With this double issue, Australian Book Review enters its fortieth year. ABR was of course founded in Adelaide in 1961 as a monthly magazine. Max Harris and Rosemary Wighton edited the first series, whose final, quarterly appearances lapsed in 1974. The second series was created in 1978 under the auspices of the National Book Council. Edited by John McLaren (1978–86), ABR had moved to Melbourne – first Carlton, then Richmond, now soaring Southbank. The April issue will mark the four-hundredth appearance of the magazine in its second guise.
Forty years is a substantial run for any publication, and it seems fitting for a magazine undergoing immense change to reflect on the achievements, sacrifices, and intentions of those original editors and their supporters. ABR, in a sometimes difficult market for little magazines, has survived and adapted to new modes, new literary movements, new technologies because of the commitment of hundreds of individuals – and more than 3,100 contributors. None was more selfless or tenacious than my predecessor, Helen Daniel, who edited ABR from 1995 until her death in late 2000.
To celebrate their achievements and mark this new, ambitious chapter in the magazine’s life, we will unveil new programs and features throughout the year. In February we will name the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow (we thank all those who have applied). The following month we will announce a new development that will be of considerable interest to our many contributors. Several themed issues will follow. Major public events will take place here and overseas, including one
at the Australian Embassy in Berlin during our German tour in June.
Four decades is a milestone, but to myself and my colleagues – given the magazine’s present robustness and potential – it feels as though we are just starting out. Ed.
First issue, June 1978
Jolley Prize
Advances was entertained by online reactions to Kristen Roupenian’s short story ‘Cat Person’, which triggered a flurry of ‘hot takes’, tweets, and commentary after it appeared in The New Yorker on December 11 and went viral online. Responses ranged from befuddlement to outrage. Some people, convinced that it was an essay rather than a story, questioned its fictional bona fides. But it was gratifying to see short fiction generating so much attention.
The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s premier awards for an original short
story, has always welcomed new styles and voices. We look forward to being inspirited by new exponents of the genre with the opening of the 2018 Jolley Prize. The Jolley is worth a total of $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $7,000. The runner-up receives $2,000, the third-placed author $1,000. Three commended stories will share the remaining $2,500. This year the judges are Patrick Allington, Michelle Cahill, and Beejay Silcox. The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2018 issue; and the three commended stories will appear later. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony in August. As with our other literary prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). It is easy to enter, simply visit our website for more details. The Terms and Conditions are detailed and comprehensive; and we have also updated our Frequently Asked Questions. (It’s amazing what people ask!) Writers have until 10 April to enter.
The Jolley Prize is funded by ABR Patron Ian Dickson. We thank him warmly.
richard FlaNagaN
Fake news it seemed at first – or a mistimed April Fool’s Day spoof. Writing in The Australian on 11 December, Stephen Romei (the literary editor) reported that ‘Richard Flanagan has decided to boycott the Miles Franklin Literary Award … a response fuelled by bitter personal disappointment’.
Flanagan, as we know, has been shortlisted on five occasions but has never won the Award. The most recent nomination was in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which had previously won the Man Booker Prize.
According to another admirer quoted in Romei’s article, Geordie Williamson, this was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back, as I understand it’.
Richard Flanagan’s withdrawal seems unfortunate, and it is to be hoped he will reconsider in coming years. Flanagan has had much patronage from readers, government, and universities. He has won several literary prizes, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction in 2014, when – in a widely criticised intervention – Prime Minister Tony Abbott overturned the judges’ decision and insisted on The Narrow Road to the Deep North’s sharing the prize with Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People
Remarkably, Flanagan is quoted as predicting in a September 2017 interview with Romei that he would never win the Miles Franklin Literary Award. ‘I won’t win ever. I’m confident that I won’t win.’ Such negative ‘confidence’ seems extraordinary and misplaced. Is there a suggestion here that the Miles Franklin Literary Award per se or successive judging panels have been ill-disposed towards Richard Flanagan. Why would this be? Because of Flanagan’s politics, his prominence, his Guildhall triumph, his Tasmanianness …? The Miles jury changes regularly. No one serving on it now was there in 1995, when Flanagan was first shortlisted. (Disclosure: I was a judge from 1997 to 2001.)
of the Award.)
Many writers would draw solace or incentive from a quintet of shortlistings for Australia’s premier literary award.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, admired by many, was not without its critics. Michael Hofmann and Craig Raine were mordant about the novel in the LRB and TLS, respectively. Our critic, James Ley, was more positive in his review in the October 2013 issue, yet he remarked on ‘peculiar lapses of judgement’ and ‘a tendency to overplay his hand, to end his chapters with a flourish …’ (Ley reviewed First Person in our
literary prizes than there are days in the year. In a difficult environment for creative writers, they supplement incomes, boost morale, and in some cases increase sales. But prizes can have a toxic effect on our literary culture, skewing reputations and warping expectations.
To our knowledge, Richard Flanagan has not commented publicly on this ‘boycott’. ABR invited his publisher, Penguin Random House, to do so, but received no reply. Ed.
Porter Prize
When submissions closed four weeks ago, we had received just under 1,000 entries in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, our biggest field to date. We know what our three judges – John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb – will be reading over summer.
The five shortlisted poems will appear in our March issue. The winner will then be named at a free public ceremony at fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne on Monday, 19 March (visit our website for more information). Following readings from the work of Peter Porter, the five poets will read their poems, after which a distinguished guest will announce the overall winner.
Flanagan’s ‘boycott’ seems ungenerous to four of the novels that prevailed in the years when he was shortlisted: Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2002), Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2007), Tim Winton’s Breath (2009), and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing (2014). (Advances will draw a heavy curtain over the first shortlisting, when the Miles went to Helen Demidenko for The Hand That Signed the Paper, the most freakish and regrettable decision in the long history
November 2017 issue and considered it ‘Flanagan’s most artfully constructed and thematically complex novel to date’.) Literary judgement, like any prize jury, is ultimately subjective – not a ratification of celebrity or multiple shortlistings.
There is also a strong whiff of cultural cringe about this brouhaha. Just because an Australian novel wins the Man Booker Prize doesn’t mean that local judges should roll over in agreement. Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang – surely one of the greatest modern Australian novels – won the Booker Prize in 2001 but not the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for which it was shortlisted. It happens. Australia probably has more
alexis Wright aNd the BoisBouvier chair
Alexis Wright, award-winning novelist and member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria, has been appointed as the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne. The Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature was established in 2015 thanks to a $5 million gift from John Wylie and Myriam BoisbouvierWylie. Richard Flanagan was the inaugural chair in 2015.
‘I hope that I can do some justice to the position by sharing my experience, knowledge, and vision as a practising writer of over thirty years,’ said Wright. Her new book is Tracker: Stories of Tracker Tilmouth. Michael Winkler reviews it on page 8.
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Australian Book Review
January–February 2018, no. 398
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
‘He was the story’
A polyphonic portrait of a mercurial activist
Michael Winkler
TRACKER:
STORIES OF TRACKER TILMOUTH
by Alexis Wright Giramondo, $39.95
pb, 650 pp, 9781925336337
In Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006), Girlie claims, ‘If you ever want to find out about anything in your vicinity, you have to talk to the mad people.’ There are a lot of mad people in Wright’s biography of Aboriginal activist, thinker, and provocateur ‘Tracker’ Tilmouth. He is probably the maddest of all, in the Kerouacian sense of ‘mad to live, mad to talk’, but, according to his mate Doug Turner, his ‘madness gave him sanity’.
Wright takes a polyphonic approach to profiling her quixotic subject. The lead voice belongs to Tilmouth, but she augments and counterpoints his words through interviews with more than fifty informants, in often pungent vernacular. The voices overlap, re-embroider, and articulate different perspectives.
When he was about four, authorities removed Tilmouth and his two younger brothers from their Alice Springs home and dumped them at a mission on Croker Island off Australia’s north coast. In his mid-teens he returned south, working at Angas Downs, where he found it was
‘very difficult to work out who you were and what you were … I am a blackfella but not that black.’
Through formidable intelligence and a fierce work ethic, Tilmouth gained a tertiary education and became a key figure in the Central Land Council. He cultivated relationships with politicians and bureaucrats, and muscled into the fray on a wide range of issues. Two interviewees liken him to Paul Keating. Former colleague Owen Cole says, ‘You needed people like Tracker, otherwise you were just going to settle for the status quo.’
In 1998 Tilmouth was a leading candidate for a Senate position, but was nobbled by forces within the Northern Territory branch of the ALP. His response was to snarl, ‘Labor likes pet niggers, and I’m counted as a pet nigger. I’m allowed to mow the lawns, but I’m not allowed up on the veranda.’
Tilmouth’s salty tongue and virile intellect lashed anything he considered gammon. The Garma Festival was ‘The nigger’s (sic) picnic’. The native title debate was ‘an absolute sell-out by Aboriginal people’. Pat Dodson was ‘a mobile
wailing wall’. Recognition and Reconciliation represented ‘be kind to coons week’. At other times he could be devastatingly smart when demolishing shibboleths, such as the inanity of pushing private home ownership in remote communities.
He had deep enmity towards Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Warren Mundine – beneficiaries of significant corporate and political patronage, and preferred voices for non-Indigenous conservatives. ‘They eat the right biscuits at the right time and use the right fork for the cheese. Their discourse can be in language that white people find amazing, that Aboriginal people use the English language better than they can.’
Tilmouth’s wit was legendary, and there are copious examples in the book. (On Julia Gillard: ‘Probably the last time she saw a real Aborigine was when she was licking a postage stamp.’) However, many allies caution that he sometimes used humour inappropriately. Sean Bowden speaks of ‘the subtlety and depth, the distinction’ of the man, but wearied of ‘this constant banter. Sometimes it was infuriating because he would let it contaminate a serious moment, and sometimes he used it too often.’
‘The able-bodied and healthy among the remote community population choose not to work because they have no need to.’
Tilmouth had the qualities of a natural politician –energy, intelligence, courage, chutzpah, charisma. He was also, like many great politicians, full of human flaws. There is plenty of ammunition in Tracker for those wishing to discredit his ideas, due to defects in the man. Multiple informants talk about his sexist language and poor behaviour at times towards women. He brags about when he ‘massacred five hundred dogs and pups’ on a covert poisoning spree in Amata.
Tilmouth’s salty tongue lashed anything he considered gammon
Phillip Toyne says his jokes ‘were often amazingly offensive’. Turner says he used disparaging names, such as mud monkeys or rock apes, to demarcate Aboriginal people from different areas. Murrandoo Yanner tells of attending the presentation of the Bringing Them Home report in Darwin, when Tilmouth yelled ‘No one bloody took youse away, your parents gave you away and look at you, I wouldn’t blame them.’ Yanner was mortified but thought it was Tilmouth’s idiosyncratic way of dealing with his own pain as a stolen child.
Tilmouth’s great passion was for economic development. This is captured in a long section, ‘The Vision Splendid’, where he expatiates on potential Central Australian land use, agricultural and horticultural ideas, industry and infrastructure dreams. It is the guts of his life work, important to document, but the general reader may long for a 4WD to get through the denser scrub.
Wright says that, ‘His life was lived with the aim of achieving something greater, to sculpt land, country and people into a brilliant future on a grand scale.’ Tilmouth also understood, and tried to teach his acolytes, that there can be no political agency unless it is underpinned by an economic framework. Although he was an entrepreneurial ideas machine, almost all of his thinking seemed to surround mining and food production. He gave scant regard to economic development through tourism, transport, renewable energy, art, or cultural knowledge.
Tilmouth said sagely that, ‘A welfare-based economy cannot work, it does not work. It is an oxymoron.’ However, his job creation schemes ignored the contemporary reality that, in Nicolas Rothwell’s words,
Some of his thinking also seems contradictory. He expresses enthusiasm for a pan-Aboriginal movement and exasperation with traditional owners who do not want mining or agriculture on their land. At other times he derides the widespread ignorance about the profound differences (and schisms) between language groups and communities, and calls native title ‘a clash of cultures between the urban Aboriginal … and the traditional Aboriginal people’. He voices concerns about enforced assimilation of people who are ‘trying hard to find a long-lost language and culture to give themselves an identity’, but despairs at the lack of Western-world business savvy in remote communities.
The pop-psychology conclusion is that this multifariousness was within Tilmouth the man. He was a desert Aboriginal fella with green eyes. He could catch fish in the Gulf in the morning and monster mining companies in the afternoon, tell bush yarns all night and be sitting on Bronwyn Bishop’s knee in Canberra next day. Wright says, ‘He was among the most extraordinary contemporary story-makers in the Aboriginal world. He was the story.’ Her bricolage presents a fractured portrait of a mercurial man she calls an enigma. It is unclear that he really knew himself.
He was a trickster figure in many ways, conjuring mischief and alchemical outcomes through the power of his voice and personality. He was also superbly unbowed. Cole said, ‘He was audacious, and when you have been pushed back and downtrodden for so long you feel a little bit intimidated, but he was always out there and in your face, and here I am.’
Wright’s brace of ineffable, awkward, uncanny novels (Carpentaria, The Swan Book [2013]) will be unravelled and enjoyed by readers when other contemporary fiction is forgotten. Tracker, a book performed by a folk ensemble rather than a solo virtuoso, adds to her enduring non-fiction oeuvre that captures the unique ground-level realpolitik of Aboriginal Australia. g
Michael Winkler lives in Melbourne and works in the Northern Territory. He won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize for ‘The Great Red Whale’.
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The bills are still due Global reverberations of the Cold War Barbara Keys
THE COLD WAR: A WORLD HISTORY by Odd Arne Westad
Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 720 pp, 9780241011317
‘The long years we spent plunged in the Cold War made losers of us all,’ Mikhail Gorbachev lamented after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By then, Gorbachev was unequivocally a loser himself – out of power and soon to be Russia’s least popular former leader, with ratings far lower than Stalin’s.
Americans do not share the sentiment that the Cold War was a net loss. They experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the magical disappearance of their Soviet enemy as victory and vindication. Odd Arne Westad, however, eschews any notion of the Cold War as a triumph. A Norwegian-born historian whose recent appointment at Harvard was preceded by a long career in Europe, Westad has long been one of the most persuasive advocates of the view that the Cold War was a tragedy for much of humanity, above all for those in the unfortunate battlegrounds where millions of lives were lost.
Westad is best known for a brilliant, prize-winning book, The Global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times (2005). Its searing account of the Cold War’s hot wars was coloured by his own experiences in Africa and Asia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when his sympathies were engaged by courageous struggles to resist foreign interventions and to remedy colonial legacies of injustice and inequality. Constructed on a research base of such geographic and linguistic breadth that it should qualify for a world record, the book argued that superpower interventions in the Third World turned decolonisation into a kind of re-colonisation.
As European empires unravelled
after World War II, newly independent countries were drawn into the orbits of one or the other of the superpowers, replacing one form of domination with another. Westad found but one major distinction between imperialism and Cold War interventionism: in the former, a civilising mission was ‘almost an afterthought’, whereas the Soviets and the Americans were both genuinely convinced from the beginning that their meddling would improve the world.
In this even more ambitious book, Westad returns to these themes but extends his chronological coverage to the twentieth century and his geographic sweep to the entire world. In 629 pages of lucid prose, he offers an exceedingly detailed and prodigiously researched account of an ideologically driven conflict that touched everyone alive, if only because of the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation. His account begins not in 1947, the usual marker of the onset of the Cold War, nor even in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. He opens instead with the first crisis of global capitalism in the 1890s, to underscore his argument that the Cold War arose from economic, social, and political transformations that date from the nineteenth century. From there, the story moves forward to chart the contest between capitalism and communism across the next century, encompassing both the familiar – the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet intervention in Afghanistan – and the lesser known: the Lomé Conventions, India’s role in the Congo crisis, Trotskyist parties in Europe. More than eighty countries are listed in the index.
Befitting a historian of the world
who is also a China specialist, Westad offers superb coverage of events in Asia. The twenty-page chapter on the Korean War, which Westad singles out as perhaps the Cold War’s single greatest calamity, offers an exceptionally wellcrafted synopsis. Using Soviet and Chinese archival sources and recent scholarship, Westad deftly reconstructs the miscalculations that led Stalin to acquiesce in Kim Il-Sung’s plot to reunify the Korean peninsula by force. Frustrated in Europe, emboldened by the success of the Chinese Revolution, lulled by mixed signals from the United States about its commitment to South Korea, but most of all caught up in delusions of omniscience, Stalin at last approved a risky move that he had previously forbidden. Mao, though worried about foreign intervention, had no choice but to go along.
Kim and Stalin were wrong. When US-led UN forces intervened after North Korea’s invasion of the South, Mao was forced to send a million Chinese troops to stave off its communist ally’s defeat. US General Douglas MacArthur publicly called for war against the PRC itself; the Truman administration privately debated the nuclear option. By the time Stalin’s death in 1953 finally provided an opening for a negotiated settlement, Korea was a ‘wasteland’ of ‘death and despair’. Three and a half million Koreans had died or been wounded, and the country was in ruins. Westad is unsparing in his assessment of what he calls an entirely avoidable, barbaric, and catastrophic war.
Its reverberations were global. It fomented McCarthyist hysteria in the United States, bonded the Chinese to the Soviets (temporarily), hardened a Sino-American hostility that would endure for decades, escalated nuclear fears around the globe, and accelerated the race to build nuclear arsenals that could destroy the world. Above all, it cemented the notion that the Cold War was a zero-sum game, in which no side could afford to ‘lose’ any inch of territory and military options were always on the table.
The assumptions that the Korean War set in place shaped much of the rest of the Cold War, as the superpow-
ers battled for influence from Angola to Zaire. Westad deftly surveys every major crisis and many minor events that constituted or were shaped by the Cold War. The saga ends on 25 December 1991 when Gorbachev handed the nuclear codes to Boris Yeltsin, the new leader of new Russia, and the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time over the Kremlin.
Westad is unsparing in his assessment of what he calls an entirely avoidable, barbaric, and catastrophic war
Westad amply proves his point that, although the Cold War did not determine every development between 1945 and 1991, it acted like a black hole in international affairs, its gravitational force distorting the orbits of even the most distant objects.
If the book has a flaw, it is that, despite the author’s admirable thoroughness and indisputable brilliance, at times he exerts too little gravitational force over his own narrative. It will be a priceless reference work for scholars and devotees of Cold War history, but general readers may sometimes falter over the preponderance of detail. As Cicero observed, ‘the causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves’. Westad’s explanations of ‘why’ are often too bland, too brief, and too even-handed to offer the reader a foothold in the sheer mass of information. Soviet leaders made mistakes. American leaders made mistakes. Third World leaders made mistakes. The reader strains to make sense of decades of conflicts without sharply drawn guides as to where responsibility lies. The book can sometimes feel rather like a movie in need of a soundtrack: it underplays the cues that tell the reader how to understand not just the sequence of events but their underlying meaning. Mao, for example, is arguably the worst mass killer in a century riddled with mass murderers. In the figure Westad cites, forty million Chinese died from starvation and overwork in the
disastrous Great Leap Forward, which was followed by the madness of the Cultural Revolution – mass torture, murder, and mind-boggling disruption to the country’s functioning. After establishing what Mao knew, ordered, and encouraged, Westad concludes that ‘Mao’s preoccupation with ethos over practical gain ... had led the revolution astray’. A preoccupation led China astray? Historians should not don the robes of judges, but they can be clear about who did what and pen words that match the deeds described.
Even so, Westad has written an indispensable guide to the world today, which, nearly three decades after Gorbachev’s downfall, is still shaped by what happened during the Cold War. We need look no further than North Korea, where the Kim dynasty still threatens aggression on a peninsula divided along Cold War lines. Westad agrees that the United States ‘won’ the Cold War, but at unnecessarily high costs, both at home and abroad. The bills are still due. The old habits that American leaders refused to shed, along with the hubris borne of Cold War triumphalism, led them into mistaken wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Misguided thinking may yet lead to another. g
Barbara Keys is Associate Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and the author, most recently, of Reclaiming American Virtue: The human rights revolution of the 1970s (2014). ❖
A long way downhill
Postwar
leadership in Australia
Frank Bongiorno
THE PIVOT OF POWER: AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTERS AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 1949–2016, by Paul Strangio, Paul ‘t Hart, and James Walter
The Miegunyah Press, $49.99 hb, 376 pp, 9780522868746
Has the Australian prime minister’s job become impossible?
The authors of The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership 1949–2016 ask this question at the very end of their book. They conclude on an almost utopian note, one rather out of keeping with the otherwise judicious tone maintained over 300 pages: ‘a new dawn will arrive’.
Sadly, the optimism of Paul Strangio, Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter on this point is founded on their historical observation of previous reinvigoration of the office, and not anything that has come to pass during the prime ministerships of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, or Malcolm Turnbull. Most of what the authors tell us in their account of the office since John Howard’s political demise belies their eventual optimism. But they do help us to see that the issue is not that we have suffered an unusually long run of duds; the problems are rather inherent in the evolution of the role of prime minister.
We expect a great deal of our prime ministers – perhaps more than ever –but we also subject them to a level of scrutiny that would have struck Robert Menzies, whose long postwar prime ministership (1949–66) opens this book, as downright impertinent. If asked by a journalist for passing comment, Menzies would simply advise the enquirer to listen in parliament. But by the time we get to John Howard, there is a media unit with eight staff, a veritable spin factory. Rudd’s prime ministership notoriously degenerated into a quest for the next ‘announceable’.
The authors suggest that Menzies has a great deal to answer for, mainly because he was so good at his job. No
other political figure managed to fill the prime ministership as he did. He weighed like a nightmare on the brains of his successors because he became the benchmark for prime ministerial performance: a masterful political communicator, superb tactician, astute judge of civil service talent, and a creative thinker about party philosophy. He dominated ministerial colleagues, party, parliament, and media, and he presided over a politically propitious combination of Cold War and long boom. No wonder he won seven elections on the trot. And he also achieved a standing as a respected international statesman to which his successors could only aspire.
Menzies made his mistakes. There was his support of Britain in the Suez crisis, and he became out of touch with the way Australia was changing in the 1960s. But it was a long way downhill from him to his three Liberal predecessors, Harold Holt, John Gorton, and William McMahon. Holt, Menzies’ hand-picked successor, was an amiable man who ‘misjudged his strength’, the authors suggest, both in the Portsea surf and in ‘the highest office in the land’. Gorton was clever enough to understand that he needed to break the Menzies mould entirely by forging a different image of ‘strong leadership’, but his personal idiosyncrasies and erratic political style proved too much for a party still living in Menzies’ giant shadow. McMahon, in formal terms, was well prepared for the prime ministership with his years of ministerial experience and his training in economics, but proved a failure on the job.
The paradox of ‘the burden of succession’, however, was that the very inability of Menzies’ successors even
to approach the benchmark be had set meant that they sought ways to augment the office. Gorton, for instance, famously selected the formidable Lenox Hewitt as secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department in the expectation that he would be the prime minister’s ‘“go to” man’. The changes in government machinery of this era were modest by later standards, but they laid the groundwork for prime ministerial government.
Whitlam’s prime ministership is a watershed in the story of the office of prime minister. Not only was he the first prime minister of the post-Menzies era who looked as though he might be capable of emulating the Liberal prime minister’s gravitas, but he made changes to institutional arrangements that planted the seeds of the future growth of prime ministerial resources and power. As opposition leader, Whitlam had built up a rich network of policy expertise that he wanted to be able to continue to exploit in office. The development of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) as a source of both policy and political advice, along with the reconfiguration of the Prime Minister’s Department (PMD) as a policy powerhouse, owed a great deal to the Whitlam era. The trend was magnified under Malcolm Fraser: the role of the prime minister as chief economic manager now emerged.
While Strangio, ‘t Hart, and Walter do produce, among other things, something like a de facto history of the PMO and the PMD, their approach is also biographical. Each man brought to the job a background and personality that would shape their aspirations and performance. Whitlam was the son of a senior public servant who had spent part of his formative years in Canberra, and
this animated his faith in the ability of a central government to act as the instrument of his goals. Fraser was an Oxfordeducated Victorian grazier whose solitary upbringing had bred self-reliance along with a sense of life as a battle, and of politics as a contest of wills. Both found their time in office haunted by the economic problems that came with the end of the long boom.
Bob Hawke’s prime ministership has come to be seen as a gold standard, but the times were favourable for creative leadership. By the early 1980s the old protectionist state could no longer sustain economic prosperity and living standards. Here was an opportunity for ambitious reformers, but the authors argue that the success of the government owed much to Hawke’s model of ‘distributed leadership’, which empowered a talented group of ministers, most importantly among them the young Paul Keating. The authors accept the orthodoxy that this partnership was central to the government’s success. While Hawke had a notoriously large ego, he also had the wisdom to allow his ministers to get on with their jobs and was an effective cabinet chair. Keating, when he came to the prime ministership in 1991, was careful to avoid recriminations from his battle with Hawke, but less able in the chairing role, less inclined to delegate, and occasionally in the habit of cutting the cabinet out of important issues entirely. But Keating’s aspirations for the office were Whitlamite in their ambition – he would redefine Australia’s identity, reshape its place in the world.
John Howard was ideally suited to exploiting the hubris that lurked at the heart of this idea, and the authors recognise just how successfully he moulded the prime ministership to his times and his purposes. He cultivated the image of the ordinary man, yet he was ideologically creative and made excellent use of the media, especially talkback radio. Howard was also a fine manager of people: he never took party support for granted, even sometimes joining backbenchers in the parliamentary dining room, and he surrounded himself with a highly effective policy and political machine. But like Keating he eventually grew out of touch, the quality of his decision-
making declining in his final years.
This issue of the party is critically important: for ordinary voters, the leader stands in for a party otherwise often invisible. And yet what the party giveth, the party taketh away, a reality learned too well by a succession of discarded prime ministers in the leadership churn of recent times. The problem of needing to serve two demanding masters – party and public – has been especially pointed for Malcolm Turnbull. It is a tightrope that would confound the cleverest performer, especially in the age of social media and the 24/7 news cycle.
The Pivot of Power is the sequel to Settling the Office: The Australian prime ministership from Federation to Recon-
struction, published in 2016. Considered together, the two volumes are a major contribution to the study of Australian politics, bringing to the task a scale and ambition more commonly associated with presidential history in the United States. The writing is unadorned, but happily eschews the kind of bloodless prose not unknown in academic political science. And Melbourne University Press has produced an immensely handsome volume under its Miegunyah imprint. g
Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University and the author of The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia (2015).
‘Infamy! They’ve got it in for me’
Chris Masters cracks the ADF’s hostility
to the media
Kevin Foster
NO FRONT LINE:
AUSTRALIA’S SPECIAL FORCES AT WAR IN AFGHANISTAN by Chris Masters Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 609 pp, 9781760111144
Few organisations defend their reputation more vigorously than the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Long since clasped to the national bosom, the ADF has no intention of being shoehorned out of its prized position at the heart of Australian identity and culture. The first duty of its public affairs personnel is to protect the brand – a brand, it believes, is fragile and under constant assault. In reality, the ADF’s reputation is virtually unbreakable. At one point during 2011 there were six separate investigations running simultaneously into various aspects of ADF culture, including inquiries into personal conduct within the ADF, the use of alcohol, the treatment of women at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) and in the ADF more broadly. Sparked by the ADFA Skype Sex Scandal, the investigations laid bare
a toxic culture of misogyny, bullying, and abuse. What damage did this scarifying experience inflict on the ADF’s standing in the eyes of the public? In February 2012, while new allegations of abuse were still surfacing, Essential Research asked its polling sample ‘How much trust do you have in the following national institutions?’ The ADF came in top, well ahead of the Federal Police, the Federal and High Courts, ASIO, the Reserve Bank, and the Commonwealth Public Service.
The ADF’s conviction that it is under assault, particularly from the national media, has deep and dubious roots that stretch far back into the nation’s military history. In almost every conflict involving Australian forces, from the Boer War to the present day, the national media’s presence on the battlefield has been sporadic, contentious, and gener-
ally unhappy. Tim Bowden notes that in Vietnam the Australian Army treated the media to what a British colleague called the ‘feel-free-to-fuck-off’ approach to public relations. But you can’t fuck off unless you’re there in the first place. Throughout both Gulf Wars the ADF, ably abetted by the Department of Defence and the governments of the day, did their utmost to ensure that the media never got near the battlefield.
This policy of censorship by exclusion reached its apogee in Afghanistan. The nation’s longest war was arguably its worst reported. While British, US,
The ADF’s conviction that it is under assault has deep and dubious roots
Canadian, and Dutch journalists embedded with their respective – and sometimes their allies’ – militaries, keeping their publics informed about what their troops were doing in their name, Australian reporters cooled their heels at home. A fortunate few were allocated spots on ‘bus tours’ to the Australian base at Tarin Kowt. Directed to record the latest developments at the Trade Training School, where young Afghans wrestled with trowels and screwdrivers, or the refurbishment of Tarin Kowt Hospital, they were forbidden to travel beyond the wire where the real story was unfolding. Australia finally trialled an embedding program in 2009, and only established a functioning system of media rotation in 2011–12, just in time for the beginning of the end of the deployment. In the light of this, is it any wonder that Australians grew increasingly detached from a conflict they scarcely saw and barely understood?
