch people from around the world take photos of the scene of Lindsay’s fictional mystery. I hear tales of more recent incidents, such as the death of a twelveyear-old boy in 2002. I observe my daughter, a thoroughly modern Miranda, moving defiantly through the landscape. Like the others, we are drawn in, encouraged to move forward, onwards, upwards. There is no sense of menace, but with so many people around it is impossible to imagine the environment in other settings – at night, at dawn, without tourists and picnickers.
Lindsay not only wrote a novel, she reinscribed a landscape. As my visit to Hanging Rock revealed, a once secluded, spiritual site has been transformed into a busy tourist spot. In the visitor’s centre, tourists can read about the history of the region, from its geological origins to its original owners to colonial picnics and, finally, to the novel itself. Sightseers can walk along the path to Hanging Rock and take their photos before settling down to afternoon tea at the café.
Peter Weir’s film, released eight years after the publication of the novel, made use of Hanging Rock and the Macedon Ranges, augmenting the region’s fictional identity and fame in a way the author could never have anticipated, and subsequently heralding the era now known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Australian cinema.
The ripples continue. The novel has been adapted by playwrights for both dramatic and musical theatre, in-
cluding Tom Wright’s version, which premièred in 2016. Ursula Dubosarsky’s young adult novel The Golden Day (2011) was inspired by Picnic at Hanging Rock. A miniseries has also been scheduled for release in 2018. As the miniseries garners media coverage, intensified by the novel’s fiftieth anniversary, comments continue to be made about the ‘truth’ behind the story. Lindsay’s ripples extend, so it seems, to the manifestation of a strange psychological landscape in the form of an enclave of Australians who, like Lindsay, believe that fiction is fact.
Next day I visit Mulberry Hill, Lindsay’s home on the Mornington Peninsula. Built in 1926 as an addition to a small cottage, Mulberry Hill – an American colonial-style house – was the Lindsay residence before it was bequeathed to the National Trust. Perhaps because it was built for the couple and owned only by them, Mulberry Hill exudes a palpable energy. In Daryl’s art studio, a list of handwritten telephone numbers is still attached to the wall, and a small notebook of contacts lies open on a bookcase. Upstairs, where the spacious main bedroom sits across the landing from the writing room, Joan’s presence is intense. Time has stopped. A sparse, square room, the writing studio remains as she left it: a low table covered with a makeshift cardboard top holds her typewriter, glasses case, a sheaf of papers, and a tray of seashells. This ‘unstuffy’, eclectic ensemble sits on top of an old Persian rug, marking the domestic landscape in which Joan, sitting on the floor, wrote her tale of another landscape.
While Mulberry Hill is trapped in time, Hanging Rock is timeless. And, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the bridge between these two worlds, casts its long, rippling shadows across Australia, extending across the globe, going on forever – shaped by the Australian landscape and in turn having shaped it. g
Marguerite Johnson is Professor of Classics at The University of Newcastle. She is a writer and academic specialising in the widespread influences of the ancient Mediterranean on post-antiquity. Her focus is on the reception of Greek and Roman cultures in colonial Australia, including literature and art. Marguerite is the author of several scholarly books, numerous articles and chapters, and has also published a series of short stories. She is a regular contributor to The Conversation and the ABC. ❖
Thank you to ABR Patron Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO; ABR Editor Peter Rose; Valerie Laycock, Mornington Peninsula Properties Manager, The National Trust of Australia (Victoria); Professor Ian D. Clark, Federation University Australia; and Leni and Kate Johnson.
The ABR Gender Fellowship was generously funded by Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO.
THE
BEST
AUSTRALIAN POEMS 2017
edited by Sarah Holland-Batt Black Inc.
$24.99 pb, 192 pp, 9781863959629
When W.H. Auden took the cue for his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ from Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, he did not presume the reader’s knowledge of the iconography of the painting but rather sprang open its central and universal theme, which touches all our lives: how ‘dreadful martyrdom must run its course’. It is easy to think our lurid times are perhaps unsuited to such universalities, given the way we loudly chart even the smallest martyrdom, or indulge the biggest Trump on any manner of forums without ever feeling the need to properly situate the subject within a unifying longue durée. The cultural seeds of Trumpism may be found in most real estate offices, just as they are in Aeschylus and Dan Brown. But who cares about that? When it comes to capturing hearts and minds, umbrage and outrage are as much subject to the traction of demand and supply as anything else. At present, there are more poets writing in this country alone than there are footballers kicking goals at the highest level or politicians compromising the healthy future of our children’s climate. But where are the crowds, where is the hysteria, and the press conferences? Thankfully, not here. Like the ploughman ignoring Icarus falling into the sea in Brueghel’s painting, the workaday world and its directional spotlight will
always carry on as if nothing has happened in the poetry world.
But something has happened, and something big. Again. As always. The job of the annual Black Inc. anthologies is not to chronicle the year’s news and events but to provide what in Greek is called a temenos, a holy, or unholy, grove where the radiant ignition of a human’s deeper and properly stratified work can get done. This work, as the 2017 poems demonstrate, does not exclude vent or excoriation, nor highlights and humour, but it must exclude the badly made, the imprecise, and the cheap or surface view.
Thus the temenos this year is full of complex allusions, clashing enjambments, and worried content, but never does it agitate the mind like a newsfeed or a doggerel bloom. But hold on, I risk preaching to the converted, so enough of that. The point is that Judith Bishop’s poem ‘The Grey Parrot’ brought Auden’s poem to mind because it began in the impenetrable cold of a bare description of Walter Deverell’s painting of the same name before Bishop repealed her ekphrastic error and carried us properly into the ‘rapt stillness’ that is the poem’s, and the painting’s, resonant theme. Kim Cheng Boey, on the other hand, understands the temonos from the start, the way the magnetic zone around a poem’s ignition is as much about the prospect of translation as immersion. His longlined ‘Time is a river, time is a bridge’ has a riparian undulance which flows and returns and expands both music and emotion as it goes.
At their best, the Black Inc. collections show just how many ways there are to be in the poet’s grove. The poem which follows Kim Cheng Boey’s highlights this. Ken Bolton’s ‘Reach & Ambition’ is a snubbing inventory for a future vault of Blu-tak domesticity, a spooling memoir connecting heuristically to what precedes it. Along with John Watson’s prismatic ‘Long-On’, it is one of the lengthier poems of the collection (I wish there were more) and reads like a rather insouciant excerpt of excerpts. ‘I love it:’ Bolton writes, ‘human frailty / simple pleasures. What else?’ Thanks to the alphabetical sequencing of the collection by author, we can simply read backwards for an answer.
Or jump to Jaya Savige’s ‘Fort Dada’ seventeen letters on, which bedevils the boredom of current commodifiers such as ‘creative content’ by returning us gleefully, freely, subversively, to the long grass of language.
I counted thirty-two poems that I loved – a high number – but the standout poems here for me (even in the temenos we must have stars, if only for the preservation of the dark in between) are three. Maria Takolander’s ‘Nox’, which uses Anne Carson’s work of the same name as its confidante and referent, deals in the coping mechanisms that are always the armature of trauma itself. The interplay between the emergency space of Takolander’s husband’s heart attack (also present in the collection is David McCooey’s brilliantly quotidian ‘One Way or Another’) and her own steely, even Dickinsonian, self-portraiture, amounts to a fully poetic shock and recourse. Truth is paramount, and no painting is required.
Meanwhile, Anthony Lawrence’s knockabout rant on our era of pretentious beer is actually no such thing. It is caustic no doubt, but rises to that most traditionally difficult challenge of carving out a spoken voice for the page. Nostalgia is too tempting these days – what with the goulash of climate change and selfiedom – so Lawrence cuts to the chase, opting for an expert lancing of the wound.
