Australian Book Review - January-February 2017, no. 388

Entries are now open for the

2017 ABR Elizabeth

Jolley Short Story Prize

The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of Australia’s leading prizes for an original short story. It honours the work of the great 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

The closing date is 10 April 2017

‘Winning the Jolley Prize after being overseas for several years was an immensely bolstering welcome back – all the more so for the honour it pays to one of the most influential and tenacious forces in Australian literature.’

Josephine Rowe, 2016 winner

Full details and online entry are available on our website

www.australianbookreview.com.au

The Jolley Prize is supported by Mr Ian Dickson.

The Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – one of the country’s major short story prizes – is once again open. Generous support from ABR Patron Ian Dickson has enabled us to maintain the total prize money at $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $7,000. The runner-up receives $2,000, the third-placed author $1,000. In addition, there will be three commendations.

The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2017 issue; and the three commended stories will appear later. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony, to be followed by a jolly good party.

As with our other literary prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). The 2015 Jolley Prize was won by Rob Magnuson Smith, who is based in the United Kingdom. Josephine Rowe won in 2016.

It is simple to enter. This year we’re also making it more attractive to enter. Current ABR subscribers can do so at the concessional rate ($15 per story). Students at high schools and universities can now enter all our prizes at the concessional rate. New subscribers to ABR Online (which costs $50) can enter their first story free of charge.

Non-subscribers pay $25 per story.

This year they will receive ABR Online free of charge for three months –beguiling reading as they await their next short story.

See our website for more details. Writers have until 10 April to enter.

Vale Shirley hazzard

As we were going to press, we learned of the death of Shirley Hazzard, one of the finest novelists and prose stylists Australia has produced.

Aged eighty-five, she died in New York, where (when not in Europe) she lived for decades with her husband, the late Francis Steegmuller, the great Flaubertian.

Hazzard’s relatively small, choice body of work – five novels, two short story collections, some non-fiction –places her in the pantheon of great Australia writers. Her first book, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963), is a classic of the genre, and many critics would rate The Transit of Venus (1980) as one of the finest novels to be produced by an Australian (Hazzard moved to the United States in 1951 and later became a US citizen). Her next and last novel, The Great Fire (2003), won the National Book Award and the Miles Franklin Award.

We will publish an appreciation of this supremely stylish Jamesian novelist in a coming issue.

inauguraTion BlueS

So it has come to this! On 20 January (a day that may well live in infamy), Donald John Trump – that serial bankrupt and television bully, that vilifier of women and union workers, that bilious flayer of opponents and the press, that admirer of Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbayev and their ilk – will be sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States. (We liked the New Yorker cartoon about setting the alarm clock for 2020, though worse might follow Trump.)

Advances wishes it could report that Philip Roth – America’s great moralist and scold – has come out of retirement to write a sequel to his apt and terrifying novel The Plot Against America (2004).

FellowShiPS galore

Last month we introduced our newest Fellowship: the ABR Gender Fellowship, which is worth $7,500. Interested writers, scholars, and commentators have until 1 February to apply. We are looking for proposals for a substantial article on gender in contemporary Australian creative writing in all its forms. This Fellowship is funded by ABR Patron and long-time Board member Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO, a former Vice[Advances continues on page 5]

Australian Book Review

January–February 2017, no. 388

Since 1961

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Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

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January–February 2017 Contents

Klaus Neumann

Suzy Freeman-Greene

Angelo Loukakis

Gabriel García Ochoa

Ann-Marie Priest

Jill Burton

Evelyn Juers

Felicity Plunkett

Letters

Geoffrey Wells, Jacki Weaver, Eleanor Windsor, Andrew Fuhrmann

Australian History

Mark McKenna: From the Edge Michael Winkler

Biography

Maggie Black: Up Came a Squatter John Arnold

Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield: Dr James Barry James Dunk

Politics

Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen: The Turnbull Gamble Lucas Grainger-Brown

Fiction

Charlotte Wood (ed.): The Best Australian Stories 2016

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Ali Smith: Autumn Shannon Burns

Josephine Wilson: Extinctions Gillian Dooley

Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman: The Transmigration of Bodies and Signs Preceding the End of the World

Gabriel García Ochoa

Peter Boyle: Ghostspeaking Kevin Brophy

Gretchen Shirm: Where the Light Falls Josephine Taylor

David Whish-Wilson: Old Scores Dean Biron

Melissa Ashley: The Birdman’s Wife Anna MacDonald

Heather Rose: The Museum of Modern Love

Duncan Fardon

Arts Update

A History of the World in 100 Objects and Versailles

Christopher Menz

The Crown James McNamara

Der Ring des Nibelungen Peter Rose A United Kingdom Anwen Crawford

Dance

Simon Morrison: Bolshoi Confidential Lee Christofis

Three new books on 'forced migration'

Susan Faludi’s surprise

Don Watson’s imaginative tour Letter from Mexico

The young Katherine Mansfield

Cynthia Nolan – troubled muse

Thomas Mann’s tempestuous son States of Poetry – Queensland

Music

Roger Neill: Divas John Rickard

Opera

Roger Scruton: The Ring of Truth Tim Byrne

Science

Alan Schwarz: ADHD Nation Nick Haslam

History

Frank Trentmann: Empire of Things Benjamin Madden

A.C. Grayling: The Age of Genius Kristian Camilleri

Military History

Karl James: Double Diamonds Kevin Foster

Publisher of the Month

Michael Heyward

Norway

Paul Cleary: Trillion Dollar Baby Adrian Walsh

Essays

Siri Hustvedt: A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

Jennifer Levasseur

Poetry

J.H. Crone: Our Lady of the Fence Post

Bruce Dawe: Border Security

Alan Loney: Melbourne Journal

David McCooey Star Struck Peter Kenneally

Memoir

Catherine de Saint Phalle: Poum and Alexandre Kate Ryan

Cathy McLennan: Saltwater Sue Bond

Cricket

Brian Matthews: Benaud Varun Ghosh Open Page

Kim Mahood

THANKING OUR PARTNERS

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, and our new partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Sydney Ideas

Chancellor of Flinders University. We now have two other Fellowships on offer, each worth $7,500. Applications close on 10 March.

The ABR Eucalypt Fellowship (formerly the ABR Dahl Fellowship) is presented for the third time, with support from Eucalypt Australia and ABR Patrons. Proposals are sought for an article on the Australian eucalypt in all its forms, with reference to literature, science and natural history, Indigenous subjects, history, the arts, or politics. This Fellowship article will appear in our annual Environment issue later this year.

The ABR RAFT Fellowship is offered for the second time (historian Alan Atkinson inaugurated it with a memorable essay on the national conscience in our September 2016 issue). We welcome proposals for an article on any aspect of the role and significance of religion in society and culture. This Fellowship is funded by the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust.

Those thinking of applying are always encouraged to email Peter Rose first, with an outline of their proposed article: editor@australianbookreview. com.au.

Vale anne deveSon and georgia Blain

Journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker Anne Deveson and her novelist daughter, Georgia Blain, both died in December, within days of each other. Blain had been diagnosed with brain cancer the previous year.

Anne Deveson had a long career as a journalist, first in London, later in Australia, with the ABC. She was also an influential radio presenter at 2GB. Her memoir Tell Me I’m Here (1991), chronicled her son’s struggles with schizophrenia. Her documentary film Spinning Out (1991) examined the illness in relation to its effect on family members.

Last month, in our Books of the Year feature Georgia Blain’s final novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, 2016), was nominated in ABR’s 2016 ‘Books of the Year’ and ‘Publisher Picks’ features by James Bradley, Fiona Wright, and Jane Palfreyman.

Letters

Tissues on the sofa

Dear Editor,

I’m pleased that Peter Craven found so much to enjoy in The Boy behind the Curtain (ABR, December 2016). Winton always writes good – though somewhat deliberate, even mannered – prose. But in my view his work has become a kind of sacred cow in this country: no one seems willing to write a critical review of it. Craven’s is a case in point, fawning to a fault.

There are some good things about the book, as your reviewer says; but there are problematic areas, too, and Craven is reluctant to identify them. This is a memoir: you expect it to be personal. But it is far too emotionally indulgent. Winton, in this book and in others, wallows. Even his political commitments rarely go beyond his own outrage and sadness. Emotional intelligence is valuable, and Winton has that, but it needs to be connected to other kinds of intelligence and to seek deeply informed insight beyond the borders of the author’s personal feelings – with which Winton is obsessed. He avoids the complexities of contemporary Aboriginal issues, and seems to have made even less effort to educate himself about them. The same is true of environmental issues. It’s a pity he didn’t take more seriously the work of Peter Matthiessen, who really did write in this integrated, informed way. Here it is all navigated from inside the Winton universe of feeling. It’s all very comfortable, but in the end it requires little engagement from the reader beyond tissues on the sofa.

Is this why Australian readers love Tim Winton? Perhaps we don’t do well, as a people, when we have to think and question and learn.

Geoffrey Wells (online comment)

Russian accents

Dear Editor, Andrew Fuhrmann is mistaken when he says ‘the much lauded 2011 Sydney Theatre Company production of Uncle Vanya with Cate Blanchett was done with Russian accents’ (Arts Update, November 2016). I know this to be quite

untrue because I was in it. At the insistence of the Hungarian director Tamás Ascher, we actors used various Australian accents, depending on our characters’ station in life, ranging from broad and rustic, to middlebrow and educated, to downright posh, rather like a typical cross-section of accents one can hear any day in Australia. What’s more, American audiences seem to have no problem listening to an Australian accent; some even profess to enjoy it.

Jacki Weaver (online comment)

Freaks and oddballs

Dear Editor,

That’s rather naughty of Red Stitch to change words in a translation they are using. Did they obtain written permission from the translator’s agent to do this? I doubt it. Many Australian theatre companies are not abiding by the rules and contracts that are clearly stipulated by playwrights and translators alike: that is, not to change a word in the script. If Red Stitch didn’t get permission to change ‘freaks’ to ‘oddballs’, the company should be ashamed of itself. After all, Annie Baker is the translator, not Nadia Tass (or anyone else).

Eleanor Windsor (online comment)

Andrew Fuhrmann replies:

Many thanks to Jacki Weaver for correcting the not-so-small matter of the accents used in the STC’s production of Uncle Vanya during their tour of the United States. Alas, I can no longer remember where I picked up this (in hindsight) absurd misconception. I’m pleased to be corrected by such an incontrovertible authority, but vexed that I didn’t check it myself.

Regarding the translation: for what it’s worth, I do think that ‘oddball’ worked well enough in this production. It’s a colloquial Americanism, so it fits in with the rest of the translation. There’s a discussion of the relative merits of ‘creep’ and ‘oddball’ on page seven of the program of the Round House Theatre’s 2015 production (https://issuu.com/roundhousetheatre/ docs/vanya_program_150401a).

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Who are

we keeping out?

Three new books on 'forced migration'

Klaus Neumann

Three years ago, Australia was supposedly being overrun by asylum seekers arriving by boat. The situation was considered grave and dominated public debate and the government’s agenda for months. An alternative government was elected on the promise to ‘stop the boats’. In 2015, Europe was said to be in the grip of a refugee crisis. ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change,’ said the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees, AntÓnio Guterres, in June 2015, ‘an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before.’

The scale of human displacement is mind-boggling. At the last count, more than sixty-five million people worldwide have been forced from their homes. About a third of them have been classified as refugees. But the size of displacement, in either absolute or relative terms, is not unprecedented. And while in recent years countries such as Lebanon and Jordan have indeed experienced a refugee crisis, the European Union, with a total population of half a billion people, ought to have been easily able to cope with the arrival of a million asylum seekers in one year.

Australia’s presumed predicament also ought to be put into perspective: the total number of asylum seekers and refugees who arrived in 2013 either by boat or through the country’s humanitarian program was less than half of that of refugees resettled in 1949, when Australia’s population was a third of the size of today’s.

While references to an unprecedented crisis abound in public debate, contributors to such debate also tend to assume that the context within which such movements occur, has remained the same: that nation-states, borders, and the controls that prevent the entry of unwanted aliens are somehow natural.

The last few years have seen the publication of a plethora of books analysing forced migration, and the response to refugees and asylum seekers in countries of the global North. William Maley’s What Is a Refugee? (Scribe, $29.99 pb, 285 pp, 9781925321869) is among the best informed and most wide-ranging of these books. He debunks many myths about refugees and

asylum seekers. Not only does he show that ‘refugees are products of the system of states’; he also demonstrates that the pedigree of national sovereignty as we know it today reaches back only as far as the seventeenth century, and that it was only for the past one hundred years or so that states required migrants to produce passports and visas and thereby controlled access to their territories.

Answers to the question, ‘What is a refugee?’ are comparatively straightforward: a refugee is somebody who is commonly labelled as such, and/or meets certain criteria, such as those laid down in Article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention. Perhaps the more interesting and challenging question is: What are the people who are to be kept out, be it by Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders, by a problematic deal between the leaders of the European Union and the autocratic ruler of Turkey, or by the wall that Donald Trump wants to build? As anybody familiar with refugee status determination procedures would know, it is difficult neatly to distinguish refugees from other migrants, even if the criteria of the 1951 Convention were the only yardstick.

However, Maley’s book is far more than an answer to the question, ‘What is a refugee?’ He explores the historical origins of today’s global refugee regime, discusses the root causes and enabling factors of mass displacement, and explains why refugees are the outcome of a political order based on territorially bounded nationstates. He illustrates his argument with examples from around the world, but keeps returning to the situation in Afghanistan, with which he is particularly familiar. His book also draws extensively on the Australian case. While it aims to provide a global picture, it is also an impassioned appeal for an end to the Australian government’s punitive policies and its ‘indifference to the basic principles of the rule of law’.

The inherently violent border regime that allows one part of the world to jealously guard its privileges is the subject of Reece Jones’s book, Violent Borders: Refugees and the right to move (Verso, $34.99 hb, 221 pp, 9781784784713), which I found to be the most readable of the three reviewed here. Violence

Victory Lap

Mozart & Haydn in the City

Mozart and Haydn make the perfect pair in this concert showcasing

Andrey Gugnin, winner of the 2016 Sydney International Piano Competition.

MOZART Piano Concerto No.12 in A, K414

HAYDN Symphony No.68

Toby Thatcher conductor / Andrey Gugnin piano (pictured)

THU 2 FEB 7PM FRI 3 FEB 11AM

City Recital Hall complimentary morning tea from 10am

Maxim Vengerov plays Brahms Tchaikovsky 5

Brahms’s Violin Concerto is an undisputed masterpiece and is the perfect vehicle for Maxim Vengerov’s long-awaited return to the SSO. Then Chief Conductor

David Robertson conducts Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5.

BRAHMS Violin Concerto

TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.5

David Robertson conductor / Maxim Vengerov violin (pictured)

SPECIAL EVENT

PREMIER PARTNER CREDIT SUISSE

FRI 17 FEB 8PM SAT 18 FEB 8PM

Music under the Moon Lantern Festival Celebration

Tan Dun is at the helm for a musically and visually rich exploration of the oral traditions of Nu Shu. An evening of spectacle, drama and colour to celebrate the end of Chinese New Year.

GUAN XIA A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix

BARTÓK The Miraculous Mandarin: Suite

TAN DUN Nu Shu – The Secret Songs of Women

LI HUANZHI Spring Festival Overture

Tan Dun conductor / Liu Wenwen suona / Louise Johnson harp

SUPPORTING PARTNER

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY CONFUCIUS INSTITUTE

SAT 11 FEB 8PM

Also see Daniil Trifonov in Recital –Mon 6 Mar, City Recital Hall

Young Russians Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.1

Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, written in the closing years of the Russian empire, frames a glistening, Chopin-esque slow movement with virtuoso fireworks. Rising star Daniil Trifonov makes his SSO debut.

PROKOFIEV Classical Symphony

RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No.1

SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No.1

Gustavo Gimeno conductor / Daniil Trifonov piano (pictured)

APT MASTER SERIES

WED 1 MAR 8PM FRI 3 MAR 8PM SAT 4 MAR 8PM

accompanies nation-states’ attempts to defend their borders against presumed intruders. For example, between 2000 and 2015, India’s Border Security Force killed more than one thousand civilians along the border between India and Bangladesh.

The regime is violent also because efforts to make borders impenetrable force people to embark on lifethreatening journeys. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), in the first eleven months of 2016 at least 4,699 migrants died while trying to cross the Mediterranean alone. There were presumably many more deaths that have not been accounted for. Australia’s offshore gulags in Nauru and on Manus Island are also part of this violent border regime. (Australian readers may be irritated by the fact that Jones has a rather sketchy knowledge of Australia’s policies and practices.)

The European Union ought to have been easily able to cope with the arrival of a million asylum seekers in one year

According to Jones, border-related violence that targets migrants is only the latest instalment ‘in a longterm conflict between states and rulers … and people who move in order to gain new opportunities or leave repressive conditions’. While the historical evidence provided by Jones is impressive, his argument omits the fact that the policies of ‘states and rulers’ enjoy widespread popular support in the countries of the global North, particularly in recent years. If the United States were indeed to build a wall at its southern border, it would be able to do so because American voters gave their new president a mandate for it.

Ifound Borderlands: Towards an anthropology of the cosmopolitan condition (Polity, $35.95 pb, 195 pp, 9780745696805, translated by David Fernbach), French anthropologist Michel Agier’s book about borders, in-between spaces, identity, and what he calls cosmopolitism, less inspiring. While it is on the one hand an incredibly rich essay which prompts reflection on important broader issues, it is also a frustrating read: disjointed, fragmentary, and enigmatic. This may be the result of a translation that often seems too literal, and resorts to neologisms and the frequent use of scare quotes. Agier’s text is also less useful for somebody interested in forced migration because it is essentially about the dilemmas of anthropology. Since the 1980s, anthropologists, more so than other scholars in the humanities and social sciences, have repeatedly diagnosed a crisis of their discipline. Their writing has often been informed by an angst, as if they feared to become compromised, or implicated in what they set out to criticise.

Violent Borders and What Is a Refugee? betray the

disciplinary backgrounds of their authors. Jones is interested in demarcations that curtail human movement, as a political geographer. Maley, a professor of diplomacy at the Australian National University, devotes separate chapters to ‘diplomacy and refugees’ and to humanitarian intervention, which don’t seem essential for his overall argument.

In conclusion, Maley writes: ‘The principal message of the book … is that refugees are human, just like us. The problem is that all too often, we fail to treat them as human.’ This claim raises three issues. First, if refugees are ‘just like us’, there is no need to exclude ‘them’ from ‘our’ conversation. Second, refugees and non-refugees may have more in common than their humanity. A former head of Australia’s immigration department once wrote: ‘It is sobering to consider how easily today’s well-established and confident citizen can, by the overnight imposition of an unacceptable political and economic regimen, become tomorrow’s refugee.’ Finally, notwithstanding the fact that refugees do not comprise some kind of exotic species who warrant ‘our’ gaze, it is useful to pay close attention to different groups of actors, including irregular migrants, but also, for example, members of the security forces who are tasked with preventing refugees from reaching the global North.

This is where anthropologists often come in. Agier’s book opens with an ethnographic vignette. He describes a group of young Afghans encamped at a Greek port who try to cling to trucks that could take them on to a ferry to Italy. Their attempts to move on are regularly foiled by the police. The cat-and-mouse game involving migrants, the police, and truck drivers is observed from a safe distance by middle-class Greeks (who witness the scene through the plate-glass window of a fitness studio) – and by a surprisingly disengaged anthropologist.

Anthropologists could supplement the analyses of scholars such as Maley and Jones. While the latter can tell us what a refugee is and what borders are, anthropologists could tell us not only who the young Afghans are, but also provide detailed ethnographic portraits of the locals in the fitness studio, the police, and the truck drivers: their aspirations and fears, and their relationship with the outside world. Anthropological accounts could highlight the fact that refugees are also political subjects, who are not only the beneficiaries of compassion but who often claim rights.

Whatever their disciplinary background, those writing about borders and migration ought to tackle longheld assumptions: about the supposed crises precipitated by refugee movements and the alleged timelessness of nation-states and borders. Maley and Jones do that particularly well. g

Klaus Neumann has written widely on issues of human rights and forced migration. His latest book, Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees: a history (2015), recently won the CHASS Australia Prize.

Advantages

Suzy Freeman-Greene

IN THE DARKROOM

by Susan Faludi

William Collins

$32.99 pb, 417 pp, 9780008193508

The subject line of the email –from a father in Budapest to his daughter in Oregon – is ‘Changes’. ‘I’ve got some interesting news for you,’ writes Steven. ‘I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.’ Thus Susan Faludi, an author known for her books on feminism and the collapse of traditional masculinity, learns that her father has undergone sex reassignment surgery in Thailand. At seventy-six, Steven has become Stefánie. Faludi has barely spoken to her father in twenty-five years. She remembers him as an ‘imperious patriarch’ with a taste for violence, who cultivated the persona of a rugged outdoorsman when not tinkering in his basement workshop. But this email is so startling that she soon boards a plane to Budapest, with notebook in hand. When they hug at the airport, Stefánie’s breasts poke into Susan’s. As they walk to the car park, people stare at ‘the dissonance between white heels and male-pattern baldness’. Back at Stefánie’s fortress-like home in the hills of Buda, they begin the strained process of becoming reacquainted. And Faludi, a superb reporter and researcher, begins a quest to decode her father’s many riddles that will eventually span ten years.

A Hungarian Jew born into a wealthy, cosmopolitan family, Steven survived World War II by hiding out and passing as a gentile. Nearly half a million Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust; Steven lost twelve of his relatives. After the war, he moved to the United States, adopting a new identity as a suburban family man who ‘aggressively celebrated Christmas and Easter’. Estranged from his parents, he rarely acknowledged his Jewish upbringing. When Susan was seventeen, her parents split up. Her mother took out

a restraining order against Steven; one night, he broke into their home and stabbed her lover repeatedly with a Swiss army knife. After convincing the authorities that he was ‘saving’ the family from a trespasser, he escaped serious punishment. Steven moved to Manhattan, where he ran a commercial photo studio, then returned to Hungary after the fall of communism. It was there he began dressing as a woman.

In the Darkroom blends memoir and reportage with historical forays into subjects as diverse as the origin of the term ‘identity’ and the creation of the modern Hungarian state. It is a deeply serious book, but hilarious, too. Much of the humour comes at the author’s expense, as the noted feminist grapples with a father turned happy hausfrau. Stefánie’s favourite attire at home is a crimson bathrobe with angel-wing sleeves, which always seems to be falling open. She barges into her daughter’s room to show off a skimpy new negligee and is constantly demanding sartorial advice. ‘You write about the disadvantages of being a woman,’ she tells Faludi, author of Backlash: The undeclared war against women (1991). ‘But I’ve only found advantages.’

Stefánie is one of the most vivid, infuriating characters I have encountered on for some time. A proud Hungarian nationalist, she brushes off questions about her Jewish heritage. Although she cultivates the persona of a respectable matron (style-conscious, with a fondness for sachertorte and pearl earrings), she is the same bossy patriarch underneath. I felt sickened when I read of her past violence towards her family, but I admired Faludi’s complete absence of selfpity when describing the events of her childhood. ‘I became an agitator for women’s equality,’ she calmly tells us, ‘in response to my father’s fury over his own crumbling sense of himself as a man in command of his wife and children.’

Faludi researches the history of male-to-female surgery and interviews members of the Hungarian Tranny Club (including Lorelei, a retired police officer who owns a copy of Mein Kampf). She reflects on Hungarian nationalism, with its virulent strain of anti-Semitism, and the particular blend of ‘self-pity and

brutality’ that characterises Hungarians’ view of themselves as the ‘losers of history’. In doing so, she connects her father’s new identity to the social forces that shaped him. We begin to see the importance of clothes in Steven’s life. As a teenager, during the war, he briefly got around in grey overalls, impersonating a Luftwaffe mechanic. He later mounted an audacious rescue mission in a so-called ‘protected house’ for Jews while dressed as a young fascist.

At the centre of all Faludi’s investigations is a burning question: what prompted Steven to become Stefánie so late in life? Did he cross-dress while married? Does his desire for acceptance as a woman relate to his having felt rejected by his parents as a boy? Has he spent his whole life trying on identities? Is he happiest when acting a role?

In the Darkroom brims with wonderful scenes. One of the best describes Faludi’s attempt to interview Stefánie’s gynaecologist about her father’s new body. As she sits there, notebook in hand, the doctor and his patient talk animatedly in Hungarian. Then the gynaecologist asks Faludi, ‘Have you tried fertility treatments?’ The pair, it transpires, have been discussing the ‘problem’ of this forty-nine-year-old feminist, who is childless by choice.

By the end, though, it is clear that Faludi’s most touching achievement is the completeness of her portrait of her exasperating father. For Stefánie, it turns out, is a survivor of heroic proportions – a brave, stubborn shape-shifter in pearl earrings. g

Suzy Freeman-Greene is the arts and culture editor of The Conversation. ❖

Watson’s panoply

An imaginative route through history

Angelo Loukakis

A SINGLE TREE: VOICES FROM THE BUSH compiled by Don Watson

Hamish Hamilton, $45 hb, 416 pp, 9781926428819

In The Bush (2014), Don Watson explored notions of what that most variegated of terms, ‘the bush’, meant to earlier generations, including his own family. In A Single Tree, he presents extracts from writings of all kinds for what he calls ‘a fragmentary history of humans in the Australian bush’. He takes as given the diverse applications of the word ‘bush’ over time and chooses pieces that give expression to a multiplicity of feelings, words, and thoughts around aspects of Australian place.

The urge to assign meaning to the natural world beneath our feet or in the distance is abiding and universal, and the work has been pursued on Terra Australis as elsewhere on the planet. For Australia’s British conquerors in the nineteenth century, the job was never going to be easy. Before any possibility of harnessing the continent to their various needs, a first difficulty lay in simply comprehending what it was they were seeing, so different was the scene to back home.

