The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twelfth year, has played a major role in the resurgence of the literary essay. This year we received more than 200 original essays from thirteen countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose judged the Prize with novelist and essayist Andrea Goldsmith and NewSouth publisher Phillipa McGuinness. Their task was a long but stimulating one because of the quality of the thirty longlisted essays.
Lucas Grainger-Brown is the winner of the 2018 Calibre Essay Prize. His essay, which appears on page 45, is entitled ‘We Three Hundred’. It offers a candid and unsentimental account of life at the Australian Defence Force Academy as an idealistic cadet straight out of high school. Dr Grainger-Brown receives $5,000 from ABR Grainger-Brown, who first wrote for ABR in 2016, told Advances: ‘It is an incredible honour to win the Calibre Essay Prize. Many of its past winners changed the way I think and feel about fundamental things. I am delighted my words will be added to this important body of work. When I was ready to write my formative story, I knew I had to submit it to the Calibre Prize. Australian Book Review provides a fantastic national platform for the appreciation of Australian arts, ideas, and culture. I hope my essay is read as a constructive addition to the ongoing dialogue about who we are
and where we are going.’
This year’s runner-up is ‘Once Again: Outside in the House of Art’ by novelist Kirsten Tranter. In this ekphrastic essay, Dr Tranter, who lives in California, returns to Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation ‘The Visitors’ and offers a subtle meditation on art, parenthood, and expatriation. Kirsten Tranter receives $2,500. We will publish her essay in May.
Black Inc. may have decided not to proceed with The Best Australian Essays (as with its poetry anthology), but Calibre will be back bigger than ever in 2019.
ABR gratefully acknowledges generous support from Mr Colin Golvan QC and the ABR Patrons.
Peter temPle (1946–2018)
Peter Temple, the first crime writer to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, died at his home in Ballarat on 8 March, aged seventy-one. Temple, who was born in South Africa and emigrated to Australia in 1980, was the author of nine novels, including the Jack Irish series, later adapted for television. Truth, his last novel, won the Miles in 2010. Temple also won five Ned Kelly awards and the British Crime Writer’s Association’s Gold Dagger award. In a tribute to its author, Text Publishing described Temple as bringing ‘the soul of the poet to the demands of the crime novel’.
400th issue subscriber giveaway
Porter Prize
Nicholas Wong became the first Asian writer to claim an ABR literary prize when he was named winner of the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Wong, who had travelled from Hong Kong to attend the Melbourne ceremony on 19 March, receives $5,000 for his poem ‘101, Taipei’. He told Advances, ‘I’m honoured to be the winner, especially with a poem whose subject matter may seem foreign.’
Tracey Slaughter was placed second with her poem ‘breather’; she receives $2,000. One-third of the entries in this year’s Porter Prize came from overseas – a measure of its international prestige and of greater awareness of ABR outside Australia.
We congratulate Nicholas Wong, the other shortlisted poets (Eileen Chong, Katherine Healy, and LK Holt), and our three judges: John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb.
A podcast of the Porter ceremony – including readings from all five shortlisted poets – is available on our website.
Films galore
For reasons too Bollywood to relate, our Film and Television issue has been postponed to June, giving readers more time to vote in our online survey. Tell us your favourite film, director, and actor for a chance to win one of five great prizes, including a one-year Palace VIP card. You have until 21 May to vote.
To celebrate this special issue, we are giving away $400 worth of books from The Folio Society to the first two readers who take up or renew a print or online subscription to ABR for two years or more.
For more information and to be in the running, visit: www.australianbookreview.com.au/400giveaway
THANKING OUR PARTNERS
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
April 2018
David Brophy
Beejay Silcox
Neal Blewett
Ian Donaldson
Sheila Fitzpatrick
James Walter
Kim Mahood
Lucas Grainger-Brown
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Andrea Goldsmith Letters
John Miller, Barry Oakley, David Fitzpatrick, Claire Rhoden, Robert Wills
Biography & Memoir
William Taubman: Gorbachev Barbara Keys
Alan Fewster: Three Duties and Talleyrand’s Dictum
Geoffrey Blainey
Peter Hempenstall: Truth’s Fool Simon Caterson
Joe Hagan: Sticky Fingers
Anwen Crawford
Craig Emerson: The Boy from Baradine
Lyndon Megarrity
Poems
John Kinsella
Gig Ryan
Judith Beveridge
Letters & Essays
Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (eds): The Letters of
Sylvia Plath, Volume 1 Felicity Plunkett
Zadie Smith: Feel Free Sarah Holland-Batt
Darryl Pinckney (ed.): The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Patrick McCaughey
Rebecca Solnit The Mother of All Questions
Johanna Leggatt
Clive Hamilton and the Chinese menace
Australian magazine culture
The various selves of Kevin Rudd
A biography of Pierre Ryckmans
Exploring the Russian Revolution
John Curtin – loner and warrior
Tracing one of history’s great narratives
The 2018 Calibre Essay Prize
Gail Jones’s new novel
Odysseus and me
Politics
James Prior: America Looks to Australia Rémy Davison
Shaun Walker: The Long Hangover Kieran Pender
True Crime
Gideon Haigh: A Scandal in Bohemia Anna MacDonald
Classics
Stephen Fry: Mythos Julia Kindt
Fiction
Rodney Hall: A Stolen Season Brian Matthews
Ceridwen Dovey: In the Garden of the Fugitives
Ashley Hay
Stephen Orr: Incredible Floridas Gregory Day
Robert Lukins: The Everlasting Sunday Anna MacDonald
Publishing
Peter Ginna (ed.): What Editors Do Richard Walsh
Poetry
Judith Bishop: Interval Jill Jones
Interviews
Nathan Hollier
Sarah Sentilles
ABR Arts
Barnaby Smith
Harry Windsor
Morag Fraser
Michael Halliwell
Ben Brooker
Sophie Knezic
Susan Lever
Human Flow
A Fantastic Woman
The Lady and the Unicorn
Hamlet
Thyestes
Hilarie Mais
Antony and Cleopatra
Australian Book Review
April 2018, no. 400 Since 1961
First series 1961–74
Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
ISSN 0155-2864
Registered by Australia Post Printed by Doran Printing
Published by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006
Editor and CEO Peter Rose Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu Deputy Editor (Digital) Dilan Gunawardana Business Manager Grace Chang Development Consultant Christopher Menz Poetry Editor John Hawke
Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Patrick Allington, Ian Dickson, Anne Edwards, Rae Frances, Andrea Goldsmith, Sarah Holland-Batt, Gub McNicoll (Observership Program), Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder
ABR Laureates Robyn Archer, David Malouf
Editorial Advisers Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Des Cowley, James Der Derian, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Andrew Fuhrmann, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Fiona Gruber, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, James McNamara, Julian Meyrick, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Craig Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson
Media
Progressive PR and Publicity: darren@progressivepr.com.au or (03) 9696 6417
Volunteers David Dick, John Scully
Cover Judy Green.
Correspondence Editorial matters should be directed to the Editor; advertising matters to the Deputy Editor; and subscription queries to the Business Manager. Major articles are refereed.
Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters. All letters are edited. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter. Correspondents must provide a telephone number for verification.
Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is the first time that he or she has appeared in the magazine.
ABR Arts Reviews are rated out of five stars () with half stars denoted by the symbol
Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soybased, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.
This issue was lodged with Australia Post on March 28.
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This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program.
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Editorial
Acynic once remarked that an editor needs two things: good grammar and a long memory.
But we all know there’s a bit more to it than that. As we prepare to send the April issue to press – the four hundredth in the magazine’s second series – it occurs to me that an editor’s main function is to be a recogniser of expertise, discernment, literary flair – and, more importantly perhaps, courage even, for sometimes it’s needed in this caper.
Over the past forty years, ABR has had the good fortune to publish hundreds of writers and critics who have demonstrated these qualities in abundance and who have contributed enormously to the success and tenor of this magazine. Some of them have been contributing for years. Neal Blewett wrote for us in 1966, long before he went into federal politics. Geoffrey Blainey had a review in the very first issue of ABR (first series), back in 1961. For me, it has been a privilege to work with this loyal and discriminating cohort.
But a magazine’s responsibilities don’t end there. We have a duty to encourage the many young littérateurs who long to appear in publications of this kind. ABR’s cultivation of new literary talent is ongoing and multifarious. Through lectures, workshops, prompt
commissions, we offer freelance work to bookish newcomers. And we back it up with decent payments (there are no unpaid probations here). ABR continues to deplore the exploitation of freelance reviewers. Unpaid and patronised, young writers will give up in frustration or despair.
To mark its birthday, ABR is pleased to announce that our base rate of payment for reviews has increased by ten per cent to $55 per 100 words. Since 2013 the base rate has trebled, at a time of shrinkage or stagnation elsewhere. Furthermore, we are intent on paying writers $75 per 100 words in future.
ABR’s many Patrons are responsible for this increase, along with rising subscription revenue and admirable support from government. All of our Patrons are listed on page 8. With their continuing support, we look forward to paying our writers even better and to diversifying our programs. Patrons have the satisfaction of advancing literary careers and contributing to the vitality of arts criticism in the country.
Help us to support Australian writers by making a donation or becoming a Patron. To do so, please visit our website or drop me a line on (03) 9699 8822 or at editor@australianbookreview.com.au.
I hope you will enjoy the four hundredth issue.
Peter Rose
Letters
Flouting Christian principles
Dear Editor, Paul Collins’s essay ‘God and Caesar in Australia: The Close Nexus between Government and Catholicism’ (ABR, March 2018) was a brilliant piece. What I found most interesting was the huge gap between the teachings of Jesus on human behaviour – compassion, tolerance, love, concern for others, empathy – and the apparent abandonment of such principles by the so-called Christian Right in our parliament. Its approach to the marriage equality issue and the bill led by the courageous Senator Dean Smith seemed to flout all
Christian principles. The same situation appears to be so in the United States, How can such contradictory attitudes be deemed Christian?
John Miller, Toorak, Vic.
Trivialising the tale
Dear Editor, Saul Bellow says somewhere that in fiction sentences should be ‘charged’ – something should quietly beat through them. When you begin reading, this is what you should listen for: imaginative confidence, a sense of sureness. This applies to historical fiction as much as any other. You don’t
ask, ‘Is this true to history?’ You ask, ‘Is this true to itself?’ Luke Slattery’s Mrs M is imaginatively true from beginning to end.
Reading Gillian Dooley’s review of Mrs M, I felt as if it were an account of a different novel altogether (ABR, March 2018). Her criticisms are mostly of the pernickety kind, although she conflates them into a vaguely defined sense of disapproval. What I found astonishing was her reluctance to convey to your readers any of the novel’s finer qualities: its energy, its humour, its visual sensitivity, and the achievement of conveying,
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Australian Book Review and the judges congratulate the winner of the 2018 Porter Prize.
Nicholas Wong
Nicholas Wong is the Vice President of PEN Hong Kong and teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry.
John Hawke – chair of the judging panel and poetry editor of ABR – commented: ‘Nicholas Wong’s “101, Taipei” is a powerful representation of urban dislocation, which cuts across cultures and languages in its swerving indirections and switches in style and syntax.’
The Prize this year was also judged by Jenn Webb and Bill Manhire.
Tracey Slaughter (New Zealand) placed second for her poem ‘breather’, and receives $2,000.
ABR gratefully acknowledges the support of Ms Morag Fraser AM and Mr Ivan Durrant.
To read the winning and shortlisted poems visit: australianbookreview.com.au
in a first-person narration, the interior life and adventures of an intelligent and spirited woman of the early nineteenth century. I felt, from the very first pages of Mrs M, a sense of authorial authority.
Dooley provides only two fragmentary quotes, out of context, and they are used – rather clumsily – to scorn the novel. I suspect that her decision not to quote any longer passages was part of a general reluctance to give the book its due. I should add that she never gives an adequate account of the story – the essential matter of the novel – which is the political drama that Macquarie provoked when he insisted that former convicts were the equal of free settlers and that the penal colony at Sydney Cove should become an elegant Georgian town. As a result, she not only diminishes the novel’s stylistic achievements, she trivialises the story itself. The novel deserved better.
Barry Oakley, Wentworth Falls, NSW
Thuggish methods
Dear Editor,
I will believe that the Chinese employ thuggish methods abroad when they have their Marines in Darwin, conduct exercises with our Navy, mandate our military purchases, and exclude Australians from listening posts at Pine Gap and the North West Cape. The rivalry between US and Chinese investors is commercial; only the PR has a different complexion.
David Fitzpatrick (online comment)
Tim Rowse
Dear Editor,
I’m surprised that Philip Jones was impressed by, and seemingly convinced of, the validity of Tim Rowse’s argument that institutionalisation ‘ensur[ed] the survival’ of Australia’s Indigenous population (ABR, March 2018). Isn’t this just another way of saying ‘at least European invaders didn’t massacre them all’? The reviewer also comments, with apparent disapproval, that ‘For some historians, an appreciation of the actual damage done to Aboriginal people by colonialism can cause bias to affect their
work’. I would think that the most objective historians should be rightly concerned about ‘actual damage done to Aboriginal people by colonialism’, and that acknowledging that damage should not draw a charge of bias.
I’m afraid I disagree with your reviewer. Rowse’s work sounds very much like an apologist interpretation of colonial policies, at least from this review of it.
Claire Rhoden (online comment)
Beowulf
Dear Editor,
Bruce Moore, in his review of the new edition of Beowulf, has offered a good review and a useful discussion of translation issues (ABR, March 2018). It would be interesting to know the extent of translator Stephen Mitchell’s knowledge of Old English. Given the wide linguistic range of his other translations (Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese), one wonders how much he himself draws on the work of others, or whether he is one of those impressive intellects skilled in many languages. I agree with Bruce Moore that the Beowulf translations of Michael J. Alexander and Seamus Heaney stand out, but even better is Alexander’s Penguin Glossed Text of the poem where readers (with a fair amount of work) can find their way into the original – Old English text on the left hand page, glossary on the right. Sydney University taught me Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English in the 1960s. Happily, I see it is still teaching others the same.
Robert Wills (online comment)
Want
Forty years of ABR
1978
Australian Book Review is revived, with John McLaren as Editor 1982
John Gorton writes about six Australian prime ministers 1986
Kerryn Goldsworthy becomes the second Editor 1988
In the 100th issue Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History 1989
Rosemary Sorensen becomes the fourth Editor, succeeding Louise Adler 1991
David Malouf reviews David Marr’s biography of Patrick White; Robert Dessaix’s influential essay on multiculturalism, ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’ 1995
Helen Daniel becomes the fifth Editor; forum on the Helen Demidenko controversy 1998
With the closure of the National Book Council, ABR becomes fully independent 2000
Tributes to Helen Daniel in the November issue; Aviva Tuffield wins the ABR Reviewing Competition 2001
Peter Rose becomes the sixth Editor; ABR begins publishing new poems; Peter Porter writes at length about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 2002
La Trobe University becomes principal sponsor 2005
Flinders University becomes a sponsor; Stephen Edgar wins the first ABR Poetry Prize 2007
Elisabeth Holdsworth wins the first Calibre Essay Prize 2009
Michelle de Kretser is our first subject on Open Page; Mark Gomes becomes the first of many full-time paid interns 2010
Maria Takolander wins the first ABR Short Story Prize 2011
ABR Online is launched; Gregory Day and Carrie Tiffany share the renamed ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize; Patrick Allington is the inaugural ABR Patrons’ Fellow; Judith Bishop wins the renamed Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2012
ABR moves to Boyd Community Hub in Southbank 2013
Martin Thomas wins the Calibre Essay Prize – our best-read feature to date; Brian Matthews is our first Critic of the Month; launch of ABR Arts 2014
Inaugural Environment issue, with the first ABR Eucalypt Fellowship (Danielle Clode); Robert Adamson is the first Poet of the Month; David Malouf is named ABR Laureate 2015
Colin Golvan QC succeeds long-time Chair Morag Fraser; first Film & Television issue 2016
New partnership with Monash University; first ABR cultural tour (USA); Robyn Archer becomes the second ABR Laureate; States of Poetry is launched 2017
Four-year funding from the Australia Council; four ABR Fellowships; prominent role in the marriage equ alit y campaign; Michael Heyward is our first Publisher of the Month 2018
ABR celebrates its fortieth birthday; Beejay Silcox becomes the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow; ABR again increases payments to writers
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Beethoven’s Mass in C
11, 13 & 14 APR
Experience Beethoven’s choral masterpiece together with one of Haydn’s great London symphonies in a stirring and magnificent program.
Masaaki Suzuki conductor
Sara Macliver soprano
Anna Dowsley mezzo-soprano
Benjamin Bruns tenor
Christian Immler bass
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
The Bernstein Songbook
A Musical Theatre Celebration
Come out on the town with Leonard Bernstein in a concert of musical theatre highlights from Candide to West Side Story and more!
John Wilson conductor
Lorina Gore soprano
Kim Criswell mezzo-soprano
Julian Ovenden tenor
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
‘Music to Xi Jinping’s ears’
Exaggerating the Chinese menace in Australia
David Brophy
SILENT INVASION: CHINA’S INFLUENCE IN AUSTRALIA
by Clive Hamilton Hardie Grant Books, $34.99
pb, 376 pp, 9781743794807
Lawyers, media organisations, human rights NGOs, and unions have been lining up recently to warn us of a serious threat facing civil liberties in Australia. It comes in the form of Malcolm Turnbull’s new national security laws, which, in the name of combating foreign influence, would criminalise anyone who simply ‘receives or obtains’ information deemed harmful to the national interest. Yet there, in the midst of this chorus of opposition, stood economist and public intellectual Clive Hamilton, with his Chinese-speaking collaborator Alex Joske, to tell us that to resist the threat of Chinese authoritarianism we would have become more authoritarian ourselves.
A notable contributor to 2017’s crop of ‘Chinese influence’ reportage, much of Hamilton’s new book will be familiar to readers of that genre. Yet in Silent Invasion: China’s influence in Australia, he has not missed the opportunity to turn things up a notch.
The loss of Australia’s ‘sovereignty’ has been a common, if slippery, talking point in the debate so far. Here, Hamilton cuts through the confusion: the ‘invasion’ in the book’s title is no mere flourish. The People’s Republic of China is laying the groundwork in order, one day, to make territorial claims on our nation. Failure to heed the author’s prescient warnings ‘would see Australia become a tribute state of the resurgent Middle Kingdom’. And just as Australia’s survival is on the line, so too is Hamilton’s. Realising the scale of the Chinese threat was something of a dark epiphany for him: ‘I felt nervous about my own future, given the reach and ruthlessness of China’s security apparatus.’
justify this sense of impending doom? Which of our freedoms has China’s influence so far threatened?
Readers of Silent Invasion will search in vain for evidence that Chinese actors have impaired the normal functioning of our imperfect democracy, let alone succeeded in imposing on us elements of the PRC’s totalitarian system. To be sure, Beijing has its lobbyists, its front groups, its propaganda; but to depict China’s activities as in any way unique in this respect strains credulity. US lobbyists admitted as much, when they complained that Turnbull’s new laws would endanger their own activities in Australia.
Hamilton is equally aware of this basic truth. Notwithstanding its catalogue of Chinese wrongdoings, Silent Invasion in fact carries a very simple message, one that renders much of the lengthy book superfluous: China presents a threat not because of what it does, but because of what it is.
But what exactly have we lost, or stand to lose, to
In Hamiltonian ethics, the key question is not the nature of the deed, but the identity of the actor. Judging ourselves by the standards to which we hold authoritarian China would therefore be a false equivalence. This logic renders us immune to any charge of hypocrisy, and gives Hamilton a green light to sacrifice principle to thwart his enemies. ‘Are we so soft as to defend everyone’s right to free speech when their objective is to take away our free speech?’ In their submission to parliament, Hamilton and Joske outlined this position explicitly: to meet the Chinese threat we would have to abandon the idea of treating all sources of foreign influence equally. One might well ask, where would this leave the principle of equality before the law? In a very
vulnerable position, it turns out.
It is common knowledge that the Chinese Communist Party is a secretive institution, which presides over a dictatorial regime at home, and adopts thuggish tactics to defend its interests abroad. That means putting pressure on Chinese citizens living in Australia – much of it directed towards democracy activists, or minority groups it views as inherently suspicious, such as the Uyghurs. Clearly, the party should be told to back off. Employers and universities need to know the pressure that people in their charge might be facing. Beyond that, there is an obvious remedy to this situation. If someone is being victimised here in Australia, there is a good chance they will face the same, or worse, back in China. Such individuals should have every opportunity to apply for refugee status.
Readers of Silent Invasion will search in vain for evidence that Chinese actors have impaired the normal functioning of our imperfect democracy
Hamilton doesn’t say if he supports this approach or not, but he is clearly sceptical of the wisdom of embracing more citizens of the PRC on humanitarian grounds. We have been burnt that way once before, he believes. Bob Hawke’s intake of Chinese refugees in 1989, in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, was a mistake: these were mostly ‘economic migrants’, some of whom have gone on to become ‘agents of influence in Beijing’s campaign to transform Australia into a tribute state’.
Instead, the emphasis of Hamilton’s proposals is firmly on the punitive, to ostracise and restrict the rights of Chinese in Australia. Specifically, he wants to ban organisations which fall within the pastoral care remit of the Chinese embassy, such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, and reject out of hand residency applications from anyone who participates in ‘patriotic agitation’ while studying here. By Hamilton’s broad definitions of pro-PRC activism, this would cast suspicion on anyone who has ever cheered for a visiting politician from Beijing or been snapped glad-handing the local PRC consul. If implemented, Hamilton’s residency blacklist would license a form of red-baiting far more intense than any Cold War snooping in Australia’s Chinatowns.
This is but a prelude to the more serious steps that Hamilton sees as necessary to confront China: we must restructure our economy to avoid dependence on the PRC, riding out any economic hit that this entails, and prepare for eventualities in the case of war. This will involve silencing dissent from a ‘fifth column’ of proChina business élites and muddle-headed peaceniks, and quelling any civil strife that the CCP tries to instigate among Chinese locals. In the book’s conclusion, Hamilton speculates as to the percentage of Chinese in Australia whose primarily loyalties lie with Beijing. Hamilton’s McCarthyist manifesto might be more
easily dismissed if it were the case, as he insists, that his is the voice of an embattled minority. He rails against not only the ‘realists’ and ‘pragmatists’ but also the more insidious appeasers’ and ‘capitulationists’, who combine to dominate our ‘media, think tanks, universities, businesses, business lobbies, the public service and, of course, parliaments’. But the truth is that bipartisan subservience to Washington is as solid as it ever was in Australia. And with Pacific Command top brass Harry B Harris on his way here as Trump’s ambassador, Silent Invasion will serve as a resource for policing even the mildest criticism of the US alliance. In Hamilton’s view, the idea of a more ‘independent’ foreign policy is but a mirage, one that only serves the interests of Beijing.
In the absence of more Chinese-Australian voices in this debate, Hamilton foists his black-and-white view onto the community. While claiming to have engaged widely, he gives voice only to those who meet his standard for a genuine Chinese-Australian – staunchly loyal to Australia, and defiantly hostile to the PRC. One of Hamilton’s close collaborators is John Hu, previously a Liberal Party councillor and now chairman of the Australian Values Alliance (AVA). The AVA espouses a love-itor-leave-it brand of Australian patriotism, which, predictably enough, leads in the direction of apologies for Australian racism.
Hu seems to have impressed on Hamilton the notion that Chinese in Australia would all be dinky-di Aussie patriots like himself, were it not for the brainwashing they receive at a young age. ‘Brainwashed from birth’, these mainland Chinese give everyone else a bad name, and so if Chinese in Australia end up victims of a backlash, well, it’s China’s fault. Should the white majority come to resent the presence here of ‘a large group of citizens whose understanding of the world is shaped in Beijing and whose first loyalty lies with the PRC’, Beijing will be to blame for creating that perception. Widely publicised books about a Chinese ‘invasion’ of Australia will of course have nothing to do with it.
Chief among Hamilton’s complaints against these recently arrived PRC citizens is the threat they pose to our intellectual freedom, a case he builds around a handful of classroom incidents that a receptive media has already turned into something of a canon. Even if we treated all these episodes as the work of patriotic hotheads, we would still only have evidence for the views of a miniscule percentage of the more than 100,000 PRC citizens studying in Australia. But is that fair? To take one of them, Chinese students at ANU took offence when their Anglophone lecturer told them, in a lecture slide written in Chinese, not to cheat. They took this a
twofold slight: that a) the Chinese in the class were most likely to cheat, and b) their English was substandard. Surely not an unreasonable interpretation?
A newfound confidence among some Chinese in Australia to talk back to figures of authority might create the occasional headache for university administrators. But a threat to the vibrancy of Australian intellectual life? Hardly. Certainly nothing that could compare to the Fair Work Commission’s recent decision to allow Murdoch University to terminate its union-negotiated contract (EBA). In doing so, Murdoch deprived its staff of their only legally enforceable right to intellectual freedom. Endorsing the move, Minister of Education Simon Birmingham publicly called on the rest of Australia’s vice-chancellors to do the same. The party plotting to undermine intellectual freedom in Australia today is the Liberal Party of Australia, not the Communist Party of China.
No doubt, those Australian universities with a Confucius Institute would be well advised to keep it at arm’s length from the undergraduate curriculum, lest directives from Beijing interfere with teaching on Chinese culture and society. Similarly, think tanks that solicit corporate donations, such as UTS’s Australia–China Relations Institute, should face questions as to the independence of their research. But to blame entities such as these for eroding critical thinking on China is to mistake the symptoms for the disease – the long-term decline in Australian university funding. Not once in his threehundred-page tome can Hamilton find space to criticise the direction of Australian higher education policy. Nor is there any mention of disastrous decisions such as that of ANU in 2016 to slash its Asian Studies faculty, a cut from which this once-leading centre of China research will have difficulty recovering. No, for Hamilton the reason for the decline of a critical perspective on China is that our universities have been intimidated or bought off, with scholars ‘policing themselves so as to stay on the right side of the CCP’s legion of watchers’.
This unwillingness to confront our own failings and shift the blame onto China runs throughout today’s Chinese influence scare and reflects a deep malaise in Australian society. We’re all too conscious of the corruption in the system, the amount of influence-peddling going on, and how little say this leaves us in the most important decisions. Yet we feign shock when the Chinese join in the game and seek a quid pro quo for themselves. Sam Dastyari was a fool to forward on his bills to the ALP’s Chinese donors, and all the more for spouting CCP historiography on the South China Sea. But when you survey the dismal scene of Australian politics, who could blame Huang Xiangmo for trying to get value for money?
Silent Invasion will no doubt be sold as the book that Beijing doesn’t want you to read, but in reality, its paranoid tone will be music to the ears of Party Secretary Xi Jinping. An anti-communist witch-hunt in the
West will be just the thing to revive the revolutionary esprit de corps that Xi thinks is lacking among the PRC citizenry, particularly those who seek a more comfortable life abroad.
Even on its own terms, Hamilton’s plan of action will be counterproductive. Treating the marginal position of Chinese in Australia as a counter-intelligence challenge will only drive them into the waiting arms of the Chinese embassy. And less punitive measures to entice Chinese into an Australian ‘mainstream’ will fall flat, as long as that mainstream is defined by a set of myths about distinctive Australian ‘values’, which, to outsiders, look as flimsy as the hastily built island camps in which we warehouse asylum seekers.
Countering the PRC buy-up of Australia’s Chinese-language media with greater public funding is an idea worth considering. But if that new media simply translates into Chinese a narrative of the PRC as inherently subversive, and US global leadership as essentially benign, its intended audience will most likely switch off.
Chinese banks do now give out more foreign loans than anyone else. In part, China has risen to this position of leading lender because its loans come with fewer strings attached than the World Bank’s or IMF’s, but there is no denying that its debt-diplomacy gives Beijing leverage on the global stage. Yet at the same time, China’s lone naval outpost on the coast of Africa cannot compare to the almost eight hundred bases that the US military maintains around the world. If America’s meddling looks like ‘child’s play’ from Hamilton’s Australian standpoint, it is only because the United States allows us to play the role of bully’s sidekick. Things look a little less rosy to the Chinese, who have seen American bombs rain down on five out of the PRC’s fourteen neighbours since its founding in 1949. In a rivalry between Beijing’s empire of debt, and Washington’s empire of drones, we should be doing all we can to avoid taking sides.
The tectonic political shifts that have aroused Clive Hamilton’s anxieties are real, and there is no avoiding the political questions that they raise. But to deal with them effectively, we need to find ways to formulate legitimate criticisms of China’s actions without adding to our all-too-rich library of Asian invasion fantasies. There is reason to be worried about Chinese money in Australian politics. But let’s shine the same spotlight that fell on Dastyari onto all the back-door lobbying that’s going on. Let’s give our universities the funding they need to resist the many and varied threats that corporate and political interests pose to their integrity. And let’s show some consistency in our anti-imperialism in the Asia-Pacific. Only then might we stand a chance of convincing Chinese in Australia that our policy was grounded in principle, and not xenophobia. g
David Brophy is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Sydney and the author of Uyghur Nation (2016).
Defying the moment
by Beejay Silcox
‘I think that in a time when everything seems to be the victim of the pursuit of the moment, to have a natural rhythm which is completely to the counter, is almost in-and-of-itself something of a statement.’
Jonathan Green
Moments began as medieval measures, the time it took for a sundial’s blade of shadow to shift – ninety seconds or so, depending on the season. A slice of sunlight. A moment now carries cultural as well as temporal weight. A slice of spotlight. Increasingly, we speak of our present as a moment, as if its minutes are sprung like an ontological mousetrap, primed to snap. As Sam Anderson writes in The New York Times: ‘No nexus of events is too large or heterogeneous – no geopolitical weather too swirlingly turbulent – to avoid being reduced to the shorthand of the moment.’
I am sceptical of moments. A career or two ago, working in strategic policy at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, I would argue with my boss, a seasoned public servant, about the way we garnered support for policy reform. He favoured the language of moments (‘We have never lived in a more complex and difficult time ...’). This felt chrono-centric to me, a cheap appeal to the inchoate promise of political heroism, rather than marshalling evidence and reason (‘The time to act is now!’). Of course, we were both right: I was virtuously precise, he pragmatically effective. He understood that calling something a moment – whether or not the designation is objectively earned – matters; that a moment is a prompt for action, demanding to be seized or savoured. As Anderson states, ‘The declaration of the moment turns out to have been the moment itself.’
So, what is this moment of moments asking of us? Or, more accurately, what are we asking of ourselves when we hang every event, debate, or idea on its own temporal hook? These gravid moments are increasingly riven with insecurity about our relationship to information and its bearers: we can’t seem to tell if we are drowning in unfiltered noise or coddled in our own echo-chamber; if we are more afflicted by narcissistic individualism or by borderless globalism. Post-fact, post-truth, and fake news moments. Social media moments, vacuous, volatile, and invented. Call-out culture and troll armies, snowflakes and the rise of the alt-right. Moments that march on and off the public stage to the merciless beat of the 24/7 news cycle, and moments that bloom into movements: #MeToo, #TimesUp, #BlackLivesMatter. It can be exhausting, keeping up with the moment; keeping track of the ever-moving targets of our righteous (and unrighteous) outrage. ‘Gosh,’ sighs Nick Feik, ‘I’ve been in this job for four years and I can’t think of a time when it didn’t feel like we were in some sort of a moment.’ That job is editor of The Monthly, Australia’s highest-profile cultural and political magazine, and just one of a number of contemporary magazines that are aiming – in print and online – to foster less frantic national conversations. As Jonathan Green, editor of Meanjin, describes: ‘There seem to be many speeds in public conversation, but there’s a deeper current in which the big ideas are held, and they slowly sort of tumble along the bottom of the river.’
Magazines have always been a liminal form of writing, structurally forced to resist the urgent, fractal logic of moments; relieved of news’s burden of immediacy (the forces of churnalism), yet still striving for cultural
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relevance. ‘Often, I’m commissioning something that will appear on shelves in six weeks and will be there for a further four’, explains Feik. ‘So, in ten weeks, what is something that I commission now going to look like? You really have to apply a completely different way of thinking about a subject.’
‘How is the thinking different?’ I ask Green, who assumed the editorship of Australia’s grand dame of literary magazines in 2015. ‘Well, you can’t get lost in the moment,’ he says. ‘There are some things which are just not going to go away. You can talk about equality and you can talk about climate and you can talk about gender. And you can do those things in a way that goes to the deeper parts of those conversations and that’s always going to be of interest. It’s not going to fade in six months, because those are the big questions.’
When The Bulletin folded in 2008, the death of Australia’s cultural magazines seemed all but certain; the establishment canary had suffocated in the social media coalmine. Peter Rose, editor of Australian Book Review since 2001, recalls: ‘Ten years ago, most of us, truth be told, were apprehensive about the viability of little magazines, as of the book itself.’ The graves were dug, eulogies written and stuffed in the bottom draw. Writing at the time in The Australian, James Bradley argued: ‘In a world where anyone can publish anything, instantaneously and for free, it is no longer enough simply to publish new work ... magazines must reconceive themselves as spaces for debate and discussion, sites of intellectual and aesthetic encounter.’