The third star, Amanda Joy’s ‘Almost Pause/Pareidolia’, works both with language and what it denotes. Which just about covers things really. Joy’s tercets unstitch meaning for a new raiment, open cage doors on received opinions of beauty and disaster, and are reminiscent of Wallace Stevens in their philosophic look at our urge to escape into simile and metaphor. If each year the world, or the paintings of the world, need a new name, and it seems they do, a poet like Joy might have it. Hers is an exciting work of art in another excellent issue, curated from the teeming heart of the temenos by Sarah Holland-Batt. g
Gregory Day’s forthcoming novel, A Sand Archive, will be published by Picador in 2018. He lives in south-west Victoria.
Kenneally
THESE THINGS ARE REAL
by Alan Wearne Giramondo
$24 pb, 144 pp, 9781925336320
Alan Wearne’s work over the past thirty years or so – dense, demanding, unique, rewarding – is like the oeuvre of a cinematic auteur: one that never quite got onto the syllabus, or brought out the crowds at Cinémathèque. Technique above all, most of the time, but allied with real if unfamiliar emotion, even if the narrative needed the reader to have the right stuff in the first place before it unfolded itself.
More recently, the scope has lessened, the rhyme schemes become less ornate, the characters more constrained. One wouldn’t have noticed in his previous book, Prepare The Cabin For Landing (2012), with its overt Juvenalian satire woven through the personal narratives. But in These Things Are Real the two things have largely separated. The verse narratives in the first half of the book are more sanguine than we are used to from Wearne, with the antiqueness of the scenarios a kind of enabling constraint rather than a period set.
The first story concerns a widow, Nance, in postwar Moorabbin, reconnecting with her old friend Iris and carrying on a kind of ‘friendship’ with Iris’s husband Keith: unconsummated, hardly even a flirtation, but somehow essential to her. The first thing one notices, in the opening lines, is Wearne’s sleight of hand. Iris, he says, belonged to the ‘generation of unadorned names, / Jean and Elaine, Nance and Wynne.’ There are also Dot, Elwyn, and Gwen. They may be unadorned, but they fall together on the ear in a singular way: the way Alan Wearne hears them. The tuning fork is struck. Even more, in this first story, is the way he gets his characters to speak with his diction. ‘Now call me a sophisticate,’ Nance says, ‘but what sophisticate’s a Moorabbin sophisticate?’ Even though it is hard to imagine a person saying that, Wearne manages to get it
out of Nance on the page and still make her utterly quotidian. I had not realised before how much this makes him work.
There are two other female characters, as different as could be. A single mother, in ‘Anger Management: A South Coast Tale’ falls in despite herself with a just-sensitive-enough-to-beginwith failure at everything who soon turns to anger and abuse, ‘a stocky, perspiring man, making noises no one wants / to understand, getting dragged away’. It convinces in an almost too benign way. Rather more laboured, ‘Waitin’ for the Viet Cong’ has a ‘recently retired femocrat’ looking back on a disastrous, almost fatal, flight to Paris in a headlong 1960s pursuit of love and rebellion: only to be saved by, and permanently enveloped in, the way in which one’s family insist on loving, doggedly, infuriatingly, through everything. The story creaks: the emotion does not.
The male characters represent so much that their personalities recede to vanishing point. There is Peter, in ‘Memoirs of a Ceb’, struggling with being gay, somehow finding his way through, in some semi-distant era, so mysterious it retreats before you. And finally, defiantly, in the familiar form of the dishevelled, divorced, ex-junkie ex-teacher remembering a ghastly event from the salad days of his junkiedom, who opens his mouth, for Wearne to speak: ‘So it continues, my tick-off list of / Them them and them, those those and those till it will have happened / much too many years ago, and even these memories, our sour / and blighted memories, must surely need to cease.’
The second half of the book is ‘The Sarsparilla Writers Centre’: nearly fifty pages of satire directed at all and sundry. Satire, according to the Concise Oxford, is the ‘use of ridicule, irony, sarcasm etc., in speech or writing, for the ostensible purpose of exposing & discouraging vice or folly’. The brothers Fowler were rightly ambivalent about satire – hence the ‘ostensible’ lurking in the definition, ready to pounce.
In this case, the purpose is mostly to expose and discourage anyone who has got up Wearne’s nose in the last forty or fifty years, and it’s not especially edifying. There are also a couple of other ret-
rograde tropes on show from the poetry universe: writing poems about other poets; and limp two-line squibs. There are many poets guilty of both, but seldom on this scale. Fun to perform, I daresay, but not to read. There is one, ‘The 1987 Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry’, that is genuinely funny, and here it is: ‘What you see is what you get / Runnerup to Lily Brett.’
The first thing one notices is Wearne’s sleight of hand
There is also a completely delightful longer poem called ‘Freely, and with the appropriate sense of space ( Dreams: lived, dreamt and composed for Ken Bolton)’. If it is a parody it is a very affectionate one, and full of an uncharacteristic lightness and grace. It works because it doesn’t matter who all the poets paraded past us are, or what exactly Wearne’s grist is: fifty more pages of picaresque Bolton-lite would have been far more refreshing, if a little gassy, than all the indigestible two-liners. However, after some consternation, the realisation dawned that this is how a poet might tweet: especially one so firmly lodged in the pre-Twitter ambience of the bookish, beerish twentieth century fin de siècle. Ephemeral and stolid: it was worth a try, I suppose. g
Catherine Noske
TERRA NULLIUS by Claire G. Coleman Hachette
$29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780733638312
It is hard to review a novel when you don’t want to discuss two-thirds of it – not because it is not worth discussing, but because doing so risks undermining the genius of the novel’s structure. The blurb of Claire G. Coleman’s début makes clear that the novel is ‘not [about] the Australia of our history’, but for the first third of the novel, this is not readily apparent.
Instead, at the opening, the novel seems to be set at the point of first contact and colonial settlement in Western Australia. It follows multiple threads, principally the stories of Native escapee Jacky; Sister Bagra, a Settler and head of a colonial mission school; Trooper Rohan, hunting both Jacky and Johnny; and ‘free’ Native Esperance. In the intersections between storylines and through the experiences of each character, we are offered insight into the physical and emotional violence of colonial occupation, the social and political distance between the Natives’ and the Settlers’ lives. The capitalisation of these terms is an important idiosyncrasy in the historical setting, but in reading it seems natural given the impact this distinction has –the systemic racism, the danger and depression faced by the Native characters. Coleman’s novel won the State Library of Queensland’s black&write!
Fellowship, (an initiative supporting emerging Indigenous writers, responsible for producing of excellent works like Alison Whittaker’s Lemons in the Chicken Wire [Magabala, 2016]). While the novel is in many ways a début – there is some redundancy and repetition in developing both themes and characters, for instance – it is an intriguing read. The novel’s epigraph, from Goanna’s hit single ‘Solid Rock’, focuses the narrative on colonial first contact: ‘They were standing on the shore one day, / saw the white sails in the sun. Wasn’t long before they felt the sting, / white man, white law, white gun.’ (That Goanna’s frontman Shane Howard is not himself Indigenous should perhaps be read as the first indication that the consideration of race in this novel will be complex and subtle.) The final line of this epigraph is important – subjugation by both law and weaponry is from the onset a key theme. This dissection of the colonial application of law is at its most pointed in the depiction of child removal within the mission system. Sister Bagra, in ‘educating’ the children in her mission, openly contemplates their legal status, dismissing their intelligence and thus situating them as animals under law. Thinking in this way legitimises for her the life of slavery for which the children are being prepared. Part of the strength of the novel is the manner in which such thought is offered to the reader – Coleman’s use of free indirect discourse draws the reader step-by-step into complicity with Bagra’s twisted logic, and shows the damage of this perspective as a social discourse. That this is a commentary is directly relevant to contemporary Australia is not difficult to see: the novel’s title makes that clear from the outset.
Alongside this (shattering) depiction of violence, however, Coleman also offers poignant representation of the value of culture and art. The human instinct to artistic expression is seen as something transcendental, crossing the void between Settler and Native: ‘There was something unfathomable about the Native voices; no two sung exactly the same note, yet the different tones combined to make the whole unfathomably larger. He was surprised to be so moved …’
As a counterpoint to Coleman’s emphasis on the violence of colonisation, the power of art offers a fragile thread of hope, reduplicated in the strength of Coleman’s own voice. The afterword, for instance, very deliberately connects the novel to a tradition of Indigenous writing.