It is ironic that the first, truly comprehensive history of the ADF’s engagement in Afghanistan should emerge from the one perspective perennially regarded as off limits to media scrutiny – Special Forces (SF). It is like getting a first history of the Ottoman Sultans from inside the harem. Chris Masters enjoyed unprecedented access to personnel and to the records of their missions over more than twelve years of operations. Steeped in the language and
culture of these modern-day action men, he begins the book with an important disclaimer: ‘While I liked them I never wanted to be them. Rather, I wanted to tell their story.’ And what a story it is.
Perhaps the book’s biggest revelation is the tempo and intensity of the operations that it describes. Over twenty force rotations between 2001 and 2013, Special Air Services Regiment (SASR) troopers and Commandos were involved in hundreds of troops in contact incidents – tumbling out of helicopters into deadly firefights, raiding compounds, responding to IED strikes, laying ambushes, and engaging with the enemy at close quarters. The level of fire, both incoming and outgoing, in the greater number of these contacts was extreme and that Special Forces casualties remained so low – only twenty-one out of the Australian total of forty-two – is testament to their selection, training, professionalism, and luck. But not everybody was so lucky. Masters’ descriptions of the specific circumstances in which men died –crushed beneath a crashing helicopter, disintegrated by an IED, blown out of a vehicle by a roadside bomb, shot in the head – provide a sobering corrective to the euphemistic cant about ‘supreme sacrifice’ that was increasingly on the lips of the senior ranks and the politicians as losses mounted.
The intensity of incoming fire that inflicted so much damage reveals a resilient, and surprisingly admirable foe. The enemy who emerges from these pages showed commitment, guts, and battlefield nous. Unprotected from the air, under-equipped, and often undergunned, sometimes they hit and ran, escaping to fight another day, but on many occasions they stuck to their guns and willingly chose death. Though we rarely meet them, they are both a powerful presence and a stern reminder of how unforgiving and unknowable Afghanistan remained to most of the coalition forces who passed through there and the publics they served.
The book’s account of relations between the SASR and the Commandos offers an implicit riposte to the reflex narrative of universal mateship that lies at the heart of our military myths.
Relations between the SASR and the Commandos were poisonous. Mostly afforded separate tasks in the field, they billeted, ate, and socialised separately back in camp. Endlessly squabbling over access to limited helicopter capacity and the missions assigned to the other, the Commandos disdained what they saw as the SASR’s arrogance and triggerhappy carelessness, while the SASR regarded the direct entry Commando force as ‘direct entry cunts’, insufficiently trained and not up to the job. Enmity ran deep. After a solemn ramp ceremony for three Commandos killed in a helicopter accident in June 2010, key members of the SASR audibly denigrated the Commandos. Brilliant and brave, these men could also be petty, puerile, and morally misguided – disturbingly human, in fact.
If this was the truth that the ADF was so desperate to keep from the Australian media, it has done itself and the public a massive disservice. Masters’ book details, at extended length, the extraordinary stories that we never heard because the ADF was too petrified to tell them. This was public affairs gold – yet the fools mistook it for base metal. Convinced that ‘they’ve all got it in for me’, the ADF’s obsession with reputation management has silenced the authentic voice of its people at war for too long. I would like to think that Chris Masters’ marvellous book marks the beginning of a new openness from the ADF, but I’m not betting on it. g
Kevin Foster teaches in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
Wenxue
Silencing and destruction in China’s literary history
Nicholas Jose
A NEW LITERARY HISTORY OF MODERN CHINA
edited by David Der-Wei Wang
Harvard University Press (Footprint), $110 hb, 1,025 pp, 9780674967915
In his searching introduction to this immense volume, the editor, Harvard scholar David Der-Wei Wang, refers to the ‘architectonics of temporalities’ by which the project re-maps and re-chronicles Chinese literary history. A New Literary History of Modern China follows the model of the provocatively kaleidoscopic slice histories of French, German, and American literatures produced by Harvard University Press in recent years. The title of Wang’s introduction, ‘Worlding Literary China’, signals the scale of the ambition.
There are 160 bite-size essays by 143 contributors that focus on key moments on the timeline that reveal larger meanings. Some are by famous Chinese authors – Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Wang Anyi from China, Chu T’ien-hsin from Taiwan. Others are by leading scholars and thinkers in the field, including Wang himself, whose lineage goes back to Taiwan via Columbia University. Some essays are personal, others are written in what Perry Link calls ‘irrefutable academese’. A couple are by Australians, but it is mostly the view of China from North America. An appealing piece by Boston-based author Ha Jin imagines how Lu Xun wrote his first story, ‘A Madman’s Diary’, under the pressure of a deadline in Beijing in 1918, creating a new kind of vernacular fiction and launching the pseudonym that posterity would know him by, all in one night: the story’s theme, ‘eating people’.
In the official literary historical teleology of the People’s Republic of China, modernity begins with the May Fourth movement in 1919, of which Lu Xun is a hero. In the ‘counterdiscourse’ of this new literary history, that becomes ‘the big misnomer’. Stephen Owen, in an essay called ‘Utter Disillusion and
Acts of Repentance in Late Classical Poetry’, pushes the start of Chinese literary modernity back to 1820, when foreign encounters were increasing and the classical language started to fail. ‘Chinese poetic modernity,’ he writes, ‘… begins in a profound rift between the literary language … and a new intellectual world.’ ‘Modern’ then comes to cover the last hundred and fifty years or so, which puts 1949, the year of the communist victory, at the heart of this book. For many writers, 1949 was a year of transition, either through awkward accommodation of the new order, the literary requirements of which were floridly enunciated in Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (1942), or through withdrawal and exile. For some it was ‘the great rupture’, as a new diaspora emerged in Taiwan and Hong Kong and other language environments further afield. In her essay, Shuang Shen evokes that time: ‘On a certain day in July 1952, Eileen Chang (1920–95) crossed the border between mainland China and Hong Kong and stepped into a new life of exile … facing a momentous personal and historical transition that would eventually make her into one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures in the Chinese worlds for the rest of the twentieth century.’ That puts Eileen Chang rather than Lu Xun at the centre of the picture. Shen goes on: ‘Around 1949, modern Chinese literary history, yet to be fully integrated into a singular and unified story, further splintered into multiple and competing histories.’ That is what A New Literary History of Modern China hopes to encompass.
There are essays on film, photography, and popular songs; the defini-
tion of literature is as flexible as can be. There is particular interest in minor, unfinished, and trace works: the Angel Island poems, for example, inscribed on the walls of the detention centre in San Francisco Bay by interned Chinese immigrants, or the texts written in her own blood by Lin Zhao (1932–68), speaking truth to power during the Cultural Revolution, before she was taken from her prison bed and executed. The concept of literature itself, wenxue in Chinese, undergoes a thorough re-consideration, articulated as fundamentally different from its English equivalent: ‘ wenxue, or literature, refers to the art of registering, and being registered by, the incessant metamorphosis, from era to era and from region to region, of forms, thoughts, and attitudes regarding wen’, which can be understood as ‘pattern’ in the cosmos or the world, of which literature is manifestation, writes the editor. From this derives the supreme importance of literature in Chinese thought as a medium and measure of civilisational renewal, which proved so costly to many practitioners.
The novelist Lao She is one writer who returned to China in 1949, disillusioned with the United States and keen to participate in the promise of the new start. He drowned in a lake in Beijing in 1966 after being severely persecuted: ‘we should always remember the tragedy of his decision’, writes Richard Jean So, ‘between an unhappy life in America and a tragic death in China’.
‘I might not be able to accomplish
such a transformation,’ wrote another great writer, Shen Congwen, in the leadup to 1949. ‘Before long, even if I were not forced to, I would eventually stop writing. This is the fate of certain people of our generation.’ Shen wrote no more fiction after that transition year, though a case can be made for his research on Chinese costume as the writing of an alternative ‘history with feelings’.
As essay after essay recounts the silencing, destruction, or premature death of writers, the tragic pattern of this new history becomes apparent. The great literary translator Fu Lei and his wife took their lives in 1966 at the onset of the Cultural Revolution. ‘Anything Chinese about This Suicide?’ asks Maghiel van Crevel in an essay about a later year, 1989, when the poet Haizi threw himself under a train. A few years later another poet, Gu Cheng, would hang himself in New Zealand after murdering his wife. Is the long line of violent deaths a consequence of the ‘obsession with China’ that burdens Chinese writers? The sobering conclusion to this survey of a period in which China struggled stridently for progress is that, in David Wang’s words, the winners ‘in a fierce competition of new possibilities… were not necessarily the best of those possibilities’.
In seeking to contest and expand orthodox PRC literary historiography, A New Literary History of Modern China looks to unexpected corners for creative vitality. There are essays on contemporary writing in minority languages in China, and on the difficult situation of non-Han Chinese writers, such as the ‘Tibetan’ writer Alai, who write in Chinese about their personal, ethnic experience. I have added Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas and Wong Bik-Wan’s Doomsday Hotel to my reading list from Bonnie S. McDougall’s essay on 1997, the year of ‘Hong Kong Literary Retrocession’. Another discovery is Malaysian Chinese writer Ng Kim Chew (born in 1967), who makes several appearances, most startlingly in Andrea Bachner’s essay on 1899, ‘Oracle Bones, That Dangerous Supplement’. I can’t wait to read Ng’s stories in the English translation by Carlos Rojas. The scope widens further with a persistent transnational framing,
as in Q.S. Tong’s delightful essay on ‘Practical Criticism in China’, tagged October 1930: ‘I.A. Richards writes to T.S Eliot from Beijing’.
English literary history got off to a good start with Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, his sharp critical account of his immediate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precursors. A New Literary History of Modern China, recording the extinction of so many writers, cannot be so happy. But, as Wai-lim Yip
suggests, himself an exile from Hong Kong to America, ‘the world should appreciate … that which gave Chinese writers the strength to resist power’. This massive book does that grandly and movingly. g
Nicholas Jose is an author and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. His most recent book is the short story collection Bapo (2014)
A Half-Open Door
A study of David Malouf’s early work
David McCooey
DAVID MALOUF AND THE POETIC: HIS EARLIER WRITINGS by Yvonne Smith
Plenty of novelists begin life as poets. Few, though, have managed to maintain their status as poet–novelists quite so impressively as David Malouf. But even Malouf, in his ‘middle period’, more or less dropped poetry for his ‘big’ novels – The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), and The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) –before a late return to poetry, kicked off with Typewriter Music (2007). Perhaps appropriately, the last novel that Malouf has so far published, Ransom (2009), is based on a poem: Homer’s Iliad
All of this suggests that Yvonne Smith, in this welcome study of Malouf’s early writings, has picked up on a pertinent theme (‘the poetic’) to apply to her subject. Smith’s study covers Malouf’s juvenilia, but is primarily concerned with the first part of his professional career, from his début poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970), to the collection of autobiographical essays, 12 Edmonstone Street (1985). The prose fiction of that period ranges from Malouf’s first novel, Johnno (1975), to the collection of stories Antipodes (1985). After something of a slow start
– Malouf struggled with the writing of Johnno for more than a decade –the late 1970s to the mid-1980s proved to be extremely fertile, with seven books appearing in as many years. Despite leaving its subject in midcareer (aged fifty-one), David Malouf and the Poetic covers considerable ground. While not a biography per se, the book employs considerable biographical detail to good effect. Malouf’s background – a Jewish mother with an English family, and an Australian-born father with Christian Lebanese parents – illustrates the long-standing multicultural nature of Australian society. For Malouf’s family it was the source of (often unspoken) tensions, and for Malouf (whose paternal grandfather did not speak English) it was a main source – via his mother – of an aspirational Anglophone heritage. Growing up in Queensland during World War II was also a defining event for Malouf. The threat of Japanese invasion was real, while the sinking in 1940 of the SS City of Benares by a German submarine, which caused the deaths of seventy-seven evacuated children, was
a traumatic event for the six-year-old Malouf, making its way into his adult writing.
After the war, and an incipient career as an academic at the University of Queensland, Malouf joined many other Australians in the 1950s and travelled to England, where he taught, and from where he travelled. Returning to Australia, he began an academic career at the University of Sydney, a position he gave up in the 1970s to write full-time, basing himself mostly, for the next seven years, in a small Italian village.
Smith covers this biographical record admirably, and uses it judiciously with regard to Malouf’s published output. Her considerable original research, via interviews, diaries, letters, and drafts of Malouf’s work is also put to good literary-critical use. In this respect, David Malouf and the Poetic is a major resource for any student of Malouf’s work. The letters to fellow-poet Judith Rodriguez are particularly useful in delineating not just the course of Malouf’s writing career, but his thoughts about writing itself. Smith balances nicely the drive of an ambitious, self-consciously literary writer with the contingent nature of the publishing world and of being a writer. (Smith discusses, for instance, an unfinished novel on Goethe.)
It is debatable if Smith quite catches how Malouf moved from struggling author to one fielding bids from international publishers for his second novel, An Imaginary Life (published in 1978). But accounting for anything so mysterious as literary success is no easy thing, and it surely helped that Malouf made a number of important contacts and friendships in Sydney, most notably with Patrick White, who had only relatively recently become a Nobel laureate. Smith outlines the cultural context of Malouf’s career briefly but effectively, and notes with an impressive economy the critical reception of his work. Her interest in theory, however, goes beyond the economical. She shows little interest in thematising Malouf’s work through psychoanalytic theory, post-colonial theory, or whatever, and has little to say, about sexuality with regard to Malouf’s work. (Indeed, the first hundred pages of Smith’s book barely make Malouf’s
homosexuality clear.) Notwithstanding this, Smith’s approach – biographical and descriptive analysis – proves to be a powerful way to produce new insights into old works, a number of which (especially Johnno and An Imaginary Life) have already acquired a sizeable critical literature. The pages on An Imaginary Life, both its conception and Smith’s analysis of it, are particularly compelling. One of the remarkable things about this short novel is that its subject matter – the poet Ovid exiled to the edge of the Roman Empire – is so apparently unrelated to Australian subjects and themes.
Few have managed to maintain their status as poet–novelists quite so impressively as Malouf
Smith is also strong on the themes and motifs (such as ‘earth’, memory, loss, and vision) that run through Malouf’s early works. Put at its simplest, Smith makes a persuasive case for Malouf’s writing as attempting to transcend or resolve apparent binary oppositions: the tamed and the wild; the lyric and the narrative; the body and the imagination. In all of these, as she argues, the scene of writing is what is ultimately being thematised, since writing is what allows loss to be regained. (Not surprisingly, Proust has been a key writer for Malouf.) Writing, despite its apparent permanence, is associated with the evanescent, the transitory, and the half-glimpsed. As Malouf writes in ‘A Medium’ (a story from Antipodes, quoted by Smith): ‘There is no story, no set of events that leads anywhere or proves anything – no middle, no end. Just a glimpse through a half-open door, voices seen not heard, vibrations sensed through a wall …’
My one substantive frustration with this otherwise excellent study is the disinclination on Smith’s behalf to really discuss ‘the poetic’ of her title. ‘Poetic’ is, as many have noted, an extremely vague term. Certainly, Malouf, in his poetry and his literary prose, approaches many elements that one might associate with ‘the poetic’ (lyricism, intensity, musical-
ity), but Smith’s attention to these is not programmatic. Her evocation of Philip Mead’s idea that poetry is an ‘eruptive force’ is perhaps misplaced for a work relatively uninterested in cultural or sexual politics. Perhaps most informative is her description of Malouf’s interest in ‘characters who struggle and communicate their unique personal visions in an increasingly technological, materialistic society’. In this regard, ‘the poetic’ can be seen as a synonym for ‘post-Romantic’, a cultural ideology that values the individual and the imagination, placing the two in tension with society via poetic ‘vision’.
The tension between narrative and ‘the poetic’ might account for Malouf’s interest in compact forms. As I have noted elsewhere, Malouf has generally been attracted to constrained forms: the lyric poem, the short story, the essay, the libretto, and the novella. Malouf’s attraction to such forms is consistent with his interest in details, the day-today, and the minute as sources of great insight. In this respect, Malouf’s oeuvre is quintessentially post-Romantic, bringing together the vast and small, the significant and the insignificant, to produce a body of work that is ‘poetic’ in its attentiveness to the relationship between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. Happily, Smith’s study helps us to pay closer attention, in turn, to Malouf’s important body of early work. g
David McCooey’s latest book of poems, Star Struck, was published by UWA Publishing in 2016. He is a professor of writing and literature at Deakin University in Geelong, where he lives.
The adventures of ‘Clara Tomahawk’
Claire Tomalin tells her own story
Brenda Niall
A LIFE OF MY OWN by Claire Tomalin Viking, $55 hb, 352 pp, 9780241239957
When a biographer tells her own story, the rules change. Because the subject is the self, the problem is not so much a search for the unknown, but what to tell about the known and how to tell it. One of Britain’s finest biographers, Claire Tomalin, has spoken of her pleasure in ‘investigating’ other people’s lives. What happens when she turns to her own life? What will be told and what withheld?
Tomalin’s memoir of a brilliantly successful life as journalist, literary editor, and author of eight biographies is more than a career study. It is a search for emotional truth in her painful, deeply troubled relations with her parents, and with her first husband, the philandering charmer, Nick Tomalin. The personal and the professional are woven together in a life remembered with remarkable resilience and magnanimity.
Reading Samuel Pepys,Tomalin says, made her aware of the seamlessness of experience. Unwanted by her father, she was conceived ‘not only without love but through the gritted teeth of [his] murderous loathing’ for her mother. Her parents divorced when she was eleven, after a ‘poisonous’ marriage, mostly spent apart from one another. Rivalry for parental affection meant that the two daughters of the marriage were never close to one another. Yet Tomalin doesn’t look back in bitterness. Memories of emotional neglect co-exist with knowledge of her mother’s intense love, a background that was culturally privileged, and eventual reconciliation with her father.
Tomalin came down from Cambridge with a First in English to find that the best jobs were taken by men,
but she made the most of the crumbs as a reader for a publisher. One of her interviewers at Heinemann was designated to rate her for looks. She learned later that he had given her only seven out of ten. At twenty-one, she married fellow graduate Nick Tomalin, who was ‘funny, quick, affectionate, generous, original – and hard to resist’.
Nick and Claire had five children. The first, a son, died a few weeks after birth and the fifth, Tom, was born with the severe handicap of spina bifida. ‘Who will love him?’, she asked, and from the heart she replied: ‘I will. And I will see that he has the best possible life.’ She wrote with Tom’s carrycot beside her. Like Jane Austen, with no space of her own, she tidied her work out of sight when guests came.
Tomalin was forty when she wrote her first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft, in which she had an almost unexplored field. With later biographies, on Shelley, Austen, Pepys, Hardy, and Dickens, she entered some hotly contested sites. The Invisible Woman, her biography of Dickens’s mistress, the young actress Ellen Ternan, was a tour de force of detection. Ternan’s relationship with Dickens was so carefully hidden that only an impressive blend of persistence, inspired guesswork, and the close interrogation of public records could have brought it to light.
Some admirers of Dickens attacked the Ternan book, on the grounds that it damaged a reputation without certain knowledge. But Tomalin has never been afraid to speculate, while making it clear just what is known and what is guesswork based on human probability.
Believing that biography is best written by those old enough to have had experience of life, Tomalin doesn’t regret her late start. Nor does she see her life as determined by her own private tragedies. She looks back without rancour towards those who injured her, and without bitterness about the blows of fate that she has endured. The passage of time, her second, happy marriage, her pleasure in her work, and the recognition it has brought her combine to give this memoir a remarkable serenity. Life, she says, is seamless; the bad and the good co-exist. When Nick Tomalin, on a journalist’s assignment in Israel in 1973, was killed by a Syrian missile, she didn’t dwell on the betrayals of her marriage. She felt ‘as though the sun had been eclipsed’. She also felt pride in being strong enough to stand alone.
Tomalin flourished as literary editor of the New Statesman and later of the Sunday Times. She was confident in her judgements of books (Clive James called her ‘Clara Tomahawk’) and fearless in denouncing ‘ruthless and bullying management’ during Rupert Murdoch’s war with the print unions. At fifty-three, she became a full-time writer.
Writing biography, Tomalin felt ‘intensely happy’. She had found her vocation – ‘late in life but it changed everything for me’. She also found personal fulfilment: her long, close friendship with writer Michael Frayn turned to ‘middle-aged love which proved stronger than anything [she] had known before’. A quietly supportive presence, Frayn doesn’t come to life for the reader as does the irresistible betrayer Nick Tomalin. That’s the privilege of memoir. In a biography, the relationship with Frayn would have been explored, and the name of another lover would not have been withheld.
Tomalin writes poignantly about Susanna, her brilliant second daughter who killed herself at the age of twentytwo. ‘I should have protected her, and I failed.’ Her two living daughters are mentioned with loving pride but, like Frayn, they are allowed their privacy.
Tomalin is more than a literary detective; her human sympathy and her gift for asking the unexpected question make her biographies exceptional. Her
FEB / MAR
A MOZART CELEBRATION
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Don Giovanni: Overture
Piano Concerto No.14 in E flat, K449
Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor, K466
Symphony No.40
Seductive Mozart
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Così fan tutte: Overture
Piano Concerto No.16 in D, K451
Piano Concerto No.17 in G, K453
Symphony No.39
Taikoz and the SSO
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Piano Concerto No.19 in F, K459
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Symphony No.41 (Jupiter)
9 & 10 FEB
Batiashvili plays Prokofiev 2
Acclaimed Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili plays Prokofiev’s great Violin Concerto No.2. Plus music story-telling at its finest with two much loved tone poems by Richard Strauss.
1997 life of Jane Austen was published at the same time as one by David Nokes. What could either of them contribute to the understanding of the few known facts of Austen’s life? Quite a lot, as it turned out: on certain episodes in Austen’s life, they disagreed quite markedly. Tomalin, I thought, had the edge: she wrote simply, with none of Nokes’s embarrassingly arch interior monologues; and psychologically she was more astute.
The personal and the professional are woven together in a life remembered with remarkable resilience and magnanimity
One example: there is no way of knowing the effect on the infant Jane Austen of being sent away to a village wet-nurse after three months of breast-feeding by her mother. But, as Tomalin wrote, when she drew on modern theories of maternal deprivation, ‘you have to wonder’. Her own experience as a working mother who faced difficult choices and experienced great joy as well as tragedy made her alert to a family pattern that had never been explored.
Now in her mid-eighties, Tomalin has written the memoir which might be expected to end her career. But she is keeping an open mind; she may well write another book. As a biographer who is much of an age with Tomalin, I find that heartening. g
Lady Luck
Richard Walsh
MEMOIRS
by Mike Willesee Macmillan
$44.99 hb, 416 pp, 9781760553517
Mike Willesee has been one of the giants of the Australian media for over half a century. He was a major force in television for most of those years; but he began his life in print journalism and made a small fortune as the joint owner of 2Day FM when it was sold to the Lamb family. The memoir of such an important figure is always much anticipated, and its publication has been greeted with much fanfare, coinciding with a two-part episode on Australian Story, which is always notoriously shy of looking as though it is in any way promoting a commercial enterprise.
This memoir is at its strongest when it functions as the literary equivalent of a ‘Best of’ CD compilation or a television highlights reel. There are so many great moments that it is hard to know where to begin. There is the birth of This Day Tonight and Willesee’s time there as its Canberra correspondent. Next he was frontman and star reporter for Four Corners, a period during which he was almost thrown into an Indian jail and had an enigmatic relationship with a beautiful Vietnamese woman who was probably a Vietcong agent. There was his tumultuous relationship with Frank Packer, almost from when he launched A Current Affair for the Nine Network through to his ultimate sacking.
The memoirs begin with his strained relationship with his father, Don Willesee, a Western Australian senator who ultimately became Whitlam’s foreign minister, and who once dispatched the young Mike to a brutal orphanage to toughen him up; and with his mother, who confessed to him that she loved him least of all her six children. To say that he felt neglected would be an understatement; his emotional scars reveal themselves in unexpected ways throughout his narrative.
Willesee’s account of his first marriage is extraordinary. He does not provide a coherent reason as to why he married Joan Stanbury, other than that she was very beautiful; it seems like a whim that produced two fine children but from which he could find no exit door for a long time. He writes, rather cryptically, that when Joan produced their second child ‘to my great surprise – because I didn’t believe that Joan liked me – Joan decided to call our son Michael’.
In Willesee’s world there were plenty of obstacles, apart from his parents and his first wife; he appears to be an intense hater who, even now, at a time when it seems his prospect of a long life is slim, has no trouble recalling old slights. Bob Moore, his predecessor at Four Corners and no slouch as an interviewer, though not capable of a classic Willesee inquisition, told Mike at their first meeting, ‘You know, Mike, everyone thinks that they’d be good on television.’ Willesee took this to be a great insult, and seems never to have forgotten it. Mike Ramsden, a Packer trusty who was in fact a sharp newshound, is dismissed as ‘a real arselicker’. Old age has certainly not mellowed our cicerone.
The weirdest thing about this memoir is that it contains some wonderful anecdotes, which are enlivened by their small details and reconstructed conversations, and yet, for many of the most decisive and critical events in his life, Willesee confesses that he has total amnesia. In 1972 he had an almighty row with Frank Packer: ‘But suddenly – and I can’t remember how or why – everything switched around and I was allowed to do the story.’ He cannot remember who came up with the name ‘A Current Affair’, nor why his important and profitable collaboration with Paul Hogan and John Cornell ultimately terminated.
In the acknowledgments, Willesee thanks ‘my daughter Amy and her husband Mark Whittaker, both established authors, for ushering my memories into this book’; perhaps they have also ushered some inconvenient memories off the page. For example, there is only one fairly anodyne mention of Germaine Greer in the text, but there is a picture of the two of them in 1972 with the bland
Brenda Niall’s memoir of her grandmother, Can You Hear the Sea?, is published by Text.
caption ‘We became good friends.’ There is no mention of their torrid affair.
One of the problems of this book is that he confesses on page 284 that ‘the early to mid 1980s were the golden years of my life’. At that stage we are not yet three-quarters of the way to the far horizon. The landscape becomes less alluring. Of course, there are still some enticing oases – notably his interviews with Julia Gillard, James Packer, and Schapelle Corby for the Seven Network’s Sunday Night. Then he discovers God – and Pete Evans’s paleo diet. All this happens before he receives the dire diagnosis that he has advanced throat cancer. Yet, in a final twist, Lady Luck, who has never deserted him (which is not to deny in any way the prodigious talent he possesses through some kind of über-gene he shares with many of his siblings and descendants), ordains that he turns out to be one of the small percentage of patients who benefits from the miracle drug Keytruda.
The collapse of his third marriage, to make-up artist Gordana Poljak, is as mysterious as the origins of his first one. He writes: ‘The quiet young woman in dark, demure clothing was replaced by an exotic, tattoo-covered woman, wearing hot clothes and looking good. She left me in late 2010.’ The world of the emotions is a mysterious kingdom into which this intrepid and justifiably acclaimed journalist never ventures. g
No doughnuts
Mimi Biggadike
COMING TO MY SENSES: THE MAKING OF A COUNTERCULTURE COOK
by Alice Waters Hardie Grant Books
$39.99 hb, 320 pp, 9781743793862
It is a colourful and turbulent life
Alice Waters leads. Thankfully, it is turbulent in the fruitful sense, a process of regeneration and creation so nimbly edited into her autobiography, Coming to My Senses, that it strikes one as being deserving of its titular gerund. It relays the creation of both her ethos and her restaurant, Chez Panisse. Both are realised with great clarity throughout the book: style and substance ring together in both her writing and her aesthetic. Artfully crafted as this carefully curated view of a life is, it also remains humble and warm and satisfyingly alien to what we might now consider to be ‘food writing’. There is no ego here; Waters places importance on seasonality and intuition, regardless of culinary training or tradition. And all without bombast, as she herself asserts: ‘Taste is an incredibly strong sensation – it’s deeper than language.’
For the unacquainted, Chez Panisse, founded in 1971, is an American institution, in a particularly unAmerican fashion. First, it is a French restaurant. Second, it is known for its antithetical stance to US culture: absolutely no doughnuts are permitted. Fast food is referenced with debasing fervour, held partly culpable (and at the very least emblematic) by Waters for the multiple failings of modern America. She speaks of disconnection in its many guises: from our society, our stomachs, and ourselves. Although politically charged, it is not a call for action. There is, indeed, a placid acceptance reminiscent of William Cobbett’s cry, ‘I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach.’ Although separated by nearly 300 years, this tacit acknowledgment of the fundamentally comfortable classes remains astute. Food is no longer a necessity, it is a
distinguisher: both in terms of wealth and political inclination. This is true to such an extent that when Waters urges us to remember ‘Food is alive’, it comes as a bit of a shock.
With a life guided by such an aesthetic sensibility, it seems fitting that the restaurant was named after a character from a Marcel Pagnol film: Panisse the French provincial sailmaker who saves the day with his chivalry. Food and film are gracefully matched as the two main loves of her life, mediums through which to find fulfilment. Nourishment is a word used here throughout. Larger themes, those of love and politics, the perfect lettuce leaf, are deftly navigated through pithily titled chapters. ‘Queen of the Garden’, for example, holds up a specific moment for examination within a wider context, a wider lens through which to view a life.