With a lack of free-flowing rivers and fertile expanses, it soon became evident that Australia was not another America. The poet Charles Olson once wrote that the defining fact of ‘man in America’ was space, but such space as North American colonists knew and could voyage around was never the kind that white folk encountered in Australia. And yet Australian space also came to be appropriated by a growing non-Indigenous population that would eventually layer and invest this land with unique, local meanings and attachments of its own.

Watson, in The Bush, suggested that by the second half of the nineteenth century any perception of the bush as a kind

of Australian wilderness was already a thing ‘of the past’, representing perhaps no more than ‘an early form of theme park’. If that earlier sense carried stray Romantic connotations, they did not last long. Those who had created farms and homesteads, who had tree-felled and cultivated for pasture or agriculture, would stop seeing themselves as living amid untamed nature as soon as material success allowed. But such control as colonists and settlers had achieved sat less happily once the degradation inherent in earlier practices became obvious, and was qualified again when it was understood that Aborigines had been managing their environments skilfully and less destructively for aeons past.

A more realistic acceptance of this continent’s potential for mass habitation and exploitation, including its limits, had to wait for twentieth-century imaginations and politics. Some among recent generations have come to see and relate to the bush, or at least tried to, in ways drawn from Indigenous perspectives: ‘Changing to this view of reality had been a long hard struggle against the old conditioning’ (Robyn Davidson). Many more have given up against its various forms of obtuse resistance and have fled to easier locales: ‘Australia, like some great termitey redgum, is emptying out, concentrating its vital tissue into a thin coastal cambium with big fat nothing at its centre’ (Elizabeth Farrelly).

The task of populating this collection has led Watson to take an imaginative route through a very Australian drama. The tension between cultivation and preservation pervades the volume. From the farming and husbanding side, Watson includes a despairing despatch from 1853 about the setbacks in growing animal herds: ‘I find from the rapid

strides the silk-grass has made over my run, I will not be able to keep the number of sheep the run did three years ago’ (John Robertson) – and a later and cheerier bit of advice from someone now comfortable enough to even provide ‘how-to’ thoughts on land management (Francis Myers, 1914). In sharp contrast, a decidedly modern perspective appears further along, presenting a serious but also entertaining argument in support of weeds: ‘Weeds are stateless persons,

For Australia’s British conquerors in the nineteenth century, a first difficulty lay in comprehending what it was they were seeing, so different was the scene to back home

with no civil rights, subject to arbitrary execution’ (George Seddon).

Science divides the Australian landscape into various geo-botanical zones –dry coastal, sclerophyll forests, wetlands, etc. – but this is not how we live it. We enter and traverse our instance of the bush as individuals, filtering and tuning to build a personal version of what is and what counts. Which is perhaps what the more literary voices in this collection do best. Reflective of the image in the book’s title, novelist Roger McDonald is found here in non-fiction mode, writing with a kind of melancholy wonder about ‘ trees away out in the smashed-glass glare of wheatfields: yellow box, white cypress, kurrajong. Lone sentinels shimmering

in heat haze. And playground eucalypts in asphalt, their leaves pungent after rain …’

Many of the pieces assembled in A Single Tree are memorable for the distinctive – and sometimes prescient – sensibility on display. Among those are a few that do much to honour their subjects, as in the passage extracted from a 1953 essay by the acclaimed journalist and anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner. At a time when the deep unity of Aboriginal life with land was only just beginning to be appreciated, he wrote: ‘And, arching over it all, is the logos of the Dreaming. How we shall state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I think we are more likely to ennoble it than not …’ The author delivers homage from the ground of factual study and the heart of moral recognition.

Watson’s panoptic approach allows him to draw in a fascinating spread of material – everything from bits of measured observation and eloquent insight, to items of innocent misapprehension or wilful ignorance. While A Single Tree makes available all kinds of texts against which readers might test or expand their own vision of the ‘bush’, its compiler also quite properly states that ‘Across place and time, no book could do justice’ to the principle of variety that has guided his selection. Still and all, on a subject as big as this, Don Watson’s ‘fragmentary history’ stands as an excellent and thoughtfully arranged noncompendium, non-anthology that gets satisfyingly close. g

Angelo Loukakis has been a writer, teacher, scriptwriter, editor, and publisher. He was Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors, 2010–16.

A cult of forgetfulness

Intaglios of dashed hopes and tragedy

Michael Winkler

FROM THE EDGE: AUSTRALIA’S LOST HISTORIES

by Mark McKenna

Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 271 pp, 9780522862591

There is a well-meaning musician who performs intermittently in Central Australia. When he plays his hit song, he tries to augment the lyrics by chanting the word ‘strong’ in local language. In fact, he is singing a similar word that means urine. Presumably he thinks the audience’s laughter connotes delight rather than derision.

Benign intentions, botched communication, a messy outcome. Interactions between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians have been ever thus. Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (2003) made the case that the British incursion at Sydney Cove involved goodwill from pivotal figures on both sides, undermined by mutual misunderstanding. And, of course, the small matter of taking land.

Twenty years ago, in a research paper on the so-called ‘history wars’, Mark McKenna wrote, ‘The most terrible events in the past can be used as a source of positive affirmation if they are addressed in an honest and open manner. All history is useful.’ In From the Edge, McKenna limns the liminality of Euro-pean settlement in a country that had been occupied for millennia. By exploring of four stories from very different parts of the continent, he derives some truths that are widely applicable.

His method – starting with place and foregrounding story – echoes the Indigenous approach, where everything starts and ends with Country and the oral tradition has long been paramount. He posits, ‘Perhaps we would understand Australia differently … if we started from the ground up, from the local and the regional perspective.’

The ongoing search for national identity – as mad and doomed as Lasseter’s treasure hunt – has conventionally

centred on the inland, but McKenna finds his stories on the edges of the continent, at approximations of the cardinal points. At each place he etches the bloody historical narrative, creating intaglios of tragedy and dashed hopes.

The best story is situated in the south, a ripping tale full of drama, suspense, courage, crisis, rhythm. In 1797 a cargo-laden ship sank beside a speck of island in Bass Strait. William Clark and a crew of British and Bengali sailors crossed to the mainland in a longboat which was dashed to pieces on Ninety Mile Beach. They set out to walk 700 kilometres to Sydney, a settlement they had never seen. Their highly variable experiences with the different groups they encountered exemplify the ‘extraordinary regional diversity’ that McKenna emphasises. Most convergences were respectful, curious, even tender, ‘each searching tentatively for proof of the other’s humanity’. Even when violence occurred, it seems a product of fear rather than aggression.

For the northern story, McKenna visits West Arnhem Land to trace the doomed settlement of Port Essington. From 1838 to 1849 a small group of Britons was embedded in a disastrous attempt to create a ‘new Singapore’. Here, narrative gives way to image. McKenna shows us women inside ironstone Cornish cottages, clothed from head to toe, cooking over open fires in oppressive tropical humidity. The camp commander engages local men to bring ashore the frame of a church, a surreal enterprise reminiscent of the steamship lugged over a jungle-clad hill in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).

Port Essington was ‘an unusual laboratory of mutual fascination and cultural exchange’. Into the midst came a

shipwrecked Italian priest, quixotic Father Angelo. Flawed, remarkable, Angelo quickly became conversant with local languages, compiled a dictionary, and struggled to create converts. ‘For every step that broke down the chasm of cultural difference, there was a countervailing push to remind both sides of the enormity of the divide.’

The third and fourth stanzas of the book are situated at coastal points west (Murujuga, near Karratha) and east (Cooktown). These are records of indiscriminate killing and deliberate acts of bastardry and dispossession. The commonality of horrors during the second half of the nineteenth century in places more than 3,000 kilometres apart suggests these stories are emblematic rather than unique. ‘[A]llegations of forced labour, chain gangs, incarceration, severe beatings, stockwhip floggings, shootings and an “unquestionable system of slavery” abounded.’ McKenna provides enough documentation of frontier massacres to stopper the most pettifogging Windschuttle acolyte.

There is a consistency within the disparate stories that suggests patterning: humans tending to act like humans, regardless of race, place, or time. Throughout, there are transfixing accounts of what Jane Mulcock called the ‘difficult, delicate negotiations of belonging’. Contact changes both parties. NonIndigenous Australians have had to find a way to live in this country. Indigenous Australians have had to find a way to live with more recent arrivals.

McKenna shows the way language functions to both facilitate and indicate the negation of Indigeneity, creating a space in which physical erasure can occur. One illustration: the largest hill near Murujuga, Jarndunmunha, was renamed Mount Nameless. We see the devilish paradoxes and ambiguities of history. An example: much of the slaughter of Guugu Yimithirr and other traditional residents near Cooktown was performed by the Native Police, predominantly Aboriginal men from southern Queensland.

McKenna shows but does not belabour ironies: the helplessness of overlord Europeans reliant on ‘primitive’ locals; the way land ownership was transferred

to Britain by hoisting a symbol and declaiming some magic words, the sort of thing that, reversed, would be derided as mumbo-jumbo. He also guides us through topsy-turvy scenarios that mimic a modern Australia in which privileged white men fume and fulminate about the injustice of being labelled racist merely because they have been, well, racist: ‘the descriptions of war and conflict that have survived in the historical record do more than just reflect the banality of the killing: they also reveal how the miners and pastoralists perceived themselves as victims.’

There are small errors (Ninety Mile Beach is not in north-east Victoria; ‘decimated’, is used incorrectly, twice) and a few arguable assertions are expressed as fact, but these are flea bites on the muscular corpus of a significant work. The stately book design and abundance of photographs do justice to the text.

It is half a century since W.E.H. Stanner spoke in his Boyer Lectures of ‘The Great Australian Silence’ about the erasure of Indigenous inhabitants from Australian history: ‘What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.’

Mark McKenna’s careful work is a timely corrective. We need to hold simultaneously in the national imagination detailed, sorrowful knowledge of violent dispossession and the rich possibilities of cooperation and growing together. Good intentions have never been enough. g

Winkler

Essay Prize for ‘The Great Red Whale’.

ABR Eucalypt Fellowship

Australian Book Review seeks applications for the 2017 Eucalypt Fellowship.

Proposals are sought for an article on the Australian eucalypt in all its forms, with reference to history, literature, science and natural history, Indigenous subjects, the arts, or politics.

This Fellowship article will appear in our annual Environment issue later this year.

The ABR Fellowships are intended to reward fine Australian writers and critics, and to advance the magazine’s contribution to ideas and critical debate. All published Australian writers are eligible to apply.

The Fellowship is worth $7,500

Applications close 10 March 2017

This particular Fellowship is funded by Eucalypt Australia.

See our website for full conditions and guidelines: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Michael

won the 2016 Calibre

Head to foot

John Arnold

UP CAME A SQUATTER: NIEL BLACK OF GLENORMISTON, 1839–1880

by Maggie Black NewSouth

$49.99 pb, 328 pp, 9781742235066

At the launch of Up Came a Squatter , Geoffrey Blainey reflected on how important the wool industry was to Australia for more than a hundred years. He noted that forty or fifty years ago you would not have bothered to mention the fact: it was as understood as the vagaries of Melbourne’s weather. Now wool is not even among Australia’s twenty top exports. Many of those present listening to Blainey and the author speak were from the Western District, descendants of Niel Black and others who established squatting runs in the 1830s and 1840s on the lands of Australia Felix ‘discovered’ by Major Mitchell during his overland expedition of 1836. An inevitable result of the land’s rapid occupation by squatters was the dispossession and near destruction of the local indigenous peoples.

Niel Black was a Scot from Argyll shire with extensive farming experience. He came to Australia in 1839 having formed Niel Black & Co with his own capital and that of two Scottish partners, one a first cousin of the future statesman William Ewart Gladstone. Black developed their land holdings on two core principles. He would not borrow money but only use the partners’ capital,

and he would not break the sixth commandment. He deplored the boasting of some of his fellow squatters about how they had killed Aborigines on their runs who had stolen sheep or speared a shepherd. To overcome his moral dilemma, he made a conscious decision to buy an established run where the Aboriginal ‘problem’ had been solved by others before him.

Black wrote a detailed letter home virtually every week to his partner and mentor, Thomas Gladstone, reporting on his activities and progress. He kept copies, and his letterbooks comprise more than a million words. They were in danger of being pulped during World War II due to government requisitioning of waste paper, but Hope Black, the widow of one of Niel Black’s grandsons, hid them in the loft of the family stables. They were discovered in the 1950s by Margaret Kiddle during her research for her posthumously (and acclaimed) Men of Yesterday: A social history of the Western District (1961).

It is these letters, now housed in the State Library Victoria, that Maggie Black has used to write a biography of her great-grandfather. Although a descendant of her subject, this is no hagiography nor a ‘names and dates’ family history. Black is an experienced author having published histories of Oxfam and UNICEF plus several books on water sanitation. In Up Came a Squatter she presents a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of Niel Black.

Besides looking after and developing the partners’ pastoral runs, Black’s other main concern for much of his adult life was finding a suitable wife. He came to Australia as a bachelor and returned to the British Isles twice to find a partner. The second visit, in the 1850s, was successful, but he was away for seven years. During this time, the business was left in the hands of Black’s young nephew, Archie Black. Somewhat reckless and mentally unstable, Archie resisted direction from his uncle and borrowed money to buy large tracts of their land.

Black returned to Australia with his new bride late in 1857. He had already purchased a substantial home in Scotland and the plan was to stay only for a

short period while he tidied up what he considered to be young Archie’s mess. But he stayed on, one of the reasons being the Selection Acts. These were aimed at opening up the leased pastoral lands in the vain hope of creating an Australian yeomanry of small farmers. Archie’s previous purchases had probably protected the runs from being broken up completely when the acts were introduced. Black, however, was forced to participate in dummying and using dubious agents and middle-men to buy key lots of land on his behalf. These actions, forced on him as the only way he could guarantee the retention of his holdings and their improvements, disgusted him. He wrote home in one of his many letters that ‘we are full of corruption from head to foot’.

Grace Black, his much younger wife, in addition to bearing him three sons, was a tower of strength to her husband. Their home at Glenormiston and later at Mt Noorat became social centres for the district, hosting dances and entertaining visitors, including Prince Alfred in 1867. Queen Victoria’s son, however, was more interested in hunting than playing the role of a visiting royal dignitary.

Conservative in his views, Black was a member of both the Melbourne Club and the Victorian Legislative Council for many years, as well as being patron or president of numerous local organisations. He died in 1880, aged seventyfive. His funeral cortège was nearly a mile long and consisted of over sixty vehicles, plus numerous people on horses or on foot from all over the Western District.

Niel Black may have been opposed to what he called ‘the wild torrent of democracy’ but, as this admirable and well-written biography shows, he was a man of principle who developed rather than exploited the land as well as being a benevolent employer. He deserves to be remembered as a nineteenth-century landed capitalist who left lasting benefits to his adopted country, in his case Victoria and its Western District. g

John Arnold is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash and Editor of the La Trobe Journal

Pyrrhic dissolution

Transaction costs of the Turnbull coup

Lucas Grainger-Brown

THE TURNBULL GAMBLE

by Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen

Melbourne University Publishing, $29.99 pb, 207 pp, 9780522870732

After he crossed the Rubicon, Julius Caesar marched on Rome and imposed an authoritarian rule that would alter history. The way in which Australia embraced Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow of Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September 2015 suggests that some may have harboured similar hopes, on a slightly less grand scale, for the twenty-ninth prime minister. On the first anniversary of the coup, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen, public intellectuals and professors of politics both, have released a book titled The Turnbull Gamble in which they gauge what emulating the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd débâcle rendered unto the Liberal Party.

Instead of Caesar, Errington and van Onselen trace a parallel between Turnbull, wandering amid the ‘wreckage’ of the July 2016 federal election, and another aggressor against Rome: King Pyrrhus of Epirus. Like Pyrrhus against the Romans, Turnbull’s electoral victory over Labor was so costly as to invite defeat. The Turnbull Gamble analyses the two ‘political gambles’ that led to this impasse; first, the decision by a majority of the Liberal Party to make Turnbull prime minister; second, the new regime’s gambit to inflict a midyear, ten-week double dissolution election on the nation. Turnbull as leader and the election he risked are, inexplicably, treated separately, bifurcating the first and second halves of the book into two related yet disunited theses.

Errington and van Onselen have provided cuttingly honest leadership portraits of John Howard and Tony Abbott in their first two books: John Winston Howard: The definitive biography (2007) and Battleground: Why the Liberal Party shirtfronted Tony Abbott

(2015). Their third consecutive study of a Liberal prime minister is, however, hampered by the ephemerality of Turnbull as a leader. The leadership portion of this book begins with the promising concept of ‘transaction costs’ associated with changing leader. But what might have been an interesting theorisation of the increasingly short tenure enjoyed by Australian prime ministers quickly devolves into the much less illuminating, ‘what if Bad Malcolm hadn’t really changed?’.

The yardstick for Bad Malcolm is a lionised incarnation of John Howard, touchstone for good Liberal leadership (despite incubating many of the modern party’s flaws). Errington and van Onselen layer superficial arguments about Turnbull’s personality using the headlines from his parliamentary career: hostilities with Brendan Nelson; Godwin Grech’s ‘Utegate’ scandal; Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme. Through these lenses, Turnbull is diagnosed as a narcissist, referencing, in an overreach, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Moving on from pop psychology, the authors then affix to Turnbull the epithet ‘bower bird’. Defining Malcolm’s spirit animal as a hoarder of political ‘shiny objects’ is an indirect criticism of his unprincipled inconstancy. This half-hearted caricature is inferior to those of the authors’ peers. Paddy Manning and Annabel Crabb have both produced excellent biographies of Turnbull.

The authors’ insider knowledge is impeccable, often rendering details that escape the headlines. Revelations such as Bill Shorten facing down a left-wing leadership plot in early 2016, and Scott Morrison’s deep involvement in ousting Abbott, even conspiring with Turnbull in

the February 2015 spill motion, bolster the engaging and substantive election coverage.

The second half of this book might be the most immediate release of a scholarly electoral study in Australian political history. This section was drafted while the campaign unfolded. Errington and van Onselen provide a lucid and detailed analysis of the campaign strategies, tactics, twists, and turns. Theirs is a welcome corrective to animated election-night ‘crushers’ and parliamentarian ‘ejection seats’. Careful scrutiny demonstrates the degree to which narrative overtook events during and especially after polling day. Arithmetically, the Opposition could never have prevailed in the twenty House of Representatives contests it needed to oust the government. The value of this history will likely grow in time as an acid test for retrospective storylines invited by future political happenings.

Despite this dividend, the conclusions reached by The Turnbull Gamble reinforce that it is an odd composition about an indecipherable politician. Errington and van Onselen consider the Liberal Party’s gamble on Turnbull a success based on electoral victory, and grade Turnbull’s disastrous double dissolution a failure. Both these propositions are self-evident and do not warrant the 180-odd pages separating question and answer. The animus of this book is also strangely detached from reality. The term gamble implies a measure of choice, and the uncharted heights of

incompetency towards which the Abbott government soared left his party bound to throw in with a man many of its members distrusted.

Although they range expansively over most factors affecting the Australian political milieu, Errington and van Onselen inexplicably focus on esoteric and irrelevant patches of our rupturing electoral landscape. In an election remarkable for the success of minor parties, they conspicuously avoid the global tectonic shifts roiling the West. Laying out the emergent stakes for democracy, American author Fareed Zakaria wrote an excellent article on populism in the August 2016 edition of Foreign Affairs. In it he dissected the cultural wave of reaction against immigration, progressivism, and social élites. Canvassing the countries of the globe, from Japan to Canada to Greece, he concluded that ‘there is no substitute for enlightened leadership’ in countering the mobilisation of populist extremists.

Here is the real ‘transaction cost’ Australia must pay for Malcolm Turnbull. As the authors observe, he cannot be a benevolent autocrat nor remake the government in his image. A morally ambivalent careerist cannot conquer in the name of good sense during an epoch primed for demagogues. Although Howard is Turnbull’s natural analogue, the Coalition has drifted away from the party that his predecessor led. Conservative institutionalism, reactionary radicalism, Howard’s nationalism, Turnbull’s vague liberal neo-liberalism, and One Nation’s ethnocentrism are vying for prominence in the government’s agenda. Increasingly, the Coalition is coming to resemble US Republicans and UK Conservatives, both of whom refuse to submit to the imperatives of good government, much less rise to the pressing problems of this age.

Andrew P. Street, also celebrating the Turnbull government’s anniversary by rushing into print, tries to make light of this farcical turn in his sardonic The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: The incredible shrinking man in the top hat (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 356 pp, 9781760294885) Even Street’s single-malt wit cannot

soften the distastefulness of an electorally victorious leader denied a legislative program by his own party. Characters that Street skewers are all carried over from his earlier page-turner, The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott (2015); their antics are too familiar The Liberal Party’s real gamble is preventing Turnbull from realising the expectations that made him, for a few short weeks, one of Australia’s most popular prime ministers. Holding the nation hostage will only increase voter disillusionment. Beside which, 2016 election tactics and Turnbull’s peccadillos pale in significance.

The Turnbull Gamble provides a mimesis of Turnbull: clever without cutting through; bleeding over minor endeavours; most enlightening in its omissions. Ironically, a throwaway idiom that anoints Turnbull the Pyrrhus of Australian politics inadvertently delivers the authors’ best portent of his leadership. Pyrrhus was a rich, powerful freelancer; he won his eponymous battles in southern Italy only to come undone through inept entanglement in the thorny affairs of lesser powers; his vassals turned on him and the Romans expelled the fallen trespasser. With luck, Malcolm Turnbull’s political fate need not facilitate the rise of a more capable and less liberal Caesar. g

Lucas Grainger-Brown has written for numerous journals and news media.

ABR RAFT Fellowship

Australian Book Review seeks applications for the RAFT Fellowship.

We welcome proposals for a substantial article on any aspect of the role and significance of religion in society and culture.

The ABR Fellowships – which are funded by a range of philanthropic foundations and ABR Patrons – are intended to reward fine Australian writers and critics, and to advance the magazine’s contribution to ideas and critical debate. All published Australian writers are eligible to apply.

The Fellowship is worth $7,500

Applications close 10 March 2017

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust

See our website for full conditions and guidelines: www.australianbookreview.com.au

The City of Palaces by Gabriel García Ochoa

Describing Mexico City without tripping over a cliché is not easy. Vibrant, colourful, dangerous, loud, exhilarating, rich in history and gastronomic delights, it’s all been said before. But one aspect of Mexico that is not often spoken about is its correspondences with Australia. Famously, the preColumbian ruins of Monte Albán and Chichén Itzá influenced architect Jørn Utzon’s design of the Sydney Opera House’s podium and Monumental Steps. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) was filmed in Mexico City. There is also a little-known anecdote about colonial palaces that links Mexico to Australia, via none other than Victoria’s first lieutenant governor, Charles La Trobe.

What is now known as the ‘Historic Centre’ of Mexico City, an area of about ten square kilometres that includes thousands of heritage buildings, monuments, museums, archaeological sites, and government offices, was once Tenochtitlán, the centre of the Aztec Empire. Erected where five sacred lakes meet, with its mighty avenues, gardens, canals, and great temples – including Montezuma’s personal palace, famous for its zoos and aquariums, and for having more than one hundred rooms, each with running water for the monarch’s guests – Tenochtitlán, according to the writings of Hernán Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, was a sight to behold.

In 1836

Charles La Trobe published The Rambler in Mexico , an account of his travels through the country in the early 1830s. In his book, La Trobe describes his impressions of the Historic Centre of Mexico City:

Let us do the stern old conquerors justice. Their minds would appear to have been imbued with the pervading spirit of the land which they conquered. All around them was strange, and wonderful, and colossal, – and their conceptions and their labours took the same stamp. Look at their works: the moles, aqueducts, churches, roads – and the luxurious City of Palaces which has risen from the clay-built ruins of Tenochtitlán …

Mighty Tenochtitlán gave way to a different generation of grandiose buildings, which in turn have been dwarfed by one of the biggest cities in the world, the heart of a disproportionately centralised republic that daily pumps electricity, food, and water for – but how many people live in Mexico City? Official figures vary, from almost nine million to twenty-five, depending on how ‘Mexico City’ is being defined in the census. Interestingly, to date many still refer to this megalopolis by La Trobe’s epithet of the City of Palaces.

Several of those colonial palaces still stand. There is the National Palace, the seat of the Mexican government’s executive power; and the Palace of Iturbide, eponymously named after Agustín de Iturbide, first anointed ruler of the Mexican Empire in 1822. Not far from these is the Archbishop’s Palace, now a museum, built atop the foundations of the pyramid of the god Tezcatlipoca, lord of the night and the earth, great nemesis of Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent. Even the Holy Inquisition had a palace in the New World that still stands today, although with a different name, the Museum of Mexican Medi -

The glass stage curtain at the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City (photograph by Scott Irwin)

KATE MILLER-HEIDKE 28 January

EAST MEETS WEST – CHINESE NEW YEAR CONCERT 4 February

SIDNEY MYER FREE CONCERTS 8, 11, 15 February

TCHAIKOVSKY SYMPHONY NO.4 24 February

MAXIM VENGEROV – SEASON OPENING GALA 28 February

JURASSIC PARK – LIVE IN CONCERT 3, 4 March

Freya Franzen, Second violin

cine (it sounds like a joke, but it isn’t).

Five kilometres away from the city centre is Chapultepec Castle, also mentioned in The Rambler. Chapultepec was the official residence of Mexican heads of state until the 1940s. It is located in the centre of an urban forest, now an urban park, which covers an area twice that of Central Park in Manhattan. Inside the park one can find Chapultepec Zoo, the Anthropology Museum, and the Modern Art Museum. The latter boasts the exquisite works of British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington and her friend, Spanish-Mexican Remedios Varo, both often associated with the Surrealist movement. They are still relatively unknown outside Mexico, but their oeuvres are an important part of the country’s multicultural history and artistic patrimony.

The Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City’s foremost opera house, was built after La Trobe’s visit. It is one of the most striking buildings in the city. The style of the Palace is eclectic, half art nouveau and half art deco, a titan of ironwork and white Carrara marble surmounted by a colourful glass dome. Due to its weight and dimensions, and because it was built atop the aquiferous subsoil near the five lakes of Tenochtitlán, the palace has been sinking for the last eighty years. Inside, there are murals by David Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and Diego Rivera. Outside, carvings of local vegetation and Mesoamerican mythology decorate the façades and parapets with Aztec warriors, poppies, pineapples, and sunflowers. The crown jewel of this palace is a miracle of art nouveau design, a stage curtain made entirely of glass, designed and built in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studios in New York. The curtain is a mosaic of almost one million pieces of opalescent and iridescent tesserae that show the two volcanoes overlooking the Valley of Mexico. In 1950, before this very curtain fell at the end of the second act of Verdi’s Aida, Maria Callas, as a homage to Mexican soprano Angela Peralta, the Mexican Nightingale, sang a now legendary, unscored E flat that brought down the house.

As one waits in line to enter these buildings, it is not unusual to start a conversation with the person standing nearby; generally speaking, in Mexico, striking up conversations with random people at the drop of a hat is perfectly normal. Give the taxi driver five minutes and he’ll tell you all about his divorce and his plans for a new business; if the bus is running late, the lady sitting next to you may discuss that persistent pain in her lower back, and you may even be invited to a christening or two before learning your interlocutor’s name. This is the country’s modus operandi, typical of Latin America, at once enchanting and erratic. In mid-November of 2016, not surprisingly, most of these sporadic conversations tended to orbit around one pressing topic: the new president-elect of the United States.

Latin America has a long history of deranged, megalomanic dictators, most of them with a penchant for ensconcing themselves in magnificent palaces. In his Nobel Lecture, ‘The Solitude of Latin America’, Gabriel

García Márquez touches on some of these colourful figures. He mentions Augusto Pinochet, responsible for the torture, disappearance, and murders of tens of thousands of Chileans during his government. There is General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez of El Salvador, ‘who invented a pendulum to detect poison in his food, and had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever’. Mexico had its own Antonio López de Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West, who lost his right leg fighting the French and later honoured said leg as a fallen hero, with a military funeral and all the concomitant pomp and ceremony.

In light of Donald Trump’s election, this legacy of madness, abuse, and despotism that continues today stirs different reactions amongst Mexicans. First, there seems to be something along the lines of optimistic resignation. Autocrats come and go, but in the meantime one has to make do, bring home the bacon, and, somehow, figure things out and deal with the immediacy of daily life, which presents more than enough challenges without having to worry about foreign leaders, over whom no influence can ever be effected.

There is also fear. What will happen to those relatives living abroad, and to the economy? Historically, when the dollar flutters its wings the Mexican peso plummets like a piano pushed from a twelfth-storey window. Now, every word Trump utters is synonymous with devaluation. Following the US election, overnight the peso lost thirteen per cent of its value. Will the country give in to Trump’s outrageous demands? Surely not, one hopes. Secretary of Foreign Affairs Claudia Ruiz Massieu has stated on a number of occasions, unambiguously, that Mexico will build no wall between the two countries. But will the government’s resolve hold, or will it buckle to the new bully?

There are constant comparisons to Adolf Hitler. Racism is a serious problem in Mexico. Along with the portentous palaces strewn across the country, it is part of its colonial inheritance, so deeply ingrained into the nation’s cultural fabric that many do not even notice it. But that is internal racism, European-looking Mexican pitted against indigenous-looking Mexican. Trump’s outspoken xenophobia has plucked a general chord of indignation. Mexicans may criticise their country and one another, but now the consensus seems to be, Who does that gringo think he is, to speak like that about us? Nepotism, racism, despotism, conflict of interest, the most profound ignorance of the workings of diplomacy. From his palace of marble and gilded steel in the heart of Manhattan, Trump has raised a mirror to Mexico, or perhaps it is the mirror of Latin America, where the Unites States now gawks in astonishment at an aspect of its culture that has finally come to light. Together, we cringe. g

Gabriel García Ochoa grew up in Mexico City. He teaches Spanish, Translation, and Comparative Literature at Monash University.

A desultory air

Ann-Marie Priest

KATHERINE MANSFIELD: THE EARLY YEARS

by Gerri Kimber

Edinburgh University Press (NewSouth)

$69.99 hb, 304 pp, 9780748681457

Katherine Mansfield is one of those shimmering literary figures whose life looms larger than her work. This is not because her writing lacks value: Mansfield’s spiky and diffuse tales, published in the first decades of the twentieth century, helped reshape our ideas of what short stories are and what they can do. But her life story proved to be even more compelling. As American essayist Patricia Hampl points out, Mansfield was an early example of the ‘lost woman writer’, her generation’s Sylvia Plath. Though Mansfield – unlike the American poet – did not court death, doing her best to outrun the tuberculosis that finally killed her in 1923 at the age of thirty-four, it was her early demise that elevated her to minor cult status.

Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, was the first and most impressively indefatigable of the mythmakers. In the five years following her death, he whipped out strategically massaged editions of her journals and letters, and by 1933 had produced a biography, in collaboration with a young Mansfield enthusiast, Ruth Elvish Mantz. It set out his partial and sentimental view of Mansfield’s early life. For the next twenty years, he would continue to promote, and profit from, his wife’s writings – ‘boiling Katherine’s bones to make his soup’, in the oft-quoted words of one of his contemporaries.

In her biography of Mansfield’s early years, Gerri Kimber describes the Mantz and Murry book as ‘a rather fanciful, romantic – and, in places, inaccurate – distortion of her early life’. Kimber’s argument is that subsequent biographies – no fewer than four, in addition to numerous scholarly works – have not paid enough attention to Mansfield’s early life, and thus have not sufficiently

corrected the biographical record so thoroughly smutched by Murry. Nevertheless, Kimber does not directly address any specific inaccuracies or distortions in Murry’s account, or any other. Instead, she focuses on painstakingly documenting what is known about Mansfield’s childhood and adolescence, ending her book in 1908, when the nineteen-year-old Mansfield leaves New Zealand for London for the last time. In this, Kimber draws largely on Mansfield’s own work as published in the hefty, four-volume Collected Writings, of which Kimber was the series editor (the final volume came out in 2016). These tomes contain, seemingly, every scrap of writing Mansfield ever produced, from abandoned stories and draft novels to poems, diaries, and random scribblings. Kimber’s biography is structured around those snippets that relate to Mansfield’s girlhood. As a result, the narrative – while impressively illustrated with numerous family photographs – amounts at times to little more than lengthy quotations stitched together with threads of historical context. Kimber seems curiously reluctant to draw the significance of the material she is presenting, which gives the work a desultory air. The overall effect, however, is to foreground Mansfield’s own flexible voice, which even at a young age is never less than engaging.

Kimber supplements Mansfield’s accounts of her childhood with unpublished material gathered by Mantz in 1931, when she visited New Zealand to interview Mansfield’s family and friends. Most were disapproving: until Mansfield was eleven or twelve, everyone she knew seems to have found her thoroughly unpleasant. She irritated her father, infuriated her mother, and was considered by her teachers to be ‘dull’; she of the quicksilver wit and emaciated frame was pilloried for being ‘slow and fat’. Such characterisations bring to mind other misfit Antipodean girls, including Henry Handel Richardson, who, like Mansfield, was considered to be ‘imaginative to the point of untruth’, and Christina Stead, whose father and stepmother reviled her for being ugly, fat, and passionate. In all three cases, the crux of the problem seems to have been

the lack of a becoming girlish sweetness and malleability.

Mansfield, certainly, was always one to see more than was strictly convenient for those around her, and her challenges to conventional feminine behaviour began early. Even so, by her teens she had learned how to be charming when she needed to be, and to attract a changing constellation of friends and admirers. From this point in Kimber’s book, Mansfield is increasingly dramatic, tragic, lively, and incorrigible as she falls in and out of love with her school friend Maata, a Maori princess, slips away during a dance to engage in scandalous behaviour with a nameless young man, or pens a Wildean vignette suffused with the decadent scent of a dying rose. It is impossible not to laugh when she adjures herself earnestly in her diary to ‘tell the truth more’, or to be moved when she speaks of her sense that she is ‘unlike others’, and that ‘there is no one to help me’.

Kimber, however, seems to lose patience with her subject as her story progresses, describing her, for instance, as ‘egotistical’ and ‘wholly self-centred’, and at one point berating her for failing to understand that with freedom comes responsibility. Such throwaway comments do not do justice to the complexity of Mansfield’s situation, or, indeed, of adolescence itself. Yet in bringing together numerous biographical excerpts from Mansfield’s lesser-known writings in a single, readable account, Kimber has performed a service not only for those who worship at the Mansfield shrine, but also for those who simply want to know more of the tempestuous girlhood of the woman who wrote such masterpieces as ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’. g

Ann-Marie Priest teaches at Central Queensland University.

IF THE 21 ST CENTURY IS THE BIO CENTURY

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR HUMANITY?

Monash

Arts

Making a difference through research

Have you considered research?

Monash University's Bioethics Centre is the only Centre in Australia and 1 of 6 around the world to form the Global Network of World Health Organisation (WHO) Collaborating Centres for Bioethics. Directed by Professor Michael Selgelid, the Monash Bioethics Centre serves as an integral arm for the WHO in delivering its ethics mandate.

We spoke with Professor Selgelid on the Centre’s recent recommendations relating to the Zika and Ebola virus, and his White Paper for the US government on gain-of-function research (disease-causing-pathogen creation). Issues spanned canceling or moving the 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil to the critical need to empower womens’ rights and freedoms in making their own informed decisions if infected with the Zika virus.

Research areas

» Film, Media and Communications

» Historical Studies

» Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

» Literary and Cultural Studies

» Philosophy

» Social and Political Science

» Theatre, Performance and Music

By comparison, the big question with Ebola was whether unregistered medicines could be used in the context of an outbreak emergency, highlighting the need for more robust guidelines, resulting in a published WHO guidance document on Ethics in Outbreaks and Epidemics.

And after halting funding towards gain-of-function research in 2014, the White House is expected to shortly release new policy on this, directly informed by Professor Selgelid’s White Paper’s analyses and recommendations.

You can read our full interview with Professor Selgelid at artsonline.monash.edu.au/bioethics/global-bioethic s-a-conversation-with-professor-michael-selgelid.

Practice-based research degrees

» Creative writing

» Journalism

» Music composition

» Music performance

» Theatre performance

» Translation studies

Sowing a wind

Jill Burton

CYNTHIA NOLAN: A BIOGRAPHY by M.E. McGuire Melbourne Books

$34.95 hb, 208 pp, 9781922129963

When times were difficult, Cynthia Reed Nolan ‘drew the veil’. Born in Evandale in 1908, the youngest of six children, Cynthia always sought distance. From an early age, like siblings Margaret and John, she longed to escape from Tasmania. Oddly, however, this was not what John Reed expected of her. Such anomalies make this biography, which foregrounds her life before she became Cynthia Nolan, particularly interesting. Drawing on newly available correspondence, it portrays a sensitive, ironic woman previously overshadowed by more famous contemporaries.

Cynthia believed that education happened outside school. While she was still at the Hermitage, sister school to Geelong Grammar School, her ability to use her family connections surfaced; she also began writing. Following her mother’s death, she spent more time on the mainland, where she met conductor Bernard Heinze, with whom she had an affair, experiencing ‘the utmost happiness, the utmost hell’. During this period, she laid the foundations of many lifelong friendships, but the urge for further independence and travel were irresistible. Her letters home portray her delight in freedom and her ability to find interesting places to stay. ‘Germans appear to be crazy for anything new and it is the fashion to have an English girl [sic] in your house … I’m really made a fuss of which is naturally too gratifying.’ She spent six months in the Mullers’ household in Königsberg. But conditions in Europe were deteriorating and she reluctantly headed home, aged twenty-one.

Cynthia’s life in 1930 became a mix of ‘art, sex and modern life’. Soon she was ‘setting up a modern art and design business’ to ‘give Melburnians a cosmopolitan alternative to the com-

mercial dominance of art deco’. At her first exhibition in 1932, she was ‘congratulated on giving Australian men of real constructive genius a chance to show their work’. It was an indication of what was to become a recurring motif in her life. Her social skills and business enterprise, coupled with her ability to create an ‘air of detached calm’, tended to conceal rather than display her artistic talents. Typically understated, Cynthia’s description of her time in business in Melbourne was a ‘convalescence’.

After briefly pursuing an acting career as Miss Liese Fels in Sydney, she sailed to Los Angeles with ‘Michael’, an American film producer who was married to someone else. Redeeming this ‘mistake’, she started training as a nurse ‘in progressive America’. Unfortunately, the immigration department tracked her down at St Joseph’s near Chicago and she had to leave quickly. In London, she was accepted at St Thomas’ Hospital. Alone in 1938, facing her final examinations, Cynthia declared her daunting life ‘infinitely preferable’ to one that might have included poverty, ill health, and an unhappy marriage: she was writing, and nursing gave her a sense of purpose and interesting material. A step ahead of war, she travelled to France with friends, then on to America as the carer of a mentally ill woman. In New York, she completed a postgraduate course in psychiatric nursing before travelling home via the Caribbean and South Africa.

Pregnant, Cynthia returned to Melbourne after seven years. To protect her unborn child, she recreated herself as Mrs Knut Hansen, wife of a Danish pilot and intelligence officer who had just been ‘shot out of the sky over Romania’. No one knew the truth. John and Sunday Reed invited her to live with them at Heide, where Sidney Nolan encountered her for the first time. Not long after Jinx’s birth in 1941, and wanting ‘quiet understanding and silence’, Cynthia bought a small cottage at Wahroonga outside Sydney where she began writing Lucky Alphonse (1942), based on her overseas nursing experiences, which John published. Her second novel, Daddy Sowed a Wind, cast a bleaker light, ending with the suicide of its anti-heroine, Hyacinth. Following the

novel’s publication in 1947, it was chosen as Australian Book of the Month. Its themes aroused outrage among family and friends; John and Sunday called it ‘a total disaster’. McGuire, however, claims that ‘Cynthia was a much firmer character, more worthy altogether’ than any of her characters.

The Heide household was in emotional disarray, and Sidney decided to follow the advice of Cynthia (nine years his senior) and get away. He looked her up in Sydney; soon they were married, in 1948. With Cynthia’s guidance, Sidney’s career blossomed. Their life was one of constant travel, new friendships and connections, and preparations for exhibitions. It was exhausting. During one extended road trip through the United States Cynthia developed tuberculosis. Her role as Sidney’s mainstay could no longer continue, and it was then that the Nolans’ marriage began to falter. Cynthia’s six-month hospitalisation in New York was intensely difficult for her, but a rich source of material; her memoir Open Negative (1967) showcased her perceptive writing of idiom and highlighted her discomfiture at having to live close to others.

In London, after her release from hospital, Cynthia remained in constant pain. It made for uneasiness among friends, but in the wake of her carefully orchestrated suicide in London in 1976, friends acknowledged her mental steel. ‘Let’s face it,’ Patrick White wrote in his newspaper obituary, ‘The Cynthia I Knew’, ‘Cynthia … would have been less exhilarating, less special if she had not questioned our values, put us to the test’.

Well-behaved women seldom make history, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich argues, but Cynthia wasn’t particularly well behaved; in ensuring that Sidney Nolan realised his potential, she was perhaps unfortunate in his being so gifted an artist that he both exhausted and eclipsed her. Cynthia might have appreciated this restrained, sympathetic biography, though she would have possibly been irritated by aspects of its publication format, such as its distracting headings and chapter footnotes. g

Jill Burton has worked as an applied linguist and language teacher educator. ❖

Oceanic depths

Kerryn Goldsworthy

THE BEST AUSTRALIAN STORIES 2016

edited by Charlotte Wood Black Inc.

$29.99 pb, 230 pp, 9781863958868

If a collection of stories is put together on the basis that these are the ‘best Australian stories of 2016’, is it fair or reasonable to hope for some kind of cohesiveness or gestalt beyond those three explicit parameters of quality, place, and time? The answer will depend largely on what the editor’s ideas might be, not only about what makes a good short story, but also about the way to make a group of individual stories add up to a book: to something more than the sum of its parts.

This year’s editor, Charlotte Wood, herself a celebrated writer of fiction, is a woman of unusual intellectual flexibility and reach: at one end of the spectrum she is quickly gaining an international reputation for her dreamlike dystopian novel The Natural Way of Things (2015), at once a powerful political fable and an extraordinary feat of imagination; and at the other end she has experience as a senior arts administrator and a scholar, this year adding a PhD to her growing collection of achievements.

Her introduction to this anthology is thoughtful and meaty, discussing the ideas behind her choice of stories. She begins with a quotation from the Amer-

ican abstract painter Laurie Fendrich: ‘Ever since the invention of painting on canvas, paint itself has been part of the meaning of a painting.’ She uses this as an analogy for writing: ‘meaning is generated in the application of language itself, rather than purely from the writer’s desire or intentions … The words do not merely tell, but are the story.’

Wood then quotes from her interview with Amanda Lohrey: ‘“There’s the literal surface of life,” Lohrey told me, “and then there’s that oceanic meaning underneath … any narrative that doesn’t have a few messages from that realm is, for me, deficient.”’ For herself as a writer, Wood says, these messages from another realm arise from the choosing and the placing of the words themselves, rather than from some pre-existing idea of what the work is consciously intended to mean. This sense of wellplaced words giving rise to the message from beyond is what ‘distinguishes art from mere storytelling … I can see that it’s this sense more than anything else that has guided my choice of stories.’

Reading the book, you can see what she means. This is a very varied collection and some of the stories are startlingly imaginative, emotive, and original, especially Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Monster Diary’ and Ellen van Neerven’s ‘Blueglass’: both are stories you need to let wash over you without worrying too much about interpretation. Fiona McFarlane’s ‘Good News for Modern Man’ is a message from the depths of the ocean, and so, in a very different way, is Michelle Wright’s ‘Blur’, while James Bradley’s ‘Martian Tryptich’ brings news from the solar system. In other stories there are messages from realms equally mysterious but much closer to home, messages from the unmanageable inner reaches of heart and soul, in the bleak, uncompromising story ‘A Few Days in the Country’ by Elizabeth Harrower, or in the depths of strangeness plumbed by David Brooks’s ‘Grief’.

In Australian writing over the last few years, there has been a sharp upward swing in awareness, emotion, and knowledge to do with the natural world as whole landscapes and entire species are threatened, and that is very noticeable in this collection. James Bradley,

like Elizabeth Tan in ‘Coca-Cola Birds Sing Sweetest in the Morning’, envisions a denuded future that is very different from the present as we know it and yet an easily imaginable step from here to there. Like Wright’s ‘Blur’ and Gregory Day’s ‘Moth Sea Fog’, Trevor Shearston’s ‘A Step, A Stumble’ shows how easy it is for the natural world to overwhelm and destroy us. Less grand but equally lethal dangers are explored in Jennifer Down’s ‘Alpine Road’ and Jack Latimore’s ‘Where Waters Meet’, both of which belong to the strong Australian literary tradition of social realism and illustrate a wise remark once made by Germaine Greer: ‘Life is too hard for most people.’

The other contributors include Tegan Bennett Daylight, Nasrin Mahoutchi, Brian Castro, Michael McGirr and Kate Ryan. Every story in the book has earned its place: there are no false notes, no straining after effect, no smell of the lamp.

I am making this book sound more solemn than it is, but it is leavened throughout with various kinds of humour, and two stories in particular manage to be both substantial and hilarious. Julie Koh’s ‘The Fat Girl in History’, which I first read in her excellent début collection, Portable Curiosities (2016), nods to Peter Carey and is a playful story about sexism and racism, if you can imagine such a thing. And Abigail Ulman’s story ‘Frida Boyelski’s Shiva’ is about a Jewish mother trying to come to terms with her daughter Ruthie’s transformation into Rafael: ‘“You mean to tell me, you’re gay?” Frida asked. “No,” Ruthie said. “I’m telling you I’m trans.”’ This subject matter could make for a tragic story, but Ulman sacrifices nothing of complexity or empathy for all parties in making it very funny. In placing it as the last story, Wood has chosen to make the last word in this anthology a moment of redemption and recovery on the upward curve of a smile. ‘His fingers were slender and strong, and he gripped Frida’s arm and held on tight as she struggled, and then managed, to rise to her feet.’ g

Kerryn Goldworthy edited Australian Love Stories (1997).

A collage for our times

Shannon Burns

AUTUMN

by Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton

$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9780241207017

Ali Smith is a formally and thematically exuberant writer who takes obvious pleasure in the art of storytelling, the mutability of language, and slippages in representation and perception. Her novels are typically embedded in the contemporary world, and take account of social and technological developments, as well as political conflicts and crises. They also tend to give equal space to suffering and pleasure: the racking cough of the homeless woman in Hotel World (2001) is as memorable as the ‘woooooooohooooooo’ of its tumbling ghost.

Smith’s writing has always generated a sense of immediacy, but with Autumn – the first of a seasonal quartet – her gift for transforming the present into fiction is taken to the extreme. The novel’s first dedication reads ‘For Gilli Bush-Bailey / see you next week’; an epigraph cites a newspaper article from late July, 2016; and the early scenes take place in postBrexit London – ‘just over a week since the vote’.

Autumn’s chief protagonist, Elisabeth, is a young academic with ‘no job security’ whose passport has expired. Daniel is a centenarian who babysat and mentored Elisabeth when she was a child. Elisabeth is distressed by the social and political transformations she witnesses daily, while Daniel slips between vivid dreams as he lies in a care facility, seemingly close to death.

While the bulk of Autumn is set in the present, its action is thrown into relief by flashbacks. We witness Elisabeth’s childhood and Daniel’s late adolescence. We encounter the 1960s Pop Art painter Pauline Boty, and the model Christine Keeler (who was at the centre of the ‘Profumo affair’ in the early 1960s), and we read of Hannah Gluck’s

escape from likely internment in Nice in 1943 (Hannah is probably Daniel’s sister, and seems likely to reappear in subsequent volumes). These flashbacks serve to anchor the narrative in a larger historical context.

Daniel encourages Elizabeth to be a creative and inventive reader, to ‘trifle with stories that people think are set in stone’, and to thereby envisage new possibilities for herself and the world. This is something that Smith has done throughout much of her fiction, and Autumn duly trifles with the stories of Homer, Charles Dickens, Aldous Huxley, and others. Autumn begins with a pointed revision of the opening sentence from A Tale of Two Cities (1859): ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.’ We learn that Daniel has washed up on the beach, naked as Odysseus, and is concerned to hide himself from a local Nausicaa and her handmaidens. Then he notices human bodies scattered along the shore:

Some of the bodies are of very small children. He crouches down near a swollen man who has a child, just a baby really, still zipped inside his jacket, its mouth open, dripping sea, its head resting dead on the bloated man’s chest. Further up the beach there are more people. These people are human, like the ones on the shore, but these are alive. They’re under parasols. They are holidaying up the shore from the dead.

Smith presents a grim juxtaposition of dream-images: Odysseus, who enjoys the generous welcome of the Phaeacians, notwithstanding his dishevelled state and unproven identity; the drowned bodies of contemporary asylum seekers, who are summarily refused entry despite the legitimacy of their claims; and holidaymakers, who ignore, or simply can’t see, the tragic spectacle down shore. It is a collage for our times. Mentors who help protagonists see the world clearly, and to act bravely, are recurring figures in Smith’s fiction. A grandfather in Girl Meets Boy (2007) reveals the emancipatory qualities of rebellion by encouraging his granddaughter, Anthea, to throw a stone through a window. In How to Be Both (2014),

Franscesco’s mother inverts the cautionary message of a myth to inspire her daughter to take risks. In Autumn, Daniel illustrates the fleetingness of time, and the need to embrace the moment, by throwing his watch into a canal. These lessons invariably combine storytelling with performance. Daniel demonstrates the human capacity for blindness with the aid of a magic trick, and teaches Elisabeth to think of language as organic, cross-pollinating, and adaptable: ‘Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth around them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. Then the seedheads rattle, the seeds fall out. Then there’s even more language waiting to come up.’ He also dramatises the importance of true dialogue, which involves listening carefully to those who have opposing views and allowing time and space for reflection and reconsideration, instead of cornering people with accusations or threats. After listening to a political argument on the radio, Elisabeth thinks: ‘It has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually ever becoming dialogue … It is the end of dialogue.’ And so it seems.

According to Elisabeth, Pauline Boty made art ‘look like a blast’, but she notes that ‘you can’t write that in a dissertation … You can’t write, she looked like she’d be really good fun, like she was full of energy, or energy comes off her in waves.’ I can write that about Ali Smith. Autumn is an urgent and committed novel that grapples with serious and looming social horrors, but it is also a work of joyful intelligence. g

Shannon Burns is an Adelaide-based writer and critic.

Blow after blow

Gillian Dooley

EXTINCTIONS

by Josephine Wilson

UWA Publishing

$29.99 pb, 286 pp, 9781742588988

Extinctions takes its time giving up its secrets, and there are some we will never know. One of its most persistent enigmas is what kind of book it is. I wondered, during the first half, whether it was a powerful and perceptive example of the Bildungsroman for seniors: an elderly person (usually male) meets someone new who teaches him to be a better person, to pay attention to the important things in life, to treat those he loves properly, to reconcile himself to his past – in short, to grow up.

Frederick Lothian, a youngish retiree at sixty-nine, is living reluctantly in a ‘retirement village’ with the ghosts and relics of his past cluttering up his mind and his confined living space. He resists making friends with the other residents, especially Jan, the woman next door, whom he despises because she keeps budgerigars. One day she knocks on his door and asks for help with her bin. Ah, you think, I know where this is going. But do you? ‘This isn’t some romantic comedy set in a retirement home,’

Jan warns Frederick, and the reader, likewise, is duly warned. She is right. This is no romantic comedy. Though sometimes very funny, it is dark and full of tragic power. The title promises extinctions and the narrative delivers, in blow after sickening blow, as Fred’s life passes through his memory and onto the page. I started keeping a tally of traumatic events. Most people in Fred’s life have died or suffered catastrophes. One of the few survivors is his daughter Caroline. But Caroline is in London, and Fred is in Perth. They communicate only by telephone these days.