This is not a eulogy. One decade on, there is an insistent heartbeat in contemporary magazine culture, and it doesn’t feel too much like tempting fate to talk about the future, even though the conversation is being held among the rubble of Australian newspapers, the desiccating corpse of Fairfax. Their collapse may in fact be part of the reason why Australian magazines have persisted; magazines have learned the digital lessons that newspapers didn’t and picked up the cultural content they (largely) dropped. Bradley’s predictions have come to pass.
When talking about the future of Australian magazines, it is too easy to get caught in the narrow furrows of old debates: print versus digital, public versus reader-funding, emerging versus established writers, fiction versus non-fiction. These are unanswerable questions, because their dichotomies are lazy: they have always been questions of individual balance rather than of polar choices, or else subjective questions of generosity, taste, and the value of art. What’s more vital is a conversation about how the minds behind our cultural magazines approach their evolving role in a national conversation that is fractured, fickle, and fractious.
Conversations are increasingly hard to delineate, because debates in the internet era are as networked and unbounded as their technologies; they are neither linear nor containable, rather they bloom like ink
drops in water. ‘To try to characterise that debate and to engage in it – from an editorial position – it’s very difficult,’ Feik tells me, ‘you either have to define a very specific part of the debate, or step back and take a kind of perspectival view – a stocktake.’ He responds by trying to be the first word or the last word on something, and points me, proudly, to Helen Garner’s essay ‘Why She Broke’, which The Monthly published in June 2017. This is a profile of Akon Guode, a thirty-five-year-old South Sudanese refugee who was convicted of drowning three of her children by driving her car into a Melbourne lake. ‘The news media basically wrote it up as this is a horrible woman who killed her kids, but no one had really taken the time to investigate her life circumstances, or what could possibly lead someone to do something like that.’
Garner’s deeply compassionate essay is anchored by a desire not to excuse Guode, but to give her the dignity of context, of narrative. ‘If a full-bore jury trial is a symphony, a plea hearing is a string quartet,’ Garner writes. ‘Its purpose seems to be to clear a space in which the quality of mercy might at least be contemplated. There is something moving in its quiet thoughtfulness, the intensity of its focus ... working to fit the dry, clean planes of reason to the jagged edges of human wildness and suffering.’ You would be hard pressed to find a better description of what Garner’s essay is trying to do.
There is a cultural hunger for this kind of analysis, Green assures me: ‘For as much as there is all that tribalism and dissent and sensationalism and so forth, I think, I suspect, I hope there is a counter need among other people for something of substance; a depth of understanding.’ He cites Alexis Wright’s ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story?’, which Meanjin published in December 2016. It too is about the power of narratives, but in a potent obverse to Garner – not bestowing a story but claiming it back. ‘We do not get much of a chance to say what is right or wrong about the stories told on our behalf, which stories are told or how they are told,’ Wright declares about the stories government tells about Aboriginal Australia. ‘It just happens, and we try to deal with the fallout.’
Garner’s essay tips the scales at five thousand words; Wright’s is double the size. Neither author could achieve what they set out do without the luxury of space, and the same can be said about much of the highest-profile work that contemporary magazines champion, such as the Calibre Essay Prize (first presented in 2007), and the ABR Fellowships (2010). Rose notes: ‘We were determined to offer assured essayists, critics, and commentators due space to advance sophisticated ideas without compromise. The response from readers was immediate, and in the process the magazine has been fundamentally changed.’
There is a growing media orthodoxy that length isn’t just integral to authorial aims but is the key to readerly attraction. ‘We were genuinely shocked that so many people would be interested in reading five to six thousand
words about the mechanics of power pricing in Australia,’ Feik tells me, ‘but this is a piece that’s been circulating widely for two years.’
A grand irony: notwithstanding the tide of shortattention spans and White House Twitter rants, longform writing is having its moment. From The Guardian to BuzzFeed, mainstream media outlets are scrambling to invest in long-form projects, to capitalise on the size matters Zeitgeist. Long-form has become a potent cultural shorthand for a particular kind of literary and intellectual heft, but the focus on length privileges form over function, or often mistakes the former for the latter. ‘When you fetishize – as opposed to value – something, you wind up celebrating the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself,’ warns Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times
Notwithstanding the tide of shortattention spans and White House Twitter rants, long-form writing is having its moment
James Bennet, former editor-in-chief and copresident of US magazine stalwart The Atlantic, has been particularly vocal in his frustrations with the long-form label: ‘making a virtue of mere length sends the wrong message to writers as well as readers’. He offers this alternative: ‘There’s another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work ... you might just call it magazine writing. And get on with it.’
Bennet’s admonition is worth noting. Magazine writing is doing a number of more interesting things than simply taking up space. By consistently anchoring the political in the personal (and vice versa) – be it through commentary, criticism, memoir, fiction, or poetry – it provides a vital connective tissue between our cultural and political products and lived experience, between how we think and how we feel. In a political climate where expertise has become suspect, thinking and feeling are too often conceptualised as combative, that to do one somehow prohibits or inhibits the other.
‘We need to tell stories in a way that makes them interesting to the reader,’ Feik says adamantly. ‘And that does involve a feeling component and a thinking component, as well as a recording and a reporting component. I think that’s fundamental to good writing.’ Call it magazine writing; call it good writing. It is the quality of thought and expression that carries cultural heft, not brute mass. Space requires time.
What Garner’s and Wright’s articles share isn’t how much they speak, but how and to whom they listen. ‘You’ve got to stop and listen,’ Green insists. ‘I mean, we’re still at a point of not actually understanding each other’s stories, of not really knowing. We don’t really yet know what happened in this place, even so recently. So, we should be in a listening phase, trying to work that out.’
What does this mean, in practice – a listening phase? ‘I think “nothing about us without us” is a good mandate for all media outlets,’ Amy Middleton tells me. She
founded Archer Magazine in 2013 to address the lack of nuance in Australian letters about sexuality and gender. She longed to see her identity reflected, a place where she could find evidence that sexuality is ‘unique and individual, and desire can look like something completely different from the depictions of sex we see in popular culture’. Middleton has created that place at Archer by illuminating diverse experiences from within: ‘If we published a story on polyamory, we’d commission someone in a polyamorous relationship, rather than getting a journalist to report on the community from a distance. If we publish content about sex workers, it’s written by someone who works in that industry.’ She is interested in telling the quiet stories that get buried by community orthodoxies. Some of the best-read pieces at Archer are those she has published on queerness in Aboriginal communities: ‘when you search Aboriginal homosexuality in Google, the results are pretty sparse outside of Archer’s content’.
‘There are so many voices striving to make themselves heard,’ Mindy Gill explains, ‘why say something just to become a part of the noise?’ The magazine she edits, Peril, has spent more than a decade showcasing Asian-Australian and migrant voices. Gill, like Middleton, is keenly aware that it is not only a question of diversity of authorship that matters, it is about diversity of stories – acknowledging that vital and vibrant differences exist within as well as between Australia’s communities. Peril is also actively challenging the pervasive expectation that diverse writers must write about their identity to be relevant. ‘While of course there are those who do so, and do it well,’ she explains, ‘it’s limiting for those whose work is commissioned only in response to cultural movements.’
Peril ’s approach is working. ‘More and more mainstream publications are publishing the kind of work that we have championed from the beginning,’ she tells me. ‘It’s liberating. It allows us to focus on publishing great writing.’ There’s plenty of it out there. ‘The internet is fundamentally a verbal culture,’ Feik reflects. ‘Our skills are lifting. We write a lot more, and we have new ways of writing for other people with clarity and wit and thought.’
Curated in our magazines, that clarity and wit and thought act as a powerful mirror reflecting Australia back to itself. There is a particular kind of cultural nationalism at play here, one that seeks to interrogate, rather than to enshrine myths and shibboleths. ‘I think the responsibility is not a particular point of view,’ Green explains, ‘it’s that points of views that are expressed with a degree of subtlety. It’s not advocacy or anything like that. I don’t see it as sort of an activist position, I see it as one which is reflective.’ Feik strips it down even further:
2018 ABR Elizabeth
Jolley Short Story Prize
The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story. It honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007). The total prize money is $12,500. The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. The prizes include:
First prize: $7,000
Second prize: $2,000
Third prize: $1,000
(Three commended entries will share the remaining $2,500).
Judges: Patrick Allington, Michelle Cahill, and Beejay Silcox
The closing date is 10 April 2018.
‘My very first publication came from a magazine contest, so I know first hand the opportunities they provide to new writers. I am incredibly grateful to ABR and the judges for choosing my story and helping me to connect with Australian readers.’
Eliza Robertson, 2017 winner
Full details and online entry are available on our website
www.australianbookreview.com.au
The Jolley Prize is supported by Mr Ian Dickson.
‘Over the years, I’ve just recognised the importance of putting things on the record.’ It’s a powerfully simple idea –the power of words on a page. Inking our country down.
‘I think there is a real kind of crisis around who we are in Australia – where our country is going and what we believe in,’ laments Rebecca Starford, editor and cofounder of Kill Your Darlings (KYD), ‘and so, people turn to writing and writers in order for them to contextualise what is going on, to provide a narrative that’s not being offered to us by our politicians.’ She is struck by deepseated political disaffection amongst Australia’s youth, a disaffection she attributes to a prolonged absence of political leadership: ‘I can’t remember a time when our whole political paradigm has been so degraded and depressing,’ she tells me.
Peter Rose feels it, too: ‘There is such dismay at the state of our politics, such distaste for the intemperance and slovenly thinking that disfigure public debates. ABR stands for something different, and last year we began to engage more urgently, more publicly, with issues such as Adani, the Namatjira copyright fiasco, and marriage equality.’
for the country if it doesn’t resolve its past,’ says Green. It is the ultimate antithesis to moment-by-moment thinking – letting our drop of time loose in the grand river of history.
Curated in our magazines, clarity and wit and thought act as a powerful mirror reflecting Australia back to itself
They are not untempered hopes. Resources are scarce and often precarious. Editors understand the limits of their readerships and cultural reach in a country the size and shape of Australia. They also grapple with the ever-present tension between the desire to blur the barrier between the people making the magazine and the people reading it, and the danger of creating a perfect circle, where the only readers are writers and inclusivity becomes a form of exclusivity. More importantly, there is an acute awareness that the barriers to entry for new writers are painfully (often prohibitively) high, and that the regions, groups, and communities from which the country most needs to hear are those often least able to contribute.
The controversial plebiscite was a fertile time for Australian magazines, a catalyst to invite readers to reimagine their country, to talk about the Australia they wanted to build – to think beyond the tick-box, beyond the moment. It is easy to forget the importance of a politics of the possible, of aspirational narratives that help us conceive and shape change, that explore the ways our nation can be unmade and remade. In the absence of a political narrative, we must write our own.
‘That’s why politicians try to degrade culture,’ Starford argues, ‘because it does show a pathway forward. They can’t harness someone’s imagination in the way they can harness their welfare cheques.’ KYD transitioned to digital-only content last year. Starford describes her magazine as a place where young Australians come to express their anger and anxieties in more resonant forms than politics and news media can offer. ‘And their hopes as well,’ she adds.
Hope is not the watchword you expect to find in a media discourse long steeped in pessimism, but it is here in our cultural magazines – sometimes flickering, sometimes smouldering, and sometimes ablaze. ‘Overland doesn’t just want better literature, it wants a better world, and it wants writers and readers who believe that’s possible too,’ its editor, Jacinda Woodhead, proudly declares. With its explicitly left mandate, her magazine has a clear vision of ‘better’. There is a palpable energy here: the energy of sustained momentum, rather than the fits-and-starts of moments.
But the hope that burns brightest – echoed by every editor – is that that Australia will be brave or humble enough to face its history. ‘I see there being a problem
‘But the readership continues to grow,’ Starford says proudly. ‘I think there is a real kind of hunger for the ideas we’ve been speaking about. And there’s an audience out there. So, you know for us, in terms of the magazine space, we’re feeling incredibly optimistic and excited.’
The allure of a culture diced into moments is the allure of a self-contained explanation; a narrative we can cup in our hands, smooth and perfect as an egg. It is far less daunting than trying to wrestle with our place in history, and there is a comfort in being able to attribute the things that most confront us to some temporal aberrance, a blip rather than a trend. ‘Mostly what we’re doing,’ Sam Anderson argues, ‘is making the gesture of insight, the gesture of mastery.’ That is the problem with the language of moments, without narratives and context, they’re empty. Just ask Malcolm Turnbull: ‘There’s never been a more exciting time to be an Australian.’
Australia’s cultural magazines are not leading some kind of revolution; they are mostly doing what they have always done. Magazine writing. Good writing. Telling Australia’s stories, and taking their time to do so. They are capturing our moment of moments by refusing to capitulate to it. ‘There’s a bookcase behind me with shelf after shelf after shelf of those old issues of this magazine,’ Green muses in the final minutes of our conversation. ‘They’re all still there, this collective consciousness. Over decades you’re just adding little pebbles to the top of that pile. I just hope that the ideas are enduring, I hope they take their place in that big historic pile – that they speak to the truth of human thinking and feeling.’ g
Beejay Silcox is the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow. This is one of several articles she will contribute over the next twelve months.
Rudd’s ruminations
The various selves of Kevin Rudd
Neal
Blewett
NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED: A PERSONAL REFLECTION ON LIFE, POLITICS AND PURPOSE by
Kevin Rudd
Macmillan, $44.99 hb, 689 pp, 9781743534830
It has already become a cliché: Kevin Rudd’s memoir, Not for the FaintHearted, is not for the faint-hearted. More than 600 densely packed pages long, it contains some 230,000 words and over 1,000 footnotes, but by the end of the volume Rudd is yet to be sworn in as the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia. Yet the work was ‘intended to be a letter of encouragement’!
But why so long a letter? An obvious response is verbosity: over-written, too detailed, and with a narrative regularly interrupted by digressions. A generic explanation is that Rudd has opted for autobiography (‘a personal reflection on life, politics and purpose’) rather than the political memoir, with its focus on the political career and limited personal background or introspection. Further, Rudd is probably the most consummate presenter of self in recent Australian politics: ‘My name’s Kevin, I’m from Queensland, and I’m here to help.’ He used the popularity derived from this presentation to out-manoeuvre the factional chieftains to become prime minister and then again to resurrect his career, albeit briefly.
It is no surprise, then, that much space is devoted to the various selves of Kevin Rudd. The non-political Rudd: loving son to his widowed mother, committed Christian, budding sinologist, a devoted family man, a promising young diplomat. And, following his appointment as private secretary to Queensland Opposition leader Wayne Goss in 1988, ‘the single most important turning point in my professional life’, the political Rudd: bureaucratic supremo to Premier Goss, a hard-working and imaginative constituency MP, an effective parliamentarian and perhaps, above all, a phi-
losopher prince in Australian politics. Family plays a more important role than in most political autobiographies. His mother, a woman of heroic stature, had a profound effect on the shaping of his character; her centrality is reflected in the title of the opening chapter, ‘My Mother’s Son’. Raised as a Catholic and partly schooled, out of necessity, in Catholic institutions, as a young man Rudd had a wayward and eclectic path through various Christian sects. This tortuous path is narrated, often in minute detail and larded with great slabs of theology, until he finishes up an Anglican with his wife, Thérèse Rein. As their three children grow older, there are regular conclaves around the marital four-poster to determine Rudd’s political future. There is a certain cuteness in the treatment of the children: ‘babe’, ‘bub’, or ‘tiny tot’, rather than ‘baby’, though these are probably preferable to ‘our two little possums’. It is not surprising that half of the photographs reproduced in the book are family ones.
The sensitivity of Rudd to any efforts to impugn the integrity of himself or his family is revealed in a ferocious attack on Howard’s ‘full-time dirt unit’, which launched a series of rather crass and possibly counter-productive assaults on the Rudds in the run-up to the 2007 election. Each allegation, however trivial – picking wax from his ear on the parliamentary benches – is dealt with at length. A drunken night out at a New York strip club –‘the coup de grâce of the Liberals’ dirt unit’ – is given two pages, while an attack (‘animal behaviour’) on the work practices of Rein is given a whole chapter, including a two-page reproduction of the summary findings of the Office of
Workplace Services exonerating Rein.
A key feature of Rudd’s presentation is as a philosopher prince among the ruck of Australian politicians. The narcissistic element in this project is best reflected in his treatment of his maiden speech in the parliament. It is a remarkable speech –philosophic, polished, and reflective – but does it deserve a whole chapter, a series of quotes in the prologue, and, for good measure, reproduction in toto in an appendix? Numerous other speeches and articles, particularly of a philosophic bent, are quoted at length throughout the book.
This role is accompanied by much erudite baggage. Digressions abound: for example, Billy Hughes and ‘Red Ted’ Theodore, and recent Indonesian history and though ‘not the place to recount the Battle of Kokoda’, we still get a long paragraph on the battles of 1942. Rudd is easily distracted by historical or religious byways – the brothers Wesley and Methodism and Menzies’ red bishop, Ernest Burgmann. Allusions from the whole of human history abound – sometimes apposite. I like Senators Ray and Faulkner as ‘the Torquemadas of Senate estimates’. Some, however, are clichés, others simply baffling: while denying any relevance between Queensland Labor’s Old Guard and Napoleon’s Old Guard, we still get references to Austerlitz and Waterloo.
But it is not simply history. The philosopher is a cultured man. So we get ‘a silent, Munchian scream’, ‘the good Dr. Johnson’, and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. And he is an architectural critic too: Parliament House Canberra and the State Department Building Washington receive severe appraisals, as
does the Presidential Palace in Baghdad: ‘Grand Assyrian architecture, in the tradition of the great king Ashurbanipal on the outside, with all the pretensions of faux French rococo opulence on the inside’ .
Rudd is well aware that by constructing this persona he is likely to be seen as an élitist ‘policy wonk’. He has three techniques to minimise the danger. First, for every high-culture reference he has a populist allusion. So we have his mother running like ‘Marjorie Jackson-Nelson, the Lithgow Flash’, and references to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and popular films – Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, Peter Sellers movies. And there is ‘Operation Ratsak’, a two-page account of a battle with ‘a phalanx of the little buggers (Beijing rats)’. Second is the resort to the demotic. ‘Ockerisms’ flow free and fast: ‘without a brass razoo in our pocket’, ‘pain in the political derrière’, ‘to park a proverbial tiger’, ‘howling like a deranged dingo’. Rudd is aware that he might be seen as posing ‘as a man of the people through the orchestrated use of ockerisms’, but denies any artifice, claiming that they are the natural result of his upbringing. Finally, there is self-deprecation. The focus is on his lack of ‘hand-eye co-ordination’: in rugby, ‘second row for the underthirteen E team’; batsman with ‘the local Yandina C team … with a stunning season’s average of eleven’. Piano playing gets a notice: ‘not destined to become Australia’s very own Liberace’, as does do-it-yourself activities: ‘not a single home handyman bone in my body’. So insistent is this self-deprecation that it seems a form of ironic egotism.
Nearly two-thirds of the volume is devoted to Rudd’s parliamentary career to 2007. Two themes dominate. One is foreign affairs, more prominent in political debate over terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than at any time since the height of the Cold War. The second is party factionalism, the party having some five changes of leaders in as many years. Rudd became shadow foreign spokesman for Labor after only three years in parliament, when Simon Crean
rejuvenated the Labor front bench in November 2001. This, for Rudd, offered the prospect of becoming ‘a Labor foreign minister in the reforming tradition of Evatt and Evans’. Being Rudd, almost the first thing he did was to ‘conceptualise’ a new foreign policy framework. Being omnivorous in his interests and an inveterate traveller, the post offered Rudd countless opportunities for digressions, and they are counted.
More importantly, Rudd established a national profile as ‘inquisitor-inchief’ on Australian involvement in the Second Iraq war in 2003. In two detailed chapters, he provides a powerful indictment of Howard’s ‘folly’ and that of his ‘preening lapdog’, Alexander Downer. (Rudd’s contempt for Downer is immeasurable: ‘the longest serving, though least significant, foreign minister in Australian history’.) In what can be described as the prosecutor’s brief, he demolishes each and every defence for that disastrous intervention, and charges Howard with deception as well as error. As he confesses, his account is designed to prevent ‘Howard’s self-hagiography becom[ing] entrenched in the Australian historical memory’. He follows this up with another forensic attack on ‘Howard’s Farce: The Iraqi Wheat for Weapons Scandal’, labelling it, with some justification, ‘the single biggest corruption scandal in Australian history’.
Interspersed between these chapters is a detailed study of Labor factionalism. Rudd never hides his view of ‘the party I love but whose faceless men I loathed’. He prides himself on his ‘preference for factional virginity’, though he compromised this in his pursuit of candidate selection. He seems to have enjoyed defying the Queensland party officers, comforting himself in the belief that they were not much interested in marginal seats such as Griffith where the candidate was in factional terms ‘expendable’.
In the turbulent internecine struggles in the early years of the century, Rudd refused ‘to act as factional cannon fodder’ for either side, earning thereby the ‘abiding distrust of both’. In 2002 and 2003 he voted reluctantly for Beazley; in the first case because he
thought Beazley would be electorally a better bet than Crean, and in the second because of his antipathy towards the alternative, Mark Latham. Indeed, so bad were the choices in 2003 that Rudd contemplated throwing his hat in the ring, but after a family conclave around the four-poster bed and a preliminary canvass of potential supporters he decided ‘martyrdom’ was pointless. In 2005 both he and the left-wing Julia Gillard put their names forward, but, in Rudd’s words, their ‘respective collisions with factional reality’ led both to withdrew before a ballot.
Yet the logic of the non-contest of 2005 was obvious. If neither Gillard nor Rudd had the numbers singly to beat Beazley, might not a coalition of the two succeed. The midwife of this unlikely alliance was the Victorian powerbroker Kim Carr, who in a series of secret meetings brought the two together on a joint ticket, with Rudd as the lead candidate, given that right-wing and centre votes were more likely to leak to him. Ultimate success was ensured by the decision of another powerbroker, the NSW secretary, Mark Arbib, not to bind the NSW right to Beazley. And so to Kevin 07 and one of the greatest Labor electoral triumphs in 2007.
Up to this point Rudd’s career had been a success story, achieving his goals in a range of endeavours. In the nineteen years since taking up the vocation of politics, he had moved steadily through the ranks of the Labor party to become its federal leader. There had only been one brief hiccup, when he lost Griffith at his first contest in 1996 and briefly contemplated a return to diplomacy. Philip Flood, the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, advised ‘voluntary early redundancy’ given Rudd’s ‘far too colourful career’ in recent times. Rudd suspects that Flood, a long-time confidant of Howard’s, may have acted at Howard’s behest. If so, John Howard created his own nemesis.
The euphoria of victory in 2007 hid but could not undo the damage of half-a-dozen years of fratricidal strife. Recrimination and animosities ran through the caucus. If the factional chiefs had been out-manoeuvred, many were unappeased, believing the party
was now led by an outsider, one alien to the traditions of the party. Rudd’s own views suggested unhappiness at the very top. He considered his foreign minister, Steven Smith, ‘the most ice-cold politician I had ever met’; his deputy-leader in the Senate, Stephen Conroy, ‘no longer had a single Labor bone left in his body … he made me look like Che Guevara’; and his treasurer, Wayne Swan ‘wasn’t up to the job’. Whatever successes are to be chalked up, the core theme of the next volume will inevitably be the unravelling of a political career. That unravelling is likely to be the
subject of a prolonged historical inquest. Indispensable to that inquiry will be this thorough, if long-winded, account of Rudd’s pre-prime ministerial career. It is not so much a book to be read with pleasure but rather a work to be mined by the brave-hearted. In that quarry they will find invaluable nuggets for understanding the character, the personality, and the philosophy of Kevin Rudd. g
Neal Blewett has had a varied career as an academic, politician, and diplomat. He first wrote for Australian Book Review in 1966.
‘In springtime the dragon is useless’
An exhaustive biography of Pierre Ryckmans
Ian Donaldson
SIMON LEYS: NAVIGATOR BETWEEN WORLDS by Philippe Paquet, translated by Julie Rose La Trobe University Press (Black Inc.), $59.99 hb, 720 pp, 9781863959209
The Belgian-born scholar Pierre Ryckmans, more widely known to the world by his adopted name of Simon Leys, was widely hailed in the Australian press at his death in 2014 as ‘one of the most distinguished public intellectuals’ of his adopted country, where he had lived and taught for many years – first in Canberra, later in Sydney – and where, after a titanic battle with the Belgian bureaucracy, he chose shortly before his death to become a naturalised citizen.
‘Public intellectual’ aptly describes one side of Ryckmans’s complex character, though it doesn’t quite tell the larger story. It befits the man who, near the time of Nixon’s and Whitlam’s earliest visits to China, famously alerted the Western world to the lesser known aspects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and who dipped controversially from time to time into other areas of public debate. But in his courteous, reclusive, and faintly eccentric way, Ryckmans was also what might be called a private
intellectual, quietly immersed in art and books and scholarly pursuits that he loved, regardless of their immediate relevance or appeal to a wider public. Pleasing Myself, the title that Frank Kermode gave to a late collection of his own critical essays, is a phrase that seems equally to capture the motive and spirit of many of Ryckmans’s writings.
In his later years, Ryckmans was inclined to view the very idea of public usefulness – which he believed now dominated educational practice in Australia, prompting his own early departure from the academic world –with a certain gloom. He gave his own collected essays, published by Black Inc. in 2011, a title that teasingly posed an alternative view of the nature and value of learning. He called the collection The Hall of Uselessness. As a student (he explains in a foreword to the volume), he had lodged for a couple of years with an artist friend and two fellow students in a rundown quarter of Hong Kong, in a ramshackle building which the group
adorned with a sign in fine calligraphic script proclaiming this house to be ‘The Hall of Uselessness’. Those who are young, those who are in any early season of learning – so a piece of traditional Chinese wisdom runs – are driven by love, curiosity, excitement, and pure indifference to ultimate returns: ‘In springtime the dragon is useless.’ Only time will tell if the years of learning have granted them anything of lasting value. ‘The superior utility of the university,’ as Ryckmans later rephrased this thought, ‘what enables it to perform its function – rests entirely upon what the world deems to be its uselessness.’
The longer trajectory of Ryckmans’s own years of learning is fascinatingly revealed – though at times overlaid by exhaustive detail – in Philippe Paquet’s comprehensive biography, first published in French in 2016 and now released in an English translation by Black Inc. and La Trobe University Press in their new joint publishing series.Ryckmans’s understanding of late twentieth-century China was slowly attained, as Paquet shows, through a series of journeys, observations, events, discoveries, and encounters, some planned or anticipated, others the product of chance or accident. An early visit to the Belgian Congo where his uncle (another Pierre Ryckmans) was serving as the country’s governor-general first alerted the younger Pierre to the humiliations and inequities of colonial rule, some of the worst features of which, as he later came to realise, were bizarrely replicated in Maoist China. A deeply exciting, monthlong, first-time venture into China during his student years first stirred his ambition to master Chinese and acquire some knowledge of the country’s culture and history. ‘I discovered all at once that what we call “humanism” is just one humanism among others’, he later wrote of this visit,
and that the joy of encountering da Vinci or Mallarmé needed to be supplemented with the wonderment of discovering Leang K’ai or Li-Ho; and that there can be no genuine political awareness without awareness of the problems of Asia, and that the fate of the world of tomorrow seems to be linked to this
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prodigious awakening of China – which all Asia is watching closely.
Longer stays in Taipei, Peking, Singapore, Kyoto, and Hong Kong, along with frequent return visits to Europe and the United States, helped Ryckmans to refine these skills and adjust his view of events in China. In Hong Kong in 1967 he witnessed the gruesome assassination of the political satirist Lin Pin, burnt alive in his car together with his cousin (‘the first real political lesson of my life’). While in Bratislava the following year, he observed the violent suppression by Warsaw Pact troops of students and dissidents during the Prague Spring. Approached not long after these events in Hong Kong by Professor Liu Ts’un-yan of the ANU –‘one of the last representatives of what was truly a generation of intellectual giants’, as Ryckmans later fondly recalled – Pierre and his wife, Hanfang, moved with their family to Canberra in 1970. ‘Coming to Australia is the best decision we ever made,’ he later said. ‘We could never have dreamt of anything better.’
Ryckmans’s wide and diversely acquired knowledge of China marked him off from those whom he wryly described as China ‘experts’, who lacked fluency in the language of the country they professed to observe and any deep understanding of its culture and history, and were content merely to repeat whatever their guides and interpreters (‘who take care of everything’) happened to tell them. He was shocked by the credulity of Western visitors to China such as Philippe Sollers and the distinguished members of his Tel Quel team, including Roland Barthes and Hannah Arendt, who appeared startlingly ignorant of atrocities occurring during Mao’s regime.
A keen linguist and confident speaker of Mandarin, Ryckmans gained his own knowledge of China in another way. While in Peking reporting for the Belgian Embassy, he journeyed regularly on foot or by bus or bicycle out into the countryside to meet with workers and local people and to hear their opinions. He loved and translated into French the autobiography of Shen Fu, a humble public servant in the reign of the
Qianlong Emperor who, two hundred years earlier, had written of everyday provincial life in China in much the same quietly observant way that Ryckmans himself was now following. He drew on his knowledge of episodes in China’s and Europe’s history to throw partial light on current political events. Past and present realities – like those from the private and public sphere, like those vexed notions of ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ learning – were often (in his mind) surprisingly, unpredictably, and suggestively linked. Studying the story of the wreck of the Dutch trading vessel Batavia off the coast of Western Australia in 1629 and the conduct of the self-appointed leader of the community of survivors, Jeronimus Cornelisz, he found himself thinking of other more recent acts of political management.
Since, during the ‘Cultural Revolution’ seen from Hong Kong, I’d been able to watch Maoist totalitarianism in action from close up, this sudden overlap of two experiences in my life, ones that were totally foreign to each other but equally memorable – a passion for the sea and a horror of politics – gave me an irresistible desire to go and explore the story of the old shipwreck. I didn’t regret it.
Ryckmans’s one brilliant venture into short fiction, The Death of Napoleon – conceived in the late 1960s, but not published until twenty years later – was already stirring somewhere in his mind as he worked on his longer study of another, later, exercise in tyranny, The Chairman’s New Clothes, published in French in 1971. Ryckmans aimed his critique of Mao from the far-left flank of the political field. He saw Mao as too conservative, too old-fashioned, too unyielding a figure to be trusted with rule of such a vast, diverse, and rapidly evolving country as twentiethcentury China. Ryckmans’s distaste for the legacies of European colonialism inclined him firmly likewise towards the political left. But on questions of moral, religious, and social conduct his right-wing Catholic upbringing often continued to govern his views. He famously chastised Christopher Hitchens for his uncharitable writings about
Mother Teresa, quarrelled publicly with former Governor-General Bill Hayden over his views on euthanasia, and failed to accept the case for same-sex marriage. Yet wherever you stood on such matters, Ryckmans’s views – expressed with a lacerating wit and brilliant economy (qualities not always achieved, alas, in this otherwise meticulous study of his life) – were likely to make you pause for a bit in your own opinions, and smile at moments at his sheer dialectical skill. That these were the effects also of his teaching is clear from the testimony of his former students, one of whom, Kevin Rudd, has recently written of Ryckmans’s loving demonstrations of the art of calligraphy, energetic singing of Chinese revolutionary songs – an exercise in parody, as Rudd eventually realised – and, on the lawns outside the ANU’s Asian Studies building, of Chinese shadow boxing. Was this useful or useless learning? Who can tell? It gave Rudd delight and directed his vision –like that of no other Australian Prime Minister before or after him – unerringly towards China. ‘Canberra was not quite big enough to cope with the prodigious mind, talents, and broad-ranging scholarship of Pierre Ryckmans,’ writes Rudd. ‘He was one of the finest intellectuals Australia has ever welcomed to its shores.’ Philippe Paquet’s study of his friend and fellow-countryman’s life and achievements, completed shortly before Ryckmans’s death, confirms and endorses this affectionate verdict. g
Ian Donaldson is Emeritus Professor of the Australian National University, and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He first wrote for ABR in 2006.
From glasnost to oblivion
The last leader of the USSR
Barbara Keys
GORBACHEV: HIS LIFE AND TIMES
by William Taubman
Simon & Schuster, $49.99 hb, 877 pp, 9781471147968
‘Heroes, hero worship, and the heroic in history’: so did one observer describe the essence of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940). A series of portraits of ‘great men’, the book culminates with Lenin’s arrival on a German train at Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917, shortly after the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. In six months, Lenin – against all odds, by dint of sheer will – would overthrow the provisional government and establish the world’s first communist state.
Seventy-four years later, one of Lenin’s successors would dismember that state, almost inadvertently. ‘Heroic’ is not a word often applied to Mikhail Gorbachev, certainly not in Russia, where polls rank Putin, Lenin, Stalin, and even Brezhnev, who presided over the ‘era of stagnation’, far higher than Gorbachev. He is disliked by two-thirds of Russians and viewed favourably only by about one-fifth. When he ran for office five years after being booted out, he received a humiliating 0.5 per cent of the vote. Although Gorbachev, now eighty-seven, lives in Moscow, his daughter moved to Germany partly to escape the vilification still routinely heaped on the man who lost an empire.