Ending with the opening of the restaurant, Waters’s autobiography simmers with ambition, flavour, and finely realised nuance – not unexpected from someone who is widely hailed as single-handedly propagating the Slow Food movement in America. Part of the ambition is its use of multiple mediums to explore thoughts and themes. Recipes, letters, photos, hand-calligraphed menus, and other such materials are interjected throughout. They uphold the structure and solidify the various pertinent vignettes that Waters conjures with ease in her happy prose.
For such considered exactitude in all years previous to the opening, the event itself seems ingloriously crammed into the final chapter. The restaurant floats conceptually throughout; it is the endgoal, the unifying semantic. It is unnerving, then, to watch it materialise so messily. The writing here seems mimical of this chaos. A rushed and gregarious prose suited to a chaotic night of late meals and the soon-regretted decision to have swing doors into the kitchen. Needless to say, a lot of plates were smashed.
It would be unfortunate to omit Waters’ two collaborators, Christina Mueller and Bob Carrau, without whom, as she herself states, there would be a nonsensical rift in her ‘efforts to recapture the past’. As with everything in her life, there is a strong emphasis on
Richard Walsh is Consultant Publisher at Allen & Unwin.
CDW STUDIOS
SCHOOL OF VISUAL EFFECTS AND ENTERTAINMENT DESIGN
community in the book, a strength that shines forth even without her heartfelt thanks in the lengthy acknowledgments. The decision to defy chronology and include direct interjection, often in the present tense, into the main body of text, and to distinguish it with italics, is inspired. It is a collaboration through and through: from the people in Waters’ life gifting ideas and encouragement in the past, to the person editing and placing an expertly timed comma during construction.
The aforementioned ambition of her book has an easy pragmatism, synonymous with her philosophy. She is erudite, ambitious, and kamikaze. And so is the craft of her autobiography. The steely determination necessary to achieve this is evident in even the young Alice; the book is laced with wonderful moments of rebellion, from incurring her mother’s wrath when jumping around at four years old when supposed to be in bed with scarlet fever, to biting a child (himself a prolific biter) at a Montessori school. She was his teacher at the time.
Coming to My Senses is warm and fascinating, without being sentimental. Waters’ ability to couple thoughts and reminiscences into unison is echoed in her ability to match flavours. Everything is synchronised and harmonious, and weird as it may sound, it reads like the menu of a life – one filled with both wonder and wonderment. Alice Waters is a woman who looks at life as though it were a (doubtless French) film, and one who thinks through food. g
Mimi Biggadike studied English at the University of Cambridge and works as a freelance journalist and professional chef. ❖
Gold dust
Susan Wyndham
THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES: 1983–1992 by
Tina Brown Weidenfeld & Nicolson
$29.99 pb, 438 pp, 9781474608404
Tina Brown hit the ground partying in New York when she arrived in 1983 to revive the struggling Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair But an early diary entry shows the former Tatler editor was still a Londoner with residual Oxford snobbery.
Everyone at the party was so famous but unfortunately I had never heard of them. I said to Shirley MacLaine, ‘What do you do?’ She gave me a manic, hostile stare and went on talking to [investigative journalist] Ed Epstein about how he should research a book about flying saucers.
Brown’s naïveté did not last long. Her edited diaries of the eight years she spent as editor of Vanity Fair chronicle a brilliant professional and social ascent. The fourteen-page index is an A-list of names from Hollywood, publishing, the arts, fashion, business, and politics who crowded her life with their emaciated shoulders and bloated egos.
What did last, and makes Brown’s diaries a wicked pleasure to read, is her amused observation of everyone she met, enhanced by her energetic, reflective, and often prescient prose. As first-draft history of an era of unashamed wealth and power, by a writer with rare insideroutsider status, this is gold dust.
I could fill pages with the bullseye portraits that suggest Brown had a tape recorder but probably just a sharp, imitative memory. Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall ‘looked like Satyricon creatures at a Venetian carnival with a whiff of decadence you only see as you get close’. Millionairess Jayne Wrightsman ‘gave the Kissingers a tractor for Christmas for their house in Connecticut’. Norman Mailer ‘sat with his legs akimbo like a macho koala, eyes twinkling with
satire’. Philip Roth, in person, is ‘like an accountant’. The recurring property developer Donald Trump, his ‘pouty Elvis face folded into a frown of selfcastigation’, half-charmed Brown until he poured a glass of wine down the back of a critical journalist. A ‘crazed’ Jacqueline Onassis, also offended by the magazine, launched an attack on Brown over dinner that she details in all its ‘deft and understated malice’. And so on and on. Brown did not emerge into this stratosphere from nowhere. The daughter of a British film producer and a former assistant to Laurence Olivier, she was a discerning social creature, thrown out of several schools for ‘crimes of attitude’. She thrived at Oxford, where she had a play chosen for the Edinburgh Festival and a romance with ‘the small and Jaggeresque’ Martin Amis.
Wisely, she married Harold Evans, her editor at The Sunday Times, after an affair that propelled her move to Tatler. She gave the languishing society magazine a sassy revamp focused on her ‘chocolate-box’ lookalike, Princess Di. After Rupert Murdoch fired Evans in 1982, the couple was ready to take on the high-stakes challenge of New York. Murdoch haunts them as a villainous shadow and, when they become power brokers, a social acquaintance whose ‘face has degenerated to the melting rubber mask of a cartoon character like Nixon’s’.
Evans gave Brown entrée to ranks beyond most magazine editors. But her own instincts and determination drove circulation and eventually ad sales to heights that made her the hottest editor in town. Photographer Harry Benson’s portraits of President Reagan and his wife Nancy clutched in a foxtrot and a kiss turned the couple into ambassadors for the magazine. Annie Leibovitz shot cover after memorable cover, pushing sales over a million with a naked, pregnant Demi Moore.
Much of the book follows Brown’s own foxtrot with proprietor Si Newhouse, as she negotiates herself into the editorship of Vanity Fair and then – as her taste veers to the big news stories of the 1990s – The New Yorker. She flirts with other employers, woos and fires staff, creates the magical story mix of high and low, froth and substance, and makes
the odd blunder among the triumphs. All this may intrigue media junkies more than other readers, but it is as frank a behind-the-scenes business report as I have ever read, and a reminder of the age of letters and faxes, when deals were done over lunch.
Brown’s nose for the Zeitgeist and passion for her work are awe-inspiring. Yet as a journalist who laboured many rungs down the New York ladder in those years, I am struck by her unawareness of how high she lived. The society dinners, limousines, Hamptons weekender, money thrown at problems made me need breaks from the book, craving tea-and-toast simplicity as I once did on a junket in France, where dinner was always Champagne and foie gras.
As unexpected as her magazine, however, Brown declares an introverted side to her nature, a yearning for a quiet, bookish family life and nostalgia for witty old England. The births of her premature son (later diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome) and daughter tear her between love and guilt. She worries about her distant parents and mourns friends struck down by AIDS. But in the next sentence she is overseeing Vanity Fair’s fifth-anniversary party or admitting ‘I can executive-produce dinner, it seems, but can’t cook it’.
‘I rethink my life for the millionth time,’she writes on March 17, 1988.‘Why do I keep seeking out the very things I deride? Perhaps because I was born to chronicle them.’ That is excuse enough for such a talent. Let’s hope she kept her diaries from The New Yorker years. g
Zoo Quests
Danielle Clode
ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG NATURALIST: THE ZOO QUEST EXPEDITIONS by David Attenborough Two Roads
$39.99 hb, 400 pp, 9781473664401
David Attenborough turned ninety last year. In a short animation celebrating his birthday, two Aardman penguins muse on their first meeting with the famous naturalist. ‘There’s something just about him,’ says the first penguin. ‘I don’t know why you wouldn’t love David Attenborough,’ declares the second. Indeed, it is hard to find anyone who does not admire Attenborough. Over the decades his work has fundamentally has shaped the way we think about ‘wilderness’ and the natural world. His influence on nature education and conservation – and modern broadcasting – is incalculable. It is rather astonishing to think that Attenborough has been making nature documentaries for longer than most of us have been alive.
In many ways, Attenborough’s long career maps out our changing attitudes to nature conservation. Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a compilation of three books originally written and published in the 1950s about Attenborough’s earliest expeditions – to Guyana, Paraguay, and Indonesia. The Zoo Quest programs were collecting expeditions, documenting the capture of wild animals for the London Zoo. They are more reminiscent of the hands-on physicality and showmanship of Harry Butler or Steve Irwin than of the quiet, non-interventionist observation of modern Attenborough documentaries. If the approach has dated, there is no denying the good intentions and the importance of such endeavours in promoting conservation and environmental protection in many places that might otherwise have been ignored.
Adventures of a Young Naturalist belongs to a distinctive sub-genre of adventure, nature, and travel writing made
popular by writers like Alfred Russel Wallace and Alexander von Humboldt. It sits alongside similar works by Gerald Durrell. The form proved so popular it even inspired Willard Price’s immensely popular fictional Adventure series.
The covers of the book feature a startlingly youthful Attenborough; mud-splattered beside a bogged jeep on the back cover and wrapped in the arms of an affectionate young chimp on the front. The pictures have the sepiatinted quality of 1950s studio portraits firmly positioning them in their time. The black and white sequences of the original Zoo Quest TV programs have a similarly dated feel. Attenborough refused to use the unwieldy 35mm film cameras in the field, arguing for handheld 16mm film, which was regarded as amateurish and poor quality. The BBC finally compromised that Attenborough could film on the smaller film, but should do so in colour to improve the quality and tone of the monochrome end product. It seems that even Attenborough had forgotten this feature. Recently, the original colour negatives were found in the BBC archives and the footage was rescreened in surprisingly crisp colourful detail.
Technology, it seems, has always dictated the way nature is depicted for us. Today, wildlife documentaries seem to be constructed around breathtaking panoramic shots, zooming in on a lone narrator standing on the top of an isolated snow-clad mountain peak with no visible means of support. In the 1950s, when Attenborough finally got his hand-held camera to the jungles of South America, he realised they were too dark to film the animals. This gave rise to the format of live-action capture shorts, followed by studio presentations of the animals with the zookeeper. Ultimately, this format put Attenborough in front, rather than behind the camera, when his curator partner fell ill. The rest, as they say, is history.
This book reminds us not just how much has changed since the early days of nature conservation, but how much Attenborough himself has changed – obviously with age, but also in tone and style. His younger self lacks his trademark melodious rhythm, which is
Susan Wyndham was New York correspondent for The Australian in 1988–96.
so characteristic of both his narration and his books today. This book is written in the earlier, less sophisticated voice we hear on the Zoo Quest programs and lacks some of the polish and panache of the older narrator (such as in A Life on Air). In comparison with contemporaneous works, like Gerald Durrell’s A Zoo in My Luggage (1960), Attenborough is less inclined to exploit his subject matter (both human and animal) for comedic effect. Cultural misunderstanding and confusion raise the same anxieties and complexities that visitors to less-travelled places will recognise. Attenborough’s descriptions of politely consuming calabashes of vomit-scented cassiri or attempting to constrain an irrepressible peccary are similarly amusing, but conveyed without the same comic timing. Attenborough describes both his own and other’s behaviour with a bracingly impartial eye. If this edition has been sanitised for modern tastes, the changes are not evident on first reading. The republication of these accounts makes a worthy addition to the great naturalist expeditions of the past, such as Wallace’s journeys to South America and Southeast Asia. This book may not match the descriptive charm of Wallace, the humour of Durrell, or even the evocative lyricism of Attenborough’s own later work, but there is still much to love here. In these early works, we see a young naturalist in the making, and join him on the journey that helped create one of the most respected and admired nature writers and broadcasters of the modern age. g
No closure for Isabel
Brenda
Niall
MRS OSMOND
by John Banville
Viking
$29.99 pb, 376 pp, 9780 241260180
The last page of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881) leaves its heroine, Isabel Osmond, with an ambiguous choice. To go back into the cage of her wretched marriage might be an exercise of will for duty’s sake, or an evasion, based on fear. Readers have been disputing Isabel’s motives ever since her creator so provokingly left the door ajar. Now, distinguished Irish novelist John Banville has taken it on himself to answer the question that James left hanging. What will Isabel do next, and why?
First in England, then in Italy, James’s young American heroine had encountered a world of possibilities. Suitors appeared, offering love and marriage. She refused an English nobleman and an American industrialist. At the prompting of her cousin Ralph Touchett, an invalid who loved her without hope of marriage, she inherited half of his own legacy from his father. The bequest, which was intended to guarantee Isabel’s freedom, led to her disastrous marriage to impoverished expatriate American Gilbert Osmond, in whom she mistakenly discerned indifference to worldly concerns. Having refused gold and silver, Isabel opened the leaden casket of her choice, only to discover that her marriage had been arranged by a subtle, greedy schemer, Madame Merle, Osmond’s former lover. The demure young daughter of their secret liaison, Pansy, became Isabel’s special charge, her main reason for maintaining a façade of marriage in Osmond’s choice of an imposing home in Rome, the Palazzo Roccanera.
In Banville’s sequel to these events, Isabel takes a long journey from Ralph Touchett’s deathbed in England. Bound for Rome to confront her husband, she
relives her past in a series of brief encounters in London, Paris, and Florence. Her journalist friend Henrietta Stackpole is ready with reproaches and advice; in a series of scenes between the two women, new readers are given the story of Isabel’s folly. Readers who know James’s novel may find this section tediously repetitive. That’s Banville’s dilemma. Is he writing a sequel or a self-contained novel? And is his prose, so reminiscent of the later James in its elaborate imagery and nonstop sentences, intended as homage, pastiche, or both? Does it topple into parody now and then? Would James approve ‘the padding, yellow-eyed, implacable creature that was Isabel’s conscience’, or an extended metaphor in which Isabel’s heart might ‘jump up, like a longneglected pet, panting in eager recognition [but with] no happy barks or waggings of the tail’?
Is Banville writing a sequel or a self-contained novel? And is his prose, intended as homage, pastiche, or both?
Isabel meets her former suitor Lord Warburton calmly – no regrets there. She evades Caspar Goodwood, who is still in relentless pursuit, but relives in memory the moment when ‘he had grasped her in his electric embrace and branded her with a kiss’. In several paragraphs of overheated prose, Banville emphasises the sexual terror that James had made plain enough.
Indulging the curiosity of James’s readers, Banville sets up other meetings. Ned Rosier, Pansy’s disappointed suitor, reappears, doing nicely as an art collector, and engaged to a wealthy young woman. Pansy herself provides another surprise. Osmond’s docile daughter has a ‘new, sharp cool manner’; she doesn’t need Isabel and won’t waste time on her. She has become ‘like her father, and her mother too’.
Isabel’s aunt, Mrs Touchett, and Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, are unchanged, but Isabel’s conversations with them, and the reveries that follow, build up suspense for the climactic meet-
Danielle Clode’s biography of naturalist Edith Coleman, The Wasp and the Orchid, will be published by Picador in March 2018.
ings with Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. What kind of revenge can Isabel exact? Before Banville answers that question, he takes a leap into the past, rather clumsily revealing through an old servant’s testimony that Osmond was no mere ‘sterile dilettante’ but an active agent of evil.
Isabel’s revenge is uncharacteristically devious. Binding her two betrayers together by making a gift of the splendid house in Rome to Madame Merle, she makes sure that neither Merle nor Osmond will ever be free.
And for Isabel herself? A reviewer shouldn’t spoil too many of the surprises Banville has devised. Readers will notice several new characters, introduced to push the narrative in a different direction. As Isabel concluded at the time of Ralph’s death, ‘life would be her business for a long time to come’. Banville is Jamesian enough to resist closure. g
Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea? My grandmother’s story (2017).
‘Leir the sonne of Baldud, was admitted ruler over the Britaines, in the year of the world 3105’ (Holinshed’s Chronicles, 1577). Shakespeare’s play King Lear is set in the long ago, the age of ballads and folktales. ‘Amongst those things that nature gave …’ goes the ballad King Leir and His Three Daughters. The sea and the storm, beauty, generation, crops, weeds, sex, suffering, death: King Lear deals in those things that nature gave – time unredeemed.
‘The tragedy of this play has been urged beyond the outermost limit,’ wrote Coleridge. Samuel Johnson was so shocked by Cordelia’s death that he could not endure to read the last scenes again until he came to edit them. Nahum Tate, in 1681, rewrote the play to give Cordelia a happy ending. His version of King Lear played for more than a hundred years.
Now, as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project, Edward St Aubyn has reconceived the play as a novel, Dunbar – a satire on an ageing media mogul
ousted by two nasty daughters. These daughters bed the old man’s doctor. With Dr Bob’s help, they have had Dunbar committed to a nursing home. There, Dunbar meets his fool, an alcoholic comic actor with the vulnerable genius of Peter Sellars. The daughters of Dunbar’s first marriage are plotting to privatise his media empire. They have their pantomime villainy and implausible loan conditions. Meanwhile, the daughter of his second marriage is living happily on a ranch with her loving husband and a trust fund from her mother. But she is starting to wonder where her father is.
Dunbar is a clever, amusing, and occasionally radiant novel. As a version of King Lear, it probably has more in common with the well-ordered and enjoyable anonymous play The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella. Shakespeare was one of the Queen’s Men, who joined with Sussex’s Men to perform this play at the Rose Theatre on 6 and 8 April 1594. He may
well have acted in it. About a decade later, he came to write his own version.
In King Leir, the author gives the King a sly reason to test his daughter’s love: he wants to choose her husband:
Then at the vantage will I take Cordella, Even as she does protest she loves me best, I’ll say, Then, daughter, grant me one request,
To show thou lovest me as thy sisters do.
Accept a husband, who myself will woo …
Shakespeare omits the King’s reason for testing his daughter’s love from his King Lear. He returns to the unreasonable simplicities of the chronicles and ballads: ‘So on a time it pleased the King / A question thus to move ...’ In doing so, he brings back into the story, as its driving force, what Coleridge calls, ‘the intense desire of being intensely beloved’. Shakespeare’s play originates, not in policy, but baffled feeling. It is Coleridge who first pointed out something wrong from the start with King Lear’s love test: the map of his daughters’ shares is drawn before they speak. Wrongness, suddenness, blindness, extremity – from the first, King Lear sets loose these forces.
What is radical in the play derives from such unreason. Self-dispossessing truth, loyalty to a fallen king, a servant’s protest against torture, kindness to an enemy’s dog – in King Lear, ‘amongst those things that nature gave’, these are unaccountable, unreasonable, hugely politic. A mad beggar, a son in disguise, leads his blind father to an imaginary
cliff’s edge. The father thinks that he falls, in his blindness, and lives, and calls it a miracle. ‘Where have I been?’ asks the King. ‘Where am I? Fair daylight –’
But in Dunbar, as in the old play King Leir, the characters have plausible reasons to act as they do. There is no love test. Dunbar disinherits Florence when she wants no part of his business. She never stands alone, with nothing, mysteriously stubborn. The other daughters were raised badly. Dunbar himself had a culpable parent. Dunbar’s Fool follows him because he needs alcohol. ‘The art of our necessities is strange,’ says King Lear. Like King Leir, Dunbar concerns itself with the art of power, and is more expedient.
In another way, St Aubyn keeps to the old King Leir and chronicle histories: he leaves out the story of Glouces-
Wrongness, suddenness,
blindness, extremity –from the first, King Lear sets loose these forces
ter and his sons. Shakespeare found this story of a blind father, unreasonably betrayed by one son, unreasonably saved by the other, in Philip Sidney’s romance novel Arcadia, and wove it into his King Lear. ‘The incorporation of the two stories has been censured as destructive of the unity of action,’ writes Schlegel. But, he adds, ‘it is the very combination which constitutes the sublime beauty of the work’, changing a story of ‘private misfortune’ into ‘a great commotion in the moral world: the picture becomes gigantic’.
In Dunbar, St Aubyn keeps versions of these characters where they shape King Lear’s story. Out in the cold overnight, Dunbar meets, or perhaps imagines, a homeless man who helps him into a cave – a hint of Poor Tom, a hint of Paul Flowers. Dr Bob, the daughters’ lover with secret ambitions of his own, is a type of Edmund, though, with his articulate self-pity and his nervy pillpopping, here Edmund is being played by a character from one of St Aubyn’s Melrose novels. But Edmund’s betrayal of his brother, and Edgar’s banishment, and Edmund’s betrayal of his father,
and Gloucester’s blinding on the stage, and Edgar’s disguises – all of this goes. It is a strange, deliberate diminution. Dunbar is the story of King Lear alone. Out of Shakespeare’s gigantic picture of unredeemed suffering and radical wonder, St Aubyn has drawn a narrow, topical satire on the power and ethical blindness of a contemporary media mogul, who may prove complacent enough to find this flattering.
If St Aubyn has deliberately narrowed the range of the play – from a terrible vision of nature without god into a vision of some people with terrible natures – nevertheless he has kept, in Dunbar’s walk through the night and snow, a memory of King Lear’s discovery of the natural, which is the great awakening beauty of the play. It saves nobody, and justifies nothing, but is there. Into these passages of the novel St Aubyn pours his love for the play, much as Dunbar, loosed from the machinations of the plot at last, starts feeling the world pouring through him: ‘When at last he dared to look up he saw a canopy of thin broken cloud and, behind it, the detached blue of the upper sky flooded with light …’ In these visions, and in St Aubyn’s account of Lear’s fool, the novel enters another register. g
Lisa Gorton is a poet, novelist, and critic. Her novel The Life of Houses (2015) shared the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction.
The Highly Strung Players, Australian Book Review, and fortyfivedownstairs present
The Ones
by Peter Rose
Peter Rose and Francesca Sasnaitis – members of The Highly Strung Players – will present three new works from Peter Rose’s The Ones, a series of duologues about a married couple who happen to be publishers.
The Highly Strung Players is an ensemble dedicated to the performance (rehearsed readings) of works of absurdist drama, past and present.
Monday, 26 February 2018 6 pm for 6.30 pm fortyfivedownstairs 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
The cost of $25 includes a glass of wine.
Purchase your ticket at: www.fortyfivedownstairs.com
Lost child
Rachel Robertson
THE BEST AUSTRALIAN STORIES 2017
edited by Maxine Beneba Clarke Black Inc.
$29.99 pb, 188 pp, 9781863959612
In her Introduction to The Best Australian Stories 2017, Maxine Beneba Clarke describes how the best short fiction leaves readers with ‘a haunting: a deep shifting of self, precipitated by impossibly few words’. Many of the stories here achieve this, inserting an image or idea into the reader’s mind and leaving it there to worry, delight, or intrigue. The collection as a whole seems haunted by the figure of the lost child, one that Peter Pierce suggested in his book The Country of Lost Children (1999) has preoccupied the Australian imagination at least since the nineteenth century, first as children lost to the bush and later as victims of adult behaviour. The children featured in these stories demonstrate resilience as well as damage, creativity as well as fear, but many of the adult protagonists are heavily shadowed by their anxiety over children.
In ‘Miracles’ by Jennifer Mills, a boy comes home from school one day radically altered. His mother mourns her old son and his childhood. Soon other children in the town change and stories begin to circulate about the cause of this. It might be one of these stories, in the end, that does as much harm as the changes themselves. ‘Dreamers’ by Melissa Lucashenko also features a mother, a lost child, and a mystery. In this case, the grief is shared: ‘And the terrible thing which would have driven any other three people far apart instead bound them together.’ This story, like Tony Birch’s
‘Sissy’, is shadowed by the lost and stolen children of Aboriginal Australians. When Sissy is offered a holiday with a wealthy white family, she is initially thrilled, but her mother is less keen. Will it be safe and how can they trust the charity involved?
A child taken by ideology features in ‘Help Me Harden My Heart’ by Dominic Amerena, which opens with a woman scrubbing ‘the word SCUM’ off her front door. Her neighbours are both friends and foes in this tragic tale. In ‘Glisk’ by Josephine Rowe, two brothers struggle with the legacy of a careless act and the memory of children harmed. A young boy accidentally overhears something in a girl’s room in John Kinsella’s ‘The Telephone’, while in Raelee Chapman’s ‘A United Front’ a young man wants to protect a newborn baby.
Some of these stories are set in the past, some in a potential future, and a few in a parallel, more surreal, world. The hovering spectre of the lost child, however, made me think that underlying these stories is a recognition that we are already living in an Australia that will soon be past, that we have already taken the decisions that will destroy our planet. If the image of the child is a representation of the future, perhaps such stories are performing our work of grieving for our own children’s blemished futures and the lost children of the future.
‘The Boat’ by Joshua Mostafa imagines a future for white middle-class Australians that is a reality for many people around the world – the need to flee their homeland in order to survive. Elizabeth Flux’s ‘One’s Company’ shows an immigrant boy splitting into two halves, with the marvellous beginning: ‘As they stepped off the plane, Zhen’s mother turned to hold his hand and was met with two different versions of her son. She tsk’d impatiently. There were bags to collect and paperwork to fill out – she didn’t have time for magical realism.’ Julie Koh’s ‘The Wall’ conjures a wall across Australia to keep the Chinese out, which happens to run right through the middle of the protagonist’s bedroom. ‘“My husband will have something to say about this,” I tell them, but he is nowhere to be found.’ We learn later what the husband is doing. There is humour and satire in this
collection and both realist and fantastical modes. The works – diverse in tone, style, and voice – come from established and emerging writers. The stories come from a range of publications (with two of the twenty-one stories not previously published), showcasing the valuable work that Australia’s literary magazines perform. Are they the best short fiction published in 2017? This I can’t tell, though Clarke notes she chose from ‘hundreds upon hundreds’ of stories. These are all excellent works which more than repay time spent reading them. Many of them stayed with me for days. I keep wondering what choice I would make were I the woman driving the ute in Verity Borthwick’s ‘Barren Ground’. I continue to be unsettled by the girls in Beejay Silcox’s ‘Slut Trouble’ and the idea of twinning in Mirandi Riwoe’s ‘Growth’. I wish I could write in the voice of a child as Madeline Bailey does in ‘The Encyclopedia of Wild Things’, where, ‘All of us built the fox but it went wild. It kept soaking up stories, so we couldn’t stop it growing and we had to make a plan to protect parents.’ Yes, indeed, stories can be dangerous, as this and other works in the collection make clear. Stories we tell ourselves, stories others tell us, and our political stories – all can be dangerous. But they are also nurturing and enriching, even life-saving. Even as we move towards death, stories can hold us, as Ellen van Neerven shows in ‘Sis Better’, which ends with an arrival and the words, ‘Today I’m here.’ g
Rachel Robertson is a West Australian writer and lecturer in professional writing at Curtin University.
The suitcase syndrome
Lilit Thwaites
ALL MY GOODBYES
by Mariana Dimópulos, translated by Alice Whitmore Giramondo
$24.95 pb, 160 pp, 9781925336412
After all my travels, all those years lost and won and lost again; after testing a thousand times the raw stock of my being, which never seemed to cook; when at last I had found a man and I had loved him, they called me up so I could see how the story ended: the living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house, the abandoned axe. What was I supposed to say?
Given that the unnamed narrator–protagonist of Mariana Dimópulos’s All My Goodbyes (Cada despedida) has difficulty putting together and understanding her own fractured, nomadic life, it is perhaps not surprising that we readers have to call on all of our faculties to reconstruct her narrative – but it is well worth the effort. It is often a challenge even to know where we are in time because of the constant shifts from present to past, but this fragmentation contributes to a sense of timelessness – or to the unimportance of time – in this novella where the past is remembered from the present and where place matters more than time. This, too, calls for a focused reader alert to every verbal nuance and tense shift, and willing to assemble the narrative jigsaw. Spare a thought for the translator, Alice Whitmore, whose task it was to convert this Spanish puzzle into an equally enthralling English one – and who does so magnificently.
Interestingly, Dimópulos, who is from Argentina, is herself a translator (from German and English into Spanish), and frequently immerses herself in what she calls ‘games of linguistic chess’. Language and words are a feature of her life and of her writing, along with explorations of location, displacement,
movement, and riddles.
She is the author of three published works of fiction – Anís (2008), this book, Cada despedida (2010), and Pendiente (2017) – as well as short stories and non-fiction, including a critical study of the work of the German philosopher, translator, and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. All My Goodbyes is her first work to be translated into English, and launches Giramondo’s new series ‘Southern Latitudes’, which aims to bring together writers from the southern hemisphere and allow their work to resonate with Australian readers.
The protagonist of this novella – a genre that features prominently in the work of many contemporary writers from Latin America – is a young woman from Buenos Aires with a fractured life and an acute case of ‘suitcase syndrome’. She informs us early on that ‘at twentythree I was already ancient’, and ‘rather than fall into introspection and rummage around in my own muddy depths I preferred to pack my bags, to inaugurate something, the next thing’. She is –or was – a biologist and chemist, and an inveterate liar, perhaps in part because, after her mother died when she was four or five, she was raised by her father, a physicist, who ‘simply enjoyed tainting with doubt [scepticism] everything I was beginning to believe ... naïve with his wisdom, a well-intentioned butcher of innocence’. Is this in part why she feels – and frequently tells us – that her heart, ‘neither fair nor kind’, is ‘cut from a bad cloth’? Why she ‘had no love for myself. I was good for nothing’? Why, after ten years in the Old (Northern) World where she did connect emotionally with three or four people, albeit briefly, she finally returned to Buenos Aires and then quickly fled from there to Patagonia, and ‘never saw any of [those people] again. I never spoke to any of them again … I put an end to them all, I didn’t leave a trace, didn’t feel a trace of remorse. These are all my crimes: all my goodbyes’?