Frederick was an engineer, a university lecturer; a world expert in concrete. The book is in five parts: Columns,Bridges, Eggs, Trench, Hyperbolic Paraboloid. Each of these titles has multiple resonances, as does the book’s title. There are illustrations: grainy grey-scale photos which are not always mentioned in the text, but which all have a haunting and sometimes shocking relevance to the words on the page. Not that Wilson is ever at a loss for words. She wields the English language sometimes like a surgical instrument, sometimes like a weapon, but always with complete mastery of allusion and resonance. There is no doubt, when she writes a sentence like, ‘For a woman close to extinction, sex was merely palliative’, that she has judged its impact precisely. We don’t yet know Caroline well enough to understand exactly what it means, but the effect is almost like a physical blow. We laugh later when we realise the literal meaning, but that doesn’t quite remove the uneasy undertone.

Equally, by the time Fred muses that ‘Residents at St Sylvan’s were scared witless of losing their memory’, we are au fait with his almost compulsive propensity for playing with language and recognise this is a typical attempt at satire on his part. Language is, for Fred, a puzzle and a fascination. He is constantly challenged by figurative language. Even though ‘Engineers were not supposed to concern themselves with figures of speech’, he feels it necessary to spend ‘hours in the reference section of the library’ trying to sort out paradoxes from metaphors, but emerges ‘none the wiser’.

In the first two parts of the book, we see everything through Frederick’s irascible point of view. It is a triumph of free indirect style, and we find out a great deal about Frederick’s many failings as a father and a husband without a hint of authorial commentary. The third part, Eggs, takes us to meet Caroline in London, where she is curating an exhibition about extinction: ‘Perhaps because it was because she was thirtyseven, perhaps it was because she was adopted, but Caroline could not stop thinking about a child of her own when she imagined being pregnant she felt such a mixture of terror and longing it left her breathless.’

Caroline is living with her own history of trauma – not Stolen Generation, not quite that, but the consequences are similar. She meets a stranger, on the chilly pavement outside her London flat. He sees that she, like he, is black: ‘one of those real Australian Aborigines they’re always writing about in the Guardian’. He is disabled, like her brother. Their differences and similarities connect them readily, allowing them to talk freely on taboo subjects. But they remain strangers: events intervene, at least for the moment.

We also spend a short time viewing this world through Jan’s eyes, and we realise that she is beset by her own problems: ‘I’m not the angel here – or the priest. I’m not here to save you from yourself, or absolve you of your sins,’ she tells Fred. But she does have a dramatic effect on him. It is possible that Fred will mend his ways and finally start acting like a responsible adult. Or not. The ending allows for hope but doesn’t preclude exasperation as the women in Fred’s life face the fallout from a new wave of impetuous decisions. Wilson offers her readers not closure but the impetus to continue imagining how these characters – how we all – impinge on each other, whether we like it or not. We may draw morals from this dark novel, but let us be warier than Fred of the impulse to take drastic action to atone for past failings. g

Gillian Dooley is Publishing Support Librarian and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English at Flinders University.

Calibre Essay Prize 2017

The Calibre Essay Prize, founded in 2007, is one of the world’s leading prizes for a new essay. The Prize is now worth a total of $7,500. We are seeking essays of between 3,000 and 7,000 words on any non-fiction subject.

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Judges: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Rose, Geordie Williamson

The closing date is 15 March 2017

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Piper, 2014 winner

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The Calibre Essay Prize is supported by Mr Colin Golvan QC.

Transitions

Gabriel García Ochoa

THE TRANSMIGRATION OF BODIES AND SIGNS PRECEDING THE END OF THE WORLD

by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa

Dillman

Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925498240

Mictlán, the underworld of Aztec mythology, is divided into nine regions, like Dante’s Inferno. Yuri Herrera’s novella, Signs Preceding the End of the World, opens with a symbolic doorway to that underworld: a sinkhole that swallows a man, a dog, and a couple of cars parked down the street, missing Mika, the protagonist, by a few steps.

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of two novellas in this volume. Herrera belongs to a group of Mexican authors whose translated works are making headlines internationally (Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Villoro). To date he has published two children’s books, and three novellas. His first novella Trabajos del reino (to be published next year in translation as Kingdom Cons) tells the story of a talented singer and songwriter who falls under the dangerous patronage of a drug lord. Kingdom Cons received critical acclaim as an early example of what is now known in Mexico as ‘narcoliterature’, a subgenre that deals with the social and political issues that the drug wars have unleashed. The novella takes place in a border town, but the reader is never told exactly where. The text gravitates around the life and tribulations of a drug

lord, but again, words that one would normally associate with such a setting are not present in the text.

Signs Preceding the End of the World follows this writing style. Makina travels ‘North’ to a different country, a place of ‘Anglos’ in search of her lost brother, who went there to find his fortune. She can’t afford to get caught. She has to cross the border. The Mexican migrant story is there, blatantly obvious, and yet, the words ‘Mexico’, ‘United States’, ‘English’, ‘Spanish’, or ‘Wetback’ are never used. Like the Styx, like the Apanohuacalhuia of Aztec folklore, a river marks the border to the realm Makina is venturing into, but hers is a nameless tributary. This lack of specificity, this ‘absence’, has an extraordinary effect on the text. Herrera’s novella becomes a micro-epic, at once clear and ambiguous, transcultural, localised but applicable to countless sagas of migration across the globe. In scarcely more than one hundred pages, it encapsulates a story that is much bigger than itself Herrera’s other novella in this volume, The Transmigration of Bodies, is not about a journey to the underworld, but through it. The characters are already there. Scarcely two pages into the story, we find a swarm of harmless-looking mosquitos drinking from a puddle of blood. They are the carriers of the plague that has decimated the unnamed city where the story takes place.

The main character, the Redeemer, is a diplomat of the demi-monde. Words are his capital, cudgel, and code to the city’s many secrets. He uses them to seduce beautiful women and to bring gangster feuds to a peaceful resolution. The Redeemer has been hired to resolve a dispute between two powerful warring families. Each family holds hostage the corpse of a member of the opposing clan. The Redeemer has to negotiate the exchange of bodies without triggering an escalation of violence in the already apocalyptic setting.

The plot serves as a good excuse to show the state of a once bustling metropolis that has run out of facemasks. Drugstores have been looted and vandalised. The army roams the empty streets imposing ‘order’, which, in typical Latin American fashion, means they are

abusing their authority. The Redeemer goes from one place to the next in search of clues, risking his life through possible exposure to the mosquito-borne disease, and other less tangible but equally deadly epidemics (corruption, violence, insecurity). Again, Mexico City is never mentioned in the text, but there is a strong sense that this is where the story takes place, perhaps because the novella’s dystopian setting appears to reference the swine flu pandemic of 2009, which, unprecedentedly, managed to clear the streets of the biggest city in the world.

Lisa Dillman is a seasoned translator. She has translated more than a dozen novels by authors from Spain, Argentina, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico, including Sabina Berman and Eduardo Halfon. This year she won the University of Rochester’s Best Translated Book Award for Signs Preceding the End of the World. It is easy to see why. Dillman’s translations are nothing less than heroic. Herrera’s writing feels foreign, even in Spanish. Not because it is impenetrable (it is quite accessible, actually), but because his originality defamiliarises language. He is terribly inventive; terribly, because prose like his has to be a pleasure and a nightmare to translate. Herrera peppers his sentences with Mexican slang, Arabisms, neologisms. There are French and English portmanteaus, a constant shift in register from formal to informal, and back again. The subject matter of his texts is serious, but the prose is playful. Words fluctuate, adjectives are nominalised, nouns verbalised.

Herrera’s novellas are transgressive. In their plots, their use of language, they cross boundaries, and in that transition, that crossing, they create something new. As the unidentified narrator of Signs Preceding the End of the World tells us, ‘Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving?’ g

Gabriel García Ochoa teaches Spanish, Translation, and Comparative Literature at Monash University.

Entering other countries

Virtuosity in a fictive anthology

Kevin Brophy

GHOSTSPEAKING

by Peter Boyle

Vagabond, $29.95 pb, 370 pp, 9781922181787

If Peter Boyle’s new and selected, Towns in the Great Desert (which I reviewed in ABR, March 2014), was a tour de force of the imagination, and a book of stunningly strange and brilliant poetry, this next book, Ghostspeaking, surpasses it in ambition and virtuosity. Across nearly 400 pages, Boyle introduces us to eleven Spanishspeaking poets from Argentina, France, Spain, Cuba, Canada, and Puerto Rico, with small biographical portraits, reports of interviews, and translations of selections of their poems and memoirs. Often the work he translates is unpublished or only available in rare editions.

And what is translating if it is not ghost-speaking? The ghost-speaking in this anthology extends beyond the usual work of a translator, however, for each of these poets has been invented by Peter Boyle, and all of their various poems, styles, and autobiographical writings have been created by him in a Borgesian or Pessoan trickster world where, ‘when a true witch throws the yarrow-stalks of the dream, the sleeper will travel immense distances and wake convinced the myriad chances of life form a single path’ (from the writing of Elena Navronskaya Blanco, 1929–2014 [as ‘translated’ by Peter Boyle], a woman who refused to be interviewed, for, she wrote via her publisher, in Spanish, ‘I am neither an actress nor a politician and, accordingly, detest biographies’).

For me, it is that quaint, classical military, now literary word, ‘myriad’, that helps to convince me that what I am reading is a translation. Is it a word only translators would use these days?

In this anthology we are introduced to Ricardo Xavier Bousoño (1953–2011), an Argentinian writer and target of the military death squads of the 1970s,

who writes of surveillance cameras ‘with bovine faces’, concluding: ‘Say this only: / what happened elsewhere / speaks now because / there is no elsewhere.’

Bousoño’s later poem on the way each poem travels ahead of its poet, arranging accommodation, and warming a room for his arrival, is a marvellous piece of work, whoever wrote it. Bousoño is, as expected, hyper-alert to the presence of death and the threat of his own grave, a ‘small scooped / hollow of amazement’.

There is much to admire in Bousoño’s poetry, but his is only the first contribution. After him, we have Elena Navronskaya Blanco, the Argentinian novelist adept at bringing elements of nature into her poetry. Then there is the eccentric Mexican, Lazlo Thalassa (1940–?), whose work in Spanish is itself a loose translation of a fifteenth-century poet, a heretic from Urbano. You could spend many hours on Google chasing up the threads of this anthology that might trail into the actual world or have their only connection to it through this book. There is, I guess, no way that Google can tell the difference between an imagined and an actual person, so I have resisted consulting the internet on all the figures in the book, apart from one, mentioned in passing on the final acknowledgments page: the enigmatic scholar Monsieur Chouchani, who appears throughout the book. Lazlo Thalassa’s poetry, in Boyle’s treatment of it, mixes high and low, classical and mass culture in an ironic, playful manner we have come to associate with the post-modern – a rich mix, provocative and testing for readers who think they know the high and the low. At one point, his shopping trolley is filled with wedge-shaped cones that carry the stamp, ‘made in reality’.

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There is work from Maria Zafarelli Strega (1961–?), a shadowy Argentinian poet, homeless and of doubtful identity, a woman who fears she may never find a way through the labyrinth of herself. Federico Silva (1901–80) is a French memoirist whose father was a master of aliases. Silva notes, nightmarishly, that the English words ‘now’ and ‘here’ fuse into ‘nowhere’. Antonio Almeida (1899–1981) the late-in-life Spanish poet provides us with a luminous biographical sketch worthy of Borges. There is a series of ‘new essays by Montaigne’, composed by the Montaigne Poet, who might be several poets, or identical twin poets co-writing in two languages. Robert Berechit (1926–47) is the teenage poet in the anthology, and his ‘Love Letters’ written in World War II occupied France do feel like the work of a precocious talent. The Cuban, Antonieta Villanueva (1907–82) shared with Boyle the real-life experience of polio, though a crippling fall from a stage moves her into a strange territory where forces larger than herself seem to move through her. The Puerto Rican, Ernesto Ray (1965–2016), could have been as famous as his inspirations, Dylan and Cohen, but he renounced music to become (like Wittgenstein, and perhaps Monsieur Chouchani) a ‘humble’ teacher.

How different, then, are these voices, styles, periods, languages, and cultures from one another? We have no

way of knowing how distinctive each author actually is, because all of them are filtered to us through the work of the one ‘translator’; and we know that a translator can put a stamp on a text that identifies it as ‘their’ work. We do hear Peter Boyle throughout the anthology, and we know that at certain times he has ‘selected’ passages of writing that reflect his own values and his own aesthetic commitments (who knows what he left out?). In a footnote to the work of Federico Silva, Boyle quotes from Villanueva’s memoirs some dismissive comments on how dull experimentalism can be, especially when it is focused upon inventing procedures for massproducing poetry. The only experimentalism that is worthwhile, Villanueva writes, is innovation that seeks ‘a fresh way to channel the stuff that really matters – the horror, the beauty, the delicacy, the silence’. I read this, against the book’s resistant framing, as a statement of intent. Largely, Boyle succeeds. Each poet does channel the stuff that really matters, and the book demonstrates how various and unpredictable the means to that end can be. The scandalous Montaigne Poet later adds to this aesthetic with a Neruda-esque question: ‘Can goodness write a poem and, if not, why then write a poem?’

The Canadian, Gaston Bousquin (1957–2014), rounds out the anthology. He is one with whom Boyle, the translator, formed a strong bond over

many years. A belligerent bear of a man, one suspects he was the physical opposite of Boyle, who confesses he had always been afraid of Bousquin, and in his presence felt his own inadequacies. Bousquin’s chaotic life and violent death in Australia seem to touch upon the motivation for putting this anthology together: How is one to make sense of a life? Can we only pay tribute to the creative energy in each person we encounter? How important are destructive impulses to that creativity? Does it matter who wrote these poems, when we live in a so-called real world where ‘There was a yacht owned by the British royal family tied to a tumbledown wharf and, if you walked across the gangplank, you entered another country’ (from Elena Navronskaya Blanco’s ‘Exquisite Calendar for the Duke of Madness’). g

Kevin Brophy teaches Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

BRUCE GRANT

Canberra exhibitions

by Christopher Menz

Two very different touring exhibitions are showing in Canberra this summer. A History of the World in 100 Objects, from the British Museum, at the National Museum of Australia, tells a twomillion-year story through works from the collection of the British Museum. It is based on former director Neil MacGregor’s highly successful 2010 BBC Radio series and book of the same name.

The touring version, for logistical reasons, does not have all the same objects, but it covers the same territory, with a vast range of artefacts from cultures around the world. Less ambitious in the period it covers – a mere 130 years – but grander as a display is Versailles: Treasures from the Palace at the National Gallery of Australia. Drawn from the collection of the most celebrated of European palaces, Versailles presents the art, design, architectural and garden patronage of the French monarchs of the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century.

A History of the World , arranged chronologically, spans prehistory to the present day. The first two objects are extraordinary stone hand tools from Tanzania, the older one being nearly two million years old. The most recent is a Chinese made Solar-powered lamp and charger (2010). One of the strengths of the exhibition is how it presents familiar and unfamiliar objects in close proximity. The message here is surely that they are all part of a cultural continuum, reinforcing Neil MacGregor’s mantra that the British Museum is a museum for the world. While the individual objects are not necessarily the best of their type (Australian collections hold finer examples in several cases), they tell a coherent story of what objects reveal to us about culture. Thus, the exhibition goes some

way to providing a framework for understanding the role objects play in society.

While the exhibition explores ideas and concepts, the works do not seem to have been included to support theories; rather, they suggest themes and shape the exhibition. The attractive exhibition book illustrates only one of each type of object: the exhibition is richer, often presenting multiple examples. The texts, while informative, are rather basic; the curious will go to Neil MacGregor’s original.

Much of the exhibition is archaeological loot of some form or other, yet there is surprisingly little emphasis on this aspect of the history of the works. Also, after seeing so many rare and beautiful objects from the outset until well into the eighteenth century, those from the nineteenth century onwards were a bit flat, and here the exhibition fizzles. Their stories are interesting, their importance undisputed – witness the HSBC Visa Credit card (2009) from Dubai – but they are often less striking as objects in their own right.

Versailles is impressively displayed, with a grandeur that befits the collection and the three Louis who lived there. It opens with a splendid room and maintains pace throughout, with a generous selection that includes paintings, sculptures, furniture, tapestries, porcelain, and other decorative objects. There is even a walk with

Benin plaque of the Oba with Europeans, 1500-1600 ce (image courtesy of The British Museum)

fountains in the gardens, the perfect way to enjoy some wonderful garden sculpture in situ. (Here, Arts Update was reminded of Barbra Streisand’s memorable statement about one of her former decorating passions: ‘I wanted everything Louis.’)

Several of the paintings and prints are well known to social and cultural historians through illustrations in publications. It was good to see the originals, such as Nicolas-André Monsiau’s imaginary Louis XVI giving instructions to La Pérouse, 29 June 1785 (1817) and some dining and socialising scenes, even if Michel-Barthélemy Ollivier’s The Prince of Conti’s dinner at the Temple Palace 1766 (1777) is a little worse for wear. The exhibition also includes the famous tapestry after a design by Charles Le Brun, The kings’ visit to the Gobelin factory, 15 October 1667 (1729–34), and a spectacular Savonnerie Carpet (c.1682), one of ninety-three commissioned by Louis XIV for the vast sweep of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie. There is a group of superb impressions of the Lepautre engravings of the outdoor entertainments held at Versailles during the 1670s (excellently covered and contextualised in the Getty Research Institute’s The Edible Monument, 2015). They show how, from the beginning, Versailles was all about theatre and spectacle. It is in these illustrations of the ancien régime and its rulers – their glorification and their palace – that the exhibition excels. In this rarefied vision of French

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royalty, we don’t see the unsettling, gritty side of French eighteenth-century painting so evident in Watteau and Chardin. Several of the paintings of famous subjects (all three Louis and Marie-Antoinette) are ‘after’ or ‘studio of’ the original (by Rigaud, Carriera, Duplessis, Vigée, Le Brun); they certainly they look it. This, and other works by lesser artists, does a disservice to the undoubted qualities of the best of the court painters, and will only reinforce prejudices about eighteenth-century French court painting, its flatness, stiffness, and artificiality. Nevertheless, there is much to see and discover.

Both exhibitions will whet the appetite to see more of the same. A History of the World should encourage us to look at objects differently and to visit the British Museum. Let us hope that the model for A History of the World is also a learning experience for staff at the National Museum of Australia, and that they revamp the atrocious and embarrassing display of their remarkable permanent collection in a way that is attractive, coherent, and meaningful. g

Versailles: Treasures from the Palace is at National Gallery of Australia until 12 April 2017; A History of the World in 100 Objects is at the National Museum of Australia until 29 January 2017

Christopher Menz is a former director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. A longer version of this review appears in Arts Update.

BIOGRAPHER

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Dead cats and battery acid

A compelling biography of Russian ballet company life

Lee Christofis

BOLSHOI CONFIDENTIAL:

SECRETS OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET FROM THE RULE OF THE TSARS TO TODAY

by Simon Morrison

Fourth Estate, $34.99 pb, 530 pp, 9780007576616

In November 2016, former principal dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko entered the Bolshoi Ballet studios in Moscow to begin retraining for the stage. He had recently been released from prison for instigating an attack on his artistic director, Sergey Filin, in January 2013. Dmitrichenko’s plan went awry when his henchman, Yuri Zarutsky, decided to throw battery acid in Filin’s face, virtually blinding him. This act horrified the international ballet world and the public, and shed a new light on this famous but often troubled institution. After many operations, Filin recovered his sight in one eye, but lost his directorship. He now runs a choreographic workshop at the Bolshoi.

The irony that Dmitrichenko excelled as the murderous tsar in Ivan the Terrible is not lost on American musicologist Simon Morrison in Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian ballet from the rule of the tsars to today (coincidentally released in November). Morrison sees Dmitrichenko and Zarutsky’s crimes not as rarities, but consistent with the rivalries, politics, and vexatious bureaucracies that have riven the Bolshoi Theatre since Catherine the Great fostered ballet in Moscow in 1806.

Bolshoi Confidential is a compelling biography of Russian ballet company life and of an imperial theatre; an album of Russian ballet’s myriad players, and a catalogue of the love–hate relationship the Soviet regime had with choreographers and their artistic associates. It is also a story of rival clans and claques, a dead cat thrown at the feet of one ballerina, a flock of chickens released on stage at another’s. The density and scope of Morrison’s research is indicative of

his intellectual energy and perspicacity. Furthermore, he had paved his way into Bolshoi culture while researching Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement (2002), The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet years (2010), and the reputedly harrowing Lina and Serge: Lina Prokofiev’s loves and wars (2013).

The story begins with the circuitous history of the Petrovsky Theatre, precursor of the Bolshoi Theatre – mismanaged, bombed by Napoleon, and burned to the ground. The man who built the theatre’s audience, Morrison’s ‘Swindling Magician’, was Michael Maddox, an English actor, acrobat, and clockmaker. A brief encounter as tutor to Empress Catherine’s son, Pavel, proved helpful when Maddox joined forces with Prince Pyotr Urusov, whom Catherine had licensed to

present public entertainments. While nobles and merchants who ran serf theatres on their estates looked on with concern, Maddox indulged his grandiose plans. Today his enterprise would be regarded as a salad of vaudeville, opera, folk, and fairy ballets danced by Italian, French, and German artists, and a corps de ballet of serfs and children from the Imperial Foundling Home. He created so many disasters that Urusov pulled out broke, leaving Maddox to his own devices until the Imperial Theatre directors in St Petersburg chose to corral the Bolshoi under its administration.

The Bolshoi ensemble that developed was barely Russian in content or aesthetic, but after Napoleon’s destructive raid on the theatre, it, along with ballet, became something of a na-

President Vladimir Putin and dancer Maya Plisetskaya, 2000 (www.kremlin.ru.via Wikimedia Commons)

tional fetish. After the 1917 Revolution, Lenin wanted to destroy the theatre as he returned the seat of government to Moscow, the ‘real’, ancient Russia, or, as Morrison puts it, ‘Russia before Russia’. Fortunately, People’s Commissar for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky persuaded Lenin otherwise. By the end of World War II, the Bolshoi had become a place of ‘Russian exceptionalism’ (code for supremacy), an unconvincing concept that would flourish in the process of Cold War cultural diplomacy.

Behind the glittering theatre lights, other, sorrier scenarios ran unfettered by propriety. While Imperial favourites, such as prima ballerina Mathilde Kchessinska, mistress of Tsarevich Nikolai (soon to be tsar) and two of his cousins, lived in luxury and was regularly given fabulous diamonds, lesser dancers were exposed to chronic sexual exploitation. Many were orphans, some teenagers, many living in poverty, as did Avdotya Arshinina, an emerging talent. Arshinina’s poverty-stricken father sold her for ten thousand rubles to Prince Boris Cherkassky, who drugged and raped her, then abandoned her to others who abused her too. She was severely beaten, her genitals described as ‘blackened’ by the hospital staff that nursed her to her death, while the culprits escaped censure through connections, mendacity, and victim blaming. Arshinina’s father, however, was briefly imprisoned.

Of a completely different tenor is Morrison’s account of routine censorship of new works in the making, or days after a première, imposed by pedantic, often ignorant bureaucrats on creative minds of the day. Shostakovich’s serious but playful experimental ballets, for instance – The Golden Age, The Bolt, The Bright Stream – were criticised in Pravda and at Communist Party meetings, and led to excoriating denunciations commanded by Josef Stalin. These were artist who tried to put a human face on Soviet ideologies, while Prokofiev, trying to create a new, muscular music for Romeo and Juliet, watched the deracination of his intentions, line by line, instrument by instrument, page by page.

It is fortunate that Morrison is resilient and ironic in the face of such

harrowing events. At times he makes some crisp, colloquial remarks that do not sit well in the text, although one may well share his pleasure at taking pot shots at belligerent theatre bureaucrats, who could make life miserable, even dangerous, for artists who stood up for themselves. The final chapter examines the battle between Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi’s most gifted and glamorous international star from 1945 to 1990, and her nemesis, Yuri Grigoriev, artistic director and chief choreographer for thirty years. He was a pathological controller of independent spirits, and one of the least inspired choreographers in Russian history. His ballets, fraught with posturing and declamatory gestures, were ridiculed in the West. Ultimately, Plisetskaya undid his iron grip by seeking and receiving permission to create her own ballets with her husband, composer Rodion Shchedrin. But did her freedom, her victory, appease her lifelong hatred of a country that assassinated her father, enslaved her mother in a labour camp, then exiled her to Kazakhstan? Morrison thinks not –only her death, before her ninetieth birthday in 2015, could do that.

Finally, a word of gratitude to Simon Morrison for revealing, after two hundred and forty years, the author of the original scenario for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake – Vladimir Begichev, a repertoire inspector and scenarist at Moscow Imperial Theatres. g

Lee Christofis writes on dance, music, and design. In the 1960s he danced in the Queensland Ballet.

This year’s “good read”

http://www.lady-ruth-bromfield.com

La Divinas

John Rickard

DIVAS: MATHILDE MARCHESI AND HER PUPILS

by Roger Neill

NewSouth

$69.99 hb, 436 pp, 9781742235240

Finding the right teacher is always a challenge for young singers, and the relationship between student and teacher can see the formation of a lifelong bond. By the same token, when there is a falling-out there may be a legacy of hurt or bitterness. Mathilde Marchesi, the subject of Divas, was in her eighties, with more than fifty years of teaching behind her, when the New Zealand born Frances Alda first approached her. ‘What a czarina she was!’ Alda recalls in her wittily titled memoir Men, Women and Tenors (1937) – ‘upright and stiff as a ramrod, with snapping black eyes and stern, tightly compressed mouth’. Marchesi saw Alda’s potential and guided her into a stellar career. Marchesi became a legend in her own lifetime, attracting aspiring singers not only from Europe but from America and Australasia. One of her most famous students was Nellie Mitchell, whom she transformed into the phenomenon known as Melba.