Lenin and Gorbachev both held power for seven years. Both confronted extraordinary political and economic dislocation. Neither came to power with a plan. In difficult moments, Gorbachev turned to Lenin’s writings, finding reassurance in the fact that the great revolutionary had also wrestled with doubts. Most Soviet leaders merely paid formulaic obeisance to Lenin, dutifully reciting the quotations speechwriters inserted into their orations. Gorbachev read Lenin’s collected works – all fiftyfive volumes. He compared himself
to Lenin as he made difficult choices in fraught circumstances. In the end, however, Gorbachev proved utterly different from Lenin. He rejected violence. He refused to risk large-scale turmoil. He was too cautious to be ‘heroic’.
William Taubman takes a deeply sympathetic approach to assessing Gorbachev’s successes and failures. Shelves groan under biographies of Stalin, Lenin, and Putin. So toxic is Gorbachev’s name in Russia that this is the first full-scale biography of Gorbachev in any language, including Russian. It is, like Taubman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Khrushchev (2003), a stunning achievement, packed with lively and engrossing stories chronicled on the basis of extensive research. After 2004, when Taubman first conceived of writing the book, he interviewed Gorbachev eight times. He visited Stavropol, the agricultural region in the northern Caucasus where Gorbachev was born and made his initial career as a party official. He interviewed dozens of Gorbachev’s former associates. Because access to archival records is still limited, Taubman leans on Gorbachev’s own writings and recollections and those of his aide and admirer, Anatoly Chernyaev, who kept a diary throughout the years in power. Gorbachev diligently recounts the charges of critics, but almost always sides with the defence.
Taubman carefully reconstructs Gorbachev’s childhood in a mostly loving peasant family. As a boy he worked hard on the collective farm and in school. An excellent school record and the prize he won working a combine harvester helped secure his admission to the élite Moscow State University’s law school. (Ten years later, Taubman himself would enrol there as an American exchange student, writing on a
research topic nearly identical to the one Gorbachev had chosen for his thesis.)
A striking feature of Gorbachev’s character was his thirst for knowledge. He and his wife, Raisa, read voluminously and widely, including literature not available to ordinary Soviets. As he rose through the ranks as a provincial party official, and even when he arrived at the top of the party hierarchy in Moscow, he prided himself on being more ‘cultured’ than his rough-hewn communist peers, a difference that proved alienating.
Gorbachev diligently recounts the charges of critics, but almost always sides with the defence
How did this enlightened expeasant become the leader of the USSR, and once there, why did he embark on dramatic, and fatal, reforms? Three geriatric leaders died in quick succession in the early 1980s: Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. In 1985 the Politburo had little choice but to turn to a younger generation. Gorbachev, known as a hard-working, knowledgeable, and sometimes charming party stalwart, initially seemed an inspired choice. The public responded with hope to the energetic young progressive in the Kremlin, and, as Taubman reminds us, Gorbachev was the most popular political figure in the USSR until 1990.
His ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy gradually won him thunderous applause in the West. Whenever he needed an ego boost, he went abroad, to be thronged by adoring crowds and meet with leaders like Margaret Thatcher whom he considered more allies than adversaries. (Years after leaving office, in
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May 1999 he and Raisa came to Australia, where he had just been voted ‘the man of the twentieth century’. The visit was bittersweet: the ‘long and difficult’ flights may have exacerbated Raisa’s illness. She died of leukemia later that year, leaving Gorbachev devastated.)
At home he was confronted with festering problems: a failing war in Afghanistan, economic stagnation, declining oil prices, social ills like rampant alcoholism, and an agricultural sector in crisis. His own experience on a collective farm had laid the seeds of doubt about communism: he had seen first-hand that farmers had no incentive to produce. Coveted visits to Western Europe in the 1970s, where the freedoms he saw struck him even more than the material abundance, chipped away at his convictions. Yet he toed the party line to advance his career, keeping his doubts to himself, and as the head of the Soviet Communist Party he spoke and acted like a believer. According to Taubman, Gorbachev gave up on communism in favour of social democracy only around 1989, and then only in private.
Gorbachev’s move to glasnost’ (openness) in the political realm opened the floodgates to debate, but without being matched by market reforms. Perestroika (restructuring) was too piecemeal to affect the lumbering Soviet economy except to make it more chaotic. On any given day in 1990, only twenty-three of 211 basic foods could be found in state-run stores. Yet even in the face of unrelenting decline, Gorbachev waited five years to hire an economic adviser. To this day many Russians see poverty and lawlessness as the major outcomes of his rule. Meanwhile, the constituent nationalities of the Soviet empire grew restive, and Gorbachev’s attempt to appease them provoked party hard-liners into an ill-fated coup attempt in August 1991. After its failure, Gorbachev waited to repudiate the Communist Party, frittering away his credibility. When the core of the remaining Soviet republics withdrew from the union (the Baltic republics having seceded already), Gorbachev was left with nothing to rule. On 25 December 1991 he handed his Kremlin offices, and the nuclear codes, to the mercurial and bombastic Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Russian Republic.The Soviet flag was lowered and a superpower disappeared.
Taubman suggests that Gorbachev deserves admiration and pity. He struggled with overwhelming forces, doing his best work when he stepped aside to let those forces flow where they would, as when he blessed Eastern Europe’s independence. Russian historians of the future may blame Lenin and Stalin for creating an untenable system more than they condemn Gorbachev for presiding over its inevitable end. And, they may recognise that heroism is made not only of the ‘great’ but also of the ‘good’. g
Barbara Keys is Associate Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and the author, most recently, of Reclaiming American Virtue: The human rights revolution of the 1970s (2014).
From Lyons to Whitlam
Geoffrey Blainey
THREE DUTIES AND TALLEYRAND’S DICTUM: KEITH WALLER: PORTRAIT OF A WORKING DIPLOMAT
by Alan Fewster
Australian Scholarly Publishing $44 hb, 320 pp, 9781925588613
Keith Waller was one of the top ambassadors in a period when Australia urgently needed them. During the Cold War, he served in Moscow and then Washington, where a skilled resident diplomat could be more important than a visiting prime minister.
As a young arts graduate, he had moved in 1936 from Melbourne to Canberra, where one of his first jobs was working for Billy Hughes, who had been prime minister in World War I. Occasionally, Waller must have felt that he was tending a beehive without mask or gloves.
When Waller made his first trip outside Australia at the age of twenty-seven, he was little prepared. It was less than three months before Pearl Harbor, and he had to open the first Australian embassy in Chonqing, the new wartime capital of China. Much of that nation had already been conquered by the Japanese, and Waller had to fly in from Burma – in effect the back door. Neatly dressed as always – his nickname was ‘Spats’ – Waller was persuaded by foreign diplomats to wear shorts and to appear a bit casual. It did not come easily. A Chinese photo shows him wearing a tie and reading a book while being carried in a chair along a narrow street by four strong men.
Accompanying the learned and kindly Frederic Eggleston, our first ambassador, Waller walked with some excitement up the steep hillside steps of Chongqing to meet China’s leader, General Chiang Kai-shek. The general’s wife, also present, was one of the four or five most famous women in the world, – charming in her ‘very hard way’, and
admired by those who thought Nationalist China was a vital ally in the war against Japan. Young Waller was less impressed. He soon believed the ruling Chinese regime was corrupt, inefficient, and almost ready to be overthrown by Mao’s communists.
After China he served in Rio, Washington, and London, and then in Manila before becoming the ambassador in Bangkok, whose people he loved. Like apprentice tradesmen, he always learned on the job. Among his teachers was the long-dead Talleyrand of France, whose dictum embodied the advice, ‘Above all, not too much zeal.’ This was an injunction to be cautious and balanced.
Now and then Waller displayed zeal and passion. Wilfred Burchett was the first Westerner to describe the devastation at Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. Later, reporting on the Korean War as an intense sympathiser with China, Burchett was seen by the Menzies government as a traitor to the country of his birth, and he was refused an Australian passport. In response, Burchett, remembering that Waller had once been more or less his friend, renewed contact in Moscow where Waller became Australia’s ambassador in 1960. Ignoring Talleyrand’s dictum, Waller busied himself in an attempt to secure, from Canberra, passports for Burchett and his three foreignborn children.
In Washington as ambassador, Waller must have been a remarkable success. He had the ear of many powerful people: he diagnosed the military and political dilemma in Vietnam. Not so happy was the afternoon in July 1966 when he heard Harold Holt as prime minister depart for a few sentences from his typewritten speech and graciously say aloud – and off the cuff – to President Johnson that he was ‘all the way with LBJ’. Even Johnson shuddered a little when he heard Holt’s phrase, for he intuitively knew that in Australia it would be widely viewed as ‘going too far’. Waller heartily agreed: words were bullets and had to be chosen with care.
Seven years later, by chance, I sat with Waller on a federal committee. While breathing an air of authority, he seemed remote, as if he had done enough.
Alan Fewster has written a quietly impressive book. Continuing the tradition displayed by Peter Edwards in his well-known biography of Arthur Tange (2006) – another Canberra diplomat – Fewster’s book throws light on the rivalries and enmities of a variety of politicians and diplomats. As for Waller himself, he increasingly disliked H.V. Evatt, our foreign minister for most of the 1940s, and at times was wary of John Curtin, John Gorton, and Gough Whitlam.
Australia has produced at least a dozen civil servants who deserve a very high place in our history. Someday, monuments in their honour might well jostle and elbow the multiplying statues of footballers and cricketers in public parks. With his white handkerchief peeping out of his left suit-pocket, Waller will probably be a statue, for he served Australia from the eve of World War II to the height of the Cold War and advised, directly or indirectly, every prime minister from Joseph Lyons to Gough Whitlam, as well as fourteen foreign ministers. Keith Waller died at the age of seventy-eight after languishing in nursing homes. His memorial service in Canberra in November 1992 drew little attention – Fewster could find no record of it. Of the capital city newspapers, perhaps only the Canberra Times published an obituary, and it was brief. The nation barely noticed the departure of its influential and loyal servant. g
Geoffrey Blainey’s many books include the second volume of The Story of Australia’s People (2016). He first wrote for ABR in 1961.
Not marching in step
Exploring the importance of the Russian Revolution
Sheila Fitzpatrick
RED FLAG UNFURLED:
HISTORY, HISTORIANS, AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
by Ronald Grigor Suny
Verso, $39.99 hb, 314 pp, 9781784785642
The centenary of the Russian Revolution has just passed, leaving a rather eerie silence, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia decided not to hold any official commemoration. In the current climate of what has been called a ‘new Cold War’ with Russia, people in the West often forget that the Soviet Union and its communist regime ceased to exist in 1991. The Russia of our imagination is still a superpower – despite the fact that its GDP has shrunk to approximately the size of Spain’s, putting it just below Australia in global ranking. Putin is not Stalin, however; for him the Soviet past is a mixed bag, part of which he wants to keep and part not. The once sacred October Revolution seems to be on the throw-out list.
Western Russia scholars were wary of the centenary, too. The general tenor of their assessments was that the revolution was a failure because it led to Stalinism. While Eric Hobsbawm’s judgement in The Age of Extremes (1994) was that the Russian Revolution was the key event of the global twentieth century, historians in the centenary year were keen to downplay its significance. In this, as in many other issues during his distinguished career in Soviet studies, American historian Ronald Grigor Suny is not marching in step. He thought the revolution mattered in the 1960s, when, as a young radical Marxist, he entered the historical profession and became a Soviet specialist, and he thinks it matters now. His lively and erudite new book, comprising six historiographical essays focusing on the interpretation of the revolution and its aftermath, is eloquent testimony to this belief.
Suny’s first book, The Baku Commune (1972), launched him on two subjects
that were to be central to his writing: the revolution and what we would now call its multicultural character (focusing on the non-Slavic nationalities). From an Armenian family with roots in the Russian and Ottoman empires, Suny has written extensively on the Caucasus. As an early advocate of social history, he was active in the great Cold-War-inflected dispute of the 1960s and 1970s about whether the victorious Bolsheviks had popular support, giving them legitimacy as rulers, or merely took power by a coup, making their rule illegitimate. Richard Pipes, the hard-line anti-communist Harvard professor who was adviser on Soviet affairs to President Reagan in the early 1980s, took the latter view, Suny the former. The present volume contains two essays on this topic, one from the 1980s and the other a decade later, together with a new essay on the currently fashionable topic of violence and terror in the post-revolutionary civil war.
Suny was part of a cohort of young historians in the United States and Britain, some of them Marxists, who were challenging the dominant ‘top down’ interpretations of Soviet history and trying to look from the ‘bottom up’ one.
In the interests of full disclosure: I was one of the same cohort, though not in the Marxist wing, which led me into scholarly clashes not just with Pipes but also with Suny, subsequently a friend and sometime colleague at the University of Chicago. We saw our critics as ‘Cold Warriors’, unable to analyse the Soviet Union accurately or objectively because of political prejudice, while they accused us of being ‘pro-Soviet’ and ‘soft on Communism’.
The great early influences on Suny
as a historian were the British Marxist E.P. Thompson, with his emphasis on shared experience as the basis of class consciousness, and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, with his sense of man as ‘an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’, those webs being what we call ‘culture’. Suny assessed the retrospective significance of the ‘cultural turn’ in an article originally published in the American Historical Review in 2002, reprinted here in revised form. Historiography – looking at the trends in the ideas and methods historians bring to their research and the themes they choose to pursue – has always been Suny’s forte: he even managed to introduce it, despite his publisher’s qualms, in his very useful textbook overview of Soviet history, The Soviet Experiment (1998), and it is also the genre of his present book. But his perspective is not a narrow disciplinary one: concurrently with his Armenian studies and history positions at the University of Michigan,he managed to spend a decade working as a political scientist in Chicago, along with his friend and intellectual mentor William Sewell.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing independence to the nonRussian republics such as Ukraine and pushing the question of Soviet nationalities into the political limelight, Suny found himself in great demand as an expert adviser and public intellectual. Among the offshoots of that new role were his efforts to bring Armenian and Turkish scholars together to talk about the Armenian genocide – something that only a person of Suny’s genial personality and fair-mindedness could have brought off. More recently, he has writ-
ten a history of the Armenian genocide, ‘They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else’ (2015). An unexpected result of the break up of the Soviet Union was the sudden consensus among historians that it had indeed been an ‘empire’, a term previously used mainly on the political right and avoided by the left. Suny accepted this shift, albeit wryly noting its partisan overtones, and discusses it in one of the most interesting chapters of the book, ‘The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, “National” Identity, and Theories of Empire’, written in the mid-1990s.
The countries we study often become second homelands, especially when, like Suny, you first go there as a young and impressionable exchange student. He arrived in the Soviet Union in 1964, when the hopes of the Thaw period that real socialism could be built now that the evils of Stalinism had been acknowledged were still tangible. The Brezhnev decades eroded those hopes through inertia and mild (by comparison with the past) repression, but then hopes of reform were rekindled with Gorbachev: as Suny writes, ‘at the effervescent moment of the late 1980s, “actually existing socialism” seemed about to become modern and humane.’
But Gorbachev, unlike the Chinese reformers, decided to start with political reform and leave the economy for later, which turned out to be a disastrous choice.
The collapse of the Soviet Union made its constituent republics, including Armenia, independent – but Suny’s Armenian identity was never of the nationalist kind. ‘When someone innocently congratulated me that now I had a country, I told him coldly, rashly, no, I have lost my country’ – that is, the place where, as a long-delayed consequence of the Russian Revolution, a humane socialism might have emerged.
Suny, an optimist by nature, does not accept that socialism was discredited by the Soviet experiment. The socialist goal of empowerment and social justice remains something to fight for, in his view, and capitalism and the assumption that ‘individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number’ something to be opposed. Suny also offers no apology
for the work of the pioneering cohort of Western social historians of the Soviet Union, seen as gullible and open to Soviet manipulation by critics like Richard Pipes and Anne Applebaum. He stoutly defends their ‘exemplary contributions to our knowledge of a world that was difficult to penetrate and whose authorities obstructed both domestic and foreign critical investigations of its history’, while admitting the inevitable
tension ‘between the historian’s noble ideal of objectivity and the partisan political arena in which that history has been written’. g
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent publications are On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2016) and Mishka’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s (2017). She first wrote for ABR in 2013.
Inverting Hölderlin’s ‘Geh unter, schöne Sonne’
I’d ask you to reappear from behind the wet blanket, Sun, But the ozone has been eaten by refrigerants And we can’t take your glare. We are people Of the skin cancers, tuned by solar flares.
So, whatever your good intentions towards the solar system, The galaxy, however far back to the beginning your light Reaches, we remain tentative, so easily led by your Coming and going, we are trapped in this metaxy.
I have a burnt spot on my macula, a legacy, a result, a consequence: L ove of gazing into the brightest light, the solar acetylene, The fier y magnesium ribbon, the deceptions of eclipse.
On this dark, wintry day I won’t ask
That you slough off the cloud, pierce the dark-hearted vapour. Nature is outside eyesight and latent growth below the surface S till wrestles with absolute darkness. What blessing Is bestowed by residues of warmth alone?
John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s recent works include the three-volume Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (2016).
A loner and worrier at war
The first half of John Curtin’s prime ministership
James Walter
JOHN CURTIN’S WAR: VOLUME I
by John Edwards
Viking, $49.99 hb, 560 pp, 9780670073474
John Curtin may be our most extensively documented prime minister. He is the subject of many biographies (including one by the author of the volume reviewed here) and countless chapters and articles, and is necessarily a central figure in war histories of the 1940s. John Edwards ventures into a well-populated field. The publisher’s claim in promoting the book that Curtin is one of our most underrated prime ministers is specious – in every comparative poll undertaken, Curtin is ranked at, or close to, the top.
In his earlier book (Curtin’s Gift, 2005), Edwards was explicit about his purpose in recovering Curtin from Labor partisans and war sacrifice narratives. There is no such declaration of purpose this time. He avoids framing his enterprise as a contribution to a larger debate, or explicitly engaging with differences in interpretation. His intention, evidently, is to tell the story anew, for the general reader, specifically focusing on wartime decision making. He makes judicious use of existing work when needed, but writes as if this is a tale never told before. It is an approach well-suited to the general reader. It may provoke peer researchers.
This, the first volume of Edward’s project, takes us from the inception of World War II to 1942 – the period immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There followed the US entry into the war, the fall of Singapore, and the confirmation of Curtin’s early prediction that Australia’s fortunes depended on the United States, not Britain, in the Pacific War.
To reach this point, Edwards recapitulates Curtin’s life and political history. We are introduced to his early socialism and activism, journalistic career, election
to parliament, the calamitous politics of the Depression (and loss of his own seat in 1931), re-election in 1934 with election to party leadership in 1935, and the tortuous process of rebuilding Labor as a respectable party of government. It is an adroit revelation of character and of intense commitment tempered by learning the art of the possible – and consumes more than half of this volume.
Curtin, a loner at heart, had to adapt markedly in managing Labor’s contending forces (combative radicals versus pragmatists; ambitious opportunists intent on displacing him). There were personal demons to overcome: depressive episodes and the alcoholism that blighted much of his career. There was the strain of balancing the family life that was so important to him with constant travel (from Perth to Canberra) and then the crushing demands of leadership and approaching war. Edwards is adept in using the letters between Curtin and his wife, Elsie, to illuminate their relationship, and to recover Curtin’s own representation of the challenges and fears tormenting him, and the agonies of separation from family support. However, the book does not really take off until its mid-point, when we get to Edwards’s primary subject – the encroachment on everything else of war. Curtin’s prescience in predicting likely developments in the Pacific, and his fraught negotiations with Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt over the disposition of Australian forces for the defence of Australia once combat commenced and the prospect of invasion seemed ever more imminent, form the heart of this narrative.
It is here that Edwards shines. His project reminds one of Ken Inglis’s and Alan Gilbert’s admonition: that
‘the future that beckoned or alarmed [historical subjects] was not necessarily our past – what actually happened – but rather a hidden destiny, a precarious vision of probabilities, possibilities and uncertainties’. As Edwards takes us through the minutiae of Curtin’s strenuous attempts to assert Australia’s interests, to bring elements of the AIF back from Europe to defend Australia and to gain a US commitment in the Pacific theatre, against Churchill’s ruthless commitment to the European war and Roosevelt’s relative inattention to Britain’s dominions – until Japanese aggression forced his hand – we are compelled to appreciate Curtin’s confrontation with a hidden destiny, subject to a most precarious vision of probabilities, possibilities, and uncertainties.
Without resorting to hagiography or polemics, Edwards persuades us not only of the courage and tenacity with which Curtin fought his corner, but also displays a sure sense of the complexities, anxieties, failures, and nuances of the deliberative processes and relationship building this entailed. To achieve this with gripping anecdotes in accessible prose will make it an indispensable book for those who have read nothing else on Curtin.
John Curtin’s War also justifies our attention to Edwards’s interpretation, despite competing accounts that cover almost exactly the same ground. It is nonetheless striking that Edwards –widely read in every other respect – makes no reference to works that most closely parallel his own, such as David Day’s equally lengthy, rigorously researched and detailed The Politics of War: Australia at war 1939–45, from Churchill to MacArthur (2003). Arguably, new books and articles of recent years have superseded Day. While Ed-
wards trawls much the same archives as his predecessor, clearly he makes his own choices and reaches his own conclusions. Nonetheless, this may take abstaining from debate with others a little too far, and the assiduous reader will find comparative treatment of the same events in these two books (for instance, the cable wars between Curtin and Churchill) thought-provoking.
A limitation of Edwards’s concentration upon the military imperatives, and especially upon Curtin’s relationships with allied leaders and generals, is that it leads at times to sketchy coverage of essential domestic politics. Edwards notes, for example, that instances of Curtin’s absence from certain crucial War Cabinet meetings (due to a return to Perth, and episodic illness) probably contributed to poor outcomes, but does not offer sufficient detail of how he handled colleagues when he was there.
While astute in capturing Curtin’s reliance on the influential Secretary of Defence Coordination, Fred Shedden, Edwards pays less attention to others. In his account, there were just five important players: Churchill, Roosevelt, General Douglas MacArthur (US commander in the Pacific), General Thomas Blamey (commander of Australian forces), and Shedden. This leads to an underestimation of one of Curtin’s conspicuous skills: his capacity to exercise distributed leadership at home, to give difficult colleagues hard jobs (Eddie Ward, Labour and National Service, for instance), which limited their time and capacity for general criticism while drawing his closest allies – officials as well as politicians (Ben Chifley, especially) – ever closer as participants in key decisions. Chifley’s significance as an emotional support in the hardest times is underplayed. Edwards accords Curtin ‘some kind of moral authority’, difficult to
define but undeniable, yet there are many accounts from his colleagues that illuminate just how it was acquired: recognised integrity; the knowledge of how hard and agonisingly Curtin worked on outcomes; courage and resolve when a course was decided; notwithstanding ambition, a steady commitment to the cause rather than self-aggrandisement; and a capacity for decision allied with personal humility. The manner in which
this loner and worrier generated enormous regard on all sides is an object lesson for contemporary leaders. g
James Walter is emeritus professor of politics at Monash University. His latest book is The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership, 1949–2016 (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart, 2017). He first wrote for ABR in 1986.
‘A very vital part of me’ A treasury of Sylvia Plath’s ideas
Felicity Plunkett
THE LETTERS OF SYLVIA PLATH, VOLUME 1: 1940-1956 edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil Faber & Faber, $69.99 hb, 1424 pp, 9780571328994
‘Aletter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Yet part of the lure of letters – and life writing generally – is a sense of the corporeal, the promise of discovering the writer herself. As Jacqueline Rose suggests, writing about biography and Sylvia Plath in the London Review of Books, it is tempting to imagine access ‘not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past’.
Perhaps suicide intensifies this desire. Rose suggests ‘it is a paradox of suicide that the murderer, who lives on for ever, is the one who didn’t survive’. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), she probes the antithetical after-effects of this. Plath ‘haunts our culture’, Rose writes, but is caught between execration
and idealisation, hovering in ‘the space of what is most extreme, most violent, about appraisal, valuation, about moral and literary assessment’.
Since her death in 1963 at the age of thirty, the biography industry – from its demonising to its hagiographical extremes – has fed on Plath. When she wrote, in a late poem ‘Words’, of words’ echoes travelling on, ‘dry and riderless’ with ‘indefatigable hooftaps’, she might have been prophesying the afterlife of her own work. Yet the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ she evoked in ‘Lady Lazarus’ has demonstrated a more voracious appetite for speculation and gossip. Plath is a magnet for peanut-crunchers, mostly uninterested in the feast of her late poetry. Discussion of Plath has been intemperate and extreme, epitomised by the words of her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes, who
described her as ‘pretty straight poison’ yet became her literary executor.
This collection contains three prefaces. Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter with English poet Ted Hughes, writes about her mother’s prolific letter-writing, but devotes half her note to a defence of the ways her father ‘honoured’ the work Plath left when she died, and the significance of the writers to one another, which returns to the very tensions such a collection seeks to remediate by letting Plath speak for herself.
Editors Peter K. Steinberg (an archivist who maintains ‘the oldest, continuously updated website for Plath’) and Karen V. Kukil (curator of the Plath collection at Smith College library, and of several key exhibitions of Plath’s archival material) describe this desire to allow Plath ‘to narrate her own autobiography’. Their aim – ‘to present a complete and historically accurate text of all the known, existing letters to a full range of her correspondents’ – is ambitious in its scope and in the ethical impulse it implies. The work evident throughout this collection, the first of a pair, in the meticulousness of its notes and the vast quantity of letters assembled, is extraordinary. Completion may be an impossible goal, but the collection is impressive in its scale. For those interested in the evolution of Plath’s writing, and of the development of particular works and ideas, it is a treasury.
Steinberg and Kukil argue, though, that Plath’s epistolary style is ‘as vivid, powerful, and complex as her poetry, prose and journal writing’. This large claim sidesteps the very different purposes of these forms, and over-eggs the pudding. This metaphor isn’t accidental. One aspect of the corporeal that the Plath letters gloriously highlight is her appetite. In the delightful earliest letters of a seven-year-old Plath to her father, Otto, who died just a couple of years later, ice-cream is a key theme. From the start of an extensive correspondence with her mother, Aurelia, that lasted until her final days, an eleven-year-old Plath is a diligent cataloguer of ‘coco’, cookies, a ‘kheese and balonae sandwich’, raspberry jello, chopped beef, salad, prunes, glasses of milk, ‘doughnuts’. Plath was to become the original ‘procrastibaker’,
a term that obscures the role cooking has for some writers as part of the creative process. A superficial analysis might dismiss Plath’s interest in food as purely a subscription to the mores of femininity. It was an aspect of her creativity, and is a metonym for her sensuality, appetite, and resourcefulness.
Much later, writing as a newlywed to Hughes during a short absence, her descriptions of food poignantly (and with the self-aware wit that shoots through these letters) convey her longing. Cream crackers are ‘soggy; the nescafe is a hard cake; the strawberry jam is rancid. I drank the last of the Chilean burgundy and I love you’. She eats ‘a lousy little breakfast of queertasting honey on white (ugh) toast’, but declines ‘a pale bilious green dessert (dyed custard) poured over a ladyfinger biscuit’. A good childhood day is ‘honeydew melon and hot blueberry muffins’, and Plath’s and Hughes’ Spanish honeymoon is a feast of sardines, tomatoes, butter, and ‘bread made in dark cave-like ovens’.
The other dominant strand in Plath’s correspondence charts the development and publication of her work. Readers know the results of Plath’s visionary talent, but the letters reinforce her ambition, grit, and tenacity. This is evident early, but from her first letter from Smith College, in 1950, to her benefactor, Olive Higgins Prouty, when she describes her ‘interest in writing’ as ‘a very vital part of me’, there is an additional accent on an extraordinary tenacity.
She powers on despite the impact of trauma and the oscillations in her emotional and mental health these letters more often conceal than reveal. In those letters that cut through her empathic instinct to put the reassurance of her correspondents first, her straight gaze at mental illness and its treatment recalls that of her contemporary, Janet Frame, who was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and received over two hundred ECT treatments, administered without anaesthetic. In Frame’s autobiography she describes ECT as ‘the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution’.
Eddie Cohen first wrote to Plath as a college English student and ‘fan’ after reading a story she published in
Seventeen. With Cohen, Plath felt less need to dissemble and reassure. At first she valued the letters less, commenting to her mother that she was so keen for a letter ‘even Eddie C. would do’. But Cohen was an interlocutor with whom Plath was open – she also calls their correspondence ‘magnetic’. During her hospitalisation and ECT treatment she describes the sensation of ‘shuddering in horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room’.
In contrast, the most sustained and in some ways restrained correspondence is with her mother. In a letter from Cambridge, where she was studying, to her brother, Warren, Plath notes that she has ‘hacked through a hard vacation, shared really only the best parts with mother, not the racking ones’.
Virginia Woolf described her journal writing as ‘loosening the ligaments’. This feast of letters is most fascinating as a part of Plath’s practice as a writer –maybe even as a writer of the dramatic monologues for which she is famous, since crafting a voice and playing a role often seem central.
Does it simply fuel an acquisitive, compulsive approach to Plath, or does it enhance the feast, like Emily Dickinson’s ‘envelope poems’, the latest Bob Dylan bootleg, or the recently published ‘lost’ Neruda poems, found scribbled on menus and scraps of paper? The opportunity to trawl through Plath’s larder, garden, and heart builds, in me, an appetite for the work that sprang from these places, and from this epistolary limbering-up. g
Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic, and Poetry Editor at University of Queensland Press. She first wrote for ABR in 2010.
A
Virtuoso nattering
compelling novelist who is leery of the first person
Sarah Holland-Batt
FEEL FREE: ESSAYS
by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, $35 pb, 459 pp, 9780241146903
‘When I was younger even the appearance of “I” on the page made me feel a bit ill,’ Zadie Smith confesses in her new book of essays, Feel Free. Shades of this chariness about the personal pronoun still persist in her non-fiction today, which is markedly self-effacing. From the outset, Smith repeatedly attempts to ditch the mantle of authority: ‘I have no real qualifications to write as I do. Not a philosopher or sociologist, not a real professor of literature or film,’ she says in her foreword. Later, she demurs, ‘I am a laywoman … a dilettante novelist, a nonexpert.’ You could be forgiven for writing off such claims as disingenuous, coming from a boldface name who writes for The New Yorker and Harper’s – hardly the bush league.
By the end of Feel Free, I came to see these caveats not as false modesty, but rather as Smith’s declaration that she won’t heed jurisdictional boundaries. Over the course of these essays, she moves balletically between highbrow and popular art, politics, identity, and philosophy. She examines the isolating fame suffered by pop’s preening boy-king Justin Bieber through the lens of philosopher Martin Buber’s theories of I-Thou and I-It. She uses Kierkegaard to illuminate her obsession with Joni Mitchell. She argues that the materialistic swagger of Jay-Z’s rap verses is linked to the long history of boasting in epic poetry: ‘asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies’. In Smith’s hands, such long-bow connections between esoterica and mainstream culture seem natural – inspired, even. They’re also frequently very funny.
The vintage of the pieces in Feel Free –mostly written during the Obama years –
might easily render them obsolete, given the velocity of change in pop culture and politics. Only one essay feels a touch dated: ‘Generation Why’, a deep dive into Facebook and the 2010 film The Social Network. Smith offers an incisive critique of Sorkin’s zinger-heavy portrait of Mark Zuckerberg as a spectrumy, sarcastic kid genius, but some of the ancillary issues she frets over – the sophomoric nature of the Facebook interface, for instance – seem quaint given where Facebook now sits in the news cycle: as a witting agent of Russian propaganda. Overwhelmingly, however, she proves a trenchant and astute analyst of timely subjects such as gentrification, climate change, and corruption at the heart of the UK media exposed by the Leveson Inquiry. She also wades into the left’s political exile on both sides of the Atlantic in nuanced essays on Donald Trump’s rise and Brexit, which forgo the customary hysteria in place of a searching introspection about liberal complacency.
Many of Feel Free’s standout offerings grapple with race and identity. In ‘Getting In and Out’, Smith offers a penetrating analysis of Jordan Peele’s breakout horror film Get Out (2017). Underlying the movie’s chilling conceit – white people parasitically occupying black bodies – Smith argues there is an ‘ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved’. Get Out’s theme of the white desire to annex black experience raises the spectre of appropriation, and Smith pivots to the furore surrounding white artist Dana Schultz’s controversial painting of lynching victim Emmett Till, Open casket (2016). Smith is troubled by the notion that the right to make art about black suffering is a clear-cut affair. She asks whether her blonde, green-eyed
children could make art about Till:
When exactly does black suffering cease to be their concern? ... If their work of art turns out to be a not especially distinguished expression or engagement with their supposed concern – must their painting be removed from wherever it hangs? Must it be destroyed?
To what purpose?