Similarly, the novel contains epigraphs beyond the lines from ‘Solid Rock’, one at the opening of each chapter, all of which are ‘excerpts’ from fictional texts. These introduce a subtle commentary as to how, in hindsight, culture is recorded and perpetuated, and at the same time, on what is lost. Several of these focus on the need to protect Native culture, questioning the manner in which Indigenous art is maintained and consumed in contemporary Australian society. In this, the novel’s interest in structures of law opens into a wider consideration of the construction of any society through language, legislative, cultural, and historical.
In all these interests, the novel’s thematic implications support what is at heart an assumption made by the reader: that the Natives of this society are Australia’s Indigenous people. Despite the warning in the blurb, the novel gently and persuasively lulls the reader into understanding the setting as historical fiction, encouraging him or her to participate in assumptions about the characters and social politics at play. Coming mid-narrative, the twist then forces the reader into a consciousness of their own reading and the ideas it has perpetuated, pointing to and undermining stereotypes which tend to frame the reading of colonial spaces. The lines between colonial ‘Other’ and self are blurred. This is very clever writing. The result is a metafictional questioning of how we read, which lifts the narrative to a new level. The blurb’s assertion that this place is ‘all too familiar’ cuts both ways, making clear the connection between the novel and history, but also pointing to the danger of complaisance in looking back. g
Catherine Noske is the editor of Westerly Magazine at the University of Western Australia, where she is a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
Fiona Wright
DRAWING SYBYLLA
by Odette Kelada
UWA Publishing
$24.99 pb, 164 pp, 9781742589510
Drawing Sybylla is a wonderfully unusual book, narrated in parts by a modern-day Sybil – one of those ‘mad mouthpieces’ of prophesy and poetry from Ancient Greece. This Sybil springs to life from an elaborate doodle in a notebook, drawn by a Sydney Writers’ Festival panelist who is listening to another writer on her panel. This writer is describing to the audience a feminist short story from 1892, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a work in which a woman, diagnosed by her physician husband as suffering ‘a slight hysterical tendency’, is confined to a single room to rest and recover, and slowly descends into madness, beginning to see other women moving behind – and trapped behind – the intricate patterns of the wallpaper. And it is this wallpaper, these figures, that come to form the central metaphor of Kelada’s book – as the suddenly animated ink figure, aptly named Sybylla, invites her creator to step behind the wallpaper and into its pattern, and examine the lives of other women writers, in Australia, across time.
This is, of course, a worthy and important project, a rewriting and reconsideration of the past and of women’s creative and intellectual lives and the circumstances that have constrained them; it also taps in to a wider cultural conversation – championed by organisations like VIDA and the Stella Prize (indeed, one of Kelada’s fictional women writers is named Stella) – around redressing the historic bias against women writers and their work. Kelada’s novel imagines the lives of five different women, living and writing in 1901, 1929, 1932, 1954, and 1979 respectively, and explores the pressures and expectations that affected their work and its reception – be they family expectations and social mores, house- and caring work, or objectification and institutional
sexism. But it’s also an ambitious project that doesn’t always accomplish its aims.
The five historical women in the novel are all characters who have been touched in some way by Sybylla. The first, Lucy, professes to ‘a hissing in [her] head’ that impels her to write; another is told that she was ‘born to bleed in ink’. Writing is their unavoidable fate; so too is being dismissed as frivolous at best, misguided and dangerous at worst. Each character narrates her story in the first person. At times their narration, and consciousness, seem ahistorical; each character is so keenly aware of the forces working against them and of the injustice of their situation, and able to describe these things clearly, and more completely than seems plausible for someone still embedded within them. The details of this oppression – characters who dismiss their work as ‘just silly things’ or ‘scribbles’, who remind them of their other duties or accuse them of having ‘grand notions’– are so similar across the stories that they eventually begin to feel unindividuated and almost didactic.
Furthermore, when these women do sit down to write – secretly at night, in the early morning before the family is awake – the words are always described as pouring from them effortlessly, or as it narrated to them wholesale by the characters of their own fiction. Kelada does not portray these womens’ writing as acts of volition, or work – they often seem more like vessels for the divine inspiration of the muse-like Sybylla –and while it is a political act to explore precisely what a woman’s muse might be, it nonetheless undermines the novel’s interest in tracing the determination, creativity, and intelligence of these women writers suppressed by the social forces of their time.
Despite this, the narration in each of these stories is peppered with delightful turns of phrase and small jokes: Lucy wonders about her mother’s repeated mantra that she has ‘her hands full as it is’ by stating, ‘We run around with our hands full so the devil won’t come out and grab them’; Eve, worrying over the transgressive story she is writing, says, ‘I decide not to think. I am thinking too much. I will make jam instead’ (and dis-
covers instructions for ‘How to preserve a husband’ in her recipe book to boot). These moments of levity are one of the real pleasures of the book; so too is the wildness of its premise and imagination. Each writer’s story is interspersed with a short and often dream-like return to the underlying narrative, of Sybylla and her companion trying to free themselves from behind the wallpaper pattern, where they are encountering these women. These passages serve as constant reminders of exactly what it is that the book is trying to do.
It is a political act to explore precisely what a woman’s muse might be
The stories are also impeccably researched. Kelada is an academic specialising in marginalised voices; her PhD focused on the lives of Australian women writers such as those that make up this book. There is a force and vitality to the angrier of her characters – Susanne in 1979, Vera in 1929 – that energises their chapters in particular. But this research is not always carried lightly, and at times seems to direct both the narrative and narration; so too does Sybylla’s insistence on the ‘real power of stories’ and their ‘danger’ occasionally feel forced. Drawing Sybylla is an admirably ambitious book, both in its form and scope, and it has much charm and intelligence, but it is uneven, and occasionally lacks the nuance that would make it a truly compelling read. g
by Robert Edeson
Fremantle Press
$29.99 pb, 306 pp, 9781925164930
You can’t help but smile while reading Robert Edeson’s Bad to Worse, his second book featuring Richard Worse, polymath, conversationalist, fighter, and resident of Perth. The mirth may have something to do with the Dickensian names Edeson uses throughout – not just Worse, but an aeronautics engineer called Walter Reckles, the Norwegian–British logician Edvard Tossentern, and the aptly named villain, Glimpse (who only makes a short appearance). It may also come from the reader trying to separate the real science and philosophy from the author defying the laws of nature and daring his readers to pick the difference.
What violence there is is more cartoonish (not an insult) than is usually associated with the forensic gore of many mysteries and thrillers, and is quickly dealt with. Then it’s back to the smiling. As with Edeson’s previous book, The Weaver Fish (2014), the merriment starts on the title page with the far from usual acclamations from the famous, including praise from Euclid, Dante Alighieri, R. Magritte, A. Einstein – and St Ignorius. The author’s attitude to religion is probably summed up in the name.
There are a few loose strands in this book that are never resolved, probably teasers for the next in the series, which you can’t help feeling is on the horizon, not too far from the Ferendes, islands that do not appear on any map but play an important role in Worse’s journey. But then the whole book is somehow just a few degrees off true north. At some point, Edeson is going to have to explain the giant crab that walks on two legs.
The conceit in the foreword is that Magdalena Letterby, its writer, does not know the author of the book that follows, but cheekily recommends that
the work be read five times in order to fully understand it. Twice will probably suffice.
The story begins in Dante, Arizona, in 1877, with the death of Rigo Mortiss at the hands of the first Worse to settle in the area. And thus is ignited a feud between the Worses and the Mortisses, who eventually expand their business interests to become a multinational conglomerate. The feud spills over into Perth, when Richard Worse and his particular range of skills are enlisted to investigate a mid-air collision involving Walter Reckles and an object that seems to have originated at a mysterious, closely guarded no-go area just outside the town of Dante, a site that seems to belong to the Worses’ arch enemies. The Mortiss family, under its present ruler, Regan Mortiss, are a particularly ruthless lot, having amassed a fortune over the generations ‘using the proven business model of forgery, extortion and murder’.