Marchesi came from a well-to-do Frankfurt family, and from an early age was passionately devoted to music, but her father lost his fortune when she was sixteen and she was packed off to two aunts in Vienna with a view to her finding employment as a governess there. With some financial help from her sister, Mathilde avoided this fate and, overcoming opposition from her family, moved to Paris to study with Manuel García, a teacher in the bel canto tradition. Mathilde would appear to have been a mezzo soprano, but her relatively brief career was mostly confined to concert work, including a spell in London where she sang contralto parts in some of Handel’s popular oratorios. In 1852 she married the Italian baritone Salvatore Marchesi, who decided that it was not appropriate for his wife to appear on

the operatic stage. It is not clear whether this veto came as a surprise to her, but she seemed to accept her fate gracefully, directing her energies into teaching.

Nor was it just singing that Marchesi taught. She gradually developed a program designed to prepare the student for a career on stage or concert platform. ‘Literature, declamation, history, harmony, the history of music, the French, German and Italian languages – all these branches of learning must be thoroughly studied,’ she wrote in one of her texts. She also advised on diet, emphasising the importance of breakfast, and told her students to refrain from bicycling, rowing, dancing, long walks, and reading late at night. She was well placed to help deserving students launch their careers, and she invited agents, impresarios, composers, and opera house managers to her regular student concerts. The singer’s image was also important: many of her students, like Melba, had a suitable name created for them, usually one with a vaguely Italian sound to it.

Roger Neill understandably seeks out every Australian connection, starting with the Austrian Elise Wiedermann, who had been a Marchesi student and had a quite distinguished operatic career before her engagement to Carl Pinschof. The businessman had visited Australia and seen opportunities in goahead Melbourne, so that was where they settled. Wiedermann, who taught singing and became involved in the local cultural scene, gave Nellie Mitchell a letter of introduction to her old teacher in Paris. Many aspiring Australasian singers followed Melba in making the pilgrimage to Madame Marchesi.

Much has been made of the Marchesi ‘method’, not least by herself in her publications. At a time when it was common for female singers, having débuted as young as seventeen, to burn out before they reached forty, Marchesi trained her students in the art of preserving their voices. Although she insisted that a student must have three lessons a week, each was usually no more than twenty minutes. Marchesi believed, rather against the medical evidence, that the female voice had three, not two, registers – the chest, the me-

dium, and the head. Marchesi’s students, in the bel canto tradition, were notable for their ‘ravishing piano head-notes’. The advent of Wagner, with the increasingly demanding roles he created, particularly for sopranos, was problematic for Marchesi. In their preparation of arias, her students were allowed to study Elsa in Lohengrin, Eva in Die Meistersinger, Elizabeth in Tannhäuser and Senta in Der fliegende Holländer, but Brünnhilde and Isolde were definitely off limits. Against her teacher’s advice, Melba made one attempt at Brünnhilde in Siegfried, which was a disaster.

The challenge for a book such as this is to maintain a narrative thread; at times this does seem to get lost in a succession of mini-biographies of divas, including some who had hardly any exposure to Marchesi’s ‘method’. Madame’s story, of course, should provide the continuity, but here sources are sparse, and Neill is very dependent on the memoirs of Marchesi and her daughter Blanche. A chapter on the ‘method’ comes at the end of the book, almost as an afterthought, and although appendices record the dispersal of her influence through later generations of teachers, there is limited evaluation of this legacy. And there is one obvious question which Neill never addresses: why did Marchesi teach only women? Was this simply reflecting a nineteenth-century convention that it was not appropriate for a woman to be instructing a man? And if so, when did that begin to change? Neill provides only sketchy historical context.

Divas: Mathilde Marchesi and her pupils is a valuable resource, but documentation is curiously intermittent, and there is no suggestion of it being provided on a website. g

John Rickard has written widely on Australian cultural history and biography.

The Crown

by James McNamara

When a friend suggested over dinner that I watch Netflix’s The Crown, I responded with an earthier version of ‘Ten hours about an unelected monarch? Nope.’ It made sense, of course, for the US streaming giant to drop $100ish million on a television drama about Her Maj: Wolf Hall did well, Downton Abbey was finished, and America had just gone all King George and elected a lunatic in a golden palace. But I didn’t think it was for me.

Then I was reminded that, while I don’t think our head of state’s qualification should be ‘How posh is your dad?’, I admire Her Maj as a person. Then I learned Claire Foy – who played Anne Boleyn so exquisitely in Wolf Hall – plays the queen. And then I heard John Lithgow plays Winston Churchill. ‘John Lithgow?’ I spat, misting gin across the table. ‘3rd Rock From the Sun, American John Lithgow?’ This, I thought, I had to see. So I toddled off and switched it on. Reader, it was glorious. I felt a like a 100-kilo six-foot-four-inch Lizzie Bennet standing shocked, Darcy’s letter in hand, realising the prejudice that had blinded me to wonder.

Based on his play The Audience, The Crown is created by Peter Morgan, whose Last King of Scotland, The Queen, and Frost/Nixon grabbed a bag-load of BAFTA and Oscar bling. Queen Elizabeth II is famed for her reserve, and it’s hard to separate the person from the crown. But Morgan’s series pushes past the palace curtains to offer a vibrant picture.

In any biopic, where to start and what to focus on are critical choices. Morgan’s decision to show Elizabeth in her twenties, a new queen, is excellent: it helps the audience identify and empathise. The narrative begins just before she inherits the throne – living a light-filled life in Malta, where Prince Philip is a naval officer. The series then moves through deftly chosen episodes of her early reign: the dash to find her in Kenya when George VI dies in 1952, political struggles over her coronation, the illnesses of Churchill and his deputy, Anthony Eden, while the Russians pop off H-bombs.

Morgan uses each episode to interrogate a central question: how the person, Elizabeth, must change to become the immortal symbol of ‘the Crown’. That evolu-

tion is dramatised in elegant scripts that insistently show the impact of Elizabeth’s regal role on her family and vice versa. Philip’s brattish response to feeling emasculated as consort frays the marriage, something furthered by Elizabeth’s aloofness. Outmaneuvered by sharp-fanged ministers and mandarins, Elizabeth blames her mother for failing to educate her sufficiently.

Their tension amplifies when Elizabeth accepts advice from her uncle, the duke of Windsor – his abdication back in 1936 still bleeding poison through the family, but offering Elizabeth a unique advantage: counsel from a living former king. The dramatisation of regal dilemmas through the lens of family culminates in Margaret’s scandalous wish to marry the divorced Peter Townsend, an act requiring the sovereign’s permission. Pulled between a sister’s promise and a monarch’s duty to refuse as head of the church, this issue underpins season one and distils Elizabeth’s central conflict – the split between being human and a symbol of the realm.

Elizabeth is aided by an elderly Churchill, who dodders on as PM to guide the young queen. Lithgow is astonishingly good, bringing a bullying, sputtering truthfulness to Churchill’s physicality and voice. He is one of a stellar cast: Vanessa Kirby whirls through scenes as a wild, hilarious Margaret, playing the younger sister’s vivacity off Elizabeth’s reserve. Matt Smith’s golden, ladsy Philip gives notches of comic relief while embodying a commander’s frustration at a life of secondplace and ceremony. Ben Miles and Jared Harris bring reserved emotion to Townsend and George VI respectively, and Alex Jennings inhabits the duke of Windsor – at once waspish and poignant, spiteful and wise. First among them, though, is Foy – an actress of luminescent talent who conveys, with deft physical nuance, a blend of hesitancy, determination, dignity, and pain as she steps away from ‘Elizabeth’ and becomes ‘the queen’.

The Crown’s directors – Philip Martin (Birdsong), Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Reader), Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited), and Benjamin Caron (Sherlock) – bring a tight grip to the production. This is a show of scale: from wild Scottish coastlines and Kenya’s golden plains to quiet drawing rooms and corridors. The directors capture the glory and vastness, but also draw poignancy from quiet scenes, carefully judging and playing emotion, with every moment honed.

In every respect, in every creative department, this show excels. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you give $100ish million to creatives who know how to spend it, The Crown shows you. This is how prestige drama should be done. Even the most curmudgeonly republican will admire it. g

The Crown was created and written by Peter Morgan, directed by Philip Martin, Stephen Daldry, Julian Jarrold, and Benjamin Caron, and produced by Sony Pictures Television and Left Bank Pictures for Netflix.

James McNamara is a past ABR Fellow.

Der Ring des Nibelungen by

Peter Rose

Der Ring des Nibelungen, presented by Opera Australia three years after its première in Melbourne, was a great success, mostly because of the excellence of the singing. Several local singers retained their principal roles, but we had a new Siegmund, Wotan, Loge, Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde, all but the first from overseas. How refreshing to attend a Ring without a single dud individual performance. Four of the main roles – Brünnhilde, Sieglinde, Alberich, Siegfried – were sung about as well as we mortals have a right to expect. Let us hope that Opera Australia – with support from government and patrons – is able to mount a new Ring in the future. Clearly, there is a committed Wagner audience in Melbourne. Rarely has Arts Update been part of such a silent, respectful, avid, and ultimately demonstrative Ring audience. Economists and governments should exult, not just Wagnerites.

Although minor changes were introduced, Neil Armfield’s original production was largely unaltered. Clearly, the singers – many of them engaged and compelling actors – had responded to his close direction. Overall, however, the flaws in Armfield’s production were still manifest, as was the absence of any overarching or identifiable concept. The first and last operas were marred by the pointless introduction and hapless manipulation of otiose supernumeraries. Other effects were jarring. The Ride of the Valkyries resembled a public service drill, and the puny barbecue that encircled Brünnhilde was risible. The Immolation scene was spoiled by a pitch invasion.

Orchestrally, this was a fine Ring, with bright, unflagging playing from the Melbourne Ring Orchestra. Pietari Inkinen, another late recruit in 2013, again conducted. He is a busy conductor, and the tetralogy passed without mishap, but Inkinen’s reading lacked authentic Wagnerian majesty and oomph. When it mattered most, music of great profundity passed by without the requisite emotional heft or reverberation. The Funeral March was one example: it merely sounded loud and monochromatic, not helped by the State Theatre’s plush acoustic.

Convention has it that the Ring is about the conflict between love and power. In Act II of Die Walküre,

Wotan – the scarred and sorrowing god – tells Brünnhilde, ‘When the joy of young love departed from me, my spirit longed for power.’ Armfield has written, ‘In absolute terms the pursuit of wealth requires the denial of love. Wagner wrote the Ring in the thick of the clamour and smoke of the Industrial Revolution. In the Ring he was creating a great poem about the future of civilisation. He could see the ferocious growth of capital changing the world forever. He could see the natural world being torn apart, the wars fought, the families divided in what has proved to be an apparently endless process of expansion; turning natural resources into wealth and then manipulating wealth to create more wealth.’ This may sound modish, even Pikettian, but Wagner – despite the archaisms of his libretti, not to mention his wardrobe – is ever modern and renewable. Those taxidermic animals and slumping gods bespeak general inanition just around the corner.

It opens, of course, with Das Rheingold, Wagner’s ‘preliminary evening’. Problems remain with the first and last scenes. The opera begins with the famous, sustained low E flat from the Rhine. But why all these supernumeraries in bathers? They mooch about, staring. What do they signify? The Rhinemaidens – Woglinde (Lorina Gore), Wellgunde (Jane Ede), and Flosshilde (Dominica Matthews) – sang well. When Alberich appeared, sex-starved but ultimately content with gold, they teased him mercilessly.

Warwick Fyfe, returning as Alberich, sang powerfully each night; his performance was even more inspired than the one he gave, at short notice, in 2013. Fyfe was always acting, flinching, leering, and there were some neat touches, such as when, like a boy in a playground, he skipped around the stage in delight during his scene with Wotan and Loge, there to steal the Tarnhelm.

But why, in that first scene, must costumier Alice Babidge strip Fyfe to his jocks? Don’t we have imaginations? The same applied to Liane Keegan, a substantial woman who was dressed in a pale sleeveless nightie. We now know that Stefan Vinke – returning as Siegfried in the last two operas – declined to be undressed before Siegfried’s Funeral March. ‘People are coming to hear me sing, not to see me nude on stage,’ he told Matthew Westwood of The Australian Notwithstanding, Keegan was a commanding Erda, as she was in Adelaide in 1998 and 2004. She sang equally well in Siegfried. Small though this role is, Erda is one of Wagner’s pivotal creations, and she has some of the best music in the Ring

American bass-baritone James Johnson, who first sang the role in Paris in 1988, was an underpowered Wotan. Although he looked the part and acted well, Johnson was not in good voice on the first two nights; there was a distinct lack of volume. He rallied in Siegfried, helped by the Wanderer’s rather different music and tessitura.

Michael Honeyman, despite his silly toy pistol of a hammer, was a good Donner. Andreas Conrad was in fine comic form as Loge.

At the end of the Rheingold, as the gods prepare to cross the rainbow bridge, the showgirls appeared. Is this

what Wagner intended for this noble and ambiguously triumphant music, as the spiteful gods are sucked towards their mortgaged dream castle? It was difficult to attend to the music amid such a display. One sat there admiring the beauty of the colours, the precision of the formations, the preternatural excellence of the dancers’ legs, while music of matchless grandeur played in the background. Something was lost here, something more de luxe than feathers.

Die Walküre is the most successful work in the Armfield production. This is fitting, Die Walküre being perhaps the greatest of operas, with a first act of singular perfection, some of the most beautiful passages Wagner ever wrote, and five compelling individual principal roles.

Stuart Skelton – a memorable Siegmund in 2013, as in the Adelaide Ring (2004) – was missed, but Australian tenor Bradley Daley made a fine impression in his stead. He was at his best in that greatest of scenes, the Todesverkündigung, when Brünnhilde announces Siegmund’s imminent death and his journey to Valhalla.

Daley’s opposite, the young American singer Amber Wagner, was sensational as Sieglinde. Listening to her, one immediately thinks of Jessye Norman – those powerful chest notes. The top is ringing and very secure. Vocal highlights were many, including an extraordinary ‘Der Männer Sippe’, followed by ‘Du bist der Lenz’. Sieglinde rose to soaring heights in ‘O hehrstes Wunder!’ before fleeing to prepare for the birth of Siegfried. Amber Wagner is a revelation: let us hope it is not too long before we hear her again.

Lise Lindstrom was a welcome new Brünnhilde. Young, blonde, slender, she was a perfect Valkyrie, and her singing, right from that searing entrance, was accurate and powerful. Armfield exploited the marked age difference between Lindstrom and James Johnson (Wotan) to great effect. Rarely has the tenderness between father and daughter – loving confidants – been conveyed so stirringly. In Act III, after Brünnhilde’s disgrace, Wotan’s farewell to his daughter (to some of Wagner’s greatest music) was almost unbearably moving.

Jacqueline Dark, as the ever-exasperated Fricka, most alarming of stepmothers, was superlative, and Jud Arthur (Hunding) sang and moved with force and menace.

As between the first two offerings in the Ring, the dramatic and tonal differences between Walküre and Siegfried were huge. Act I finds Siegfried, illicit child of Siegmund and Sieglinde, being raised by Alberich’s mendacious brother Mime. They live in a dump, incongruously set beneath designer Robert Cousins’s high white proscenium arch. Desperately, Mime tries to forge the shattered Nothung while Siegfried romps on his bunk-bed and paints his dragon.

Act I can be a testing one in the theatre. Postwar directors have felt a reflexive need to deprive Siegmund’s posthumous son (and Wotan’s grandson) of any heroic potential. In doing so they often make him tedious or fatuous – a buffoon in whom we struggle to believe during the poignant meditations of Act II and his enraptured rescue of Brünnhilde in Act III. Things could not have been more different on opening night. Even the soup-making

scene, which can be interminable, was amusing. The physical comedy and interplay between Mime and his charge worked well, thanks to vibrant performances from Graeme Macfarlane (Mime) and Stefan Vinke (Siegfried). Macfarlane – who would be droll at a funeral – has made the role his own. Vinke, who was good in 2013, was even better this time. Both these singing actors took it fast and furious, but everything went to plan and in the famous Forging Scene – the Schmeltzlied or Schwertlied (Melting or Sword Song) – Vinke gave Lauritz Melchior a run for his money.

Siegfried is one of Wagner’s toughest creations; we have all heard some dreadful botches and surrenders to human frailty. But Vinke was heroic all night. Nor is he capable only of flamboyant, sustained high notes. Some of his most beautiful singing came after he had dispatched the loathsome dwarf.

The dragon scene was done well. Jud Arthur, as in 2013, was the dragon. The cave itself was merely a hole beneath the ubiquitous proscenium arch. Why waste millions of dollars on a dragon, as they did in Adelaide in 2004 –a folly that ended up giving the finger to the audience and any principles of economy?

The love duet in Siegfried is one of the most gradual and ecstatic of its kind. Siegfried duly found Brünnhilde on a kind of rock from Ikea, wrapped in plastic, like the ones for the taxidermic animals. This long scene requires great artistry from both principals. Lise Lindstrom, looking magnificent after her epic sleep, was magnetic as Siegfried kissed her awake. With a mixture of tenderness and fright, she resisted Siegfried’s advances and lamented her lost godlike status. Then, to the most exhilarating music, Brünnhilde relented and the lovers – aunt and nephew –rhapsodised about the new day. Both singers sang with lustre and aplomb – a thrilling finale.

After the exaltation of the closing duet in Siegfried, we had to wait until the second part of the Prologue to Götterdämmerung before meeting the post-coital lovers. Back on the rock, Siegfried and Brünnhilde’s exposed mattress was set far back on the large stage. This presented some difficulties for both singers, who seemed understandably tired after their heroics in Siegfried. Early on, Lindstrom evinced signs of strain. Then she simply sang louder, longer, surer – a revival worthy of her character. When Brünnhilde offered Siegfried her steed, Lindstrom produced a long, ecstatic trill, something few Brünnhildes risk.

Lindstrom, a Californian of German-Norwegian extraction, is fairly new to Australian audiences; last year she was Turandot in Sydney. Lindstrom has sung Brünnhilde once before (Walküre only, in Palermo); this is her first complete Ring. It surely won’t be her last. Lindstrom is a revelation: magnificent to behold on stage, with a cutting voice and fearless high notes.

What a shame, then, that the interlude between the Prologue and Act I was spoiled by the return of the aimless extras when Siegfried set off on his journey down the Rhine. During one of the greatest passages in the Ring, the supernumeraries performed a Mexican wave and

jarring aerobics. Who were these people? Why were they there? It was an embarrassment.

The rest of the opera progressed with the usual elations and longueurs. In the first scene of Act I, the hall of the tribe of Gibichungs had been turned into a private gymnasium. The following acts contain some remarkable and transgressive music, beginning with Hagen’s dream scene in which Alberich appears in his sleep and adjures him to retrieve the Ring. Of the several Hagens Arts Update has heard from Daniel Sumegi (beginning in Adelaide in 1998), this was by far his best.

Musically, Wagner begins to do all manner of things he has previously eschewed. The double wedding is set in a white marquee redolent of more weddings than Arts Update likes to recall. As if exhausted (though never destitute), Wagner throws in a magnificent chorus – the very thing he has resisted throughout the Ring. Act II even ends with an almost Verdian trio in which Brünnhilde conspires with Gunther and Hagen to destroy Siegfried.

The long scene preceding Siegfried’s execution lacked a certain edge, but Vinke was good throughout. Having a shopping trolley on stage (for the obligatory slabs of beer) seemed de trop; it distracted from the gravitas and sheer monumentality of the Funeral March. Then it was time for Brünnhilde’s slow, charismatic entrance at the back of the stage. Imperiously she silenced the mournful Gutrune. After the unfortunate extras had appeared, it was Brünnhilde’s melancholy duty to expiate the gods’ manifold sins

and return the Ring to the Rhine. Lise Lindstrom was in radiant voice throughout the Immolation, never faltering.

Götterdämmerung, it must be said, is a flawed dramatic work. One thinks of the abrupt efficacy of Gutrune’s magic potion and Siegfried’s convenient loss of memory. Then there is the suddenness and ferocity of Brünnhilde’s vengefulness towards Siegfried when she sees him with Gutrune. Only Verdi – Wagner’s great rival and antithesis – could have depicted such rapid, Italianate enragement. And then there is the ending. ‘Why,’ a friend of Wagner’s wrote to him, ‘since the gold is returned to the Rhine, is it still necessary for the gods to perish?’

Nonetheless, as Nietzsche wrote: ‘[Wagner] knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder and at every moment something may spring out of nonentity …’

Nonentity, for a week, in this demoralised and meretricious age of plutocrats and Trumps, was emphatically overcome. g

Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner, directed by Neil Armfield and presented by Opera Australia, ran from 21 November to 16 December in the State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne.

Peter Rose is Editor of Australian Book Review. His four individual Ring reviews appear in Arts Update.

Arts Update

Fuhrmann

Sophie Knezic

David Larkin

James McNamara

Michael Shmith

Philippa Hawker

Jake Wilson

A United Kingdom

by Anwen Crawford

In London, 1947, a young white English woman named Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), of modest background, meets an ordinary-seeming young black man named Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) at a dance. They go on a few dates, swap jazz records, and then, in short order, the young man reveals to the young woman that he is an African king and proposes marriage to her. She accepts him immediately.

This is the foundation of the fairytale-like romance at the heart of A United Kingdom – delivered to viewers in the film’s efficient opening scenes – though it isn’t quite a fairytale. The story is based on a notable instance of true romance from the history books. Seretse Khama was kgosi (king) of the Bamangwato people, who were colonised by the British and who dwelt, during the first half of the twentieth century, inside the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. Neither the British government nor Khama’s royal family approved of the marriage between Khama and Williams, and the couple’s efforts to live together would play a part in the wider independence struggle of Bechuanaland, which became Botswana in 1966, with Khama as its first president.

British director Amma Asante uses the romance as a vehicle to explore the machinations of British power at the end of the colonial era. This is fortunate, in so far as the politicking is more interesting than the love story. The film’s narrative tension is generated by what gets in the couple’s way; as in all good fairytales, love must run an obstacle course.

The first and most powerful brake on the pair’s happiness comes in an early scene, when the newly engaged Williams is confronted by Alistair Canning (Jack Davenport, a reliable player of villains), the British government’s representative in South Africa. That country regards an interracial marriage on its border as a threat to its own recently established system of apartheid. ‘Do you know this word?’ Canning asks Williams. The British Labour government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, also fears losing access to South African resources, should it not pressure Khama

into giving up his royal claims. Canning wastes no time in conveying the disapproval of both governments.

But the couple also meet with hostility from Khama’s family when, defiantly married, they arrive in Bechuanaland. In particular, Khama’s uncle Tshekedi (Vusi Kunene), who has acted as regent since Seretse’s childhood, and his sister Naledi (Terry Pheto), regard rule by a white queen as a terrible insult. The film’s greatest structural success lies in its its doubling of outsiderness: in London, Khama is regarded by the British colonialists as both an exotic and a troublemaker, while in Bechuanaland, Williams is seen as an arrogant interloper. There is no place to which they really belong, even if they belong to each other. A pity, then, that the onscreen relationship is not developed to a greater extent. Rosamund Pike and David Oyelowo are both charismatic performers, but their steady affection is the same at the end of the film as it is in the beginning.

Their respective characters are more interesting when circumstances force them apart. Pike, who was so brittle as the lead in Gone Girl (2014), is suppler here, and smart enough not to play the white saviour in Africa (credit must also go to Asante for her direction of this role). She is visibly humiliated by the rejection of Khama’s family, but she can also laugh at herself, while maintaining an interest in the international politics that are shaping the fate of her adopted country.

Oyelowo, meanwhile, reprises some of the statesman-like notes that he developed so effectively under the direction of Ava DuVernay in Selma (2014), where he played Martin Luther King Jr. Khama, like King, is both an excellent public orator and an advocate for social justice. There is a danger, perhaps, that Oyelowo will end up playing a parade of history’s Most Dignified Men (apart from anything else, he has a great facility for accents). This would be a shame, as his powerful screen presence suggests his ability to convey character traits well beyond the realm of virtue. Any lack of nuance here is more the fault of the screenplay – written by Guy Hibbert, with origins in the non-fiction book Colour Bar, by Susan Williams – than of Oyelowo as an actor.

As in her previous film, Belle (2013), which was loosely based on the life of the eighteenth-century black British gentlewoman Dido Elisabeth Belle, Amma Asante has crafted a polished period drama which also resonates with contemporary struggles for racial equality. Both she and Oyelowo, who championed the development of this film for many years, are passionate advocates of onscreen diversity. Though A United Kingdom has an emotional arc that is too predictable, its resurrection of a widely forgotten piece of twentieth-century history is worthy. g

A United Kingdom, 111 minutes. Directed by Amma Asante and written by Guy Hibbert. Distributed in Australia by Transmission Films. In cinemas from 26 December 2016.

Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based film critic.

‘Voyeur of death’

Klaus Mann’s troublesome life

Evelyn Juers

CURSED LEGACY: THE TRAGIC LIFE OF

KLAUS

MANN by Frederic Spotts

Yale University Press (Footprint), $75 hb, 338 pp, 9780300218008

In ‘The Art of Biography’, Virginia Woolf insists that this ‘is the most restricted of all the arts’ and that even if many biographies are written, few survive. But somehow, by sifting and compressing and silhouetting, her friend Lytton Strachey – ‘alive and on tiptoe’ amid new ideas of biographical realism –managed to unshackle this truth-bound genre. Ever since Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) eschewed dead biographical matter and cut to the chase, life writers have swung past the doldrums of inauspicious facts and aimed for something more brisk. This is how Frederic Spotts introduces us to his subject, Klaus Mann – briskly. He was ‘six times jinxed. A son of Thomas Mann. A homeless exile. A drug addict. A writer unable to publish in his native tongue. A not-sogay gay. Someone haunted all his life by a fascination with death.’ (Spotts is simply doubling the curses already listed by the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his book on the Manns).