Such vexed questions, Smith notes, make her ‘yearn for absolute clarity: personal, genetic, political’, but she concedes that as a biracial woman, a certain ambiguity and ‘torsion’ is inevitable. Ultimately, Smith’s conclusion is more nuanced than much of the polemic that dominates the appropriation debate: she argues that the idea ‘that we can get out of each other’s way, mark a clean cut between black and white’ is a fantasy. The answer is not to ‘get out’ of each other’s experience, but to ‘go deeper in, and out the other side’. Another standout essay that picks up a related theme is Smith’s take on Hanif Kureishi’s deliciously profane The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Reading Kureishi as a young writer, Smith was emboldened by his ‘naughty, bubbly book’, with its refreshing lack of model minorities and the ‘equal-opportunity’ bad behaviour of its characters. Indeed, it is impossible not to see the shadow of Kureishi in the antic energy and garrulous cast of Smith’s début, White Teeth (2000). Reflecting on the outsized effect Kureishi had on her generation, Smith comes back to the notion of liberty: ‘what he gave us most of all was a sense of irresponsibility, of freedom’. Revisiting The Buddha of Suburbia, Smith wonders how its risky irreverence and subversiveness would fare today:
From the point of view of our twentyfirst-century world where the only possible reaction to anything seems to be outraged offence, I find it a relief to go back to that more innocent, hardier time, when we were not all such delicate flowers that every man’s casual idiocy had the awesome power to offend us to our very cores.
It is a similar point to one Smith makes in her essay on Brexit, where she
bemoans the ‘strange tendency of the younger lefty generation to censor or silence speech or opinions they consider in some way wrong: no-platforming, safe spaces, and the rest of it’. Down that path leads censorship and misplaced moral righteousness. Freedom – to speak, to make art (even bad art), to dwell in ambiguity – is paramount to Smith. It’s not a stretch to read Feel Free as a paean to negative capability.
‘I didn’t know you could speak to a reader like that, as if they were your equal – as if they were a friend,’ Smith says of Kureishi. It is this radically honest tone that makes these essays so riveting. Whether she is writing about Schopenhauer, or taking her father on a ‘grand tour’ of gardens in Italy, or her mother’s pride when the family moved into a maisonette with a bathroom and a powder room – ‘a very British form of achievement’ – you always have the sense that Smith is nattering away to you and you alone. It is erudite nattering, of course, full of virtuoso allusions and dazzling lateral leaps, but it is also intimate and democratic, and lingers just as often on the unknown as the known. Smith may be leery of the first person, but the I of these essays is compelling and utterly free. g
Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book, The Hazards, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is the editor of Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2016 and 2017.
The higher seriousness
Elizabeth Hardwick’s invaluable criticism
Patrick McCaughey
THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF ELIZABETH HARDWICK edited by Darryl Pinckney NYRB, $34.99 pb, 629 pp, 9781681371542
Elizabeth Hardwick is, unfairly, better known outside of New York as Robert Lowell’s second wife, who heroically endured twentythree years of tumultuous and tortuous marriage. She inspired his finest love poetry:
All night I’ve held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad –its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye –and dragged me home alive …
Sleepless, you hold your pillow to your hollows like a child, your old-fashioned tirade –loving, rapid, merciless –breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head,
Lowell left her brutally for Lady Caroline Blackwood, who bore him a son but could not stand his descents into mania. The end was appalling for
all of them. Fleeing Ireland and Caroline in 1977, Lowell flew to New York desperately seeking Hardwick. He died in a Yellow Cab at her door.
In New York, Elizabeth Hardwick is known as a novelist and short story writer, more admired than read. Over a lifetime – she died in 2007 at the age of ninety-one – she became a formidable critic. Collected Essays brings together, invaluably, her work from Partisan Review days in the 1950s to the birth and flowering of the New York Review of Books, of which she was a founding contributor. (Lowell’s trust fund provided the collateral for NYRB’s start-up loan.) The review essay, which became the hallmark of Robert Silvers’s NYRB, fitted her like a Halston suit. As a critic she always wrote like a novelist, taking pains to expatiate on the character and context of the writer under review. As deftly as Henry James but more forthrightly, she could summon a city or define an event in a paragraph. On
Boston’s ‘whimsical stagnation’ in the 1950s, she wrote:
If the old things of Boston are too heavy and plushy, the new either hasn’t been born or is appallingly shabby and poor. As early as Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations unequaled for cheap ugliness go up in the Public Garden and on the Boston Common. Year after year the city fathers bring out crèches and camels and Mother and Child so badly made and of such tasteless colours they verge on blasphemy.
Hardwick was a metropolitan critic, free of academic critical fashions. As she wrote for intensely competitive journals, her criticism had to be readable and rigorous. In this she succeeded as few others have done. Edmund Wilson comes to mind as a model. Her criticism fixes on the persona of the writer and how it focused their work. They are not ploddingly biographical: Hardwick goes for the jugular. She opens her account of Robert Frost’s letters: ‘Simplicity and vanity, independence and jealousy, combined in Robert Frost’s character in such unexpected ways that one despairs of sorting them out.’ But she does. After the success of North of Boston, ‘he was to be the most gregarious of lonely men, the most loquacious of taciturn Vermonters, the most ambitious of honest Yankees’. Although Hardwick says little about the poetry, she exposes the folksy wanderer of hill and wood as an ungenerous misanthrope.
The persistent effort of Hardwick’s criticism is the discrimination of the genuine, the real and the remarkable. In the New York circles in which she moved, the word ‘cant’ was never far from anyone’s lips, and ‘middle-brow’ the dirtiest of words. Hardwick is too good a critic to waste her energies on extended negations, but her Collected Essays does contain a comprehensive put-down of the Oxford don Peter Conrad and his book Imagining America. It begins well enough; ‘Unusual conjectures, connections that move from text to interpretation with the speed and force of a bullet in transit, dazzle … these uncommon gifts in alliance with a nervy vehemence of tone ...’ Such vehemence immunises
Conrad from wit. Oscar Wilde observed of Niagara Falls, then as now a honeymooning site: ‘The sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the first if not the keenest disappointments of American married life.’ This draws from Conrad the leaden comment ‘that Wilde’s wit not only subverts morality, but subjugates America by diminishing it’. Conrad’s high falutin’ notion – catch the whiff of cant – of America in the nineteenth century as ‘the vast deathchamber of English individuality’ unable to ‘validate individual existences’. It hardly hardly applies to the period that produced Walden, Moby-Dick, Leaves of Grass, and the emergence of Emily Dickinson, to paraphrase the text.
The persistent effort of Hardwick’s criticism is the discrimination of the genuine
Hardwick’s exasperation is reserved for Conrad’s treatment of W.H. Auden; ‘galling hysteria’ when the poet’s East Village apartment was described as ‘a cave of defilement … the squalor of the nursery’, and the man ‘pickled and prematurely aged’. Hardwick’s response is wonderfully simple: ‘Auden’s eccentricities were harmless … His mind, his loneliness, his ability to love, his uncompetitive sweetness of character survived his ragged bedroom slippers and egg-spotted tie. And his genius, the high seriousness of his life, survived his death.’
Hardwick’s search for the genuine, the remarkable, took her to surprising places. In 1955 she published an article in PR on ‘The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead’, noting that none of her work was in print. Plus ça change …Of The Man Who Loved Children she remarks, echoing Stead’s own emphatic, repetitive prose, ‘It is all this, all story and character and truth and directness and yet it has been composed in a style of remarkable uniqueness and strength, of truly radical power and authenticity.’
In a collection of absorbing essays, ranging from a sympathetic consideration of William James’s ‘indecisiveness’ as a thinker to a sensitive appraisal of
Elizabeth Bishop’s fiction, ‘a curiosity about the curious’ to mounting disdain for Katherine Ann Porter (‘unusually inclined to fabrications about her past’), we come to an essay on Gertrude Stein of sparkling originality. Stein is a particularly tricky case on the phony to genius continuum. Hardwick quotes T.S. Eliot’s excoriation of the work: ‘It is not improving, it is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one’s mind.’ Stein’s character and career stir Hardwick’s novelist’s imagination: ‘In her life, confidence and its not-toogradual ascent into egotism combined with a certain laziness and insolence. It was her genius to make the two work together like a machine …’ Hardwick shrewdly observes that Stein’s gift was for comedy. Although Stein was known and despaired of for her prolixity, Hardwick points to her genius for the epigram. Sometimes they have a Dadaist twist: ‘I like a view but I like to sit with my back to it.’ She can also be sharply satirical: ‘Ezra Pound is a village explainer, excellent if you are a village, but if not, not.’
Literary criticism is rarely read for pleasure, but this hefty collection is pure tonic mixed copiously with the dryest gin. g
Patrick McCaughey, who first wrote for ABR in 1981, is a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Yale Center for British Art. He met Elizabeth Hardwick just once, in the Knickerbocker Club, where a colleague was giving a paper. ‘This is very good but rather long’, was her departing comment to our reviewer.
The vault
Johanna Leggatt
THE MOTHER OF ALL QUESTIONS: FURTHER FEMINISMS
by Rebecca Solnit Granta Books
$24.99 hb, 176 pp, 9781783783557
So much has been written about male–female power dynamics, Trump’s grotesqueries, the public outing of protected abusers, and the growing chorus of women speaking out about sexual harassment that it’s hard to believe there could be anything new to add. Yet Rebecca Solnit, author of celebrated essays ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ and ‘If I Were a Man’, is skilled at filtering cultural commentary into thoughtfully argued and nuanced thinkpieces; at combing through the clamorous voices to find the nub. Some of what Solnit writes is far from new, but her ability to see connections between seemingly unrelated events or ideas, while highlighting the pervasiveness of gender inequality and its deep entrenchment in many of our institutions, is what makes her work stand out from others.
In her introduction to this collection, Solnit makes it clear that hers is an anthology for everyone – men, women, children, and those who are ‘challenging the binaries and boundaries of gender’. This expansiveness and generosity of spirit is in stark contrast to Jessa Crispin’s clarion call Why I Am Not a Feminist (2017). While both works call for revolution, a complete rethinking of gender relations, Crispin is chiefly a flame-thrower and a compiler of griev-
ances. Solnit’s approach is to point out the absurdity of treating women like second-class citizens, while conveying hope that genuine change will blow through, bringing as many people with it as possible.
Silence and women’s untold stories preoccupy much of Solnit’s writing. She draws a compelling distinction between silence that is imposed and the quiet that is sought, arguing that many women possess a vault of unspoken shame that is distinct from the luxury of deliberate quietude. Part of women’s liberation, therefore, is the telling of stories that have thus far been hidden. Having a voice is fundamental to human rights, Solnit says, and the fight for women’s liberation is essentially expressed as the en-masse breaking of silence.
The Mother of all Questions was released a little more than a month before the allegations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein broke. Although he isn’t mentioned in the collection, the spectre of Weinstein and the gross abuse of power he represents are everywhere. In ‘A Short History of Silence’, Solnit references the exposure of BBC entertainer Jimmy Savile and US comedian Bill Cosby, and highlights the way a hotel maid was able to launch the beginning of the end of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. These men wielded considerable power before the dams broke and the stories were told. A few months, however, is a long time in the world of hashtag movements and gender politics, and at times Solnit’s cultural references sound out of date. Some of the men Solnit praises have become fallen stars in the short time between writing and publication. She points to the feminist credentials of comedian Aziz Ansari, but in recent months an anonymous woman has accused Ansari of sexual misconduct. Similarly, Louis C.K. is described as one of a number of recent ‘feminist stand-up comics’; in November 2017 he admitted to sexual misconduct against several women. Nevertheless, such a fast-moving cultural movement is bound to make a few abrupt turns and feature some surprise revelations, and this does not diminish the quality of Solnit’s writing nor blunt the sharp-
ness of her arguments.
Solnit’s problem lies less with men and more with structural dynamics. Indeed, she is sensitive to the way patriarchy imposes a rigid masculinity on men by demanding a kind of emotional castration from an early age. Solnit is at her best when detailing the way masculinity is often a prison, cutting men off from feeling or vulnerability and denying them psychological wholeness. Men and women, after all, have much to gain from a feminism that seeks to liberate both genders from restrictive roles, but men learn quickly in life, Solnit argues, that an emotional depth and richness is the trade-off for power. ‘Masculinity is a great renunciation’, is how Solnit puts it, and one that requires the realm of emotions to be outsourced to women. As a result, we become skilled as adults at protecting ourselves against vulnerability, with ‘people meeting as caricatures of human beings, offering their silence to each other, their ability to avoid connection’.
Perhaps Solnit’s most personal essay is the titular ‘The Mother of All Questions’, a perceptive take on the way women are judged (often harshly) for their life choices, including whether or not to have children. Solnit is often asked why she hasn’t become a mother, and many years of fencing with this question has sharpened her understanding of the imputations behind it and the best response to those asking it. ‘There is no good answer to how to be a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question,’ she writes. Solnit declares that the best response to such closed questions on women’s life choices, those that are more accusatory than curious, is to respond with an open question as to why the person is asking it. Why, she wonders, are we given a one-size-fits-all model of happiness and success when those conventional formulas, such as marriage and babies, can make prisoners of many people? Solnit puts it most elegantly: ‘We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower – and wither – all around us. g
Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist.
Bridgehead
A re-evaluation of Richard Casey’s influence
Rémy Davison
AMERICA LOOKS TO AUSTRALIA: THE HIDDEN ROLE OF RICHARD CASEY IN THE CREATION OF THE AUSTRALIA–AMERICA ALLIANCE, 1940–1942
by James Prior
Australian Scholarly Publishing, $39.95 pb, 244 pp, 9781925588323
Duumvirates frequently dominate politics, irrespective of whether they are partners or rivals: Napoleon and Talleyrand; Nixon and Kissinger; Mao and Deng. But few second bananas survive history’s vicissitudes. A dwindling portion of the Australian public might still recognise the names of Robert Menzies and John Curtin, but one doubts whether anyone outside the field of diplomacy still recalls Richard Casey.
James Prior mounts a serious case for a re-evaluation of Casey’s influence upon the profound reorientation of US foreign policy throughout 1940–42. Australian historiography has traditionally accorded Curtin primacy in the forging of the American alliance. However, Prior delivers convincing evidence of Casey’s untiring efforts to convince Washington of the centrality of Australia as a ‘bridgehead and a base’ of operations.
As Prior notes, even prior to Federation Australian leaders recognised that Washington was a Pacific as well as Atlantic power, a fact the Spanish-American War (1898) made explicit. To drive the point home, Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘Great White Fleet’ circumnavigated the globe in 1907–09, visiting Melbourne and Sydney en route, demonstrating America’s burgeoning blue-water naval capabilities. The fleet’s visit was stage managed by Alfred Deakin, in an unsubtle cock of the snook to London. Britain’s alliance with Japan (1902–23) was unpopular with Australian political élites, as Tokyo was clearly a revisionist Pacific power, evidenced by its 1910 occupation of Korea. However, the 1922 Naval Treaty effectively gave Japan a free hand in the Pacific, deepening Australian
anxieties still further, as Tokyo’s territorial aggrandisement in the 1930s went unchallenged by either London or Washington. Ironically, Casey greeted Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 ‘with a sigh of relief’, convinced that Tokyo would be preoccupied by its northern turn, thus distracting it from adventurism in Australia’s immediate sphere of interest.
Casey was an early realist. Like his contemporary, the Sovietologist E.H. Carr, Casey was an enthusiastic appeaser, before the word took on pejorative connotations. Carr advocated appeasement of Hitler in his first edition of The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939). In subsequent editions, Carr obliterated all references to his support for appeasement; however, for Casey, appeasement was a pragmatic means of averting a world war that was inimical to Australia’s national interests.
For Casey, British interests, a priori, were not Australian interests. London was a global power, but the European theatre was the epicentre of its core balance-of-power strategy. In contrast, Australian eyes were fixed firmly upon the Pacific. However, from the 1920s until 1935 Australia enjoyed little foreign policy autonomy; despite the 1931 Statute of Westminster, which conferred law-making powers upon the British colonies, Commonwealth policy remained entrenched at the Foreign Office. Energetic attempts by Stanley Bruce and, later, Joseph Lyons, to establish a system of diplomatic liaison officers were only partially successful; by the mid-1930s Australia still had no foreign service. Nevertheless, Prior finds Casey making early appearances in the diplomatic milieu of the 1920s; Casey acted
as UK liaison officer throughout 1924–1931, providing Australian cabinets with information that Westminster otherwise hid from its colonial governments.
Appeasers had gained the ascendancy in the late 1930s, counting Casey and Menzies among their numbers. Conversely, the ALP was isolationist, supporting a policy of withdrawal from international affairs. Menzies, leader of a minority government in 1939, argued that Poland was not worth fighting over, even after Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. The only noteworthy antiappeasers were independent MP Percy Spender and that political polygamist, Billy Hughes.
Menzies may have considered himself British to the bootstraps, but geopolitics dictated a Pacific strategic calculus. In January 1940 he appointed Casey, his political rival, as Australia’s first ambassador to Washington. For Menzies, who was overturning his own earlier opposition to such appointments, worsening relations between London and Tokyo necessitated a decisive response. Cabinet also endorsed an Australian representative to Japan, but Rab Butler, an ultra-appeaser serving at the Foreign Office, intercepted Canberra’s request for an Australian minister in Tokyo and scotched the scheme. Butler thought an Australian legate would publicly reveal Canberra’s dissatisfaction with London and let slip to the Japanese that the colonies were far from united on foreign policy.
Casey deployed his considerable charm and networking skills to remarkable effect in Washington. Casey urged Canberra to gear up for war production; the means was American Lend-Lease,
which prompted a wave of industrial dynamism in Australia. As US–Japanese relations reached their nadir in late 1941, Casey sought – and obtained –a guarantee from Washington, if the Japanese attacked Malaya. This was a singular achievement, which pre-dated Pearl Harbor. That said, Casey still sought to delay a Pacific conflict at all costs, although, like Churchill, he hoped an ‘incident’ would bring America into the war. He did not have to wait long.
Equally, it was Casey’s discussions with General George Marshall that
likely persuaded Dwight D. Eisenhower and Franklin D. Roosevelt to designate Australia as Washington’s operational base to drive the Japanese out of Southeast Asia. By contrast, Curtin’s famous proclamation that ‘Australia looks to America’ was a diplomatic blunder that was condemned privately by Roosevelt himself. Elsewhere, Prior’s eye for detail impresses; one can only admire Casey’s chutzpah in attempting to set the Soviets against the Japanese in the wake of Pearl Harbor, if only to divert the Japanese from their southern push.
‘The cryptic residue of former worlds’
Tracing one of history’s great narratives
Kim Mahood
DEEP TIME DREAMING: UNCOVERING ANCIENT AUSTRALIA
by Billy Griffiths Black Inc., $34.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781760640446
In Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, Billy Griffiths describes the process of imagining the past through the traces and sediments of archaeology as ‘an act of wonder – a dilation of the commonplace – that challenges us to infer meaning from the cryptic residue of former worlds’. In his endeavour to infer meaning from this cryptic residue, Griffiths begins his wondering by sifting through the evidence, insights, enthusiasms, and mistakes of an articulate band of Cambridgetrained archaeologists who, from the 1960s, professionalised what had been the province of amateurs. Led by John Mulvaney, they halted the indiscriminate gathering of artefacts and human remains, brought rigorous techniques to the excavation of sites, and began to strip back the layers of time, aeon by aeon, to reveal the astonishing antiquity of human presence on the Australian continent.
By writing a history of the evolving discipline of Australian archaeology,
Griffiths invites us to imagine a history of ancient Australia. The structure he has chosen serves his project well – to tell the stories of the significant players; the famous, the infamous, and the invisible; their personalities, methodologies, and discoveries – and, in so doing, to create a narrative that is accessible and compelling. It is a tale of the characters who dug the trenches, of the Indigenous people who objected to the cavalier approach of the early ‘cowboy’ archaeologists, of the political reverberations of archaeological finds within environmentally contested regions, of conflict and discovery and the shifting relations between white and Indigenous Australia.
Griffiths does many things in this book. He brings us up to date on the evidence of Indigenous occupation of Australia – 65,000 years, as revealed by Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land – and what it reveals about changes and developments during those 65,000 years. He
The shock of Pearl Harbor placed Casey squarely in Roosevelt’s circle and saw him appointed to Churchill’s war cabinet. Readers will not be surprised that Casey, as External Affairs Minister, ultimately oversaw the promulgation of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951. And, like his old boss, Curtin, Casey saw no need to include Britain in this new Pacific alliance. g
Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University. ❖
explores the political and environmental implications of archaeological discoveries through case studies, none more gripping than the story of Kutikina Cave and the Franklin River Campaign. Although we know the outcome of the campaign, it is salutary to be reminded how close the dam came to proceeding, flooding not only the Tasmanian wilderness, but a unique Indigenous legacy. In a region considered too inaccessible for human settlement, Kutikina Cave provided evidence of Ice Age occupation in a treeless tundra landscape, unintentionally contradicting the environmental claims for the antiquity of the south-west forests. Kutikina also came to encapsulate the tensions between scientists and the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, which demanded control of its heritage. The emerging agency of contemporary Indigenous people, and the ways in which this has transformed the profession, provides a counterpoint world view to that of the
archaeological community.
Archaeology is a profession with as many women as men in the field, and Griffiths dedicates several chapters to ‘that intrepid yet often shadowy, even invisible band of women archaeologists’. The author of those words, Isabel McBryde, was the second professionally trained archaeologist to work in Australia, the first being John Mulvaney. While the latter excavated stratified sites that pushed back the dates of human occupation, overturning the assumption that Australia was the last continent to be colonised, McBryde developed a field practice that was spatial as well as stratigraphic, mapping sites across the New England landscape and developing relationships with the Indigenous people of the region. She emerges as a seminal figure in embedding archaeological material in the physical and social environments that produced it. Her process uncovered the network of trade routes that configure the landscape as a web of social and ceremonial connections. McBryde and other early women in the field established methodologies that were the precursors of contemporary fieldwork models, inclusive of Indigenous people, making room for beliefs antithetical to scientific priorities.
a language to express his conviction that Mungo Man represents a bridge between the past and the present frames the unstable conundrum between scientific and Aboriginal world views. The methodical and rigorous scientific practices that have extended Australian deep history from 5,000 years to 65,000 years, challenging the accepted timeline
long-inhabited sites contain the spiritual presence of ancestors. They remain charged with meaning, inhabited by restless ghosts. Whether those ghosts are 10,000 or 60,000 years old is immaterial to the modern custodians of the sites.
The observations of Anbarra man Frank Gurrmanamana, paraphrased by Jones, on visiting Canberra in 1974, provide a telling glimpse into the fault line between our different perceptions of order and meaning.
Billy Griffiths is not a revisionist historian. Although he brings the nuances of post-colonial interrogation to the project, he honours the unflagging commitment of Mulvaney, the ‘father of Australian archaeology’, and the chutzpah and enthusiasm of the charismatic, brilliant, and controversial Rhys Jones, nicknamed ‘Wombat’ because he was short, stout, and liked to dig. There is a hilariously graphic description of the bearded, unwashed, all-male team, led by Jones, descending on the northern coast of Tasmania in 1964 and being pulled over by the local police, who suspected them of having stolen the expedition’s Land Rover.
Lake Mungo retains its central status as the site that brought Australian prehistory to national and international notice, and Jim Bowler’s attempt to find
of human migrations out of Africa, are counterbalanced by the Indigenous perspective that human remains should be treated as individual ancestors and that Aboriginal people have always been here.
As the physical process of archaeology becomes less invasive, the cultural terrain becomes more volatile. Indigenous agency has drawn up the rules of engagement. To excavate human remains is no longer a given – it is just as likely to shut down a site permanently. Western science has its place, having established evidence of human presence in Australia many thousands of years earlier than in Europe and the Americas, and discovered technologies that rewrite the story of cultural evolution. But
Here was a land empty of religious affiliations; there were no wells, no names of the totemic ancestors, no immutable links between land, people and the rest of the natural and supernatural worlds. Here was just a vast tabula rasa, cauterised of meaning … Viewed from this perspective, the Canberra of the geometric streets, and the paddocks of six-wire fences were places not of domesticated order, but rather a wilderness of primordial chaos.
‘Who owns the past?’ This question, posed by McBryde, continues to resonate through Australian Aboriginal archaeology, and Griffiths brings to the question a forensic thoroughness worthy of the archaeologists whose lives, ideas, and discoveries he excavates. Beautifully written, with a cast of compelling characters both ancient and modern, and a storyline that traces one of humanity’s great narratives, this is a book that will captivate both the general reader and the scholar.
Deep Time Dreaming brings the past alive in the present, through the passion and imagination of the people who have sought to unearth the material evidence of the past, and through the complex sensitivities of the people whose ancestors left that evidence. It is a book for our time, a deep history that allows us to imagine our way into the future. g
Kim Mahood is the author of the memoirs Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) and Position Doubtful (2016). She first wrote for ABR in 2001.
John Mulvaney at Fromm’s Landing, 1958 (photograph by Dermot Casey, courtesy of the National Library of Australia PIC P11128/10)
‘A banquet of consequences’
Portrait of a revisionist and a procrastinator
Simon Caterson
TRUTH’S FOOL: DEREK FREEMAN AND THE WAR OVER CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
by Peter Hempenstall University of Wisconsin Press, US$34.95 hb, 321 pp, 9780299314507
‘It is hard to reach the truth of these islands,’ observed Robert Louis Stevenson of Samoa in a letter written to a close friend in 1892, two years after the author had moved to an estate on Upolu. Stevenson, who died in 1894, could never have anticipated the prophetic dimension added to those words. Less than a century later, in the 1980s, the Western understanding of Samoan society would become the subject of a fierce and protracted international dispute among anthropologists and others that has raged ever since.
A cynic once said that the more bitter the dispute between academics the less there is at stake. But when in 1983, Derek Freeman, a New Zealand-born anthropologist based at the Australian National University, published a refutation of the fieldwork conducted in Samoa in the 1920s by his famous American colleague Margaret Mead, it wasn’t simply an intramural disagreement. Freeman seemed to call into question the most widely accepted assumption within the social sciences of what it is to be human.
Not for nothing did the announcement of the publication by Harvard University Press of Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth appear as front-page news in The New York Times. At that time, Mead was one of the best known and most admired public figures in America. Such was Mead’s status as an American idol (in the pre-reality TV sense) that in 1969 she was described in Time magazine as the ‘Mother to the World’. A major media figure for decades, in 1974 Mead became the first woman elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A
year after her death in 1978, President Carter posthumously awarded Mead the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mead established her reputation with fieldwork described in her book Coming of Age in Samoa: A psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation (1928). Mead boldly claimed to have uncovered proof that norms of behaviour are determined by culture and not biology, and that the traditional Samoan society she observed made it much easier for adolescents to come of age than was the case in the United States at that time. Among the Samoa adolescents with whom she interacted in 1928, Mead discerned that the girls especially were permitted to experiment with sex free from guilt and shame, a licence denied most American teenagers. Mead’s findings were embraced within her discipline and were enormously influential in shaping postwar American attitudes towards parenting and education.
Mead’s Samoan research seemed to confirm that it was nurture rather than nature that accounted for human behaviour, and that the central claim of eugenics – that biology is destiny, a theory that was influential in the 1920s and informed fascist political ideology – was demonstrably false. Mead’s alternative vision, realised in her description of a remote Polynesian community of a few hundred people, held out the prospect to countless progressive American parents, educators, and lawmakers that human beings were perfectible.
According to Freeman, however, Margaret Mead’s utopian recreation of an idyllic society in the Pacific Islands was misleading. Anthropologists make much of ‘context’, and Freeman charged that Mead had succumbed to observer
bias that distorted her appreciation of the true complexity of Samoan society, and led her to ignore or discount darker aspects of Samoan life, including the prevalence of male aggression and patriarchal control. In a subsequent book, published a few years before his death in 2001 at the age of eighty-four, Freeman further alleged that Mead had been hoaxed by two of her Samoan teenage informants, who he claimed had confessed that they simply told her what they thought she wanted to hear about their imaginary sex lives.
Whether the reader is aligned with Mead or Freeman, or has no commitment to either side, Truth’s Fool is a fine intellectual biography of Freeman that explores the subject’s lifelong struggle to fully understand human nature in parallel with an inner struggle to come to terms with his own drives, shortcomings, manias, and contradictions.
Apart from anything else, the book is a fascinating account of academic politics and the currents of twentiethcentury intellectual history. The Mead–Freeman fracas erupted at a time when many on the American intellectual left felt besieged following the heady decades of the 1960s and 1970s. ‘The fragility of liberal cultural politics in the Reagan years of the 1980s and a whiff of American exceptionalism heightened the outrage against Freeman,’ writes Peter Hempenstall. In the backlash that followed his refutation of Mead’s Samoan research, Freeman was accused of misogyny and racism, and there were even some detractors who questioned his sanity. (Hempenstall reveals that Freeman was once diagnosed with bipolar disorder, though the diagnosis was never made public.)
Truth’s Fool is a portrait of a compulsive contrarian. Hempenstall, a historian who has written more than one biography about people of principle who stood apart from the intellectual or political orthodoxy of their time, is empathetic towards Freeman but also prepared to acknowledge that all idols, including iconoclasts, have feet of clay. The biography was supported by Freeman’s family, though direct access to his private diaries was denied.
The Derek Freeman that emerges
from the pages of Truth’s Fool is a thinker more adept at critique than exposition. As suggested by the title Truth’s Fool , Freeman was inclined to cast himself as a kind of medieval court jester given licence to speak truth to power. At other times Freeman characterised himself as a heretic, a self-image which was reinforced by David Williamson in his 1996 play Heretic inspired by Freeman’s work. In the same year, Freeman was praised by the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as ‘one of the great scientific heroes of our age’.
Although Freeman is remembered, for better or worse, as the debunker of Margaret Mead, he nursed a much grander intellectual ambition. Freeman’s plan was to establish a unified theory of human behaviour that combined nurture with nature, and thus offer a new paradigm beyond the two opposing doctrines.
In debate, Freeman was formidable,
yet away from professional disputation he became distracted by prospect of endless interesting new avenues of research. Too often, in the judgement of Hempenstall, Freeman spent time reading and ruminating when he should have been writing and publishing. Hempenstall laments the time Freeman frittered away in his later years that could have been spent completing his magnum opus.
In addition to being a research junkie and chronic procrastinator, Freeman was unable to bear not having the last word: ‘Freeman’s absolutist principle of replying to every written criticism was not a recipe for normal life and relationships, even within a scholarly community.’
None of us, and certainly no one in academia, ever quite gets to have the last word on any topic. Freeman copied into his notebook a quotation attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘Sooner or
later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.’
True enough, with the example of Derek Freeman suggesting that it is wise to leave the table rather than pick over every last morsel. g
Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer and the author of Hoax Nation (2010). He first wrote for ABR in 2001.
Spring Idylls
1.
‘My new persona helped me to make money,’ says the streamer, but cruel and petty, unhoped for ideal like a hovercraft shimmers behind a definition of a chair. You tarnish the boulevards with your shrapnel castanets and chucked heels dancing under the exsanguinated sun, but insufficient, burnt coat of meaning wages a lost covenant.
You hang out till the last minute then take what’s left. At home’s the torquemada you thought mistakenly. The Equality Issue opines to the crepe myrtle.
‘I need superficial to relax’ says the airborne Treasure, drinking up a storm, as she modded the program again until no frond pecks. On TV chiselled-by-Praxiteles turns his novel arms. He was an ornament to the game a muse on the field. He passed away surrounded by his fame.
2.
Longer reading, even though by exit’s no display, as consumer paradise stews the criss-cross city and soap powders perform a castella’s smithereen of poise, seismological effusions wither with the vine, the gate perpetually shut. Sandwich board architecture knifes over the city. The escalator reminds me of you as does a wall in the paraffin trees of fleet-footed Spring.
The commissars adore ceremony, and standing on it, but I prefer a swamp bordered with abandon, a trumpet at your balustrade, a car of squabblers eating fallen pizza off the road, every line a gasket, the stairwell bending as you sailed into the past. Call the broken waves that you sink, Thyrsis, arms ashes and the house renovated and the street painted.
Gig Ryan’s books include New and Collected Poems (2011).
Gig Ryan
Mollie’s story
Anna MacDonald
A
SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MOLLIE
DEAN
by Gideon Haigh
Hamish Hamilton
$32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780143789574
AScandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean is Gideon Haigh’s engrossing account of the circumstances surrounding the unsolved 1930 murder in Elwood of primary school teacher, aspiring journalist, and bohemian, Mollie Dean. Less true crime journalism than an interrogation of the genre, Haigh’s meticulously researched book recalls the ‘thick description’ of cultural history, which in historian Greg Dening’s words conveys ‘the fullness of living’ at a particular time, in a particular place. In this instance, the time and place are Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s and, more specifically, the ‘virtual Melbourne Bloomsbury’ (as it is described by biographer and memoirist Gary Kinnane) of the group of artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals with whom Mollie Dean became entangled. This group included chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Hart, The Bulletin’s Mervyn Skipper and his wife, Lena, poets Louis Lavater and Frank Wilmot, writers Bernard Cronin and Vance and Nettie Palmer, and artists Max Meldrum, Clarice Beckett, Justus Jorgensen, and Colin Colahan among others.