Like the narrator of All My Goodbyes, with whom she shares the ‘suitcase syndrome’ or travel bug, Dimópulos decided to leave Buenos Aires in her early twenties. But unlike her character, who spends ten years constantly on the move,
Dimópolos knew exactly where and why she was going – to read the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. This entailed travelling to Germany and, among many other things, discovering and learning the German language. In the process, she realised that coming across someone who speaks your own language can be a plus when you are living in the daily swirl of a place where you don’t know the language and cannot interact with the locals. It can open up a space of sorts, a quietness, perhaps even a momentary sense of ‘arrival’.
Fragmentation contributes to a sense of timelessness – or to the unimportance of time
It is only when Dimópulos’s nomadic protagonist arrives at the Del Monte farm near the isolated town of El Bolsón in Patagonia, sees the orchards and berry fields, is hired as a summer worker and eventually allowed to stay on and live in one of the three houses owned by the equally taciturn Marco and his wealthy, ‘sweet and malicious’ old mother, Madame Cupin, that she realises that ‘love exists and the place exists’. She has become ‘a magnificent animal: soft, compact, whole’. For the first time in her life, she can ‘sit and recline without a shred of [her father’s] scepticism, trusting completely in the resilience of chairs and beds’. Does it last? The horrendous crime described in the opening pages of All My Goodbyes suggests otherwise, but it is left to the readers to complete the puzzle. g
Lilit Žekulin Thwaites is a Melbournebased literary translator. ❖
2018 Calibre Essay Prize
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 6,000 words on any non-fiction subject. Calibre is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English.
First Prize: $5,000
Second Prize: $2,500
Judges: Andrea Goldsmith, Phillipa McGuinness, and Peter Rose
The closing date is 15 January 2018.
Special offer
Subscribe to ABR Online (RRP $60) and enter one essay for a total of just $65. Additional entries cost only $15. The price of $25 for non-subscribers includes a free four-month subscription to ABR Online. If you don’t already subscribe to ABR’s print edition you can purchase a one-year subscription and enter a single essay for the following rates: $95 (Australia), $150 (New Zealand/Asia), or $170 (Rest of the world).
‘Winning the Calibre Essay Prize validates the risks I felt I took in writing “Salt Blood”. Calibre has opened new conversations and new pathways for me.’
Michael Adams, 2017 winner
Full details and online entry are available on our website
www.australianbookreview.com.au
The Calibre Essay Prize is supported by Mr Colin Golvan QC and the ABR Patrons
SURVEY
Publisher Picks
To complement our 2017 ‘Books of the Year’, we invited several senior publishers to nominate their favourite books – all published by other companies.
Madonna Duffy
Two Australian novels have stayed with me through 2017: Heather Rose’s The Museum of Modern Love (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in ABR, 1/17) was brilliant in every way. Challenging and engrossing, it reminded me that it takes courage to live well. Rose is such a keen observer of human nature in all its tortured forms. It also featured Sandy Cull’s gorgeous design work on the cover, so anything within had to be worth reading. Kim Scott’s Taboo (Picador, 8/17) asks the questions that many of us are asking ourselves. How do we make a shared future out of a fractured past? He reminds us that the power of Indigenous storytelling transcends time, race, and politics. They were the first storytellers, and we still have so much to learn from them.
Madonna Duffy is Publishing Director at the University of Queensland Press.
Michael Heyward
Philippe Paquet’s monumental biography of the sinologist Pierre Ryckmans is entitled Simon Leys: Navigator between worlds (La Trobe University Press/Black Inc.). Superbly translated by Julie Rose, this book explores an extraordinary life. Ryckmans was born in Belgium, where he trained in art history but wanted to become a painter. He first went to China when he was nineteen. Later, he became a scathing critic of Mao and Maoism, writing under the nom de plume Simon Leys, before landing up in Australia where he
raised his family, and wrote his unclassifiable masterpiece The Death of Napoleon, along with the masterful essays that were collected in The Hall of Uselessness. Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing.
Meredith Curnow
Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (Allen & Unwin, 10/17) is a quietly brilliant piece of work that left me rather sad at the end, but happily so. The hopeful and abiding love of Bunty and Christabel will long stay with me. The intent of the novel is clear from Part I, The Fictive Self. We all tell ourselves stories and ignore or reinterpret what is too hard to digest. Confronting, cutting, moving, and funny in equal parts. Long may this storyteller continue to absorb fact into her fiction.
Meredith Curnow is Publisher – Knopf, Vintage, Penguin Random House Literary.
Phillipa McGuinness
I was hopeful that Dennis Glover’s The Last Man in Europe (Black Inc.) would be free of the ‘clunky philosophical dialogue that made the protagonists sound like Marxist gramophones’, a criticism Glover has Orwell direct at another writer. I hoped too that Glover’s prose might hold its own alongside one of the century’s greatest writers. It exceeded my hopes on both counts. I can’t read or publish enough about Sydney it seems. Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney (Giramondo, 1/18) was a joy. It made
me want to set off to find the Wrigleys factory in Hornsby, such is its power to make the marginal and the lost seem much less so.
Phillipa McGuinness is Executive Publisher of NewSouth Publishing.
Mathilda Imlah
For me this year, Stuart Kells’s The Library: A catalogue of wonders (Text Publishing, 12/17) is an easy choice for any bibliophile. On a vivid tour of the world’s great libraries, both real and imagined, Kells is a magnificent guide to the abundant treasures he sets out. In fiction, Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman (Hachette, 12/17) is a powerful and skilful novel – I could mention speculative fiction, but it transcends that tag. It offers a vision of Australia’s future and past whose twist, quite as intended, took me completely by surprise.
Mathilda Imlah is the Picador Publisher.
Barry Scott
Increasingly, international publishers are the the first to publish books by Austral-
John Allison
ian writers. As the wealth of local talent grows, it is probably inevitable that some authors will bob up elsewhere. Peter Barry’s The Walk (New Internationalist), a delicious satire, tells the story of a charity worker who brings Mujtabaa, a young Ethiopian man, to London and has him walk from Heathrow to Trafalgar Square to raise funds for famine relief. The hilarious McDonald’s scene is worth the price of admission alone. I found Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt (Text Publishing, 11/17) impossible to forget. Penetrating, soulful, and surprisingly welcoming, it reminded me of my own ancestors and how easy it is to sidestep the past.
Barry Scott is Publisher at Transit Lounge
Rachel Bin Salleh
It is unusual to read a short story and feel the kind of satisfaction that comes with finishing a great novel. I felt this about each one of Tony Birch’s stories in Common People (UQP, 9/17). In this collection, Birch reveals himself as a master of the short story. He draws you in from
ABR Arts
Ian Dickson
Rosalind Appleby
Ben Brooker
Jane Clark
Des Cowley
Anwen Crawford
Helen Ennis
Andrew Fuhrmann
Fiona Gruber
Michael Halliwell
Bronwyn Lea
Susan Lever
Louise Martin-Chew
Peter Rose
Dina Ross
Zoltán Szabó
Harry Windsor
the first paragraph and leaves you both satisfied and with cause for reflection. The stories are surprising and diverse, and Birch’s sense of humanity pulls you in. I loved the grittiness, the dark humour, and quiet celebration of human resilience.
Rachel Bin Salleh is Publisher at Magabala Books. Rod Morrison
Jane Rawson is one of our most gifted and unpredictable – and under-appreciated – writers. I really enjoyed her fourth novel, From the Wreck (Transit Lounge, 4/17), a densely poetic, imaginary tour de force that combines seemingly familiar scenes and characters – an historical shipwreck – with surreal and speculative leaps of fancy. Overseas, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner) by Jesmyn Ward is a spare and searing portrait of just a few of the countless faultlines at the heart of American society. A dysfunctional family drama and modern road novel in one, it is painful, shocking, and illuminating reading, but you dare not turn away.
Rod Morrison is Publishing Director at Brio Books.
Nikki Christer
The one that got away! This year I devoured Chris Womersley’s rich and gothic City of Crows (Picador, 10/17). With each very different novel Womersley exposes the wanton sides of human nature, and looks for beauty. This dark, visceral book is a brilliant piece of historical fiction. Rural France and Paris, scenes familiar to us from centuries of fiction, are drawn here in many layers. I particularly enjoyed wallowing in the blood and magic of the underground rooms and clusters of trees where most writers do not linger. Charlotte’s quest to save herself and Nicolas stretched the imagination of this reader in the most enjoyable ways.
Nikki Christer is Group Publishing Director at Penguin Random House
Georgia Richter
Two portraits of writers provided excellent reading this year. Thornton McCamish’s Our Man Elsewhere: In search of Alan Moorehead (Black Inc., 9/16), an ‘in the footsteps’ narrative, returns a legendary war correspondent to public view, revealing an author whose wit and self-deprecation make him an ideal companion on the discovery journey. Helen Garner’s writing has influenced my teaching and thinking about style like no other. In A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (Text, 5/17), Bernadette Brennan offered fresh perspectives with her thorough, immensely readable portrait of one of Australia’s finest authors.
Georgia Richter is Publisher at Fremantle Press.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DIRECTOR PETER EVANS
3 MARCH – 7 APRIL SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE
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La Trobe’s legacy
A sympathetic biography of Victoria’s first governor
John Arnold LA TROBE: TRAVELLER, WRITER, GOVERNOR
by John Barnes
Halstead Press, $59.95 hb, 384 pp, 9781925043334
Victorians know the name La Trobe through the eponymous university, La Trobe Street in the city of Melbourne, and the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland. Tasmanians are familiar with the town of Latrobe in the north-west of their state. But how many are aware that all the above were named after Charles Joseph La Trobe, the first superintendent of the European settlement of Port Phillip, one-time acting governor of Tasmania, and the first lieutenant-governor of the new British colony of Victoria?
La Trobe’s reputation has been a mixed one. Few of his Melbourne contemporaries questioned his personal qualities, but they, and later historians, regularly contrasted these with his perceived inefficiencies and weaknesses as an administrator. In this sympathetic biography, John Barnes balances the ledger. Whilst not uncritical or shying away from what he sees as La Trobe’s weaknesses, Barnes argues strongly, and elegantly, for La Trobe being both a man of fine personal qualities and, for most of his time in Victoria, a competent and good administrator.
La Trobe’s Moravian upbringing and his belief in the ‘will of God’ were central to both his personal and professional life. Born in London in 1801, his father was a senior leader in the Moravian Church, and Charles and his siblings were educated in Moravian schools. As a young man La Trobe ‘rambled’ around Europe, producing two well-received books about his travels. He was particularly taken with the Alps area and Neuchâtel in Switzerland where he met his future wife, Sophie de Montmollin. In his early thirties, he travelled extensively around America,
including periods with Washington Irving, and subsequently wrote The Rambler in North America (1835) and The Rambler in Mexico (1836). These, as with his other books, featured some of his own sketches, several of which are reproduced in this biography.
It was probably the strength of his writings that led to La Trobe being sent to the West Indies in 1837 by the Colonial Office to report on the education of emancipated slaves and their children. And it was most likely on the basis of his submitted reports that he was appointed in 1839 to be the superintendent of the new settlement at Port Phillip.
As there was no official government residence, La Trobe bought with him from England a pre-fabricated dwelling. He erected the house – now known as La Trobe’s Cottage – on the twelve and a half acres he purchased soon after his arrival just east of the city that he called Jolimont, after a hill bordering Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland.
The Moravian creed directed that its followers did not involve themselves in any public controversy. Charles La Trobe followed this principle while he was the administrator of Port Phillip, refusing to publicly rebut or even comment on the often vitriolic criticism of him in the Melbourne press. La Trobe was considered to be aloof, more European than English, rather than a man of the people. This was reinforced by his dislike of socialising for socialising sake and by his few close friends being those of the ‘gentlemen’ class of Melbourne. Due to his relatively low salary, he did not hold public balls or levees to commemorate major events.
Barnes devotes a full chapter to the treatment of the Indigenous Victorians
during La Trobe’s time in the colony. The report card here is mixed. La Trobe believed that the local natives were primitive peoples whose only salvation was through conversion to Christianity. He was aware of the atrocities committed against them by squatters, but realised that it was near impossible to try and seek justice with magistrates and juries coming from the same class as the perpetrators.
In 1845 La Trobe sent his eldest daughter back to Europe to be educated. He assumed that he and the rest of the family would be following her within a year or two. But he stayed on after being appointed lieutenant-governor of the new state of Victoria. His governorship coincided with the discovery of gold. The resulting excitement and turmoil put enormous pressure on La Trobe and his administration. He feared anarchy and came close to a physical breakdown under the pressure of the extraordinary times. However, after a year or so things stabilised, for which, Barnes argues, La Trobe can take some credit. In December 1852 he submitted his resignation. His wife, suffering from poor health, had already returned to England with their remaining children.
While waiting for the arrival of his successor, Charles Hotham, La Trobe read in the English newspapers that his wife had died not long after she had arrived in England. The family letters informing him of her death had been sent on a faster ship but it was delayed, arriving after the one carrying the latest
English papers. His belief in the will of God again carried him through, as it did when he went blind in his sixties.
La Trobe was confident that he would be offered another position in the colonial service after he returned to England. But none was forthcoming. He did not have powerful connections amongst the upper and ruling élite, nor did he have a military background, often one of the key criteria for colonial governors. The fact that he married his deceased wife’s widowed sister would not have helped. In addition, the strong criticisms made of his administration, especially those regarding his handling of the gold diggers in 1852–53, made by the respected William Howitt in his Land, Labour and Gold (1855), possibly influenced English bureaucratic opinion of the former governor.
After his forced retirement, La Trobe and his wife and their children along with those from his first marriage, lived comfortably in England, with frequent visits to Neuchâtel. He became a retired man of letters pursuing his intellectual interests, including a planned book on Victoria that never eventuated, and rambling locally. He remained in contact with close friends in Victoria especially those who administered his affairs relating to the sale of the Jolimont land. He was belatedly granted a civil pension in 1864 and died eleven years later.
The magnificent Domed Reading Room in the State Library is now called the La Trobe Reading Room. The library and Melbourne University (he co-founded both with Redmond Barry), and the gardens surrounding Melbourne, particularly the Royal Botanic Gardens, which he reserved as Crown Land, are enduring legacies of La Trobe’s fourteen years in Victoria.
Published by a small independent publisher, La Trobe: Traveller, writer, governor is a long book, around 200,000 words, a length that that may limit its readership. But it is the first comprehensive biography of La Trobe and will become the standard work. g
John Arnold is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash and Editor of the La Trobe Journal
The music of Powell
Brian McFarlane
ANTHONY
POWELL: DANCING
TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
by Hilary Spurling
Hamish Hamilton
$55 hb, 525 pp, 9780241143834
Readers of this review are warned that they are in the presence of an addict. Having read Anthony Powell’s monumental twelve-volume Dance to the Music of Time three times, I had been trying not to succumb to a fourth. Then along comes Hilary Spurling’s brilliant biography and will power has suffered total defeat.
Anyone who has read Spurling’s magisterial ‘lives’ of, among others, Henri Matisse and Ivy Compton-Burnett (each in two volumes), will be expecting that irresistible combination of immaculately detailed research and eloquent storytelling. There are pages of notes at the back giving sources for everything, but Spurling has not peppered the chapters with those little numbers that can get in the way of narrative fluency. Since, like Powell in his great work, she deals with a huge cast, it is important for us to know where she got her information about them, but equally important for them to establish and retain their presences.
There is, of course, more to Powell (1905–2000) than Dance, but that is above all what he will be remembered for. And that is what hovers over Spurling’s biography, with its extraordinary sense of interlocking lives, personal aspirations, successes, and disappointments, and its remarkable evocation of the changing times, politically, socially, and culturally. From Spurling’s account, Powell emerges as the source of the Nick Jenkins narrator-figure in Dance: that is, observer rather than observed, but a curiously palpable figure nevertheless.
In fact, the Jenkins character, from boyhood through to late middle age is one of the triumphs of the series. His voice is measured, with just enough
attractive firmness to command the reader’s trust, and, in the wide-ranging diversity of his life’s choices, professional and personal, and of the other lives that intersect with his, he repeatedly echoes his creator’s dealings with the world. Spurling creates a sort of shadowy dance between the reality and the fictional representation that will make subsequent readings of Dance an even richer experience.
So what kind of man and life does this book put before us? As to Powell’s personal life, it is the wonderfully complementary marriage to Lady Violet Pakenham that gives it coherence. For more than sixty years, she became, in Spurling’s words, ‘a collaborator in the sense that, without her, the Dance to the Music of Time could hardly have taken the form it did’. As their son Tristram said of her memory, it was ‘the right arm, as it were, of my father’s imagination’. Another (unnamed) man became briefly ‘the love of her life’, probably during wartime years of long separation from Powell, but her ‘role as wife and mother exerted in the end a greater pull’. Powell’s discovery of the affair plunged him into the depression to which he was prone, but the strength of the marriage survived and each remained crucial to the other’s professional activities, Violet having also become a writer. He with his irascibly difficult father and she with her chilly mother seem to have been made for each other. They certainly needed each other, but don’t imagine this makes for soppy reading.
In spite of the overriding sense of Powell’s belonging to the upper-middle classes (and marrying a step up, becoming the brother-in-law of the seventh earl of Longford), he always had to earn enough to support his major writing ventures by taking on reviewing and editing jobs, especially in pre-war London. There were tiresome experiences with some publishing firms. In detailing these, Spurling vividly evokes what may well be a vanished world of people jostling for places in firms that settled for easy commercial success – or those with more high-minded aspirations. Powell was also a regular book reviewer for the once-popular journal Punch and later for the Daily Telegraph but his
was essentially the mind of an author, especially of a novelist, with all other activities taking second place to that of the writer who needed the view from his study window obscured by a tree lest he be distracted.
And yet, Spurling’s Powell isn’t wholly a solitary man. While sometimes overtaken by depression and exhaustion, he also took pleasure in enormous numbers of friends accumulated in his long life. Many such were fellow writers, such as Evelyn Waugh (Spurling’s dealings with him confirm other views of his waspish tongue and unreliable temper), George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Greene, and (surely deserving reappraisal) Henry Green. The text is not just lavishly sprinkled with names of the famous: they get their vivifying share of time before the camera of Spurling’s eye for what makes people react to other people, for good or ill. Powell’s had been a lonely childhood, with a war-traumatised father, and the horrors of boarding school (he hated Eton) preceding the disappointment of Oxford: it is as though this unprepossessing start to life had inclined him to value the gifts of family and friendship which so characterised his life as they would do his alter ego Nick Jenkins.
Again and again one is struck by how Powell transformed real-life acquaintances into memorable fictional figures. For example, battling husband and wife the warring Cyril and Barbara Connolly, wittily sketched by Spurling, are the prototypes of Dance’s pugilistic Macklinticks. Most memorable of all, though, is the reincarnation of Lt-Col. Capel-Dunn, ‘short, stout, graceless, totally lacking in humour and superlatively good at his job’ as Powell’s Widmerpool, as riveting a study of an ego utterly devoid of self-knowledge as twentieth-century fiction has given us.
Not only is Spurling’s research exemplary, but she also knew Powell the man. She seems to have grasped his ‘peripatetic existence’ and the times in which he lived it with effortless dexterity. g
Brian McFarlane’s next book is Making a Meal of It: Writing about film (Monash University Publishing, 2018)
The might of the right
How economic freedom outstripped political freedom in the US
Max Holleran
DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT’S STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICA by Nancy MacLean
Scribe, $35 pb, 366 pp, 9781925322583
On 12 August 2017 a mob of neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, chanting racial epithets while openly carrying rifles and pistols. Many of the participants were from groups that advocate not just racial supremacy but the end of the US federal government, which they see as tyrannical. This is not the first time that the University of Virginia (UVA) has been in the eye of the storm when it comes to radical movements calling for the end of national government. In the late 1950s, the libertarian economist James M. Buchanan used the university as a centre to launch an assault on Keynesian economics. From UVA and later George Mason University, also in Virginia, Buchanan trained a generation of right-wing thinkers and began amassing a war chest from affluent donors to link academia to the political interests of the super-rich through a network of think tanks. Eventually, Buchanan would command millions of dollars annually from the tsars of conservative fundraising, Charles and David Koch, particularly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986. Buchanan, with the help of his wealthy backers, transformed the economics departments he led from staid quantitative backwaters to aggressively, and unabashedly, ideological spaces on the political frontlines. The goal of this movement was not just to demolish the welfare state but to bring down the entire federal government with it.
Nancy MacLean’s gripping new book, Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America, tells the story of how Buchanan created the Virginia School of
Political Economy during the 1960s. While most economics departments were becoming more mathematical and niche, Buchanan styled himself as a moral philosopher in the mould of Adam Smith. He worked to shape the UVA as a place that would be immune to campus activism, training his students to see the federal government as the creator of problems rather than an arbiter of weighty issues like civil rights. This was radical thinking at a time when most members of the Republican Party still had few qualms about using ‘big government’ for their military and
The goal of this movement was not just to demolish the welfare state but to bring down the entire federal government with it
economic priorities. MacLean shows how out of step Buchanan’s philosophy was even within the conservative Chicago school of economics in which he was trained: ‘what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.’ For Buchanan, taxation was an act of violence and it selectively targeted the wealthy whose suffering was disregarded by the masses and permitted by the law. Buchanan’s time at UVA was also inflected with racism: the state of Virginia battled the Brown vs. Board of Education decision for years, closing
public schools to blacks between 1959 and 1964 in order to not comply with federally mandated integration. MacLean stirringly draws the connection between ultra-free-market economics and Southern concepts of a racial order based on social Darwinism, both of which found like-minded adherents at the UVA in the 1960s. Buchanan and his colleague Warren Nutter, who would later work in the Defense Department for the Nixon administration, argued that the solution to integration was the privatisation of education with limited school vouchers. At the time this idea fell on deaf ears, even amongst conservatives, but it foreshadowed the current agenda of today’s pro-privatisation billionaire secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, whose thinking echoes Buchanan’s belief that the community values taught in primary school are often contrary to liberty.
The influence of James Buchanan and his euphemistically named brand of ‘public choice’ economics had disastrous effects that can be seen far more clearly than the usual academic pipeline of white papers and advisory councils. Rather, Buchanan was an eager guest of the Chilean General Augusto Pinochet after he overthrew the democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende and installed a military dictatorship that held power through torture and ‘disappearing’ opponents. He helped Pinochet shape a new constitution that dramatically favored the wealthy, not only in economic policy but also through mass voter disenfranchisement. At the same time, Buchanan’s policies in the United States called for cuts that would do away with social security (retirement) in the name of ‘reform’, while using the money saved to lighten the tax burdens of the wealthiest families.
Buchanan, departed severely from the conservatives of the Nixon and Reagan eras. He didn’t just regard government programs as inefficient: ‘Buchanan believed government failed because of bad faith: because activists, voters, and officials alike used talk of the public interest to mask the pursuit of their own personal self-interest at others’ expense. His was a cynicism so toxic that, if widely believed, it would eat like acid at the foundations of civic life.’
The book shows how this distrust for elected officials has mushroomed since the 1980s, culminating in Donald Trump, who has divided the Republican Party and impugns the entire political system. However, as exemplified by Trump, the right’s promise to eradicate the federal government is frequently not borne out. Instead, the state is the prize for the highest bidder to be wielded by oligarchical interests. Once these interests gain traction through think tanks, state legislatures, or executive orders, they cut some regulatory functions of the government but they also use taxes to subsidise business ventures while programs like social security, healthcare, and food stamps are mercilessly slashed.
to the right and, to a large extent, took the country with them. The book energetically asks us why economic freedom came to outstrip political freedom and why so many people in the United
States identify with the rich: seeing taxation not as a necessary sacrifice but as an unjust shakedown by which the prosperous few are made to suffer the tyranny of the impoverished many. g
Looking back at Buchanan’s market orthodoxy from today’s vantage point of the worst inequality since the Great Depression, MacLean is left to wonder how American billionaires went so far
WRITTEN WORD
Max Holleran is Early Career Fellow in Sociology at the University of Melbourne. His work on cities and politics has appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New Republic, and Slate ❖
Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park holding Nazi, Confederate, and Gadsden ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags, 12 August 2017 (photograph by Anthony Crider via Wikimedia Commons)
THE ART OF NAVIGATION
by Rose Michael UWA Publishing
$24.99 pb, 247 pp, 9781742589213
Conceptually, The Art of Navigation is as intriguing as it is ambitious. The narrative is part near-future time travel, part historical drama, part nostalgic Australian Gothic – and all slipstream fiction. The novel braids, unbraids, and rebraids three main threads of time and place: suburban Melbourne in 1987; the royal courts of Elizabeth I and Rudolph II in 1587; and the outskirts of a new, not-quite-Melbourne in 2087. Yet there is practically nothing simple about this book – not the style or structure, nor the way it resolves. This complexity is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of slipstream stories. Slipstream fiction is difficult to process; it’s demanding, often frustrating. It functions because it is strange, because it estranges. Readers are not made welcome, not offered clear or complete pictures, but are instead asked to decipher dreamlike visions glimpsed sideways through a warped scrying glass.
It is worth bearing such generic conventions in mind when reading The Art of Navigation. The first third – spanning one wild night in 1987 – reads like a long, psychedelic hallucination. Drifting at its centre is Nat, whose obsession with Edward Kelley – alchemist, charlatan, and assistant to Elizabeth I’s astrologist, Doctor John Dee – haunts and complicates all of the book’s timelines. In the second section, astral projections transport Kelley into the queen’s most private moments but also allow him to spy twentieth-century Australia through Nat’s eyes. Six hundred years later, Nat –now over a century old – uses the Skrype app her grandson developed to revisit a past she has been writing and rewriting since she was a girl.
‘But what does it mean?’ asks young Queen Bess, a sentiment anyone expecting a plot-driven work of speculative fiction might echo. ‘I want answers, not more auguries that lead like ropes of sand or sea slime to the moon!’ Yet The Art of Navigation offers few straight answers – and asks readers to supply their own compasses.
Lisa Bennett
‘This huge, dusty mirror’
A new portrait of a deeply flawed, complex US president
Richard Nixon remains one of America’s most intriguing presidents (1969–74). Intelligent, shrewd, and possessing a keen sense of the public mood, Nixon represented the ideal presidential model. His grasp of foreign policy has been unmatched by his successors, and his domestic policies represented the last hurrah of ‘New Deal’ governance. Yet there was also a personal darkness culminating with the Watergate scandal, forcing Nixon to become the only president to resign from office. John A. Farrell successfully reconciles these elements in Richard Nixon: The life, crafting a lively narrative that encapsulates Nixon’s contradictory aspects, while providing groundbreaking research that has eluded previous historians.
Nixon’s rise to power was meteoric. Growing up in Yorba Linda, California, his upbringing was tinged with tragedy, including the premature deaths of two of his brothers. Nixon was determined to escape his impoverished world. His entrance into Whittier College provided both his education and hints of the politician to come. Alienated from the élitist Franklin Society, Nixon organised the rivals, Orthogonians, who ‘made a virtue of their rank as plebs … and displayed a laudable blindness to class, ethnicity, and race’. They gave Nixon a platform in campus politics, and foreshadowed his later resentments of élites.
After naval service during World War II, Nixon parlayed his military record into campaigning for political office. Farrell outlines the controversies in Nixon’s early victories, against Jerry Voorhis for the House of Representatives in 1946 and Helen Douglas for the Senate in 1950. Nixon proposed placing spies in the Voorhis campaign, and denigrated Douglas’s ‘Communist sympathies’.
Nixon had already gained a national reputation investigating State Department official Alger Hiss’s alleged spying for the Soviet Union. Nixon’s defeat of Douglas (using the spectre of communism) saw him chosen by Republican kingmakers as Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952. But he faced a serious challenge: focus on a fund allegedly funnelling bribes from donors. Threatened with removal from the ticket, Nixon organised a televised broadcast known now as the ‘Checkers Speech.’ Outlining his tax situation and family finances, Nixon bared himself to the public, culminating in the declaration that his daughters had been gifted a dog (Checkers) by a donor, and that they were not going to return it. These disclosures, combined with middle-American values, worked and Nixon became one of the youngest vice presidents in US history, ideally positioned for a presidential run in 1960.
Nixon’s presidential race against John F. Kennedy broke new ground, with the first televised debates between candidates. These proved the power of image over substance, particularly in the first, where a physically ill Nixon floundered visually against the tanned, youthful Kennedy. The 1960 election was one of the closest races in US history. Farrell outlines the accusations of voter fraud in Illinois and Texas, arguing that Kennedy possibly stole the election. The election marked Nixon deeply. In his memoirs RN (1977), he vowed ‘never again [to] enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable … on the level of political tactics’.
The 1960s were wilderness years for Nixon. After failing to win California’s governorship in 1962, he gave a press conference announcing his retirement
from politics with the famous line: ‘You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.’ Yet Nixon remained determined. The 1966 congressional elections saw him barnstorming the country for the GOP, building favours that allowed him to capture the nomination for the presidential nomination in 1968.