Born in Munich in 1906, the second of Katia and Thomas Mann’s six children, Klaus became a famous but – according to the thesis of this new biography – an insufficiently loved German-American writer. He led a troublesome life. He was a journalist, critic, playwright, essayist, and novelist. Der fromme Tanz (1926) is recognised as Ger-

many’s first modern novel with a manifestly gay theme. He is best known for Mephisto (1936), which was banned by Hitler’s regime and nervously shoved aside in the postwar years, then briefly published in West Germany in the early 1960s and promptly banned again. The reason for this dicey history is its blistering portrait of Mann’s former friend and ex-brother-in-law Gustav Gründgens, the turncoat actor and director who was fêted during and after the Third Reich. The ban on Mephisto was effective until 1981, when it became a bestseller and an award-winning film. It had arrived almost half a century after conception. Klaus’s personal favourite, Der Vulkan (1939), and the autobiographical The Turning Point (1942) underscore his passionate fight against fascism. Like his uncle Heinrich Mann, he was at once a writer and an activist. Klaus was especially close to his

mother and sister Erika, but within their difficult family dynamics he showed solidarity with all his siblings. Unlike his father’s lifelong battle with homoerotic desire, Klaus acknowledged his own homosexuality from an early age. He also gave free rein to his fascination with suicide, which (Spotts proposes) must have begun innocently, as part of a ‘long tradition of German youth’, but soon became ‘morbid’, making him a dedicated ‘voyeur of death’.

With Erika he goes on teenage escapades. Their parents think they are on a cheerful walking tour of Thüringen. Instead, they head straight to the ‘homosexual heaven’ of Berlin. While Erika is drawn to political theatre, Klaus decides to become a writer. By the end of his teens ‘Klaus was a youth in psychological, sexual and moral turmoil.’ He speaks and writes rapidly, travels compulsively – in Europe, America, Africa, the Pacific, and the Soviet Union – and is puzzled by this innate restlessness. He often misbehaves. As a theatre critic, for example, ‘it amused him to praise nobodies ... and take the mickey out of distinguished actors’. He knows everyone. Mostly he lives in hotel rooms, governed by the rituals of packing and unpacking a clutch of photographs,

Thomas, Lotte Lehmann, Klaus, Erika, Bruno Walter, Elsa and Lotte Walter at Santa Barbara, 1940

typewriter, cigarettes, difficult relationships, casual sex, and drugs. His intensity arises from an overwhelming fear of loneliness and failure.

When Hitler came to power Klaus went into exile, where he wrote a blazing manifesto of resistance in the form of a letter to the once highly esteemed poet Gottfried Benn, who had thrown in his lot with the Nazis. Decades later, Benn confessed that Klaus Mann was right; that this young man had seen things ‘much more presciently than I did’. Both Klaus and Erika were increasingly involved in protests – they commissioned exiled writers, staged cabarets, spoke forcefully on radio, at rallies and conferences – while their father, careful not to offend his German publisher and his public, stayed silent on politics.

It was his premonition of an escalating crisis that had propelled Klaus

His intensity arises from an overwhelming fear of loneliness and failure

Mann into writing Mephisto . Then Austria was annexed, Czechoslovakia sacrificed, fascism spread in Italy and Spain, the German–Soviet pact was signed, war broke out, and the French surrender triggered a massive refugee crisis in Europe. Dissent proved ineffective. With no passport and nowhere to go, Klaus fell ever deeper into despair and drugs. He sought help at various clinics. When the Manns found refuge in America, Klaus tried to start afresh by unlearning German, a language polluted by Hitler. He studied English and read voraciously; Virginia Woolf was his favourite. Ahead lay a rocky path of more failed affairs, failed ventures, failed attempts to die. But by 1942 he was writing his diary and books in English, one of the few exiled German intellectuals to master their new language.

To have some stability of place and purpose, Klaus enlisted in the American army. This brought him to the attention of the FBI, which suspected him of communist sympathies, a crime considered worse than fascism. Klaus endured a hurtful process of surveillance and character assassination. In the army,

between boredom and bayonet drills, he read Proust; eventually he was assigned to the psychological warfare unit and shipped off to Europe.

At the end of the war, as an intrepid American journalist, he returned to the bombed-out ruins of Munich and his family home and made his way to witness what had occurred at Dachau and Theresienstadt, where he met his aunt, who was barely alive. In an interview with Richard Strauss he thought the composer ‘could have lived in a land of a hundred Hitlers, providing no one bothered him personally’. He spoke with Winifred Wagner, who confirmed her admiration for Hitler, and with Karl Jaspers, who was guilt-ridden at having survived the war. Together, Klaus and Erika attended and wrote about the Nuremberg trials. Both of them believed in collective responsibility; both detested Germans. For Germans who disliked being criticised by those who had gone into exile, ‘disowning Klaus Mann was a way of disowning the past’.

In the end he was physically and emotionally exhausted. It is said he drank heavily without getting drunk and spoke in a mere whisper; one friend saw that ‘the light in his soul seems to have gone out’. When he died on 21 May 1949 in Cannes, his brother Michael was the only family member to attend the funeral. Clearly he had wanted to die, though Frederic Spotts argues that ‘biographic orthodoxy has it that he deliberately killed himself. Biographic orthodoxy errs’. Spotts believes Klaus Mann’s tragedy was his famous father, ‘who despised, tormented and humiliated him’ to the point of causing ‘depression, drug addiction and longing for death’. That is much too bold and probably only fractionally true.

It is to be hoped that Cursed Legacy will take readers back to Klaus Mann’s writings, his letters, diaries, interviews, and his portraits of Gide and Tchaikovsky, as well as the memoirs and novels. With his keen biographical instinct – not unlike Strachey’s – Klaus Mann was one of the sharpest observers of his time. g

Evelyn Juers is the author of House of Exile (2008) and The Recluse (2012).

Scrutony

Tim Byrne

THE RING OF TRUTH

by Roger Scruton

Allen Lane

$49.99 hb, 401 pp, 9780241188552

There is a kind of dread in the heart of any reader who approaches a philosopher in the act of pronouncing on a great work of art. Many a filmmaker’s oeuvre and painter’s catalogue have been bullied to death by the schematics and architectures of these men – they are inevitably men – who attempt to explain an artist’s meaning in the context of a particular philosophy, be it political, moral, or aesthetic. They always reveal far more of themselves than the artist they are in the process of skewering, and the result is often reductive and parasitic.

Of course, it depends on the philosopher – and the artist. Roger Scruton is a formidable example of the former, and Richard Wagner a towering example of the latter; together, they make for fascinating, if occasionally uncomfortable, reading on the subject of the German composer’s monumental achievement, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which was recently performed in Melbourne (see page 39). There is a compelling tussle at the centre of this book, brought on by the author’s sometimes problematic but always deeply sensitive attempts to grapple with the sheer weight of the opera cycle, and the work’s fiendish ability to shirk any definitive interpretative analysis. Wagner wins, but the battle is worth following.

Scruton’s main exegesis is that Wagner’s Ring is less a modern creation myth than a spiritual and moral guide to life itself. In telling the story of the downfall of the gods and the sacrifice of their mortal offspring, Wagner is documenting humanity’s most profound attempts to touch the outer extremities of the sacred; not only that, he is teaching us how to die in a post-religious world. It is bold, energising stuff, and entirely in keeping with the scale and ambition of the work. Scruton is right to see in

Das Rheingold – the first opera in the cycle, and a prelude to the central story – an artist engaging in the fundamental drives of the human condition rather than a prehistory of the world. ‘In tracing things to a beginning,’ he explains, ‘we are exploring what is first in essence, not what is first in time.’

The opening chapter, titled ‘History and Culture’, stands as one of the finest historical and philosophical contextualisations of an artist’s work since Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004). From Hegel and Marx to Feuerbach and the 1848 revolutions that Wagner participated in and was lucky to survive, Scruton tracks the intellectual lineage of the Ring. He also manages to deftly weave in the artistic and aesthetic evolution of the work – from Greek tragedy to Norse myth and the Brothers Grimm – with a self-assurance that is often dazzling. This chapter is then followed by a detailed summary of the plot of each opera, an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting unpicking of the narrative action. It can feel labyrinthine even for those familiar with the works, but this is the clay from which Scruton extrapolates and moulds his theory.

The book is full of surprising insights and illuminating interpretative flourishes, largely drawn from ideas Scruton has prosecuted over his many decades of public discourse: he is excellent on the nature of resentment that drives the character of Alberich, something he previously discussed in relation to totalitarianism in A Political Philosophy: Arguments for conservatism (2006). He also has complex and nuanced things to say about the nature of law and contract in relation to the character of Wotan. Even when he turns his attention to Brünnhilde, he is largely sympathetic and enlightening, given his often controversial positions on feminism and sexuality in the past. He sees her not as ‘an idealised woman, but an ideal woman. She is the incarnation of a femininity prepared in the realm of pure ideals’.

This is true of the character as she appears in Die Walküre, the godhead who steps down into mortality, but it holds less sway in the subsequent operas. Scruton seems to teeter on the cusp of

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outright sexism when it comes to Brünnhilde’s experience of mortal love and betrayal, as if he is unwilling to countenance her wrath and need for revenge, even given the circumstances of her rape and ruin. He comes closest to outright offence with this: ‘Among the great artists none was more determined than Wagner to remind us that ... men are under an obligation to idealise and protect the women whom they desire, and that shame – shame of the body – is the woman’s primary form of protection and the deep expression of her will.’ That any writer could recover from this excruciating paternalism is something of a miracle, but Scruton does go on to mitigate – if not quite ameliorate – his painfully outmoded view of the feminine. He emphasises another of Wagner’s preoccupations: the need for sacred things in a world that can conceive of the death of gods. His description of Brünnhilde’s immolation on the funeral pyre is frankly beautiful, its justification more convincing than that of Nietzsche or Shaw.

Scruton is such a confident guide into the world of Wagner’s Ring –musically, textually, philosophically –that it is sometimes hard for the reader to extract their own perspective amongst all the highly astute, occasionally offcolour, observances. This is the danger in following a philosopher’s passion: they have a tendency to override your own, even in the act of describing. The Ring of Truth succeeds because of the monumental greatness of the source material as much as the supple, subjective responses the author brings to it. g

Tim

Big Pharma

A new look at the history and politics of ADHD

Nick Haslam

ADHD NATION: THE DISORDER. THE DRUGS. THE INSIDE STORY. by Alan Schwarz Hachette, $35 pb, 340 pp, 9781408706572

The spectrum of opinion on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD in the acronymcrazed world of psychiatry – runs from the firiest red to the deepest purple. At the radical red extreme, critics see the diagnosis as a dangerous fiction, scripted by Big Pharma so that rambunctious youth can be profitably pacified. At the violet end, advocates view the condition as a disorder of the brain, its validity attested to by mountains of genetic and neuroscientific evidence and its treatment necessarily biomedical. Parents of affected children tend to lean in this direction, pulled by some combination of medical authority, relief from the moralistic judgement that wild children must have deficient care-givers, and the appeal of a pharmacological solution to their troubles.

Alan Schwarz is no scarlet radical, but his book on the history and politics of ADHD glows like a slow-burning ember. Schwarz acknowledges the reality of pathological inattention and hyperactivity, and does not deny that the condition has a neurobiological dimension. His critique does not undermine the essential idea of ADHD so much as the way it has been stretched, marketed, and leveraged by commercial interests, with the willing connivance of mental health professionals. Without dismissing the value of medication in the treatment of ADHD, Schwarz is refreshingly scathing in his assessment of some of the main pharmaceutical players and their medical mouthpieces.

The villains of this book may be a few multinationals and some prominent psychiatrists, but the main characters are the drugs themselves, whose early lives are tales of misdirection. Benzedrine was ini-

tially developed to treat asthma and nasal congestion, and only later found a role in treating childhood attention problems. Ritalin – named after the inventor’s wife, Rita – was intended to treat narcolepsy, depression, and senility. Adderall existed first as the appetite suppressant Obetrol. The apparent paradox of treating excessive activity and flighty attention with stimulants aside, these amphetamines and amphetamine-like compounds can work wonders on some people with ADHD. Concentration sharpens, fidgeting and distraction diminish, and schoolwork becomes manageable. These therapeutic benefits must be set against several troubling costs, however, and it is here that Schwarz is

Alan Schwarz is no scarlet radical, but his book on the history and politics of ADHD glows like a slowburning ember

especially compelling. Stimulant medications occasionally have significant side effects, but more importantly they have great potential for abuse. Contrary to the widespread belief that these drugs simply level out chemically imbalanced brains, they can also improve concentration and dissolve fatigue among people without ADHD. To an alarming degree on some US college campuses, and increasingly here as well, these stimulants are openly shopped and popped by students seeking a dose of cognitive enhancement to get them through their exams and final papers. Besides these rare side effects and common abuses, stimulants can also be highly addictive. Schwarz presents

Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic. He reviewed the Melbourne Ring for Time Out

vivid profiles of young people who have become dependent on their medication and, more controversially, who may have been led into the abuse of illicit drugs through the stimulant gateway.

The stubborn refusal of many experts to appreciate the dark sides of stimulant medication angers Schwarz, but the tendency for pharmaceutical companies to overlook them does not surprise him. The most devastating revelation of his book is the ingenuity with which they have steadily enlarged the markets for their products. ADHD was initially understood as a disorder of young boys, often emerging when they first encountered the constraints of formal schooling and declining as their prefrontal cortex ripened on its spinal vine. Over time, the disorder expanded its territory. Increasingly, ADHD was diagnosed in adolescents and later still viewed not as a transient condition of the young but as a lifelong affliction, requiring medication of course. Moving in the other direction, research in the United States has uncovered troubling evidence of stimulants being prescribed to toddlers. The potential market for these drugs was also swelled by the suggestion that ADHD was underdiagnosed in girls, who were less likely than boys to behave ‘hyperkinetically’, but might still be quietly lost in a fog of distracted daydreaminess. As if expanding ADHD’s reach was not enough, enterprising marketers and researchers have brought into being a new condition, binge eating disorder, which is to be treated by the same medications. They are now in the process of creating a new disorder of attention, the very relatable ‘sluggish cognitive tempo’.

The expansion of the stimulant market has been accompanied by steep rises in the prevalence of the ADHD diagnosis, abetted by gradual shifts in how it is defined and assessed. Schwarz notes with alarm how the condition was thought to affect three per cent of children when it was first formally recognised in 1980, but this estimate has steadily risen to eleven per cent. He attributes this inflation not to societal change or other factors that might legitimately change mind and behaviour on a macro scale –diet, digital technologies – but to rampant over-diagnosis. With the encour-

agement of ‘pharmaceutical evangelists’, quick-and-dirty assessments, enabled by simple-minded checklists, are prescribing medications to people who are neither impaired nor unwell.

ADHD Nation is primarily a critique of the entangled relationship of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry in the United States. Some things are different here. Rates of ADHD among Australian children are significantly lower, and rates of stimulant prescription and off-label use

substantially so. However, it would be a mistake to read Schwarz’s powerful book as a travel guide to an exotic land. ‘Our culture’s handling of the disorder could very well be diagnosed with ADHD,’ he writes, and because US cultural trends have a tendency to globalise, we need to be attentive. g

Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches social and personality psychology.

Materialism redefined

Tracing the history of modern consumption

Benjamin Madden

EMPIRE OF THINGS: HOW WE BECAME A WORLD OF CONSUMERS, FROM THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST by Frank Trentmann Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 862 pp, 9780713999624

If there is a single event that marks the maturity of a new field of study, it may well be the appearance of a sprawling monograph from a trade publisher. Empire of Things: How we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first by Frank Trentmann, Professor of History at Birkbeck University College of London, announces the arrival of consumption history in lavish style. Consumption, defined as ‘the acquisition, flow and use of things’, is a defining feature of twenty-first century life.That much we can all agree on. Beyond this, certain obdurate myths obtain, against which the history of consumption sets itself.

The most familiar of these is a definition of consumption as ‘private choice, rampant individualism and market exchange’, emerging after World War II in the West (particularly in the United States) and spreading out from there. On closer inspection, however, the roots of modern consumption reach back to at least the fifteenth century.

This history has often been told from the perspective of production, but to approach this lengthy historical span from the perspective of consumption is to experience a paradigm shift. Technological change and the forces of production are not the only drivers of economic and social development; consumption, along with the forces that alternately encourage and constrain it, is just as important.

Trentmann looks for the origins of modern consumption in ‘three cultures of consumption’: Italy during the Renaissance, China during the Ming dynasty, and Britain and the Netherlands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Renaissance coincided with a flourishing of material culture in the northern Italian cities, but the acquisition of goods was often a way of stockpiling wealth. Those goods were made to be stored and reused, not exhausted and replaced; this attitude also imposed a constraint on the cycle of fashion insofar as chasing novelty could reduce citizens’ net worth. Moreover, in a pattern that recurs throughout con-

sumption history, increasing material wealth gave rise to moral panics, perhaps most spectacularly exemplified by Girolamo Savonarola’s ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in 1497.

In Ming China (1368–1644), the growth of internal trade produced a similar culture of conspicuous consumption among the merchant class. In Renaissance Italy, those who would associate consumption with moral decay had both Christianity and the Stoic tradition (transmitted through Cicero) to draw upon; in China, Confucianism functioned in much the same way. But in China the Confucian tradition was personified in the class of scholar–officials, who were able to counter the merchants by mobilising their cultural capital to elevate antiquity over novelty, and connoisseurship over consumption. The result was to impede the development of a broad and acquisitive consumer culture in China for centuries. The breadth of the sources Trentmann marshals behind his arguments frankly astonishes; it is easy to pay lip service to the need for transcultural approaches in the humanities, but extremely demanding to carry them out.

Of these three societies, it is northwest Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ushered in ‘a new regime of consumption ... characterized by volume, variety and innovation’. The question of why modern consumption should have arisen there and not elsewhere has traditionally been answered in three competing ways: the populace’s higher real wages, emulation of their social superiors, and willingness to work more to acquire more. Having deftly identified the shortcomings of each thesis, Trentmann argues that a complete explanation for why certain societies were more amenable to the

world of goods than others must include a deeper analysis of cultural factors than has been hitherto put forward. As such, he goes on to examine the role of the Enlightenment, of empire, of urbanisation, and of home life in forming a culture of consumption from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first. By giving a central role to ideas and ideologies in his account, Trentmann makes an important break from the staid materialism of (nonetheless foundational) historiographical traditions like the early Annales School. Empire of Things pays careful attention throughout to consumption’s role in producing modern identities, the ‘material culture of the self’. At the same time, the book resists the temptation to retreat into abstract theorisation, while having some fun with those who do, notably Marx, whose tortured grappling with commodity fetishism is juxtaposed with the sordid material circumstances of his life in Kentish Town. Indeed, Marx is the modern thinker perhaps most responsible for historiography’s neglect of consumption; the irony that nominally communist China is home now to some of the world’s most avid consumers is lost on nobody. Indeed, China’s ongoing transition from a production- to a consumption-driven economy and the immense stakes thereof seem ample justification for a concomitant shift in intellectual emphasis for economic historians. Moreover, the rise of Asian consumers and their differences from their Western counterparts underscore one of the central insights of consumption history: that consumers are not the passive, hypnotised, undifferentiated mass of puritanical imaginings. Rather, consumers are actively engaged in constructing their identities and their worlds by appropriating things

creatively, and often using them in unexpected ways.

Part Two of Empire of Things turns away from historical narrative to consider consumption’s role in a series of contemporary debates: over consumer credit, work/life balance, social security, the welfare state, the corporate world, global trade, inequality, and the environment. That this topic figures prominently in so many familiar political and social issues is testimony in itself to the importance of Empire of Things , particularly insofar as it succeeds in moving the debate on from the easy moralism that still attaches to consumption, particularly from the political left. Moreover, in an age characterised as much by a profusion of information as of things, a monumental work of synthetic scholarship like this, presented in terms accessible to the common reader, points the way forward for interdisciplinary work in the humanities. g

Benjamin Madden is the former editor of Modernism/modernity, and presently teaches literature at the University of Adelaide.

WRITTEN WORD

Contortions

James Dunk

DR JAMES BARRY: A WOMAN AHEAD OF HER TIME

by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield

Oneworld Publications

$35.99 hb, 492 pp, 9781780748313

‘The devil! It’s a woman!’ exclaimed a charwoman as she laid out the naked body of James Barry, MD, for burial. Seventysix years earlier, Barry had been born Margaret Bulkley in a struggling Irish merchant family. After taking her uncle’s name and expending his estate on medical school, Margaret acted the part of a man for six decades.

The life she enjoyed as a man was breathtaking. She surmounted the early challenges of switching genders: she assumed a masculine voice and bearing, and falsified her age to account for her smooth skin and diminutive stature. James Barry became an army surgeon and worked tirelessly in a string of colonies, healing illness, improving sanitation, and educating civilians and military personnel in healthful living. It was a successful but unremarkable career: a breathtaking life for a woman of her time.

After James Barry was exposed, the Medical Times and Gazette and Lancet ran short articles about the woman who had become an officer and surgeon. Soon afterward, Charles Dickens, with his compassionate eye and relish for

eccentricity, wrote a short account of Barry’s life. Barry was studied in other short pieces before a full-length biography was published in 1958. In 2003, historian Rachel Holmes furnished him with another biography, Scanty Particulars: The scandalous life and astonishing secret of Queen Victoria’s most eminent military doctor, before it reappeared four years later, with a less Victorian title: The Secret Life of Dr James Barry

At first glance this is a transgressive gender story, perhaps even a transgender one. In Dr James Barry: A woman ahead of her time, however, Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield write Margaret Bulkley as a young woman masquerading as a man so that she could learn medicine to participate in a coming Venezuelan revolution. The actual moment of decision when, with her progressive friends and anxious mother, she conceived the plan remains a marvellous unknown. The second half of the mystery, however, is the main subject of the book. How did this woman maintain the guise of a man? Did people know but not say anything? Perhaps it was too difficult to imagine, so that the swirling rumours about Barry’s effeminacy were cruel but credulous –jokes crafted on the premise that James Barry could not possibly be a woman. Or perhaps there was no vocabulary with which to ‘out’ Barry; no way in which to say to a man that, despite his successful practice of medicine, he was a woman.

The book is testament to a decade’s careful research by Michael du Preez, a retired surgeon. Its engaging manner, identified by two dust-jacket blurbs as ‘verve’, is the work of Jeremy Dronfield, a ghostwriter and ‘book-doctor’ who has helped to cure other projects: a covert pilot behind the eastern front; a female Russian aristocrat and spy; a murdered art doyen and possible spy.

Although the content of Dr James Barry is sometimes bleak, the tone is light, even jovial. Du Preez and Dronfield recount Barry’s life by artfully skipping between moments that can be isolated from the stream of history: a red-haired girl standing on the dock in a bonnet and muffler; the Lord Cathcart carving through the waves outside Plymouth; the quiet cocking of a pistol at dawn; carriages pulling into

Buckingham palace for a levée. Many of these moments are reconstructed painstakingly from the pieces of information about Barry scattered through his writings and people’s descriptions of him; other events are recreated from oblique descriptions penned by those who travelled similar paths. This patchwork effect produces an extraordinary sense of the past, so that the book is a medically inflected excursion through the islands of the second British Empire.

Du Preez and Dronfield do well not to overwrite Barry’s life: they open up his world, capture much of his character through deft biographical work, and then leave us to make what we may of him. Perhaps it was not bewilderment but sympathy that protected Margaret Bulkley. Three officers, we read, stumbled upon Barry while he was ill in bed and saw that he was a woman, yet remained silent. Barry also charmed a series of powerful patrons who worked hard to smooth his career path. Perhaps they knew, and for private reasons supported the project.

Perhaps the most striking passage involves our gendered expectations. Late in his life, James Barry took leave from his responsibilities in Corfu and travelled to Turkey to observe the Crimean War. The authors evoke the image of a slight man (who we know, but sometimes forget, is a woman), riding unsupported into a war zone, for personal interest. It is a vision of trespass and liberation.

Barry was hardly an advocate for women’s liberation. We glimpse this when, during his Crimean tour, he chanced upon the famed Florence Nightingale. He saw a privileged woman standing in her own right in this male sphere, and gave her a severe dressing down for not protecting herself against the sun. Nightingale was incensed, writing later that he was ‘the most hardened creature I ever met’. It seems apt. Margaret Bulkley’s life, in the hands of du Preez and Dronfield, was a long act of private contortion. g

James Dunk is a historian and writer living in Sydney. His doctoral thesis was titled ‘The Politics of Madness in a Penal Colony: New South Wales, 1788–1856’.

The modern mind

Kristian Camilleri

THE AGE OF GENIUS: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN MIND

by A.C. Grayling Bloomsbury

$27.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781408870389

The seventeenth century was unquestionably one of the most tumultuous and transformative periods of European history. It was a century that saw Europe ravaged by war and religious conflict, the reimagining of a new political order, the break from the medieval scholastic worldview, and the birth of modern science. In his latest book, A.C. Grayling mounts a case for considering the seventeenth century as the most significant epoch in human history. In this retelling of the Enlightenment grand narrative, Grayling traces the dramatic changes that took place in politics, religion, philosophy, science, technology, letter-writing, and even literary style over the course of the seventeenth century, in an effort to locate the origins of ‘the modern mind’.

Grayling’s central thesis is that the political and religious turmoil of the seventeenth century created the conditions under which traditional forms of authority gradually lost their hold, thus opening the way for the emergence of the modern scientific worldview. This was an intellectual revolution forged amidst the devastation of the Thirty Years War, a renewed fascination with magic and the occult, and the quest for a new philosophical method. Here, Grayling provides a fascinating insight into the way in which changing social and political conditions contributed to the rise of early modern European scientific culture. The short chapter on the new developments of the European postal service provides a particularly striking example of how the rapidly changing social and technological context was instrumental in the spread of new ideas and the formation of the first scientific societies.

Regrettably, however, the book is littered with historical inaccuracies that have long since been dispelled by historians of science. Nowhere is this more evident that in Grayling’s portrayal of the clash between science and religion. Giordano Bruno, we are told, was burned at the stake for ‘among other things – advocating the Copernican view’ that the earth revolves around the sun. This popular myth has been repudiated several times. While Bruno did indeed endorse the Copernican view, this was not among the list of heresies for which he was put to death in 1600. Nor could it have been. The Church only decreed the Copernican doctrine to be heretical in 1616, some seventy years after the publication of Copernicus’s book.