Haigh reflects upon the narrative effect of a crime that remains unsolved. ‘When nobody is punished,’ he writes, ‘the reproach distributes itself more widely, less predictably – over individuals, systems, societies, even the victim themselves, for incurring what can come
to be felt as foreseeable danger. Instead of arcing, the narrative fans.’ Thus, Haigh’s narrative takes shape through powerful ‘layers of association’: between Mollie and Colahan, with whom she was in a relationship at the time of her death; between Colahan and George Johnston, via whose fictionalisation of Mollie’s murder, in My Brother Jack, many readers will first have encountered her story; between earlier representations of Mollie (in fiction, painting, diaries, newspaper reports) and Haigh’s own; and between Mollie’s death and the murders of other young women, past as well as present. As a result of this many-layered narrative, what gradually unfolds is as much a portrait of Mollie’s life and death as it is a portrayal of the city and the society in which she lived.
It is also the portrait of a woman whose story has remained disturbingly current. A Scandal in Bohemia is one among a number of recent retellings and in an especially satisfying chapter, Haigh considers these others – a play, Solitude in Blue (2002) by Melita Rowston, Lisa Miller’s ballad ‘Molly Dean’ (2016), and Katherine Kovacic’s forthcoming crime novel, The Portrait of Molly Dean – as part of ‘a belated female editing of [Mollie’s] story’. ‘[T]he times,’ writes Haigh, ‘rather suit Mollie Dean. She modernises so easily that it’s as though we have caught up with her rather than she catching up with us.’
Certainly, Mollie seems to have been an uncomfortable fit in many circles. She was, in this sense, ahead of her time. Mollie’s mother, Ethel Dean, chastised her violently for being ‘too brainy’, having aspirations inappropriate to her station, and mixing with ‘bohemians’. Indeed, the relationship between mother and daughter was so acrimonious that Ethel was suspected of being implicated in her murder. Neither were Mollie’s independence and creative ambition easily accepted by Colahan and his circle (the Meldrumites). They had their own –surprisingly conventional – ideas about what a woman’s role should be and how she should fulfil it. According to Haigh:
It was not only convention that Mollie found herself pitted against; it was unconvention too. To the ranks of the
Meldrumites, she was a unique addition: young, bold and a bit barefaced, a misfit by gender, class and youth in being a woman who worked outside the home at a time it still in some circles engendered pity and contempt. Her manners were modern … It was thought of her that she had rather much to say for one so young … And for all their self-conscious épatage, the Meldrumites observed social conventions reflecting their leeriness of modernism. Women were fetchers, carriers and cleaners, and certainly not co-creators.
Mollie refused to accept such unnatural restraint. At the time of her death, she was writing a novel of which only the title, Monsters Not Men, remains. Her final act before walking home on the night of her death was to telephone Colahan to discuss the possibility of her giving up teaching in favour of pursuing a career in journalism. (Colahan was against the idea.) In the context of her refusal to comply, some of the contemporary responses to Mollie’s murder are all too familiar: that in seeking independence, she was also courting risk. When he heard of her violent death, Percy Leason is reported to have said, ‘How completely in character.’ And from Lena Skipper’s diaries – recovered years after the event from a rubbish heap at Montsalvat – there is a clear sense that ‘Mollie’s sauciness … was bound to drive a man to violence.’
At the heart of Haigh’s approach to Mollie Dean is a consideration of the ways in which, via narrative, we seek to make sense of a violent and apparently random act. In composing his narrative, he is, therefore, also concerned that it should tell ‘its own story’, which in the case of Mollie’s life – being ‘[t]oo brief to leave deep traces’ – leads ‘one unavoidably into … realms of [well-researched] conjecture’. Such conjecture pits itself against the suspect ‘closure’ of a ‘solved’ murder. In so doing, A Scandal in Bohemia focuses upon Mollie – in ‘the fullness of living’ – rather than restraining her story to the circumstances of a violent death. g
Anna MacDonald is a Melbourne bookseller and critic.
The outstanding digital skills of Flinders University and its partner CDW Studios Adelaide saw them crowned the world’s #1 Best Digital Illustration School in this year’s prestigious global Rookies rankings. The competition attracted 3,000 entries from more than 600 schools in 42 countries. For Flinders and CDW to be named the standout performer in the Best Creative Media and Entertainment Schools in the World 2017 Global Rankings Report is no small feat, but one we’ve worked hard to achieve.
As a national leader in creative arts and media, we’ve long inspired a legacy of artistic excellence. World #1 is further confirmation of Flinders University’s commitment to collaborative learning as we inspire one another to realise our ambitions and Go Beyond.
flinders.edu.au/creative-arts
Giddy riddle
Julia Kindt
MYTHOS
by Stephen Fry
Michael Joseph
$32.99 pb, 430 pp, 9780718188740
The ancient Greek gods were a rowdy bunch. Adultery, theft, blackmail, and lies are all on the record, as are the usual confrontations between siblings, ranging from harmless banter all the way to aggravated assault – and worse. In short: rather than paragons of exemplary behaviour, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and Aphrodite were quintessentially human. Like us, they loved, hated, and envied one another; like us, they felt intense affection, jealousy, and pride. The Greek gods and goddesses never aspired to lead by example. Rather, they outdid humans by getting away with murder.
Myth (ancient Greek mythos) is the body of stories that circulated in ancient Greece and Rome telling about these gods, their origins, genealogies, and relationships to one another and to the humans in the world. Despite the amusing (and often disturbing) content matter, the historical and cultural significance of myths cannot be overestimated. Not only do they provide a unique access to the world view of the ancient Greeks and Romans, they also constitute part of the classical legacy, inspiring art, literature, and film ever since.
Stephen Fry’s Mythos offers a fresh retelling of the old stories. His book takes the reader on a wild ride from
primordial chaos and the creation of the cosmos to the full-blown Greek pantheon in all its glory. Along the way, we encounter Zeus, with his numerous extramarital affairs, as well as his wife Hera’s reactions. We come across Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humans, and Pandora with her infamous box. Fry guides us on this tour de force in his signature style, familiar from his many previous fiction and nonfiction books, with great virtuosity – and a good dose of British humour.
Fry’s storytelling is witty, vivid, and full of irony. It is especially in direct dialogue that the old gods come to life. Take the following exchange between the primordial deities Tartarus and Gaia:
‘Gaia, you’ve put on weight.’
‘You look a mess, Tartarus.’
‘What the hell do you want down here?’
‘Shut up for once and I’ll tell you …’
While this may be taking liberties with the ancient sources, it also enhances the spark and liveliness of the divine characters.
Greek myth can be a pretty messy affair. In the ancient world, there were competing strands of one and the same story – some in direct contradiction to each other – spread over different authors and genres, frequently with no particularly authoritative core. It is Fry’s signal achievement to have distilled a complex and potentially confusing body of evidence into a grand but accessible whole, with a coherent storyline.
What gets a bit lost, however, is the social, political, cultural, and religious function of the original stories. In the ancient world, myth was told and retold in different situations and for different purposes. Some explained the origins of certain institutions; others articulated contemporary problems and questions by displacing them into a timeless past. Even though Fry acknowledges this dimension, his retelling of the stories is largely free of such specific functions, ancient or modern.
The enduring relevance of the ancient Greek myths emerges in other ways. The book is full of references to modern culture both high and low: allusions to Shakespeare stand in juxta-
position to Monty Python. The sudden explosion of life in the cosmos after the gigantomachy is likened to exponential growth in computing capacity. With such references, the reader is constantly drawn into the story, asked to compare, to judge, and to take a stance, to draw multiple lines between seemingly unrelated situations. All this makes for a consistently good read. It also encourages us to think about how the old stories still speak to us today, what they offer in terms of timeless reflection on things human and divine.
The question brings us right to the core of human existence. As Fry states halfway through, ‘[W]hat we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and godshaped, not pure and mathematical.’ In short: myth is about the mysteries that make up human life just as much today as they did back then. Myth allows us, if not to solve these mysteries, at least to visualise them.
The book ends with a short afterword and useful briefs about the nature of ancient myth, Greek culture and society, and the ancient and modern sources used in the book. It is illustrated with several maps and images of ancient artefacts and neoclassical representations of the classical stories. Perhaps inevitably, the expert might detect a few inaccuracies and shortcuts, or take issue with the presentation here and there; but in the end this does not really matter. Overall this book is remarkably well researched. Moreover, the Greek myths have always been around to be told and retold with the ultimate purpose of having them speak to the present. Fry’s book does this skilfully, and in an informed, lighthearted way. Mythos ensures that these important tales live on to be appreciated for what they are: gripping, funny, and extremely versatile stories that tell us much about the ancient Greeks – and ourselves. g
Julia Kindt is Director, Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia, University of Sydney. ❖
We Three Hundred by Lucas Grainger-Brown
Isigned away ten years of my life at high school. Three hundred or so teenagers did likewise around the country; from Sydney and Melbourne to the wind-rustle quiet of burnt umber townships. We had similar reasons – wanting to be heroes and leaders, chasing self-respect, escaping loose ends, following Simpson and his donkey.
After graduation we cut our hair to regulation length, checked off items on a list in a thick wad of mailed instructions. We packed our luggage, teenage surfeit shrunk to military limits. Stiff in two-piece suits and shiny new leathers, family members farewelled, we converged on Canberra.
Canberra from above, in the throes of summer: a slice of suburbia deserted amid the pivot of a tumbleweed dust bowl; kindling grass chequered with vacant car parks; dark green mountains at the edge of the plateau. It was almost deserted. The politicians had gone home; locals had fled to the coast. The bushfire season consumed the headlines at a newspaper stand by the luggage carousel.
Buses with tinted glass awaited us. In a strange quiet, cocooned by the thrumming air-conditioning, we endured an anxious trip along the highway. Halfway up a gradual rise overlooking dry scrubland dotted with brick whitewash, our convoy turned through insigniacrusted walls. Into a strange city we burrowed, among Brutalist buildings stacked on the concave hillside like a Brazilian favela. Strangers began shouting at us. I caught the eye of another passenger and we shared a moment
of sangfroid. We had arrived at the Australian Defence Force Academy.
ADFA is a degree factory for commissioned officers, a feeder institution for the three branches of the Australian Defence Force – Army, Air Force, Navy. In the ADF, commissioned officers are appointed to lead the noncommissioned soldiers of Her Majesty’s dependency. The promise of status and a three-year delay in earning it while studying at ADFA is a major selling point for young Australians who are thinking, but perhaps a little chary, of enlisting. Not that many people are aware of this product catalogue and sales pitch. You have to attend the right high school career fairs or browse certain webpages to hear the carefully modulated call.
To the public, ADFA remains a well-kept secret, hidden in a sleepy hollow beneath Mount Pleasant on the outskirts of residential Canberra. It presents as a genteel private school, nurtures an image of youthful potential, national service, hygienic self-improvement, and sleek patriotism. This mixture appeals to some middle-class school-leavers and their parents.
In my day, the marketing tools were computer giveaways, uniformed salespeople, and glossy pamphlets. These were works of art: young silhouetted faces in serious attitudes beneath the slant of a slouch hat inlaid with the bayonet rays of the Rising Sun. Amphetamine for the respectably red-blooded. I still have my pamphlet. Sometimes I gaze at the monastic tableau and yearn to join up all over again.
We three hundred were sold a reassuring world
of black and white. A tough challenge, a good cause. Rectitude. Purpose. Guaranteed positions in the upper echelons of Australia’s doughtiest patriarchy. Group of Eight degrees in our kit. Who Dares Wins. Duty First. Where Right and Glory Lead, etc., etc.
Even before our arrival, some of the ambiguities and paradoxes awaiting us became evident. On the flight I met one of few people who fitted the hallowed Australian Army officer mould that I had volunteered to fill. This man – let us call him John – inspired fear through his mere physical presence, his speech and gestures fraught with hair-trigger preludes to rage. John’s leonine eyes fixed on me over Qantas cheese and crackers. It was plain at a glance that he wouldn’t fit in many places outside the military. Later, out on the town, I often found him in the middle of a brawl, shirtless, stammering, drunk.
Wittgenstein wrote, ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’ I intuited as such with John. On the plane we compared fangs, growling testosteronic stories that were – at least in my case – fables. My fictions seemed to persuade John. He didn’t make me for an impostor, which is what I was; didn’t strangle me with the airsickness bag.
From then on, full-frontal lion-baiting became my approach to military life. It proved a successful behavioural course. This mentality gradually transformed me, swelled my body, shortened my hair, scarred my arms, broke my teeth. Metamorphosed me, in short, into a simulacrum of John.
geants drove us to replace the comportments of our former selves. They worked on the body and the mind concomitantly. It was a process of carefully timetabled adaptation.
We’re not here to fuck spiders. That was the chivvying catchphrase with which they ratcheted up the pressure. We heard it so often we internalised the concept. Repeated it to one another, laughing less at the inane imagery as the stakes grew larger. WE’RE NOT HERE TO FUCK SPIDERS. Chuckle-chuckle. Faltering at the barbed wire: OPERE CITATO, smoke grenade, overhead machinegun burst. Shit-shit-shit. They had virtuoso ways of speeding us along. Off the bus, into ranks, into camouflage, into dormitories – ‘the lines’ – into cleaning, into regulations, onto the parade ground. Onwards, outwards, sidewards: part of a grand ancient folkway designed to hurtle us towards our new regimented selves as regularised automatons that had no time to fuck spiders.
John was ahead of the curve. He already fitted the blueprint. Bookish types like me were meant to achieve what John was by submitting to the trivial ordering and self-polishing that characterises life in the Academy. Meanwhile, John and his ilk waited listlessly in the wings, ready for their chance to go to war.
On arrival at ADFA we were sectioned off from the rest of the Academy and drilled dawn to dusk. Ironing clothes. Folding bed corners. Marching. Running. Standing. Shaving. Shooting. Likewise, personal finances, communal hygiene, military history, proper decorum, correct push-up execution. The ser-
Sergeants tweak the base instincts underlying cooperation. Climb the hill, and then we’ll rest. Before you know it, a mountain range is fading over your shoulder into the nacreous horizon. They had me vexed about everything: shaving and toilet cleaning and riflerange manslaughter. I made lists of things to practise in my own time, but it was no use. There was no time; time no longer existed.
Most nights I stayed awake until early morning, painstakingly ironing a crumpled shirt by the light of the moon. Terrified the sergeants would see my light on. They lurked outside in the bushes, pelting lit windows with rocks and then rousing us all to the breezeway in our pyjamas to be screamed at. When my creases seemed presentable, I would lie on the floor – the sheets took too long to straighten otherwise – and resist sleep so I could savour a few moments of peace and silence.
Deprived of thinking time, life became a muddled conveyor belt of mechanical actions. The wider arc of days, weeks – what felt like months – collapsed into endless cycles of activity. Doubt and reflection, the little deaths of obedience, vanished from our lives. Not lives any longer, but agglomerations of happenings. To deal
Officer Cadet Grainger-Brown with his mother at ADFA, 2011
with the endless stream of events, we banded together – for the most part. There were exceptions: those unable to chime with the group, low-hanging fruit ripe for bastardry. We abandoned the exceptions outside our protective ranks. They served as bait for the sergeants.
A man I will call Dave was an enormous beast with a stoic disposition. His manner was steady but not lugubrious, reserved but not unpleasant. Dave simply didn’t care what people thought of him or did to him. He was destined to fail. The key to survival as a recruit is amour propre. Nothing but collective norms and individual egos get us through basic training.
though; repressed artists and would-be messiahs on heat for authority. Let’s call one of them Jack. As in Jack Merridew from The Lord of the Flies before he gets a taste for hunting.
We three hundred were sold a reassuring world of black and white
We learned to love Dave. We laughed at him behind frozen expressions on the parade ground as he copped flak. When he tried to march, his body flailed around; when he halted, he tripped over. The war-bitten vultures circled him, shrieking, jangling his nerves, hovering an inch from the end of his nose. He was our Gomer Pyle. But we learned to hate Dave when his punishments affected us. Then he was our Guy Fawkes.
I began to like Dave again when I found out how little he cared and how free that made him. He wore heavy metal T-shirts under his uniform, kept a bottle of scotch in his gun safe, and spent Saturday nights in clubs searching for a fight. Dave was too much himself, whatever that was, to be co-opted. We neophytes had a lot of growing up to do, but Dave was the Army’s Peter Pan. Eventually, he gave up pretending to care and discharged himself.
There were a few Daves among us, blown serendipitously into recruitment off the streets. Most dropped out after six months. Those of us who stayed were mostly jumpers, my gerund for the upwardly mobile via the Defence Forces. There were a lot of us at ADFA.
The Academy, which opened in 1986, is specifically designed to capture the career calculator. It must have been hard to recruit after Vietnam, harder still when Gorbachev came to power. No great enemies left to impel patriots into service. Inducements were needed. A free degree; a breather between high school and deployment; the illusion that martial skills translate to the ordinary economy. Perhaps the War on Terror provided a brief respite, something to stir the bourgeois classes that produce officers. But then came the predictable consequences of Middle Eastern adventurism; running battles in arid nations accomplished at killing invaders; WMDs and oil and a fashionable distaste for the US war machine. Suffice to say, the subtext of my enlistment was not ask not what your country can do for you but rather what’s in it for me?
Most of us grasshoppers were fairly prosaic in our ambitions. Five or ten years, a promotion, one or two overseas deployments, discharge into business or politics or academia. There were a few jumped-up jumpers,
Jack was fairly tall with narrow shoulders, full-moon eyes, and a shark-fin nose. He hailed from a tony high school about which he often reminisced. Back there he’d allegedly been somebody. In Basic Training we were scum and shit out of luck. Which was the whole point. Trudging, footsore, yelled at, head sore. Forget your senior school year, prom date, and grade point average; never forget you ain’t nothing special. Sergeant shits better soldiers than you.
Jack knew he was special though. Splendour was ingrained in his marrow. Only on Day One would he stand in brief solidarity with the rest of us mugs, mostly due to shock. Goldfish mouthing, flabbergasted, wrestling the preservative urge to sprint back to the bus, motor to the airport, leap on the first flight. On Day Two, Jack made his first move.
Late in the evening, one of the sergeants called us to a room in the lines. He summoned us by looming in the stairwell and bellowing until we compacted, thirty strong, nose to armpit and in various states of undress, around one of the crappy ten-dollar ironing boards the quartermaster’s store had issued us earlier that day. Growling at us, Sergeant demonstrated, with impeccable strokes, the precise ironing tricks needed to correctly present every item in our seven-piece uniform wardrobe.
After this, Jack took control. He summoned us to the common room and laid out his plan to reduce the friction of our induction. We would spend the night preparing the lines to the sergeant’s impossibly high inspection standards. Just this once, though. Our verve, our esprit de corps, our virile can-do, would dumbfound the sergeants. They would realise the calibre of their pupils. We leapt at the hope he was offering.
Next morning the sergeants stood blinking in the glare of a thousand brass implements refracting through a thousand varnished windows and spit-shined whitewash walls. In our impeccable uniforms, we ran laps around the Academy until we puked. One does not pre-empt Basic Training. Nor does one react. One merely clings on as the waves of bile and misery wash unendingly over.
Jack tried other gambits. He had to. For him control was essential. He was anatomically incapable of surrendering or allowing the Academy to take over. For the next few weeks we cut his thrashing legs from underneath him – small deeds, in every sense. Jack’s esteem never recovered. He retreated to sardonicism, detachment, and affectation. Many ruinous months later he spat out his masticated pride and left.
In retrospect, those first inflexible weeks were the easy part. Not physically or emotionally. We were always
tired. Sometimes we cried about petty things. A sock went missing; a tile would never get spotless. Nevertheless, the rigour had a purifying clarity that made every humiliation bearable.
The ADFA we endured in Basic Training was the packaged one – the face under a slouch hat bit. Easing into your imagined role in a national mythology. That marketed ADFA – dramatised in the ABC documentary The Academy, which we had all watched before enlisting – lasted six weeks. Then we were ready to join the main body of cadets. Things went downhill from there.
Friends and family flew to Canberra to witness our triumphant emergence from Basic Training. They scarcely recognised us in parade-ground coffle. We were granted a weekend’s leave to reassure them. My assurances, at least, were a performance. By Sunday I was happy to farewell my parents and my little brother. I love them but they had reinscribed my old self. And it was an old self, the contour of an eighteen-year-old superseded at a rate of three years per week.
After Basic Training we were released from our chrysalids, partially gestated. Mean, assured, anaclitic – and suddenly directionless. For the following three years we reverted back to ordinary human privileges and had to navigate our own way between formative, still adolescent, capabilities and the shadow of the Aussie Digger we’d been told, ad nauseum, we would never be worthy to lead.
No sooner had we farewelled our relations than a procession of cars with P plates revved their way through the gates of ADFA. Overnight, ascetic restrictions yielded to anything goes. Autos, bikes, rock climbing cordalettes, fireworks, Xboxes – anything legal that we wanted and could cram into our garrets and car park spaces, we could have. One cadet spent his accumulated pay on a massive television that covered his window. He spent most of his free time obscured behind an alpine range of DVDs. The Berlin Wall had come down. Ours was the liberation of the credit card.
The fracturing of our platoon group-think into disparate identities culminated as a rabid build-up of appurtenances. I ordered a bushel of Penguin books, Ray Bans, and a bar fridge – a smidgen of individuality to help build my personal brand among a sea three hundred bodies wide. Micro-cults emerged. Motor heads, gym rats, hard cases. Material stereotypes pasted over our common military denominators. For some, blue jeans and guitars from which a tune was never coaxed became de rigueur.
Casual roll-calls began to look like John Wayne meets Mad Max meets Ned Kelly conventions. Black cut-off T-shirts and flannel shirts and Akubras sprung up like fungal growths on clothes lines. Idiots went to bars and picked fights with ‘civilians’ - a long-standing tradition, passed down by the second and third years. One fixture of Canberra nightlife is the spiritual turf war between ADFA and the Australian National University. Our cohort took to the custom with joie de vivre.
Next weekend the new chrome motorcade, stuffed
with beer-loaded cadets, rumbled out the gates. I remained in the lines with our platoon’s designated Duty Officer. He was a smarter version of Jack. Smart Jack and I had a tentative rapport. I would help him perform his role as Duty Officer and vice versa. My responsibility that night was to assist him in corralling his troops come our ten o’clock curfew – a Sisyphean task. We watched Band of Brothers until nine-thirty, then we began working the phones. Based on garbled replies, we mapped out a recovery operation and dispatched taxis. Balanced above Jack’s perspiring head was a network of temporary Duty Officers responsible for Squadron, Year, and, finally, Academy roll-checks. A single AWOL pleb could run the administrative gamut to the Commandant’s ears. Then our entire platoon would be on remedial drill until the End Times. Smart Jack began talking to himself, a habit of his at times of stress. Though comical, it made sense; I found myself doing the same in like situations.
Smart Jack couldn’t reason with his bushwhacked peers. C’mon, guys, do it for me, I’m your buddy. That was a Duty Officer’s only recourse; in reality we were all powerless. Smart Jack couldn’t appeal to some god or higher institution. His only ecclesiastical commitment was vested in the same organisation in which he was powerless. He couldn’t admit, even to me, the palpitating fear that this Kafkaesque situation induced. Cadets never confess their frailties. All Smart Jack had by way of a sympathetic audience was Smart Jack. That debauched night he encapsulated the illogical lives we lived beneath our martial and maverick exteriors.
I remember vividly the last time I saw Smart Jack, days before my discharge. After a stint in hospital I was deposited in his section while they were ‘out field’ conducting manoeuvres in the bush. This field exercise was a survival course, and Smart Jack had been without proper food, sleep, and water for about three days. Muttering a low chorale of self-encouragement, he was listing like a zombie, unresponsive except for trained reflexes. It took three salutations for him to recognise me. I tried to sneak him some food but he wouldn’t take it. They couldn’t, they shouldn’t, and they weren’t allowed. That’s what he said. Those were his orders. Only one ration pack per person, per issue: no cheat snacks from the outside world. Smart Jack is still in the Army.
I distrusted Smart Jack, yet liked him. We were birds of a feather, with two exceptions. He wanted to be an Army officer more than I did. More importantly, he never latched onto an external reference point like I did. Inside the whitewash walls we lived like members of the priesthood, cloistered from the external world. Somehow, by pure chance, the world found me, but not Smart Jack.
My ADFA years were a grinding tug-of-war played out on quicksand. Whenever I found my footing, the terrain would shift beneath me. The pendulum swung witlessly between bohemian excesses and soldierly bonhomie. We were typical teenagers, troupers
in the Stanford Experiment, disciples to total war. The central theme was our trying to build, from misbegotten pieces, a façade worthy of respect and worthy of leading heroes; painstakingly finding a self amid a massive and regularised machine only to misplace that gossamer sensibility.
Most of the day the cadet body was dismembered, wandering across campus to classes. We did a few hour blocks of military training every other day. In the main, we were university students in uniform. Worse, we were teenagers with disposable income, bed and board. Occasionally, we handled heavy weapons between tutorials, which reinforced our delusional concept of soldiering. Call of Duty boomed from every building: Army types ‘simulating combat’ in twelve-hour, somnambular stints. Military curios, books on tactics, protein powders, and pre-workout formulas were massed in cupboards. I stole milk jugs from the mess fridge every other day. At night I read von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, sipping PURA from a frosty glass.
Kirk, an exchange cadet, was king of our frenetic gym culture. He and his posse competed in bodybuilding competitions. Developing muscle was a sign of possession, control, will power, self-worth, for we that had surrendered our autonomy. The police busted several steroid rings across the armed services. Kirk went home under a cloud. His best mate became more extreme in his solitary pursuit. Speedwalking laps around the oval at four in the morning, melting the last slivers of adipose from his abs. Soon after, he quit to start a weightlifting club.
displaced fear of the next tribulation. Past triumphs and future insecurities amplified our eccentric perversions. I shaved my head and bought a bike, crashed the bike and bought a car. The crash was potentially fatal: still accelerating out of animal fright, I was heading for a massive eucalypt. A ditch and gravity intervened and I somehow ended up with mere bruising and a moonboot on my left foot. The accident happened over summer. When I began my second year, I turned up at our next ‘battle block’ in full combat gear and a moonboot. We were deployed to rural Victoria at the height of the bushfire season. Listening in on the section radio for news of inferno fronts while we patrolled vast tracts of wilderness in pursuit of non-existent objectives, sweeping creek beds and killing fields with rapid fire from our blank-loaded rifles.
The author inspects his equipment at RMC, 2012
Besides voluntary dropouts, some devotees of workouts or parties or PCs or fast machines made themselves useless at routine fitness tests. Or, worse still, incapable of passing what was our true test, the battle blocks.
The gauntlet of each ADFA year occurred between semesters. Then we cadets were signed over to our parent services to conduct three or four weeks’ training, during which our judiciously wrought or lifestyle-blunted mettle was tested. There were formal goals and learning objectives. But the real threat was reputational.
If we survived the pitfalls of each block – successfully avoided shitting ourselves in gas chambers, contracting a crotch infection on a bush march, attacking the wrong hill during manoeuvres – we kicked back once more, mission accomplished, to our easy pastimes and
I completed that rotation and won extra kudos for taking part in a moonboot. I returned to ADFA on a high, lethal stupidity gainfully alchemised. I had cracked the riddle of ADFA. The Academy is a degree factory and a counterfeit factory. Image is its currency. Appearance and symbolism are the only ways to resolve, or at least delay, the contradictions of life behind the whitewash walls. The psychology of an ADFA cadet is inseparable from the nature of the Australian Defence Force. The ADF remains a thoroughly modern structure quite unsuited to the current epoch. ADFA’s role in the aged apparatus is that of crucible, in which the pluralistic individuals of a free and reasonably equal society are indoctrinated with the orthodoxy required to send soldiers over the top, as in 1915. But this era is, in every imaginable way, incompatible with trench warfare. War
nowadays is televised; body bags are political kryptonite. Add to that a complex globalised-capitalist matrix that warps narrow alliances into transnational economies. Add to that an overweening war fighting asymmetry between the rich and the poor that renders terrorism so common. On our side of the battlefield, drones and algorithms have replaced cunning and tactics. Tactical nukes and government hackers have superordinated a soldier’s skill and endurance.
Despite this, the West remains shackled to the thinking that a nation is not a nation without a sizeable conventional defence force.
The Academy is a degree factory and a counterfeit factory. Image is its currency
‘Conventional’, in this context, means prepared for early twentieth-century patterns of carnage: the world wars and superpower rivalry. Australia is no exception. We churn out the officers of yore to staff the tank divisions of yesteryear. We cadets read Rommel as though our mastery of manoeuvre warfare could make an iota of difference in a nuclear-armed world.
Our major battles today are with failing social systems. Mass armies meant for yesterday’s geopolitics. Duopolistic political parties that serve vested powers. Sclerotic welfare states that struggle to deliver functional services. Tidal waves of technology that erode a clear sense of national identity a million times more effectively than a few boats drifting across the Pacific.
As a collective, the industrialised world is fumbling with twenty-first-century challenges of global warming and irregular migration. Exponential population growth and the buckling of an exhausted planet dictate our crises.
We cadets reflected these ambiguous trends in our approach to the military vocation. My motivations were my prospects, my family, and the good I thought the military might do in emergencies, in peacekeeping. For my generation, questions of country and duty rarely enter into day-to-day belief systems, despite vague shibboleths and the odd Southern Cross tattoo impulsively selected from a tattoo artist’s brochure. My dilemma, as a cadet, was how patriotism should motivate me. How could historic lessons make my duty easier? I treated legacy like a resource. I didn’t believe. There was no stimulus to believe: I was born in a country untroubled by obvious threats. My generation has yet to face anything like the Depression, the Evil Hun, the Conquering Jap, the Evil Empire. Related concepts of strong nationhood, shared monoculture, and existential unity are only accessible to me piecemeal.
By contrast, Dmitri had a tangible and systemic commitment to his values. He was clumsy, serene, gangly, acne-scarred, desperately kind, and embarrassingly religious. Faith gave Dmitri fortitude. Which was just as well, because it placed him in a corner among a platoon full of atheists and assholes. When the sergeants stared Dmitri down, he genuflected. When some yokel
buttonholed his metaphysics, he elucidated. Dmitri was too virtuous for the postmodern generation and our syncretic take on the military. Ambivalence was our norm; covering it up our aim. The end justifies the means. That was how we dealt with an inflexible martial organisation as twenty-first-century teenagers. Dmitri could see the difference between his deep faith and our shallow attachment to civic pride and military iconography. He became disillusioned with us. Finally, he packed his bag and quit.
Of the various departures, Dmitri’s had the biggest impact on me. I had learned to trust him. He even coaxed me into visiting the padre one Sunday. We made a sorry sight, Dmitri and the padre and I, in the mess. While they softpedalled scripture I sipped my coffee, wondering how a man of Jesus ends up in uniform.
The tension between the monolithic traditions we were inheriting and the mongrel culture in which we were maturing was most apparent on Anzac Day. Much has been made of the profit-soaked circus that Anzac has become. In his book ANZAC’s Long Shadow, James Brown, a former soldier, lays out an incisive argument about what that means for our country. For us, the April 25 burlesque meant confronting everything we were play-acting at being.
We awoke each Anzac Day morning to plangent gunfire. Slurping lukewarm coffee reinforced with rum. We were driven in a convoy of buses to the Australian War Memorial and stood in semi-circular ranks in front of the cenotaph, joining a thick knot of bodies already huddled against the freezing gusts hurling down Anzac Parade. My overriding memory of those days is of figures pressed close, sharing warmth against scorching cold. A formless mass shoulder-to-shoulder with eyes shut tight as the bugle calls. Shiveringly trying to share the same imaginary: Simpson and his donkey, et al.
In my third year I was part of the catafalque guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on that most hallowed of days. I saw the sun rising over Parliament, framed by bronze sheets filled with names of the dead. Arrayed beneath the dawn, the respectful faces of the audience, pale ovals in the wavering gloom. I faced them, resplendent in full dress uniform, gleaming bayonet, superlative creases many hours in the making. I felt like a complete fraud. How otherworldly strange to stand at one’s national memorial, in uniform, and feel that way. Apart from drill commands I remained stock-still. Blank-slate. Metronomic. The absurdity didn’t trouble me. The absurdity was everyday. For twenty-nine months I had been immersed in incongruity, performance, imagery, farce. My imago of John had been nurtured in such amniotic fluid. I was inured to yen and melancholy.
Now I see my mortification as natural before the cultural ideograms we cadets coveted and literalised. No one measures up to the stories we spin about our war heroes. It is impossible to identify with them. The birth-of-a-nation mythopoeia reifies them beyond human recognition.