Farrell’s account of this election breaks important new ground, and has been praised by leading Nixon scholars. With the Tet Offensive reinforcing the cost of war to news viewers at home, Lyndon Johnson announced in March 1968 he would not run for re-election and that he would devote his efforts to pursuing peace. Had peace been achieved prior to the election, it would have guaranteed the victory of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. There has long been speculation that Nixon pursued back channels to sabotage the government’s talks with the North Vietnamese, promising a better deal once he was president. Farrell has found the smoking gun, a document from Nixon urging aide H.R. Haldeman to throw a ‘monkey wrench’ into the proceedings. As historian Tim Naftali argues, this removes Nixon’s ‘fig leaf of plausible deniability’. In time, the undercutting of Johnson’s peace efforts may well rank above Watergate in historical criticisms of Nixon’s presidency.
dirty tricks would prove politically fatal. Concern about leaks led to Nixon forming a group of aides who engaged in a range of dirty tactics against opponents, notably the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at
a brilliant narrative about one of the most complex individuals to occupy the presidency, whose term mixed high achievement with skullduggery. The sabotage of the 1968 peace talks, the Red-baiting and Watergate run alongside the opening of relations with China and the USSR. Nixon remains one of the most environmentally progressive presidents, with The Clean Air and Water Acts, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency to his name. While racial profanities were captured on tape in the Oval Office, Nixon showed a deep commitment to affirmative action. These contradictions prompted Gore Vidal to write: ‘In Nixon we observe our faults larger than life. But we can also … see in this huge, dusty mirror our virtues as well.’ Farrell ends on an elegiac note, describing Nixon’s death in 1994:
Nixon’s victory did not lead to the ‘peace with honour’ he had promised. The war widened into Cambodia, paving the way for the rise of Pol Pot and the killing fields. Nixon’s 1972 re-election saw him win one of US history’s biggest landslides, but his campaign’s
the Watergate Hotel. Initially dismissed as a ‘third-rate burglary’, the scandal engulfed the administration, forcing Nixon to resign in August 1974. These scandals ran parallel to Nixon’s greatest foreign policy triumphs: grand breakthroughs with the USSR and China. But Watergate proved his undoing. Farrell’s tone moves from political thriller to forensic examination as he describes the missteps of Nixon and his aides, including the taping of the Oval Office itself, which revealed a president who was profane, anti-Semitic, and paranoid during the Watergate hearings.
As with most Nixon biographies, Farrell finishes quickly after Nixon’s resignation. Yet Nixon remained influential, advising his successors and writing numerous books, including his bestselling memoirs. Farrell has written
His daughters chose his epitaph, to be carved into his tombstone, there in … Yorba Linda. It is a line from his first inaugural address. ‘The greatest honour history can bestow is the title of peacemaker,’ it says. He had come so long a way, chasing the whistles of trains in the night, and never so far at all.
Farrell has successfully reconciled the different aspects of Nixon, presenting a president almost Shakespearean in his dimensions, in a volume that will remain an important part of the Nixon canon. g
Andrew Broertjes teaches at the University of Western Australia. He is currently working on a book about controversial US presidential elections from 1800 through to 2000.
President Nixon at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, 1973 (White House Press Office via Wikimedia Commons)
What matters
Janna Thompson
DOES ANYTHING REALLY MATTER?: ESSAYS ON PARFIT ON OBJECTIVITY
edited by Peter Singer
Oxford University Press
$61.95 hb, 300 pp, 9780199653836
Philosopher Derek Parfit claimed that nothing matters unless ethical and other normative beliefs are objectively true. Parfit, who died on 1 January 2017, wrote a three-volume work, On What Matters (2011–17), because he believed that the meaningfulness of his life, and the lives of others who devote themselves to ethical thought, depend on demonstrating the reality of normative properties and the necessity of basic ethical truths. This collection of essays, edited by Peter Singer, is a response by some moral philosophers to Parfit’s views about ethics, normativity, and meaning.
Parfit, though scarcely known outside the world of philosophy, was one of the most important thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His earlier work, Reasons and Persons (1984), made an impact mostly because of its claims about personal identity and duties to the unborn. He turned to the esoteric field of meta-ethics, the study of the meaning of ethical propositions, and the foundation of our ethical beliefs, because he became convinced
that the very possibility of ethical truth depends on defeating David Hume’s view that values depend on our desires. Hume was no nihilist. He thought that we construct a satisfactory ethics from our sympathies and our ability to put ourselves in the place of others. For Parfit this is not good enough. Hume provides no reliable way of appealing against someone who is convinced that pain is intrinsically good or that there is nothing wrong with torturing babies. But pain is bad and torturing babies is wrong. Parfit thinks that normative properties like goodness and right must exist outside of our minds. But they are not identical to anything in the natural world. Normative properties, he argues, are like mathematical properties. They are similarly accessible to reason and have no causal impact on worldly events.
Some of the philosophers in Singer’s collection agree that ethical properties exist outside our minds but have doubts about Parfit’s account of their nature. Larry Temkin thinks that their influence on our behaviour shows that they have causal power. Frank Jackson is convinced that ethical properties are reducible to properties in the natural world in much the same way as heat is reducible to the motion of molecules. Mark Schroeder favours a ‘conservative’ reduction to natural properties that does not conflict with our intuitive knowledge of ethical truth.
Peter Singer, in his own contribution to the collection (with co-author Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), welcomes Parfit’s objectivism because it confirms his longheld view that reason is the only reliable guide to right and wrong. Impartial rationality, he believes, tells us that we should sacrifice much more of our wealth to help those in need and the fact that most of us do not feel that we have this duty is no justification for refusing.
Many of the contributing philosophers side with Hume. Some do so because they think that an ethics detached from motivations is implausible. Moral judgements, according to Stephen Darwall, make agents accountable for what they do. But it is incoherent to hold people accountable unless they are capable of having moral motivations. Michael Smith argues that subjectivists have means of explaining why some normative
statements cannot reasonably be denied. Sharon Street thinks that Parfit’s objectivism fails to explain how humans as products of evolution can recognise ethical truth. Simon Blackburn believes that ethics as a practice must engage our motivations, and he thinks that Parfit’s position is defective because he does not explain how this happens. Blackburn thinks that subjectivists are entitled to rely on their ethical beliefs and to regard them as true when they are the products of reflection and can withstand criticism.
How can there be ethical truth when people with different subjectivities are apt to disagree about right and wrong?
The threat of ethical relativism makes Parfit’s objectivism appealing, but it leaves him with the problem of explaining why philosophers disagree, not only about particular issues, but also about the moral theory that ought to guide our actions. Parfit’s strategy is to argue that these theories, properly interpreted, are not really at odds with each other. Coming from different directions, they converge on the view that right action is in accordance with principles which, if they were universally accepted, would make things go best. The problem with this strategy is that it risks misrepresenting philosophers’ views. Andrew Huddleston convincingly argues that Parfit does not succeed in making Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism compatible with the ethical consensus that he wants to achieve. Ethical disagreement remains a problem for Parfit, as well as for subjectivists.
There is one matter on which all the contributors to the collection agree: that some things matter, and thus that Parfit’s life was not wasted. Temkin thinks that Parfit’s claim that only his objectivism can save us from nihilism is implausible. Even if ethics is invented, it matters what we invent. Street says that things matter because we believe they do. Those who stop caring need more sleep, a healthier diet, or medication.
What these philosophers are implying is that meta-ethics doesn’t matter very much – except to those specialists who are interested in the problems that it raises. They imply that the rest of us can ignore theories about where ethical beliefs come from and get on with living our lives, just as we can happily live our
lives without a thought about quantum physics. Parfit did not waste his life, but if these philosophers are right, and if his primary concern was to determine how we ought to live, then he wasted a lot of precious time writing a threevolume work on meta-ethics.
Do On What Matters and the essays in this collection matter? We are creatures naturally disposed to find meaning in our activities. But when we take a step away from human preoccupations
and put ourselves and our activities under what Spinoza called the perspective of eternity, it is reasonable to wonder whether our values and lives have any significance whatsoever. Parfit, following in the footsteps of Plato and other great philosophers, did not think that this fundamental question could be avoided. I agree. g
Janna Thompson is a former professor of philosophy at La Trobe University.
‘At a poet’s word’
The emblematic life of Czesław Miłosz
Peter Goldsworthy
MIŁOSZ: A BIOGRAPHY by Andrzej Franaszek, edited and translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker Belknap Press (Footprint), $79.99 hb, 539 pb, 9780674495043
About halfway through this thick biography of the Nobel Prizewinning poet Czesław Miłosz (and halfway through the century of horrors that his life experiences uncannily track and are witness to) came a passage that stopped me dead.
In the spring of 1943, on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw, standing on the balcony, we could hear screaming from the ghetto. The screaming was the sound of people being murdered … The screaming gave us goose-pimples … We did not look each other in the eye.
It is hard to look those words in the eye. The occasion was the mass murder of the last Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Two or three hundred thousand had already gone to the extermination camps; many thousands who remained fought to the death against the Germans. I hadn’t read this passage before in any of Miłosz’s extensive prose writings. It wasn’t included in The Captive Mind (1953), his superb book about the ac-
commodations and cowardices of artists and intellectuals living under totalitarianism, but that book was more concerned with the monstrous regimes of the left than of the right.
This passage immediately horns the reader into Miłosz’s shoes. How to stand on a balcony while the next suburb is burning, and its children being shot in the streets? I know what I like to think I would have done, but Miłosz was in semi-hiding himself, and hid and supported Jewish friends, so I’m not about to judge him – especially when he would judge himself so harshly later.
Miłosz had established a reputation as a poet before the war, but that terrible event seems to me the turning axis of this book, and of his later writing life. He was to return to it – and numerous other dark nights from those years – in his poems obsessively.
‘Campo dei Fiori’ was one of the earliest, written that same year, and named after the square in Rome in which Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in front of an indifferent crowd several hundred years before:
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the flying-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were soaring high in the cloudless sky.
So were the ashes of burning Jews, there and all over Europe – surrounded by indifference. Miłosz goes on to foreground the murdered rather than leaving them in the background, as if offering an argument against, say, Auden’s famous ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’:
Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet’s word.
Well, maybe. But does this poem achieve anything more than the simple prose passage? Miłosz looks himself, at least, more squarely in the eye in ‘Dedication’, another poem from that annus horribilis:
You whom I could not save Listen to me
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another. I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree ...
… What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies.
Which leaves us where all such discussions about human suffering and poetry seem to beach themselves: wrestling with Theodor Adorno’s (misquoted) dictum that ‘After Auschwitz, poetry is impossible’. Pablo Neruda (hardly a poet of ‘simple speech’ himself) put it another way: ‘the blood of the children flowed in the streets … like the blood of the children’. Miłosz’s slightly younger contemporary Tadeusz Róże-
wicz was to take this anti-metaphor program to its conclusion more rigorously than any poet I can think of, and as a result his ‘anti-poetry’ is simply and powerfully translatable. As is Miłosz’s prose – besides The Captive Mind, his autobiographical and critical writings translate lucidly. But it is much more difficult for a non-Polish speaker to properly assess his worth as a poet, given his continued reliance on the ‘wizardry of words’.
I first came across Miłosz in 1970, not as a poet but as the translator of another of his contemporaries, Zbigniew Herbert, whose Penguin Selected Poems blew my mind, as we tended to say back then. On the strength of that book, I bought another Miłosz-edited Penguin – Postwar Polish Poetry (1965) – and discovered he was a poet too. It was another mindblowing book, filled with a poetry so hard-earnt, so forged in the fiercest possible furnace – the Polish experience during World War II – that it made the preoccupations of Anglo-American poets of the same generation seem trivial. There was one odd editorial decision, at least in retrospect: a single poem only by Wisława Szymborska, who would also go on to win the Nobel Prize. Her poem, singular, was accompanied by an editorial note that I am sure Miłosz later regretted: ‘There are many women among the postwar Polish poets. Szymborska, I feel, best exemplifies their merits and defects. She is witty, daring, resourceful, but too fond of conceits.’
Like another larger-than-life East European poet, Joseph Brodsky, Miłosz was never short of an opinion, which got him into trouble on all sides, even more so when those opinions changed. During the war years, he was too left-wing cosmopolitan for the Polish nationalists (and also perhaps too pro-Semitic) and either too Catholic or too humanist for the communists. Which is not a bad place to be: it’s important to pick deserving enemies.
His life (1911–2004) is a microhistory of the twentieth century, at least in its European manifestations: a story of repeated wartime dislocations, of homecomings and exiles, of shifting political allegiances, of acts of principled courage alternating with dubious moral
accommodations. His restless wanderings – geographic, linguistic, political, intellectual, emotional – began as a four-year-old refugee fleeing with his mother before the advancing German Army during World War I. At one stage, they found themselves as far into Russia as the shores of the Volga. Born in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, Miłosz was fluent as a boy in Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. ‘Language is the only homeland,’ he would later claim; on the other hand, he missed his physical homeland terribly in his years of exile. His rural childhood before World War I was idyllic – a lost paradise that shines its light throughout his later writings – as were the years afterwards, if interrupted
Miłosz was never short of an opinion, which got him into trouble on all sides
in 1920 by a new war between Bolshevik Russia and the newly independent Polish state. This time the family fled westward, back into Lithuania.
Much of this idealised childhood is described brilliantly in his memoir, Native Realm (1959), even if some aspects of that antebellum paradise make for poignant reading in the light of later events. We know only too well what happened to those picturesque Jewish villages that supplied artisans and tailors and craftshops for their neighbours, and musicians for their Catholic weddings.
Miłosz spent a year in Paris before World War II but was soon shuttling back and forth between Russian and German armies again, this time with his wife, Janka. As a rare Polish species –a left-wing Catholic – he came perilously close to being executed by both sides.
A proper review of the thick tapestry of this book’s events, and of its morally complex protagonist, would be another book – and probably not much smaller. Since I can’t hope to compass that in a review, I will limit myself to that wartime crucible in which his best work was forged, and the immediate communist aftermath. A year after the ghetto rising came the Warsaw
Uprising proper: the Polish Home Army attacking the occupying Germans while the Red Army waited on the other side of the Vistula to pick up the pieces. Miłosz refused to join the Uprising, in part because he thought it was futile, in part because he was suspicious of its nationalism – but also because of another passage in the book that stopped me dead in my tracks. The occasion was Miłosz explaining to a resistance fighter friend that ‘he had no intention of fighting, because it was essential for him to survive the war: his duty was to write, not fight. The possible loss of his life would be of no use, but his writing was very important to his country.’
The friend, not surprisingly, thought this dishonourable. Me too, instinctively, but again it is too easy to pass judgement from the safety of an armchair. Throw yourself under a German (or Russian) tank and achieve little, or survive and bear witness? Miłosz had seen many friends – and poets – die in futile resistance, including Krzysztof Baczyński, ‘the hope of Polish poetry’. He also continued to hide, and support, Jewish families during those years. But the ghosts and the guilt would haunt him, despite his best efforts at exorcism. From ‘Dedication’, the last quatrain: ‘They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds / To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. / I put this book here for you, who once lived / So that you should visit us no more.’
There are ghosts aplenty in his bestknown poem from those years. ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’ uses a favourite trope of anti-Semitism: the Jew as a furtive subterranean creature, in this case a mole that is burrowing through the graveyard, counting and enumerating the corpses, including the Christian narrator’s.
I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole
He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.
What will I tell him, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.
This is a poem that stands with Paul Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ as one of the most powerful written about the Holocaust. Like Celan’s, it is no anti-poem, but makes use of the full range of poetic special effects. Most of these war poems were published in his stunning 1945 collection, Rescue, which also contains a sequence of simple, beautiful lyrics about his childhood, as if in ironic counterpoint. Szymborska first heard Miłosz read in Kraków in this period. ‘A great poet’ she called him, a far more generous assessment of his talent than his of hers, and ‘like an angry cherub with a distinguished voice.’
The end of the war brought new problems, new dilemmas. In the chaos of ‘liberated’ Kraków, filled with refugees, there were fresh pogroms against Jews by returning Poles. Miłosz and Janka shared an abandoned apartment with a Jewish couple, on the empty bookshelves of which he placed a single book, perhaps ceremonially: Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Well, life was frugal – if anything but simple, politically.
‘The purest of nations when judged by a flash of lightning, / But thoughtless and sly in everyday toil,’ he wrote in ‘A Nation’, and he was fully aware of his own slynesses. Publicly loyal to the new Marxist government, he was more cynical in private. ‘In no circumstances would I join the Polish Workers’ Party,’ he wrote, ‘although I shared their hostility and paranoia about the right; so in fact, I did not have to lie.’
Except by omission.
Things got even more complicated when he joined the Polish diplomatic corps, serving as cultural attaché at the Washington embassy. More startling passages here: he reported, controversially, back to Warsaw on the views of various Polish émigrés in the United States. When he finally defected to the West – in Paris – he was not universally welcomed in émigré circles. The ghosts
continued to haunt him through his years of exile in America, even as late as 1968, when he had a major clash with his close friend Zbigniew Herbert. Herbert, like Różewicz, had been an active member of the Polish Underground, and revisited those years, vehemently, after a few too many drinks. Their relationship never fully recovered, although Herbert wrote a memorable apology to Miłosz some months later: ‘Whether you like it or not, I will haunt you with my strange love until the end of my life and then some time afterwards … You must understand there are certain things I cannot communicate to you, because of the lump in my throat.’
My strange love of Polish poetry still haunts me. I felt personally (and ridiculously) affronted when Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980. If it was Poland’s ‘turn’, surely it should have gone to ‘my’ horse in the race, Herbert. This big, complex biography has challenged that, mostly by making me take down his big 1988 Collected Poems and read through it again with fresh eyes. It has been so long it might as well have been for the first time. The book now seems almost an embarrassment of riches, despite having to survive translation into the different music of English. And despite Miłosz’s own postwar minimalist tendencies, the larger body of his work makes the plain-speaking of a Różewicz, say, now seem overly puritanical.
Another thing I noticed for the first time: his poetry – like his prose – is always at war with itself. Heraclitus is a name that crops up often in Miłosz’s writings, and the Greek philosopher would seem as much a guiding light as his Catholic faith. Two well-known Heraclitean precepts spring to mind for this wandering, quarrelling man: that flux is the fundamental property of the universe, and that the nature of reasoning is always oppositional. Especially self-oppositional. Forget Marx and Hegel; Miłosz’s dialectics were pre-Socratic. Robert Frost’s epitaph would suit him well: he ‘had a lover’s quarrel with life’, alternating between celebrating its beauties, and remembering its horrors.
Under a linden tree, as before, daylight
Quivered on a goose quill dipped in ink. Books were still governed by the old rule Born of the belief that visible beauty Is a little mirror for beauty of being
Thus begins a poem from the ‘The Spirit of History’ section, only to finish with survivors running through war-torn landscape: ‘Till the end of their days all of them / Carried the memory of their cowardice.’
On the subject of arresting passages, one other from the years of the Warsaw Uprising caught my eye: ‘Not just family and friends of the Turowiczes found refuge on their estate, but also people who were in hiding: partisans, Jews, and even an Australian paratrooper.’ Who that paratrooper was, and what he was doing on the Eastern front, sandwiched between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, I have no idea. Miłosz, also in hiding on that estate, survived, but here he is, years later, quarrelling with his wartime notion that his duty was to write not fight:
Do you still say to yourself: non omnis moriar?
Oh, yes, not all of me shall die, there will remain
An item in the fourteenth volume of an encyclopaedia
Next to a hundred Millers and Mickey Mouse.
Peter Goldsworthy’s most recent poetry collection is The Rise of the Machines and other love poems (2015).
‘I
am to proliferate’
Two different exponents of lyric poetry
Toby Fitch
BRINK by Jill Jones
Five Islands Press, $25.95 pb, 99 pp, 9780734053640
PASSAGE by Kate Middleton
Giramondo, $24 pb, 128 pp, 9781925336436
The poetic epigraphs that introduce all three sections in Brink, Jill Jones’s tenth full-length poetry collection, are collaged fragments from the poems proper. Moodily, they skirt the edges of what’s to come: ‘I am to proliferate.’ The poems then, in all their multiplicity, evoke and explore being on the brink – of knowing, feeling, sensing, and making sense:
... but there’s a feeling that can’t be formalised or even spoken as we pass in and out of and into again the known, or the known knowns, and the unknowns, the way things brush past, or the way you fall in haste, in love, what trickles onto a porous path, as traverses of skin.
(‘Data, Twigs, Memory Lapses’)
Jones is interested in ‘words that sound like words’, in how ‘Twigs make their Ts’. A poem is a construct that can talk of itself and the world, simultaneously: ‘It’s communication ... / though you don’t really know / if it’s a system of messaging, / or a type of presence.’
To Jones, it is both, in varying degrees. The poem ‘Edge Against Sign’ alludes to this duality – of the sign and signified, these ‘pests of language’, the gap between them but their inseparability. The poem also wagers that past and present are not so easily delineated: all its phrases are sourced from Jones’s first book, The Mask and the Jagged Star (1992).
In ‘Speak Which’, Jones’s lyric mode is clear. The poem is an utterance: ‘words tear’ and ‘form / is tested / as leaves fall // not itself / but what it / does // shapes in
/ the mind breath / unsaid’. An unsettled feeling then emerges about writing place (and the allusion to country is deliberate): ‘trying to figure / landscape / and failing’. Antipodean poets have long occupied the land in their poetry, but as Jones points out, ‘who do we / think / we are?’
Jones, ‘being sneaky and queer within / and beyond spaces’, is occupied with the contradictions of the contemporary world – its beauty, how to live ‘without all the modest accounting’, versus our destruction of it: ‘We know plexiglass, expecto patronus / or police presence won’t save us’. Her poems are always ‘thinking the unthinkable today’. ‘[F]lowering and simply kidding’, she has a dry sense of humour – perhaps not unrelated to living in Adelaide – most evident in ‘Divination Isn’t What It Was’: ‘I went out among leaf litter that seemed glum / … Is the solar system being hacked?’
In the first section, the poems draw images and ideas together breathlessly, list-like: they ‘spark and spit in the sky’. Some of these also split – literally down the middle – and shimmer/shimmy down the page. The second section continues with freewheeling poems, a number of which are knockouts, including ‘Our Epic Want’: ‘Raw music stunned us, it hurt more than love.’ In the final section, a range of notational, fragmentary experiments in sound and sense offer us a glimpse into the ‘shadow language’ of Jones’s process. These give way to more existential, elegiac poems that memorialise: ‘Our waxworks are dying ... We are terrifying But no longer awesome.’
The poems in Kate Middleton’s third full-length collection, Passage , cover much terrain: untrodden land, moors, refuse, days, time, utopia, empire, ships, exploration, travel, saints, science, science fiction, colour, art, artworks, and animals – rats and whales, especially, but also lions, the oldest living tortoise, and a gynandromorph butterfly. Like her favoured rats, Middleton has ‘success at roving’ between these topics and themes: ‘(Follow them all the way down; refuse maps)’. Middleton trusts the intuitive, ‘go on your nerve’ approach, as Frank O’Hara put it, to writing: ‘The body bears the text / of distances covered.’ Poems, stanzas, phrases become islands: ‘A Lilliput of words and meadows.’
In Passage, she writes charms, elegies, centos, erasures, eulogies, ekphastic poems. The sections are split into ‘Past’, ‘Present’, ‘Future’, and an additional ‘Future’. Within these, poems aren’t wedded to chronology. Sci-fi crops up in the past and fourteenth-century fantastical travel-writer Sir John Mandeville descends into the future:‘Paradise is / a loch / –and it / has / no bottom.’ Middleton revels in getting lost: ‘Lost is – and is not – a contagious / panic.’ Many of the poems work ‘in the borderland of dream // and memory // in the empty space of light between maps // of possible pleasure’.
The present is fleeting: ‘Only the ever-changing calligraphy / of waves sweeping the shore / records the moment. Then it’s gone.’ There is, tellingly, only one poem in the ‘Present’ section. There, and elsewhere, ‘memory is what is present ’.
Passage mines dozens of mostly textual sources to then create ‘puzzle patchworks’. The recurring sources (Dan Beachy-Quick, Siri Hustvedt, S.P.B. Mais’s This Unknown Island (1932), BBC science news, art, varying texts about rats or whales) intertwine throughout so that themes interlock and give the whole form: ‘the always-sharp meeting / point of water tumbles land / into shape’.
The ‘Watching Science Fiction’ sequence, which takes the television series Fringe as its inspiration, dovetails nicely with the poems about science: ‘When you turn to your / science to explain it nothing pierces the mystery of loss / … In some unwritten future there’s a law
of physics to explain it.’
Grief and loneliness feature in these assemblages of found traces left by others: ‘for what is loneliness but // awareness I am human? … What is that awareness / but an act of praise?’ To end the poem ‘Prayer for Any Morning’, Middleton writes: ‘cherish the broken / monuments / days’. To Middleton, the poem is a monument, no matter how
broken, in praise of imaginative exploration. Negotiating her own position toward her interests against a backdrop of climate change – ‘toxic hailstones rain down upon you’ – Middleton finds passage through time, text, tradition: ‘With all that elegiac grace you clear a space for yourself.’
Both Jones and Middleton approach a kind of ‘pure lyric poetry’, as Marina
Tsvetaeva defined it: both are performative, oral, musical, and foreground the lyric ‘now’ or moment of utterance. And yet both assemble their poems, much like collages. One poet is perhaps more sceptical and rightly critical of the world, and one is more in awe. g
Toby Fitch is the poetry editor of Overland
Herr Doktor Tulp’s Interrogation (1942)
Conveniently located next to Perrache railway station, the Hôtel Terminus, Lyon, is distinguished by its extensive frescoes and mirrored columns. All rooms feature narrow beds, equipped with straps for arms and legs; two baths; and a gas heater with three pokers. Tout confort
In the extensive fourth-floor suites, the vast machinery assembled for the subjugation of the Lyonnais runs smoothly on. Here, baths are augmented by a central derrick allowing movement of materials between the two. As if summoned, a naked body explodes from beneath the surface of the ice bath (froid), sucking up with it a sheet of water. The interrogator, Herr Doktor Tulp (under direct tutelage from Klaus Barbie) is immediately back to his questioning: ‘Names and addresses of your leader and his colleagues, s’il vous plaît. And time and place of your next meeting.’ The résistance fighter, coughing, gasping, retching ice-flakes not yet melted by the heat of the lungs, spits out a chain of obscenities gathered against pain. The derrick swings his trussed purple-fleshed form across to the opposite bath (chaud).
Seven ruff-wearing students – suitably dressed
for a solemn social occasion – regather at the rim to watch the body lowered, screaming, into the bubbling water. Occasionally, struck by inexplicable compassion, Tulp leaves the trussed body under water for longer periods; peering through the surface to observe his subject’s death.
In these situations, the corpse is dumped somewhere in the surrounding pasture land, or let fall to the Rhône from the bridge at Cours Lafeyette.
Not so now. The doctor signals for the subject to be raised from the bath. As you can see, he notes, the eyes have already been poached to blindness by previous immersions. (With boiling water, the metaphors are all culinary. With the icy cold it is more difficult.)
In the background Tulp can hear his daughter at the piano practising the Chopin polonaise l’héroïque. Fräulein Erne Kris interleaves carbon in between the pages; feeds the three sheets into the bail. Behind her, Ferdinand Neukirchen peels an apple with his pocket knife – the skin expertly removed in a continuous ringlet.
In the room’s far corner, a famous Dutch Master renders an oil of the procedure.
John A. Scott
John A. Scott won the 2013 Peter Porter Poetry Prize for ‘Four Sonnets’.
Balts and DPs
Francesca Sasnaitis
BEAUTIFUL BALTS: FROM DISPLACED PERSONS TO NEW AUSTRALIANS
by Jayne Persian NewSouth
$39.99 pb, 250 pp, 9781742234854
Igrew up in a New Australian household, and admit at the outset to a biased view. My Lithuanian-born parents were actual Baltic immigrants among the other nationalities referred to by the blanket designation ‘Balt’. Much of the anecdotal material of Jayne Persian’s Beautiful Balts was deeply familiar to me from childhood: stories of the shock of a new culture and country so at odds with the idyllic descriptions handed out to prospective migrants; the oddities of Australian English; heartwarming stories of kindness; humorous ones of petty provincialism; and tales of less kind or frankly hostile reactions to difference. The sequence of events, dates, statistics, and official policies were less familiar and, therefore, of greater interest in so far as the data filled some blanks in my knowledge.
Persian begins her chronology of the first wave of non-Anglo-Celtic postwar migration with the dramatic story of her husband’s Cossack grandparents, the first ‘displaced persons’ story she had heard, and the recounting of which stands in for the Eastern European migrants’ experience of mass devastation and dislocation prior to resettlement in Australia. I can understand why Persian does not dwell on this back-story. If, as W.G. Sebald suggests in The Emergence of Memory (2010), we are inured to images of horror, there is no benefit in repeating what is familiar to the point of dreariness.
What Persian does demand of the reader is an attention to the inconceivable numbers of people involved: twelve million or more displaced persons (DPs) who were stranded outside their own countries by the end of the European conflict in 1945. Imagine, if possible, the logistics of providing welfare and hous-
ing for that many disparate nationalities – Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Hungarians, Yugoslavians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians – concentration camp survivors, forced labourers, civilian evacuees, and ex-prisoners of war. This in a country devastated by Allied bombing; a Germany that was struggling to feed and house its surviving civilian population. No wonder the Allied authorities were keen to repatriate as many of these problematic DPs as quickly as possible, avoiding at all cost the ‘permanent status’ implied by the term ‘refugee’. That DPs, fearing execution or deportation to Siberian labour camps if returned to Soviet-occupied territories, were not taken seriously is an indictment of the entire situation.