Further errors crop up as Grayling recounts the triumph of the Copernican view against religious dogmatism. The original Copernican system was not, as Grayling suggests, more accurate than the earth-centred Ptolemaic system in fitting the observational data. Nor did it do away with the use of epicycles. The reader is left with the impression that by the time Galileo wrote his highly controversial Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems in 1632, the scientific case for Copernicanism was beyond doubt and the only thing holding back its acceptance was the fear of persecution. Yet many of the leading Jesuit scholars of the time accepted Galileo’s telescopic observations (and made many more of their own), accommodating them within the earth-centred Tychonic system. Galileo’s unsuccessful attempt to clinch the argument for Copernicanism in the last chapter of the Dialogue – his argument from the tides – was recognised by most of his contemporaries to be seriously flawed.

It might be argued that all this is to miss the point. What was really at stake here was not the cogency of Galileo’s arguments, but the suppression of intellectual freedom by a repressive religious authority. There is an element of truth to this. But Grayling makes no attempt to situate the Galileo affair within its wider social, political, and intellectual context. Little attention is devoted to Italian court culture, or the social and political conditions of the Counter-Reformation

and the political contingencies of the Thirty Years War. Nor is there any discussion of how theological attitudes to the interpretation of Scripture, and its relationship to science, may have changed over time, or how religious attitudes were different elsewhere in Protestant Europe, or for that matter, in the Roman Empire or the medieval Islamic world.

Much of Grayling’s case for conflict of science and religion rests on his account of the Galileo affair. Yet, here we might ask: to what extent was this singular episode representative of relations between science and religion more broadly? On this question, there is a disappointing lack of engagement with much recent scholarship on the subject. Grayling conveniently overlooks the fact that the Jesuits made enormous contributions to fields such as astronomy, optics, and mechanics in the seventeenth century. Not only were Jesuits like Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne among the leading lights of the Scientific Revolution, but it was largely through the establishment of the Jesuit Colleges that the mathematical sciences acquired greater prominence than they had in the universities.

Far from representing the triumph of the secular intellect, many of the leading lights of the Scientific Revolution –Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Leibniz – saw their contributions to the new science as a positive force for religion, even as an antidote to atheism. By the end of the seventeenth century, the relationship between science and religion had fundamentally changed, but theological motivations remained inextricably part of the scientific enterprise. Here we might also note that traditional forms of political authority and views that would today be considered ‘pre-modern’ continued to dominate the eighteenth century. Grayling concedes the ‘transformation of worldview was not complete until after Darwin’. But this is already to suggest that the seventeenth century, while signifying a decisive break with the past, might not have ushered in the modern mind. g

Kristian Camilleri is a lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Science program at the University of Melbourne. ❖

Every picture …

Photographing the ‘human face’ of war

Kevin Foster

DOUBLE DIAMONDS:

AUSTRALIAN COMMANDOS IN THE PACIFIC WAR 1941-45 by Karl James NewSouth, $39.99 pb, 231 pp, 9781742234922

The recent scandal over Facebook’s censorship of Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of ‘Napalm girl’, Kim Phuc, offers a salutary reminder of photography’s stubborn resistance to narrative orthodoxy or societal norms. The editors at Facebook were hardly the first to fret over the propriety of reproducing the photo. When Ut first brought his film into the Associated Press’s Saigon office, the duty photo editor rejected the pictures of Phuc: AP’s policy was clear – no frontal nudity. Recognising the significance of the image, Horst Faas ensured that it was printed and dispatched – but only after a photo-tech lightened the child’s pubis to make clear that she was pre-pubescent. Societal norms be damned. Despite the dedicated revisionism surrounding the photo, on full display again during the recent spat, it did not change the course of the war. By 1972, President Richard Nixon’s Vietnamisation policies were in full force and the Americans had fewer than 70,000 troops in the country. The photo revealed that the training and equipping of South Vietnamese forces had scarcely improved their efficiency: Kim Phuc was the victim of a misdirected South Vietnamese napalm attack, the day after the same air force had killed nine of its own troops near Hue. This undermined Nixon’s repeated assertions that the war, and the defence of democracy, were safe with Vietnamese forces. Their carelessness and incompetence were writ large all over Kim Phuc’s burned body. It goes without saying that no equivalent photo, neither so graphic, nor so contradictory of the official narrative, has emerged from any of Australia’s military engagements. The Australian

military has rigorously controlled the access of photographers – and reporters – to its conflict zones. Their work has been subject to multiple layers of vetting ensuring that the images that emerge faithfully support the official line on the given conflict. There have been no Vietnams for the Australian military – least of all in Vietnam!

In the case of World War II, the majority of photographs in the Australian War Memorial were gathered not by the civilian photographers of the Department of Information, but by the uniformed photographers of the Military History Section, who, as attested servicemen, were sworn to serve the Commonwealth. Directed to record every aspect of the nation at war, from battle to battalion mundanities – postal delivery, fuel supply, sporting events – it is a miracle they produced any images of note. But they did. Their technical proficiency and artistic eye, honed on newspapers and in photographic studios before the war, have bequeathed us a trove of individual and group portraits, landscapes, action shots, and an assortment of enemy dead. Karl James employs a selection of these images, and some well-chosen war art, to illustrate his history of Australia’s commando companies in the Pacific War. Taken together, the photographs offer a candid portrait of an army at war in all its demotic glory. Belts unbuckled, hats askew, a Sam Browne belt jerry-rigged from string, the men sprawl under tarpaulins, recline in long grass or by rivers, often caught unawares by the camera. Cheerful, triumphant, tired, frightened, the images offer a powerfully human record of an army half-dead on its feet, battling the manifest hostility of the en-

WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS by

Gretchen Shirm Allen & Unwin

$27.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760113650

In the midst of preparing for an important London exhibition, photographer Andrew is drawn back to Australia by the sudden disappearance of his former girlfriend, Kirsten. His compulsion to resolve this troubled relationship evolves into a desire to account for an earlier loss. As Andrew grapples with his ambivalence about a new photographic subject, and his ability to sustain the ‘small, bright miracle’ of his present-day relationship with Dominique in Berlin, the complex role of photography in his life is redefined.

Where the Light Falls could be described as a literary thriller – a detective story of the psyche. The book is replete with flawed characters, among them Andrew’s new child-subject, Phoebe, whose damaged smile will ‘always suggest some inner grief’. Implicated in Kirsten’s fate by perceived guilt, Andrew questions his own remove from the world, ‘so definite it might have run along a perforated seam’, and the instinct towards silence. Imagery suggests an incremental understanding of specific harm: a ‘delicate teapot the colour of crushed bones’; a cold house with carpet ‘the colour of crushed eggshells’.

Shirm writes with an artist’s eye: composition and focus deftly delineate the narrative; lighting is refracted through Andrew’s subjectivity, slowly clarifying the opaque and illuminating the ‘terrible’ dark. Metaphors are particular and often exquisite – a reaching for subtle precision: ‘He felt something in his throat each time he swallowed, like a piece of broken china lodged where his Adam’s apple should have been.’

Is Andrew’s photography a way of further distancing life? Is it a protest against silence, a language that is honest – even beautiful? We wrestle with Andrew’s motivations; we want to understand them better; we are brought to question the relationship between art and life, and whether each might successfully nurture the other.

Josephine Taylor

vironment as much as an unseen enemy. If we lament the fact that these photos would never get past today’s hypersensitive PR flak, we should reflect that most of them suffered the same fate in their day, never reaching the newspapers. Clearly, photos that betray the human face of the men and women who fight our wars were no more popular in the 1940s than they are now. Directly lodged in the War Memorial, they, and thousands like them, have gathered dust for almost seventy years. It is time more of them saw the light: outstanding images in their own right, they will illuminate our record of the South West Pacific campaigns.

Sadly, James doesn’t make nearly enough of the photographs. This is illustrated history in the most traditional sense. The text, necessarily foreshortened by the abundance of images, proffers a synopsis of the commandos’ South West Pacific campaigns, their individual actions, signal triumphs, and defeats. The photos illuminate the main narrative, but they find no explicit place in it. Detailed descriptions of each image are confined to a separate, accompanying apparatus. The book cries out for a more detailed engagement with images that enrich our understanding of what these men endured, the conditions they battled, the equipment they used, the

local peoples who helped them, and the enemy they hunted and killed. That they challenge the approved account of Australia’s triumph in the South West Pacific is all the more reason why they should have shaped the narrative. The photos have their own story to tell, and it is only by an act of will that the book ignores it.

James, a senior historian in the War Memorial’s Military History Section, and as such the professional ancestor of the men who took these photos, perhaps felt constrained by his position in the

Directed to record every aspect of the nation at war, from battle to battalion mundanities, it is a miracle they produced any images of note. But they did

belly of the myth-making engine, or else trapped by the rigid conventions of military history. Too timorous, or perhaps uncertain about how to break away from his dominating genre and its preoccupations, he fails to fully exploit his rich visual resource and to offer something genuinely novel to our understanding of what our troops endured. The concerns of military history are important and valuable, and they have their place – but this is not it. Let the pictures speak – they have a hell of a story to tell. g

Kevin Foster teaches in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His most recent book is Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict (2013).

Private Henry ‘Harry’ Lake, 1942, a sniper who was one of the oldest men in the 2/5th Independent Company (from the book under review)

Publisher of the Month with Michael Heyward

What was your pathway to publishing?

In 1979, when I was twenty, I took Vincent Buckley’s poetry seminar at Melbourne University. He introduced us to the work of the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, by then in his late seventies. That summer I went to Britain in pursuit of Bunting. In Newcastle I knocked on the door of Bloodaxe Books and explained my mission to Neil Astley, the publisher. It was the first publishing office I had ever been in. I thought: this is what I am going to do. Neil phoned Bunting and I caught a bus to the council estate where he lived. We talked until the light faded. My future had found me. After I came back to Melbourne, I set up Scripsi with Peter Craven.

Name the first book you published.

Smoking by John A. Scott, a book of poetry we published at Scripsi in 1983.

Do you ever edit the books you commission? Yes, often.

How many titles do you publish each year? Around 100.

What are the qualities you look for in a new author? A voice, a hunger to write, to be read, to take risks.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

Editing provides the greatest pleasure and the greatest pain. If I couldn’t edit, I would stop publishing. Editing, a secret exchange in which one plus one can equal three, remains a riddle to me. Publishing is an endless series of conversations, but the editorial conversation is the most mysterious of them all.

Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?

I wrote a book a long time ago about the ‘Ern Malley’ poetry hoax. It’s a publishing story. Doing that book taught me something about what it could mean to publish a book in this country. And it offered me the experience of sitting on the author’s side of the desk. My book was edited by Robert McCrum, who was editor in chief at Faber & Faber. He opened a door. He showed me how you could shuffle a manuscript like a deck of cards, but he never made me feel that my book was being taken away from me. He encouraged me to

find my own solutions. He was teaching me not only how to be a writer but how to be an editor too.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?

Diana Gribble, who, with her partners, founded two publishing companies, McPhee Gribble and Text. Maxwell Perkins, editor of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, who was fond of saying that a book could be the most important thing in the world. Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s first publisher, who later founded Pantheon and who once said, ‘A publisher’s relationship with his author must be like a love affair in which he asks nothing and has already forgiven every failing in advance.’

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?

I don’t think so. Publishers are always seduced into taking on books that resemble what has already been published, but original and distinctive books will find a path. Lookalike publishing mostly gets what it deserves. The past is there to remind us of the singular books it contains, but we forget how many more had no lasting value at all. In a competitive market books matter, and individuality can shine through because writers have a genuine choice about who they want to publish them. The key to a competitive market is creative diversity: to have different kinds of booksellers, different kinds of publishers.

On publication, which is more gratifying –a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?

Each is equally gratifying, and any one of them can help compensate for the absence of the others. The holy grail is all four at once.

What’s the current outlook for new Australian writing of quality?

It has never been brighter, if only we can do what the writers demand of us. The place is stuffed with gifted writers and gifted readers. The whole point of publishing is to connect these two groups as early and as often as possible. We need more publishing companies so we can train readers to identify the talent around us and bring it to market. The writers, now and to come, are waiting for us.

Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing and author of The Ern Malley Affair (1993).

Nordic plenty

Adrian Walsh

TRILLION DOLLAR BABY: HOW NORWAY BEAT THE OIL GIANTS AND WON A LASTING FORTUNE

by Paul Cleary Black Inc.

$27.99 pb, 235 pp, 9781863958961

The casual visitor to Oslo, with little or no knowledge of Norway’s recent history, could be forgiven for being unaware that per capita this is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. With its predominantly nineteenth-century streetscapes and the absence of large or monumental buildings, there is in fact little evidence, except for the recently built opera house on the harbour, that Oslo is the capital of a nation with the world’s largest future fund. The latter, with assets worth 185 per cent of the country’s GDP, was built on rates of taxes on petroleum resources, that in some instances, were as high as eightyfive per cent. The Norwegians have managed to avoid the euphoria that often accompanies mineral riches and resource booms, and have invested their petroleum riches so as to become one of the world’s biggest creditors.

This, then, is the puzzle that is Norway. A seafaring nation with poor soils but a great deal of mineral wealth has been able to create a sovereign wealth fund that is their ‘trillion dollar baby’. How was Norway able to extract so much in economic rent from multinational oil companies?

Paul Cleary’s interest in Norway’s success is motivated by his experiences with the current Australian minerals boom.

An Australian journalist who worked in East Timor and has written on the oil industry in the Timor Gap, Cleary was astonished to discover the control the Norwegian state had over the development of mineral resources. This book is the outcome of that astonishment. As he notes in the afterword, his goal was to understand why Norway was able to amass a Future Fund worth US$760 billion, while Australia, after the biggest and longest minerals boom since the 1850s gold rush, finds itself more than $1 trillion in debt. At the heart of the book are fundamental questions of public policy.

Cleary outlines a number of reasons why the Norwegian state was able to extract such high rates of return. The first is that the Norwegian public service, which he describes as strong and highly competent, has a long history of negotiating with foreign resource companies as a result of the development of hydro-electric power in the early 1900s. A second reason that Cleary notes is the social democratic tradition that is to be found in most of the Nordic countries, and according to which resources are regarded as belonging to the nation as a whole and thus should be developed under full national control. The final reason is the absence of political opportunism on the part of all political groupings within Norway. This contrasts markedly with what transpired in many other resource-rich countries where oil companies were able to obtain extremely favourable contracts by dividing the political class. This they were unable to do in Norway. Even the conservative Progress party, which has low taxation within Norway as a central plank of its policy platform, are firm believers in the propriety of the nation’s high taxation upon petroleum products.

Cleary also addresses the significant question of how the Norwegians were able to avoid the so-called ‘resource curse’ which has afflicted many minerals producers. Here, the Dutch experience of the 1970s is said to be a case in point. It is one thing to obtain wealth, another matter entirely to ensure that it does not distort the economy (and another again to ensure the benefits are shared across the polity). Cleary argues that they have

achieved this through their policy of investing all of their oil-related earnings in foreign currency, which means governments spend at a sustainable rate and the foreign resources provide a hedge during downturns in commodity prices.

I had also hoped that the book might provide an overview of the philosophical underpinnings of their high taxation policies. This is an important issue in the Australian context where high levels of taxation have been regarded in mining circles as a form of theft. Unsurprisingly in a popular book such as this, there is little discussion of this question, though, intriguingly, there is a brief mention of the influence of the ideas of the theorist Henry George on hydro-power legislation enacted in 1909 – which, according to Cleary, had a lasting impact on Norwegian policy makers.

In addition to exploring comparative questions of public policy in broad outline, the book contains substantial sections describing the challenges involved with mining in the North Sea. The oil off the Norwegian coastline is often to be found more than 300 metres below the surface, and this presented substantive challenges for the divers, who remained below the surface for days at a time with saturated blood in their systems. These tales of ‘derring-do’ are fascinating, especially for readers such as myself who have never contemplated how oil rigs are actually built.

This well-written book is primarily directed at a general public readership here in Australia. The lessons it contains are obvious. For most of its history, Australia has relied on the export of commodities for our financial well-being. Cleary argues that it is time that we recognised the finite nature of many of those resources and established institutional frameworks to ensure future generations will also benefit from the extraction of those resources. Cleary’s book is a timely reminder that our current political and economic arrangements are neither necessary nor inevitable. If politics is the art of the possible, Cleary’s book is important in expanding what we understand the scope of the possible to be. g

Adrian Walsh lectures in philosophy at the University of New England.

Dancing with her

Jennifer Levasseur

A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN: ESSAYS ON ART, SEX, AND THE MIND by Siri Hustvedt Sceptre

$32.99 pb, 576 pp, 9781473638914

Siri Hustvedt revels in ambiguity, the in-between places where the certainties of fact fray. In her idea-driven novels such as The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), and The Summer Without Men (2011), gender is often fluid, identity unfixed, relationships precarious. Her own neurological condition that causes seizure-like flailing, which she chronicles in The Shaking Woman (2010), defies categorisation or treatment, and seems to exist in a mysterious realm between the mental and physical. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, her fifth collection of essays, builds bridges between the humanities and the sciences, while she challenges the convictions of both. Throughout Hustvedt’s compulsive and demanding work, she refuses to accept staid understandings. She writes, ‘I discover what I think because I write. The act of writing is not a translation of thought into words, but rather a process of discovery.’

In the book’s 550-plus pages, we enter a conversation with a thinker working through questions about how we experience and remember art, the nuances of neurological disorders, and where writers get their ideas. She couples these explorations with personal anecdotes and discordant sources. Divided into three parts, the essays – on such topics as the mind–body problem, Pina Bausch’s choreography, Susan Sontag’s take on pornography, and how trauma can induce physical disability –are a result of reflection on visual arts for exhibition catalogues; her own work for a scholarly collection that examines ambiguity in her oeuvre; suicide prevention for a conference in Oslo; a keynote on Kierkegaard for the philosopher’s two-hundredth birthday; and her time

as a writing teacher in a psychiatric hospital. She refuses to stay within the fiction writer’s traditional safe places. ‘The truth,’ she writes, ‘is I am filled to the brim with the not always harmonious voices of other writers.’

Hers is a mind in motion, trying, testing, prompting responses. Readers familiar with her novels The Blindfold (1992), The Sorrows of an American (2008), and the Booker Prize long-listed The Blazing World (2014) will recognise the erudite sensibility that informs these essays. Both forms display Hustvedt’s insatiable curiosity, alongside her ability to combine ‘hard’ sciences with ‘soft’ arts.

Hustvedt, who is also a lecturer in psychiatry, makes the world infinitely more complex, and, at the same time, more accessible. Well-read across a variety of disciplines, she offers a pathway out of our own ghettos of interest. In ‘Much Ado About Hairdos’, she glides from memories of braiding her young daughter’s hair to the traditions we unthinkingly accept about gender, to the function of hair in our sense of self, and then to men’s revulsion at being perceived as feminine.

Throughout, she encourages active interaction from the reader, inviting us into the essay to have an opinion. For instance, in her essay ‘Mapplethorpe/ Almodovár: Points and Counterpoints’, she mixes questions with certainty. One section ends: ‘May I say that Almodovár is dense and complex, that his art is about proliferation, while Mapplethorpe reduces and simplifies? Is this accurate?’ The entirety of the following section reads: ‘Yes.’

Hustvedt describes her method: ‘I see. I feel. I remember. The work in front of me is at once of me and not of me. I muse and I wonder. I interrogate my responses. I take time.’ Her work is generous, even as she refuses to suffer fools and shoddily expressed prose. She is unapologetic and fierce, but also compassionate. Notably, when she conducted an on-stage interview (described in ‘No Competition’) with novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard and he, perhaps inadvertently, insulted her along with all women who write, she transformed her shock into a deeper understanding about his place as a writer of tradition-

ally female literature and the ways in which many (most?) of us unconsciously accept the male as arbiter of quality.

There are writers you love, writers you sink into as a special treat, and writers you read because they’re good for you. Then there are those who make you rock in your chair, the ideas and phrasings so pleasurably challenging that you can’t sit still while they stir your mind.

Hustvedt is a writer you press onto others, the voice you wish would spring to mind when you find yourself in a discussion about art, politics, or feminism: she is solid, questioning, articulate. She has done all the difficult preparation, and she plays like a musician with perfect pitch. That’s not to say that her writing is always fluid: she jolts and stabs in an idiosyncratic voice. Moulded by her diverse influences, she has been enlarged, not subsumed, by them.

Her essays require attention and slowness and can become overwhelming if read without pause. She provides entryways for readers to follow her intricate musings, but she doesn’t wait for them to catch up. Experienced individually, though, these essays become fuel to move the reader back into the world. She is a natural teacher, someone who needs to share information, to test theories to see what sticks.

Siri Hustvedt concludes the final essay in this wide-ranging collection with the words: ‘we must dance with him’. Her subject is Kierkegaard, but it is a fitting end to a book that invites us to move with her through disparate fields as she pulls us into uncomfortable, constricting, freeing, and exhilarating motions. Yes, we should dance with her. g

Jennifer Levasseur is a Melbournebased author and critic. ❖

Poetry in Queensland

edited by Felicity Plunkett

Welcome to States of Poetry, a national project intended to highlight the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry. Funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, these are the first federally arranged poetry anthologies published in this country. Each state and territory anthology is edited by a senior poet closely associated with that state. These anthologies appear on our website with introductions from the state editors, biographies, and remarks from the individual poets. Below is the fourth of our mini-anthologies: selections from the larger Queensland anthology. Of the selection, state editor Felicity Plunkett has remarked: ‘These are poems of gossamer and afterglow, of spindrift and slipstream, of watery and airy paths. Poems of conversations across borders of time and language sit next to poems in dispute with language, undoing certainty as their lines unravel. Assembled, they insist on nothing but the space they take and give, and the provisional and vibrant energies that are poetry’s vital signs.’

Jealousy of the Undertow/ Tombstone

The need to recall the journey Is her gift to her children?

They are the perfect journalists

To inscribe her tombstone

Outside my bedroom window

I see them walking the path to my door

Who understands the logic?

That they look so much like me

Meanwhile what a lousy deal They will also in heart my life

This heat reminds me of a certain freedom Is hell the detour to heaven?

Until our bones prevent us

From dodging an eternal life

I wonder if she even spoke to God?

The bird that sits in the tree outside my window

A thousand rivers, collided and changed direction

Within my chest

I realise there is much more journey to be done

Lionel Fogarty

Chips

Can I say white people really bore me sometimes to be exact

I grow tired with what’s unmentioned idling in surf club bathrooms nothing wrong with the chips but they’re talking about Tasmania my thoughts haunted by islands maybe I’m dying I’ve too many chips teeth like stones take me to be flossed and cleaned I need new soles sticking to the floor what is happening with the dialogue of this country they are killing people with words if I’m not back soon tell them I’ve had too many chips

Ellen van Neerven

Lapis Lazuli/ Sketches from the Nile

I.

You tilt lapis to your lip –a day light as wicker.

By the water, bullrushes bow into sailboat blue, lace-necked

egrets fossick and pick, and the elements rearrange a goliath heron’s skull to mud. Up on the embankment

a crouching child scratches his name into a temple wall.

II.

Ultramarine, lapis lazuli— today it seems possible to boil queens to bone and paint, unlike our childhood saints whose vigils never cease, whose faces do not age.

Feluccas rock in afternoon sun, yellow licks of light hammer the Nile to scattered scale. In a valley near Thebes, antique heads suffocate in starless catacomb, linen figure-eighting the face,

jewel blue basting the eyelids, the last cold smears of sky.

III.

A sprint of sandpipers on mudflats, a low hammock.

Thought flakes away. History is a headless dog

on the road to Karnak where a tribe of sparrows excavate the bones of old sparrows, digging in the mortar for a home. Buried in the stucco there

you might find a blue splinter, a figure for a mortal skull.

Sarah Holland-Batt

The World’s Yard

Right at the back of the world’s yard I am sitting. I have nothing. I had a stone but lent it to the poet to put in his shoe. No sooner did he turn into a slim golden feather that flew straight to the sun that fed the snakes new skins. It could as easily have resulted in ripe figs resting in baskets or unruly persimmon trees twirling in fogged mountains. Regardless, I have nothing. I had a stone but it was just an essay I wrote once about staying with one’s shadow.

Black Cockatoos

after David Brooks Redtailed Bedouins  of Poetry, black cockatoos embroider the sun into us, seam-rip it asunder.

* On the Fitzroy’s  bank at midday, cracking seeds of eucalypts  that outrank Council, a hundred  Banks’ black cockatoos, a paroxysm of commas.

* With their subtler complexions, the females infinitely  more beautiful  than the ludicrously coloured gatherers.

* The gospel according to the locals: ‘Four black cockatoos  kreeing seawards  means four days of rain’ (burkesbackyard.com.au confirms it).

I am not a God-fearing man.

* Should black cockatoos know that theirs are the colours of life?  Indefatigable black and needlepointed into this  starry orange and yellow.

* Imprisoned black cockatoos long-lived as man neglectful beneath the same white sun, its ROYGBIV illusion destroyed by the tiniest prism. Stuart Barnes

MTC Cronin

01.

no one ha s ever written there is no gr eater poem than this one no one ha s ever written there is no gr eater poem then this one 02. this poem was complete until you decide d to read it

03.

this is what australian p oetry looks like after the fire bu t before all the trees were pu t back in the landscape b efore all the trees were pu t back in this p oem

04.

i am the only poet i have ever kn own who ne eded to write this

statements to forget when remembered

05.

everythin g i have ev er known w as in this sentence unt il i decide d to remov e it

06.

every conceivab le object not y et conceived i n the word o bject is what you should ob ject to tireless ly until the p un is entirel essly defeated motion carried 07.

this poem is t o show I AM capable of us ing imagery in a poem bu t not in a pain ting

08. ) / l ( \ l (|\ /) ( | ( /l\ ) | \ )|\) | /( ( l | l(|/) / l ))\/|/ ( /)(| these are n ot the sam e trees no t used in a different a ustralian po em

09.

he should ne ver be left al one until he i s by himsel f then he is everyone

10.

if there are w orse poems th an this one i would like to r ead them beca use i know t here are no w orse poems ju st better read ers

11.

i have never mu rdered anyone i d id not know whe n they were ali ve knowing this you are the nex t victim the ne w suspect the las t murderer of all s elves

12. when i was you ng i used to sit up the back and throw full stops a t all the philosop hers trying to wa tch movies abou t themselves

13.

what earnestne ss i would declin e when sucking on the last win g to brush your heart into its thin nest medium

when mirrors chan ge their shirts we un button ourselves

14. it is importa nt not to writ e too much ot herwise you end up writing poe ms like this on e

less is moor sai d the boat befo re it sank

ha ha being t he first two ha lves of half

15.