In truth, our supermen were just people doing what they had to, what people in extremis must do. We should remember them. Absolutely. But the weight of an entire national sense of self overwhelms them – Weary Dunlop and the Victoria Crosses, Simpson and Monash, and all the rest we can’t name because they are just one sedulous archetype: the Plucky Larrikin Warrior, the Aussie Digger. Since Gallipoli we haven’t updated our definition of heroism or public service beyond that of clichéd bravery and sacrifice for country – valiant males tested by the execrable violence of industrial war.
Where are the contemporary Australian parables being written? Not in verminous holes on the outskirts of Amiens. Not in the hellacious mud of Papua. At least not with guns and grenades as styluses. Contemporary Australia will never return to the trenches of last century. Nonetheless, our repertoire of civic virtues is still calibrated according to those bloodsheds. Without new vistas, ADFA’s cadets and Australia’s youth can only be pretenders to foundational legends.
Eight months after my turn as catafalque guard, I marched out of the ADFA dreamscape and into the stark embrace of the Army’s Royal Military College. RMC – cloaked in chill mist, haunted by the mighty dead – is a lonely set of Elizabethan homesteads adjacent to ADFA, a working farm commandeered early in the twentieth century for the training of gentlemen killers. Here the hardcore Army tuition began, joined by an entirely other ensemble.
When I left ADFA I tried to wring some pathos from the milestone. I drove my car to the top of Mount Pleasant, the rise separating ADFA and RMC. From the lookout, I pondered the white brickwork arena. Fog was rising from the parade grounds. The walkways were empty, ant-like figures packed their vehicles. Interminable grass fields surrounded the installation, undulated by wind. I still see ADFA as it appeared then: a weathered headland amid a slumbering sea.
Eventually, the Academy will give way to catalysed whitecaps. Numerous attempts have been made to shut the place down. Some in the services view it as a liability, redundant, a waste of resources. There are periodic sex scandals; too few make headlines. The Skype affair of 2011 did; so too, the rape of a female cadet in 2014. Tip: iceberg. There have been frequent reviews of the ADF’s culture of harassment. Public opinion and/or bureaucratic fusillades will eventually put an end to the ADFA experiment.
Until then, bleak irony thrives at the Academy. It presents itself as a bastion of ethical cultivation. Its stated purpose is the doctrinaire training of officers
who will command combat-ready troops. The nature of combat has changed. So has the syntax of command. The Australian milieu from which officers are drawn continues to change and evolve. The ADFA doctrine persists, oblivious to its own self-satire.
Somewhere between the vaulting Academy motto – To Lead, To Excel – and its structural penchant for scandal, life at ADFA fades into grey. The same grey wash that bleeds out of holding too tightly to the icons of a national imaginary long since outmoded. And so we three hundred cadets, annually inducted, can at least take comfort that our three-year purgatory likewise plays out across the country in macrocosm. g
Lucas Grainger-Brown joined the Australian Defence Force as a high school student. Subsequently he worked as a management consultant. He is a researcher, tutor, and doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne. Philosophy and politics are his enduring passions. He has published commentary, essays, and fiction across numerous media. He first wrote for ABR in 2016.
The Calibre Essay Prize, created in 2007, was originally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its Cultural Fund). Calibre is now fully funded by Australian Book Review, with generous support from ABR Patron and Chair, Mr Colin Golvan QC, and from the other ABR Patrons.
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A must-read for sceptics, the curious, the lapsed, the devout, the believer, and non-believer.
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A CULTURAL HISTORY MEREDITH LAKE
the opening words about Bra Boy tattoos, this book had me gripped. It breathes colour, poetry and life into our understanding of the Bible in Australia.” – Julia Baird
‘Cocooned
in his own silence’
Rodney Hall’s outstanding return to fiction
Brian Matthews
A STOLEN SEASON
by Rodney Hall
Picador, $29.99 pb, 342 pp, 9781760555443
‘We are the inheritors of a world we need to remake for ourselves.’
Rodney Hall
The Island in the Mind (1996)
Of the now twelve novels that make up Rodney Hall’s distinguished prose fiction –ranging from The Ship on the Coin (1972) to this year’s A Stolen Season – it is arguably in the latter that the task of remaking is most explicitly and adventurously undertaken, even literally in the case of Adam Griffiths. As an Australian soldier fighting with the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, Adam has been shockingly wounded: he is ‘helpless and isolated’. ‘Cocooned in his own silence’. Now, with his young wife, Bridget, who, in edge-of-panic reflection, muses ‘she ought never to have married him in the first place’, Adam, smashed, burnt, ‘ought to have died’, navigates the pain-racked hours, tortured step by step, with the robotic help of his exoskeleton, ‘the Contraption’. Like Viktor Frankenstein, Bridget recognises that she is in thrall to a monster: ‘He is her monstrosity, hers and hers alone.’
While Adam and Bridget struggle with visions of a terrifying future –‘it isn’t just his life in ruins … So, of course, she’s angry’ – Marianna Gluck, into whose presence we are now unceremoniously conducted, is conscious, despite her jungle isolation, ‘that some day she will be forced to confront the past’. Having fled to ‘a country so remote she has never heard of it’ she feels safe. It’s not clear yet what she feels safe from, though the reader searching for continuity can find teasing shocks of recognition in Marianna’s self-knowledge that ‘she is the kind of monster who must learn step by step – and always painfully
– how to behave in the age of humans’, and in her surroundings, the ‘baroque church tower’ she sees thrusting up nearby, reminiscent of that ‘mudbrick tower … spiralling up’ near the military compound where ‘a surprise explosion leaves two men dead and one, an Australian, critically injured’. The Australian is Adam Griffiths, and so we are briefly taken back to the incident that destroys his body and to the first sentence of the story. ‘A mudbrick tower stands in ancient Samarra …’
Adam and Bridget’s agony is interleaved – or, not to put too fine a point on it, interrupted – first by Marianna’s jungle escape and, perhaps most bizarre, confronting, and puzzling of all, the affairs of John Philip Hardingham, who, ‘too preoccupied with the meaninglessness of existence, too filled with doubts and regrets, too shy to make new friends and, in the end, too comfortable with his capitulation’, discovers at age sixty-eight that his parents’ conviction that ‘he would one day be someone special’ may be coming true. What will ensure his distinction is the ‘curious legacy’ from an eccentric, childless greatgreat-uncle and the manner in which John Philip chooses to celebrate it. To this celebration – out of place and unexpected among guests more notable, genteel, and effete – comes Christian Fletcher, better known to Adam, in another time and under fire on the Iraq front, as Killer.
Our dark hut with its shattered roof stands abandoned on the black land under the empty sky. Too early for moonrise. Soon a man won’t be able to see his fucking hand in front of his fucking nose. A single vehicle drones invisibly along the road that runs in a sandy de-
pression. Now the Milky Way begins to emerge – a glittering universal lake seen upside down – as if you’ve been stood on your head. Thing is … to get a fix on east, the way to the river, and not lose it. Christian Fletcher takes the lead … Out across the infinite nowhere. Treacherous stones underfoot. The least noise a dead giveaway. ‘Halt,’ I whisper. ‘Ssh!’ We stop: Ratso, Killer, me. That lone vehicle drones, remote as an insect …
‘Where’s Ratso?’ I ask in panic. Fletcher’s ghostly voice answers, ‘The Rat’s not coming.’ The stroke of darkness heavy. While being hunted by a dangerous enemy, most dangerous is my ally, all too close and by my side. The truth knocks the wind out of me.
‘I’ll go back for him,’ I say. Fletcher says, ‘You won’t.’ I whisper, ‘That poor little bugger never stood a chance.’ He whispers, ‘That poor little bugger would have got us killed.’
As happens so often in this novel, one narrative reactivates another: a character makes a surprising return, memories, chance encounters, sudden recalled words or sentences, long forgotten voices, the unlooked for suddenly logical lineaments of certain incidents –Adam’s unusual blood group, for example, and the mysterious emergency recipient of his ‘jar of blood’ bound for ‘the third world’ – these are the triggers and engines of a network of hints, signals, chords, and lightning-like illuminations that subtly stitch together the seemingly disparate stories – Marianna’s, John Philip’s – through which are woven the strands of Adam and Bridget’s profoundly moving, doomed bid for renewal.
This is a terrific, unremittingly demanding novel that comes after an
uncharacteristic hiatus in Rodney Hall’s creative life – a fiction hiatus anyway – and it is not just tempting but necessary to note that Hall’s long-standing interest in the ways and possibilities of narrative has reached, in A Stolen Season, a daring, almost reckless, magnificent climax (eclipsing the massive narrative problem he successfully conjures with in, for example, the splendid The Day We Had Hitler Home, 2000). A Stolen Season more or less abandons explanation and offers the kind of network of glimpses, echoes, apparent juxtapositions, voices, intriguing possible connections, and credulity-testing ironies that most of us encounter and shrug through year by year, sometimes seeing and making the connections, sometimes not.
All of this is accomplished in a prose
equal to any test: the lush jungle and precipitous, mysterious heights of Marianna’s escape; the flash and blur, the mutilation of combat; the orotund ironies of John Philip’s nunc dimittis moment; Bridget’s confused guilt; and, like an always ready theme to swell into any pause or moment of indecision, the murderous pomposity of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and the duplicity of ‘weapons of mass destruction’.
In its scope and innovation, its flair and balanced intricacy, the sense it has of Hall’s successfully gathering together and, as it were, consulting a lifetime’s personal artistic provenance, A Stolen Season is outstanding and inimitable.
It is Adam who utters, in his disabled, halting way ‘from the recesses of sleep’ the phrase ‘a stolen season’, as if reading
‘The long now of grieving’
Gail Jones’s new novel Kerryn Goldsworthy
THE DEATH OF NOAH GLASS by Gail Jones
Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 316 pp, 9781925603408
Noah Glass is dead, his fully clothed body discovered floating face down in the swimming pool of his Sydney apartment block, early one morning. Born in Perth in 1946, father of two adult children, widower, Christian, art historian, and specialist in the painting of fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, Noah has just returned from a trip to Palermo. There he celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday, experienced intimations of mortality, fell precipitately in love, and agreed, for the sake of the beloved, to commit a crime. Even before the funeral, the police are in touch with Noah’s son: a valuable work of art has been stolen and Noah is implicated in its disappearance.
Everything that happens in this novel either leads up to or spins out from the moment of his death, and in the complex but skilfully managed narrative
chronology the points of view of the three main characters are followed in parallel. We learn Noah’s life story and the means by which he arrived at the moment of his death – ‘his concluded life was now a neat story running backwards’ – but we also follow his adult offspring, Martin and Evie, as they process the meaning of his death and negotiate the days and weeks and months that follow it.
Gail Jones’s new novel, her seventh, returns to a field she has explored before, particularly in Sixty Lights (2004): the power of the visual image and the complexity of its relationship with time. This idea is explored through the epiphanic moment at which Noah, at this point an ambitious but lonely young Australian in London, looks at a 500-year-old painting by Piero della Francesca and sees his future in it: ‘he found his vocation
Bridget’s thoughts about their youthful, ill-advised marriage. Bridget is not sure what he means – ‘perhaps he is thinking of football’. He is not thinking of anything in particular at that moment, having just painfully awakened and having ‘survived the night’, but all of Hall’s characters in their far-flung distantly connected ways long for a ‘season’ of independence, renewal, love, or recognition of one kind or another. In Adam’s season, his ‘body dreams of walking free: the natural balance of an evolved hunter, able to leap and pounce. He has to think his way back to the present.’ g
Brian Matthews’s Manning Clark: A life (2008) won the National Biography Award in 2010. He first wrote for ABR in 1981.
in the National Gallery. He saw at last a painting whose singular majesty moved him, and was reminded why art history was worth pursuing.’
In this painting of the Nativity, Noah sees a fully human baby Jesus, a Joseph who sits apart ‘with his foot on his knee, like a bloke looking for a thorn’, and a singing magpie on the roof of the stable: ‘The mundane and the divine, he told himself, in seamless coalition.’ This is the beginning of a theory of art and time that he continues to develop throughout his life, prompted again later by other Piero della Francesca paintings:
… the audacity of the painting would exist in imagining a man exceeding time … Might the death of a son issue in a temporal fold of some kind, so that the human and the divine were radically continuous? … It was easy to argue that
the famous panels on the Legend of the True Cross declared the loops of time – repetition, surely, must be a kind of temporal mystery – but every painting, Noah believed, worked on a variation of this principle.
The novel opens not immediately with Noah’s death, as might be expected, but rather with a story about a cross-country skier accidentally killed and buried for decades in the snow before a thaw uncovers his remains and his two sons, now in their late seventies, gaze upon the body of their forty-two-year-old father. It is an announcement of the two main themes that will run through the book: non-linear time, and fatherhood.
The novel’s domestic-realist mode balances these ideas about folds and loops of time against the linear chronology of daily life as lived in the body, with its bent towards entropy and its inescapable causality. The characters have ideas to express and a mystery to solve, but they also carry luggage, see colours, have sex, get drunk, watch old movies, go swimming in the ocean, and fondle the cat, and all of these activities are represented in the clear and loving detail of Jones’s beautiful style. But the allusions to temporality recur throughout the characters’ daily lives like a leitmotif: in the tortures of jetlag and the puzzle of time zones, in the word ‘abide’, in the time-skip of Skype, and in ‘the long now of grieving’.
interior states are convincing vehicles for information and lines of argument: educated, articulate characters for whom thought, grounded in a rich field of cultural reference, is second nature.
And, wildly unlikely as it may seem for the work of so cerebral and intellectual a novelist, there is a third genre to be considered here: the theft of a valu-
in the luggage compartment of a bus at a highway rest stop on the outskirts of Paris, of a Degas painting stolen nine years ago from a museum in Marseille. Like Jones’s novel Five Bells (2011), this book is a love letter to Sydney. One virtuoso passage describing what it feels like for Evie, a Melburnian introvert, to find herself suddenly in the harbour city is a mosaic of noisy, shiny adjectives and verbs: buzzy, dense, electric, glittered, hoot, massive, rang, savage, streaming. Here as elsewhere, in all this dense wealth of connotation, implication, and allusion, every word and phrase is carefully chosen and nothing is wasted. Jones’s hard-working style makes for a richly imagined – and imaginable – story, including the looping narratives of each character’s inner life, and the depth and detail of their conversational and emotional exchanges. At its most extreme, the language can occasionally seem overwrought and overthought, but mostly it comes across as swooningly lyrical, carrying the reader along in the wake of its beauty:
The densely layered material detail typical of domestic realism does not interfere with the fact that this is also a novel of ideas in which Jones solves the problem of exposition by creating characters whose conversations and
able artwork and the subsequent smuggling of that artwork across the world, done under extreme pressure from the Mafia, which then takes extreme steps to discourage any investigation while the reader is treated to a slow reveal, can only be described as a thriller. I never thought to find myself using the word ‘heist’ in connection with a novel by Gail Jones, but the world is full of surprises. The ending, however, is a neat subversion of the thriller genre, and anyone who finds this plot unconvincingly melodramatic might consider an item that appeared in The Guardian on 24 February 2018 describing the discovery,
WRITTEN WORD
He was unable to say how being a father moved and engaged him, how Martin and Evie, even in times of estrangement, were his centred world. No hypothetical eternities, but their actual now. And the memory of them as children, dressing, undressing, pulling garments on and off their vulnerable bodies, the incandescent light falling like seawater over their small bent backs.
Kerryn Goldsworthy is a former Editor of ABR (1986–87) and a former ABR Fellow (2012). She first wrote for the magazine in 1985.
The Nativity (1470–75) by Piero della Francesca (The National Gallery)
Vita and Royce
Ashley Hay
IN THE GARDEN OF THE FUGITIVES
by Ceridwen Dovey
Hamish Hamilton
$32.99 pb, 305 pp, 9781926428598
Iwas never brave enough to visit Pompeii, partly due to an overactive imagination that combined a sense of the ferocity of Vesuvius’s blast in 79 ce and the volcano’s ongoing muttering with thoughts of the city’s Roman residents, cauterised in the eruption: outstretched hands; a dog expiring mid-roll; a mother and her child.
The shapes that people Pompeii are not strictly bodies. They are casts made by pouring plaster into the negative space left after skin and flesh and organs decomposed inside the ash and pyroclastic muck of the explosion. They are statues – constructions, rather than artefacts. I learned this while reading Ceridwen Dovey’s rich and ambitious new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives. Pompeii anchors half of the book’s story through the character of Kitty Lushington, a vivacious archaeology student whose attention moves from the remnants of its dead world – casts and murals; all the rubble – to the ancient gardens of the place; the living, instead of the dead.
Kitty is the friend and focus – the obsession – of a rich young man called Royce. The now-elderly Royce provides one of this book’s two voices. He writes letters about Kitty and her work, her life and death, to another of his former protégées, Vita, a younger filmmaker. Vita, in turn, sends Royce missives about her own life and work; her failures, frustrations, lost love. That Kitty’s work revolves around Pompeii invites an abundance of metaphors to do with excavation and rediscovery, cataclysm and risk, death and threat. The book shimmers with layers of literary lapilli, the pumice pebbles that spew from volcanoes, entombing treasures in sites like this. At one level, it plays with the ways different generations recast and
rewrite what they imagine might have happened centuries before. At another, In the Garden of the Fugitives is a book about desire: it is impossible, Royce suggests, ‘to experience a place like Pompeii outside the prism of your own desires’. Royce and Vita speak to many different and complicated desires – betrayals as much as seductions; points of yearning, sinister duplicity, pursuit.
Pompeii sometimes feels like a feint, a single famous instant that contrasts with the complexities and nuances of Vita’s story. Vita’s childhood was an ongoing shuffle between South Africa and Australia and their two colonial histories, before university delivered her to America and, ultimately, the munificence of the fellowship that Royce funds in Kitty’s memory. As an adult, she remembers worrying whether ‘my extreme self-consciousness about my identity would block some essential human connection’. Thus, the prism of her desires allows Dovey to reflect and refract questions of race and colonisation, of intergenerational complicity and guilt. These open the way for some of the most moving passages: on creative process, on communication and connection, on the very stuff of being human.
Dovey is an extraordinary writer. The delicacy of her plot’s intersections and correspondences complements the heft and challenge of the ideas her twinned narratives explore. Even the most fleeting concepts – like ‘pronoia’ (the obverse of paranoia), or ‘collective effervescence’ – resonate.
Against such beautiful vastness, Dovey adopts the epistolary form, with all its constraints. The only information we have about her two characters and their stories comes in the letters they write to each other; more often than not, one barely remarks on the other’s. Royce and Vita know more about each other than we can ever know, and there is also the inescapable sense that neither may be quite reliable. Dovey’s literary ground shifts and heaves, unstable. If fiction is, most simply defined, something that is made up, how far might that point be pushed, and what is not permissible out on the edges of created characters and narratives and forms?
‘We can fill in each other’s gaps,’
suggests Royce early in the correspondence, ‘and somewhere between us may lie the truth of ourselves.’ Which speaks again of liquid plaster poured into a body’s void.
A crucial character, only later excavated from the site of Vita’s life, is Magdalena, a psychotherapist who works with people’s experiences of the past – those who can simply acknowledge it; those who use it to remake their present; those who use it to recast a future. This book attempts all three, which makes for a challenging and occupying whole. Even the motes of fury and hostility that flit between Vita and Royce seemed to fly off the page now and then, leaving me feeling accused, unmoored. Reading this book demanded the exploratory vigour involved in navigating J.M. Coetzee’s work. At the book’s end (about which it is impossible to speak, and without which it feels impossible to fully frame what comes before), I turned straight around and went back in again.
If I tell you that Dovey made a film about South African wine farms, like Vita, and moved back and forth between South Africa and Australia, like Vita, I don’t mean to suggest that Dovey is Vita. ‘Who’, after all, is any fictional creature? ‘Who’ is Vita, or Royce? But I liked the image of an author excavating spaces in her own world and filling them with the liquid stuff of story. Through the resulting forms, Dovey has embodied and interrogated some of the most urgent matters that can face us.
The book remains now, rattling inside me, as unsettling as the unsafe Vesuvius, Europe’s one active volcano, with its overdue threat of explosion. You really never know what’s coming next. g
Ashley Hay was the 2015 ABR Dahl Trust Fellow.
The unsaid
Gregory Day
INCREDIBLE FLORIDAS
by Stephen Orr Wakefield Press
$32.95 pb, 335 pp, 9781743055076
Despite the detailed excavatory art of the finest biographies, sometimes it takes the alchemical power of fiction to approximate the emotional geography of a single human and his or her milieu. Stephen Orr’s seventh novel, a compelling and at times distressing portrait of a twentiethcentury Australian painter and his family, is one such book. Roland Griffin’s resemblance to that of Russell Drysdale is clear from early on, not only through Orr’s descriptions of the type of creator Griffin is – a painter of ‘small towns, deserted pubs … it was all he knew’ – but also through the portrait of the artist’s troubled son (Drysdale’s only son suicided at the age of twenty-one). Drysdale’s family story obviously worked as a catalyst for Incredible Floridas but rather than chronicling that story itself, Orr employs his own creative divinations to construct a breathing and tactile fictional amalgam from its outlines and contours.
As the novel’s action opens in 1962, Roland Griffin is a nationally revered painter, an artist whose vernacular imagination has triumphed in England and whose daily routines in the studio represent the complex heart of the novel’s mise en scène For the artist’s son, Hal, his father’s fame, and perhaps most particularly the charismatic singularity
of his ongoing artistic practice, seem to have created a destabilising effect. Or perhaps it is not that simple. The nonlinear construction of the novel, as well as its intrinsic empathy, helps to keep such easy conclusions in flux. Orr’s artist, for instance, does not exhibit a stereotypically destructive or dark obsession, but rather a way of being that subtly constellates all those living around it.
Orr’s longstanding interest in family dynamics comes to the fore in Incredible Floridas as he orchestrates the cross current of energies of what is both a completely ordinary Australian family and one with a significantly contrasting element. There is a ‘great man’ in their midst, one whose gift it is to fashion an authentic yet emblematic reality out of the scrappy and often inchoate material of the primary world. What the events of the novel imply is that no matter how good-natured or balanced this artist may be his very vocation can unintentionally detonate a molten atmosphere among those closest to him. In the case of the Griffins, it is Hal who both scorches and is scorched.
But of course it could never be just Hal alone. Not in such a tight-knit family and community. In the course of the boy’s teenage years, everyone is caught in the web of his radical destructiveness: his mother, his sister, his neighbours and close family friends, all of them, through compassion and affection, trying to sort out the mysterious and inexplicable material that lies at the heart of Hal’s troubles.
The matrix of this wider family group is a compelling element of the novel. Orr’s characterisations are affecting and he works well with the mid-twentiethcentury vernacular textures of a lost Adelaide, painting a layered and sensory family picture reminiscent of George Johnston’s Melbourne or Christina Stead’s Sydney. The destructive misogyny of the time is clearly represented here too, as the emotional intelligence of Hal’s mother, Ena, is constantly dismissed as needlessly anxious by both father and son. Hal’s heartless mistreatment of women his own age has catastrophic effects.
Orr also renders the way in which the creative nuances of Griffin’s art jostle with the often monosyllabic and knock-
about attitudes around him. The novel contains a valuably unsettling record of what could be described as ‘the grammar of the unsaid’ in Australia at that time. There is a constant sense of Griffin and others extemporising their way through the more difficult terrain of their lives, hoping for the best, following ‘she’ll be right’ hunches and relying on the kind of chancy intuition the artist might call upon in his paintings. Everyone seems to mean well – except Hal perhaps – but there are large and musty shadows which no clarifying light ever reaches into, so that a sense of craftlessness pervades the characters’ repeated attempts at redirecting Hal’s plight.
One of Orr’s main achievements then is to interrogate the external textures of mid-twentieth-century Australian life – the sleep-out, the smell of a roast, the constant patina of nostalgia and sentiment – with a starkly delineated interior realism. There is one painting that the artist cannot finish, one that remains unresolved, that of a boy in a boat, the artist’s Rimbaudesque portrait of his own son. Despite the undoubted and even symbiotic emotion Griffin feels for Hal, and despite all his inklings regarding what might heal him, there remains the conundrum of the son’s very self being constantly subject to the artist–father’s all-consuming imagination. ‘This is about my son. Hal Griffin, boy, climber, jam-maker, letter-writer, little sod, miracle,’ Griffin says at one point. But ‘little sod’ comes nowhere near to naming the complexity of the wilful damage Hal inflicts, and the miracle he needs is never accomplished. In his moments of clarity, Hal knows this too. In one telling scene during a road trip into the far north, he clumsily fires a shot at a crocodile and his father comes running in fear. ‘I heard the shot,’ Roland gasps. But Hal is sceptical. In the instinctive intensity of the moment, it is impossible for him to separate his father’s concern from his artistic self-interest. ‘You couldn’t paint a corpse,’ he thinks, bitterly. It is both a transitory and indelible insight, and one which lies at the very heart of the novel. g
Gregory Day’s new novel, A Sand Archive, will be published by Picador in May 2018.
Unlovely portrait
Anwen Crawford
STICKY FINGERS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JANN WENNER AND ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE
by Joe Hagan Viking
$34.99 pb, 457 pp, 9780670078653
Sometime in 1970, an unidentified person – perhaps a disgruntled journalist or aggrieved interviewee – scrawled the words ‘Smash “Hip” Capitalism’ onto an office wall at Rolling Stone magazine. It was an incisive piece of graffiti. Rolling Stone had begun publishing in 1967, in San Francisco, at the epicentre of the counterculture, but it had already proved less than radical. As the revolutionary promises of the 1960s flamed out in violence and despair – the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the Manson murders, the Kent State shootings – Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, granted himself a new executive parking spot for his Porsche, and accepted $200,000 from the record labels CBS and Elektra in order to keep his magazine’s finances flush. ‘Well, Jann was building a corporation,’ remarked one former writer, who was sacked in 1970, alongside the majority of Rolling Stone’s early staff. ‘Love it or leave it, right?’
Rolling Stone would become not only a corporation, but an American cultural institution. It would usher in the gonzo journalism of writer Hunter S. Thompson and the celebrity portraiture of photographer Annie Leibowitz, among other famous bylines. Wenner, a man of limited critical acumen and average journalistic skill, may have only had ‘one great idea’, writes his biographer, Joe Hagan, but it was an idea with staying power. Wenner realised, sooner than just about any of his peers, that the legacy of the 1960s could be turned into a business. He used Rolling Stone in order to shape what is now the canonical version of popular music history, with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan as its Holy Trinity. Unquenchable nostalgia for the 1960s
would make Wenner spectacularly rich. It would not make him loved.
Sticky Fingers is the first authorised biography of Wenner, and it is far from flattering. Wenner has never met a friend – or an enemy – he couldn’t somehow use, and those who have suffered his betrayal speak bitterly. Dozens of soured relationships and broken promises run through the pages of Hagan’s book, and nearly everybody, from former Rolling Stone colleagues to rock stars to family members, has chosen to speak on the record. Perhaps Wenner, who has spent the better part of half a century coming out on top, believed that co-operating with Hagan, an experienced New York journalist, would ultimately be to his advantage. A firm believer in his own historical importance, Wenner has held onto copies of just about every memo and letter he’s ever drafted, and Hagan was granted access to this exhaustive personal archive. The result of that research, combined with Hagan’s interviews, is a detailed but unlovely portrait of an ambitious, needy, often conflicted man, and the gilded circles he has moved in.
‘The first child of the baby boom’, Wenner was the eldest son of parents keen to disguise their European Jewish roots (the family name was changed from Weiner) and to assimilate into an affluent, suburban, postwar California. From a young age, Wenner possessed an unassailable ego. When he took over the student newspaper at his private Los Angeles high school, he was quick to discover that he could accrue both attention and social status as a publisher. He was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement of 1964–65, and reported on those protests for NBC News. Like most of his fellow middle-class students, he avoided being drafted to fight in Vietnam (‘None of my friends died there’).
Wenner, by his own admission, ‘was not a deep musical person’ – he never saw The Beatles in concert – but he was nevertheless taken under the wing of experienced West Coast music critic and jazz fanatic Ralph Gleason, who admired the younger man’s ambition. In 1967, Wenner went to Gleason
with an idea to start a newspaper in the vein of Britain’s Melody Maker, ‘but an American one that would be different and better’, covering not just music but the whole gamut of the counterculture, including plenty of sex and drugs. Rolling Stone was born.
Hagan has a clear eye for Wenner’s essential conservatism. Despite the thin veneer of countercultural rebellion that Wenner cultivated in the pages of Rolling Stone, the magazine would court a suburban readership, and it would sell to these readers the usual mass market products: cigarettes, alcohol, and cars. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s – Rolling Stone’s most successful decades – its cover stars skewed heavily white and male (Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger endlessly). Joni Mitchell was dismissed as ‘vanillavoiced’ and Janis Joplin mocked as an ‘imperious whore’. Michael Jackson was denied a Rolling Stone cover even when 1982’s Thriller made him the biggest pop star in the world, because, according to Wenner, the magazine didn’t do ‘R&B acts’. Punk, hip hop, MTV, and the internet: Wenner considered each of these things as passing fads, and was repeatedly proved wrong.
Despite the occasional moment of pat scene-setting (‘He flicked on the television. John Lennon was dead’), Hagan’s biography is, on the whole, lively and nuanced. His subject is a difficult man, but Hagan doesn’t stoop to a hatchet job. Wenner sold his remaining fifty-one per cent ownership stake in Rolling Stone last year; the internet extinguished the magazine’s cultural clout. But Wenner remains ‘the de facto architect of rock’s cosmology’. g
Anwen Crawford is the music critic for The Monthly
Odysseus and me
by Andrea Goldsmith
Ihave always believed that, at a personal level, anything is possible, that if I desire to be a particular someone or do a particular something, I can. All my desires have been realistic: no hankerings for time travel or reinvention as a theoretical physicist, although both have enormous appeal. My desires have been possibilities: working as a volunteer in Africa, joining a choir, mountaineering, falling helplessly in love, winning the Booker. The only impediments would be lack of ability, lack of application, and/or lack of courage – all of which, given enough time, could be overcome.
Time, once as abundant as air, is now suddenly in short supply. One day everything seemed possible, and the next, my life wasn’t exactly on its knees, but neither was it leaping with anticipation.
When did it happen that all the things I planned to do became the things I will never do? I will never climb a mountain, I will never win the Booker, I will never sleep alone in the outback under a big Australian sky; even the choir and the hot love affair have gone the way of all flesh. The list of things not done, so recently sparkling with possibility, had turned to sludge. Hard not to feel a failure. Harder still not to wallow in self-blame for so much unused life.
Then my spirits lifted.
It was late November and I was travelling in Iceland. The strangeness and solitude of volcanic, snow-covered wildernesses – such beautiful and tranquil environments – made me unusually and surprisingly happy. My senses were alert, my imagination was feasting. This was better, much better. On my return I was determined to hold on to the wonder and aliveness I’d felt while away; I would, I decided like so many returning travellers, be a tourist at home. But it didn’t work. Something about the comforts and familiarity of home slowed me down and dulled the questioning mind. I was lulled, stilled, out of focus. I was without expectations; all my yearnings had gone quiet.
When I mentioned this to people my own age, they would nod knowingly: what I was experiencing, they said, was a fact of advancing years. But how could I be on the final slope, inexorably sliding down to the end when just days before I’d been hiking over iced lakes towards unknown destinations and clinging to cliffs in furious winds and flying snow? Age alone could not explain what was happening to me. It was in this gloomy and brooding mood that I hap-
pened upon a review of An Odyssey: A father, a son, and an epic (William Collins, 2017) by the American classicist, translator, and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn. I have enjoyed Mendelsohn’s essays in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Without further thought, I bought myself a copy.
There have been several times in my life when the right book for the right time has simply presented itself. I never expect it, I never will it, it is an inexplicable wonder of the imagination (and heart and soul) and something for which I am deeply grateful. Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey turned out to be one such book.
It tells a simple story. In the first semester of a new year, beginning in the depths of winter, Daniel Mendelsohn will be teaching a weekly class on The Odyssey at Bard, a liberal arts college about one hundred and forty kilometres north of New York City. His octogenarian father, Jay, a retired mathematician who had studied the classics as a young man, asks to attend the class. While surprised at the request, and a little worried about the effect his father might have on the other students, Daniel nonetheless agrees. Each week for a semester his father makes the long journey from New York City on the Thursday, stays with his son that night, attends the class on Friday morning and returns home by train in the afternoon. The students taking this class are undergraduates; Jay would be older than most of their grandfathers.
As a father and a very particular type of scientist, there are no shades of grey for Jay: X is X, and when it comes to Homer’s great epic two fundamentals quickly emerge as self-evident: so-called ‘heroic’ Odysseus is not a hero because he is a liar and cheats on his wife; and, given that nearly all his men die, the so-called ‘great leader’ is in fact a poor leader of men. As a loyal husband who enlisted in the army at age seventeen, Jay has the credentials to judge, and his two complaints set up a refrain throughout the course.