Along the way to meet a branch of the family he didn’t know existed, Worse makes a side trip to the Ferendes to help with research into the linguistics of the swint, a bird that appears to have a larger than normal brain. The swints, as with many other characters and lines of research, first made their appearance in The Weaver Fish. Edeson’s background as a consultant anaesthetist, and in neuroscience and mathematics, plays a huge part in Worse’s character, but where necessary and to move the plot, he plucks the science from the realms of his own vivid imagination.
The world’s problems are more easily fixed in Edeson’s world than ours, but that is part of the fun. There is enough that is familiar in his world to take the reader along for the ride. But, unlike Edeson’s scholarly writing, he is not above taking us on a tangent that cannot exist in our reality. History, scripture, and French philosophy are just a few topics that Edeson makes up as he goes along, negating the need for the meticulous research that necessarily goes into his other works. As Edeson has said, it also takes copyright and defamation out of the equation.
The main narrative is interrupted and illuminated by letters, emails, foot-
notes, and other asides that can bring an unnecessary lull in proceedings. But these are amusing vignettes in their own right, some raising far more questions that they answer and leaving the reader wanting them to continue, yet, paradoxically, longing to get back to the action. There is even an index – often sacrificed in the name of cost cutting in some non-fiction – keeping intact the pretence of a scholar at work.
In Edeson’s universe, witty, amusing, and learned conversation still has its place in human interaction, and no non sequitur is sneered at. Worse and his sometime travel companion Sigrid Blitt’s exchanges range from observations about the logic of police officers to Dante’s Inferno being translated into limericks. Other exchanges follow similar paths.
Edeson’s writing has a rhythm all its own that is unlike other mystery stories and thrillers, and has to do with the ease and confidence with which he can take the reader from the familiar directly into a little bit of Worseworld. And it is with great glee that we often hear ourselves saying, ‘Surely he made that bit up, didn’t he? Didn’t he?’ For the most part, Edeson gives us villains who are truly awful and good guys who are either virtuous or immensely learned, with researchers willing to face any peril in the pursuit of knowledge. It all makes for a joyful ride, lots of smiles – and frequent checking of dictionaries and other references. g
Barry Reynolds is a freelance writer. ❖
‘The worst kid. The best teacher. United as underdogs. Battling for justice.’
An 89,000 word Australian story, told from fifteen perspectives. Book $24.95 (inc. Aus postage); contact Adrian at Staddie Media staddie1@yahoo.com.au –ebook from Amazon
Andrew Fuhrmann
by George Steiner and Laure Adler
University of Chicago Press (Footprint)
$44.99 hb, 144 pp, 9780226350387
In the late 1950s, when he was a fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Learning, George Steiner overheard the legendary J. Robert Oppenheimer, at that time head of the Institute, dressing down a young physicist outside his door: ‘You are so young,’ boomed the father of the atomic bomb, ‘and you have already done so little!’ The story appears most recently in A Long Saturday, a series of conversations between Steiner and the French journalist and biographer Laure Adler, but it is one he has told several times before as a kind of apology for his own unflagging industry as an educator, critic, essayist, and novelist. ‘After comments like that,’ he reflects, ‘you could only hang yourself.’
This is the severest sort of credo –achievement or suicide – and may explain why at the age of eighty-eight the prolific Steiner is still reading and writing and planning new books. It is the only way to resist what he calls the urgency of death, the inevitability of non-being.
Steiner was born in 1929 to Viennese Jewish parents. The family left Europe for the United States in 1940, securing passage on the last American passenger ship to leave Paris before the Nazi invasion. Once in the States, the young Steiner flourished. He went to the University of Chicago and then Harvard. He managed to win a Rhodes Scholarship despite having no talent for any sport except chess. After completing his doctorate at Oxford, he briefly returned to the United States to study at Princeton, but eventually settled in Cambridge, where he was elected an extraordinary fellow in 1969. And in Cambridge he has remained, although he still talks passionately about the virtues of statelessness and transnational mobility. ‘A tree has roots,’ he tells Adler. ‘I have legs. And that’s a magnificent advance.’
There is, too, something of the dedicated stroller in his approach to literary criticism. He is not a great systematic thinker or enquirer after foundations. His range of interests is broad and his touch is light. There are themes and ideas and writers he returns to – translation, the Shoah, Paul Celan, silence, tragedy, Heidegger – but he never gives the impression of claiming exclusive rights. He is always passing through, not trying to manage or enclose or control. In his own terms, he is a kind of literary postal service: ‘All my life I’ve tried to be a good mailman, to take letters and put them in the right mailboxes. It’s not always easy to find the right mailbox if you’re talking about a piece of writing, introducing a new work. You can sometimes be terribly wrong, but it’s a fascinating task, and an important one. I’m lucky to have served as a postino for some very fine writers.’
This analogy is appealing because Steiner’s criticism does sometimes feel like a series of dazzling but discrete parcels. What is remembered about his first book, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, published in 1959 and partly written while at Princeton, is not its attempt to align all categories of thought and feeling with the pattern of one or other of the two Russians; what endures is his energetic demonstration of the profound influence of dramatic literature on Dostoevsky’s artistic sensibility. As in so many of Steiner’s books, it is not the grand thesis that impresses but the sparkling sidenote: the virtuoso reading or unexpected comparison.
The knock on Steiner used to be that he cuts corners, camouflaging ignorance with plausible eloquence and demonstrations of trilingual fluency in English, French, and German. One thinks, for instance, of John Simon’s demolition job on Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy for The Hudson Review in 1961, in which he gleefully holds aloft Steiner’s every slip and distortion. Simon’s performance – and he has given several encores over the years – is the tearing down of a pretentious educator who sets himself up as an encyclopedia of world literature. Fair enough, but Steiner is not read only because he is conspicuously erudite. He is read – and admired
– because he is a stylish and persuasive advocate for works in different languages, difficult works, and works that confront difficult but important subjects. Still, having his mistakes so loudly proclaimed must have hurt. And yet, in his conversations with Laure Adler he laments that there is so much ‘bluffing’ in the humanities. In the sciences, he says, they do not tolerate it: ‘You can’t cheat. Anyone who dares to cheat in an experiment, in a result, in a theorem, is destroyed.’ Perhaps we are all fortunate that the humanities are more forgiving.
More recently, critics like James Wood have accused Steiner of a different sort of cheating – of excessive reverence for ‘greatness’. According to Wood – for whom there is no literary magic that cannot be sluiced away with explanation – Steiner too often substitutes rhetorical veneration of the mystery of genius for the grunt work of defining, explaining and clarifying. And it is true that even in this slim volume Steiner manages to use the word ‘miracle’ some twenty odd times. Books are miracles. Records are miracles. China is not a miracle, but India might be. Valéry’s La Jeune Parque is a miracle. The survival of Europe is a miracle.
But for Steiner, what is important is not how literature works but that it works at all. Critics do not need to rationalise the transformative potential of art; they only need to give it ‘a more precise authority and presence’. After all, you don’t want your postman opening the packages as well as delivering them. g
Ryan Cropp
by Joe Gorman
University of Queensland Press
$32.95 pb, 424 pp, 9780702259685
During the past few European summers, several of the world’s biggest soccer clubs have deigned to visit Australian shores for branding exercises more commonly referred to as ‘friendlies’. These dull, meaningless matches are organised almost solely to line the pockets of the visiting clubs, yet they have been immensely popular. Australia’s local soccer competition, the A-League, is modelled on this slick, corporate mutation of modern sport. For the last twelve years, strategically located clubs have played in rented stadiums in front of paying customers. Soccer’s governing élites carefully control the sport’s ‘brand’ and its ‘metrics’. This is Australian soccer’s brave new world. Before the revolution, we are told, there was nothing.