Between 1947 and 1952 more than 170,000 DPs were granted asylum in Australia. In effect that meant two years’ indentured labour in exchange for assisted passage. In a shrewd piece of propaganda, then Minister for Information and for Immigration Arthur Calwell, with Prime Minister Ben Chifley, sold these ‘Beautiful Balts’ to an insular, monolingual society as blond, blue-eyed, hard-working candidates for assimilation: that is, as racially (Aryan) and politically (anti-communist) suitable and, less publicly, as a cheap labour force in places where Anglo-Australians were unwilling to go.
What surprised me, though perhaps it should not have, was the degree to which the Australian recruiting missions in Europe were actively antiSemitic, excluding those most in need of compassion. Like many of their compatriots, my parents chose to believe the myth of humanitarianism over economic imperative, and maintained their eternal gratitude to the Australian people for giving them sanctuary. Others, interviewed by Persian, were more vocal in their criticism of the conditions of their migration.
Rebranded by Calwell as ‘New Australians’ in another piece of astute labelling to counter the derogatory connotations of ‘refo’ and ‘balt’, and despite positive propaganda promulgated by newspapers supporting the Labor government initiative, the DPs’ lived expe-
rience, and their intellectual capabilities and qualifications, were consistently ignored. They were required to work as labourers or domestics wherever they were needed. Families were often split up, with little consideration given to their emotional or mental health. Of course, at that time, ‘trauma counselling’ was not offered to Australian returned servicemen either.
In what amounts to a brief afterword, Persian mentions the current condition of asylum seekers, but misses the opportunity to engage with the question that dogs the pages of Beautiful Balts: ‘Is there something we can learn from [using a refugee crisis for national gain] when today’s refugee policies seem so uncompromising?’ Sadly, all we learn is that governments are rarely swayed by altruistic considerations.
Loss, longing for ‘home’, nostalgia, and guilt figure large in narratives of mass displacement. ‘Home is the return to where distance did not yet count,’ wrote John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 1984), referring to the political, cultural, and geographic factors which contribute to a permanent sense of displacement and dissociation. That is especially true of DPs, or refugees, to give them their rightful status, for whom the return to an idealised homeland is impossible; for whom the result is the burden of perpetuated sorrow.
Beautiful Balts is the offshoot of a doctoral thesis ‘centred on memory and commemoration and, particularly, oral history interviews’. Although the scholarship is undoubtedly sound (the notes and index run to forty-seven pages), Persian’s version of events does not transform into a compelling narrative. My inclination is to compare my family’s stories with how she has chosen to relate the history of this period, confirming my advocacy for a more intimate and impassioned approach. History is, after all, a matter of perspective, the primary sources and the chronologies merely the scaffolding upon which narratives are constructed. g
Francesca Sasnaitis is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.
Poetry in Queensland
by Felicity Plunkett
In his luminous paean to poetry, modestly titled How to Read a Poem (1999), Edward Hirsch writes that ‘poetry is made of metaphor’. This lucid statement is beautiful enough, but as a poet, Hirsch continues, making music, elaborating, forever taking the idea onwards, upwards, and outwards, with poetry’s relentless energy: ‘It is a collision,’ he writes, ‘a collusion, a compression of two unlike things: A is B.’
If A is B, everything is mobile, active, and energetic. As Paul Celan puts it, poetry is always ‘under way: heading towards something’. In poetry, ideas are capable of transformation, and of transforming other ideas, and lives. Poetry is about energy. That’s why we reach for the metaphor of poetry to describe beautiful human movement – the flex and reach of a dancer’s body, the loop of a backbend, the arc of a cricket ball sailing over the fence to be caught (usually less poetically) by the spectator who will endlessly relive the moment as the time they reached for poetry. Marianne Moore knew about this when she compared poetry to baseball:
Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go or what you will do; generating excitement –
You can never tell with a poem how it will go. That’s the thrill. That’s why Emily Dickinson identifies poetry through the rush, the goosebumps, the body’s alert catching of energy:
If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know. Is there any other way.
Hirsh continues, collecting poets’ metaphors about poetry in a luminous assemblage that, again, keeps moving, shifting and unsettling:
the poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets (William Carlos Williams).
A poem is a well-wrought urn (Cleanth Brooks), a verbal icon (W. K. Wimsatt). A poem is a walk (A. R. Ammons); a poem is a meteor (Wallace Stevens). A poem might be called a pseudoperson. Like a person it is unique and addresses the reader personally (W. H. Auden).
A poem is a hand, a hook, a prayer. It is a soul in action.
Poetry’s energies reach into other poems. The poems here are allusive, expansive, and mobile. These poems converse with, bounce off, and sail over other poems, to social media, music, and memory, from the therapist’s couch to the therapist on the couch, taking in Yiddish words, Polish words, tweets and amnesia, fish and chips and VHS, Zen and Kerouac, Ted Bundy and Pliny the Younger. A is B. Everything is energy. These are just some of the ways poetry is thriving, in dialogue, mobile and thrilling.
Main Street Social
O Hail! to the days of wine and typhus, the arrangements of battlefields in early spring, the glory of a factory that rifts your body before it wipes your mind, religions vivid as blood sacrifice. Rise up King Pepe! Pwn the noob descending the staircase, these Chads will know the beta’s far cry.
PTSD was straightforward when you could just belt your wife. These days all we have is a toilet stall where you can sharpie ‘Ted Bundy would have loved her as prey’ across a picture of Patricia Krenwinkel and no one will delete it.
These days it seems to me people have their favourite monkeys, bonobos or capuchins, smart as dumb likers. I might just borrow yours. Welcome to the shit show and remember to vote with your wallet.
Liam Ferney ❖
Stock Market
bipolar record lows insecurities exchanged new rashes trending daily each doctor a new violence a meteor gets closer to your face it misses and hits your face anyway it’s hard to match choice of dog to the make of car you’re called to chase lightness of spirit in heavy hands carry a brief case full of uppers this latest crash has people talking reports of a rise in self-flagellation if you could talk to the board you would tell them not to sell right now the best groomed of us can sweet talk our way out of any pill the graph seems to indicate that the voices we hear are our own companies are becoming more sensitive to the profit margins of lost sleep free-floating liquid options publically traded, nil by mouth the highest point in the building is the time to open up to pigeons but the shares get us nowhere write that down on a pink note pad another script without a lead [don’t buy into things you can’t see] look around
you notice they have put up a fence on one side of the Story Bridge perhaps when we think of jumping we plan on flying
When we dreamt like Kerouac
Where Logan Rd and Creek intersect there used to be an old gas station that looked beat even when it was new. You could feed a fuel-pump shiny 20-cent pieces at any hour of the day when petroleum was 17-cents a litre. The solid steel rods of the tram lines were stapled into the Earth, under Kagaar Mabul; home of the sleeping echidna mountain, watching over us all. No one needed to own a phone but phone booths were essential for kissing your steady-one; JC 4 MM TRUE LUV 4 EVA scratched into the concrete floor. There was a time no child would ponder going missing and our folks had little idea where we were anyway, until dinner was ready. And you never wasted coin going into Kentucky Fried Chicken until a special occasion, when we all could afford to dream like Kerouac ...
Samuel Wagan Watson
David Stavanger ❖
stones sequence sucked
(after Samuel Beckett’s Molloy)
still. but not quite. I drew on the right of time.
the other way (I have this solution): escape that hazard circulating always.
before I began (before the hope of circulation) I began better.
during the remaining of my of my of my of my (plus one in my).
I arrive at my mind my immediate predecessors remain my turn and turn. turn and turn.
I ran the same bound to chance planned to turn and turn.
my mind, a long conclusion. an extraordinary hazard.
a pinch of pins (more than I could manage) trouble wrangling an instant anger.
I penetrate the obscure. I grasp my refusal. my insoluble sound: found found-sound now.
one empty second apart from one other. no right left. just other other empty now.
begin again. but not with balance. time (or end of time) without the end now. now, away.
before / now
\\ everything before was fine \ sure \ orderly love \ I recollect \ aisles of ex in home-brand \ sober \ procedural acts \ leg by leg \ recipes for lowfat sex \ clear-cut \ past tense \ a lab report on routine me-and-thems \ but \\ oh // and then / emboss the date of I and you / you effortless / a looping tune / in fluent cursive-fever / static skin / somewhere these hands must start / or end / ask them-upstairs who listen in / a texture unconditional / sing a little more / sing //
Discovery
Dots twirl along my veins
At least a dozen in each arm
Blood-test confetti from a diagnosis party gone wild
I have a needle phobia
I’m surprised by my own skin
Anna Jacobson ❖
Pascalle Burton ❖
Zenobia Frost ❖
Palimpsest
Lucas Thompson
MIRROR
SYDNEY
by Vanessa Berry Giramondo
$39.95 pb, 320 pp, 9781925336252
Cities are essentially palimpsests, layered with overlapping lives, structures, and stories. Constantly in flux, each city is a sprawling and unwieldy text that is continually being rewritten. In Mirror Sydney, Vanessa Berry peels back many of the Harbour City’s layers, to reveal a tangle of hidden meanings and bygone inhabitants. Her book takes us on an eccentric journey through forgotten parts of the city’s history, suburbs, and architecture, while mounting a persuasive argument for paying closer attention to our surrounds.
Early on, Berry tells us that she is offering different images from those that typically spring to mind when we think of Sydney. Instead of the picturesque natural beauty of its famous harbour, she wants to show us ‘an alternative city, a mirror or shadow Sydney’, full of ‘ambiguities and anomalies’. This deeply idiosyncratic project offers countless surprises, as we travel across the city and its suburbs with Berry as our guide. She takes us beneath the streets of the CBD to reveal its many subterranean passages and tunnels, and introduces us to the Cave Clan, a subversive collective that explores the most inaccessible parts of Sydney’s vast underground network. Inspired by a 1906 postcard found in an antique store, Berry leads us to South Head, where she tells us of the giant camera obscura in
Watsons Bay that drew tourists from across the city, and the strange fate of a South Head lighthouse keeper, who survived a shipwreck on the very stretch of coast that his lamps would later keep safe. Venturing west, we journey through the faded art-deco arcades that line Penrith’s main street, and into the crumbling Midnight Star Theatre at Homebush, ‘as solid and tragic as a ruined wedding cake’. Elsewhere, Berry shows us abandoned amusement parks, giant novelty restaurants, as well as various ‘towers, offcuts and follies’.
The book is a hybrid of the best kind, and Berry’s experimental structure pairs intimately personal reflections with broader historical findings. Part-history, part-memoir, part-travelogue, Mirror Sydney is also a record of many years of strange discoveries. Berry describes a little-known military bunker in Bankstown, for instance, with a top-secret operations centre (complete with a giant map of the South Pacific), as well as the steampunk-esque water clock in Hornsby – a truly bizarre public sculpture. There is also the tale of the circus elephant said to be buried beneath Sydney Park, and the abandoned African Lion Safari Park in Warragamba, from which both a grizzly bear and several lionesses es-caped during the 1990s.
As such details make clear, the book is above all a record of whimsical encounters with Sydney and its sprawling suburbs. Even when Berry guides us through more familiar locales – Newtown, say, or Parramatta – her keen eye for the mysterious and the strange forces us to see them anew. Inevitably, certain readers will find such a project a tad twee, particularly with its accompanying hand-drawn maps, adorned with Letraset and typewritten text. Yet this same aesthetic accounts for much of the book’s charm and approachability. Mirror Sydney is an accessible city guide for a range of audiences.
There is a real generosity in sharing these discoveries with readers, whether on her blog of the same name (where the project began), in the handmade zines in which some of this material first appeared, or in the pages of the book. In short, lively chapters, Berry divulges precisely the kinds of local knowledge and insider tips
that are usually kept well-guarded. Indeed, much of the pleasure in reading Mirror Sydney lies in the anticipation of following Berry’s lead, and visiting some of the sites and suburbs described. Her account of Lansvale’s cinematically dilapidated amusement park, for instance, will make readers keen to see it for themselves, while the description of a giant, ‘post-apocalyptic’ Sphinx in North Turramurra (built by a World War I veteran in the 1920s, to honour fallen comrades) will surely inspire similar pilgrimages.
Although Berry’s prose throughout is friendly and inviting, the book isn’t particularly funny. Which is odd, given that travelogues, memoirs, and city guides are usually leavened with comic anecdotes and asides. I wasn’t expecting witticisms on every page, but I was expecting more laughs. The tragicomic dreams and longings of Sydney’s residents past and present are everywhere on display in this book. It is a shame that Berry didn’t have more fun with her material. She pays a respectful, deeply serious attention to her subjects, which is admirable, though it does miss out on the kinds of wisecracks that would have made the book an even more compelling read.
Quibbles aside, Mirror Sydney is a fascinating and timely account of a city that is disappearing depressingly quickly, in the wake of new developments and infrastructure projects. Moreover, Berry’s enthusiasm for the ghostly relics of the city’s past is infectious. After closing the book, I found myself paying closer attention to local oddities and neighbourhood quirks, as well as various crumbling buildings and fading signs –evidence of an older city being written over by the new. These traces are everywhere in the city and its surrounds, and can be rediscovered by paying the kind of attention that Berry’s project inspires. The book’s most valuable gift is its offer of a new way of experiencing the city. By introducing us to Sydney’s countless architectural quirks, past residents, and hidden layers, Berry reveals how we might poetically reorient ourselves towards the many spaces we inhabit. g
Lucas Thompson is a Research Fellow at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. ❖
A dark outline
A history of the plague that never ends
Robert Reynolds
HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE:
THE STORY OF HOW ACTIVISTS AND SCIENTISTS TAMED AIDS
by David France Picador,
$34.99 pb, 640 pp, 9781509839391
It has been an interesting month to read David France’s magisterial history of the AIDS crisis in the United States. As I sat down to the write this review, The Guardian reported that a Georgia state politician, Betty Price, had raised the possibility of isolating HIV positive individuals. ‘I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,’ Price mused to a legislative committee. The story had further potency: Price is the spouse of Tom Price, who until recently was President Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Closer to home, in a speech to the National Press Club outlining the case against marriage equality, the director of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton, apologised for ‘the very hurtful and hateful’ things said about people with AIDS by religious organisations during the 1980s. It was a typically smooth and disingenuous move by the articulate Shelton. Apologise for incendiary antigay speech in the past while dog whistling prejudicial tropes in the present.
If nothing else, these news items suggest that the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s has a long social, political, and cultural afterlife. David France’s How to Survive a Plague touches briefly on this legacy in a moving prologue and epilogue. For the most part, however, this book is a year-by-year depiction of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, from the first media stories of a strange illness afflicting gay men in July 1981 to the announcement of successful drug treatments that dramatically offered new hope to AIDS patients in January 1996.
France is a journalist and documentary maker who covered the epidemic from New York. This book comes in the wake of his 2012 Oscar-nominated doc-
umentary of the same name. It is hard not to miss the overlap with Randy Shilts’s book And the Band Played On (1987). Shilts was a journalist in San Francisco; his book covered the early years of the epidemic and was later made into an HBO movie. There are important differences, too: France’s narrative is based primarily in New York, Shilts wrote from San Francisco. In the mid-1980s, Shilts was writing in the midst of disaster; it shows in the urgency of his journalistic prose that verges occasionally on hectoring. France is more reflective and thoughtful. The emotional undercurrent of And the Band Played On is, I suspect, anger suffused by panic. In How to Survive a Plague, it is a more expansive, textured sadness. To put this another way, And the Band Played On is more of a polemic; How to Survive a Plague is history.
France is primarily concerned with the impact of the epidemic on American gay communities and their oft-heroic responses. This is well-trodden territory, not least by academics, memoirists, and novelists. The broad contours of the American AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and the havoc it wreaked on gay communities, are familiar. After a decade of gay liberation and hard-won sexual bacchanalia, gay activists responded initially with scepticism at media reports of an illness felling sexually active gay men. France notes his own cynicism. ‘I was more annoyed than alarmed by the news. The story seemed like a new slander on the gay community, which had existed cohesively for barely more than a decade since the Stonewall Riots in 1968.’ As more gay men became sick and the often brutally quick and awful deaths mounted, gay activists organised community forums and action groups. In New York,
HER by Garry Disher
Hachette
$29.99 pb, 220 pp, 9780733638541
In this dark historical novel, Garry Disher imagines a world in which small girls are sold by their desperate families and enslaved to men such as the brutal ‘scrap man’ – ‘a schemer, a plotter, a trickster’ in whom ‘nothing … rang true except rage and self-pity’ and who profits from the labour of womenfolk known as Wife, Big Girl, You, and Sister. Neither the scrap man, nor the women shackled to him, are named because ‘names had no currency in the scrap man’s family’ until, in an act of defiance, You secretly christens herself Lily.
Set in rural Victoria, the narrative follows Lily from 1909 when, at the age of three, she is bought by the scrap man for a few shillings, until 1919. Living between the scrap man’s property and the road, selling door-to-door, Lily and her makeshift family are isolated and seen to be outside ‘honest’ society. Despite this, they cannot remain untouched by the world. The scrap man may be able to avoid censure from the Education (for failing to educate the girls) and the Social (for abusing them), but he cannot evade the reach of world events like World War I and the influenza pandemic.
Lily’s understanding of the world, which is deeply connected to the land, sets her apart from the scrap man. In a repeated refrain, her knowledge is juxtaposed with ‘respectable’ forms of literacy. ‘She could not count, add, subtract, divide, spell or write. She knew the ants busy in the dirt, the habits of the birds in the nesting season and the movements of the sun and the moon.’ Such ecological literacy, which is one of the novel’s great strengths, ultimately sustains Lily. Where the scrap man ‘unravels’ in the face of war and ‘pestilence’, Lily can read the changing world and adapt to it.
Anna MacDonald
by Catherine Cole
UWA Publishing
$24.99 pb, 246 pp, 9781742859503
It is a pleasure to read a collection of short fiction in which every story is a work of elegant and meticulous craft. Catherine Cole has brought her significant observational and lyrical skills as a poet, novelist, and memoirist to bear on these stories, and the narratives unfold with cool, restrained style. However, this collection has more to offer readers than a selection of stylistically beautiful pieces. With ingenious use of theme and artful arrangement of individual stories, Cole delivers a cohesive collection that is far greater than the sum of its discrete parts.
In the opening story, a teacher in a remote outback school is moved by the fact that none of her students has ever seen the ocean: ‘Forget about nations based on land boundaries, what links us all is our shared origin in the sea.’ This idea of the ocean as linking humans rather than separating them resonates throughout the collection. Cole is similarly attentive to notions of home, exploring the concept from a variety of perspectives, yet always working from the position that, at some point in history, the forebears of all non-Indigenous Australians have crossed oceans to make this land their home.
While most of the stories stand alone, Cole plays with mini-cycles, some characters reappearing in multiple stories throughout the collection. Various stories delve into the plight of refugees and the dangers of seeking asylum by sea, but Cole broaches the subject without any sense of didacticism. Cole deftly lifts the edges of people’s lives and looks beneath, camouflaging her insights with a deceptively light touch. This intelligent collection reminds us of all that unites us as humans: love, family, and the desire for a safe place to call home.
Rachael Mead ❖
the newly formed Gay Men’s Health Crisis led the charge. After initially resisting the idea that sex could transmit the illness, gay activists produced tentative information on how to minimise the risk of transmission. American and French scientists rushed to isolate the virus responsible for AIDS and became involved in an unseemly tussle over who discovered the human immunodeficiency virus.
As the death toll spiralled, President Reagan studiously avoided mentioning AIDS by name and his administration chronically under-funded attempts to combat the epidemic. France recounts a chilling anecdote that aptly depicts Reagan’s criminally cavalier approach to the AIDS crisis. At a state luncheon for the visiting French president, the comedian Bob Hope made a crass joke about Rock Hudson’s death from an AIDS-related illness. Remember, Hudson had been a close friend of the Reagans and his death had attracted worldwide attention to the virus. France writes, ‘Mitterrand and his wife looked appalled. But not the Reagans. The first lady … smiled affectionately. The president threw back his head and roared.’ Little wonder that AIDS activists in America became radicalised, tackling government, health researchers, and drug companies headon, and inserting those living and dying with HIV into the forefront of the response to the virus.
Evocative stories like the Mitterrand banquet litter How to Survive a Plague. The author’s great achievement is to populate the history of the American epidemic with individuals, to give an intimately human account of a public health crisis. He introduces a cast of characters and then weaves them in and out his 600-plus page account. At times, I wanted a glossary to remind me who was who, but for the most part the players become familiar. When they die, as many did, the reader registers their absence. Some die in dreadful circumstances, and it is the details that catch you in the throat. France writes of his neighbour, a handsome and oncestrapping African American man who retired to his apartment after the death of his lover of twenty years. When he himself became perilously ill, he lay
down on the floor and died alone. ‘After they removed his body, a dark outline remained permanently on the spot where he had lain.’
France writes himself into the narrative, unobtrusively. By coincidence, he moved with a college friend to New York in June 1981, two weeks before the first brief mention in the New York Times of what later would be termed AIDS. This is the account of a participant-observer whose adult life unfolded in tragic times. France’s college roommate died of AIDS, as did numerous friends, acquaintances, a lover, and many of the familiar faces he passed on the streets of gay Manhattan. As David France concludes, for those of his cohort the plague will never be over. g
Robert Reynolds is an Associate Professor in Modern History at Macquarie University. He is the author of From Camp to Queer (2002), What Happened to Gay Life (2007), and co-author with Shirleene Robinson of Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian stories from a social revolution (2016), published by Black Inc..
Don’t Smile Till Easter
‘The worst kid. The best teacher. United as underdogs. Battling for justice.’
An 89,000 word Australian story, told from fifteen perspectives. Book $24.95 (inc. Aus postage); contact Adrian at Staddie Media staddie1@yahoo.com.au –ebook from Amazon
SEABIRDS CRYING IN THE HARBOUR DARK
Grenades
Blanche Clark
DISSENT: THE STUDENT PRESS IN 1960s AUSTRALIA
by Sally Percival Wood Scribe
$32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781925322194
The Guardian’s Australian bird of the year survey recently had the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) council in a flap. The student newspaper Farrago reported that the council had passed a motion condemning the Guardian for its failure to provide a preferential voting system. Farrago ‘broke’ the news on Twitter that UMSU president Yan Zhuang had fulfilled the council’s demands to ‘sigh very loudly in the general direction of The Guardian Australia’s offices two times, shaking her head upon the second time’. Zhuang tweeted that she wanted to end her presidency with ‘something as hilarious and ridiculous as this whole year has been’.
This undergraduate humour seems extraordinarily tame when compared with the sardonic wit and provocative articles that historian Sally Percival Wood presents in Dissent: The student press in 1960s Australia. The author argues that university newspapers played a significant role in Australia’s social, cultural, and political transformation during that tumultuous decade. But the sexual revolution is portrayed as more of a shuffle than a charge. In 1966, the University of Adelaide’s On Dit ’s Bird of the Year was a female student rather than a galah or magpie. It took Women’s Liberation four years to make that ‘depersonalisation of the female individual’ extinct.
Wood’s ambitious agenda for Dissent is structured around six themes: censorship, sex, women, Indigenous people, the Vietnam War, and the art of protest. She tries to focus on the individuals who ‘really did influence events’, but their role is often overwhelmed by the broader social and political debate.
Donald Horne, editor of the University of Sydney’s Honi Soit in 1941, is something of a hero in Dissent, his book
The Lucky Country (1964) ‘landing like a grenade in the ever-expanding suburbs’ and ‘forming the backdrop to the story of the 1960s student press’. One of the longest-serving student editors, Pete Steedman – loved or hated for his ‘virtuoso profanity’ – features prominently. He provided Wood with a trove of primary material from his time as editor of Monash University’s Lot’s Wife in 1965–66 and Farrago in 1967–68.
Wood, who writes in a clear and lively style, begins Dissent with quick facts about the education revolution, which saw confidence and rebellion shake-up postwar stoicism and conservatism. University enrolments doubled from 53,633 in 1960 to 110,250 in 1965 after the Commonwealth increased funding. Nine new universities were established in the 1960s and 1970s, including Monash University in 1961. The author covers nine student newspapers – Farrago, Lot’s Wife, On Dit, Honi Soit, Semper Floreat (UQ) Togatus (UTAS), Woroni (ANU), Tharunka (UNSW), and Pelican (UWA) – and traces their development from conformity to radicalism, aided in part by the advent of web offset printing.
Student editors made their mark by arcing up over puritanical censorship laws, which extended to the banning of books such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Percival Wood recounts the case of Oz editors Richard Neville and Richard Walsh, both former student editors, who were sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour for publishing Martin Sharp’s sordid cartoon depicting pack rape. Sharp was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. The author’s modern-day moral judgements are threaded into the narrative: ‘The matter of the “gang bang” did not appear to the main object of concern. What really shocked was the severity of the sentences handed down.’
University of Sydney’s Bob Ellis –co-editor of Honi Soit in 1963 with Laurie Oakes and Jim Coombs – elicits a wry comment for his conclusion in 1962 that abortion should be a hanging offence: ‘The Ellis solution would have kept the gallows in Australia extremely busy.’
The chapter on Indigenous affairs,
entitled ‘The Unlucky Australians’, summarises ‘a past of maladministration, abuse and neglect’ and highlights several history-making events, including the 1967 referendum. Charles Perkins, one of the first Indigenous students to enrol at the University of Sydney, in 1963, attracted media attention around the world with the Freedom Ride, a bus tour of rural New South Wales protesting against racial segregation. But it was the Vietnam War that truly galvanised students. Steedman and Phillip Frazer became joint editors of Lot’s Wife in mid-1965. Their first cover ‘reflected a changing mood on Melbourne’s university campuses’: ‘A photo collage included a Warsaw concentration camp, race riots in the US, soldiers shoving a captive’s head down a hole, a dismembered body, and a self-immolating Buddhist monk.’ The anti-war articles rankled the Australian government and ASIO’s files on students ‘swelled’. A campaign to raise funds for Vietnam’s National Liberation Front divided students at Monash and Melbourne campuses.
Although the student editors often seem like bit players in the dramas unfolding across the nation, the student newspapers were clearly a rehearsal space for future leaders in politics, media, and academia. Dissent concludes with the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, its bold agenda bearing ‘an uncanny resemblance to the demands amplified across student newspapers in the 1960s’.
For some older readers, Dissent may seem like a romp through familiar territory. For younger readers, it provides a chance to appreciate debates that have shaped the nation. It is to be hoped they will disprove Percival Wood’s sense that the student press has lost its nerve. The future of journalism and politics depends on their courage and willingness to fly (and tweet) in the face of convention. g
Blanche Clark is a journalist and former Herald Sun books editor.
Lessons
Paul Giles
NO END OF A LESSON: AUSTRALIA’S UNIFIED NATIONAL SYSTEM OF HIGHER EDUCATION
by Stuart Macintyre, André Brett, and Gwilym Croucher
Melbourne University Press
$49.99 pb, 332 pp, 9780522871906
Ever since Henry VIII plundered the monasteries, relations between those in seats of power and learning have tended to be fraught, since political administrators do not take kindly to scholars thinking they know best how to run their own affairs, and vice versa. No End of a Lesson chronicles, in a relatively neutral and detached manner, events leading to the unification of Australia’s higher education institutions into a national system under the direction of John Dawkins, who was appointed Minister of Employment, Education and Training after Bob Hawke won the federal election in 1987.
Dawkins saw his mission as to make this system more efficient by consolidating colleges into larger university groupings, while aligning the research agendas of higher education more with government priorities. The rationale was to increase the rates of student participation while making universities more accountable for the public funds they were receiving. The obvious problem, though, was that such reforms meant that universities became more liable to centralised control, with Peter Karmel, then vice-chancellor of Flinders University, protesting that in ‘a free society’, universities should not become ‘an arm of government policy’. Eminent economist Max Corden, who worked in the United States during the 1990s before returning to Australia, was more graphic in his criticism, describing the Australian higher education system in 2005 as ‘Moscow on the Molonglo’.
No End of a Lesson provides a detailed historical account of how this process unfolded, with its microscopic attention to the minutiae of committee
meetings and negotiations for mergers between smaller colleges occasionally testing the reader’s patience. But the aim here is to provide a scrupulously fair account of such protracted dealings, and in this the authors mostly succeed admirably. This book is itself the product of an Australian Research Council grant and might therefore be considered part of the system it is scrutinising, but from a broader perspective the challenge would have been to bring a degree of objectivity to bear on matters that are still, for most people, within living memory. Even though no explicit political case is argued here, it is clear enough from their style of dry humour that the authors are sceptical of figures such as John Button, Minister for Industry in the Hawke administration, who was disdainful of the ‘academic orientation’ of universities and wanted their culture to be geared more towards ‘the development of new products and services’. Two of these three authors (Stuart Macintyre and Gwilym Croucher) are associated with the University of Melbourne, and this also creates a perspectival ambiguity, since, although this work is meant to provide an overview of the national system – as opposed to other volumes in this series, which focus on individual universities – there is nevertheless a degree of slippage here, where the world view from Melbourne sometimes seems to blur into a universal value.