For several months, Daniel and Jay take an intellectual journey through Homer’s epic, and when the class finishes the two embark on a physical journey: a cruise tracing Odysseus’s travels through the Mediterranean. During the course of these two journeys, Daniel comes to understand his father in new and nuanced ways. The Odyssey, or rather his father’s response to it, helps explain Jay’s dogmatism, his reluctance to show physical affection, his habit of silence, his autocratic paternalism; it also makes sense of those rare and
surprising occasions when warmth and softness do seep out.
Significantly, on their Mediterranean cruise, the Mendelsohns fail to reach Ithaka.
The book takes me on two journeys, too: back to Homer’s great epic, and, more crucially, as a result of Mendelsohn’s deft yet gentle movement between text, father–son emotions and complex family dynamics, my imagination, so sluggish since the return from Iceland, begins to move.
Mendelsohn, a translator of Cavafy, draws attention to Cavafy’s wonderful poem ‘Ithaka’ (1911), with its emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. Don’t be in a hurry to arrive, is the message of this poem; embrace the risk and surprise that infiltrates all life’s journeys; pursue new experiences. Mendelsohn mentions an earlier version of Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ called ‘Second Odyssey’ (1894), in which Odysseus, having arrived home after an absence of twenty years, finds it dull and boring; he does not feel himself. So, too, in Tennyson’s great poem ‘Ulysses’. After striving to return to Ithaka, to his wife and son and ageing father, despite all the dangers he faced on his travels, the setbacks that occurred, the yearnings that plagued him, Tennyson’s Ulysses decides to leave home again. (I always take a copy of this poem on my own travels.)
I reread Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ and find a copy online of Cavafy’s ‘Second Odyssey’ (I have three different volumes of the collected Cavafy, and none includes the ‘Second Odyssey’) and at the end of my readings I am steeped in journeying and alert to the shortcomings and deceptive pleasures of home. Most surprising of all, I feel lighter, happy even, and more energised than at any other time since my return from Iceland. And these poems I thought I knew so well, I’m reading them anew and they’re feeding me. Suddenly my diminished future doesn’t matter, and, in not mattering, neither does it feel diminished any more.
I have had an engrossing time with Mendelsohn, Tennyson, Cavafy, and, of course, Homer; all of these books and poems, these words and ideas, have invigorated me. It is the same sort of feeling I had in Iceland as I wandered the snowy wilderness, that sense of newness, of possibility, of there being no limits. But there has been something else as well. All these Odysseys of Mendelsohn, Homer, Tennyson, and Cavafy have provoked me; they have kick-started my zest for life, my desire for understanding, and thereby armed me for the way ahead. They have been journeyings. And they’ll always be there. Books don’t die, they don’t leave you, they don’t develop dementia. And they’re cheap, much cheaper than Iceland. They sit on their shelves waiting for you to discover them again and again and again.
Home, certainly the ideal of home, is all about comfort and certainty; home is security. This can be counterproductive in one’s advancing years. ‘Don’t expect Ithaka to make you rich,’ Cavafy writes. While there are rewards and fulfilment to be found at home, many more are located beyond the front door – whether physically, or in the imagination. Mendelsohn points out that lurking beneath the name Odysseus is the Greek word odynê, pain. Life is not a warm and cosy nest, though that may be part of it; life is also clinging to the side of a cliff with the wind whipping through you and the wild wild sea thundering below. g
Andrea Goldsmith’s novels include The Prosperous Thief (2002), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and The Memory Trap (2013), which won the Melbourne Prize in 2015. Her new novel, The Science of Departures, will be published by Scribe. She also writes essays and articles, many of which are posted on her website: andreagoldsmith.com.au. She first wrote for ABR in 1994.
Snowy wilderness in Southern Iceland (photograph by Andrea Goldsmith)
Inner circles
Lyndon Megarrity
THE BOY FROM BARADINE
by Craig Emerson Scribe
$35 pb, 368 pp, 9781925322590
The Boy from Baradine is one of the latest Australian political memoirs to hit the shelves. Craig Emerson, a prominent minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments between 2007 and 2013, has some interesting stories to tell about life as a political adviser, a pragmatic supporter of the environment, and an ambitious Labor politician. Emerson comes across as genuine and down to earth. He appears not to have carried a grudge towards those who at times obstructed his political career. Indeed, one of the saddest implications of the book is the sense that political ambition tends to make political and personal friendships difficult to maintain.
The most intense sections of the book concern Emerson’s formative years. While the author goes to great lengths to acknowledge the bond he had with his hard-working mother and father, it is clear that Emerson’s childhood was often traumatic. His honesty is admirable, but at times readers may feel they are intruding on what are essentially private matters. Furthermore, the searing quality of the early chapters contrasts rather sharply with the rest of the book, which adopts a lightness of tone and presents Emerson as a man of action, not of deep reflection.
Emerson studied economics at the University of Sydney and later completed a PhD thesis on mining taxation at the Australian National University.
His supervisor, Ross Garnaut, was to be an important source of economic advice to the Hawke government. It was partly on Garnaut’s recommendation that Emerson became an economic adviser to Resources and Energy Minister Peter Walsh (1984–86), who was later promoted to Finance. Subsequently, Emerson became an Economic and Environmental Adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke (1986–90).
Emerson’s time as an adviser seems to have been the most enjoyable and rewarding of his professional life. ‘Hawkie’ knew how to have fun, and his staff loved him. According to Emerson’s account, part of Bob Hawke’s political longevity and reputation for being a good leader came from the prime minister’s capacity to listen to the uncompromising advice of his staff and from his ability to manage media and public perceptions. He was also able to form useful political relationships, not the least of which was with the environment movement. Emerson captures the excitement and passion of the Prime Minister’s Office as it achieved change on issues such as the protection of Antarctica from mining. Emerson shares a striking example of the camaraderie that existed within Hawke’s inner circle as they put the finishing touches to the 1987 election campaign song, with its chorus of ‘Let’s stick together; let’s see it through’:
Graham ‘Freudie’ Freudenberg improved the lyrics by replacing the second ‘let’s stick together’ with ‘Australians together’, his arm swishing in a theatrical loop, ‘Australians together; let’s see it through.’ With that flourish, Bob [Hawke], Singo [John Singleton], Terry [Hannigan], and staff sang the revised rendition with ever-increasing gusto … the air thick with Freudie’s cigarettes and Bob’s cigars.
Not all of Emerson’s anecdotes are so engaging. His memoirs of political staffers and others getting up to mischief and high jinks will leave most readers unmoved: for most of these stories to work you needed to be there at the time they took place and have a strong personal affection for the people involved.
Of greater interest to the general reader is Emerson’s account of climbing Labor’s greasy pole all the way to the ministry. To reach the top of politics involves an obsession with seizing the main chance, persuading powerful party patrons to use their influence on your behalf, and finding out that the friendship of fellow MPs can wither on the vine if you are perceived to be a threat to their own career ambitions. As Emerson’s own example shows, playing the political game involves personal sacrifices and challenges for any politician who wishes to maintain strong relationships outside work.
Emerson’s narrative of public life implies that the 24/7 political cycle and culture are not working for parliamentarians or for the people they are meant to serve. However, the author has little to say about how this cut-throat culture might be changed. He was personally advantaged and disadvantaged by a political world where being in the ‘right’ political faction or being associated with party heavyweights counted more that merit. Emerson does not use the memoir to challenge this modus operandi.
Nor does Emerson reflect in great depth on the immense public resistance to privatising government enterprises and other ALP reforms, other than to acknowledge its existence. There is an orthodox, doctrinaire quality to the author’s commitment to the free market and competition which means that his defence of Labor’s record tends towards the use of platitudes and slogans rather than illuminating argument: ‘This economic statement [of May 1988] … was pivotal in turning the nation away from an inward-looking Fortress Australia protected by high tariff walls to an open, competitive economy fully engaged with Asia.’
The Boy from Baradine is a conventional political memoir that is certainly better written and structured than many competing books of the genre. While the book has flaws, it is a useful contribution to our understanding of Australian political history since 1983. g
Lyndon Megarrity is a Queensland historian and co-author of Made in Queensland: A new history (UQP, 2009).
Putin in the Bardo
Clues to understanding modern Russia
Kieran Pender
THE LONG HANGOVER:
PUTIN’S NEW RUSSIA AND THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST
by Shaun Walker
Oxford University Press, $44.95 hb, 288 pp, 9780190659240
Winston Churchill once famously said of Russia: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ The aphorism is still cited regularly today by analysts and commentators confused by the opaque Russian state. Regrettably, the sentences that followed have been largely consigned to history. Churchill continued: ‘But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’
Shaun Walker, a long-time Moscow correspondent for the British press (most recently The Guardian), provides more clues to understanding modern Russia in his first book. An orchestrated campaign to manipulate history, identity, and memory, Walker argues, forms a central aspect of President Vladimir Putin’s nearly two-decade long reign in his expansive post-Soviet empire.
The titles of the four parts to the book are instructive: ‘Curating the Past’, ‘Curating the Present’, ‘The Past Becomes the Present’, and ‘The Past in the Future’. Walker begins with World War II, ‘the defining cataclysmic event for generations of Russians’, before tracing the use and abuse of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russian popular consciousness to the present day. Putin, Walker suggests, has distorted, overlooked, and reinvented Soviet history to suit his political desires.
Stalin poses an interesting paradox for the propagandists in 2018 Russia. Given the centrality of the Soviet Union’s 1945 success over Nazi Germany to Putin’s overarching Russian narrative, the image of the communist leader can hardly be denigrated by talk of the millions of deaths for which he bears responsibility. But nor can he and the system he represents be glorified, lest Putin lose control over such potent nos-
talgia for the past. Stalin thus occupies a position of historical limbo in contemporary Russia. Interviewing a history teacher, Walker recalls: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, was Larisa’s basic take on Stalinism. No matter that making this particular omelette had involving not only breaking a few eggs, but also requisitioning the chickens, destroying the kitchen, then executing the chef and half the diners.’
The Long Hangover is noteworthy for its depth of reporting. Walker first travelled to Russia in 2000, spending four months teaching English in Moscow before riding the Trans-Siberian Express to the nation’s far-eastern extremities. After studying Russian and Soviet history at Oxford, Walker returned to Moscow in late-2003 and has been there ever since. He speaks fluent Russian, unlike some monolingual Westerners who write about the former Soviet Union.
Walker ranges far and wide across the largest country in the world over his twelve chapters. Attending the funeral of newlyweds in Grozny, Chechnya, who had been brazenly kidnapped in broad daylight, Walker explains how Putin and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov have twisted the region’s history to their own destructive ends. He visits the Buddhist region of Kalmykia near the Caspian Sea as part of a broader discussion on the wholesale deportation of minorities perceived as troublesome during World War II. He travels to the former Siberian gulags of Magadan – ‘the end of the earth’ – and roams through war-torn Eastern Ukraine.
At a time when Russian–Western polarisation is not far from its Cold
War zenith, Walker’s nuanced analysis of modern Russia is much needed. The journalist is critical of all parties involved in Ukraine’s spiral into civil war in 2014; he acknowledges Russia’s central role while also attributing considerable fault to leaders in Kiev and their allies. Discussing the separatist territories in Eastern Ukraine, Walker diagnoses: ‘Beyond labelling them idiots, or brainwashed by propaganda, not many people in Kiev or the West wanted to think
Putin, Walker suggests, has distorted, overlooked, and reinvented Soviet history to suit his political desires
more deeply about the problem.’ He recalls meeting a European ambassador in Kiev who ranted about ‘criminal, evil, deceitful Russia’. The ambassador had never been to Donetsk, but had no interest in Walker’s empirically informed perspective.
Walker contextualises his grand thesis. ‘Probably, some level of distortion and wilful amnesia are inevitable parts of any country’s historiography,’ he concedes. But Walker suggests that the Russian case is exceptional, and dismisses parallels with Spain. ‘The Spanish forgetting had a clear goal of moving on and entering the European family. In Russia too, the broad idea was to unite the nation, but the ultimate aim was not to transcend the pain of the difficult history, but to retain glory for those bloody years, and ensure legitimacy for the successor state.’
Even Putin benefits from a balanced appraisal, depicted here in the
Greens campaigner Hazel discovers what Austen can teach a young woman about life, love and literature in the 21st century. Michelle de Kretser calls it ‘compelling’ while Ryan O’Neill says it is ‘a perfect modern romance’.
AFTeRNOONS WITH HARVeY BeAM CarrIe CoX
Talkback host Harvey Beam expects little from a family reunion – least of all the stranger who will change everything. Foreword says it is ‘vulnerable, darkly comic, and assembled like a well-laid fire.’
These are stories that celebrate getting older and wiser as well as becoming more certain of who you are and where you want to be.
middle ground between his lionisation on Russian state television and common demonisation by Western critics. ‘This book is not an apology for Putin’s policies,’ Walker declares. ‘But neither is the book an anti-Putin polemic … Putin was, to some extent, the director of the postSoviet story for modern Russia, but he was also very much a character in it.’
Underlying these perceptive assessments is a striking empathy for the men and women of post-Soviet Russia. Some of the book’s most powerful moments are when Walker reflects on the fate of ‘ordinary’ Russians stranded in the internecine battle for Russia’s past, present, and future. This poignant human element offers a stark contrast to the sweeping historical revision wrought by Putin and his cabal.
In Siberia, Walker interviews the only Gulag survivor willing to tell him her story. Olga Gureyeva was deported from a Polish-controlled Ukranian village as a seventeen-year-old in 1945, sentenced to two decades of hard labour on the other side of the world. She suffered unimaginable pain throughout her life, but – aside from a brief period of openness during perestroika – the experiences of Gureyeva and thousands of others have been forgotten as part of Russia’s collective amnesia. ‘I don’t know why God chose such a life for me,’ she murmurs to Walker. The modern Russian state does not want to know either.
It is hard to find fault in such a spectacular book, which deftly weaves personal narratives with grand geopolitical tensions to produce a compelling read. Unlike the works of some journalists-turned-authors, the book does not read like a disjointed conglomeration of reporting. If anything, Walker’s desire to thread a cohesive thesis can at times feel overdone. Symbolic meaning is imputed, and narrative arcs are stretched in attempts to accommodate on-ground complexity within the broad central argument. But these minor flaws barely detract from a real tour de force of book-length reporting.
Russia will be in the spotlight throughout 2018. Russians head to the polls in mid-March for a presidential election, timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Crimea’s annexation. With chief anti-regime antagonist Alexei Navalny barred from the ballot, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. In June and July 2018, the attention of the sporting world will be transfixed as Russia hosts the FIFA World Cup, Putin’s second attempt at brand-building through sport following the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Across the Pacific, startling allegations surrounding Russia’s involvement in the electoral victory of Donald Trump show no signs of fading. The war in Eastern Ukraine continues unabated and Putin remains the kingmaker in Syria. In these interesting times, The Long Hangover is an excellent companion. g
Kieran Pender is an Australian journalist and researcher. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian and has reported from four continents.
‘Two out of three ain’t bad’
Richard Walsh
WHAT EDITORS DO: THE ART, CRAFT, AND BUSINESS OF BOOK EDITING
edited
by Peter Ginna University of Chicago Press (Footprint) $54.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780226299976
This is an American book and no doubt primarily aimed at those interested in how American publishing works, and specifically at those interested in gaining employment there or upgrading their skills. In Australia it will be of limited use to those with similar ambitions and interests, because the Australian publishing industry is structured in a significantly different way. But it contains enough wisdom for aspiring Australian authors to be worth the price of admission.
Even after the impact of the cyberworld, American book publishing at the top end is sufficiently prosperous to be able to offer such attractive advances that the contributors to this symposium can talk airily of good books needing five to six drafts. By contrast, Australian bestseller lists are dominated by overseas authors; quite a few of these titles are acquired from overseas publishers or authors, and the local house has little creative input whatsoever. The majority of successful Australian authors are of course represented by agents; but most local publishers are much more alert to the possibilities of unagented talent than are their New York counterparts. Even American and Australian job descriptions are different; this book discusses editors acquiring and commissioning books and subsequently liaising with sales and marketing; but we tend to call such senior editors ‘publishers’.
Nonetheless, the contributors to What Editors Do offer illuminating insights into how large publishing houses operate and the kinds of texts they are looking to publish, no matter where they are located. Some of the contributions would be of particular interest to any
budding Australian writer.
Peter Ginna, in his useful introduction, cautions writers who perceive publishers as baby murderers: ‘[They] don’t live to turn books down. They live to find books they believe in and to bring them to readers. Simply put: it is acquisitions, not rejection, that drives the engine of publishers.’ Many of the contributors emphasise what Ginna himself regards as one of the golden rules of acquisition: ‘Never buy a book unless you know who the audience for it is, and how you are going to sell it to them.’ Nancy Miller and Susan Rabiner, in particular, focus on what they perceive to be the essence of a publishable manuscript. Miller, who is editorial director at Bloomsbury, believes that at its most basic, for a nonfiction book to succeed, it needs to ‘have a reason to exist’.
Literary agent Rabiner describes that raison d’être as what she calls ‘conceptualization’, which she defines as: ‘the value added by the author to what is essentially a set of facts, stories, and commentary in search of a larger meaning ... It may be one he has taken, in some form, many times before. An author’s concept for the book is her promise that with the benefit of new research, new stories, new insights, and her authorial guiding vision, the reader will see new things on the journey and arrive at a new destination.’ Even with fiction: ‘If the novel is going to find a publisher, the author must convey what will make this story unique.’
A number of contributors make the point that authors are very focused on ‘good writing’, but sometimes reluctant to focus on the other factors that weigh with publishers. Ginna points out that the ideal proposal for any publisher is for it to be by an established author, on an exciting topic and beautifully written; but, more realistically, he admits that, in the immortal words of Meatloaf: ‘Two out of three ain’t bad.’ The corollary is that a manuscript by a newcomer that offers only beautiful writing is tiptoeing down a very challenging path.
Betsy Lerner, herself an author, recognises a basic truth: ‘Writers and editors have this in common: they are underdogs. The editor desperately wants to discover the next great novel. The novelist is desperate to be discovered.’
THE EVERLASTING SUNDAY
by Robert Lukins
University of Queensland Press $29.95 pb, 224 pp, 9780702260056
Set in England during the Big Freeze of 1962–63 – the coldest winter in nearly 300 years – Robert Lukins’s first novel tells the story of Radford, who is sent to live at Goodwin Manor, ‘a place for boys who have been found by trouble’. The Manor is overseen by Teddy, a charismatic depressive, who resists pressure to establish a ‘philosophy’ of reform and instead determines ‘only to keep [the boys in his care] alive’.
Here, Radford meets West and other boys united by what West describes as ‘a reason’ – ‘the thing way down in a person that means you can’t get along with the regulars’ – and ‘a final straw’ – ‘[s]ome thing that happens that means your dumb life can’t keep going the way it was’. Teddy refuses to read the files that outline each boy’s troubled history and among the boys themselves there is a reluctance to confide. ‘Silence here, Radford concluded, was the truest act of loyalty.’ The silences that persist – and are a particular strength of the novel – shape relations between the boys and create a rare sense of foreboding and impending catastrophe.
The Gothic temper of the narrative is clear. Doubly isolated from the nearest village by woods and roads made impassable by snow, Goodwin Manor teeters on the edge of ruin. Radford observes that it ‘had the comforting look of death’. However, there is another, deeper Gothic current in Lukins’s novel, which lends itself to an ecopoetic reading. Winter insinuates itself into the action: in the unnatural confinement of the boys indoors, and the simmering violence and occasional brutal outbursts that occur in consequence, but also in brief sections that are narrated from the perspective of the season itself. Throughout the novel, Winter observes the boys – ‘trespassers’ – threatens its revenge, and further heightens the suspense in this compelling début.
Anna MacDonald
The excitement of the chase arises out of the desperation of publishing people to identify manuscripts that have real potential. Lerner describes it this way: ‘Acquisitions editors are in it for the high, for the feeling that something amazing is happening when they start to read fresh pages. Pheromones might even be involved. No matter how many manuscripts an editor reads, it is always there: the hope. This could be the book that hits the best-seller list, or wins a Pulitzer Prize, or, rarest of all, changes someone’s life.’
Most of us engaged in book publishing end up reading new submissions late at night, at the end of a long day
during which we have probably grappled with a bombardment of editorial and marketing decisions. I always counsel my students never to read submissions simply as a chore – that is totally unfair on the authors concerned. If you cannot summon up the hope and expectation so eloquently expressed by Lerner, sooner or later you will allow a gem to fall through your fingers.
Producing a good piece of writing is always a worthwhile pursuit, whether the writing is fiction or a memoir or a polemic or whatever. If it is never published, that does not diminish its worth. But many writers never outgrow the idea that submitting a manuscript is like handing
The Boathouse
ending on a line by John Burnside
No one on the boats, just cats – thin, furtive. There’s the blown cry of terns and the wheedling embarkations of crows, but you will not slip
the knot of your thoughts, what has brought you to this harbour. Rain in the distance, the same cold chant echoing in your steps, in the oars
and in the salt-encrusted timbers of the boats pitching by the pier. The smell of diesel, rust, bilge. A pelican hunkers down in the wind
near a tangle of broken nets, lines, seaweed, an oily squalor of wash along the shore. From the boathouse fishermen with voices like spray looming through a blowhole, their weather-knotted faces turning to leer at you. One of them, stiff as old rope, dumps
a bucket of guts and fish heads on the boards The cats come quickly, eyeing each other, hissing, clearing the pylons of gulls. Below the pier,
in an essay at school; they consider being rejected as literary failure. It isn’t. Writing a book is a literary activity; submitting a manuscript to a publishing house is a commercial activity – even if the publisher is a university press or has financial patronage, it is still going to bear in mind how many readers are likely to respond positively. A book such as What Editors Do offers an excellent opportunity for would-be authors to see the world through the eyes of publishers/ editors. g
Richard Walsh is Consultant Publisher at Allen & Unwin. He first wrote for ABR in 1978.
a stingray’s slow, soothing undulations. Now the cats slink away with the waste and like a mass of flies your thoughts return –
blatant, insistent – back to when you’d walk into cold spindrift, or on to the rocks from where the whole rank harbour was visible, the boathouse
with its splintering boards, ruined paint, always a man on the jetty peering into the water … In the distance a sudden lance of sunlight reveals
the ambiguity of your coming and going; how the stone’s throw of the past is still at your feet and will not move, though now you walk away from the pier. A sharp skreel – yacht-repair, or the noise of returning gulls. Sand grains blow as savagely as fish hooks against your legs.
A cat trails you, its pitiful cry mingling with the stink of dreck and rotting weed … both of you homing in on something – the urgency of elsewhere.
Judith Beveridge
Judith Beveridge’s new collection, Sun Music: New and selected poems, is forthcoming.
Weeping maps
Jill Jones
INTERVAL
by Judith Bishop
University of Queensland Press
$24.95 pb, 86 pp, 9780702260070
Judith Bishop’s Interval appears just over a decade since the publication of her first book, also using a one-word title, Event (Salt, 2007). This gap seems far too long. Certainly, there have been two chapbooks in the intervening years – Alice Missing in Wonderland and Other Poems (2008), in the Wagtail series from Picaro Press, and Aftermarks (2012), in the Vagabond Rare Objects Series, – but no full-length collection. The impression is that Bishop works slowly and meticulously. Both Interval and Event are what some may call ‘slim volumes’, that is, in comparison to many.
It is also worth noting in this context that Bishop is, so far, the only poet to have won Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize twice, in 2006 with the haunting ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which was published in Event, and in 2011 with ‘Openings’, a moving poem that now appears, with just one change to a stanza break, in Interval I was one of Event ’s many admirers, for its rich and highly accomplished imagery and, perhaps even more, for its fluid and beguiling syntax. Without venturing too far into a comparison of the two books, it’s worth briefly noting the differences between these two collections. Event was notable for its luxuriant and dense imagistic texture and rich figurative gestures. In comparison, but only in comparison, Interval feels more austere, pared back, and also more personal. Also, the poems are mostly shorter and more tightly formed. Nonetheless, both books exhibit similarities as well, particularly a sense of the elemental.
Overall, there is feeling of tenderness in this new book, a sense of care for this world, especially for family and children but also for language, of how words are associative, either sonically or as working through meanings, though not set meanings (this is poetry after
all). There is nothing sentimental in any of this. Rather, it seems an ethical impulse, a commitment to the things of this world, and their inter-relations, as the world processes to human-wrought environmental disaster, a world that gives ‘rise to maps; / these ghostly, weeping maps / showing coastlines new and late’ (‘Rising Tides’). It is this unstable and failing world that Bishop’s book and its intimacies inhabit.
Interval ’s first and last poems gesture to this movement between tenderness and intimacy and loss and uncertainty. The first poem, ‘Aubade’, announces Bishop’s intentions towards relationship – ‘Love, the shape-shifter / is on the move’ – just as the book’s final words, in a poem whose title affirms the conditional ‘As If’, end in the infinitive and the incomplete, the fragmentary but also the ongoing and connected, via grammar, sound and sense: ‘to try toward, to ward, to world – / to word this muteness, so’.
There is a sense of disquiet to be found in reading and rereading this book. Where is the place of these poems as many, not all, are hard to place? Why references to Greek myth if the poems are, at least in part, of this continent? The ‘big’ words are all there: love, beauty, infinity, sorrows, heart, etc. This disquiet most likely means the book is doing its subtle work. It is looking ‘towards’ ways of saying muteness. While conceptual, confessional, protest, or imagistic poetries do other work, Bishop’s is more a poetry of enquiry, often philosophical in tone, though very much grounded in visceral life and the familial dayto-day as it works between image and discourse, potential and fate.
But to return to the beginning, it is not only love but also language that is on the move, and it is Bishop’s use of language that centres the book’s enquiry. The second poem, ‘Letter to My Daughters’, contains the line ‘bring me back to change the script’ repeated twice, sometimes as a variant, in the first four stanzas and as the variation ‘But we cannot find the script’ in the last stanza. As well as repetition, Bishop uses a lot of slant rhyme or identical rhyme, and some full rhyme, to create fluid yet resonant and emotional effects. It lends, even to those poems that are in free
verse lines, a sense of formal pleasures. The elemental, as I indicated above, is central to the book, as is the non-human. But as well as being central, these elements and entities are also things that are disturbed, faltering:
I seem to hear iron girders taking air risk shaking out its feathers life falling into elements again (‘Oceanic’)
A line from Event seems to resonate in regard to this book as well: ‘All my deft surrogates for speech’ (‘The Shatter Rooms’). Across Bishop’s work, and certainly in this new book, there is a sense of attempting to use language to bridge a gap, to find some other place to dwell, more intimate perhaps, or more whole. There is desire – certainly there is a sense of the animal, the scent of sex, of bodies in the book – but this is conditional:
There should be a right distance at which we should meet if we could (‘Interval’)
Even though it is not possible to bridge the gap, not in language, Bishop knows poetry is the thing that must try to do so, again and again. g
Jill Jones’s most recent poetry collection is The Beautiful Anxiety (2015).
Tweet of the Month
Looking forward to the Trump Presidential Library.
A putting green.
Recipes for chocolate cake. A live Twitter feed for visitors to post on.
A little black book w the phone numbers of porn stars. You’re in and out in five minutes.
Just like ...
Alec Baldwin on Twitter, 3 March 2018
Publisher of the Month with Nathan Hollier
What was your pathway to publishing?
Traducing a prominent critic on the AustLit online discussion list in 1997 led to some literary-world taking of sides and, after a while, to writing for and then getting involved with Overland magazine. (I was editor from 2002 to 2007 and am pleased to be still involved, on the board.)
What was the first book you published?
A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor education for a changing world, by Mike Brown and Brian Wattchow, which has been an excellent backlist seller for Monash University Publishing in the United States and Europe.
Do you edit the books you commission?
I try not to because it can be time consuming. I enjoy editing though, am conscious from time to time that I can add quite a bit of value to a work, and so not infrequently do give in to that temptation.
How many titles do you publish each year?
About twenty-five.
What qualities do you look for in an author?
If we’re talking about trade books: the ability to identify and tell a good, informative, properly researched story in their own voice. Voice is the part that tests most authors. ‘Peterfitzpatrickness’, one might call it. For scholarly books: someone familiar, even if only in spirit, with Orwell’s ‘Politics of the English Language’. Einstein was able to explain his conception of relativity in one sentence (‘Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter’).
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
I am in publishing to make a positive difference to society, so when one feels that, with the author, we’re doing that, it’s gratifying. The greatest challenge is trying to explain why not all good books find the readership they deserve, despite marketing efforts and positive media
and reviews. For some books, the time is not right.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
Mostly I plan to write and then console myself I didn’t have time. Having written the odd thing, I have a greater respect for writing as a craft. As a publisher, I try not to pre-judge works written in modes or from a perspective that I don’t personally favour.
Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?
There are quite a few, here and overseas, including a number of my contemporaries. I always admired Lou Swinn and Zoe Dattner at Sleepers. I’d like to learn more about Lloyd O’Neil of Lansdowne. If I was to point to an exemplary publishing career, that was edgy but not marginal for the sake of it, and indeed popularising in its impulse ... Carmen Callil?
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
In large companies, the capacity of individuals to act independently can be constrained. But there is much diversity of writerly voices in the marketplace.
On publication, which is more gratifying – a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?
For me, consistently positive reviews matter most. Mostly I want to publish books that last.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?
People will go on writing and reading quality literature. The challenge for us – not a new one – is to organise our society in such a way that quality writing can best do its work.
Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University Publishing.
ABR Arts
Sophie Knezic on Hilarie Mais
Opera Hamlet
Michael Halliwell
Film
Human Flow
Barnaby Smith
Theatre
Antony and Cleopatra
Susan Lever
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation and the ABR Patrons.
Hilarie Mais in her studio, 2017 (photograph by Van Wens)
Human Flow
by Barnaby Smith
The unspeakably upsetting image of the three-yearold Syrian boy Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach inspired a number of visual or artistic responses after it went disturbingly viral in 2015. Among the most high-profile, and certainly among the most provocative, was Ai Weiwei’s. The exiled Chinese artist recreated the scene for his own black-and-white photograph in which he lies face down in the sand instead of Alan, who drowned after the boat meant to transport him and his family to Greece was overturned by a wave.
Ai has also confronted the question of refugees in such memorable large-scale artworks as Sunflower Seeds, Fairytale, and, at the 2018 Sydney Biennale, Law of the Journey. But this new documentary is surely the culmination of Ai’s preoccupation with the plight of refugees in the twenty-first century.
For Human Flow, Ai spent a year filming the progress of refugees in twenty-three countries and at various crisis points around the world, including Greece, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Gaza Strip, and the US-Mexico border (any attempt to reach Manus Island or Nauru, one imagines, would have been sternly rebuffed). Talking heads include the refugees themselves, as well as various NGO representatives and, at one point, oddly, Princess Dana Firas of Jordan. It is mostly a reflective, undemonstrative film, with Ai himself flitting in and out, occasionally talking (most often in conversation with the displaced), and often clutching his iPhone, with which he passively films.
This solemn spirit – created in part by many passages of silent observation of camps and people travelling en masse on foot (the film is not narrated) – does not mean that the film shies away from almost unbearably distressing scenes. For example, the churned-up, decomposing body of an adolescent lies in the dust in Mosul, Iraq. We see a man sobbing by the makeshift graves of several of his relatives. A woman appears to vomit with anguish as she describes her family’s ordeal. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, two young brothers cry into each other’s arms, lamenting their circumstances.
Human Flow illustrates the utter tedium of this life and the extraordinary patience shown by asylum seekers (not
that they have a great deal of choice). Ai shows throngs of people waiting quietly and interminably to board a boat or a bus; in another scene, they sit cramped and huddled, waiting for some administrative process or other. A young girl fortunate enough to have made it to the shelter of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, where hangars were converted into living spaces, laments that she is ‘the most bored she has ever been in [her] life’. Ai, who is often more journalist than artist, does an admirable job of depicting this least spectacular challenge that refugees must face.
What is spectacular is the imagery. The film opens with footage of the deep blue of the Aegean shot by drone from above, a technique also used to show vast refugee camps in various desolate places, this mobile aerial view capturing an uncomfortable form of beauty. Footage of a sandstorm in the Kenyan desert is also stunning. Such vistas offer a stark contrast to the close-ups of the chaos and squalor of tent cities.
The intensity of these visuals is one of a few ways in which Human Flow invites comparison with that other great documentary event of the past year, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s series The Vietnam War. Another is the film’s reluctance to engage in any serious depth with the geopolitical tensions involved or the wider historical trajectory that led to the crisis, preferring instead to concentrate on the human stories.
Accusations that Ai is layering on the aesthetics of trauma and despair too thickly are valid, but some of the intimate and anxious exchanges between family members represent the core of the documentary. On the other hand, there are the occasional lighter moments, as when a group of smiling and boisterous Gaza schoolgirls verbally spar with the filmmaker, or when a mother and her young daughter playfully argue over the collection of balloon animals the girl is clutching.
Another criticism might be that at nearly two and a half hours long, the film drags at certain points, and could have been more penetrating if Ai had edited out certain sections that add little. Scant time or examination is given to the question of the US-Mexico border or the refugee camp at Calais known as the Jungle. A mere glimpse of these locations seems inadequate. The film may have been better served by not addressing them at all.