This redacted prehistory of the sport is the subject of Joe Gorman’s passionate The Death and Life of Australian Soccer Gorman wrestles with the paradox at the heart of soccer’s turbulent history: the sport’s prominent ‘ethnic’ communities were both its biggest strength and its most debilitating weakness. It was soccer’s image as an ethnic game that pushed it to the margins of Australia’s sporting consciousness. This is no retrospective playing of the race card: until recently, for example, it was not considered controversial to refer to the sport by its decidedly racist pseudonym, ‘wogball’.
Gorman’s central claim is that soccer’s postwar experience is the best illustration of the problems and possibilities of multiculturalism in Australia. It is the true national game. At a time when all the major sporting codes are falling over themselves to prove their multicultural credentials, soccer is essentially the only sport in which this bears any relation to reality. For more than seventy years, suc-
cessive waves of migrants – welcomed into a foreign country yet disconnected from its culture – built entire communities and social networks around soccer clubs in every Australian city. This often raised complex questions about the meaning of identity and citizenship in modern Australia. For Gorman, ‘Soccer’s national question is Australia’s national question’.
The Death and Life is a reclamation of the ‘confusing mess’ that is the history of soccer in Australia. It follows the long-forgotten stories of the game’s true believers, those men and women whose unbending faith in soccer’s ultimate deliverance have sustained the sport through good times and bad. The original prophet-in-chief was Andrew Dettre, an urbane Hungarian migrant and Australia’s first ‘soccer intellectual’. After arriving as a refugee in the 1950s, Dettre quickly tired of the media focus on the established sporting codes and set about producing a publication of his own. For decades he acted as soccer’s leading evangelist and used Soccer World to chronicle all of the game’s paradoxes, absurdities, and intractable feuds.
Though Australian soccer was dominated by migrants, they shared a common determination to see the game succeed in their adopted country. Dettre’s most famous disciple was László Ürge, better known to Australians as the late SBS presenter Les Murray, who migrated from Hungary in 1957. He and his close friend Johnny Warren were dubbed ‘Mr and Mrs Soccer’, and the latter’s famous phrase – ‘I told you so’ – felt like a prophecy fulfilled when Australia finally qualified for the World Cup in 2006. Indeed, the book is filled with with religious metaphors: a sporting magazine is a ‘bible’, a football ground a ‘sacred meeting place’. Soccer, Gorman contends, is a ‘game of love’, though this is more compelling as a defence of the sport’s amateur traditions than of today’s franchised entertainments.
One of Gorman’s most persistent themes is Australian soccer’s belief in the inevitability of its own success. Fans still love to refer to it as the ‘sleeping giant’ of Australian sport, endlessly on the verge of awakening. However, he contin-
ually reminds us that middle Australia’s difficult relationship with its most multicultural sport mirrors its own inability to come to terms with its post-colonial fate. Soccer is a battleground in Australia’s endless culture war. The Death and Life insists that this relationship between sport, politics, and culture be taken seriously. In this regard, it stands well above the usual production line of hagiography and memoir that dominate the sports writing genre.
The seriousness of Gorman’s message does not stop him from producing a rollicking narrative. His writing is wonderfully colourful and humorous, expertly teasing out personal stories to make broader points. Kimon Taliadoros’s forgotten crusade to establish a players union and the tale of Mark Viduka’s complicated nationalism are clear highlights. The tale of the individual who finds identity and belonging in the communities that formed around soccer clubs in Australia is the happy refrain to nearly every chapter. These clubs were not exclusive: many of their staunchest advocates were Anglo-Australians who retained only fond memories of time spent in ‘ethnic’ enclaves like Melbourne Croatia, Pan Hellenic, and St George Budapest.
When the A-League was launched in 2005, there was an ambient racism at the heart of its ‘old soccer, new football’ marketing slogan. The achievements of the ethnic clubs – accommodating new migrants, establishing a vibrant national competition, producing generations of Socceroos – were quickly forgotten. ‘In a multicultural society,’ Gorman laments, ‘how did ethnicity become a dirty word in Australia’s most diverse sport?’ Since Australian soccer’s great leap forward, its organising principle has been commerce, not ethnicity. It was the market that killed the old clubs, just as it dispensed with the AFL’s Fitzroy Lions and rugby league’s Newtown Jets. Thankfully, we have this book to remind us of a time when sporting clubs represented, in a very real sense, communities. g
Ryan Cropp is a Sydney-based writer and historian. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.
Art
Theatre
Ian Dickson
Three Sisters (Sydney Theatre Company)
Film
Francesca Sasnaitis
On Chesil Beach (Palace Films)
Art Colin Golvan
Albert Namatjira
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
by
After decades of English-language Chekhov productions following in the footsteps of Stanislavsky and Komisarjevsky in which historically accurately costumed actors wandered around a stage awash with gloom and torpor declaiming Constance Garnett’s constipated translations, directors finally discovered that the plays were strong enough to be removed from their original place and period. Janet Suzman’s magnificent Cherry Orchard (1997) transported the play to contemporary South Africa and Michael Blakemore, in his film Country Life (1994), showed that Uncle Vanya could work if it were transposed to Western Australia. Benedict Andrews’s modernised Three Sisters at the Young Vic (2012) was well received. Now the Sydney Theatre Company is presenting its own updated version. One is as unlikely to see a samovar in a contemporary Chekhov production as a horned helmet in a modern production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Although Three Sisters, first performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, is arguably Chekhov’s dramatic masterpiece, it had a difficult gestation period. Ill and isolated in Yalta from his friends and colleagues, Chekhov was nevertheless for the first time in his life seriously in love, with the actress Olga Knipper. The
play he intended to write was to be a joyous comedy. Soon he got bogged down. Writing to Olga he said: ‘I am writing slowly; that’s something I didn’t anticipate. If it doesn’t come out as it should, I shall put it away till next year.’ To his sister Masha, Chekhov wrote: ‘I find it very difficult to write Three Sisters, much more difficult than any of my other plays.’ He put this down to the fact that as a celebrated author he was constantly being interrupted. But the impediment probably had more to do with the fact that in this play he was attempting something new. Three Sisters fits into neither of the dominant dramatic forms of the era: the popular, tightly constructed, well-made play or the impressionist dramas of writers like Maeterlinck.
Chekhov treats his story of the Prosorov siblings, three sisters and a brother, marooned in a provincial town and dependent on the more cultured members of the military for amusement and support, more like a novel than a traditional play. The original criticism of the play was that it was plotless, but in fact it brilliantly interweaves several plots, all of which have in common the way in which we try to shield ourselves from the ultimate meaninglessness of life.
In his conversation in the program, Kip Williams picks up on this and comments on the play’s thematic similarity to Waiting for Godot. Williams even provides a Beckettian tree in the final act. Accordingly, his production’s setting is vague. We are somewhere in Russia, given that the doctor, Chebutikin, is at one stage reading a newspaper with Cyrillic lettering, and it might be the late 1970s or early 1980s, since Natasha, the ghastly wife of Andrei, the Prosorov brother, constantly produces polaroids of her equally ghastly children. Liberating the play from a specific setting was presumably intended to emphasise the universality of its themes. But in doing so it places an extra burden on the actors, who have to make their characters believable in a vacuum. Even in Godot, we must believe in Vladimir and Estragon as people. In the first two acts, Williams seems determined to keep us at a distance from this group. He has his actors play in a broad superficial style, rather like a slightly watered down version of the style he so brilliantly used in the first act of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine. But whereas the Churchill piece was designed to be played
that way, Chekhov’s characters are three-dimensional people whose layers are revealed gradually. Dazed by a frenzy of mugging, at the interval we were no closer to understanding the Prosorovs and their friends than we were at the start. It is true that when Chekhov first saw a run-through of Stanislavky’s gloomy original production he is supposed to have exclaimed: ‘But what I wrote was a vaudeville.’ I doubt that this was the sort of vaudeville he had in mind.