16.

that was your la st chance to unde rstand this

now the world ha s to wait until i t can end witho ut you

17.

i will note th is then as a r efusal to accept this volatile m ass of thinkin g as opposed to your usual narr ative in which one person say s something to an other person befor e they turn awa y and walk off in opposite direc tions

18. now i will pu t the word en d in this poe m to show thi s is not the be ginning

as jesus ties y our last breath to his lips he g ets to inhale the albumen from y our eyes still car twheeling to the fr ont gate of all im ages sent off with a cut lunch & a fr esh translation whe re nothing waits f or you to open the same door captiv e inside a diamo nd cut light bulb that never worke d Nathan Shepherdson

Worlds and fragments

Four collections from UWA Publishing

Peter Kenneally

Abook called Our Lady of the Fence Post (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 105 pp, 9781742589121) by a poet called J.H. Crone is an irresistible proposition, simply as a notion. Luckily for readers, neither is at all fanciful. This verse narrative explores the events around the appearance in 2003 of a likeness of the Virgin Mary on a fence post at Coogee, near the site of a memorial for five local rugby players killed in the Bali bombings. Crowds of fervent worshippers flocked to the scene.

The elements of the real story are fantastical enough without any poetic embellishment: faith, anti-faith, nationalism, sensationalism, online abuse, grief whirled through the media at the time, all largely forgotten now. This heady mix, fading into the fog of vague recall, is a perfect ground for the narrative and allusive skills J.H. Crone has in abundance.

Female characters bear names with a Marian tinge: Mae the television reporter; Mari the bakery owner; a Muslim woman, Maryam; even an expert on religion called Maire: but this seems only fitting. J.H. Crone has come lately to poetry after a career as a documentary maker and editor, and though she has a documentarist’s skills with history, she also spins religion though everything, in

the bakery, say: ‘Mari offers a slab of soft, air-filled / bread to Jesus, but she can’t eat. Perhaps / a caramelised cardamom brulee / tart? Jesus swallows a flake. Her dolour / pours out into the throng.’

There is conflict everywhere, between genders and faiths, and strange exaltations, as Mae falls/rises into a Catholic netherworld, and everything comes to an inevitable Cronullan climax –or rather, a set of blessed anti-climaxes. Ranging wide, with compassion and compression, Our Lady of the Fence Post might just be the first verse novel that is actually a novel.

Bruce Dawe’s new collection is called Border Security ($22.99 pb, 94 pp, 9781742589138), but his world remains firmly suburban, reminiscent, good-tempered, and largely non-judgemental. These are all excellent qualities, and piqued in this case in just the right amounts by the occasional drop in pressure or poetic percussion. There is little wildlife, nature, or art. There is, on the other hand, rhyme and metre, veering between invisibility and glaring thump, giving the reader a chance to consider the point and effect of these structures. ‘Gallipoli’, for instance, is

POUM AND ALEXANDRE: A PARIS MEMOIR by Catherine de Saint Phalle Transit Lounge

$29.95 pb, 285 pp, 9780994395771

Catherine de Saint Phalle’s memoir brings us the developing consciousness of a star-struck but lonely child as she struggles to understand and negotiate parents who appear to her mythic, godlike. There is her Spanish-born mother, Marie-Antoinette or Poum, whose main occupation seems to be reeling off The Odyssey and whose sudden appearances and disappearances are ‘like the goddess Minerva’s’, and her father, Alexandre, who sweeps Catherine along on glamorous excursions and regales her with stories – here Napoleon or Caesar, there his childhood dog, Touts – before unceremoniously disappearing for days on end. Catherine is captivated as much by Poum’s whimsical moods, fears, and obsession with death as by Alexandre’s grandiose tales, but as parents they scarcely appear to see her as a child who needs their care.

Absences are at the heart of this memoir. Catherine’s precious nanny Sylvia, her body ‘the ship’ to which she is ‘tethered’, leaves without warning. Uncomprehending, Catherine is desperate for her return. On the journey with her father to her detested school Catherine vomits with anxiety. At the door, Alexandre disappears and she is abandoned to the icy headmistress, Madamoiselle Videlange.

Even the time with Daddy John, Sylvia’s father, a loving figure who wheels the small Catherine around in his wheelbarrow as he works – ‘Love was in the shed, near the cosy tools worn smooth’– is tinged with the acute loneliness they share.

Poum and Alexandre sails in poetic language and rich imagery, in layers of history and philosophy. Nevertheless, it does not quite illuminate the parental figures it works so hard to describe. Like Henry James’s depiction of warring, self-obsessed parents in What Maisie Knew, de Saint Phalle’s memoir is most successful in revealing a child unseen. Kate Ryan

at the double march time: ‘Pay tribute to Anzac valour / That served to define us, too / With the dogged sun of their courage / Above that sea of blue.’

Everything there serves its purpose, whether you like it or not; a purpose that surprises a little, at the end of the book, after so much wry containing, especially after the poem ‘Sea of troubles’ about asylum seeker deaths, where the lines never stop their ends and the rhymes course on like waves, without making too much of that fact.

Dawe’s uxorious devotion, sometimes smothering his capacity to express it poetically, charms; as do various humorous sallies that trip over themselves, but, rather in the manner of Keith Waterhouse, they have great appeal anyway. The book’s essence is the capture of moments ‘especially chosen from the lived life … digging potatoes, marvelling at the modest glory of fruit, or the work of Cezanne’. Shades of Jonathan Richman there, but Dawe brings the reader softly back down to earth when his wife finds an old, blind dog, its end sadly clear because ‘we feared it was too late for him to make / new friends in this exquisitely incomprehensible / new world. So we learn again what ‘haunted’ means’.

Alan Loney returns with Melbourne Journal ($22.99 pb, 95 pp, 9781742589114), a selection from his ‘notebooks’ of 1998–2003, and a prequel of sorts to the excellent Crankhandle (2015). Once again, all is untitled and fragmentary, but in this earlier Melbourne period the fragments

are less printerly, more philosophical and decisive, so that what are posited as fragments take on a more free-standing existence. It is as if, despite himself, he puts everything in, even in a line or two. A longer paragraph, on page seventyeight, begins ‘there are times when what I most envy about Sappho are the holes in the papyrus. That so much can be, no, it’s not ‘left out’ (tho John Wieners, sd Bob Creeley to me once, wanted to know how much of an experience can be left out and still have the language active), but just not there.’

But Loney feels much more modern and gathering than Hellenic and absent, however convincing the chagrin. There are thoughts and criticism, often delivered with a Bergeresque finality, and it is fitting that the epigraph to one section, ‘Not enough and too much’, is a fragment of Heraclitus translated by Guy Davenport. That indicates Loney’s context and timbre as a scholar. As a poet, he is here, among the reading and observation, a man finding his way in a new city, as tentatively as any other.

He sits, pensive, by Darebin Creek, watching birds, and is in equal parts fascinated by a Merri Creek dragonfly and appalled by humanity at Northcote Mall. Overhearing and observing, too much alone, occasionally unaccountably happy, and always trailing clues, the voice of the book whispers regret at being helplessly Marxiste – tendence Groucho – recovering to assert that ‘it is hard to think clearly about emotional matters when the writer in one takes over at the drop of the first word’. The body of the book disproves its voice, thankfully.

The general sense of threat and distance that characterised David McCooey’s last collection, Outside (2011), has arrived and materialised in Star Struck ($22.99 pb, 87 pp, 9781742589107), in the form of a ‘cardiac event’ His response to this experience, set out in the first part of the book, is instructive. The event is examined, forensically, and the context given an ironic once-over in a tone that is, if not actually dispassionate, at any rate far from passionate. The writer takes over here, too.

In emergency, the event confirmed, ‘Almost as if / they were not yours, tears start / coursing down the side of your face. / “What’s the matter?” a doctor asks / “I’m just labile,” you say / and the doctor is satisfied. / You are speaking his language.’ That deadpan tone runs through McCooey’s hospital time, as does a determination to face down fear, which is only a trope, he seems to say – to be kept at bay by Muriel Spark, as ‘the doctor appears with his / silent staring students: graduates / from The Village of the Damned’

In the second part of the book, McCooey, recovered, appears to take greater relish in his playful side. ‘Rhyming 1970s’, in particular, fizzes with delight and nails that definitively McCooey combination of screen, life, and music that energises him. In a highly original take, he forensically, gleefully, demolishes his own poem ‘Whaling Station’ in the light of new evidence.

The book then falls into a ha-ha of its own making with eighteen ‘Pastorals’ (dramatic monologues by or about various figures from popular music). His evocations, of Brian Eno, say, inventing ambient music in his hospital bed, or (bizarrely) Gabrielle Drake, are faintly embarrassing, however genuine their intent. Perhaps that is the problem: he loves music too much to wield the scalpel. g

Peter Kenneally is a freelance editor, writer and reviewer, and poet.

Beyond tragic

Sue Bond

SALTWATER

by Cathy McLennan

University of Queensland Press

$32.95 pb, 328 pp, 9780702253836

This book is likely to anger many readers. Saltwater is about Cathy McLennan’s time as a barrister for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service on Palm Island and in Townsville in the 1990s. Aged twenty-two and faced with a heavy workload, she was confronted with heartbreaking cases of violence, trauma, and neglect. Other lawyers in the office came and went, but the Aboriginal field officers remained constant. Throughout, there are reminders that Palm Island is a beautiful place with forests and crystalline water, despite its being referred to as ‘the most violent place on earth outside a war zone’.

McLennan focuses on the murder of a white man named Peter Lewis that occurred on Palm Island. She introduces the reader to the four young Indigenous people accused of the crime: Albert, eighteen, possibly brain-damaged; Dillon, seventeen; Malachi, sixteen, described as having a ‘snake-eye look’; and the youngest boy, Kevie, thirteen. The mother of Malachi and aunt of Dillon is Tanya Butler, a tragic figure violently abused and assaulted by her white husband, who also abused his three sons from the time they were babies. He is in prison for domestic violence. We follow their fates over the course of the book, and learn how difficult Tanya’s life is, holding on to the hope that her youngest son won’t go the way of his two brothers.

There are two other young Abori ginal people, a girl of eleven called Olivia and a teenage would-be stand-up comic named Adam; McLennan also relates their poignant stories. Olivia has foetal-alcohol syndrome and is malnourished and abused; her mother, an alcoholic, was nearly killed by Olivia’s father. Adam, funny and good-hearted, looks after his friend Tim who has brain

damage from a sporting accident, and lives with his half-sister Joanne and her family. What happens to them is beyond tragic.

The author has a powerful message delivered not in a standard non-fictional or journalistic form but more like a memoir crossed with a crime novel, and a snapshot in time. In her note at the end of the book, McLennan explains that she deliberately chose to write something that would convert statistics into real people, because ‘it’s hard to empathise with statistics’. And it works, because she understands how to structure her story for maximum impact. She begins with what reads like a fictionalised version of the night of the murder, with the four boys laughing and joking with the drunken driver, who buys them beer. The stories of the other protagonists are threaded throughout the book, their personalities made vivid with economical strokes of the author’s pen. Olivia, Adam, her work colleagues, all come to life. McLennan uses humour and pathos skilfully.

In one passage, for example, she interweaves yet another frustrating phone call with a ‘mansplaining’ barrister with her search for a muesli bar that is lost on her crowded desk. The scene ends when a colleague retrieves it from beneath the desk. Humour and collegiality thus relieve the descriptions of serious work for the four boys charged with murder. There are multiple scenes with a client called Charlie who has schizophrenia; he thinks that ‘Caffey’ (many of her clients call her this) can save him from numerous charges of assault. The poor man receives no medical treatment for his mental illness (or anything else), partly because he is violent and has been banned from multiple offices, but also because the services are just not available. McLennan manages to lead the reader through these scenes with an admirable balance of sympathy, fear, comedy, and despair. One visit to a prison, with its reek of terror, she describes with extraordinary power.

McLennan makes it clear, without browbeating, that the justice system can only do so much, and that understanding of transgenerational trauma is minimal. Family Services is not shown in a

flattering light; it seems underfunded and incapable of providing meaningful assistance. McLennan does not give the reader background to the history of Palm Island. I understand why, given the author’s reasons for writing this book, but I was propelled by the energy and passion of her writing to seek it out.

Joanne Watson’s Palm Island: Through a long lens (2010) is my recommended work for this purpose; it reveals the violent and oppressive history of government control of Indigenous peoples with regard to Palm Island. It is a devastating history that should leave no one in doubt as to why transgenerational trauma is at play.

McLennan chose to write something that would convert statistics into real people

Cathy McLennan won the 2014 Queensland Literary Award for Best Emerging Author for the manuscript of this book. She is now a magistrate based in Innisfail. In her author’s note, she relays how excited she was to be studying an Indigenous law subject during her Masters of Law degree. When she arrived for her first class, she found that no one else had chosen the subject. It is a painful point, but an instructive one. Fortunately, it is lawyers like McLennan who do make a difference, both in their everyday work and in writing books like this one, and writing them well. g

Sue Bond is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Central Queensland University, and was longlisted for the 2014 Calibre Essay Prize. ❖

On the ball

Varun Ghosh

BENAUD: AN APPRECIATION

by Brian Matthews

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 216 pp, 9781925355581

For more than half a century, Richie Benaud (1930–2015) graced the game of cricket around the world. A dashing batsman and fierce leg-spinner, Benaud was the first player to score 2,000 runs and take 200 wickets in Test cricket. As Australian captain, he never lost a series and championed an attractive, attacking brand of cricket. As a television commentator for Channel Nine in Australia and Channel Four in England, Benaud became the gold standard for insight, economy, and dry wit. Throughout a long career, he was stylish, charming, and profoundly influential.

In Benaud: An appreciation, Brian Matthews – an award-winning writer and literary scholar – eschews conventional biography and embarks on a trickier endeavour: a celebration. The book is composed of a series of cameos – key moments in Benaud’s career – intermingled with the author’s personal reflections and with extensive quotations from cricketers and journalists. The result is a pleasant, if idiosyncratic, book that is perhaps best enjoyed on a summer afternoon, or a few chapters at a time during lunch or tea breaks.

One of the highlights of the book is Matthews’s account of the Tied Test between Australia and the West Indies in 1960. In the lead-up to this series, Test cricket was in trouble. Attendances had dwindled as a result of stodgy batting, slow over rates, and negative captaincy.

Enter Frank Worrell and Richie Benaud – two charismatic, attacking captains ready to do battle. Matthews expertly weaves together the historical significance and high drama of the game – Donald Bradman exhorting the Australians to play attractive cricket, Gary Sobers’s masterly century, Benaud pushing for an improbable win on the

final day, the two crucial run outs that tied the game, and the teams’ famous joint celebration afterward.

The series reversed the ailing fortunes of Test cricket in Australia. According to journalist Ian Wooldridge: ‘[Benaud] orchestrated probably the most thrilling Test series ever played … which began with the first Tied Test in history and ended with 80,000 people lining the streets of Melbourne to send a narrowly defeated West Indian team on their way home.’ When Australia retained the Ashes in England later in 1961, Benaud’s reputation as a brilliant captain was set.

Benaud once famously summarised his approach to television commentary as follows: ‘Put your brain into gear and if you can add to what’s on the screen then do it, otherwise shut up.’ This deceptively simple formulation belied a long and assiduous apprenticeship at the start of his broadcasting career at the BBC under Tom Sloan (Head of Light Entertainment) and Peter O’Sullevan (‘The Voice of Racing’). Here Benaud learned, among other things, the value of economy.

The hours were long, the pressure intense and the lessons, for future reference, were abundant, but if there was one characteristic that these eloquent talkers shared it was reticence. They never said too much, mostly they said just enough or perhaps just short of enough, leaving irony, pregnant pause or rhythm to do the rest.

Matthews’s description of this period of training makes for compelling reading. He also offers an insightful critique of Benaud’s writing, noting that Benaud was best when he replaced ‘no-nonsense attention to documentary truth and the rather stern insistence on the authorial voice’ with a more narrative approach.

Describing Benaud’s book, A Tale of Two Tests (1962), Matthews writes: ‘There is no lack of detail about the tactics, skills and fluctuations of these matches, but their sense of story and the underlying excitement of the teller of the story is in the mode of fiction and has some of the freedoms of

fictional narrative.’

Interestingly, Matthews quotes Trinidadian journalist and historian C.L.R. James on the subject of cricket writing:

Writing critically about … cricket and cricketers … is a difficult discipline. The investigation, the analysis, even the casual historical or sociological gossip about any great cricketer should deal with actual cricket, the way he bats or bowls or fields, does all or any of these. You may wander far from where you started, but unless you have your eyes constantly on the ball, in fact never take your eyes off it, you are soon not writing about cricket, but yourself (or other people) and psychological or literary responses to the game. This can be and has been done quite brilliantly, adding a little something to literature but practically nothing to cricket, as little as the story of Jack and the Beanstalk (a great tale) adds to our knowledge of agriculture.

Unfortunately, large parts of this book meander into less fruitful territory. The book variously digresses into an account of a local council fight over Benaud’s childhood backyard, speculation on the influence of Benaud’s French Huguenot ancestry on his character, and a bizarre passage about the naming of the eponymous music group, The Benaud Trio.

Other parts of the book are almost polemical. Matthews quotes at length from Geoff Lemon’s contumelious piece in the Guardian in 2015 about the failings of the post-Benaud Australian commentary team. While many of Lemon’s points are well-taken, the extensive quotation jars. Similarly, Matthews’s critique of a book about World Series Cricket called Ten Turbulent Years (to which Benaud contributed) feels distinctly out of place. Despite these weaknesses, Benaud: An appreciation offers an intriguing, if unfinished, portrait of the man. g

Varun Ghosh is a Perth-based lawyer. He received degrees in Arts and Law from the University of Western Australia.

OLD SCORES

by David Whish-Wilson Fremantle Press

$29.99 pb, 233 pp, 9781925164107

For the most part, the burgeoning 1980s nostalgia industry in Australia tends to overlook the fact that back then the states seemed to be engaged in a kind of Sheffield Shield of venality, competing to see which would prevail as the most politically debauched. One might have thought of the Queensland of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Terry Lewis and the New South Wales of Abe Saffron and Roger Rogerson as topping the table, but Western Australia, like its cricket team of the period, was definitely no slouch.

David Whish-Wilson’s Old Scores is set amidst a Western Australia of the period that featured two jailed premiers, the Rothwells Bank scandal, Alan Bond, and more. The character of the place recalls a line from Bob Dylan’s 1986 epic ‘Brownsville Girl’: ‘Even the swap meets around here are getting pretty corrupt.’ Whish-Wilson, a lecturer in creative writing at Curtin University and a former ‘drug-trial guinea pig’, has produced a vivid (not to say excessive) account of 1980s Perth excess, the sunlight ever-glinting over a swamp of filth, depravity, murder, and deceit.

The city is indeed one of the key characters in the novel, a remote wild-west mirage with more money than sense, the sparkling golf courses and country clubs just as shady as the run-down brothels and housing commission estates. Bestriding it all is Frank Swann, a well-crafted protagonist who somehow manages to wade through the endless quagmire of shit and still come out smelling faintly of kangaroo paws.

Old Scores is reminiscent of Andrew McGahan’s Last Drinks (2000), a narrative of the same era that also interweaves fiction with fact. WhishWilson may lack the subtlety of McGahan, but he matches him for sheer readability.

Dean Biron

THE BIRDMAN’S WIFE

by Melissa Ashley Affirm Press

$32.99 hb, 390 pp, 9781925344998

The Birdman’s Wife is about passion, obsession, and ambition. Narrated by Elizabeth (Eliza) Gould, the novel relates her marriage to, and creative partnership with, zoologist John Gould. Opening with their meeting at the Zoological Society of London in 1828, Eliza’s narrative charts the years of her collaboration with Gould – including the time spent in the Australian colonies classifying and illustrating the native birdlife – as a result of which she came to be celebrated ‘not just [as] a wife and mother’, but as a zoological illustrator in her own right.

Melissa Ashley depicts the struggles of a woman attempting to reconcile the demands of her profession with her domestic responsibilities. Via Eliza’s first-person narration, the reader is privy to her grief, frustrations, and desires as she suffers through serial pregnancies, separation from her children, and the unreasonable demands of a loving but ambitious husband who encourages the development of her art but frowns upon her identification as an artist, which would ‘violate’ the ‘code of female conduct’.

Ashley has written an absorbing account of a period in which the passion for natural history, and the obsession among amateur and professional naturalists alike to be the first to collect and classify new specimens, drawn from the far reaches of the British Empire and beyond, was rife. In the course of the Goulds’ collaboration, they encountered other scientists and artists – among them, Charles Darwin (and his finches), Edward Lear, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin – all of whom feature in the narrative. The extent of Ashley’s research is clear; although it can at times sit heavily upon the page, it is the foundation of the novel’s vivid sense of time and place, as well as its detailed description of the intricate practices of taxidermy and ornithological illustration.

Anna MacDonald

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN LOVE by Heather Rose Allen & Unwin

$27.99 pb, 278 pp, 9781760291860

E.B. White once said there were three New Yorks, comprised of those who were born there (‘solidity and continuity’), the daily commuter (‘tidal restlessness’), and the searcher on a quest, the latter giving the city its passion and dedication to the arts. In The Museum of Modern Love, this third type is drawn to Marina Abramovíc’s The Artist is Present, a simple yet profound performance stretching over seventy-five unrelenting days, in which Marina unflinchingly meets the gaze of a series of individuals in a gallery.

To sit with Abramovíc is ‘utterly public but intensely private’, and it is the private that the novel tracks. This exploration of the abstract, ineffable nature of art through the personal is a profound one: the breakdown of structure becomes an attempt to reconnect with a basic, if flawed, humanity, while concurrently peering into the abyss.

The novel is propelled by a simple imperative: will Arky Levin sit? On the sidelines, he fashions an Abramovíc from pillows while he composes late into the night. Tragedy has bought him solitude and a growing sense of estrangement. Arky’s plight is drawn delicately; successful in his career, his dissatisfaction stems from artistic sensibility rather than entitlement, a subtle distinction that is a testament to the strength of Rose’s writing.

The recent popularity of Marina Abramović has all the trappings of a celebrity cult, but Rose dispels any forebodings by revealing a diverse, rich, disciplined history: the hardship of the Yugoslavian War which shaped her; the years with Ulay working and living together in a van, and the toll on her body.

Not that it’s ponderous. Art, which can never be unequivocally universal, is explored from a variety of angles, in snippets of overheard conversation (profound, opinionated, banal, sometimes amusing), and in the debates and reflections of Rose’s characters. Never didactic, this is one conversation worth following. Duncan Fardon ❖

Why do you write?

Open Page with Kim Mahood OPEN PAGE

To work out what I think, which requires digging through the received ideas and lazy generalisations that clutter the surface of my mind, and crafting the language to describe what I’ve found. I also have a strong desire to communicate certain things.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, I have vivid dreams full of ridiculously obvious symbolism.

Where are you happiest?

In my studio.

What is your favourite film?

There’s no single film I could claim as favourite – among the films I’ve loved are The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, Beetlejuice, Birdman, Blue Velvet, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Apocalypse Now, Doctor Strangelove, and All About Eve

And your favourite book?

There are too many great books around to have a favourite, but I do have a predilection for dystopian fiction –I cut my literary teeth on 1984 and Brave New World, and re-reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale never disappoints.

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

Oscar Wilde, for brilliant conversation; Leonard Cohen, because I’ve been smitten by him since I was nineteen; Janet Malcolm for her fearless intelligence.

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

‘Agile’ would be at the top of my current list of dislikes –I loathe good, functional words being co-opted by politicians and public commentators.

Humbug (verb) – to pester or make demands on; humbug (noun) – bad behaviour causing discomfort and anxiety.

Who is your favourite author?

Right now it’s Tim Winton, whose choice of Position Doubtful as his book of the year [in The Age] has done more to bring it to public attention than all the reviews, writers festival events, book launches, and public appearances put together. I also think he’s a terrific writer. On another day I might choose Alice Munro, or Randolph Stow, or V.S. Naipaul.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine? My favourite literary hero is Geryon, the winged red monster in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. My favourite literary heroine is Sybylla in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? The capacity to take you to a place, real or imagined, physical or psychological, and make it part of your own lived experience forever.

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

John Steinbeck – I loved him when I was in my teens, but haven’t read him for years.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

My art practice (which my writing impedes), and the time I spend in the desert, although that provides the raw material for my writing. I also dislike sitting still in front of a computer.

How do you regard publishers?

Scribe, my current publisher, has been a writer’s dream to work with. I’m predisposed to favour small Australian publishers.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

I don’t participate enough in our literary culture to have an opinion. The state of reviewing seems fairly healthy, but I really don’t know about criticism.

And writers’ festivals?

It’s character-building to sit at the post-session booksigning table while fans queue for the other writers and no one buys your book. In my experience, the smaller the festival, the more fun it is.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes, but not always for the right reasons.

What are you working on now?

A long story, possibly a novella, about a massacre on the Kimberley frontier in the 1920s, and an essay for The Monthly.

Kim Mahood is a writer and artist based in Wamboin near Canberra. She is the author of the memoirs Craft for a Dry Lake and Position Doubtful.