The authors consider what might have happened in 1988 if Melbourne and Sydney had decided to go independent rather than submitting to what Melbourne Vice-Chancellor David Pennington, a fierce critic of Dawkins, described as an imposition of ‘political interference and central regulatory control … virtually unknown elsewhere in the Western world’. However, his counterpart at Sydney, John Ward, made the decision that such resistance would be counterproductive. Oxford and Cambridge have had similar discussions over recent years about the potential advantages and costs of positioning themselves outside a government-sponsored system, although they similarly came to the pragmatic conclusion that the risks associated with such a move would be too high. By contrast, the mixture of
private and public academic institutions in the United States shows the benefits of not having one unified system as a sitting target for politicians. One wonders what would have happened to Ivy League colleges in the Trump era if they had been entirely state-funded, but the independence of such private establishments provides a model of autonomy and resilience that helps support the American system as a whole.
Macintyre, Brett, and Croucher offer a meticulous account of an important episode in the recent social and political history of Australia, marshalling a huge variety of sources in a way that will undoubtedly be helpful to scholars in future times. If the book itself lacks the stylistic brio of Stefan Collini’s Speaking of Universities (2017), which imagines in Swiftian terms senior lecturers in medieval history being drafted at the behest of government to the executive boards of declining corporations, it nevertheless provides a well-balanced if somewhat pessimistic view of the factors that have driven Australian higher education to its currently parlous situation. Dawkins himself declared in 2016 that the system he had devised was ‘completely out of date’, expressing surprise that it had lasted as long as thirty years and adding: ‘That is actually a bad thing.’ There is always going to be pressure on taxpayer resources, of course, particularly in an era when any government needs a much larger percentage of the population to go through higher education in order to sustain the information economy. But if there is one ‘lesson’ to be drawn from this book, it is that the gap between planning and outcome within academic environments is intractable, since discovery depends by definition on not knowing what you might (or might not) find. Ultimately, arguments between universities and government regulators turn not so much on money but on time management, with the surveillance beloved of administrators seeking to punch clocks, while the most creative aspects of university life unfold according to a more unpredictable schedule. g
Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney.
Judging judges
John Eldridge
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE COURTS: A HISTORY OF THE JUDICIAL ACTIVISM DEBATE
by Tanya Josev
Federation Press
$49.95 pb, 256 pp, 9781760021436
Although a subject of endless fascination in the hermetic world of the legal profession, the judiciary seldom excites the interest of the broader public. Despite the efforts of senior judges to promote understanding of the legal system, the community seems largely content simply to trust that the machinery of justice is working as intended.
This general indifference towards the work of the courts means that it is all the more arresting when public debate is punctuated by one of its periodic bouts of anti-judicial vituperation. Not all of these episodes are alike: some involve the excoriation of the judiciary for alleged softness on crime, whereas others turn on the alleged illegitimacy of a controversial judgment. Yet they are each marked by a willingness on the part of tabloids, shock jocks, and even government ministers to denigrate a branch of government that, by convention, refuses to enter into its own defence.
When such debates are afoot, few accusations are levelled as freely as the suggestion that the impugned judges have engaged in ‘judicial activism’. It is with the origins and evolution of this epithet that Tanya Josev is concerned in this impeccably researched and eminently topical book. As Josev reveals, the ‘judicial activist’ label first appeared in a 1947 Fortune column by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who employed it as a relatively innocuous shorthand when categorising the judicial attitudes of the then members of the United States Supreme Court. With close attention to US political and jurisprudential developments, Josev traces the way in which the term came to have its powerfully pejorative connotation.
In turning to the domestic arrival of the judicial activism debate, Josev engages in a careful sketch of the intellectual history of the High Court of Australia. Josev begins with a consideration of the High Court in the time of Australia’s most venerated jurist, Sir Owen Dixon, who famously espoused a ‘strict and complete legalism’ in judicial decision-making. Previous writings on the legacy of Sir Owen Dixon have not always been characterised by moderation of sentiment or temperance of tone, with some commentators seemingly wishing to best each other’s efforts at hagiographic adulation. Josev’s exploration of Dixon and his judicial philosophy –which includes a careful consideration of the meaning of ‘legalism’ and the cultural influence the term has had – is a welcome antidote to this earlier body of writing. Josev then turns to more recent history, examining the evolution in the High Court’s jurisprudence under Chief Justices Sir Anthony Mason and Sir Gerard Brennan. It is in this period that the some of the most politically charged decisions in recent memory –such as the famous judgments in Mabo and Wik – were handed down, and the commentary sparked by these decisions provides much grist for an exploration of the public’s attitude to the courts.
Josev’s analysis affords a number of important insights. Perhaps the most striking is that the ‘judicial activist’ label is applied with a maddening lack of consistency, and is often brought to bear in the course of intellectually lazy criticisms, which centre on the acute circumspection said to be owed by ‘unelected’ judges. Yet equally noteworthy – especially in light of the recent populist resurgence – is Josev’s consideration of judicial activism as a species of ‘élitism’.
There are perhaps only two criticisms which can be made of this work. The first relates to Josev’s heavy reliance on the United States as a source of comparative material. Given its role in originating the ‘judicial activist’ label, this tendency is readily explicable. Yet there are many lessons which might be learned from an examination of other jurisdictions. A consideration of recent developments in the United Kingdom might have been especially
fruitful given the febrile commentary which has surrounded the litigation sparked by Brexit. Indeed, much of that commentary has explicitly employed the language of ‘judicial activism’, with former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith writing in the Telegraph in November 2016 under a headline declaiming ‘Judicial Activism and the Threat of Constitutional Crisis’. Recent events in Britain might also have aided Josev’s analysis of judicial activism as a species of élitism, with the Daily Mail branding judges ‘Enemies of The People’ for rendering decisions which hindered the government’s Brexit agenda. Although Josev adverts in passing to these developments, one is left wishing that more space had been devoted to a consideration of what significance the British developments may have for Australia.
The second reservation relates to the book’s scope. By focusing on the origins and evolution of a particular appellation, Josev has at times run the risk of losing sight of the substantive debate – relating to the proper limits and function of the judiciary – in which it is a rhetorical tool. The public’s interest in this debate plainly pre-dates the rise of the ‘judicial activism’ label, and it might have been interesting to examine some of those earlier public debates to see how the participants characterised judges to whom the label would today almost certainly be applied. To give just one example, one might look to Sir Henry McCardie, an early-twentieth-century English judge whose colourful pronouncements on all manner of controversial social questions made him a subject of popular fascination and debate.
Of course, to cavil in these two respects with Josev’s approach is not to deny the significant contribution which this work makes to an understanding of the history of the judicial activism debate. In combining a masterful understanding of law and jurisprudence with a formidable marshalling of a mass of illuminating primary material, Josev has shed new light on the relationship between judges and the public which they serve. g
John Eldridge is a Lecturer at Sydney Law School, University of Sydney.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WHALES: A MARINE BIOLOGIST’S REVELATIONS by Micheline Jenner NewSouth
$29.99 pb, 320pp, 9781742235547
The title of this book is surprisingly apt. Considering that whales are such charismatic creatures and icons of the conservation movement, it comes as a shock to realise how much of their ecology and behavior was unknown prior to the revolutionary research of marine biologist, Micheline Jenner. Part popular science, part vocational memoir, this book is a personal account of Jenner’s astounding career in cetacean biology. Spanning three decades, Jenner and her husband’s work with whale and dolphin populations has significantly advanced ecological knowledge and has, as a direct consequence, enhanced conservation efforts in Australian waters.
Jenner’s zeal for her work is palpable as she narrates her team’s findings, and is understandable given the extraordinary nature of her encounters with humpback, pygmy blue, and minke whales. The conversational tone with which she relates these experiences, while clearly conveying her passion for her subjects, does not always allow for seamless interweaving of personal narrative and marine biology. While much of the book focuses on these personal encounters, it is when Jenner moves into the more familiar territory of scientific reportage that her writing becomes more confident and engaging.
Jenner’s dedication to long-term data collection on all aspects of whale and dolphin ecology has done significantly more than enhance scientific knowledge. It has been a powerful form of environmental advocacy. Through enhancing knowledge of whales’ critical habitats, the Jenner family’s work has led to the protection of these vital regions in Australian waters. The Jenners, as both scientists and co-founders of the Centre for Whale Research (WA), have made unparalleled contributions to marine biology in Australia. If this account of their work stimulates renewed public support for cetacean conservation and marine protection, it will prove a valuable addition to the genre of popular science.
Rachael Mead ❖
‘I shuffle in and go WHANG’
Capturing the nature of cricket
Bernard Whimpress
FEELING IS THE THING THAT HAPPENS IN 1000TH OF A SECOND: A SEASON OF CRICKET PHOTOGRAPHER PATRICK EAGAR by Christian Ryan Riverrun, $35 hb, 248 pp, 9781786486820
LILLEE & THOMMO: THE DEADLY PAIR’S REIGN OF TERROR by Ian Brayshaw Hardie Grant, $29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781743792599
Amodern cricket photographer using digital single-lens reflex cameras and high-speed motor drives can take 5,000 photos in a day’s play. With such a surfeit of images, the quality of seeing is diminished. For most of his career from the 1970s to the 2010s, English photographer Patrick Eagar would shoot four or five rolls of film, or around 150 to 180 pictures. An Eagar predecessor such as Dennis Oulds, using a plate camera, would take seventeen shots. As the photographers using plate cameras often took set positions, their technology restricted their view and they did not use the remote action devices pioneered by the 35mm men. Even so, the change to newer technology left some notable practitioners behind. According to Eagar, a leading photographer from the 1940s to the 1970s, Ken Kelly, used 35mm like a plate camera.
This all sounds very technical, but in Christian Ryan’s hands it is fascinating stuff and invites a discussion of the changing nature of cricket photography. Who or what prompts memory? Is it David Gower for executing an exquisite cover drive or Patrick Eagar for capturing a permanent record of the stroke?
My knowledge of French literary theory is almost zero. However, because Ryan cites Roland Barthes at a couple of points, I am left wondering whether Feeling Is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second is the first structuralist (or post-structuralist) cricket book. What follows are multiple readings and interpretations of images.
Ryan is an exceptional writer. His biography of Kim Hughes, Golden Boy (2009), peeled back many layers of Hughes’s character and career and was a deserving winner of the British Cricket Book of the Year award in 2010. In 2011 he edited the magnificent Australia: Story of a cricket country, which combined both fine writing and superb photography. Feeling reveals Ryan’s own feeling for his subject – not merely the work of Patrick Eagar in the 1975 English season; not merely a loose biography of Eagar and comparisons with the work of contemporary American photographers from Sports Illustrated ; not merely a historic appreciation of sports photography world-wide; but of the wider potential of the medium, with references to luminaries such as Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Garry Winogrand, and Annie Leibovitz.
The book begins essentially with the classic side-on shot of Jeff Thomson poised in the moment of delivery at Lord’s on 1 June 1975, an image ‘showing what sports photography –live, unstaged, not cooked up between a photographer, and performer – could do, be … In this instance, soft sunshine illuminates Thomson’s action at the moment of maximum exertion with the face a thrilling accident, sinewy, bony, grotesque.’ ‘Thrilling accident’ is a key to this description, because it is an integral part of any great photograph. Eagar has planned this shot, put himself (and his equipment) in the right place at the right time, and the
light is kind. Intention is evident, but accidents are essential to the magic. In an absorbing dialogue between author and main subject, Ryan inclines more to intention and Eagar (modestly) to luck and chance.
Intention led Ryan to Eagar. Feeling offers numerous interesting diversions and one of the most rewarding involved the relationship between cricket’s leading photographer and some of its greatest writers. Eagar, who met Neville Cardus twice, describes him as having no interest in photography. By contrast, E.W. Swanton saw Eagar’s merit and published his early pictures in the Cricketer magazine; Alan Ross and John Arlott (both poets as well) collaborated on notable books with him; and he often tried to match his pictures to the words of The Times journalist John Woodcock in capturing the spirit of a day’s play. As Arlott once noted, Eagar ‘renders cricket such a service as no one else in his field has ever done before’.
At the end of his book, Ryan lists some of his influences: two books by Lawrence Weschler, Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980), Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment (2005) and Gideon Haigh’s Stroke of Genius (2016) among them. To borrow a phrase from John Berger, Ryan has rendered us a new way of seeing cricket photography.
Lillee & Thommo by veteran writer and former journalist Ian Brayshaw, a long-time Western Australian teammate of Dennis Lillee, details one of the most frightening opening attacks in the history of world cricket. It brings back memories of Thomson’s express pace and lift from good length deliveries – in his words, ‘I just shuffle in … and go WHANG’ – and Lillee’s measured rebuilding of his grand career
after severe back injuries.
A joint biography is a worthwhile project, but the story has a misleading subtitle. The deadly pair’s reign of terror was surprisingly brief, comprising fifteen and a bit Test matches in two years until Thomson’s collision with Alan Turner at Adelaide Oval on Christmas Eve, 1976.Thereafter they played just ten more Tests together before Lillee’s retirement in 1984.
Brayshaw has interviewed widely, both Australian and international players, and their testimony enriches his text. Not all sources are equal, of course, but one gem comes from Jeremy Cowdrey telling of his father, Colin, having ‘100 per cent confidence in his technique’ when setting off, aged forty-one, to join England’s beleaguered team in the 1974–75 Ashes series. By contrast Dennis Amiss spoke of his own difficulty staying leg side of the rearing ball, whereas Tony Greig and Alan Knott had some success with that method.
Jeff Thomson provides an obvious link between Lillee & Thommo and Feeling. Brayshaw’s description of him offers a lovely complement to Patrick Eagar’s famous photograph:
at the end of a tippy-toe creep in from a relatively short approach, he crossed his feet over in the load-up – a move described as balletic. A virtual pirouette … The secret to Thomson’s pace was his method of taking the ball back behind his buttocks and then hauling it through with a supremely muscular heave …
Each of these distinctive books has much to offer their respective readers. g
Bernard Whimpress’s most recent book is The Official MCC Story of the Ashes (2015).
THE BEST OF THE LIFTED BROW: VOLUME TWO edited by Alexander Bennetts Brow Books
$29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780994606860
Acollection organised around ‘the best’ of anything invites a particular kind of evaluation, a seeking of the criteria that such an elastic adjective might imply. The criteria employed for the selection of essays, fiction, and poetry appearing in The Best of The Lifted Brow, Volume Two seem to be grounded in a desire for intellectual cheekiness and a willingness to embrace creative transgression.
All work in the anthology originally appeared between issues fourteen and thirty-two of the magazine, and it includes several extraordinary pieces of writing. Poems by Margaret Atwood and Eileen Myles, unsurprisingly, are exquisite. ‘The Right Kind of Blood’ by Rosanna Stevens is an incisive essay on how we speak about menstruation. Adam Curley offers a dazzling analysis of River Phoenix’s performance in My Own Private Idaho. Rebecca Harkins-Cross imagines a drolly adversarial conversation between Jean-Luc Godard and Baz Luhrmann, the dialogue comprising actual quotes from the directors. It should not work, but it does.
There is some variance in quality, the essays often more assured than the fiction, but collectively the writing feels risky and entertaining. If the range of thought on display is united by one theme it is a sense of fragmentation, often represented formally. Many describe a sense of impending loss, or coping with loss. Yet the anthology is also concerned with what comes next, where hope glimmers.
Shaun Prescott, in his essay on Sydney’s now-on-life-support counterculture scene – described through an examination of the city’s path-breaking but underappreciated metal band Sadistik Exekution – hopes for a resurgent rebellion. ‘It doesn’t have to be the most heavy,’ he writes, ‘but it should be the most something.’ This anthology suggests that The Lifted Brow shares this philosophy. Australia is lucky to have a literary journal pursuing its program with such fierce enthusiasm.
Dan Dixon ❖
Bluebirds over
Bruce Moore
THAT’S THE
WAY IT CRUMBLES: THE AMERICAN CONQUEST OF ENGLISH
by Matthew Engel
Profile Books
$32.99 hb, 278 pp, 9781781256688
Matthew Engel has written for many years in The Guardian and the Financial Times, on topics ranging from politics to sport, and between 1993 and 2007 he produced editions of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. In this latest book he takes up the bat (or steps up to the plate) for British English. That’s the Way It Crumbles is a lament for the death of British English, a noble warrior battered and bamboozled and beaten by its enemy, American English.
At the beginning of the book, the white cliffs of Dover become the symbolic focal point for Engel’s dirge. The Luftwaffe planes flying over the cliffs were the major threat to Britain in 1942, but when in that year Vera Lynn sang ‘There’ll be bluebirds over / The white cliffs of Dover’, she sang to a nation that was clearly oblivious of the fact that there never had been bluebirds anywhere in Britain, let alone flitting about the white cliffs of Dover. Bluebirds are American, and are viewed by Engel as a potent symbol ‘of an invading force that proved far more effective than the Luftwaffe’ – the American language.
The earliest imports from the Americas (sometimes via Spanish) included the typical colonial borrowings for flora and fauna (moose, raccoon, maize, tobacco), as well as English-based formulations such as pipe of peace. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, new English coinages (such as belittle) or English words with new or altered meanings (such as awful in its shift from ‘inspiring awe’ to ‘frightful, very ugly’) start to be noted as barbaric Americanisms.
These imports, however, were not great in number until the twentieth century. Between the world wars they increased greatly, partly due to the increas-
ing Americanisation of popular culture through films (or movies) and music. In this period a vast number of Americanisms became settlers in Britain: beautician, brass tacks, cafeteria, chip on one’s shoulder, frazzled, gentlemen’s agreement, goner, hell-bent, keeping up with the Joneses, milk shake, moron, no kidding, rush hour , showdown , snowed under , white collar, wisecrack, yes-man. From a later perspective, these all seem remarkably commonplace, but they aroused passion when they first claimed their visas, so much so that in the 1931 election campaign Stanley Baldwin explained his support for protectionism in trade in these terms: ‘My personal reason for being a Protectionist is that I may help to banish from this country the American language.’
American economic and political power and the control of international popular culture coincided with the increasing globalisation of English. The lexical onslaught continued after World War II. Some of the words imported in the early part of this period were unobjectionable, since they ‘reflected new technologies, new problems, new beliefs’. But from the 1980s onwards American words were gobbled up in a sloppy and undiscriminating manner, such that Britain ‘handed over control of its culture and vocabulary to Washington’. Engel laments: ‘A nation that outsources the development of its own language ... is a nation that has lost the will to live.’ There are minor victories, such as mobile phones holding out against cellphones But where are the defending troops? Where is Dad’s Army? Who will rid us of these meddlesome bluebirds?
For a time, the BBC was the defender of Britishness, although Engel is sharply cognisant of the ironies here. BBC English entrenched class divisions and ignored regional variation in the language, making it an easy target for the brashly democratising Americanisms. The only contemporary linguistic evidence of a fightback is perhaps in the youth dialect called Multicultural London English, with its combination of black British vernacular, traditional working-class slang, and other migrant elements (coz , bare, extra, innit, you woz). But youth slang of this kind is
unlikely to become mainstream. In some despair, Engel looks to Brexit as a possible sign of ‘the emergence of a constructive nationalism’, in which British English will also experience renewal.
In reading Engel’s book I was reminded of the fact that British English has survived many lexical onslaughts in the past. It took many words from the Viking invaders, to whom we owe the pronouns they and them. The Normans
Where is Dad’s Army? Who will rid us of these meddlesome bluebirds?
and the French delivered more than 10,000 words. Such invasions enriched British English and fostered its propensity to borrow from other languages in order to expand its word-stock. When this richness was coupled with political and economic power, British English triumphed beyond its island boundary. Was it this global imperialism, and the subsequent role of British English as the ‘default’ variety of English, that led, ironically, to a diminution of the Britishness of British English? Whatever the case, the willingness to take up Americanisms is consistent with the history of British English, and with its role as the ‘default English’.
Australian English now naturalises Americanisms with little evidence of the complaint tradition that continues in Britain, and Australian English has in its arsenal a series of key cultural terms that embody Australian values (battler, bludger, dinkum, and the like). Does British English still possess comparable cultural terms? Perhaps not, when even stiff upper lip, as Engel points out, proves to be an Americanism.
The battle may be lost, but Engel takes us on a witty and thoroughly enjoyable journey through the alarums and skirmishes that have brought British English to its present malaise. g
Bruce Moore edited the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (2016), and was director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre from 1994 to 2011.
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation and the ABR Patrons.
Helen Ennis on Robert Mapplethorpe
Waiting for Godot
by Andrew Fuhrmann
The original French version of Waiting for Godot was written in Paris between October 1948 and January 1949. This was a time of mass migration in Europe; a time of refugees, exiles, immigrants, fugitives, and transients. France settled more than 38,000 people who, for one reason or another, could not be repatriated. Australia took more than 180,000.
In 1953, there were still some 250,000 refugees awaiting resettlement in camps across Europe. These were the human leavings, the people deemed surplus to a world intent on reconstruction and forgetting: the elderly and the infirm, the crippled and the insane. In January of that year, Godot premièred at the Théâtre de Babylone in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, across the road from the Lutetia, a luxury hotel that doubled as a refugee centre at the end of the war.
Of course, Beckett’s comic tale of two derelicts waiting vainly for the arrival of a mysterious stranger who will surely come today, or the day after, is not reducible to a bleakly sentimental refugee fantasy or metaphysical reflection on the conditions of displacement and abandonment. And yet, as a point of view on the play, it seems not only valid but indeed essential.
It is not, however, a point of view that seems to inform the new Wits’ End production. Instead, this is a frolic for auld lang syne, a celebration of old acquaintances and a meditation on reunion. This is announced in the first minutes of this production when Vladimir says cheerfully: ‘On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the seventies.’
It is a minor change to the script – from the 1890s to the 1970s – but it points to the motivating impulse of the production and makes explicit the link to autobiographical experience. In 1976, John Jacobs and William Henderson played Vladimir and Estragon respectively in James McCaughey’s Pram Factory production. Here, forty-one years later, they are reprising the roles in a new version directed by Henderson and Shona Innes. The experienced cast also includes Tom Considine as a rather saturnine Lucky and Richard Bligh as a booming, ruddy-faced Pozzo. The role of the child
anti-herald, always announcing the non-appearance of Godot, is shared between Jean and Sean Innes.
It is a fine-looking production, but part of me wonders if its significance is only accessible to friends and fellow travellers, to comrade survivors of the decade of wine flagons and protest marches. In any case, it is not accessible to me. This is a decent version of one of the most durable plays of the twentieth century; what else to say except that they are all older now than they were. Time, as Pozzo assures us, has clearly not stopped.
This is the sort of production where the hats keep falling off at inopportune moments and need to be retrieved in order to get through the next bit of business; the sort of production where the performers are forever tangling themselves in Pozzo’s rope as they cross the stage. The room smells of fresh paint, and the stage floor squeaks like a basket of guinea pig pups. And yet it still works – well enough.
The highlight is designer Julie Renton’s eye-catching cyclorama backdrop. A clear, graded, late-evening sky of purples and blues and oranges encloses the performance space in a semi-circle, with the horizon a mere streak at floor level. The lone tree, which prompts the two vagrants to think of suicide, is negatively defined, a hollow cut out from the colours of the sky. Niklas Pajanti’s soft lighting suggests the all but imperceptible approach of night.
Henderson and Jacobs are relatively straightforward and unaffected in their depictions. There is little caricature or trampish colouration, and the rhythm is relaxed, though not exactly fluent. It is all made to seem as ordinary as possible. The performers play to the audience, and there is a fair bit of friendly interaction. Again, I wonder how much of this performance is really a kind of collective reflection on life in the little theatres of Melbourne.
As I looked into the empty space that represented the tree, I couldn’t help but think that all this was the merest outline of the real thing, and that what actually mattered at this moment was elsewhere. Perhaps that is the most Australian thing – the most parochial thing – about this production of a modern classic. On the night I attended, almost four thousand kilometres away, members of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary were moving the remaining 328 asylum seekers at the decommissioned Manus Island detention centre to new camps, where, no doubt, the waiting will continue.
Wits’ End, which is a new incarnation of Henderson’s Eleventh Hour Theatre, is based in the old Mission Hall at 170 Leicester Street, Fitzroy. It’s a fine building and a cosy theatre space. The streets around the theatre are pleasant and leafy. There was a storm during the performance, but by the time we emerged the streets were almost dry. It was a pleasant evening for a walk. g
Waiting for Godot (Wits’ End) is written by Samuel Beckett and directed by William Henderson and Shona Innes. The season at Eleventh Hour Theatre ended on 16 December 2017. Performance attended: 24 November 2017. (Published online: 27 November 2017.)
Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre.
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium
by Helen Ennis
This exhibition has a clear aim – to prove that Robert Mapplethorpe ‘is among the most significant artists of his time’. The evidence marshalled by the curators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum is substantial. They have conducted extensive research, sourced outstanding vintage prints, and provided an illuminating chronological and thematic structure for the hang. Instructive signage placed at strategic points tells us that throughout his career Mapplethorpe sought perfection through photography, which he considered the perfect medium because it was ‘intimate and immediate [and] a means of seduction, play and control’. There is a satisfying concentration of works in the key areas of his practice which, using the curators’ wording, comprises portraiture, homosexual and sadomasochistic scenarios, photographs of black men, and floral still lifes. Also included are Dada-ist, Pop-ish items from his art school years and two films (one involving Patti Smith, the other bodybuilder Lisa Lyon) which amplify the scope of his art practice.
But is the case for Mapplethorpe’s importance convincing? The exhibition’s curators urge viewers not to be distracted by Mapplethorpe’s once highly controversial subject matter. They downplay the documentation of sexual activity to argue for his interest in sex ‘as a purified ideal, reduced to basic form and geometries’. And they respond to the critique that the African American men he so famously photographed have no agency by suggesting that ‘documents of collaborative interactions, investigations of power dynamics, and expressions of the artist’s ideal of physical perfection’. In other words, the curatorial emphasis is more universalising than specific or topical. It is directed to Mapplethorpe’s pursuit of perfection and the ideal, his unique artistic expression, and his technical and formal mastery of the photographic medium.
This approach is perfectly understandable. It has been nearly thirty years since Mapplethorpe’s death, and there is no doubt that his work warrants serious attention. Unexpectedly, however, the show reveals that technically and stylistically Mapplethorpe wasn’t an innovator. He didn’t break the rules. He was a traditionalist, a studio photographer par excellence. Students of photography will relish his simplified, highly refined compositions both in black and white and in colour, and his masterful use of artificial lighting. And they will see numerous references to specifically American traditions of studio photography, especially the work of Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon. Mapplethorpe’s traditionalism stands in stark contrast to the radicalism of the conceptually based photography of his contemporaries Sherrie Levine, Cindy
Sherman, Richard Prince, and others working in the United States at the time. His choice of platinum printing for some portraits represents a further embrace of the traditions of fine art photography; popular among art photographers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is celebrated for its luminous and luxurious effects.
Mapplethorpe was part of the arts establishment as well as the gay scene. Handsome, talented, driven, he gained support from powerful players early on. His insatiable appetite for fame is well documented – he courted media attention and devoured the extensive coverage he received – and he was an astute businessman who built a considerable fortune. Within a few years his studio became the ‘go to’ place in New York for celebrities, including those associated with the arts, who wanted stylish portraits of themselves. There was no shortage of clients, as the show reveals, and no question that he could deliver consummate results.
However, given his reputation as a portraitist it is curious how little depth his portraits convey. Many of his subjects opted for a theatrical display that appears well-rehearsed and too knowing. There are exceptions, of course, and for me they are the high points in the show. The portraits of musician Patti Smith, his one-time partner and long-term friend are complex enough to remain interesting. That is a tribute to Smith and Mapplethorpe’s creative collaboration, and also to her preparedness to take risks as a performer. The portraits of artists Louise Bourgeois and Cindy Sherman are other standouts, because of the suggestion of an internal energy that extends beyond the photographic frame.
The self-portraits are also impressive, none more so than the strategically placed final work in the exhibition, taken by Mapplethorpe’s brother Edward. The terminally ill artist is posed clutching a walking stick topped with a small, carved human skull. He stares down the camera in an uncharacteristically intense image, one that is unflinching and purposefully discomforting.
Ermes is another high point. A dramatically reductive composition in which a pure white marble head, photographed in close up, assumes a magnificent presence. The image pushes at the limits of representation, achieving its force through its ambiguity as the head could almost be animate.
Mapplethorpe was, according to the exhibition curators, a photographer ‘who prized perfection in form above all else’. If his significance rests on this fact, there is no escaping that some of the photographs he created are more stylised than stylish, and appear preoccupied with external display. There are no signs of struggle here or of difficulty. Mapplethorpe emerges as a photographer in total control of his medium, his practice, and his own image. This isn’t an exhibition that will move you, but the odds are you will be impressed by the artistry and artifice. g
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 4 March 2018. (Published online: 22 November 2017.)
Helen Ennis holds the William Dobell Chair in Art History at the Australian National University.
At the NGV
by Sophie Knezic
The four solo survey exhibitions currently staged at NGV Australia as its summer program emphatically delineate the institution’s position on contemporary art. While the juxtaposition is headily abrasive, the aggregate speaks of certain attributes it is keen to foreground. The works are resolutely tactile, each of the artists invested in fastidiously worked materials. A cornucopia of worlds unfold, concentrated in shimmering patterns that march across painted surfaces, obliterate depth of field, draw out the sculptural properties of layered paper, or collapse architectonic space into implausible folds.
Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco epitomises the sensational end of the spectrum, Barton’s paintings, inkjet prints, textile collages, watercolour drawings – and recent foray into HD video – collectively forming a den of rapturously erotic imagery. Hybrid female figures morph with orchids or linden leaves, and nestle near horses or peacocks. The figures are stylised with hallmark Barton traits – naked, nubile, and lanky. They sport bony faces with gargantuan eyes and lips, and their erogenous zones are intensively sketched.
Barton’s work forms a highly illustrative lexicon that shows the clear precedent of Gustav Klimt and, more so, his pupil Egon Schiele, melded with the graphic aesthetic of 1970s schoolgirl swap cards and a Japanese mode of cuteness known as kawaii. There is an implied pagan world of goddesses, mythic beasts, and mutant creatures, but the absence of a symbolically unifying system sees this dissolve into a girlish sexual fantasia in trippy, hyper-chromatic overdrive.
Louise Paramor’s large-scale plastic sculptures in Palace of the Republic, by contrast, derive from a particular class of mass-produced goods that speak of a capitalist culture of consumer commodities destined for obsolescence. Plastic tables and chairs, garden hose, balls, buckets, funnels, and jelly moulds have their utilitarian functions foiled through being reworked into jaunty composite structures. Paramor craftily exploits the apertures of these objects to join them together in unprescribed ways, so that they too constitute mutant forms, albeit of a disposable variety.
As senior artists, Gareth Sansom and Helen Maudsley represent artistic practices of a qualitatively different kind. Gareth Sansom: Transformer is a comprehensive survey of the artist’s career, spanning works from the mid-1960s to the present: a tempest of provocative, relentlessly painterly experiments. The canvases teem with energy, their surfaces fractured into overlapping zones that bristle against one another with a kind of fury. They are slashes into pictorial space, foaming vortexes that simultaneously suck and spew out imagery. Graphically sketched heads jostle in claustrophobic compositions, shot through with expressive lines and drips of paint. Figures bend and contort across segments of unstable ground in heated colours of cadmium
red or bubblegum pink.
The works grapple with existential questions – of mortality, faith, human interaction, and human isolation. Sansom’s vernacular style is indebted to British mid-century precedent: the collage method of Ian Hamilton and the offbeat figuration of Peter Blake, but mostly the tortuous, angst-ridden figures of Francis Bacon, with their elastically decomposing forms suffused with a tone of nihilism and ennui. Sansom takes these influences into a territory that is more eruptively maverick yet similarly disconsolate.
Against these histrionics, Helen Maudsley’s paintings offer a world that is understated and intricate, yet no less robust. Helen Maudsley: Our Knowing and Not Knowing is not a retrospective but a collection of recent works made between 2013 and 2017 that show the artist (now ninety) to be at the peak of her powers. The paintings have a rigour that testifies to a lifetime of artistic commitment within tightly defined parameters, in a continual honing of the artist’s vision. Maudsley’s practice represents an idiosyncratic recalibration of a Cubist lexicon, hoisted from the early twentieth century to the present. It is a highly developed language of pictorial spatial relationships that shows the operation of a nimble and inventive imagination. The paintings are little crystalline universes, densely balanced arrangements that dislocate figure/ground relations, transposing them into labyrinthine compositions.
Architectural elements abut motifs that recur across the canvases – chequerboard tiles, alphabet letters, chairs, doors, windows, and glasses, and an array of volumetric shapes – that melds pre-digital space with the virtual space of the screen, in particular the three-dimensional environments of architectural modelling programs and digital games. The Leaf. The Hand. The Landscape. The Killer. The Innocent One. (2015) depicts an enigmatic terrain conjoining a topographic aerial view, architectural shards, an oak leaf, and a robotic hand, as if each element were a portal into another game dimension. At; Into; Down, Across (2017) wilfully collides multiple chequerboard planes into a faceted microcosm of syncopated rhythms.
In answer to his question, ‘What is the Contemporary?’ the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concluded that contemporaneity resulted from an ‘out-of-jointness’ with time – that is, an equivocal relationship with the present era which one both adhered to and kept at a remove. If this is the case, then more than any of the artists on display, Helen Maudsley represents a singular embodiment of the contemporary, her gem-like paintings harnessing the present to the past in a kind of luminous and revelatory disjunction. g
Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco, Louise Paramor: Palace of the Republic, and Our Knowing and Not Knowing: Helen Maudsley opened on 17 November 2017 and close on 12 March 2018. Gareth Sansom: Transformer opened on 15 September 2017 and closes on 28 January 2018. (Longer version published online: 4 December 2017.)
Sophie Knezic is a Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical
by Susan Lever
In November I attended a performance of the Australian Ballet’s The Sleeping Beauty whose the audience gasped as the curtains parted on the final act: three massive chandeliers were lit then raised above a cream and gold confection of a set which put Versailles to shame. Three days later I was at Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical. The sets and costumes are bright and garish, adding a satiric commentary of their own to the show’s cheerfully vulgar view of contemporary Australia. Gabriela Tylesova designed the sets and costumes for both productions – from Aurora’s wedding to Muriel’s – with equal flair. The talent has gathered around Muriel’s Wedding.
At its centre is Simon Phillips, who must be one of the most gifted directors of musical comedy and comic opera in the world. He can find wit and good-natured humour in the strangest places, and brings out the best in every production he touches. He has gathered a brilliant team of creators around him, not just Tylesova but P.J. Hogan to adapt his original script, choreographer Andrew Hallsworth, and Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall to write the music and lyrics for new songs. This is no jukebox musical but a wonderfully original creation.
To fans of the 1994 film, a musical comedy version of Muriel’s Wedding may have always looked like a winner. The main questions were how the story would hold up after more than twenty years, and whether anyone could write popular music that might stand alongside the greatest hits of ABBA. The answers are clear. Hogan has revised his screenplay to create a tighter, fast-moving story that appears to be more relevant to the social media, mobile phone, ‘married at first sight’ world of the present than it was in the 1990s. Even more impressively, Miller-Heidke and Nuttall have managed to write songs that invoke contemporary popular music, taking their cues not only from ABBA but from a range of current popular styles, adapting to each character and dramatic moment. They are tuneful and catchy; some of them, such as the more reflective ‘Strangely Perfect Stranger’ or Muriel’s eulogy for her mother, quite beautiful. Others, like ‘Shared, Viral, Linked, Liked’, sung by the Porpoise Spit girls with their devices in hand, or the chorus rendition of ‘Sydney’, are superbly witty.
We are engaged from the moment a lone surfer in bright board shorts appears on stage to sing about the perfection of life in Porpoise Spit. He is joined by an energetic chorus which maintains its zest through a series of character and costume changes right throughout
the show. The couch potatoes at the Heslop house sing cheerily enough about their moronic lives, in contrast to the bright harmonic chirping of the bitchy girls of Porpoise Spit, led by Christie Whelan-Browne as Tania Degano. Muriel, the hapless, clueless, thieving dreamer, appears in the form of Maggie McKenna, with a winning smile. Who could not love her, despite her stupidity and adolescent dreams?
The production hilariously incorporates ABBA into the show by transforming them into guardian angels, appearing in white satin and sequins to console Muriel at her darkest moments and, with a credible acknowledgment of generational change, to act as her mother’s source of comfort, too. These theatrical elements are so right they make the film look like a trial run for the story’s full emergence on stage. In the theatre, all the absurdities of Muriel’s story can be presented with economy – songs fill out the background and emotion; Battling Bill Heslop’s development plans are presented as ludicrous models on a table (a high-rise building like a half-peeled banana); Sydney, its underworld and bridal shops, can be celebrated with theatrical excess (a mighty Harbour Bridge overhead, a revolving shopwindow for the frocks).
Just when it might become too implausible – Muriel’s discovery of a handsome young swimmer as a marriage partner – the show diverts our attention with one of its most brilliant effects, as the chorus becomes a row of swimmers on the blocks across the back of the stage. When the pace and mood drops, as it must when Rhonda moves to a wheelchair and the Heslop family disintegrates, it is not long before Muriel’s eulogy song for her mother brings it to a new level.
Gary Sweet, Justine Clarke (yes, she is now old enough to play Muriel’s mother), and Helen Dallimore provide solid support as they demonstrate the failures of the last generation, but the show belongs to the young performers, the versatile dancers and singers, including the comic turns of Ben Bennett as Muriel’s parking inspector admirer, and Madeleine Jones as her saviour, Rhonda Epinstall. The songs, and the energetic performance of them, leave the audience bouncing with pleasure.
What can it all mean given the recent endorsement of marriage equality by Australian voters? Perhaps it is a celebration of Australian tolerance and the right of anyone to get married, though friendship wins out in the end. If there is a message, it is to enjoy yourself, but not be mean about it. The show enacts this commitment through its generous gift of music, fun, and humour. g
Muriel’s Wedding (Sydney Theatre Company/Global Creatures) continues at The Roslyn Packer Theatre until 27 January 2018. Performance attended: 23 November 2017. (Published online: 28 November 2017.)
Susan Lever is the author of David Foster: The satirist of Australia (Cambria Press, 2008).
The Disaster Artist
by Dilan Gunawardana
Few bad films have received such prolonged adoration as The Room. The story of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) whose fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle) cheats on him with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), has been screening in cinemas worldwide since its initial release in 2003. Audiences are enamoured by the film’s hilarious incompetence. It is peppered with creepy and inconsequential characters, horrendous dialogue, and baffling directorial decisions. Greg Sestero released his memoir The Disaster Artist: My life inside The Room, the greatest bad movie ever made (2013) in response to mounting interest in the film’s conception and its enigmatic creator, Tommy Wiseau. Beneath the The Room’s many absurdities was a compelling account of Greg and Tommy’s turbulent friendship leading up to and during the film’s production, and beneath that, a treatise on Hollywood, the American Dream, trauma, grief, and delusion that framed a detailed portrait of Wiseau.
In order to compress Sestero’s acclaimed memoir –or its equally engaging twelve-hour audiobook – into a 100-minute film, director James Franco eschewed the subtle poignancy of Sestero’s account in favour of a brisk tribute to ‘the Citizen Kane of bad movies’, one that falls just short of expounding its source material.
The Disaster Artist traces Sestero’s early years as an aspiring actor in the late 1990s in San Francisco to The Room’s Hollywood première in 2003. Having been mesmerised by Wiseau’s histrionic rendition of Brando’s famous ‘Hey Stella!’ scene from A Streetcar Named Desire in an acting class, Greg, nineteen years old, strikes up an unlikely friendship with the oddity. Tommy appears to be middle-aged, with long black hair and a craggy face. He has a garbled accent, possibly French, possibly Eastern European. He is evasive about his past and how he accumulated his seemingly vast wealth. He wants nothing more than to be an actor, despite his obvious lack of talent. As Greg and Tommy’s friendship deepens, Greg expresses his desire to move to Hollywood, and Tommy invites him to stay at his apartment there. As Greg’s star rises, Tommy plots to emulate Greg’s apparent success. A series of rejections from casting agents and Hollywood producers sting Tommy into producing his own work, a film called The Room, into which he pours $6 million of his own money. The Room’s production is hampered by Tommy’s ineptitude and by his explosive confrontations with the film’s frustrated actors and crew. The end result is a wonderful mess, and the rest is history.
James Franco’s The Disaster Artist is engaging for the most part. The scenes are lively and fast-paced, the performances generally strong. James Franco’s time spent
studying audiotapes of Wiseau’s speech and staying in character during the film’s production allows him to accomplish the near-impossible task of playing Wiseau without descending into pure caricature. Oddly, the weakest portrayal in the film was of Greg Sestero, as played by a miscast Dave Franco, younger brother of James. Besides sporting a distracting fake beard at one point – it looks as though someone shaved a teddy bear and patchily glued the fuzz to his chin – Dave Franco is much shorter than his brother. In his memoir, Sestero attributes Wiseau’s resentment to the feelings of inadequacy he felt towards the six-foot-plus, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, ‘all-American’ Sestero; the embodiment of everything Tommy wished himself to be. Dave Franco’s inclusion reeks of nepotism. While it isn’t necessary for filmmakers to slavishly adhere to the source material, it is important to maintain the character’s motivation. The Room is a cocktail of Wiseau’s accumulated angst – childhood traumas, failed relationships, unfulfilled ambitions – coaxed out by his tumultuous homoerotic friendship with Greg and a misinterpreted viewing of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). In the film, The Room springs from a few casting rejections and a sudden brainwave. Greg: ‘Wish we could make our own movie.’ Tommy: ‘That’s a great idea.’
Franco’s Wiseau is unconcerned when Claudette (Jacki Weaver), an elderly cast member of The Room faints during production. In the memoir, Sestero describes how quickly Wiseau snaps out of his egoistic miasma to help her. This episode emphasises the humanity which lies just beneath Wiseau’s comically petulant façade. Moments like these, which have been hacked away from the film for expediency, are what redeem Wiseau’s ‘complicated darkness’, as Sestero describes it.
The Disaster Artist is a vexing film. Fans of The Room and Sestero’s memoir will find nothing new, other than validation from a number of celebrity talking heads at the prologue of the film, that say, yes, The Room is a joyfully incoherent mess, and, yes, the story of Tommy Wiseau is a fascinating one. At the end, the cast lovingly and precisely recreate the more memorable scenes from The Room, but we are left with a feeling that the entire project was a pretext for Franco and his friends to play dress-ups. Ultimately, The Disaster Artist perpetuates the misconception of film adaptations as the apotheosis of storytelling.
In Sestero’s memoir, Tommy Wiseau baffles you at first. Then you start to dislike him – and pity him. At the end, you can’t help loving him. We are never taken on the same emotional rollercoaster in Franco’s rendering. Instead, we are in a race car travelling from point A to point B with an excellent Tommy Wiseau impersonator in the passenger seat and a man with teddy-bear fluff glued to his chin in the back. g
The Disaster Artist (Roadshow Films), 103 minutes, directed by James Franco. (Longer version published online: 4 December 2017.)
Dilan Gunawardana is Deputy Editor (Digital) at ABR.
Thin ice
Desley Deacon
THE BEST FILM I NEVER MADE: AND OTHER STORIES ABOUT A LIFE IN THE ARTS
by Bruce Beresford
Text Publishing
$29.99 pb, 281 pp, 9781925603101
Reading Bruce Beresford is enough to make any aspiring filmmaker think twice about following in his footsteps. ‘The Best Film I Never Made’, the title article of this collection of Beresford’s occasional writing over the last fifteen years, says it all. This is the sad, but in its way hilarious, story of his attempt to put together a movie based on the life of James Boswell. He knows from bitter experience that ‘skating on thin ice is the modus operandi of most film producers’; but he is ever optimistic, and his heart is in the project. With shooting only nine days away, however, his mobile rang: ‘Nik Powell was on the phone from Germany. The conversation was brief, just a few seconds – ‘There’s no money. The film’s off.’ The mobiles (supplied by the production office) all stopped working a few minutes later. A day or so later the production office in Shepparton had gone. No one connected with the film could be found.’
This is not a new story from Beresford, one of our most successful movie directors. His Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This ... True stories from a life in the screen trade (2007), and the collection put together by producer Sue Millikin, There’s A Fax From Bruce (2016), introduced us to the excruciating process of putting a project together – corralling finance, star, writer, and director in the one place at the one time long enough to actually make a movie. The Best Film I Never Made gives us several more examples of this less glamorous side of movie making: ‘The Hubert Opperman Saga’ recounts his ten-year involvement with a fantasist who dreamed of making a movie about the Australian champion cyclist. In ‘A Career of Sorts’, looking back on a career that took him from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie in 1972
through Tender Mercies (1983), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the thirty-odd others he has directed, he muses on the complexities introduced for the director since about 2000 by digital filmmaking. Not the least of these is setting up the finance. ‘Financing Movies’ goes into more detail about what Beresford calls ‘development hell’. But the reader gets the idea that Beresford finds all this skating on thin ice rather exhilarating. And he believes in his art: ‘Despite all these difficulties,’ he writes, ‘many fine films are made all over the world; there are great directors in every country, dedicated to their art and imbued with the spirit that conquers every obstacle.’
The drama and wonder of Beresford’s career is thrown into vivid relief by the accounts he gives of his background in ‘Family Tree’, ‘My Parents’, ‘Out of Toongabbie’, ‘The End of the Roxy’, and ‘Stumbling towards Directing’. Born in 1940, he grew up in ‘perhaps the most boring decade in Australia’s history’. The family lived in a fibro Housing Commission house in Toongabbie in Sydney’s west. His ineffectual and chronically depressed father and more businesslike mother ran a small electrical goods store. To the young Beresford they appeared to have no interests, and his mother considered that only servants went to the movies. From an early age, however, he was attracted to the offerings at the Parramatta Roxy, Astra, and Civic, and at the age of twelve he had his favourite directors. When he saw John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright in 1953, he decided he wanted to be one himself.
This was a generation that were able to invent themselves, thanks to postwar prosperity and the opening up of the universities. Beresford’s contemporaries at the University of Sydney included Clive James, John Bell, Les Murray, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes. Like many of these, he furthered his education by heading for London; but his future was made in 1970s Australia, where, with $250,000 from the newly minted Australian Film Commission, he began his career as a director with Barry Humphries’ The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972). What he calls ‘critical credibility’ came with David Williamson’s Don’s Par-
ty in 1976. The Getting of Wisdom (1978), Breaker Morant (1980), The Club (1980), and Puberty Blues (1981) followed. By 1980 he was being headhunted by Hollywood. The most interesting pieces in this eclectic collection are those where Beresford writes drolly about the absurdities of the craft that he loves. He also includes memoirs of writers, directors, producers, composers, and cameramen he worked with. ‘The Two Barrys’ gives an affectionate portrait of Barry Humphries (the other Barry is Barry Crocker). ‘Don McAlpine, Cameraman’ tells how he found possibly the best cameraman Australia has produced in the Commonwealth Film Unit and persuaded him to film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (in London’s grey gloom). ‘A Brief Guide to American Opera’ (which is actually twelve pages long) reminds us of Beresford’s second, late career as opera director; and articles on Jeffrey Smart and Clive James demonstrate the wide range of arts embraced by this son of Toongabbie. This is a book that was probably put together for the Christmas market. The quality of the paper is poor, and there is little help for the more serious reader: we are not told where the articles were originally published; there is no index; and the cover photo is identified only in the copyright information. It will make a good present for anyone interested in making movies and in movie history and gossip. Let’s hope that before long Beresford will take time out from the exciting work of putting deals together to write a full account of his extraordinary career. g
Desley Deacon is a writer and historian who lives in Sydney. She has just completed a biography of the Australianborn actress Dame Judith Anderson.
TINKERING: AUSTRALIANS
REINVENT DIY CULTURE
by Katherine Wilson
Monash University Publishing $29.95 pb, 304 pp, 9781925495478
What is tinkering? As Katherine Wilson makes clear in Tinkering: Australians reinvent DIY culture, there is an easy answer to that question – but also several complex ones.
At the physical level, tinkering is what the protagonists in Wilson’s book do: they convert cars to run on vegetable oil; they build their homes by hand and perfect quince jam. One tinkerer whom Wilson profiles made a pedal-powered Random Excuse Generator; another fashioned a block of wood and slate to the exact proportions of an iPhone. Tinkering is the informal repair, improvement, and hacking of objects – and is an unconventional area for academic study. Wilson says that she feels ‘like the square-kid trying to codify the cool-kids’ fun’. But she needn’t worry; her writing is upbeat and delightful. Throughout the book we sense the rapport and deep care she develops for her subjects (one tinkerer died during Wilson’s research; the book is dedicated to him).
Beyond the physical, tinkering has serious moral, economic, and political lessons. During World War II, DIY was encouraged as a patriotic duty. Now that the economy relies on people buying new things, repairing objects is equated to poverty, and looked down upon. It is sobering to think that morality can follow economics.
Wilson shows how tinkering exposes the artifices of the modern economy, such as the depersonalisation of mass-produced objects, which makes it easy to discard them and thus consume more. The consumptive logic of capitalism also extends to people: the division of labour makes us skilled in one area but not others: and so we must work for money, and paradoxically swap our lives for the means of survival.
Tinkerers provide a counter-narrative of redemption, material and otherwise: through repurposing objects, individuals can break from the formal economy and reassert their intrinsic value. What is tinkering? Wilson asks. It is ‘a foil to conditions of power. As such, it’s an embodiment of hope.’ Alex Tighe ❖
Passion and Politics
Opera’s connections to power and influence
Michael Halliwell
THE
POLITICS OF OPERA: A HISTORY FROM MONTEVERDI TO MOZART
by Mitchell Cohen
Princeton University Press (Footprint), $84.99 hb, 512 pp, 9780691175027
Amajor new exhibition opened at the end of September at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. The first of the three qualifying terms needs little explanation as a potential subject; as the title of Peter Conrad’s book A Song of Love and Death (1987) has it, opera is popularly seen as the supreme dramatic embodiment of passion in its various forms. The art form evolved in the city courts of Mantua and Florence in late Renaissance Italy, with the first public opera houses appearing in republican Venice in the 1630s. Opera has never completely lost its connection to centres of power and influence, however egalitarian its later intentions. This is made manifest in many European cities, where pride of place is given to an opera house as a display of royal or civic authority and prestige. And not only in Europe, but the saga surrounding the opera houses that were situated in three different locations on the island of Manhattan tell us much about the society of the city, so eloquently articulated in the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton. The case for Sydney needs no explanation. The Janus face of power is, of course, politics, and opera has always been imbrued with the political.
Surprisingly, major scholarly works on the subject are few. Two books must be mentioned: Anthony Arblaster’s Viva la Libertà!: Politics in opera (1992), and John Bokina’s Opera and Politics: From Monteverdi to Henze (1997). Arblaster treats the subject from Mozart to the present, focusing first on class conflict in the late eighteenth century and moving through the long nineteenth century with chapters on bel canto, Verdi, and
Wagner, through Eastern Europe and Russia, ending in the twentieth century with Puccini and Strauss with a final chapter, ‘Democratic Opera: Victims As Heroes’. His work also traces the rise of the chorus as the voice of the populace. Bokina takes a much longer time frame, commencing with Monteverdi’s three major operas, then Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Parsifal, Elektra, and Erwartung, culminating in Pfitzner’s Palestrina , Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, and, finally, Henze’s The Bassarids . Both books include in-depth examinations of particular works, as well as contextualising them within broader political developments and the politics of opera commissioning and production.
Mitchell Cohen’s primary focus is on the way in which the origins of opera are inextricably interwoven with the political structures of the time. The book has a very different layout compared with the two mentioned above. Cohen divides his work into five parts, moving from the political theories of Greece and Rome to late Renaissance Italy in Part 1: ‘Metamorphoses, Ancient to Modern’. Part 2: ‘Mantua To Venice’, deals predominantly with Monteverdi, but also includes a lengthy and detailed discussion of the literary background of opera. Cohen shows how many of the men who developed early opera were close to political power, often being directly involved in politics themselves.
Plato is revealed as a profound source for early opera, while the intermedi – those brief musical interjections between the acts of a larger work – frequently use the concept of harmony in music as an analogy for political stability: music as a symbol of the establishment and maintenance of order. The intermedi
in time outgrew the dramas in which they were embedded. The first two parts of the book focus primarily on the political arrangements in late Renaissance Italy where the ideas of Machiavelli permeated much of the political thought; Cohen notes: ‘Opera was born of the same era – its tail end – that gave birth to the notion of the “modern” state, or, more expansively, modern politics.’ Cohen is particularly good on the literary basis of opera, and the extensive role of the early librettists. Indeed, much of the discussion is on the words rather than the music, while Cohen spends much time tracing the intellectual background to Rinuccini’s now-lost
a radical rethink of the political role of opera in society. The early seeds of European Romanticism were germinating, leading to the Italian bel canto era, the rise of German romantic opera, and, ultimately, Wagner. Thus the book covers roughly the first two hundred years of operatic history, the period during which the art form was established and developed and which still structures much opera today. Politically, this period also spans the movement from autocratic city and nation states into more democratic dispensations.
The complexity and depth of the book is both its outstanding quality as well as a factor that might hinder broader
opera, Euridice: ‘This, the second opera, translated political questions into an artistic experiment deploying music’s expressive possibilities.’
‘Under French Skies’, the third part, has the operas of Lully and Rameau and the complex politics of the French court in focus, whereas Part 4, ‘Ancients In Modernity’, discusses the transformation of the use of myth, with the libretti of Pietro Metastasio as the basis of the discussion, ranging from Paris, to London, to Vienna. Part 5, ‘…And Although I Am No Count’, is set primarily in Vienna with Mozart’s Da Ponte operas and Die Zauberflöte central. The layout and time frame of the book is logical: from the origins of the art form in the late sixteenth century to the death of Mozart – a neat dividing line provided by the political turmoil fermented by the French Revolution resulting in
success. Cohen’s knowledge of the political and cultural life of this period is exhaustive. However, the discussion is at times too wide-ranging and discursive as the focus on a particular opera or composer is obscured. Those seeking a book that engages directly and succinctly with the nexus between opera and politics might find this book too clever by half. Cohen makes no bones about the fact that he is no musicologist, but it does seem at times that the book is aimed primarily at historians, and some might feel musically short-changed. Despite these caveats, the book is a most welcome addition to the study of this important aspect of the rich history of opera. g
Michael Halliwell’s latest book is National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths reconsidered (2017).
FEATHERSTON by Geoff Isaac Thames & Hudson
$70 hb, 289 pp, 9780500501108
Grant Featherston (1922–95), the most prominent and successful furniture designer working in postwar Australia, is noted for his moulded, upholstered plywood modernist chairs from the 1950s, which combined comfort and style and which resembled work by Charles Eames. Featherston’s importance as a designer is well known: he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1988, and his work appeared in Mid-Century Modern: Australian Furniture Design, also at the NGV (ABR, August 2014).
Featherston has clearly been a labour of love for Geoff Isaac. He first became interested in the designer after buying Featherston dining chairs second-hand in 1992. Pitched at the collector market, Featherston is a combination of coffee table book and textbook. Handsomely produced and generously illustrated, it forms a comprehensive catalogue of Featherston’s chairs from 1947 to 1974. It also includes much new research. Isaac has interviewed key figures, including Mary Featherston, Neil Clerehan, Ian Howard, and Terence Lane, who bring refreshing insight and commentary. There is fascinating material on the role of the designer in relation to manufacturing in Australia.
Two of the most interesting sections are those on the Talking chairs, designed for Montreal Expo 67, and on Aristoc Industries, for which Featherston designed furniture from 1957 to 1969. Aristoc was a large manufacturer in Glen Waverley; until now it has tended to be a footnote in the Featherston story. Aristoc’s best-known furniture (not designed by Featherston) was the severely functional Tierstack seating used in public venues throughout Australia in the 1950s.
An index and a timeline would have enhanced this volume, which is also in need of copy and structural editing to eliminate repetitions and typographical errors. Nevertheless, Featherston forms an appealing addition to Australian twentieth-century design literature.
I figure that with practice I might improve. Even if I don’t, I will persist. If in an entire book there is one sentence that works, I see it as proof of growth. Sometimes that sentence stares back at me as if it came from somewhere else.
Are you a vivid dreamer?
The mind continues to conjure with greater imagination than can be recovered when consciousness returns.
Where are you happiest?
Like most people, with those I love. Life can deliver some harsh surprises, but also sublime moments, delightful but unanticipatable. I look forward to the next time I am ambushed by a random burst of happiness.
What is your favourite film?
Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Joyous irreverence. My kids love it too. We smile and laugh in unison.
And your favourite book?
The hardest question. Forced to choose one for my desert island, I will nominate Pride and Prejudice
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Jane Austen, John Curtin, Barack Obama.
Which word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see back in public usage. ‘Lifestyle’, although inoffensive, manages to irritate. Some glorious, if faded expressions deserve resurrection. How about ‘galoot’?
Who is your favourite author?
Olga Masters.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
The second hardest question. I will go with Hazel Motes from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Depth and the quest for insight.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you
no longer admire.
I once met Roald Dahl. We did not hit it off. The experience exposed the banality of fandom. For that I can thank him. In the few hours we spent together, I discovered a not very nice person.
What if anything impedes your writing?
The usual: the need to earn a living. The courts have been a major impediment to truth more so than verbiage. Mostly, though, I am not too bothered. If writing becomes torturous I turn to something else and wait it out.
How do you regard publishers?
They can become like extended family. There is still a strong bond to my mother’s former editors at the University of Queensland Press, and I am close to colleagues at Allen & Unwin.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
Mixed. We have world-class critics in Australia – and some shockers. The small market makes the author more than usually vulnerable to institutional competition. And how dispiriting to sense that the reviewer has not actually read the book?
And writer’s festivals?
They seem to survive because of the large number of female readers.
Are artists valued in our society?
Yes. I am heartened by the number of smaller town councils and the like that see value in arts/literary events.
What are you working on now?
My brother Roy and I are undertaking a project for the sole purpose of having fun. In this objective we will probably fail. Worth a try, though.
Chris Masters is an award-winning journalist and author. He won a Gold Walkley in 1985 for his Four Corners report on the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior His reports ‘The Big League’ and ‘The Moonlight State’ both led to royal commissions. He is the author of Inside Story (1991), Not for Publication (2002), Jonestown (2006), Uncommon Soldier (2012), and No Front Line (2017).