The third act takes place in the bedroom of two of the sisters Olga and Irina. The town is on fire and, although chaos is occurring outside the room, this is paradoxically the quietest act in the play. Here Williams at last allows his actors to calm down and actually relate to one another. Suddenly, Alison Bell as Olga, Miranda Daughtry as Irina, Eryn Jean Norvill as their sister Masha, Brandon McClelland as Andrei, and Anthony Brandon Wong as Chebutikin show what they could have achieved in a more sympathetic production. There are other actors who come out more or less unscathed. Peter Carroll makes the council dogsbody, Ferapont, here bizarrely rechristened Philip, endearingly believable. Rahel Romahn is a marvellous combination of creepy and pathetic as the inadequate, self-hating Solyony hopelessly in love with Irina. But it is Chris Ryan as the pathetic, cuckolded, eternally cheerful schoolteacher Kulygin who comes closest to the spirit of Chekhov.
Neither actors nor director are helped by Andrew Upton’s now standard assault on Russian drama. Completely tone deaf to Chekhov’s subtle music, he rampages through the play, coarsening its texture. By allowing the sisters to swear and giving Masha an extraordinary speech in which she explains to her sisters that love is a hard cock, he undercuts Chekhov’s point that it is the sisters’ refined sensibilities that make them the ineffectual victims of the uncultured Natasha. Upton’s trio would surely have made mincemeat of her. But by making Natasha out to be simply a vulgar tart, he also misses the humour in her character. In the original play, Natasha grows from being an overwhelmed unsophisticated girl into a monster who, with her bad French, considers herself to be the height of elegance. She is the epitome of that untranslatable Russian word ‘poshlost’, a mixture of bad faith, banality, petty evil, and philistinism, which Chekhov sees as overwhelming all that is good in Russia – and which we can see on the rise here.
Most unforgivably, Upton cuts Olga’s final speech, which, in its tragic irony, sums up the whole play. Or it would have been unforgivable if by that stage we still had any interest in his characters. g
Three Sisters (Sydney Theatre Company), written by Anton Chekov and adapted by Andrew Upton, continues at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until 16 December 2017. Performance attended: 10 November. (ABR Arts: 13 November 2017)
Ian Dickson has degrees in Drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
On Chesil Beach is not Ian McEwan’s first screenplay, nor his only adaptation for the screen. The Children Act (2017), directed by Richard Eyre and based on McEwan’s 2014 novel, is also due for release in 2018. In an interview he gave at the Toronto International Film Festival, where both films premièred, McEwan said that his challenge was to find cinematic equivalents for literary devices, without resorting to the obvious solution of the voiceover. What he achieves feels like déjà vu. Interior monologues, intertwining thoughts and memories, and McEwan’s succinct narratorial commentary, return seemingly verbatim in conversations and extensive flashback scenes. Only the novel’s implicit theme, ‘the power of words to make the unseen visible’, suffers in translation.
It is 1962. The film begins with a wide-shot over neatly parcelled, green countryside. The camera pans slowly down to the coast and Dorset’s famous twentynine-kilometre shingle beach. In the distance, walking along the deserted beach, are two indistinct figures. As the camera moves closer, and the figures resolve into those of a young man and woman, their voices become clearer: the woman speaks with what would once have been called an educated English accent, the man, with a mild country lilt, the first of many dichotomies that signify the fissures in their relationship. He skips around her, passionately trying to explain the genius of Chuck Berry. It’s very bouncy and merry, she says, desperate to appreciate his enthusiasm for rock and roll. He calls her the squarest girl in the world. Does he love her despite her shortcomings? He loves her because of them, or so he insists. And she loves him, but classical music is her passion.
The first sentence of McEwan’s novel (published in 2007) baldly states their predicament: ‘They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.’ Under Dominic Cooke’s direction, watching these two naïve, young people, stymied by the unspoken rules and conventions of the period, is exquisite torture. Both leads – Billy Howle
as the self-conscious but defiant Edward Mayhew, and Saoirse Ronan as Florence Ponting, tilting the perfect oval of her face on that swan-like neck – invite us with the smallest gestures, the nervous foot-tapping, handclenching, and subtleties of vocal and facial expression
into the intimacy of their thoughts.
‘I love you,’ each declares. They believe themselves to be sincere, but lack the insight to realise that what they adore is the idea of being in love, so eager are they to embark on their own versions of adult life. Both are unprepared for a reality of patience and compromise.
‘I love you too,’ each replies, as if the word might satisfy Edward’s sexual longing and free Florence from her revulsion at the physical act.
But Florence is not only the reticent, compliant creature of Edward’s imagination. As lead violinist of the Ennismore Quartet, she is ambitious, demanding to the point of tyranny, and not above behaving dismissively towards her colleagues. Florence promises to play the Mozart String Quintet No. 5 in D major (the one he can hum) at her Wigmore Hall début. He hardly appreciates her music, or the magnitude of her gift, but promises to be there, bellowing ‘bravo’, when that day comes.
Nuanced performances are not restricted to the leads. Anne-Marie Duff deserves a BAFTA Award as Edward’s brain-damaged mother, changing within a breath from uninhibited nakedness and taking credit for household tasks she is no longer capable of performing, to speaking lucidly about the great Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello and his painting The Hunt in the Forest. Florence’s kindness and gentle banter with Marjorie is one of the film’s most poignant scenes, and in stark
contrast to her relationship with her own mother. Violet (a matronly Emily Watson) is a controlling bigot and anti-Semite whose academic career takes clear precedence over her daughter’s musical ambitions. Florence’s father Geoffrey (Samuel West) is a self-loathing bully, if possible even more vile than Violet. In memories triggered by a Rachmaninov piece for piano, there are intimations of abuse. Here, music takes the starring role, not as background to action but as plot point, as subtext, as a sublime agent provocateur.
What could have been cut is the coda, the least successful section of the novel, and worse on film, where the painful consequences of a single act in 1962 are spelled out by youthful actors imperfectly aged for 1975 and 2007. I prefer the ambiguity of the final scene, back on the shingled beach where the film began, with Edward standing silhouetted against the heavy sky, and Florence, by a clever trick of cinematography, apparently seated in an abandoned dinghy. At this moment, with him staring out to sea and her safely planted on land, whether they remain thus divided by a failure of empathy and forgiveness is still open to speculation. g
On Chesil Beach, directed by Dominic Cooke, screenplay by Ian McEwan, 110 minutes, BBC & Number 9 Films, was shown around Australia during the British Film Festival (Palace Cinemas). It will be released here in April 2018. (ABR Arts: 31 October 2017)
Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD student at the University of Western Australia.
‘It is a small world – in every sense – when from opposite sides of the planet we hear the same refrains. When those refrains turn to complaints in operatic circles about the ratio of foreign singers appearing in London or Sydney, the world begins to seem not just small but smallminded … Quite apart from the undesirability of cultural protectionism, which goes against the free pursuit of high international standards, how can those proposed measures be legal?’
John Allison, writing in Opera magazine, November 2017
by Bronwyn Lea
Famous couples from literature – from Romeo and Juliet to Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy – have enacted storylines built around rituals of courtship and the obstacles they face on the way to marrying. While the ‘marriage plot’ has never gone out of fashion – kept alive, in good part, by Hollywood’s penchant for the rom-com – changing times have led to the emergence of the ‘divorce plot’. Nora and Torvald from Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House – which enraged audiences when it premièred in 1879 because of its harsh critique of the ‘holy covenant’ of marriage – might be seen as the ur-couple of this growing genre.
Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage – conceived as a television miniseries (1973), then released as a film in 1974, two hours shorter than the 282-minute miniseries – pays homage to Nora and Torvald with his own divorcing couple, Marianne and Johan, who go to see A Doll’s House on the evening their marriage disintegrates into a harrowing game of deceit and violence.
Warren Adler), there are plenteous moments of rage and psychic devastation when one fears they might come close.