Some, possibly including Ai himself, would describe Human Flow as a polemic. Others on the hawkish side of the political divide might call it propaganda. However, regardless of the lack of a detailed picture of the ethnosocio-economic complexities of the global refugee crisis, the only possible response to this heartbreaking film is one of emotional and even physical exhaustion. If you see it, you’ll need to take a few moments at its end before you can start breathing again. g
Human Flow (Roadshow Entertainment), 140 minutes, directed by Ai Weiwei. (Online: 13 March 2018)
Barnaby Smith is a writer, musician, and poet currently based in northern New South Wales.
A Fantastic Woman
by Harry Windsor
There is something about nightclubs that appeals to filmmakers. The work of American directors like Martin Scorsese and James Gray is riddled with them. In 2017, the Cannes-storming AIDS activism drama BPM (Beats Per Minute) featured a group of friends who spent most nights in clubs; places where identities are subsumed in the dark but that are also communal, just like the movies. Now we have the Chilean film A Fantastic Woman, one of five nominees for best foreign-language film at this year’s Academy Awards. It’s about a transgender nightclub singer, Marina (Daniela Vega). A pivotal scene has her leading a highly choreographed chorus line on the dance floor. Like BPM, the film cleverly weaves moments of dreamlike symbolism into what could otherwise be mistaken for a slice of life.
The director is Sebastián Lelio, whose previous feature, Gloria (2013), made a splash on the festival circuit. Like that film, A Fantastic Woman touches on the difficulties of dealing with a romantic partner’s previous life and family. When we meet Marina, she is in a happy relationship with an older man, Orlando (Francisco Reyes), but when he dies she becomes an object of scorn and suspicion, forced to deal with her lover’s embittered ex-wife, who wants Orlando’s car, and his son, who wants the apartment. Waitressing by day, she is visited by a female police officer (Amparo Noguera), who forces her to come to the station and strip, so that the forensics guy can take photographs.
‘Time’ (about a truncated love affair) and Aretha Franklin’s ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ seem direct, not unsubtle, and as unashamed as the lead character. So unceasing is all the aggression (micro or otherwise) directed at Marina that it is a relief when we meet her singing teacher (Sergio Hernández), whom she embraces like a parent. Vega – a singer as well as actor – is electrifying in Marina’s two performances. The lushness of A Fantastic Woman’s musical palette is arguably its defining feature, beginning with a prelude at Iguazu Falls, where Orlando and Marina had planned a holiday. Cutting between different angles of this natural wonder, Lelio introduces the shimmery string-based orchestral score from English electronic musician Matthew Herbert, swelling up and subsiding as editor Soledad Salfate cross-fades to Orlando’s sauna. The sauna, as well as the tickets to Iguazu Falls which Orlando may have misplaced there, together form twin
The word for ‘genre’ and ‘gender’ is the same in Spanish (‘genero’), as Lelio likes to point out, and his film is many things at once: a Sirkian melodrama popping with colour, a contemporary social drama set in Santiago, even a ghost story. Orlando reappears in Marina’s rear-view mirror, or in the bowels of a crematorium. But the escalation of indignities heaped upon Marina also makes it feel like one of those queasy thrillers in which things go from bad to worse for the unlucky hero or heroine.
After being unceremoniously ejected from Orlando’s funeral, Marina is walking home when a 4WD driven by his son pulls up and bundles her into the back where two goons wrap her face in tape before dumping her onto the side of the road. She seeks refuge in a club where an anonymous hook-up takes the edge off, briefly. Afterwards, she washes up, sodden and homeless, at her sister’s place, where her brother-in-law eyes her with here-we-go-again forbearance.
Lelio is unafraid of the direct metaphor. A signature scene has Marina pummelled by the wind, bending forward at an acute, gravity-defying angle like a silent-movie mime. The inclusion of The Alan Parsons Project song
pillars of hope. Orlando’s locker-room key is in Marina’s possession, but when she finally discovers the sauna’s location and descends into a world of men, there is nothing there for her. This sequence provides yet another opportunity for Lelio and his DP Benjamín Echazarreta (Gloria) to show Marina reflected against mirrors or windows. The way she is viewed is a projection as much as anything else, the filmmaking suggests.
Plenty of films have been made about identities shifting and slipping under the weight of traumatic upheaval. But there is a concreteness to Marina that exists at the beginning of the film and never falters. Our perception of it might be enlarged, but her identity is never in flux. At times she stares straight down the barrel of the camera. Vega’s steady gaze, inviting us to watch her, is frank, neither shy nor defiant. g
Harry
A Fantastic Woman (Sony Pictures), 100 minutes, directed by Sebastián Lelio. (Online: 19 February 2018)
Windsor is a Sydney film critic.
Daniela Vega in A Fantastic Woman (Sony Pictures)
The Lady and the Unicorn
by Morag Fraser
One of France’s great treasures, the five-hundredyear-old, six-panel tapestry series called The Lady and the Unicorn, is in Australia for four months, courtesy of some fortuitous inter-museum contacts, and deft work by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A loan of such significance usually takes years to negotiate; this one was finalised and mounted at warp speed (one might say). It is rare for textile works of such renown and fragility to travel. France has only lent its Lady and the Unicorn twice before.
The tapestries themselves are beautiful, enigmatic, elevated. Luminous in their dark room, they float above the reflective pool of a glassy black floor (the AGNSW installation is a triumph), other-worldly, and as disconcerting as the mythical unicorn itself. You might walk slowly past and simply marvel at their textured intricacy and splendour, but you are unlikely to do only that. There is such play, such a blending of the naturalistic with the allegorical in these great panels, that any child would stop to peer and wonder at their detail, be transported into their world of myth, of story, of women, beasts, and nature, freighted with mystery. And anyone who has ever sat with needle and thread over an embroidery sampler, or who has knotted warp thread onto sticks and passed wool under and over, will have some inkling of the technical finesse of these works. They are, simply, masterpieces – of imagination and execution.
researchers that there still remains much to be discovered about them. Their existence was scarcely recorded until the nineteenth century, when they were mentioned as hanging at the rather forbidding Château de Boussac in central France – grand works befitting an elevated social status, but also serving the practical purpose of insulating chill stone walls.
In the 1840s they enjoyed good literary press. Prosper Mérimée and George Sand both enthused about them –‘those curious enigmatic tapestries’ Sand called them in her novel Jeanne. Later, Rainer Maria Rilke riffed on them in prose excursions. After the Château de Boussac was sold in 1837, the tapestries were moved around. Some panels were stored and damaged, by rats and damp. It is part of their charm now that they wear their long history – of neglect, conservation and restoration, and shifting technologies –‘on their front’, in their very fabric. As with the France’s other textile miracle, the Bayeux Tapestry (in fact an embroidery), you can see where holes have been lovingly patched and sections pieced. The lower, damaged areas, reworked with nineteenth-century dyes, have faded gently. Is it ironic that the medieval artisans used a superior dye technology?
The AGNSW exhibition is well bolstered by its scholarly (and modestly priced) catalogue, written by the director of the Musée de Cluny, Elisabeth Delahaye (who was in Sydney for the opening celebrations). Her The Lady and the Unicorn is an updated successor to the 1989 La Dame à la Licorne catalogue written by Cluny’s then Ancien conservateur général, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg. These are beautiful books, and invaluable if you want to learn where, when, by whom, how, what a genet is (a spotted feline), who the lady was, and what on earth the unicorn signifies. You might also chase up the Metropolitan Museum’s 1998 catalogue of their Unicorn Tapestries (gifted to the Met in 1937 by John D. Rockefeller). And if that prompts you to pursue the mythical white beast further though its long history and multivalent symbolism, I recommend a beguiling 1930s book, The Lore of the Unicorn, by an English scholar called Odell Shepard (Dover Publications, 1993).
The tapestry panels, twenty running metres when combined, are also manna for art historians. Created at the pivot of the Medieval and Renaissance periods (and currently dated at 1500), they are encyclopedias of encoded religion, sociology, class, industry, anthropology, natural history, politics, and literature, with the bonus for
The AGNSW adds another perspective to the unicorn myth by concurrently showing Arthur Boyd’s The Lady and the Unicorn portfolio in its Australian galleries. But you should know that Boyd created his graphic, sexually charged series in collaboration with the poet Peter Porter (one of four volumes they produced). Images and poems
Sight (detail) c.1500, from The Lady and the Unicorn series Musée de Cluny – Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris (photograph courtesy RMN-GP, M Urtado)
were published together in 1975, in a volume ‘expanding a legend that exists because we need it’.
The fifteenth-century weavers’ ‘threads of patience’ (Peter Porter’s phrase) produced a world flecked and sparkling with nature. It sparkles still, and not only because some of the tapestries’ yarns were silk. There is delight, in the making and seeing of the flowers (the millefleurs) in the tapestries’ red field and the lady’s blue corral. There is wit and life in the tapestries’ many creatures. They are never simply decorative. The lion leers; he goggles, pokes out his tongue; he looks away, knowingly. Above him, a falcon threatens a heron, vulnerable on her back. Monkeys sniff. Rabbits, even in their repetition, have individuated verve. The unicorn rears; he lays his paws in the Lady’s lap. Is he the lover, the Christ figure, the victim, the healer? We don’t know, any more than we know who the lady is, or what is going on behind her impassive visage. In the allegorical panel we now call ‘Taste’ (the scholarship is almost conclusive on the panel’s meaning), she is a Botticelli beauty. ‘The lady claims her carnal innocence,’ writes Peter Porter in the ‘Epilogue’ poem. In ‘Sight’, she has the disconsolate expression of the girl at Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In ‘Sound’, she is fully engaged on the organ’s keyboard while her attendant, smaller by hierarchy, not perspective, looks bored as she squeezes the bellows. Their garments are bejewelled, indicative of status and period, and so craftily woven that every fold in them is registered. Their hairstyles alone merit a thesis. (Porter: ‘Her hair is braided like Christ’s crown.’) The weaving skill – intermeshing of colours to create shades, reversing and thereby creating holes that become the fine lines of the unicorn’s haunch, or the fox’s snout – is astonishing. And for such a collective enterprise – from the first drawing to the enlarged cartoon to the many hands weaving – the tapestries create an extraordinary impression of unity and cohesive artistry. Before you reach the tapestries’ special exhibition room, you have to walk through the Gallery’s light-filled atrium. On the walls are large paintings, all dots and shimmering symbolism, by Australian Aboriginal painters. They are the perfect prelude to the tapestries, utterly different yet related in that they are so joyously the products of another coherent symbolic culture. Then you wander back upstairs and learn from the Cluny tapestries and from the ancillary displays about the vital connection between fifteenthcentury French aspirant society, traditions of patronage, the industrial conditions of late-medieval French and Flemish weavers, and the consequent creation of a work as magnificent – and tantalising – as The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries.
Take your time. And remember that even now, for all our pell-mell, cyber-driven trajectory, it takes master craftspeople a day to weave a few square centimetres of textile magic. And yet they go on doing it. With determined joy. g
The Lady and the Unicorn is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 10 February to 24 June 2018. (Longer version online: 16 February) Morag Fraser first wrote for ABR in 1995.
Hamlet
Michael Halliwell
It is the fate of nearly all new operas to disappear quickly after an initial run of performances, so it was with much anticipation that Australian audiences had the opportunity to see Brett Dean’s Hamlet, triumphantly premièred at Glyndebourne in June 2017 (I reviewed it for Australian Book Review). The centrepiece of the 2018 Adelaide Festival, the opera has created a real buzz around town, and there was a large contingent from the east coast. Critical reaction to the opera last year was almost uniformly positive – highly unusual for a contemporary opera – so expectations for the three Adelaide performances were high. Did it deliver?
The verdict – resoundingly, yes. Dean tailored the work for the particular acoustic qualities of the Glyndebourne theatre, with its high, atrium-like structure. Parts of the orchestra and chorus were dispersed throughout the auditorium, creating a rich and often eerily strange sound world, with much use of non-traditional musical means. But there was enough flexibility in the score for it to transfer to very different venues for a tour of the United Kingdom. The Adelaide Festival Theatre has a more conventional design, but imaginative use was made of this more limited potential. It is the same production, and Ralph Myers’s elegant and functional stage designs transferred most effectively to the new space.
What was of particular interest was how the cast changes would impact on the Adelaide performances. The focal point of the opera remains Allan Clayton’s multi-faceted performance of the title role. Not the lean and pale figure fitting the popular conception of the role, Clayton’s bearlike, shambling, yet nimble physical presence underpins a highly nuanced and subtle vocal performance. This is a marathon of a role, requiring of the singer a vocal range from hushed, lyrical asides, through to Sprechgesang and anguished cries and wordless vocalisations, exploring the widest possible extremities and capacities of the tenor voice. Clayton has it all, and, if anything, creates a more rounded character than in his earlier assumption of the role. He also provides an object lesson in operatic diction.
Rod Gilfry enjoys a proud record of creating characters in contemporary operas, and his Claudius is a beautifully sung and rich characterisation. His guilt-ridden prayer
remains one of the vocal highlights of the performance. Kim Begley expertly reprises his pedantic Polonius, while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern return in the embodiment of Christopher Lowrey and Rupert Enticknap. If anything, their comedic expertise has sharpened. The two countertenor voices provide a distinctive contrast in the often dark vocal sound world of the opera.
Sarah Connolly, with a strong motherly presence, was a warm and sympathetic Gertrude at Glyndebourne. Cheryl Barker is one of Australia’s most admired and loved singers, and her soprano, as opposed to Connolly’s mezzo, added a new dimension to the role in Adelaide.The brighter yet still rich vocal quality perhaps enhances the anguish of this figure, caught between love for her son, loyalty to her new husband, and an increasing sense of guilt. Barker adds a vivid stage presence to the dramatic mix, and while the character remains a victim of the forces ranged against her, one senses a steely quality within the character.
Of great interest was Lorina Gore as Ophelia, a singer who made the character of Honey B so memorable in Dean’s first opera, Bliss (2010). Created by the phenomenal Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, Dean’s Ophelia was tailored to her extraordinary capacities. As in all Hamlet operas, the role is much expanded, the vocal highpoint being the mad scene. Apart from her dazzling vocal accomplishments, Hannigan brought an astounding physicality to the role. The mad scene included somersaults and bodily contortions seemingly defying gravity, all underpinning the vocal fireworks. Gore was certainly up to these challenges. Her lithe physical presence fully inhabited the physicality of the role, and her voice has a velvety sweetness that considerably added to the pathos and vulnerability of the character. She met the required vocal pyrotechnics with great aplomb, and her performance demonstrated how two very different singers could make the role equally effective in performance.
Other new assumptions included Jud Arthur as the Ghost, the first Player, and the Gravedigger. John Tomlinson is a hard act to follow, but Arthur has a dark, powerful voice and a commanding stage presence. Laertes was sung with clear, fluent, and forthright tone by rising young tenor Samuel Sakker; his fight scene with Hamlet was most effective. Douglas McNicol’s Horatio was warm and sympathetic, more of a father figure than usual, but a dramatically effective foil to Clayton’s Hamlet.
Neil Armfield’s production transferred very effectively to this venue, once again demonstrating his deep understanding of the play. His vast experience directing opera as well
as a huge variety and range of theatre is evident in the diamond-sharp coherence of this production. Whatever limitations the new venue might pose, they were certainly not in evidence.
The musical reins were taken over by Nicholas Carter, following the great Vladimir Jurowski at Glyndebourne. Belying his youthful appearance, Carter revealed a deep affinity with and understanding of Dean’s music; he controlled the performance with confidence, brio, and maturity. The complexities of the score held no terrors for the superb Adelaide Symphony, effortlessly creating Dean’s unique sound world. Once more, James Crabb is the manic accordionist; it is difficult to imagine the opera without the distinct sound of the instrument. The Glyndebourne chorus, made up of some of the best young singers from all over the world, is a hard act to follow, but the Festival Chorus acquitted themselves with great credit, boosted by members of The Song Company, all under the expert direction of Brett Weymark.
In a panel discussion during the Festival, Dean made enticing reference to potential future productions in the United States and Germany. A DVD of the Glyndebourne production is due out in late 2018. All the winds seem set fair for Hamlet to become a welcome part of the current operatic repertoire, an exemplar of how Shakespeare can be successfully adapted. g
Hamlet was performed at the 2018 Adelaide Festival from 2 to 6 March 2018. Performance attended: 6 March. (Online: 8 March)
Michael Halliwell’s latest book is National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths reconsidered (2017).
Quote of the Month
‘The crowds don’t come to see subtle and sophisticated things; they come for the circus … At the Triennial … often in pairs or groups, the selfiehunters prowled, camera in hand, barely looking at the work but sizing each space up as a photographic location … It was a bit depressing to see toddlers led into such an environment by well-meaning but not overly mindful parents … Is this what these art binges are really for? It’s rather dispiriting to think that there are still two more to endure this year, the Adelaide Biennial and the Sydney Biennale.’
Christopher Allen reviewing the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial, Weekend Australian Review, 3–4 March 2018
Lorina Gore and Allan Clayton in Hamlet, performed at the 2018 Adelaide Festival (photograph by Tony Lewi)
Thyestes
by Ben Brooker
Ithink it was Peter Brook who said the longest that a staging of a play could remain vital was five years. The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, directed by Simon Stone and adapted from Seneca’s tragedy by Stone himself, Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, and Mark Winter, was first seen at the Malthouse Theatre in 2010 and then at Belvoir in 2012 . Notwithstanding a handful of updates to the text, this production feels like it belongs to a particular moment in time, appearing amid the largely confected furore around the proliferation of adapted classics on Australian stages. There is also something in its depiction of a certain kind of hypermasculinity that seems to date it to a specific period in Melbourne’s independent theatre scene, before the recent upsurge of queer work by Sisters Grimm and others. And yet this Thyestes remains viscerally alive: confronting and funny, a deeply compelling mix of the excessive and the ascetic, like the pared-back, shoulder-to-the-wheel rock and roll of a middle-period Bruce Springsteen album. (The Boss does not feature in Stefan Gregory’s raucous sound design, but Wu-Tang Clan, Queen, and Roy Orbison do.)
In Seneca’s play, a first century ce fabula crepidata, King Pelops, son of Tantalus, banishes his sons Thyestes and Atreus for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus. Following Pelops’s death, a struggle for the throne ensues which culminates in the brothers’ false reconciliation and, finally, Atreus’s notorious revenge against his usurping brother: the killing and dismemberment of Thyestes’ children, the bodies of whom are then served to their unwitting father. In Stone’s version, billed as ‘after Seneca’, these details are compressed into their bare essentials and flash up on LED displays between scenes – ‘moments between atrocities’, according to Simon Stone’s director’s note – a convention that liberatingly shears the text of exposition. Cannily, both halves of the play – the first tracking forwards in time, the second backwards – lead to the climactic banquet, here rendered as a kind of centrifugal force, flinging into view not only the inciting incident of Seneca’s play but also the brutalising history of the House of Tantalus, that is, the cycle of killings from the original myth that precede the murder of Chrysippus. In this way, Stone’s adaptation
is firmly located in the contemporary, both in its setting – a void-like though recognisably twenty-first-century set of domestic interiors – and its conceptualisation of violence as the dark fruit of intergenerational trauma.
One of the great strengths of this production is the way the audience is lured by the text’s demotic idiom, as well as the supremely naturalistic performances by Thomas Henning (Thyestes), Toby Schmitz (Atreus), and Chris Ryan (Chrysippus, and sundry characters, including all of the women), into a world that is more kitchen-sink-banal than classical-tragedy-heightened, a fact that makes the play’s periodic, dislocating eruptions of operatic extravagance all the more impactful. Stefan Gregory’s orchestral score drowns out the first words of the opening scene as though we might have tuned into the conversation between Thyestes, Atreus, and Chrysippus at any point. In their jeans, T-shirts, and hoodies, they drink wine and chat about Chrysippus’s latest fling, airports, and Guatemala City. Atreus, playing with his phone, apologises when a message alert interrupts the easy flow of talk.
The dialogue – matey and unaffected, and free from the kind of lyricism that gestures to a world beyond what we can see – draws our laughter because it is blackly funny, but also because its verisimilitude encloses us, discomforts us. Thus are the source material’s extremes of violence and cruelty (an influence on Titus Andronicus, the bloodiest of Shakespeare’s plays), configured not as items of distant curiosity but as phenomena, in every sense of the phrase, closer to home. Nothing could be less commonplace than cannibalism, but Stone lets us see the ordinary behind the extraordinary, the human within the inhuman. We understand on one level that the play, as in all mythologies, is bigger than itself, but that it is also the story of two brothers riven by familiar human follies – greed, lust, envy, and all the rest. By casting a man in the female roles – including the suicidal Pelopia, raped and impregnated by her father, Thyestes – Stone lays bare the suffering of individuals in a way that refuses the misogyny that all too often allows us to minimise women’s experiences of abuse.
And it is all so unflinching. The Romans made visible on the stage the violence the Greeks had euphemised with dialogue and gesture, but here Stone goes one step further – trapped in Claude Marcos’s box-like set, and flanked by an audience arranged in traverse, there seems not even the possibility that the actors can leave the stage. Our only relief comes when curtains on either side of the stage drop down between scenes, like two enormous eyes blinking or, perhaps, as the scenes contract into paroxysms of violence and horror, deliberately closing, afraid of what they might see and, in their seeing, reveal to us. g
Thyestes (The Hayloft Project) was performed at the Space Theatre from 2 to 7 March 2018 during the Adelaide Festival. Performance attended: 2 March. (Online: 5 March)
Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, and playwright.
Hilarie Mais
by Sophie Knezic
In a seminal essay titled ‘Grids’ (1978), the American art theorist Rosalind Krauss argued that, as a structure, the grid was emblematic of modernist ambition, encapsulating modernism’s streamlining project through the expunging of forms and conventions extraneous to it. The grid embodied a kind of will to silence, as well as an obvious antipathy to figuration and narrative in its pure rectilinearity and abstract form. Modernist artists like Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, and Ad Reinhardt dedicated their careers to ever-refining interrogations of the grid. Later postwar Minimalist and Conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt would re-inflect these investigations of the grid, imbuing it with a critical edge.
British-born Australian artist Hilarie Mais has also oriented her art practice to the exploration of the grid. Her rectilinear objects – part-painting, part-sculpture –situate themselves firmly in this lineage, drawing deeply from the vein of modernist geometric abstraction. In many ways, her varied objects span the spectrum marked out by the aforementioned artists, demonstrating the vanguard grid’s capacity for rigour and restraint as well as its more irrepressibly vibrant tendencies.
A comprehensive survey exhibition curated by Blair French and Manya Sellers, organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), and currently showing at TarraWarrra Museum of Art, showcases Mais’s practice. The works, ranging from 2006 to 2017, convey the artist’s sensibility, themes, and methods. Collectively, they demonstrate Mais’s cogency of vision and consistency of approach, which recurringly alights on the format of the grid.
Most of Mais’s objects are three-dimensional lattice grids produced through the superimposition of lengths of wood, painted with oil or synthetic polymer paint. Works like The Grid (1987), Effigy (1996–98), and Rotation No. 3 (Effigy) (2007) epitomise the austere end of grid’s topography, with their muted pewter colouring indicative of hard metal surfaces and industrial architecture; in particular, doorways, gates, and thresholds. Other works such as Rain (2000–01), Shimmer (2000), and Reflection Blue Angel (2007–11) substitute mineral hues for the vivacity of cobalt and aquamarine blues.
Through her technique of layering wood and her attunement to the dynamism created through colour contrasts, Mais animates the vernacular of the grid with a sense of material life. Not least because they are made from wood, her pieces often resemble shoji screens, connoting traditional Japanese interior architecture or the serene environments of Japanese temple gardens. Elsewhere, in spite of their rectangularity, the structures suggest the intricacy of organic forms like spiders’ webs and birds’ nests.
Mais’s recent Mist series (Mist I–III [2010–12])
shakes the grid structures out of their squared geometry and refashions them with angled lines that complexify their form. The title of this series clearly invokes vaporous atmospheric effects and the works do conjure a sense of optical haze; not just the translucence of mist but also the dappling impressions of light through foliage. In this regard, her works are indebted to Agnes Martin, the American postwar artist who also built a practice focused entirely on the exploration of grids, but who, through the beguiling fragility of her hand-drawn lines and exquisitely delicate washes of paint, voided the grid of its masculinist biases to reveal it as an understated, almost breathing, structure. Works by Martin such as Night Sea and Flower in the Wind (both 1963) are exemplars of the way in which grids can unexpectedly produce diaphanous optical effects.
The influence of Martin is most obvious in Mais’s white works, Feather (2017) and Broken Ghost (2016). Because of the open weave of their structure, the whiteness of the painted wood corresponds to the whiteness of the gallery walls against which they rest, blurring the delineations of the material form as it merges with its architectural support. Like Martin’s paintings, these works produce different visual effects, depending on the distance at which they are viewed. Close up, the wood grain is visible, along with the irregularities of the hand-painted surfaces (divulging themselves as subtly coloured rather than pure white). At a further distance, the pattern of lines and cross-lines starts to operate like a mesh – a dematerialising structure that appears to vibrate and shimmer.
In her essay on grids, Krauss proposed that the structure could operate in a centrifugal or centripetal manner. The former, as an extensive movement, implied that the grid stretched in all directions towards infinity, hinting that the artwork was a mere fragment cut from an infinite whole. The latter, as a centring movement, conversely introjected the world into the interior of the artwork, making it a representation of everything beyond its frame. Two of Mais’s most subtly commanding works, reflection/ reach (2015) and reflection/feather (2016), function in precisely this centripetal way; through obliquely referencing the death of the artist’s long-time partner in 2014. Both were born on the seventeenth of the month, making seventeen, in the artist’s words, their special number. Both reflection/reach and reflection/feather are composed of two conjoined grids which follow a mathematical progression of the number seventeen, turning the works into double portraits. For all its geometric ordering and anti-mimetic abstraction, Mais affirms the grid as a structure nonetheless able to impart something affective and profound. g
The Hilarie Mais exhibition continues at the TarraWarra Museum of Art until 29 April 2018. The exhibition catalogue, Hilarie Mais ($49.95 hb), can be purchased at the Museum of Contemporary Art website. (Online: 5 March)
Sophie Knezic is a Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian School of Arts.
Antony and Cleopatra
by Susan Lever
Antony and Cleopatra (first performed circa 1607) is one of Shakespeare’s most poetic plays, full of imagery of exotic Egypt with its crocodiles and serpents, its River Nile and, of course, Enobarbus’s extravagant speech describing Antony’s first sighting of its queen. It also has one of the strongest and most demanding parts for a woman to play: Cleopatra, with her emotional storms and teasing wit, ‘her infinite variety’ of moods.
Last year, Bell Shakespeare presented two brilliant productions – Richard 3 and The Merchant of Venice –building anticipation for its new season. Perhaps resting a little on his laurels, director Peter Evans has decided to give Antony and Cleopatra a similar treatment to Richard III, with a single contemporary set and actors in modern dress. There is no attempt to depict Alexandria or Rome, nor any suggestion of an ancient world. Instead, the audience is confronted with an oval stage area surrounded by two sets of transparent muslin curtains. We seem to be looking into one of those bland hotel function rooms where everything is grey or beige, with the odd pinkish highlight. A middle-aged couple embraces on a lounge chair, perhaps conducting one of those dismal hotel room affairs. They are Antony and Cleopatra. They speak of their love, and the curtains are drawn back so that the audience can see their faces and the colourless world they live in.
McClements’s Cleopatra adopts the nasal intonations of a moody housewife. It is only when Gareth Reeves enters as Octavius that we begin to hear the modulation and excitement of Shakespeare’s text. Ray Chong Nee as Enobarbus joins him in lifting the play from its hotel doldrums by delivering the famous speech with full flourish.
Some ideas work. The setting of Pompey’s reconciliation party on the central oval rostrum, with the inner curtains drawn, suggests the isolation and potential dangers of life on a ship, but it is difficult for Lucy Goleby, playing Pompey as a woman, to manage the sense of equal power in drinking camaraderie with the men. There are moments when McClements gets up from an armchair and appears almost regal.
The scenes where the Romans discuss the couple have the most life in them because that is when the play tells us about Antony and Cleopatra’s legendary pasts, with Octavius marvelling at Antony’s self-discipline as he endured near-starvation after battle (drinking horse urine, eating bark) and various Roman men fantasising about Cleopatra. To the Romans they are living embodiments of the rival masculine and feminine powers represented by Mars and Venus. Antony, though, has abandoned his masculine code for the soft life among the lounge chairs. Cleopatra remains true to her feminine wiles, though she overreaches in her final ploy in deceiving Antony.
Everyone wears suits, apart from a few women who make up for it with dangerously high heels. Are these the people who run the world, or merely the slaves of some dreary office culture? Evans suggests the former. As the helpful projections on the curtains tell us, these people rule the whole Roman world as a triumvirate that is in the process of splitting apart. The woman lolling on the beige armchair in her dishevelled black suit is Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt.
It is asking much of actors to carry the energy of such a long play against such an unforgiving set and unimaginative costumes, though Antony and Cleopatra is such a great play that clear delivery of its lines might be enough to keep an audience engaged. Johnny Carr’s Antony speaks in a slightly muffled style that might just get by in a city boardroom, though his bushranger beard would be out of place there and in ancient Rome. Catherine
As Octavius’s forces encroach in the last scenes of the play, the production seems to abandon it completely as rock music blasts out, the lighting turns red, and the players all bounce around to the music. It hastens its way through Antony’s ignoble suicide, then staggers on to the scene where Cleopatra and her servants tease the clown who brings her the asp.
Evans assures us in his program notes that Shakespeare’s characters are ‘just like us’, though the play insists that they are bigger than us – more heroic, more seductive, with a greater appetite for life, and a lot further to fall. Evans’s production seems intent on bringing them down to our size. But who can care about the fate of a powerful man who succumbs to the sensual pleasures of a love affair? Nowadays, that story has become banal. g
Antony and Cleopatra (Bell Shakespeare), directed by Peter Evans, continues at the Sydney Opera House until 7 April 2018, and will be performed at the Canberra Theatre Centre 12–21 April and at the Arts Centre Melbourne 26 April–13 May. Performance attended: 8 March. (Online: 13 March 2018)
Susan Lever is completing a book on Australian television dramatists. She first wrote for ABR in 1985.
Catherine McClements, Johnny Carr, and Zindzi Okenyo in Antony and Cleopatra (photograph by Heidrun Lohr)
Sarah Sentilles
Why do you write?
I write to make sense of the world – or at least to ask better questions – and because words are powerful, transformative tools that can help bring into being a more just and life-giving world.
Are you a vivid dreamer? Yes.
Where are you happiest?
At the end of a long hike, looking at a gorgeous alpine view, listening to a river, smelling wildflowers – and then finding out my husband packed cold beers for us in his daypack.
What is your favourite film?
I have three favourites: Moonlight, Waiting for Guffman, and Amélie.
And your favourite book?
Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A close second right now is Ariella Azoulay’s book, The Civil Contract of Photography.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine
Jesus (I have a lot of questions for him, and I’d like to know what he thinks about how his name gets thrown around and put to use); Desmond Tutu; and Samantha Bee.
Which word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see back in public usage.
I don’t like the word ‘utilise’. I wish ‘accountability’ were back in public usage – and back in public practice.
Who is your favourite author?
I always freeze up when asked this question. Every book I’ve ever loved and read and reread vanishes from my head. I love Kent Haruf, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Louise Erdrich. And I’m sure my true favourite will come to mind as soon as this goes to press.
And your favourite literary hero and heroine?
I love Nao’s great-grandmother Jiko Yasutani in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Imagination. The unexpected use of language that appears effortless. Showing up at the desk every day and writing.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. By vice versa do you mean someone who once admired me and now no longer does? You’d have to ask around.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Distraction. I sometimes give my creativity away worrying about the news. I have a habit of letting other voices determine where my attention goes.
How do you regard publishers?
With gratitude.
What do you think of the state of criticism? Good criticism can make us all better writers – and point readers’ attention in new directions that they may have missed otherwise.
And writers’ festivals?
A thrill!
Are artists valued in our society?
They should be. We know the power of images to make people act (just think about pornography and advertisements and propaganda), so we might as well turn that power toward repair. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry calls the art we make – the cup, the house, the sentence, the painting – ‘fragments of world alteration’. Artists remind us it’s possible to remake the world.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a creative non-fiction project about adoption, belonging, and caring for the stranger. I’m exploring how the narrow construction of nuclear family may have limited the possibilities for what it means to be related to another being. I want to expand what counts as ‘kin’. I’ve been thinking about relationships between ‘strangers’ – the moon and the ocean, for example, or refugees and those who welcome them, or moss and tree bark. What if kinship is a practice that doesn’t depend on blood or likeness, but instead depends on one body’s willingness to take care of another body?
Sarah Sentilles is a writer, critical theorist, scholar of religion, and author of many books including Draw Your Weapons (Text Publishing, 2017). She completed her undergraduate degree at Yale and both a Masters and a Doctorate at Harvard.