Designer David Fleischer’s setting for the marital breakdown is a white-on-white, contemporary home (and an equally generic university office), fitted with Ikea modular furnishing to give Johan and Marianne’s lives an aura of the universal. Winspear plays the academic–poet Johan, a self-described ‘stupendously pretentious wank’ who delivers his lines as acid blows, all the while maintaining an incongruous posture of relentless boredom.
Unlike A Doll’s House, which sees Nora walk out on her marriage, it is Johan who instigates the break-up in Scenes from a Marriage. ‘I’ve made a decision to act like a shit, and it’s a relief,’ Johan deadpans before informing his wife that he is going to Paris with his mistress.
But the stage belongs to his lawyer-wife, Marianne, whom Dusseldorp manages to depict as both sympathetic and frequently hilarious with her genius for physical comedy that undermines her similarly sarcastic retorts. Dusseldorp’s Marianne holds a cathartic mirror to us all with her tragic pursuit of intimacy that is inevitably trounced by her inability to make it. ‘How can love last a lifetime,’ she ponders, ‘when a life is so long and there are so many questions?’ Marianne’s shaky valour in the face of emotional disaster makes Murray-Smith’s Scenes from a Marriage – an otherwise unbearable story of marital ruin – a profoundly disturbing but somehow hopeful story for the ages.
On release, Scenes from a Marriage seemed to hit a nerve with audiences questioning their own relationships. It was blamed for almost doubling the divorce rate in Sweden (from 16,000 divorces recorded the year prior to its première to 26,000 in 1973). Undoubtedly, other societal shifts were also at play, but both the miniseries and film have influenced a host of future directors, with Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives (1992) being its most self-conscious adapter.
Marta Dusseldorp in Scenes from a Marriage
Queensland Theatre’s production of Scenes from a Marriage opened in Brisbane at The Playhouse on 16 November 2017, the day after Australia’s historic vote to support marriage equality. In the program notes, director Paige Rattray acknowledges same sex couples in the theatre community who didn’t, at the time of her writing, have the right to marry. All of us should own the choice, despite the multitudes of risk, to attempt a pact of love: it’s as much a human need as a human right. And yet the fluke of timing requires expertise in mental juggling not to see Joanna Murray-Smith’s savage takedown of marriage as a cautionary tale.
‘The one thing I am most certain of is that once you love someone,’ Rattray concludes, ‘you are inextricably linked, for better or for worse.’ For the future brave who go gently into that good institution, may it be for the better. g
Joanna Murray-Smith’s stage adaptation of the Bergman classic stars real-life couple Marta Dusseldorp and Ben Winspear as the warring spouses. While neither partner ever quite devolves into the depths of murderous fury enacted by Oliver and Barbara Rose in Danny DeVito’s War of the Roses (based on the novel of the same name by
Scenes from a Marriage (Queensland Theatre), written by Ingmar Bergman and adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith, is directed by Paige Rattray. It continues at The Playhouse, QPAC, until 3 December 2017. Performance attended: 16 November. (ABR Arts: 20 November 2017)
Bronwyn Lea’s most recent collection is The Deep North: Selected poems (George Braziller, 2013).
by Anwen Crawford
One can pinpoint the moment at which The Killing of a Sacred Deer gets stuck, like a train between stations. It happens midway through the film, during a scene set in a hospital cafeteria, somewhere in Cincinnati. A greying, bearded cardiologist (Colin Farrell) sits opposite a teenage boy (Barry Keoghan) whose gormless, sweaty countenance conveys an undertone of menace. The boy, whose name is Martin, explains to Steven, the cardiologist, what is going to happen to Steven’s wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), and their two children, Kim (Raffey Cassidy) and Bob (Sunny Suljic). One by one these family members will become paralysed – suddenly and incurably – and then they will die, unless Steven determines to kill one of them first, as a sacrifice.
Advance knowledge of a character’s fate is a requirement of tragedy, but The Killing of a Sacred Deer isn’t one. ‘Don’t get hysterical, it’s not that tragic,’ Kim counsels her mother, as she succumbs to the foretold paralysis. Nor is the film funny in the bleak way that previous films by the same director, Yorgos Lanthimos, have been – in particular, The Lobster (2015), a kind of satire on the notion of true romance, onscreen or off. Shorn of catharsis and short on laughs, The Killing of a Sacred Deer becomes a chilly and ultimately inert rumination on the collapse of a bourgeois family. But the film’s first half, before we know how or why the ruin will occur, is effective.
It begins with a close-up of open-heart surgery – not for the squeamish. A viewer may later have cause to wonder if this particular scene is connected with Steven’s downfall, but for the time being we are denied any explanatory context. After surgery, Steven and his colleague Matthew (Bill Camp), an anaesthesiologist, walk through the hospital, discussing wristwatches. Their conversation is competitive in its detail – brands, types of strap, water resistance – but the tone is wooden. This is Lanthimos’s mode, and it suits Farrell in particular, whose Irish burr carries with it an echo of his absurdist countryman, Samuel Beckett.
As in Beckett’s plays, the characters in Lanthimos’s films – credit must also go here to screenwriter Efthymis
Filippou – appear empty of interior life. (‘You approach Yorgos with a back story, and he’ll cut you off – he doesn’t want any of that,’ remarked Keoghan, in a recent interview.) They are more like puppets, subsumed to the will of their puppeteer. Lanthimos’s visual grammar, too, is strict. Working with cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, he favours three types of shot: a slow push-in; a medium close-up from an exaggeratedly high or low angle, and a long, symmetrical tracking shot as his characters move through corridors (there are lots of corridors). It’s Kubrickian to a fault, and the style, alongside the child characters and the bloodiness that eventually ensues, cannot but recall Kubrick’s own psychological horror masterpiece, The Shining (1980). But The Killing of a Sacred Deer is without its predecessor’s occult power.
What it does have is a suite of strong performances, from Farrell, Kidman – who excels at the self-restrained acting style that Lanthimos demands – and especially Keoghan, the enigma and then the torment at the heart of proceedings. The young actor has a bearing that feels suited to another kind of film altogether – something by Shane Meadows or Andrea Arnold, say, dogged and gritty – and his trace of streetwise wisdom brings to an otherwise highly artificial atmosphere the sense of something genuine. Wristwatches crop up again, early on; Martin receives one as a gift from Steven. There is clearly an intimacy between the younger and older man, though of what kind, and to what end, we can at first only speculate. Martin visits Steven’s family, he is polite to them, he brings flowers. There are more competitive conversations, this time about bodily parts and functions: underarm hair, chest hair, menstruation. Nobody is discomfited by it, apart from the viewer.
But as the connection between Martin and Steven is gradually revealed, and the machinery of the plot laid bare, that uneasiness recedes. The formal techniques that Lanthimos employs also yield diminishing returns. The pattern of his shots becomes obvious; his direction of the actors begins to feel unduly restrictive.
Perhaps these frustrations are deliberate; perhaps the point is that, in this airless contemporary universe that exists at only a short remove from our own, real feeling is impossible. Only mordantly ironic gestures remain, not tragically ironic ones. The analog to Steven and his expendable family is, of course, the myth of Agamemnon and his daughter Iphigenia, whose sacrifice was demanded by the goddess Artemis as a payment for Agamemnon’s slaughter of a deer. Agamemnon needed a wind in order to sail his ships to Troy. Steven just wants to get on with his comfortable life. In both cases, someone else has to pay the price. The emotional stakes are lowered in Lanthimos’s world, but the operation of power is much the same as it ever was. g
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Madman Films), 121 minutes, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. (ABR Arts: 13 November 2017)
Anwen Crawford is the 2017–18 Writer in Residence at the UTS Centre for New Writing.
edited by Jennifer Sanders NewSouth
$79.99 hb, 313 pp, 9781742235608
In 1976, when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and his wife, Tamie, were on an official visit to the White House in Washington, she was shown the collection of Americana acquired through the White House Historical Association, an idea of Jacqueline Kennedy’s as First Lady. Her enthusiasm for a similar Australian fund coincided with government concern about the care and condition of not just one but four official establishments – Government House and The Lodge in Canberra, Admiralty House and Kirribilli House in Sydney. The committee formed to take responsibility for the buildings’ interiors, exteriors, and grounds recommended the formation of an Australiana Fund, which was to be autonomous, not advisory.
Collecting for the Nation, a substantial tome weighing in at almost two kilograms, is presented as ‘a beautiful illustrated telling of Australian history and culture through the artworks’ in the Fund’s collection. It is divided into two sections, the first recounting the history of the four houses and estates themselves, the second exploring the collection and locating these ‘artworks’ in their historical context.
The four official establishments seemed, in the 1970s, a motley assortment, The Lodge being the only purpose-built residence, hastily thrown up before parliament moved from Melbourne to Canberra in 1927 and designed to accommodate the prime minister and his family – and intended to be temporary. Canberra’s Government House was originally the colonial homestead ‘Yarralumla’. With various additions and alterations, it has been described as ‘aesthetically erratic’. Admiralty House in Sydney began life as
a bungalow, ‘Wotonga’, described by Howard Tanner as ‘dull, with no distinguishing features’. Purchased by the New South Wales government in 1885 with a view to its housing the commanderin-chief of the Australian Station of the Royal Navy, it acquired a second storey and colonnade, transforming it, would you believe, into a ‘grand Italianate palazzo’. With the formation of the Australian Navy in 1913, the last British Rear Admiral handed Admiralty House to the Commonwealth, which he had no right to do, but after decades of litigation and negotiation it ended up as the Sydney residence of the governor-general. Kirribilli House was a villa, ‘Sophienberg’, built by an enterprising young German businessman, Adolph Feez: Clive Lucas hails it as ‘a very pretty house on a very pretty site’. Subsequently, it was doubled in size. When the property was threatened with subdivision in 1920, the Commonwealth government intervened and resumed the property.
Nicholas Brown, author of A History of Canberra (2014), introducing ‘the bush capital’, wryly points out that the area chosen for it ‘was far from the most dynamic in the state’, and that, from the point of view of the New South Wales government, which was ceding the territory, it didn’t matter too much parting with it. While Peter Watts charts the chequered architectural life of ‘Yarralumla’, Margaret Betteridge has the task of dealing tactfully with a succession of prime ministers and their wives. Some virtually boycotted The Lodge and made other arrangements. The longest residents were Robert and Pattie Menzies, who, although they found it shabby and neglected, made it into a family home for sixteen years. There is a very posed photograph of them, Sir Robert solemnly reading a book, Dame Pattie concentrating on her knitting, both in their comfortable armchairs looking as if they have been there for sixteen years. If there is a bad fairy in Betteridge’s story, it is Zara Holt, who swept through the house redecorating it ‘Toorak style’; Harold Holt’s colleague Paul Hasluck thought it vulgar and in appalling taste.
The history of the beautiful harbour site of the Sydney establishments is
briefly surveyed by Robert Griffin, and Howard Tanner and Clive Lucas detail the architectural fortunes of Admiralty House and Kirribilli House respectively. As both have had a hand in the houses’ renovation and restoration, they are necessarily constrained in the appraisals they can offer. However, as Lucas points out, in the postwar period Victorian architecture was viewed with distaste and renovation in ‘Georgian good taste’ common, but now ‘authentic restoration’ is the rule.
Nigel Erskine, John McPhee, Christopher Menz, and Andrew Montana take us on a historical tour of the collection. The entire book is laced with colour illustrations of paintings, sculptures, furniture and objects, and some of the detailed citations have interesting stories to tell. Menz, for example, points to the nineteenth-century fashion in elaborate silver epergnes (table centrepieces) often incorporating native flora and fauna, which were testimonial presentations to colonial worthies.
There is nothing in the nature of a conclusion to the book, and there are some unanswered questions. Some ‘artworks’ have been donated by descendants of distinguished personages, and while it is stressed that the Fund is autonomous, there is a casual reference to a ‘grant-inaid’ from the government. Purchases are presumably initiated by the Art Advisor, but have priorities changed over forty years? There are, for example, notable absences. Although the Fund has a couple of contemporary Aboriginal paintings, there appear to be no traditional artefacts and nothing representative of Torres Strait Islanders. One art form not represented is photography. Why not a Bill Henson? Or would that be too ‘controversial’? And there is no indication of the Fund having anything related to one of our most important prime ministers, Alfred Deakin.
Collecting for the Nation is a handsome book, but at $79.99 it is likely to find its main market among independent collectors. g
John Rickard’s book Australia: A cultural history (1988) has been issued in a third edition (Monash University Publishing, 2017).
by Colin Golvan
Following a concerted media and legal campaign, the Namatjira Legacy Trust has succeeded in securing the ownership of the copyright of Albert Namatjira following a recent resolution of claims made by the Trust against the long-time copyright owner Legend Press.
The circumstances of the transfer of the copyright were quite extraordinary (I wrote about it in a previous article for ABR Arts in April 2017). After Arnold Bloch Leibler, pro bono lawyers for the Trust, sent a letter to Legend Press, the philanthropist Dick Smith became involved in helping the parties to resolve the dispute. Dick’s father had worked for the father of the present owner of Legend Press, and Dick said that he had a particular wish to see the long-running dispute finally resolved. In the outcome, and without any prompting or request, Dick paid a donation to the Trust of $250,000. With the receipt of the donation, the Trust paid $1 to Legend Press to obtain the assignment of the whole of the copyright in the large body of works of Albert Namatjira.
The announcement of the resolution was received with great enthusiasm by major galleries, and the arts community generally, as well as by the Namatjira family. Since the assignment of the copyright by the Public Trustee of the copyright in 1983 for $8,500, the family has received no payments from the use of the copyright, such payments being retained by Legend Press, which also exercised strict control over the use of images of Namatjira’s work by major public galleries. This control meant that public galleries regarded themselves as being largely prevented from reproducing images of Namatjira’s works in catalogues.
The Trust has appointed Viscopy, the collecting society for the visual arts (administered by Copyright Agency), to act as its agent in the management of the copyright. A number of significant requests for reproduction have been received and an income stream established for the benefit of the Namatjira family. This income, together with the Dick Smith donation, is expected to have a significant impact on the welfare of the Namatjira family living in the remote community of Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory.
The Trust is continuing its legal campaign against the Northern Territory Government, claiming that the Public Trustee breached his obligation of trust in the original transfer of the copyright in 1983. The Public Trustee at the time, John Flynn, has spoken publicly about this issue earlier this year, and has candidly (and honourably) acknowledged that he made a number of key errors in proceeding with the transaction. He has expressed his regret. It is hoped that these claims can also be amicably settled, as occurred with the claims against Legend Press.
The Trust will also continue to campaign for legislation to have Namatjira’s copyright declared perpetual. It is currently due to expire in 2029. With half of the copyright term lost due to the loss of copyright in 1983, it would be fitting if the injustice of this loss was remedied by the copyright term in his work being extended indefinitely. As I noted in my previous article, perpetual copyright has been granted in one case in the United Kingdom, involving the copyright in Peter Pan, with the proceeds obtained from copyright usage being received by the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London.
The recovery of the copyright was achieved through a powerful confluence of factors, being the coming together of: a committed activist campaign on the part of the Big hART (which produced a stage play and film about Namatjira) and which set up the Trust; sustained and well-researched media coverage by Rosemary Neill of The Australian; pro bono legal support from Arnold Bloch Leibler solicitors; and the extraordinary philanthropy of Dick Smith.
With determination, influence, and good fortune running hand-in-hand, the outcome demonstrates what can be achieved through an issue-specific approach to engaging with important needs in the Indigenous community. In this case it has liberated the work of a national icon and placed him right back in the forefront of national awareness and appreciation – where he emphatically belongs. g
Colin Golvan is a Queen’s Counsel at the Victorian Bar, a trustee of the Namatjira Legacy Trust and Chair of ABR.
